Memorial Day 2010

Posted on May 31, 2010 by Clint

I was able to attend the Memorial Day services at the Veterans’ Memorial Cemetery south of Mandan today. It’s always moving to take a special day to honor those who serve on our behalf, although naturally we should be so mindful all year long.

I have a lot of photos of course, and they’ll likely trickle in over the next several days. Due to time constraints I’m going to simply post some observations.

Governor Hoeven received enthusiastic applause and even cheers. Senator Conrad and Representative Pomeroy received courteous applause, each time after a short pause. It was as if people were waiting for someone else to start. Someone’s horn playing “Dixie” went off as Congressman Pomeroy came to the podium, which I thought was inappropriate. The Standing Rock color guard performed a drum circle after the official ceremony ended. Someone started playing music over the speakers, two of which are near the memorial where the drum circle was performing. I unplugged the one nearest me; these men deserve our respect.

The most moving words I heard were from today’s amazing keynote speaker, Major General (Retired) C. Emerson Murry: “To be born free is an accident. To live free is a responsibility. To die free is an absolute obligation.”

The day itself was wonderful weather-wise, a refreshing break from the cloudy and cool Memorial Days of the recent past. There was an overwhelming turnout, of course, which is typical for our area. The spirit of the place was very respectful and truly part of what makes America great.

On a photography note, I also got to play around a little with the video function of my new camera. I’ll post those results too, as time allows. Time has not allowed much lately, as I’ve been busier at home and work than any May I can remember in a long, long time.

Once again, here’s a ROCK that’s more patriotic than Earl Pomeroy

Posted on May 28, 2010 by Clint

This enormous rock, about five feet tall and parked in a very remote location outside of Bismarck, has more patriotism than the American left. The owner of the land on which it sits, I presume, has adorned it with an American flag, the names of some North Dakota soldiers killed in the global war on terrorism, and the following quote from our President:

“We will not waver; we will not falter; and we will not fail. Peace and freedom will prevail.” George W Bush

It’s just a shame that very few people will ever see this rock; I stumbled upon it by accident while out getting the truck dirty. Can you imagine the heartfelt pride in our soldiers the artist must have felt as they painted this tribute to their sacrifice? It’s very moving and I had to tell you about it. At the bottom of this post I’ll give you directions on how to find it; it’s not that hard, really.

On the other hand, this reminded me of the cowardly Earl Pomeroy, the hapless US Representative from our fair state. While I and several hundred other motorcyclists stood guard outside the funeral of a fallen soldier, he came by to attend the funeral and offer waves and salutes. This happened less than 24 hours after he voted against House Resolution 861, titled “Declaring that the United States will prevail in the Global War on Terror, the struggle to protect freedom from the terrorist adversary.”

This is so typical of the liberal Democrat mantra of “I support the troops, but I don’t support the mission.” Have you seen the text of the resolution that Earl voted against? If not, click the link above. But first let me point out that this resolution was a show of support: it didn’t promise funding, it didn’t have any policy riders in it, it was simply a declaration that Americans are doing a good work and that they’ll succeed. Earl disagreed.

Here’s some of the text. I left out all the “whereas” clauses because, while they’re part of the text, they are not the meat of the resolution:

Now, therefore, be it Resolved, That the House of Representatives–

(1) honors all those Americans who have taken an active part in the Global War on Terror, whether as first responders protecting the homeland, as servicemembers overseas, as diplomats and intelligence officers, or in other roles;

(2) honors the sacrifices of the United States Armed Forces and of partners in the Coalition, and of the Iraqis and Afghans who fight alongside them, especially those who have fallen or been wounded in the struggle, and honors as well the sacrifices of their families and of others who risk their lives to help defend freedom;

(3) declares that it is not in the national security interest of the United States to set an arbitrary date for the withdrawal or redeployment of United States Armed Forces from Iraq;

(4) declares that the United States is committed to the completion of the mission to create a sovereign, free, secure, and united Iraq;

(5) congratulates Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki and the Iraqi people on the courage they have shown by participating, in increasing millions, in the elections of 2005 and on the formation of the first government under Iraq’s new constitution;

(6) calls upon the nations of the world to promote global peace and security by standing with the United States and other Coalition partners to support the efforts of the Iraqi and Afghan people to live in freedom; and

(7) declares that the United States will prevail in the Global War on Terror, the noble struggle to protect freedom from the terrorist adversary.

What was so objectionable to cowardly Earl that he couldn’t vote YEA on this? Did he object to a “Whereas” in there somewhere? The only one that should count is this one:

Whereas the United States and Coalition servicemembers and civilians and the members of the Iraqi security forces and those assisting them who have made the ultimate sacrifice or been wounded in Iraq have done so nobly, in the cause of freedom;

That clause alone is worthy of a YEA vote. Instead, spineless Earl the Pearl voted along with such notorious wackbags as Nancy Pelosi and Charles Rangel, one of the guys who keeps saying our soldiers are too dumb or poor to choose other career options. Then he has the nerve to show up at the funeral of a fallen soldier the very next day, putting on his North Dakota face on the flight back, and presumes (correctly) that it will go largely unnoticed.

“Representatives” like Earl Pomeroy do not represent North Dakota or the majority of Americans. Some of them, like our beloved Representative, are backstabbers when it comes to our soldiers at home. They make all the right somber appearances here in North Dakota, then run back off to Washington to be who they really are. I’m glad people like the person who painted this rock are up to the task of supporting our fighting men and women worldwide. If I was a member of Travis Van Zoest’s family the day of the funeral, I’d have denied the two-faced Earl Pomeroy entry into the ceremony…at least until he explained to the hundreds of real patriots outside why he voted the way he did.

The official roll call of the vote can be found here. Pomeroy’s name, quite appropriately, appears right next to that of Nancy Pelosi.

The full text of House Resolution 861 can be found here.

I know right now the struggling Earl Pomeroy is running TV ads claiming he’s such a friend of the veterans. If that’s the case, perhaps he’d like to answer a simple question: Why couldn’t he break Democrat party ranks even ONCE and cast a symbolic vote in favor of soldiers representing North Dakota and the USA as a whole?

To visit this rock, something that might be especially appropriate this Memorial Day, simply take Expressway north from where it intersects with Century Avenue. When you reach 57th Avenue, take a right and head east. It’s at the end of the road a short while later with a little cul de sac where you can park and/or turn around. Here’s a little map I put together:

View Bismarck-Mandan Blog in a larger mapOn a side note, I’m messing around a little bit with Google Maps and may post some favorite photo spots (or simply points of interest around Bismarck-Mandan) from my GPS as time allows. Happy Memorial Day! Please thank as many soldiers, veterans, and their families as you can this weekend (and all year ’round). Stand with them in support for their mission; your United States Congressman chose not to do so.

How many more 8-megapixel sunsets?

Posted on May 27, 2010 by Clint

Finally, some nice sunset weather has set in – although the weekend is still forecast to be cloudy and/or cold. I did, however, get the opportunity to go out and play at sunset with my camera a few days ago and nab this gorgeous sunset photo just outside of town. As usual, my faithful Canon 20D brought back some beautiful pictures. But this may be one of my last sunset photos with it.

Remember my posting a while back about test-driving a Canon 7D digital camera? Well, that has resulted in the purchase of a new “big dog” which I’ve kitted out pretty nicely. I’m especially well set for astrophotography; however, I seem to have single-handedly extinguished all sunspots from the sun (and a lot of aurora activity with it) when I decided to get into digital photography. Hopefully that comes back soon.

So I’ve got a new primary imaging tool. Does that mean I’m abandoning my faithful Canon 20D, a camera which has provided me with over 55,000 photos and not once given me any hassles or failed? Nope. Instead, it means I now roam the countryside with TWO cameras. I look forward to seeing what kind of images I can bring home now.

North Dakota featured in new movie viral campaign

Posted on May 25, 2010 by Clint

Thanks to the guys at /film for pointing this out, because it’s actually a pretty cool little “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:

Click to view/download: Image 1 – Image 2

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.

Union operative’s letter to GF Herald gets treated like an average reader’s…but who does he represent in ND? NOBODY

Posted on May 17, 2010 by Clint

My buddy Rob over at the Say Anything Blog pointed out that, while every letter he writes to the Grand Forks Herald comes with a disclaimer that he runs a conservative website and talk show, union shill Ryan Nagle gets special treatment. Here’s a link to the letter, and the image above is a screen capture in case the Herald site gets scrubbed. There’s no disclaimer indicating that he’s an operative for the SEIU labor union, which is likely bankrolling a good chunk of Earl Pomeroy’s doomed reelection campaign (and other Democrats too, I’m sure).

Certainly this comes as no surprise, since ND newspapers like the Herald are nothing more than house organs for the Democrat Party. Rob did a good job of highlighting the double standard, and I had another interesting thought about this: who does this Nagle fella represent? I decided to check the SEIU website to find out:

Apparently the answer is: NOBODY. Here’s a link to their site, with a screen capture shown above. There are no SEIU locals listed for North Dakota. Perhaps they think all that money given to North Dakota Democrats will change that. Maybe they just like having our Congressmen-for-Hire voting for their interests in the national legislative body. In any case, they talk about what’s right for North Dakota and accuse any Republican or conservative opposition of being “out of state interests”, when in reality they don’t speak for ANYBODY here in the great state of North Dakota.

I started this website as a photo blog, and because I love Bismarck-Mandan (and North Dakota in general). However, when wicked thugs like the labor union types and their Thug-in-Chief in the White House make it their mission to threaten my way of life, I’m going to speak out from time to time. I have more fun photos of the nice weather in the Bismarck-Mandan area ready to post as well, but for now I thought I’d take a little time to give you some information that the Grand Forks Herald, the labor union thugs, and the Democrat Party don’t want you to know.

55,000!

Posted on May 15, 2010 by Clint

I took some time this week to run to the Heritage Center with my little toddlers. First stop: the balcony overlooking the exhibits, where they can hit the button to activate the sound of geese flying overhead. This has been part of the Heritage Center visit tradition since I was a boy.

As this post’s title indicates, this is also my 55,000th photo through my trusty Canon camera! I’ve checked online and seen reports of this model racking up hundreds of thousands of exposures without issue. While I dream of an upgrade, I plan to keep this camera around and in service for years to come. Maybe my boys will learn photography with it!

To understand the socialist tendencies of North Dakota democrats, just visit the Heritage Center

Posted on May 12, 2010 by Clint

In the political portion of the North Dakota Heritage Center is an interesting display devoted to the Democrat-NPL political party. I never refer to Democrats as “Democratic” because the ideology to which they’re enslaved is the very antithesis of that. There are some interesting tidbits on this display that I think prove quite insightful.

This descriptive plate seems rather fawning and praising, doesn’t it? It refers to the NPL movement as “the greatest” and its leaders as “colorful.” I wouldn’t expect any less from the sort of academics tasked with museum duty. Interesting as well is this line: “A mixture of progressives, socialists, and cooperators…” Call a member of the Dem-NPL party a socialist now, and they shriek and recoil as if you’ve brandished a cross toward a vampire. A fitting metaphor, I think.

Anytime you see literature talking about “the worker” or that sort of thing, you’re dealing with communists, socialists, labor unions, progressives, statists…they’re all cut from the same mold. It appears that the NPL tried with the farmer what labor unions tried with the worker. Thus they substituted “producer” or “farmer” for “worker.” The caption of this photo promotes a story: “An American Example of Public Ownership and Its Benefit to the People.”

The party adopted the goat as a mascot, indicating that it “fights with its head.” I’ve always thought that the jackass used by the Democrat party is far more appropriate.

Check out that last line: “The Nonpartisan League … amalgamated with the Democrats, thus creating the modern North Dakota Democratic-NPL Party.” This helps explain why we’ve got socialist ideas coming from the likes of Comrade Dorgan, whose solution for everything is to unionize it, and his ilk. Thankfully, North Dakota voters are waking up and preparing for corrective action this November.

It’s also very telling how these people can never be honest about what they believe. For instance, do you think Tracy Potter will be promoting the fact that he called North Dakota “terribly embarassing” for passing anti-abortion legislation in 2007? I think not.

Look at the history, and the present becomes more clear. They’re finding the boldness that many of them once possessed, and they’re playing on a national stage. They’re feeling all Hopey-Changey, and that’s when they show us who they really are. Now let’s do like we did in the past: put a stop to this bankrupt, corrupt ideology and oust those who subscribe to it.

My boys have the sweetest Mommy ever

Posted on May 9, 2010 by Clint

Her children arise up, and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praiseth her. –Psalm 31:28I just want to take a minute to brag on my beautiful wife, the sweet Mommy of my two little blond-haired miracles. She’s a selfless, caring girl who I could not live without. I must say that, as we approach a milestone anniversary in our marriage, that I’ve been growing ever closer to her recently…and being a husband and Daddy is the most amazing experience.

She’s really gracious in letting me take off with my camera or hang out in my expansive Garage Majal with the motorcycles and stuff, too.

I wunder if spelling is on the kerickyewlum (and a graveyard experience of a different sort)

Posted on May 8, 2010 by Clint

I’ll admit it: I have a disorder. If I’m handed a sheet of paper filled with text, the typographical and spelling errors will typically leap off the paper, grab my me by the ears, and divert my attention toward themselves. It’s like putting on a pair of 3D glasses. It’s a suitable disorder, as I’m a proofreader and former city & county Spelling Bee champion. Sometimes I find some fun ones, like the sign above.

I derive no glee from pointing out the typos of others. While I don’t believe in karma, typographical or otherwise, I can’t help but wonder if I’m about to make a similar mistake while writing about the errors I find. Uh oh. It is 2:45 in the morning, after all (I woke up hungry). Is it unreasonable, however, to expect schools and learning centers to proofread their signs for obvious spelling or punctuation errors? I think not.

This reminded me of something I spotted a week or two ago, as I was hiking back from what used to be Hillside Park. While attempting to approach the top of the “park” I figured that the best I could do was to park in St. Mary’s Cemetery and hop the fence. On the way back to the truck I got an eerie feeling. My “spider-sense” was kicking in, so I stopped and turned slowly. Yep…there it was: a typo.

I’ve intentionally obfuscated the name on this stone, which actually sits in the middle of several markers of the same last name. Since I pretty much have a King James Bible handy as often as I do my camera bag, I grabbed one and compared the text on the stone to Psalm 107:

He sent his word, and healed them, and delivered them from their destructions. (v20)
Uh oh. The stone clearly says “DESTRURTIONS.” Dang.

Well, I’m sure I’ll go ahead and make a ton of typographical errors now. Feel free to point them out. I’ve earned it. While I don’t believe in “typo karma” I do have a strong appreciation for irony! In the mean time, I’ve shoveled enough Frosted Flakes into my head to choke a donkey…and now it’s time to return to bed.

UPDATE: We have a winner! Kudos to my friend Ken, who spotted a typographical error in the very first paragraph of this post (and called to verify that I didn’t plant it there on purpose). I didn’t remove it; rather, I just put a line through it and corrected it for the world to see. See? No one is immune from the sinister typo…especially those of us who point them out in other people’s work!

Dawn found the second one. Sigh…

Monumental shot

Posted on May 6, 2010 by Clint

Bismarck and Mandan each have their own memorials at their end of the new Liberty Memorial Bridge. There are more attractions to this area yet to come! Keep a keen eye under the bridge on the Bismarck side. I’m not sure what may be planned on the Mandan side…hopefully a complementary park is to be built.