Bismarck-Mandan’s most dangerous game of Jenga
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The ubiquitous leaf
You may recall my post from last March comparing the new Kirkwood Bank & Trust logo to the already established Lending Tree logo. If I was an executive at Kirkwood, I’d be a little ticked. Corporate identity is not cheap. They probably paid tens of thousands of dollars for that little piece of foliage. Besides, what does Kirkwood Bank have to do with trees?
Now we see this: two adjacent signs, each sporting leaves. Granted, with a name like Aspen, a leaf is a no-brainer. When placed next to the Kirkwood logo, though, it reminds me of that funny similarity between Kirkwood and Lending Tree.
My annoying watermark obscures it, but ironically I noticed later that there’s a THIRD leaf logo hiding in this shot: the Country Suites hotel sign in the background also sports foliage! TRIFECTA.
Have you seen any other local businesses with leaves in their logos?
An angle you might not get from the local news
I saw this article yesterday talking about how Kildeer Mountain Manufacturing (“Manufactuing” according to KX News) is looking forward to “sharing the award” of a big defense contract with U.S. Senator Byron Dorgan.
According to this press release, KMM’s “director of business development” is one Kristin Hedger, who tried a horribly misleading campaign against Secretary of State Al Jaeger last election cycle.
According to this post on the official ND Dem-NPL blog, Kristin Hedger offered as proof of her ND citizenship: “a letter from the North Dakota Tax Department and also the form that shows she lists North Dakota for tax withholding during her time working in Senator Byron Dorgan’s office, starting in May 2001.”
Is there something the Hedger family and Dorgan should be disclosing?
That local landmark to which I referred over the weekend
The location of this elevator, for those of you with a GPS, is 46°50.429″ minutes North by 101°30.460″ West. Here are some other photos from the morning, featuring one of the reddest skies I’ve seen.
I hadn’t planned on going out for pictures this particular morning, but I’m glad I did. I got to the location at exactly the right time, neither too early or too late. Once it was over, I pointed the truck back to the house to play with my boys. What a remarkable morning!
Amarillo – no, wait – New Salem by Morning
Little baby Jonathan was up and down all night; therefore, so were his mommy and daddy. I’d just finished a shift with him and gone to bed at around 5:30, sleeping until 7:00. Stacy was feeding Jonathan, PJ was sacked out, so I hopped in the truck for a little bit. I found myself west of town a little ways, and I wasn’t disappointed. The sky grew pink as I bolted toward a familiar landmark, one which I’ll post later this week. I stopped to take a panoramic photo of New Salem along the way. Sorry, no cow. There’s more to this sleepy little town than a big hunk of fiberglass named Sue.
Yawn…National Geographic does a stereotypical hit piece on North Dakota
Now they’ve picked up another in an endless stream of cliches: the desolate prairie states. You can read this tripe by clicking here. It’s got the usual ingredients: we’re all but driven mad by the incessant wind; people here have always committed suicide because it’s so bleak; and we’re trying to change the name to Dakota to shake the state’s image.
While I have probably taken far more “fallen farm” photos than these jokers have, I’ve never done it to fit an agenda. I’m pretty sure they came out here simply to portray North Dakota the way they see it, and quite frankly I believe they’re wrong. Heck, they couldn’t even remember Minot in their list of cities…how much attention could they have paid to writing an objective piece?
I won’t even go into a lengthy rant about their attempted hit job on our state. No, I think Julie Neidlinger has done a far better job than anyone else could. I encourage you to read her take on the matter. In my opinion, she carries a lot more weight as a writer than any National Geographic hack ever could.
If it bleeds, it leads! Or, if you die…try not to do it on KXMB’s news
How would you feel if that was your son? Your brother? Your boyfriend or husband? Pretty bad, I’m sure…especially if you found out by watching it on the 6 o’clock news.
I prefer KXMB’s newscasts…I don’t watch much local TV, but if I do it’s KX news. The reason is that I like their coverage of local issues compared to KFYR’s, who has to focus more regionally. But when I saw this story air tonight, they still didn’t have any details of the kid’s health! They even said so. Wouldn’t you want to find out if a guy is dead before you show video of someone pulling him from the snow and starting CPR on him? Apparently not at Reiten Television.
I don’t know what’s going on over there. I wish the sensationalism would simply stop. Hey, you KX folks: show a little restraint. Edit out the footage of the body, at least. Act with a little bit of professionalism, please. Heaven forbid you should rush to air footage of someone you care about some day. Is that what it would take for you to stop and think for a minute?
First sunset of the New Year! And how about some more stats?
I’m about to wrap things up for the night and put my little boys to sleep, but here are some quick numbers from my last two years of blogging. I started this blog with a photo of the ND State Capitol Building lit up with “2006” in the windows, and that’s how I started 2008. In the two years in between:
This blog has served 984,138 invidual pages;
I’ve been visited by 459,070 individual readers;
The site’s busiest day was January 14, 2007, with 12,051 pages viewed;
The total hit count (includes images, pages, ratings, and messages sent to me via the Contact Me link: 119,415,870!
Yikes. For just some guy with a camera, I’m flabbergasted. Hopefully folks keep coming, hopefully you’re entertained when you get here, and hopefully I can sell a couple of banner ads to local businesses to pay for the cost of operating this thing. I’m looking forward to 2008 on BismarckMandanBlog.com, and I hope you are too!
20+ years of ambulance chasing continues at KXMB
How’s that for journalistic responsibility?
Shots included in this story are of a stretcher with someone’s foot protruding from under a blanket, and the front of the “mangled” (in the words of Ms. Preskey) SUV. While she goes on to say that “initial information” is that there are no life-threatening injuries. Way to wait for solid information, folks.
If I sound pretty ticked about this, it’s because this isn’t the first time I’ve witnessed this kind of irresponsibility by KXMB (or posted about it). My last post on the matter got me threats of a lawsuit from Darrell Dorgan last year, by the way. Regardless, I stand firm in my stance that this kind of reporting is unnecessary and unprofessional.
How would you like to catch a news story about one of your loved ones on TV like this? Since my original post I’ve been contacted by others with similar horror stories of seeing loved ones in media. It isn’t a trivial matter.
While turning on my TV just now I caught the tail end of a KFYR-TV story on this same accident. Apparently their cameras were there, too. But did they run to get it on the air before details were known? I see their website has a story on this (with a shot taken from a distance) with a timestamp of 4:35pm. That means KFYR probably had their story on their 5 o’clock news. The KFYR story has details including the speed of both vehicles, the extent of injuries, and the fact that the payloader involved was travelling legally. In other words, they WAITED.
By the way, I’m not railing on KXMB because I worked for KFYR-TV for all those years. When I watch local news, I watch KXMB. The nature of KFYR’s four-station setup means they have to focus on regional news and don’t go into much detail on local Bismarck-Mandan stories. I love Kevin and LT, tho. I will say that when I was at KFYR, we had written policy against sensationalism. Maybe I can find my old employee manual and send that page to KXMB for inspiration.
Look, folks…we’re in DMA number 158…that’s pretty much the hind end of television. There’s no need to rush to sensationalism just to say “we’re first!” Show a little responsibility. Dashing from accident scene to air doesn’t do your stations or your viewers any favors. Think of the victims’ families…please?
ND Peace Coalition urges withdrawal from violent North Dakota quagmire
(This ain’t the Onion, but I couldn’t resist a little satire. After all, it doesn’t take an intellectual giant to make these people look silly. They do 99% of the work themselves.)(Bismarck) The North Dakota Peace Coalition called for immediate withdrawal from North Dakota this week, after describing the situation here as “a quagmire with no end in sight.” In light of numerous homicides and other violent crimes in 2007, said NDPC representative Karyn Van Possum, “the continued cost of the North Dakota occupation in the lives and health of our citizens is exceeding our expectations…not that the deaths of North Dakotans should have ever been within our expectations.”
When asked if a resolution in the state legislature along the lines of the Mathern/Kretschmar Pacifism Resolution was being considered, Van Possum indicated, “…that’s certainly a possibility. What better way to demonstrate support for our citizens than to get them out of harm’s way? Staying in North Dakota will not work and is not worth the price.”
Van Possum continued: “The list of atrocities committed in North Dakota include: an asphyxiated newborn in December, the high profile killings of two college coeds in Minot and Valley City, the beating to death of a man in Grand Forks in October, and the April slaying of a Sykeston couple in which their home was burned to the ground in an effort to conceal the crime. That’s only the tip of the iceberg. Even now, the local news is reporting a possible kidnapping in central North Dakota. In August, someone hit a young man in the head and tried to run him over with a pickup. Obviously North Dakota is not safe for North Dakotans. We need to keep our citizens safe. We support North Dakotans, just not their mission. It’s time to bring them home…er, well, somewhere safe, anyway.”
When not busy fighting to end all fighting, many of the ND Peace folks keep busy by forming an endless array of coalitions, councils, and other “dot orgs” to champion such causes such as deviant sexual practices and preferences, pseudo-peace through capitulation to all enemies of freedom, and the worship of the Earth rather than its creator. Populating these organizations, attending the occasional protest and/or drum circle, and standing in black in front of the capitol keep many of them too busy to find a productive place in society. “But we care,” stressed Van Possum, “and that’s the important part.”
While they concede that our presence in North Dakota is unlikely to diminish any time soon, the peaceniks vow to remain resolute. “There’s no giving up on giving up,” Van Possum said. “It takes courage to stand up for running away.”