Category: Five Ate For Owe Won
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One Degree Of Separation
For the first time, I’ve got one degree of separation from two members of the Trump cabinet. Well, one and a half. Defense Secretary-designate Pete Hegseth was the first guest ever interviewed on the NARN, back in March of 2004. I think I’ve interviewed Hegseth 2-3 times over the years. And closer yet, the wife…
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Do It Yourself
Back in high school, there were two radio stations in Jamestown. Up above White Drug was KEYJ, my station, a little 1,000 watt AM station whose boss, Bob Richardson, always made a point of hiring local kids and showing them how to do radio. Across First Avenue, above the jewelry store, was KSJB and KSJM.…
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In Cold, Alcohol-Thinned, Probably Mentally Ill Blood
UPDATE: Welcome, fellow Power Line fans! Let’s talk about Cayler Ellingson. “Berg’s 18th Law” says that after any politically and emotionally fraught event – mass shootings, police killings, riots, pretty much any event over which people disagree – we need to wait at least 72 hours before taking anything we hear seriously from the media,…
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Possibilities
Let’s talk about the Cayler Ellison case. Berg‘s 18th law normally takes affect for the first three days after a politically charged event, since our main stream media is more concerned about ratings and “scoops“ than getting facts straight, especially in politically charged events.since our main stream media is more concerned about ratings and “scoops“…
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Point Of Light
My high school and college classmate Pennie Werth died from Covid a couple weeks ago. Pennie and me go way back – elementary school, anyway. In high school, we did the various high school plays together. And she played piano in the first band I ever got onstage with. It was in tenth grade, for…
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When You Think Moonshine…
,,,you most likely think about the deep South or the Appalachians, of stills talked way back into mountain haulers and people driving boxes of plain white whiskey to sell out of the backs of their cars behind bars and in dusty back allways. I’m just here to say that my rural North Dakota homies, 90…
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Freedom
North Dakota has not only become a Second Amendment Sanctuary… ..they’ve caught up with a lot of other solid-red states in some areas where they’d lagged a bit: “Both the U.S. Constitution and North Dakota Constitution recognize our citizens’ inalienable right to keep and bear arms, and designating North Dakota as a Second Amendment Sanctuary…
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A Little Bit Country
I left North Dakota for a lot of good reasons. Pretty much everything I wanted in life, especially back when only Al Gore had the Internet, was in a major metropolitan area; a place to try to be a songwriter, a musician, a writer, or something just different than I could be back in one…
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Blue Fragility, Part VIII: Unequal Risk
If you remember the 1980s, you might recall the early years of the AIDS epidemic. While it was clear fairly early on that the disease particularly targeted gay men and IV drug users (leading to the overnight extinction of what had been a fairly thriving “bathhouse” scene in Minneapolis), government health authorities kept hammering on…
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Suckin’ On A Chili Dog Outside The Tastee Freeze
OK, so Jamestown never had a Tastee Freeze. Even better – we had Polar King! The home of all things cool and delicious on hot, dry, windy summer days… …provided you were willing to work for it. It was north of the college on the way to the airport – a solid mile and a…
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Things I Never Expected To See…
…growing up in Jamestown, North Dakota in the seventies and eighties? A restaurant with a staff position entitled “Executive Chef”. (However, when in Jamestown, Sabir’s Buffalo Grill is an excellent place to stop; it stacks up well with places in its price range in the Twin Cities).
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Well, Blow Me Down…
Look what came in at #9 on this MSN Travel list…
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Heh
This is about right. And about how I feel as a North Dakotan in the Twin Cities.
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A Sort Of Homecoming
Today’s Columbus Day. Which, to me, is the 30th anniversary of the day I set out to move from my hometown of Jamestown, North Dakota to the Twin Cities… …and failed. Long story, which I told here about ten years ago. It was October of 1985. I’d graduated from college almost six months earlier –…
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The Wheel Of Justice Turns Slowly, But It Turns Toward Freedom
North Dakota finally recognizes Minnesota carry permits. They didn’t, of course, because Minnesota didn’t grant reciprocity to North Dakota permits, because of a decade of pissy DFL and bureaucratic (but I repeat myself) stonewalling on carry permit reciprocity. The GOP-controlled legislature changed that, finally, in the past session. This is, of course, of hypothetical importance…
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Thanks For Nothing, Idiots
For decades – like, four or five of them – the old municipal shooting range in Jamestown North Dakota was where people went to plink, to practice their skeet, or to polish their aim or, in my case thirty years ago this summer, learn how to shoot. Now, when we say “Municipal Range”, that may…
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Citizenship
I get to catch Rush Limbaugh maybe once a month, usually for about five or ten minutes as I’m going to some noon-time appointment or another. Yesterday, I tuned in to the sound of Limbaugh citing a story from the Jamestown Sun, the daily newspaper in my hometown, about a North Dakota legislative proposal to…
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An Anniversary
It was ten years ago today that a roadside bomb in Anbar province killed two soldiers from the North Dakota Army National Guard’s 141st Engineer Battalion. One of them, Specialist Brown, was the nephew of two of my high school classmates and of my seventh-grade history teacher. I remember him as a little kid, back…
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Goodbye, Animal Dorm
I went to a little college in the middle of nowhere. I’ve written about it a time or two; it nearly followed a hundred other small rural colleges to extinction in the eighties, but bounced back in a huge way (and, in this environment where people are starting to take the higher ed bubble seriously,…
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This Hard Land
Note to all you folks thinking of moving to North Dakota to start cashing in on the oil boom: North Dakota is cold. There aren’t a lot of trees. And outside of the eight or nine significant-sized cities (Fargo, Grand Forks, Jamestown, Devil’s Lake, Bismark/Mandan, Minot, Williston, Dickinson, and maybe Valley City), there just aren’t a…
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The Harvest Home (30th Anniversary)
I wrote this piece five years ago yesterday, on the 25th anniversary of what had to have been the most famous crime in North Dakota history, the Medina Shootout. Not much has change for me, or the story, since then. So while I usually don’t re-run pieces, I’m going to basically just update the piece…
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The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year
It’s Syttende Mai – the 107th anniversary of the day that Norway declared its independence after a bloody war of independence, throwing off the shackles of onerous, brutal Swedish rule. Norwegian forces had fought a long-shot, underground war against the evil Swedes – a battle which may have been the model for the “Rebellion” in…
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“Well, Golly, Elmer – We’re Gonna Have To Hire A Fella From Minneapolis To Help Us Spend This Money!”
(NOTE: For purposes of comedic affect, the author, Mitch Berg, is going to write most of this piece in an affected “North Dakota” accent. The author notes in advance that the written patois actually sounds a lot more like a rural Oklahoma accent with overtones of rural Tennessee. The author acknolwedges this, but notes that…
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The Conductor
It was a chilly, rainy night in March of 1983. I had a horrible cold – but no matter. I was standing on a riser in a tumbledown little church in Pendelton, Oregon, with 69 or so other college kids. And by this time in the tour, cooped up on buses for day after…