{"id":61400,"date":"2016-12-20T06:00:17","date_gmt":"2016-12-20T12:00:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=61400"},"modified":"2016-12-17T10:13:53","modified_gmt":"2016-12-17T16:13:53","slug":"grassfire-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=61400","title":{"rendered":"Grassfire War"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was born in Rugby, North Dakota – which since the 1920s has called itself “the Geographic Center of North America”.<\/p>\n

It’s kind of a chamber of commerce flim-flam – how to you calculate the geographic center of an irregular shape, like a continent?<\/p>\n

But what matters is that Rugby trademarked the phrase waaaay back when. \u00a0As in “decades before I was born there”.<\/p>\n

And that designation – fanciful or real or somewhere in between – has been Rugby’s sole claim to fame (that and being my birthplace, natch) for as long as anyone can remember.<\/p>\n

And that may be in jeopardy<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\u201cWe thought, we could make an equal case just as much as Rugby can,\u201d he said. So the friends \u201csort of offhandedly\u201d declared their bar to be the geographical center.<\/p>\n

A few weeks later, after another late night at the bar, Mr. Bender checked to see if Rugby still owned the trademark. Turns out, it had lapsed in 2009. So Mr. Bender paid $375 to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, filled out some forms and snatched it up.<\/p>\n

Now Hanson\u2019s\u2014a one-room bar decorated with Johnny Cash posters and a deer head on the wall, and which was previously best known for a contest that concludes with participants blowing pumpkins to smithereens with explosives\u2014claims it is the real geographical center of North America. It has its own logo, its own T-shirt, and soon will have its own fair, Center Fest, trumpeting its new status. Mr. Bender has begun work on a monument.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I can imagine someone from the city’s chamber of commerce staring at the poor sap from City Hall who’d dropped the ball (that he or she had likely not known about) and saying “You had one job…”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was born in Rugby, North Dakota – which since the 1920s has called itself “the Geographic Center of North America”. It’s kind of a chamber of commerce flim-flam – how to you calculate the geographic center of an irregular shape, like a continent? But what matters is that Rugby trademarked the phrase waaaay back […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-61400","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-midwest"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61400","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=61400"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61400\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":61401,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61400\/revisions\/61401"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=61400"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=61400"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=61400"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}