I spotted this sign on the way back from Sibley Park last night. Obvious punctuation issues aside, it raises an important point about ethanol blended fuels that nobody wants to address: they are inferior and smart consumers don't want them. Naturally, the entrepreneurial spirit kicks in and some businesses start catering to the desires of the consumer. Amazing how the system works.
I have friends who own FlexFuel vehicles. They'll tell you that by the time they fill their tanks with E85 fuel, deal with the loss of acceleration and passing power, and figure out the horrible mileage the fuel delivers, they break about even. That is NOT counting the tax subsidy that you and I pay on each gallon of E85, whether we use it or not, in order to keep its price competitive at the pump. That also does not include the higher food costs we pay because so much corn is going into the production of said "renewable fuel."
A long time ago I made this graphic to illustrate one more point, and a real deal-breaker: Even if you have an engine that could extract every bit of energy available in a gallon of E85 fuel, it still is WAY down on gasoline. E85 simply does not have the BTUs (measured units of energy) locked within its chemistry to compete with traditional motor fuel when it's burned and the energy stored in those hydrocarbons' chemical bonds is released. (Yes, I majored in chemistry in college at one point.) Simply put: E85 is a thermodynamic loser. Even worse, we're forced to subsidize it.
Personally I have to burn high octane fuel in my motorcycles and our trucks recommend it. I burn regular in the lawn mower and stuff like that. Even so, I will not buy ANY fuel that has an ethanol component to it. Thankfully I can now jet down to Unistop along University Drive if I want some ethanol-free regular gasoline.
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( 3.5 / 80 )
As an animator I like subtleties such as the one above. Notice how Earl's path follows the outline of North Dakota's border rather than crossing it! Interested parties may remember that you couldn't find Earl Pomeroy anywhere near his constituents last year during the government health care takeover debate. Priceless.
The big deal about this video is actually the statistic that Earl Pomeroy, he of such "clout and seniority" on our behalf back in Washington, got only FOURTEEN contributors from North Dakota last reporting period. A more telling statistic I cannot find. I expect this sort of thing to hold true at the polls too, even if ACORN can get a bunch of college kids to vote twice (at home and at school) in November. Oh, and the video says that one of those fourteen was a Pomeroy.
I guess one doesn't have to be a hapless liberal to write a catchy song about a North Dakota politician! Unlike the one targeting Dave Weiler, however, this one is true.
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( 3.3 / 73 )
This quaint little church is tucked in behind a rolling green hill southwest of New Salem. The Sims Lutheran Church got a dose of publicity two years ago when Laura Bush visited it on her trip to North Dakota.
I wanted to catch this church at sunrise but just barely missed it. It was still very picturesque, with the water in the foreground and rolling hills behind. I also found a lot of other fun stuff on this little photo trip. I wanted to peruse the inside of the building but chose to move along instead...this time. I've read that the Sims church is the oldest Lutheran church building west of the Mississippi, so I can't help but be curious about its interior.
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( 3.3 / 75 )
On my way home from an already successful photo jaunt, I noticed that the moon was about to set in a most convenient location. I bolted to the one spot in Bismarck which allows such a photograph and waited for things to happen. After a little while the moon moved into position right above Bismarck's most prominent landmark. This was a nice photographic "cherry on top" to put an even better end to my Wednesday.
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( 3.4 / 101 )This is an update to a post I originally wrote about a little tidbit I discovered through /film back in May. It's a pretty cool "viral marketing" campaign for an upcoming movie. This one just happens to feature North Dakota. It all started with this movie teaser trailer:
At the end of the trailer there's a flicker of film leader that someone took still images of to get the words "SCARIEST THING I EVER SAW." From there they decided to visit the website "scariestthingieversaw.com." On that website was a simulator for a PDP-11, an old mainframe computer like the ones I used to get in trouble on in the 80s. It displayed a timer, and once the timer counted down certain features were enabled. One of those was to print these two images:
When you print them out, they appear to be newspaper pages from the 1940s that have some hidden features. One of the not-so-hidden features is an ad for Rocket Poppeteers, a popsicle-like treat. JJ Abrams is known to put fictitious foods in his movies and mention them by name, but this one's getting some prominent treatment. (Yes, there's a rocketpoppeteers.com website, but it doesn't do anything...yet.) The ad contains a form to mail in to "Become a Rocket Poppeteer and Join the Race to Outer Space!" Where do you send it? Minot, North Dakota.
Naturally, being the curious sort, I filled out one of these forms to see what might happen. So far, nothing has been mailed back to me. No MIBs have showed up at my house, even ones posing as census workers. If that changes, I'll let you know.
Why does Minot tie into this? Well, the teaser trailer seems to center around Area 51 and UFOs & aliens. UFO believers have reports of UFO activity around United States nuclear weapons facilities going back for decades, so it makes sense that the movie would include a reference to North Dakota...a somewhat remote, maybe even mysterious to some, place with lots of nukes. The X-Files featured an episode where a UFO was hidden in a hollowed-out nuclear missile silo in North Dakota, so why not take the idea to feature film?
Being familiar with central North Dakota, the presence of Air Force bases and nuclear weapons in our great state, and the whole UFO conspiracy theory subculture to a degree, I got a kick out of this viral campaign. While I'm not one of the UFO conspiracy theorists, I find them entertaining to watch. It'll be interesting to see where and how far this movie takes this campaign and how heavily it features our great state.
Here's where the new stuff starts: I got a letter in the mail from Rocket Poppeteers yesterday. Enclosed is a congratulatory letter, in 1940s-era typewriter font, with my name handwritten in a blank salutation.
As you can see, the letter has the Minot PO Box return address and a legitimate Minot, ND postmark. Whoever is checking the post office box, filling out the letters, and mailing them out is presumably from the Minot area.
This is the text of the letter, although there's more on the page. The letter mentions a 'Captain "Coop" Cooper' a couple of times, so I suppose he'll be featured in the movie. There's no official information available at this time, at least none that I found.
Since the letter asks, "Are you ready to begin?" I can only hope that this is the start of a continued Rocket Poppeteers adventure - and that North Dakota may feature heavily in the upcoming Super8 movie. If I receive any additional mail or details, I'll post it here!
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( 3.1 / 51 )
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