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You’ve got mail; not really, though
Every day, we check the mail. In fact, when my wife and I drive home from work she will always say, “I wonder if we got any good mail,” about 0.4 miles from our mailbox. She’s as reliable as Google Maps. Maybe more so. The answer is typically, “no.” The mail is usually boring. Credit…
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Flirting with fads
In our consumeristic society this weekend becomes a sort of proving ground for material desires. We mark “Black Friday” and “Cyber Monday,” not as official holidays, but as shared celebration of enormous corporations achieving their Q4 revenue expectations. The stuff we buy and sell, however, changes a little each year. I remember Tickle-Me-Elmo being…
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Thanks for everything
It’s Thanksgiving week, but you can hardly tell. Everyone’s so angry. Prices are up and there aren’t enough teenagers to work the lobby at our favorite fast food joint. The news provides near constant disappointment. Things don’t work, all because of the current president or the last one, according to our favorite talking internet person. …
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A plot to kill at deer camp
As I pack for the hunting shack, I wonder if I have enough crossword puzzles. The stack I’ve been saving since last May has grown substantially. These are Star Tribune puzzles, too, so really there are two puzzles per folded page and a Sudoku puzzle thrown in for good measure. Yes, I probably have enough.…
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Elegy for the pack-sacker
In 1922, Claude Atkinson, editor of the erstwhile Hibbing Daily News and Mesaba Ore opined about a local pageant celebrating the mining history of the Mesabi Iron Range. Iron Range towns at that time seemed curiously young for such nostalgia. It would be the modern equivalent of a pageant celebrating a 30 year high school…
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The unholy terrors of a peanut-free Halloween
Late autumn brings All Hallow’s Eve. The ancient Celts called it Samhain, the awakening of a new year when the worlds of the living and dead briefly overlapped. Today, our modern holiday of Halloween has come to represent a cultural celebration of the taboo topics of death and the occult. It is a frightful night…
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Ready, set, revitalize
They say a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. That’s true, but the success of that journey also depends upon packing a bag with snacks, supplies, and anti-chaffing creams. So it goes for diversifying the economy and winning the future of the Mesabi Iron Range. Success won’t appear all at once.…
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The Hunt for Red October: Cherry Edition
When you’re from Cherry, Minnesota, you get used to certain conversations. For instance, “Where is Cherry?” (Just east of Hibbing). “Lotta hayfields out there.” (Ya). And of course, “Isn’t Gus Hall from Cherry?” (Yes, of course). In fact, I know that fact better than most. I was the last journalist to interview Hall before he…
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Free ideas for Iron Range future
People around local politics often like to “admire problems.” In short, people like to look at problems, complain about them, even lose sleep over them, but then take few steps to actually solve those issues. Sometimes I’m reminded that talking about economic diversification for the Iron Range or the broad concept of “change” isn’t enough.…
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Naming a legacy one noun at a time
Humans didn’t create the world, but we do get to name the things we find here. We name our kids for our dads and our dogs for 19th Century burlesque performers. Someone called it “phlegm” and then invented the spelling. The ancients named “steel” and “stone” with nice sturdy words, but also called some tiny…
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Crime and entertainment
Lately I’ve been watching people walk by, wondering how many of them have bricks of cash strapped under their bellies. How many guns did they cram into those reusable tote bags? Oh, look, she’s buying a shovel. Must have thrown the last one in the lake after burying the guy who talked too much. Or…
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Confessions of a medium Sudoku genius
Back when I was editor of the erstwhile Hibbing Daily Tribune, the most passionate phone calls came after printing errors on the daily crossword puzzle. At the time I compared these angry puzzlers to junkies. I rationalized our error by telling myself that perhaps these lost souls needed a wake-up call just like this to…
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It’s supply and demand, not dystopia
These days some of us fall too easily into patterns of dystopian thinking. Hurry up and get to the end of the world! Maybe it will be better that way! Every day I hear from someone who tells me that they’re glad they’ll be dead before the worst of it. It’s kind of a downer. …
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Ancient crocodile needs our support
A local fossil needs your support. No, I’m not talking about an Iron Range politician. I’m referring to an ancient crocodile. This particular crocodile died in the muck near modern day Calumet, Minnesota, about 90 million years ago. You might think that it’s far too late to help this erstwhile reptile, but you’d be…
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Technology draws new atlas for our future
Want to blow your mind? Look at the evolutionary history of whales. Whales are mammals, not fish. As such their ancestors were land animals, specifically the Pakicetus. Pakicetus was a sort of water-loving goat- or dog-looking critter that hunted alongside lakes and rivers about 50 million years ago. It had massive jaws and was probably…