By Liam Muirgheasa

A couple of years ago we redid the kitchen, sort of. We ran out of energy when it came time to redo the cabinets.
I had proclaimed loudly that I could strip them, stain them, and put new hardware on and they would be just like new. Never mind that all the internal hardware was squeeking, grinding, sliding and making the odd bit of sawdust that gave just the slightest hint of mousies.
Part and parcel of the redo was a new fridge. I don’t think we ever had a new one during the 45 years our marriage has endured, or if we did, it would have been the stripped-down, Econo, make-your-own-ice-cubes, Bud, type-of fridge. Mostly we just inherited the fridge choice of the previous owner of the house.
So I tell Mother Superior, we want one of those stainless steel, reeks-of-ostentatious fridges that the Joneses have.
“Who’s gonna clean the paw prints off the front?” says Herself.
Having done my homework, I say we’re getting the six-ninety-five can of stuff that takes all the work out of cleaning stainless steel ... they have them stacked by the cash register. But I digress. ...
The other afternoon there appeared in the kitchen/family room a mysterious “tweet,” which I could link to no social networking device. After it had repeated itself for about 12 times, I’m thinking this fridge is so smart it is sending me a message.
So I get out the manual and discover it is telling me the interior temperature has got too high; or alternatively, one of the doors is open. So I check the temp; nothing wrong there. And then the doors ... well, if one was open it isn’t now. But still, the tweet continues.
A bit later I scour the manual for more advice and find there are ways and means to override this pesky little alarm. Following directions, I hold this button for three seconds and poke that button one time; still no relief. We watch a movie and turn the sound up so we don’t have to hear the tweet, or it blends in with movie noise.
Twenty-four hours later, having finished all that Jan. 15 was going to demand of me, I discovered the fridge still tweeting. This is no longer any fun and not even interesting. I review the manual to see if I might have missed anything and finally call the appliance dealer where we bought the thing. I am no longer enamored of the “reeks of” fridge. The guy who answers blows me off and asks if I’ve read the manual. (Response censored.)
Herself, who never waits for a knight gallant to lead her into battle, is on the Web, Googling tweeting fridges. I follow suit. I find a site that offers to help shut up the tweeter for an amount of money I propose. Now that’s easy.
The lowest selection was $14 and I would gladly pay $14 to make this thing shut up. So I go through the drill that you all know ... set a login name and password.
They want a credit card as a token of my integrity – I give ’em PayPal – and I begin a real-time type-it-in chat with Esequiel Walker, whose dad has owned an appliance store for 30 years and he has been working for 18 years. It goes like this:
Esequiel: “What’s the problem?”
Me: “The fridge has been tweeting at us for two days.”
Esequiel: “Have you closed the doors yet?”
Me: “Do you take me for an idiot?”
Esequiel: “You have faulty electronics.”
Me: “Esky, my new best friend, is there no fix for the consumer here? No hard restart; no reset button? What if I unplug the fridge for a half hour?”
Esequiel: “Try unplugging the fridge for 10 minutes.”
And I did, but the fridge still tweeted ... wait, there is something rotten in the state of North Dakota here. You know where this is going, don’t you, Dear Reader? And then I notice Mother Superior with her hands on her hips, staring at the ceiling in the family room.
“It’s the smoke detector,” cries Herself.
“I knew that all along,” says I. “Any dummy knows that a fridge can’t tweet when it’s not plugged in.”
So I picked up my cell phone and pointed it at the TV to turn on the early afternoon news. A guy can’t be too well-informed these days.
Oh, yeah, Esky, my friend, $14 is too high if you’re just going to parrot back my thinking to me. How about $7 each? Oh, and should I plug the fridge back in?

 Steve Browne

On Tuesday, the people of  Massachusetts elected Scott P. Brown, a Republican, to the U.S. Senate in a special election held to fill the seat vacated by the death of Sen. Edward Kennedy.
Let that sink in for a minute.
In Massachusetts, Republicans hold only 16 seats (10 percent) in the state House of Representatives, and five (12.5 percent) in the state Senate. The state has no Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives and hasn’t elected a Republican U.S. Senator since 1972.
State Attorney General Martha Coakley, twice elected to statewide office, had the endorsement of Kennedy’s widow, a last-minute visit by President Barack Obama, and once led Brown in the polls by 30 points.
Both sides have suggested reasons for Coakley’s staggering defeat by an obscure state senator, who had previously won only district elections.
Candidate Coakley came off as arrogant, elitist and dangerously ignorant on foreign policy and terrorism. When criticized for not campaigning harder, she disdainfully asked if she should stand outside Fenway Park in the cold, shaking hands, then referred to Red Sox star pitcher and Brown supporter Curt Schilling as “another Yankee fan.”
Worse, she’s scary. During the height of the “recovered memory of child abuse” hysteria, she helped ruin the lives of the Amirault and Souza families on obviously bogus charges, then refused to prosecute a real but well-connected child rapist. (Now serving two life sentences.)
Coakley played dirtier-than-you-can-get-away-with in the Internet Age, when she made easily checked claims Brown wanted hospitals to turn away all rape victims, and suggested Roman Catholics shouldn’t work in emergency rooms in a state with a huge Irish population!
President Obama didn’t exactly help when he disdainfully referred to Brown’s pickup truck no less than six times in one speech. Some people just don’t get that a pickup, like a Harley, is as much a lifestyle statement as a ride.
That’s how some Democrats would like to pass off the loss. But the unpleasant truth is, that’s only part of the problem. The election was also a referendum on the Democratic Party leadership.
According to a recent poll by the Washington Post, 58 percent of respondents claimed they preferred smaller government with fewer services, with only 38 percent favoring a larger government with more services.
In an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, only 33 percent of respondents said the administration’s health care proposal is a “good” idea, 46 percent consider it a “bad” idea, and 55 percent disapprove of Obama on health care in general.
Both parties have extreme wings, which exercise influence on the national parties way out of proportion to their numbers. Because extremists are more passionate and committed than moderates, they are willing to devote more of their lives to a cause. People whose own business is worth minding rarely have any interest in minding other people’s business.
The extreme wing of the Democratic Party is hard left, ranging from European-style social Democrats to outright socialists.
The extreme wing of the Republican Party are big-government theocrats who want the state to enforce a reign of virtue. But both meet at the authoritarian end of the political spectrum. Both want a busybody government, different only in the specific ways they want to run your life.
Leadership of the national Democratic Party has been captured by the hard left. Their problem is, most Americans aren’t that far left – including the majority of Democrats. That has to worry Democrats at the state level. It wasn’t just Republicans who elected Brown, who is only moderately conservative at most.
Either party can be captured by their extreme wing, but never both at once. When extremists, left or right, take over leadership, they marginalize the extremists of the other party. Right-wing extremists can safely be ignored by Republican leadership, because they have no place else to go on election day.
Flushed with success over huge electoral victories in 2008, the national leadership of the Democratic Party seemed bent on snatching defeat from the jaws of victory by trying to force a hard-left agenda on a moderate-to-slightly-conservative country with a strong libertarian streak.  
If I were the Republican leadership, the only thing I’d worry about is Democratic leadership returning to their moderate-to-liberal core constituency.

By Doug Leier

More than 40 years ago the North Dakota Game and Fish Department, in an effort to create structure for fish and create artificial habitat within Heart Butte Dam (Lake Tschida) in Grant County, sunk some old car bodies into the reservoir.
As you might expect, the practice of using car bodies for fish habitat was short-lived, but the need for creating habitat in some waters did not go away. Eventually, discarded Christmas trees became a more natural and available element for adding to lakes that needed additional spawning and escape structure.
Over a couple of decades numerous North Dakota lakes including Elsie,Spiritwood, Williams and Moon in the southeastern part of the state, and even larger reservoirs such as Audubon, Lake Ashtabula, Pipestem and Jamestown Reservoirs, got artificial reefs in an effort to boost fisheries production during a time of prevalent drought. Since then, as the state recovered from drought starting in the mid-1990s and numerous new lakes were created from flooded wetlands, use of artificial reefs has been scaled back.
Construction of these projects is time-consuming for Game and Fish staff and local wildlife and fishing club members who volunteered thousands of hours for reef projects at their local lakes.
Research on those projects showed the effort was generally worthwhile but results were often short-term. many reefs enhanced fishing and/or natural reproduction of sport and forage fish, as well as provided cover for 10 or more years. Depending on the lake, however, artificial reefs may not provide any benefits, and they are not a quick fix in lakes where benefits would occur.
 Experiences over the last 10 years emphasize that natural fish habitat – a combination of water and plants, bottom structure and depth – is more productive than artificially placed  habitat. However, some bodies of water have little structure, and adding artificial habitat may be the only way to enhance a fishery in the long term.
Artificial reefs can attract fish and therefore increase angling success in areas where fishing is poor, even though fish populations are healthy.
Tree reefs can provide spawning habitat or escape cover, not only for game fish like perch and crappie, but also for forage fish like fathead minnows.
Artificial reefs are ideal projects to involve local anglers or wildlife club members in an effort designed to yield local benefits and/or ownership.
And here’s a few other considerations:
 •  Artificial reefs are labor intensive and benefits are not always predictable.
 • If artificial habitats are placed in lakes where they are not needed, they could increase fish production to the point of overpopulation for some species.
 •  If water levels recede in lakes where artificial reefs exist, exposing the trees or tires, the material is unsightly. Reef-tops could also become boating hazards.
•  If a reef works in one area, public perception is that it will work in all areas. People may assemble and install reefs without Department approval if they think it will help their lake, or they may,with good intentions, leave Christmas trees on a lake on their own.
• Citizens who construct reefs on their own, or leave trees on frozen lakes (where the tree will wind up on shore after the ice goes out) could be subject to a littering violation. These situations are easily avoided by involving a local fisheries biologist in any prospective reef project.
Like many of you, I’d enjoy more fish and bigger fish. But the reality of establishing habitat is similar to that of stocking of fish -- it’s not as simple as dumping fish or trees into a lake and hoping for the best. We’re better served to assess the potential of each individual fishery and apply the best possible recipe for maintaining and enhancing its potential.

Leier is a biologist with the Game and Fish Department.
He can be reached by e-mail at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

 

 By Roxanne Rogers

‘Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.”
What a great quote by Marrianne Williamson and one that I really believe is true. We are capable of so much more than we give ourselves credit for and what’s wonderful is when we allow for the possibility of greatness, it happens.
An example of pure and unexpected power is when my 70-something-year-old grandmother lifted an automobile off my grandfather. She was alone with him and there was no other option, and she got it done.
Hence the phrase, “Mind over matter.” Just think about some of the phrases we hear and how they have helped shape the way we live.
“We are what we eat.” We have heard this saying dozens of times and through understanding the meaning within the phrase we have become more mindful of our dietary choices. The emergence and popularity of television’s Food Network is proof of our willingness to try new and improved ways of preparing and enjoying more healthful foods.
Here’s one: “Use it or lose it.” Catchy, simple and drives home the necessity of exercising our bodies, and boy, “Have we come a long way, baby.”
The exercise regimens of my youth are very different from the exercise programs of today. We now know that our focus, our posture, our breath and even our intention contribute to the quality of the workout session. We are now challenging the body with various balancing activities to bring about a core workout and creating a more centered and efficient body.
There is an exciting event that takes place in Valley City called Winter Soulstice Wellness Retreat from Jan. 29-31. Now in its fifth year and welcoming both men and women, this event connects knowledgeable and gifted teachers with people who are interested in learning new and alternative ways for improving the quality and comfort of their lives.
The focus this year is “the essence of life,” which is defined in the dictionary as the intrinsic nature or characteristic quality of anything; that which makes a thing what it is.
Topics included in the retreat:
• the pros and cons of the use of bio-identical hormone therapy, Tanya Diegel
• the body magic garment, Paula Quinlan
• brain gym, Cindy Ross
• emotional intelligence, Roxanne Rogers
• health benefits of herbs and spices, Karen Stene-Finch
• a savory sampling of herb and spices, Marlene Pytlik
• the power of connecting with our ancestors, Lisa Owen
• near-death experience: What happened? Firsthand experience by Belva Weston
• the art of allowing dreams to come true, Vickie Smith
• Medicine Wheel excursion, Joe Stickler
• learn a one-minute meditation, Gail Pederson
• yoga class, Janice Berg
• chi gong class, Gail Pederson
• Film, “The Shift,” Wayne Dyer (video equipment from Appliance City)
• Winter Soulstice art project
• group drumming
• group jam session.
Meals will be catered by Another Time restaurant.
People are remarkable and capable of wonderful things; learn to let your light shine.
For more information, call me at (701) 845-4324.

Rogers is coordinator of the
Winter Soulstice Wellness Retreat.