Perhaps you’ve seen the Coen brothers’ movie Fargo, which had a really good time making fun of Minnesota accents. Much of the movie was shot in Brainerd and other parts of western Minnesota, and the plot takes place in those cities as well as Minneapolis. Part of it was shot up in Pembina County as well. But one of the final scenes in the movie, where a fleeing William H. Macy is apprehended at a small hotel, takes place in Bismarck:

While we’re on the subject of that movie, you may remember the sad story about a Japanese woman who came through this area after seeing the movie. She didn’t speak any English. The police (somehow) spoke to her at the Oasis truck stop, helped her get on a bus eastward, and she apparently got off in Fargo and headed towards Brainerd. Law enforcement found her dead of exposure by the road in western Minnesota somewhere. She’d apparently been looking for the briefcase with $920,000 in it that the bad guys buried in a snowbank next to the road! Apparently she was unaware that 1) it’s only a movie, 2) snow thaws up here, and 3) that scene was shot up in Pembina County. There wasn’t enough snow down here that year.

“Fargo” has been airing on the Bravo network lately, if you’re interested.

Spring Clean-Up Week is here, and you know what that means. Yes, Bismarck citizens will set their pride aside and go scavenging in droves! It’s like a city-wide rummage sale without the little masking-tape price tags, and for some reason hundreds of people find it impossible to resist. Running around town sorting through other people’s junk is apparently beneath nobody this week.

Normally I wouldn’t have anything to do with this sort of thing. It may or may not be snobbery to think it’s improper to go through other people’s trash, but it’s not something I’d like to be caught doing. I also have way too much junk of my own already. Besides, unless it’s something really cool like a motorcycle, remote control monster truck or box of Craftsman tools, I’m really not interested in it. That is, until a couple of years ago, when even I couldn’t resist:

Honestly, I passed on it at first. But I used to have a Tron machine in the “Garage Mahal” or “Workshop of Doom™” as my garage is called. When the video board went bad on it we gutted it for parts and made a few hundred dollars on eBay. That made me wonder if I could do the same with this machine, so I researched the going price on Pac Man parts online over dinner and figured what the heck.

I asked the owner of this machine before doing anything. She said the machine didn’t work and that it was being thrown away. I asked her permission to take it, which she gave. I brought it home and plugged it in to diagnose the problem before listing the parts online and…it worked!

We played lots of Pac Man for the next few years, but the video monitor on this machine finally gave up the ghost (pun intended) and I have since parted it out. As per my original plan, I have the boardset all wrapped up in anti-static wrap and am preparing to sell the boardset, the controller, the glass bezels and power supply online. But since my wife and I like to play Pac Man so much, preferably Ms. Pac Man, all proceeds from this sale will go toward the purchase of an arcade Ms. Pac Man machine sometime in the near future.

Let that be a lesson: no matter how hard you resist, you’re likely to stumble upon something during Spring Clean-Up Week that tries to hook you in. It *can* happen to you!

It’s not precise enough to go from neighborhood to neighborhood; too bad, it’d be neat to see things get that specific. Instead it goes as small as a 1 mile radius. Otherwise we could see how badly some of those people in Southport are financed up to their eyeballs!

You can play around with it a bit by clicking here.

That’s where I met Jeff from Watertown, SD. He’s working for a company that is going through parts of the sewer system in Bismarck and preparing it for maintenance. The city will be putting polymer sock liners in some of the sanitary sewer lines around the city. But when someone builds a house and taps into the sewer line and weld their pipe to the main line, part of their pipe protrudes into the main line. That’s a problem for anyone trying to stuff a liner down the pipe. That’s where Jeff’s company comes in.

Thanks to Jeff for the explanation. He’s also got a couple of Canon digital SLRs like me and enjoys wildlife photography, so we had a really nice chat. It was quite gracious of him to explain everything he’s doing and take time during his busy evening to show me all the stuff that they do.

So just remember…the reason everything works the way it does is because the city’s got guys like Jeff and his crew that help maintain and upgrade the system. And they’ve got cool machinery to enable them to get that job done.