There haven’t been many good photo opportunities lately, as you may have noticed. The skies have been gray, the temperatures inhospitable, and I’ve been really darn busy. I’m really excited for things to green up and for the wildlife to start flourishing again. I have a feeling that this is going to be a great season for running around with a camera!
If you want to see Bismarck-Mandan differently, buy a camera and start photographing everything that catches your eye. You’ll find a new appreciation of our fair cities. Last night, as my wife and I took baby PJ out for his first stroll along the river, something caught my eye in the trees to our right. Since I was carrying my camera, I swung it over toward the trees and aha! Bunny. Hopefully he doesn’t have “a mean streak a mile wide!”
If you have a Canon camera and want to try out this lens, go to Bob’s Photo and try it out – they’ve got one in stock. It’s really quite good for the money. Or buy my old one, it’s going on eBay in the next couple of days!
When I first started at the now-extinct Meyer Broadcasting in 1990, the employee handbook boasted the KFYR AM 550 tower as the tallest free-standing radio at the time it was built. I don’t know how it stacks up now, but it’s a pretty tall structure. The “stick” towers you see held up by guy-wires are much much taller, but that’s because they have lots of additional support. These beasties here are built on top of big insulators and have no wires helping them stay upright.
AM radio towers are different than others in that the tower is the antenna. An FM or television “stick” is simply a tower with an antenna at the top of it. So you don’t want to be anywhere near an AM tower while the transmitter is operating!
The little tower is an interesting feature. AM radio signals travel using “ground wave” propagation during the day, but at night the sky’s ionosphere changes and reflects AM radio waves back to earth. That means an AM station can be heard a LONG ways away. So what if there are two 550 AM stations? There are actually a lot more than two, but two high-power 550’s near each other’s range of operation could run into problems if their signal areas suddenly grew at night and overlapped each other. That’s why many stations, including KFYR, “go directional” around sunset each night.
The little tower is energized and “pulls” the signal toward Bismarck (away from Canada, rather) so that it does not cause interference with the other 550s north and east of us. By controlling the power to each transmitter, the engineers can “shape” the signal area in such a way as to avoid interference. Pretty cool, huh?
These days, the transition back to “non-directional” happens during the PH Phactor in the mornings. As sunrise comes earlier, that’ll start to get done before Phil takes the board. But you’ll know the switch is happening when you hear a burp of static for a second or two, then the signal returns to normal.
No kidding, huh? Restrictions on what? I was going to call someone at the City offices to try to figure it out, but I’ve been busy. As I left work Wednesday I noticed that they suddenly had the word “Load” tucked into the white space above the word “Restrictions” as if it had been added as an afterthought. I think it had.
I’ve been known to be wrong before, but I am quite proficient at reading road signs at speeds WAY faster than I drive where these are posted. Having seen several in a day or two, each time wondering about what sort of insidious restrictions might be implied by the sign, I would have noticed if they mean load restrictions. I think this was a big oops. Oh well, maybe that’s why designers use white space in the first place…so you’ve got room to tuck in those pesky little words that someone left out.
Some of our office members (myself included) got whatever stomach flu is making the rounds, which led to a 102.1 fever on Tuesday. I went back to work Wednesday but came right home after work to sit back and recover fully. The agony of having two new lenses in the camera bag and a stomach that’s still sorting itself out was tolerable…but just barely.
On my way out the door I talked to one of our clients, who said the same stomach bug had worked its way through his office last week. Look out!
There’s a reason that we don’t let kids do certain things before the age of 18, even 21 in some cases: they’re not always able to make sound decisions. So how are they magically supposed to come up with good judgement when a physician presents them with medical options, dealing with their body and that of their baby, in the absence of a parent? The only logical reasoning I can find in this bill is that it’s a step toward making abortions legal without a parent’s knowledge. The way most liberal policies take effect is a little at a time, in tiny harmless steps. This looks like an insidious way to work our way towards a pro-abortion bill for North Dakota. As of now abortion is excluded in this bill, but SB 2181 paves the way.
There’s only one abortion clinic in ND that I know of, in Fargo. Presumably if there was more demand, there would be more clinics. Either too few women are getting abortions to support additional clinics to provide the murder -er, service, or it’s just plain socially unacceptable here. How do liberals change that? The kids.
As soon as teens can handle unexpected or unwanted pregnancies without the knowledge of their parents, they’re more susceptible to the tempation to just “end” the pregnancy and go on as if nothing has ever happened. No facing the music with Mom and Dad, just a trip to the clinic and hope that nobody notices. Kids are brilliant at covering things up, and this bill wants to give them accomplices with medical degrees.
As for the title of this post: let’s apply this logic to the sale of alcohol and tobacco. We don’t allow kids to purchase these items because 1) they’re unlikely to have the judgement to decide whether or when to use them, and 2) these items have the potential for severe, even life-threatening consequences from their use. Well, if the legislature makes it legal for teens to seek medical advice without a guardian knowing, how is that different? We’re talking about the health of a teen and a baby as well. Nothing could have more dire, immediate consequences for a teen’s future than their medical well-being and sound decisions made for their care. That’s why they have parents, unless the state legislature passes this nonsense.
So, if this bill passes, let’s just go ahead and let them smoke and drink and everything else too. Follow the same logic. If that seems unreasonable to you, as it does to me, then urge your state legislators to vote against this ridiculous bill. The only one it serves in the end is the pro-abortion crowd, NOT the teens they claim it helps.
A friend of mine is shooting with this very same lens in Utah right now as he mountain bikes various parks and stuff on his way to Death Valley, California, and said that it’s amazing to be able to take such wide angles of striking scenery. Well, North Dakota has striking scenery of its own, which I plan to post here as soon as things green up.
For a sense of perspective of exactly how wide this lens is, that little protuberance on the horizon is the capitol. Given a high enough vantage point, I can get the majority of Bismarck in the frame. Obviously this is going to be exciting once I get out into some wide open territory. Stay tuned!
The shorter one is a perfect fit for much of my “work.” It’s a 10-22mm super wide angle lens, which will be great for landscapes, panoramas, and skyscapes. I really look forward to sunsrises, sunsets, and most of all… Northern Lights photography with this lens!
I had a little bit of money saved for a lens last year and decided to invest it in the bankrupt Delta Airlines. Playing around with stock in bankrupt companies is risky, but I managed to play my money up quite a bit as rumors of Delta’s merging with USAir circulated. I managed to sell right before the stock took a nosedive (no pun intended) and turned my money into two really fantastic lenses!
I’ve been really busy being a husband, dad, homeowner, landlord, and video monkey lately, but hopefully soon I will be able to find more killer sights around Bismarck and Mandan to share with y’all.
