By Steve Browne
Columnist

Last week, two Winnipeg high school teachers were suspended pending a decision on whether they’ll be fired or not.
Apparently the teachers, male and female, decided to liven up a spirit rally in the gym by performing a lap dance. It was said to be ... not in the best of taste. But you don’t have to take my word for it, a student caught it on cellphone camera and posted it on YouTube.
My money’s on fired.
Northern Territories, Australia: A closed circuit TV camera allegedly “shows a woman throwing her 10-month-old baby on the ground after her partner left on a bus without her.”
You can see that on the Internet, too.
Last November, Miss California and Miss USA runner-up Carrie Prejean settled a lawsuit against the Miss USA pageant out of court after some racy videos she’d made surfaced. Not as racy as videos Paris Hilton, Pamela Anderson and Rob Lowe made, but racy enough, though they’ve been kept off the Internet - so far.
By the way, I think those teachers should be fired. Not just because they were acting in a vulgar and indecent manner in front of kids as young as 13, but because they were so unbelievably stupid it’s difficult to imagine they’ve anything worthwhile to teach.
I mean, come on, they didn’t know that was going to happen?
Everybody has cell phones these days, most with cameras.
There are video cameras in buses, streets, shops and pockets. Because of my job, I am never without a digital camera that takes both stills and video.
And yet people still insist on doing dumb things in front of cameras they really ought to know are going to come back to haunt them. If they’re funny, they easily go viral on YouTube.
High school kids have even coined a word for taking and sending intimate pictures of themselves with cell phone cameras: “sexting.”
(“Oh, but my boyfriend would never pass these around to all his friends, because he loves me and we’ll be together forever.”)
There are actually a lot of pluses to living in the video/Internet age.
A lot of crime is caught on camera these days, making arrests and convictions more likely. Dashboard cameras record what really goes down during traffic stops and makes police mindful of their own professionalism as well.
Politicians can’t get away with flip-flopping quite so much when anything they’ve ever said in front of a camera is accessible from any computer. The organization Witness.org distributes video cameras around the world to document human rights abuses.
But we also have to live with the possibility that any embarrassing or shameful thing we do or say could be recorded, and that recording could be around forever.
And you think it’s bad now. Wait until you can go to Radio Shack and buy a video camera mounted on a radio-controlled scale-model ant, housefly or cockroach. (“Learn about nature firsthand through telepresence! But of course you must agree not to spy you your neighbors with this educational toy.”)
When? I’d guess 10 years, tops.
It used to be religion exercised a certain amount of social control by teaching that God watches and judges you.
I liked it better when it was only God. He’s more forgiving and doesn’t post on YouTube.

By Lee Morris
News editor

In less than one week, the city of Valley City has gone from causing to averting a disaster. And that’s not easy.
City leaders deserve praise for catching a nearly battering blow to businesses. But the city itself initiated the problem. They were going to shutter a portion of Main Street – an economic artery for the city – during the busiest community attraction of the year, the North Dakota Winter Show. What were they thinking?
City Administrator Jon Cameron e-mailed a news release to local media outlets on Tuesday morning detailing the initial closure. For four days during the Winter Show, the road would have been squeezed to one lane to allow for construction on City Park Footbridge. Then on March 8, the road would have closed entirely for a longer time period. Cameron’s news release said the shutdown would result in “minor disruptions.” What an interesting word choice.
Also interesting was that the city tried to blame the closure on the contractor of the bridge construction, Industrial Builders Inc. of Fargo. But it was always the city’s responsibility to ensure such “minor disruptions” didn’t occur during the Winter Show. And to ensure such “minor disruptions” don’t harm business owners. Somewhere along the line, Cameron and crew failed, almost causing “minor” devastation.
In any case, backtracking on their mistake, the city sent out a fresh news release late Thursday. It said both lanes of Main Street would close today through Monday evening, the first day events occur related to the annual agricultural and community mecca. That permits the road to be open during the majority of the Winter Show’s happenings before the thoroughfare closes March 8 until the end of the month. It probably took the city a lot of work to fix the error, and for doing so, they get credit.
But any approbation must be taken with the facts:
Main Street was closed for nearly seven months in 2009. Spring flooding in April, and subsequent construction, restricted vehicles from a large stretch of the road. Many on foot avoided the mire. That downtown businesses are largely intact is possibly a miracle.
To even consider closing Main again, the city demonstrates – to put this as nicely as possible – severely poor planning or a lack thereof.
The champions of the adjusted closure schedule are, of course, the businesses. The Broken Spoke Family Restaurant & Saloon, S&S Auto Electric Inc., and MarketPlace Foods would have been among the most affected by a Winter Show shutdown. They will be the most affected by the near-monthlong closure. But all downtown businesses on Main Street would have suffered when visitors heard, accurately or not, that Main Street was partially or completely closed.
There is one more champion to name: the local media. The Times-Record and KOVC radio got the word out to businesses and the public about the city’s initial plans. And it didn’t go over so well at City Hall. KOVC’s Ryan Cunningham took calls on the topic, and the Times-Record’s front page on Wednesday spelled it out simply and clearly: “Main Street mess.”
It’s a mess the city made for itself.

Nick Simonson
Columnist

If you’ve been reading this column for any length of time you already know how this story ends, or at least how it goes up to this point.  But you would never have guessed that it all began with a disinclined college kid loading up the pickup truck with dusty spinning combos and a thirty-year-old green tacklebox just to humor his dad with a morning trip to a river they had caught nothing more on than bullheads.
I had been back from college on summer break for about three weeks, working on the garbage truck for Valley City Public Works from seven in the morning until four in the afternoon and wasting my time after the whistle blew and on the weekends.  One sunny Saturday, as I stumbled my way out of my bedroom and tried in vain to dodge the natural light pouring into the house, my dad asked me if I wanted to go fishing.  
“When?” I grumbled.
“’About an hour,” he replied.   
I grunted out an “I guess so” and wandered over to the pantry and poured myself a bowl of cereal, shaking off the ill effects and the smoky scent from the bonfire at a buddy’s farm the night before.   
I rode shotgun as my dad drove up the old river road winding through the greening hillsides toward the white concrete barrier of Baldhill Dam.  Summer was approaching, the air was warm and the slight breeze carried the smell of renewed life into the air.  Cows roamed the pastures in the river bottom, and small green rows of corn, wheat and soybeans reached skyward, segmenting the fertile black dirt into long strips tilted toward the flow of the earthy-toned water. The drive was so relaxing that I nearly drifted back to sleep.  
We pulled into the parking lot and began our mountain-goat trek toward the water. A steep embankment of large rocks and boulders riprapped the first 300 yards of shoreline downstream from the spillway and it was a sharp descent from the parking lot to the river’s edge.  Once at the bottom of the rocky shore, we saw the large metal gates were open several feet, pulling the water out from the depths of Lake Ashtabula into the modified river channel in a foamy rush.  
After fifteen minutes of casting our jigs and curly-tailed grubs under the spillway without a bite, we began moving downstream.  As we settled into our next position, my dad connected with his first fish of the day.  Battling it to hand, he held up a large white bass.  The fish sparkled as he lowered it back into the water; its metallic pearl sides with gunmetal-gray trim reflecting the radiance of the morning sun.  
“That was a nice silver,” he stated, calling the fish by its local nickname.
Ten minutes later my dad landed another white bass, slightly bigger than the first one.  After that, the spot went cold and we moved further down the riprapped shoreline with little action.  We had been out for nearly an hour, and my lack of success caused me to ask my dad if he was ready to go.
“Just five more minutes,” he stated.
My dad connected on his first cast off of a concrete wingdam. Then he caught two more, leaving me with nothing to show for the trip.  If I wasn’t frustrated before, I was certainly getting there as my dad began landing fish more frequently.  After his tenth bass, I finally set the hook into something that whirled and spun and broke the surface.  It was a white bass, not nearly as big as any of my dad’s, but a fish nonetheless.  Content with the catch, I set it back in the water and asked my dad if he was ready to go.  
Again he responded, “Just five more minutes.”  
“You said that half an hour ago,” I snorted back.
He just laughed.
As we approached the end of the rocks, the water eddied out over a sand flat in front of an overhanging elm tree and a grassy shoreline.  We picked up a few more fish scattered over the end of the rip-rap.  I looked up the rock embankment and followed the trail back to the parking lot, ready to be done.  As we stepped off of the rocks and onto the gravel path I once again asked my dad if he was ready to go.
With a smile on his face he stated once again, “Just five more minutes.”  
I shook my head, wiped my brow and fired the first cast off over the sandy flat, not knowing that my life was about to change.  Not a crank into the retrieve my rod shook violently with the strike of a massive white bass that rocketed up and smashed through the surface.  I looked over at my dad to see his reaction, but he was wrapped up in a battle of his own.  His fishing pole was bent in a similar arch, as dueling silvers danced in the water before us.  These fish were huge, humpheaded beasts that dwarfed the previous ones we had seen.  They were both over fifteen inches and at least two pounds apiece.  We released them and cast our twisters out into the swirling current and met with the same results.  Fish after fish after fish came to hand.  In five minutes we caught and released at least ten white bass.  We had stumbled on to the mother lode of silver as we continued to catch fish well into the noon hour.  Finally, my dad broke the cadence when he stated that we were due back at home for lunch.  
“C’mon dad, just five more minutes,” I begged.
He laughed at our role-reversal, stating, “We can come back after we eat.”  
I reeled in my last fish of the morning and replied, “okay, but we’d better bring Ben,” as I knew this was something my younger brother had to experience.  We returned after lunch, with my brother in tow and spent the afternoon catching and releasing a never-ending school of white bass.  We ended the day with well over 100 white bass between us, along with a few crappies.  
For the rest of that summer, the school of white bass remained in that exact same spot, and every day after work, so was I.  Sometimes my dad or brother would come with me, but for the most part I fished by myself, casting after the inexhaustible swarm of aggressive silvers that swirled about the rocks and eddies at the end of the spillway.  I learned the basics that summer – from the reading of water and the hookset to the battle and release, - and I filled the first pages of my angling memory book with smiles, silvers and sunsets.  And I recall, many times as I fished deep into the fading twilight, I’d squint against the darkness and once again ask for just five more minutes…in our outdoors.

By Doug Leier
Columnist

In like a kitten out like a lamb. I know that’s not exactly how the traditional saying goes, as I’m substituting a kitten in place of lion to describe the month of March. At least, that’s how I’d like to see March unfold, with a beginning, middle and end less like January and more like April. In fact, after last spring, most of us North Dakotans probably wouldn’t argue with skipping past the freeze/thaw pattern altogether and instead transitioning right into summer.
    Save for a few hardy ice anglers, who’ve already had nearly three months to satisfy their hard-water fishing hunger, it’s not easy finding a benefit to a hard, drawn out winter. 
We all know a typical winter in North Dakota can produce lion after lion, and the lambs might be limited to a couple of weeks, or even just a few days like last year. After that intense 2008-09 winter, man and beast are ready for a little less winter and earlier spring.
Of course, our preferences don’t really matter. With more than a foot of snow during the December Christmas blizzard, and ensuing temperatures pushing to 30 degrees on the wrong side of zero, our winter was off to a familiar pace.
An Alberta Clipper here and another foot of snow there and deer, pheasants and other critters were not only conserving as much energy as possible, but tapping into fat reserves that can prolong their lives if winter lingers into April as it did last year.
So here we are, rounding the back stretch of another winter of discontent not really knowing exactly how our wildlife fared. We do know that animals that live in areas that have good winter habitat are likely faring better than those that live in areas with marginal habitat.
Many people think that we can “help” pheasants and deer by feeding them, but there’s no shortage of studies that indicate heavy winter cover trumps food availability when it comes to winter survival. I’m not saying food isn’t important, but a place for pheasants to get out of the wind is more important. Exposure is much more of a factor than starvation in winter pheasant deaths.
The good news is that even though this winter is colder and has more snow than average, it’s not as severe or as long as last year. Remember, November of 2009 was practically balmy compared to November 2008, which came in with a major snowstorm over the western half of North Dakota. So far, this winter has been about a month shorter than last year, with not as much snow and not quite as cold. 
As March presses on, the grip of winter may loosen and then tighten up again before a full release. It is a critical month as far as winter mortality. While young, old and weak animals likely succumb first during a severe winter, the longer it lasts, the higher the overall mortality.
I hate to use the comparison of a flood, but it’s not the first month of winter or first inch of water. More often, it’s the last storms of winter and final crest. So here’s one guy hoping and praying for March coming in like a kitten and going out like a nice soft lamb.