The Official Newspaper for Foster County
The Official Newspaper for Foster County
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Anyone who is a gardener in North Dakota should consider attending the North Dakota Farmers Market and Growers Association local foods conference May 4 and 5 at Dakota College in Bottineau. Each year the conference is geared toward better educating gardeners about a myriad of subjects regarding growing, harvesting and having a better display at farmers markets to increase profit and food safety. It’s also about networking, and that is the main reason I go every year, no matter where it is in N...
When my three semi-grown daughters were young (and since I work in the lucrative world of public education), we’d spend our spring break holidays riding bikes to the park, making dad-sized pillow forts in the living room, and raiding the gift shop at the zoo. Now that two of the girls are in college and one is in high school, those days (and our gift-shop cash) are long gone. This year, I spent most of my spring break competing with my youngest daughter to see who could sleep in the latest w...
The American workforce shortage has been covered extensively since the onset of COVID-19 in 2020, which literally brought the U.S. and global economies to a standstill. Ever since, workforce shortages are still impacting every industry despite significant economic growth – and agriculture is no exception. Here in central North Dakota, where agriculture is the life blood of the local economy, local businesses and operations are struggling to find help. “Labor is a huge, huge thing for any sector...
Anyone who travels U.S. Highway 52 anywhere between Portal to Minot and beyond is fully aware of the number of semi-trailers that are coming from western Canada. I’ve written about this in the past and before retiring, sometimes counted those trucks to have statistics to back up the articles. The last time I did that was December 2019. Since the first of this year, however, there seems to be quite an uptick in the number of semis. It used to be a fascination to me that so many from western C...
Along with identifying as “Swifties,” ignoring the reported Chinese threat of bad dancing posed by TikTok, and pretending that plant-based meat is actually edible, many young people in America are engaging in another fascinating trend – not driving. According to recent surveys, around 20 percent fewer teens of driving age are getting their driver’s licenses as compared to the glorious 1980s. Much to the relief of my insurance premiums, our youngest daughter, who recently turned 16, is one of...
I got my annual Girl Scout cookie fix last Friday. One of my favorite two Girl Scouts, my niece Megan, showed up just before supper time to make her pitch. I was happy to take a full case (and a couple extra boxes) off her hands in support of a good cause. Now, a few days later, as I munched on a Tagalong while trying to come up with a topic for this column, I got an idea. Personality tests are popular these days, particularly in work settings. Companies want to know what motivates a potential...
According to the Centre of Research & Analysis of Migration in London, approximately 19 million Ukrainians have fled the country as of Feb. 13. However, nearly 10 million of them have returned over the past year. The exodus for at least 8 million are other countries in Europe, mostly Poland, while the United States has taken in 220,000, Canada 132,000, Australia 4,000 and New Zealand 4,000. Ironically, more than 2 million have fled to Russia. Here in North Dakota the number is approximately...
I dread the coming of Sunday, March 12. At 2 a.m. that morning our clocks will “spring forward.” That means that my yellow Labrador, Thurber, who wakes me at exactly 6 a.m. every morning, will begin waking me at exactly 5 a.m. every morning. He’ll do so because that’s when his Labradorian clock tells him it is time for me to feed him and take him outside for Number 1 and Number 2. Which means I’ll be in a perpetual stupor for weeks until the two of us finally get used to the clock change ...
Our physical and virtual worlds are colliding at a seemingly breakneck pace. Gaming recently joined the ranks of school-sanctioned sports. NR-S is in the middle of its third season of having a competitive team, and my son is a member of the Valorant II team. First introduced in 2019, Valorant is a team-based tactical shooter and first-person shooter game developed and published by Riot Games. Folks, this is quite a different experience than any other in high school sports. My son plays from the...
Ever since a recent Monday night football game in Cincinnati when Damar Hamlin collapsed and went into cardiac arrest, we’ve been seeing news segments of the team of first responders, doctors and nurses who worked a miracle to keep a 24-year-old from dying on the field. That’s all good and well. They absolutely deserve recognition because of life saving measures. This isn’t something easy like buttering toast or taking out the trash. Saving a life is a difficult and often traumatic exper...
It’s at once amazing and troublesome. I speak of ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence application that was launched last November by OpenAI. In a matter of seconds, it can write apparently accurate articles or answer questions on a multitude of subjects. When I asked ChatGPT what it is, it responded this way: “I am designed to understand and generate human-like language based on the input I receive . . . My purpose is to assist and communicate with people in a variety of ways, from answering gen...
This past weekend I had the opportunity to do something a little different. The 4-H Shooting Sports and Outdoor Skills Club in Eddy County spent time in the Turtle Mountain region, particularly at Lake Metigoshe State Park north of Bottineau. The trip was organized by club leader Mike Brazil, who believes it’s important to get youth outside, experiencing the outdoors. “I look at how we grew up, and then I see how our kids are growing up,” Mike said to me Saturday, “and I want them to get out...
Well folks, it took 50 years, but North Dakota now has a three-class high school basketball system. The North Dakota High School Activities Association has now approved the starting a third class next fall. Advocates, mostly from the smaller communities in the state, have fought for this since Class C went away in 1963. But the state’s population dynamic has changed dramatically since then and it was time ramp up a third class. This time, however, instead of Class C, the new class will be C...
“I’ve been watching the legislature meeting in Bismarck…” started Little Jimmy when interrupted by Dorsey Crank. “Somebody needs to be watching them,” Crank barked. “They need their mothers with them.” “Well the legislature is thinking…” Little Jimmy started again when Crank snorted “thinking” is a new verb around Bismarck.” The interruptions irked Little Jimmy. He didn’t have to put up with this. He was named the 2022 Outstanding Graduate of the Year at Omega University in northern Texas...
We publish “scam alerts” in this newspaper periodically. Often we receive a press release from the AARP, and other times local authorities notify us that there has been a victim of a particular scam in our area. As I’m sure most do, I receive an endless sea of spam and phishing emails on a daily basis. Some days I spend more time clearing out unwanted messages than I do responding to actual requests from real people. Yesterday took the cake though. Since I began serving on the North Dakota Newsp...
These stories about flying saucers just don’t seem to go away. People continue to talk about seeing them or evidence of them all over North Dakota. Numerous people continue to tell me about their experiences with UFOs. They tell me in confidence because they don’t want to be ridiculed. The thing is, these people, many of them in their 70s and 80s, have seen some strange things in the sky, or bizarre evidence that UFOs landed. I’ve covered this topic from time to time. Several years ago infor...
Who needs forensics and gunfire? My wife and I have been catching up on episodes of “The Mysteries of Laura,” the 2014-2016 NBC series starring Debra Messing. Forget murders and chases. The real reason the show resonates with me is because as Laura Diamond juggles the duties of a single mother and police detective, she’s understandably a slob with her car. Yes, my poor Altima gets woefully neglected inside and out. It’s a magnet for the abundant tree sap in my yard and the interior is home to...
I’ve seen a few Facebook posts from parents and grandparents showing their valentine box-making adventures recently, and just this morning we printed some artwork for one NR-S student’s valentine box. I can’t help but smile and cringe at the same time. I’m not particularly good at crafting valentine boxes, and I remember struggling to help my kids execute their ideas. I like wrapping presents, so the best I could come up with was to wrap an ample-sized box using the back side of some Christm...
There’s a program in the Canadian Football League called Touchdown Atlantic in which two of the nine teams in the CFL give up one date a season to play a game in Atlantic Canada. It was created because of a strong interest to put an expansion team in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Halifax has wanted a CFL team since the early 1980s when a focus committee created the name Atlantic Schooners. In the past few years, the CFL commissioner has endorsed this plan and the CFL announced that it would indeed p...
All my father ever wanted as a young man was to marry my mother and start a family — plans that were interrupted when he was drafted into the Army during the Korean conflict. As he served in Texas, Germany and other parts of the world, there was only one affordable way to stay in contact: writing letters. Every single day, seven days a week, my mother told me, he wrote a letter to her and she wrote one to him. Some letters ran four pages long. Some days, they wrote two! They shared their h...
Change is coming to N.D. high school basketball much like a freight train rolling down the track. Sports Reporter Erik Gjovik broke down the details of the latest proposal to move to a three-class system for basketball in a feature story this week. As he was unpacking all the information in the 22-page proposal, Gjovik discovered that the change would also greatly affect our newspaper coverage of area teams. Right now, the Independent covers four different teams: Carrington, Griggs-Midkota,...
Call it climate change, call it a long-term weather cycle, you can even call it a coincidence. We can argue about it all day and make it a political football. But there is no doubt water is becoming a serious issue in the western United States, despite recent heavy rain and snow in California. This drought phenomenon has been discussed, on record, here in North Dakota, for at least 20 years, but people appear to be disinterested. In 2003, a group of North Dakota and eastern Montana farmers...
Groundhog Day cannot come soon enough. It’s the thick of winter. Cabin fever is setting in. Incivility is worse than ever. A delightful, silly diversion is what we need about now, and Punxsutawney Phil has been delivering needed joy this time of year since 1887. As you know, every Feb. 2, on Groundhog Day, Phil is pulled from a tree stump on Gobbler’s Knob, a few miles outside of downtown Punxsutawney, Pa. If he sees his shadow, his Inner Circle organizers allege, there will be six more wee...
Veteran newspaperman Allen Stock has been out of the Independent office for a few weeks now. This is the first time since I purchased the newspaper in October 2021 that he has been absent for more than a few days. Let me tell you, readers, it has been an adjustment. Over the past 45 years, he has answered the office landline in the evening and on the weekends. If he is there when it rings, he picks up the phone. He also drops by the office everyday, even if only to check the building to see...
Do you suppose there is scientific evidence as to why unusual animals are showing up in parts of North Dakota, or is it pure coincidence? The most obvious of these would be mountain lions, sometimes called cougars or pumas. There was a time not so long ago that any state or federal wildlife officials denied that lions were roaming around the state. Back in my Minot Daily News days, someone called me to Garrison to show me mountain lions paw prints in the snow. I took numerous photographs and...
