Fargo, In The Editorials

The weeks of heat have kept me inside and on the internet, away from daily walks and local culture. I couldn't even do the street fair -- we made it about a block and a half before the heat was intolerable. Walks with the dogs are short and panty. The lawn hasn't been mowed in probably a month, due to the lack of grass in any form, which has alowed the drought-tolerant weeds to lay their claim and defy all who oppose them. The thunderstorms in recent evenings have been welcome...although, with the heat still lingering, obese humidity has replaced the rather dry heat of early July.

What I'll talk about here is opinion, at large, of Fargo in general. First of all, we have Bob Bestler, Fargo expatriate. In a recent column, Bestler weighs climate heavily, doubting Money magazine's evaluation of Fargo as a great place to live. His recollections of thirty-below weather shines doubt on Money's evaluation -- but, Mr Bestler, have you noticed our 100+ degree weather lately? Other than intolerable winters, there's a 140-150 degree difference between that and our summers, making for intolerable weather all year round! Er, maybe that didn't come out right. It's probably just the heat talking.

Bestler, fortunately, is a bit more crochety than other people who've seen Fargo for what it is. Last winter (interestingly, during some of the coldest part of winter) Lawrence Schumacher of the St Cloud Times stopped by and liked what he saw. Remembering the Downtown of the late 1990s, Schumacher approved of Fargo's revitalization these days, and went so far as to recommend modelling St Cloud's downtown after it. Much of his compliments are focused on night life, which one can hardly define a city by even though it's how men's magazines and alternative newspapers measure a town's worth. The loss of youth and the 'brain drain' are big contributors to city death, so Schumacher might have his finger on a thermometer of metropolitan health.

Joel Kotkin of Inc.com has a better perception of that thermometer. Simply having a Cool Downtown isn't what makes Fargo a great city to live in: it's the money. Fargo's economy, once domainted by agrarian desires, is now firmly entrenched in modern technologies, from RFID to electric cars. When a region can boast offices of both Microsoft and Amazon.com (in Grand Forks), something must be going right. Schumacher points out the organic growth of Downtown, a commercial district created by demand rather than planning. Bestler's Florida-retiree audience isn't going to be receptive to these recommendations, and Schumacher's late-20s-bachelor lens wouldn't have been pleased, either. Fargo appeals to thirtysomethings, either developing or entrenched in family matters, whose education and quality of life expectations are more than met by Fargo's economy and environment. Our Cool Downtown wasn't manufactured to create an artificial sheen on an ugly underlayer; it's here because people with money and free time are ready to part with their money. Kotkin sees what Fargo's growth comes from: making people with families and skills happy.

Even though the value of my skills are in doubt, Fargo makes me happy. While having kids make enjoying Fargo's night life difficult, we enjoy what our town has to offer. Well, when it's not so hot. Or so cold. Without Fargo's Cool Factor, it would be the intolerable place Bestler thinks it is. Money Magazine and Joel Kotkin have it in perspective, though, and realize that culture is the climate that makes a town, not temperature.

Sidenote: Me & the kids spend a few days hunting the Painted Bison -- go have a look!

Posted by: AzraelBrown on 7/29/2006 at 10:10 AM | Comments (35) | Permalink

Blogs As Art

The BlogConcierge posted this question:

I'm curious - do you consider blogging an art? I mean, is it more akin to writing on the bathroom wall (something to be enjoyed by the next few users, then painted over or scrubbed away) or is it something that should be better appreciated, with more longevity? What do you think the place of the blog is in our society/culture?

I started to reply in her blog, but decided I had more to say than could fit into a litle comment box.

As with most creative projects, "art" is subjective. Comic books were for a time considered commonplace and unartistic in their flatness and simple colors, but Roy Lichtenstein adopted the style in his art, comic artists pushed the edges of style and design to its limits, and now today comics range from the old-style lines and simple colors up to elaborate works of graphic art. The difference between a 1950s Superman and a 1990s Sandman is in application -- in simple terms, they're both comics, but they come from different artistic directions. Literature is equally divided: the literary status of Stephen King is permanently in question, but nobody disputes the popularity of his work despite the supposed lack of 'art' in his books. Burroughs' Naked Lunch is considered a literary masterpiece by some, but incomprehensible and gratuitously disgusting by others. High school students traditionally yawn and fuss over reading Shakespeare while doing their book reports on Danielle Steele and Tom Clancy. You can even find people who deride Lichtenstein as crap compared to the comics he copied. Coming up with a definition of "art" that might help define blogging looks difficult.

Considering art at its simplest term, as in the term 'artisan,' art is the creation of something by skilled human hands. Anything: a hammer or a hairnet. By this definition, a blog is art, in creating something new where nothing existed before. It's immensely feasible online, when few raw materials are required, relying entirely on the skill of the blogger. Outsider art is an example of art that becomes art simply through its creation. Anybody can be a painter, so long as they have an audience wiling to enjoy it. Painters and musicians on streetcorners begging for money for their art are creating something that isn't mass-producable elsewhere. You can't go into a Wal-Mart and buy newly-imported street art fresh off the boat form China, nor can you go down to Hornbacher's and buy a meal prepared by a chef. Art comes from the hand of a person, and that makes it art.

Most people wouldn't consider half of the hand-made stuff at the street fair art -- but getting them to agree on which is art and which isn't is the tough task. Badmouth/compliment Devo or Britney Spears in the wrong crowd and you'll see how art is varyingly defined by the audience. We tend to consider art to be something that has unique creative value, something with emotion and a message and the inability to reproduce it by just anybody. Most painters don't accidentally paint a Picasso or Dali, filmmakers don't randomly product Citizen Kane. Those works are considered art because they are unique and original, and then become a target for new artists to reach. However, most people look at a Pollock mural and think, "I could do that," but what makes a Pollock is the artist. Horror and suspense book lists are full of Stephen King and Anne Rice wannabes every year, but they do not reach any acclaim unless something sets them apart from the predecessor -- and that becomes credited to the author. The original Romeo and Juliet, when set next to the derivitive Romeo + Juliet movie from the 1990s, are both art -- but for different reasons. The former is in language and subject, the latter is in visual and conceptual style. Both were taken from earlier works, a rather bland story of "star-crossed" lovers who kill themselves to make a useless point, but each is considered art by modern society. Somewhere inside a man-made item there must be a spark of creativity, something that identifies the whole as art, regardless of the production itself.

Blogs range from reposted links stolen from other blogs, to detailed diaries, to progressive works of fiction. As with paintings, flim, literature, and theatre, blogs have something in common: the creation by human hands, and the uniqueness of the creator. Each can be considered art in its own way, based on style, composition, meaning, and purpose -- just like any other form of art. Livejournal and MySpace, both filled with rambling drivel of today's youth, are huge examples of mass-multimedia art. People flock to these sites, able to both write about what's on their minds and be able to react and respond to the thoughts of their peers. It doesn't need to be literary gold -- nobody has said that art has to be considered good.

Blogging is not strictly literature: the art lies in making something that connects to a larger whole, whether its a specific website or a network of similar-leaning blogs. Without a connection to other websites, blogs flounder in an empty wasteland. By linking each other, they net themselves together into a larger picture. Unless other blogs link to it, a blog exists in a vacuum, unable to be heard. Blogs that do little else but link to other blogs are collages, combining bits of other people's art into a cohesive whole. Fiction blogs don't post entire chapters or entire books online -- they compose individual posts to make up an entire work of fiction, sometimes without end. The diary bloggers who place their life up for scrutiny are compiling their personal memoirs, in real-time, without editorial benefit. All these various bloggers find one another, based on common themes and ideals, and interact through related posts or blog comments. Like this one: I had a choice to make a short comment on BlogConcierge's blog or blog it myself, and instead chose a longer-format by linking to her. This now creates a third dimension to both of our writings, like the beauty in a railcar covered in overlapping graffiti. While any blogger's post might stand on its own, how it fits into the bigger picture, how it connects internally and externally, make up its creative whole.

The impermanence of specific blog posts is missing the big picture: No blog exists for any single post. Recent studies show 36 hours is the half-life of online postings; no single writing has enough time to define a blog individually. As blogs link to each other and search engines spider a blog, new readers are brought in not by the newest post, but by a links from some other website to an individual post that fulfills a reader's need. These nonlinear entrances show how the blog doesn't rely on reading what's here and now, but the blog's collective contents as a whole.

Blogs are complex things, not a single sheet of paper filled up and set aside. They are a combination of what makes a person unique, and what they create becomes an extension of it. A blog is about collecting a persons thoughts and ideas, folded in with derivitive connections to other people's creations and expressions of unique points of view, erected as a creation that can be identified singularly, but also within a genre and style of its own. What could be a better definition of "art"?

Posted by: Azrael Brown on 7/14/2006 at 5:26 PM | Comments (1) | Permalink

The Cycle

My middle daughter's bike had shrunk; perhaps the garage was a little too warm, or the wintry cold had stunted it. Her knees rose too high, her arms were too low, the seat could go up no further. It was time for a new bike.

Both my daughter and I have a summer birthday. A summer birthday is a boon to a kid: not only is it nowhere near the interference of Christmas gift-giving, it's also an event guaranteed worthy of getting a new bicycle. Once the bikes are rescued from behind the snowblower, shovels, and sleds, word gets around quickly if a bike no longer fits the rider. Traditionally in my family, grandmas and grandpas are the bringers of new bikes. This spring, not long after the sidewalks were nice enough for a ride, my parents asked for gift hints for my daughter. A bike was the only suggestion they needed.

When I was four or five, I got my first bike four from my mom's parents. It was red, had training wheels, the seat was hard molded plastic, living with no paved roads for miles made for scar-ridden elbows and knees, but I managed. It was my last 'new' bike for some years -- while the tradition of getting bikes from grandparents was not broken, the bike I rode for much of gradeschool was a hand-me-down that belonged to my dad's siblings. It was far from a bad bike: it had classic mid-century style, built from sweeping curves and sharp angles as though it fell off the back bumper of a passing supersonic fighter. We went into town and bought new tires, thick and knobby, the kind that belong to a new style of bike called "BMX". Along with the tires we bought black glossy paint. This bike got me around the family farm quite well, until we moved into town during the fourth grade.

My parents bought my daughter's first bike four years ago. It was painted with a flower pattern, most likely to match the helmet and kneepads. Last summer, I produced a cerscent wrench and subjected her to the horror every child goes through. Without warning or ceremony, I removed those pesky training wheels. She stood by, watching and stressing, until I stood the bike up and suggested she get on. The slightest wobble evoked blood-curdling screams, and that first scuffed knee was on par with the loss of a limb, but she made it. By the end of the first day, those falls were less traumatic, and the wobbling changed to more confident straight paths down the sidewalk.

When I moved into town at 9, I needed a real bike, and my grandparents came to the rescue with a genuine (the stickers said so) BMX bike. I rode it around the block, over and over and over, memorizing the lanscape of broken sidewalks and lawn-crossing rules. It was OK to cut the corner and cross the lawn of one house, but the other one -- the house on the corner of 8th avenue -- was off limits, lest a elderly tenant hurl scorn upon tresspassing bikers. When I got a little older and my brother got a BMX of his own, we would head out of the yard and point our bikes for parts unknown. Usually, it amounted to following the train tracks from 6th Avenue and 2nd Street out to 25th Street. We didn't ride on the tracks, because that was far too bumpy to tolerate, but the crushed rock embakements were cross-country enough for us. At that time there were more business spurs to explore, which we followed to the backs of empty warehouses and weedy, overgrown lots. We were careful not to get too close, for fear of being caught on property not our own. Despite the risk, we still devoted full afternoons to our explorations.

Our kids aren't responsible enough to be trusted with distant travels today. We do, however, make accomodations for longer bike rides in conjunction with our walks. The rules are: stop at every corner, rotate being 'first' at each intersection, and watch for driveways. When we're feeling particularly carefree, the children also get to pick which direction. The teen invariably tries to turn us back towards home, but the other two have enough influence to offset the counterproductive backtracking. We parents follow along on foot, wringing a little personal time from the walk, and the kids get to ride strange and foreign sidewalks as fast as they can.

One afternoon in the eighties, after a wagon was stolen from our yard, my dad, brother, and I all rode down to the police station. The bikes were chained up outside, at the bottom of the stairs leading out onto the park centered around the Ten Commandment memorial. After some paperwork and the exchange of a couple dollars, little yellow numbered stickers, our bike "license plates," were affixed to each frame to ensure the bike will return if it ever wanders off. Ten-year-old me had that number memorized, ready to deliver to any detective in hot pursuit of bikenapping criminals.

Last summer, our kids' bikes were licenseless, but this year I decided to make sure each one was registered. Going online, I tried to find any information on how to go about licensing a bicycle. The closest information I could find is the City of Fargo traffic codes, which explain that the chief of police is responsible for license issuance, but it lacked price or procedure. A quick call to the police department filled in the gaps: it cost $3, and I needed serial numbers, description, wheel size, and how many speeds for each bike. "Where do I go?" I asked "You come down to the police station." As I did in my youth, I had planned on everyone riding their own bike to the station, where we'd have all the relevant information chained up at the bike racks.

I knew the station had moved since I last bought a license, so I asked her the address. 222 4th Street is the new place for bike licenses, but this posed a problem: Also in the traffic codes is Ordinance 8-1420-A:

No child under the age of 12 years shall operate a bicycle on the streets or avenues in the city within a zone the boundaries of which shall be as follows:

From the intersection of Roberts Street and Sixth Avenue North. South on Roberts Street to NP Avenue: West on NP Avenue to Eighth Street and First Avenue South; East on First Avenue South to the intersection of First Avenue South and Fourth Street; North on Fourth Street to the intersection with Sixth Avenue North; and West on Sixth Avenue North to the intersection with Roberts Street.

Sadly, the front door of the current Fargo Police Department is located mere footsteps within this forbidden land. While I'm still planning on the family bike ride, we will have to stop just short of our destination and walk the rest of the way, lest we incur a $40 fine for our intrusion.

Despite lacking licenses, the kids' bikes still zip around the block on a regular basis. My bike, however, has not made it out of the garage yet. The lawnmower blocks it now, a sign of which of the two has eaten up more time this summer, and I miss it. This bike was the first to break the cycle, one bought for me by my parents the same summer they bought my daughter's first bike. At that time I'd been without a bike since high school. It didn't seem quite so important once I got a car, but as a parent I began to see the family value in a bicycle. The bikes in my family haven't been just toys. They're part of our family's structure, a way for the kids to both expand their freedom and tighten the thread between generations.

Posted by: Azrael Brown on 7/9/2006 at 11:00 AM | Comments (0) | Permalink

Gone For A Walk

Somewhere around December, the wifey begins to complain about one thing. Well, she does complain about the weather, and about the heating bills, and about "dawn" meaning "mid-morning," and snow tracked in (when we all should know darn well to take off our boots at the door) -- but those are "regular complaints," parts of life that nobody really likes but nobody who lives here hates enough to do anything about it. You can't really live anyplace without a list of those in your pocket; part of life is grumbling a little bit about your world, just to make small-talk. No, my wife's complaint, a genuinely painful grievance, is that we can't go for a walk.

While neither of us could be considered "old" (except by our children), a couple years ago we had started to notice our inactive lifestyles weren't friendly to our bodies. My wife and I were both geekish youth, neither the sporting type, so going to the gym or joining a league wouldn't fit our lifestyles. We have dogs and kids, so we'd gone for walks in the past, but we hadn't really considered the health benefit until we started loking at what we had. Our decision, as a first step in making ourselves healthier, was to walk more.

Fargo may not be pedestrian-friendly in the winter, but the city has made up for it in accomodating summer walkers. It is a rare area that has no sidewalks (such as the industrial park); every place that people would live has a sidewalk at their front door. This consistency makes variations surprising: the cul-de-sac near South Kmart whose sidewalk ends half-way around, or the stretch of 13th avenue, around 24th street, with two sidewalks separated by three feet of grass and trees, running the length of the block. When I both lived and worked downtown, my car sat unused for weeks at a time. When we lived on the south side, walking was limited a bit due to the curvy chaos of new subdivisions and trouble in fording the wide gulfs called University Drive, 25th Street, and I-94. It didn't stop us from heading north to Ice Cream + (stopping on the blue bridge over 94 to wave at semi drivers), or all the way to Rose Creek via the paved-over abandoned rail line.

Now that we're on the north side, not far from Downtown, we can accomplish most of our days' activities on foot. Heading up to Sunmart to pick up dinner isn't a chore: it's a family event. The dogs are harnessed up, the kids fight over who leads which pup, and we head out the door. The walk is maybe eight blocks, roundtrip, but added up over weeks and months we easily walk several miles for a task that, in winter, takes one person in the van. Efficiency isn't the purpose; taking a walk is meant to burn energy, not conserve it. It also gives us fifteen minutes with the kids, without games or toys in the way...and I can't possibly express the joy our dogs feel to go for a walk. Because of our consistency, the circle we call "neighbors" has expanded. People who live from car to garage don't meet the people who live over a block away. In our neighborhood, those people get concerned when we walk by without our dogs. "Where are the puppies today?" they ask; "Grounded!" we reply, even though we all know the dogs had done nothing wrong. The grocery store baggers know we want our milk double-bagged to survive the trip. We know which houses have squealing children who like to pet our dogs, and which yards have dogs that make sure you know, in no uncertain vocal terms, that you're on their sidewalk.

Just walking to the store isn't enough, though; it's a reason to remind ourselves the necessity of a walk, but we still want more. At least twice a week, we go for a long walk.

North Fargo is often compared to small-town living. It's not a completely fair comparison, because of property prices, crime rates, and the amount of traffic, but the general sentiment is present. That small-town coziness spreads into the South side, at least as far as 13th avenue. The streets are narrow and arched-over by tall trees. Houses are reasonably sized and on proportionately large lots. People spend time on porches and decks connected to the front of their house, rather than hidden behind huge privacy fences in their back yards. Garages are properly tucked away in alleys or at the rear of the lot, rather than a monolithic guardhouse fifteen feet forward of the front door. Age has created an eclectic mix of housing types: houses that were once similar and cookie-cutter have been torn down and rebuilt, fixed up, reshingled and re-windowed, added to and trimed down. Small apartment buildings with unique designs are tossed in with the single-family homes. Sidewalks do their best to navigate around old encroaching trees, odd intersections, and a hundred years of lawn work.

To support the dogs on a longer walk, we equip ourselves with a water bottle, a collapsible doggie bowl, and four poop baggies (after discovering the pups sometimes save up for an extra deposit). Everyone gets on walking shoes, hats and sunglasses, and we head out the door. Our destination isn't nearly as important as just being out and about. We try to stick to tree-shaded walks and away from the more major streets, for everybody's comfort. Much of the time we just wander the streets around our house, looking at the older homes and studying the flower gardens for unusual specimens. The houses in our area are mostly in the century-old range, and for the most part they're well cared for. Some yards are quite clearly rentals, while others are in disarray due to carelessness. Their yards are strewn with garbage, grass turning yellow, disabled vehicles with weeds growing under tires -- one particularly unpleasant building had a Nazi flag hung in the front window, the yard disintegrated to bare dirt and scattered weeds. These, thankfully, are rare on our walks; most residents are proud of their homes, and despite income or physical abilities lawns are mostly mowed and yards are kept clean. When I grew up on this end of town it seemed in more disrepair than today, and I'm pleased to see the number of older houses restored and improved.

Other times, we head down to the river. The north Fargo bike paths follow the length of the Red River, from El Zagal to a block north of Oak Grove, and at Oak Grove a path leads across into Moorhead, just north of the Moorhead Center Mall, or we could continue south all the way to Lindenwood Park. The family entourage hasn't been equipped for the full journey to Lindenwood, but we've crossed the Red into Moorhead just to see what's there. The paths along the river are more fun for the litle explorers, dog and human alike. The children know not to get to far beyond eyeshot, so they're allowed a bit more room to browse the underbrush along the path. The kids start out restricted by conformity, their feet stuck within the borders of the path, but with a little experimentation and encouragement from the adults they begin to expand their range, hiding behind trees and walking through the grass. Tiny frogs and caterpillars are discovered; however, the youngest of the kids have too much city in them. I'm often recruited to catch whatever fearsome fauna they encounter, but I'm happy that they get to see something other than the mosquitos and ants in our backyard.

Because the walks started for the parents' benefit, we do find the time to go without the kids. The wifey and I have been known to walk to Mexican Village for good food and a pitcher or two of margueritas. Just this afternoon, Grandma took the kids to the pool, so my wife & I hitched up the pups and went for a long walk around the neighborhood, forging as far east as the 2nd Street construction and as far north as 12th Avenue. The dogs returned home winded, but the break from work and some time alone were refreshing for the two of us. I can tell why my wife misses the walks in the winter. We get so much from them, from time with loved ones to a change of scenery. We started walking with exercise in mind, but now it has become a regular part of our family's summer. We walk for fun, and it's a loss to be without it. The winters may be long, but we make due; invariably, there's one or two walks that start too early the spring, walks that are cut short by razor-sharp wind and uncrossable puddles, forcing us to head for home far sooner than we'd like. Still, we keep trying: our walks are hard to live without.

Posted by: Azrael Brown on 6/28/2006 at 4:50 PM | Comments (16) | Permalink

Early Voices From The Area

The internet seems permanently far, far away from North Dakota, an unbounded universe rooted in larger states like California, Washington, and New York: add that most of the high-profile bloggers are based out of distant metro areas, and it was easy to believe that nobody local had ever run a blog before.

As a community, areavoices.com is unique for our region. Blogging communities have been around for quite some time, successfully bringing attention to their writers by association, but there hasn't been anything like this devoted to the area. However, it's not the first place to pull together North Dakotan blogs together in one place. Far, far back in the history of the internet (say, 2003), Say Anything blog had compiled a list of a few dozen indigenous bloggers, and encouraged the tenant bloggers to copy the list to their own websites. This first group of area bloggers really opened the community to how blogging exists next door. The list, as it was in 2004, contained:

• My blog, eroneously called "Brain Log" because that was the title of the column that the blog entries appeared in. "Ones and Zeroes", as the wifey calls it, must have been too obtuse.
  
• Buffalo Common: A site made up of quick notes and links to area news websites; still going strong three years later.
• Dispatches From Outland: a poltical blog, as were most on the SayAnything list, and still in existence.
• Dylron's Filter: the personal blog of a Minotan (Minotian? Minoite?). Has not been updated since February.
• Fargoboy is the blog of a Fargo expatriate; his blog laid dormant most of 2005, but had a few posts earlier in 2006.
• Fiddle 2 is quickly approaching 10 years of blogging, and as near I can tell he's still in Fargo. His blog is of the genre "geek blog," full of references to computer jargon and technology.
• Flickertail was an early attempt at including blogs in the news; it focused on the 2004 elections, and was hosted & sponsored by the Fargo Forum. Political blogs were all the rage in 2004, and much of the 'blog buzz' resulted from these amateur pundits. Sadly, as you found out when you clicked that link, the Flickertail is no longer online.
• Gnatty Bob has been shut down, not even the Internet WayBack machine helps find more about it.
• Hampden News is part of the LonePrairie.net family, and was set up to commemorate a city centennial in 2004 -- adding to the historical nature of the event, the blog was left intact, a historial item on the internet.
• Jason Signalness has been blogging quite religiously since 1998 -- and will even moreso when he joins a seminary at the end of this month.
  
• Julie Neidlinger was co-author of the ND Blogroll, and has changed the URL since its original appearance in the list. Her blogs -- several on the site, each with a dedicated topic or purpose -- have been updated often.
• Life Of Mon is a common type of blog: one full of personal opinion, but is only updated when something significant comes to mind. These kinds of blogs often provide the best reading, but are often forgotten due to the long time between updates.
• Lydia's Xanga, in a stroke of odd timing, has just closed its doors without saying where she's going with her bloggy thoughts. Her blog, if the older and stogier of you can take it, is iconic Teenager Blog: full of the language and feelings of the youth today, which is often lost on the older of us.
• Millionth Monkey Speaks was once a blog, whose owner had registered the witty "rentamidget.com" domain name -- unfortunately, either by design or by domain-squatting, the site is now dominated by a business offering the actual rental of "little people". Go figure.
  
• Our Mother is a beautiful blog, written by daughters caretaking their aging mother. Touching and literary, focused blogs like these can be the best reads.
• Say Anything was the other co-author of the ND Blogroll, and a strong political blog -- even becoming parts of Pajama Media now.
• Shiofuki is, and was, a gaming blog, although it is rarely updated. Those of us not un the game might not have any idea what they're talking about anyway.
• SlopedSideways, too, has been shut down -- their blog claims that they wil move to slopedsideways.net, but only a parking page exists there.
• Teaching Humans appears to have started as a school project -- a teacher educating her pupils on the power of blogging -- but it also includes personal bits from her own life.
• The Bison Blog was designed for NDSU students to comunicate in a blog format, apparently created by the Teaching Humans blogger, but has been down since 2004. The URL they say they moved to is not active.
• The Cranky One is actually a blog I read from time to time: it is a blog used as an outlet, a way for a single mom to get things out of her system, tell her story, and otherwise empty her resevoir online.
• The Dream Project was the blog of event organizers in Grand Forks, but their domain now just points to a unrelated UND server.
• The Journey is the blog of one of the daughters from Our Mother, who has been producing a variety of websites and blogs over the past several years. She can also be found on AreaVoices, too. She is also author of the next one on the list:
  
• The Waiting Place , a blog addressing the lives of Kurdish Iraqi families.
• Tom Isern is a history professor at NDSU and writer, who has over the years published books and articles about living on the prairies; his blog is an extension of his other writings, much more casual and personal.
• Triblog was an AreaVoices-like website of the Bismarck Tribune, which no longer exists.
• Vastlane is less of a blog, and more of an interactive community like Slashdot or Digg, compiled of articles written by people in the Grand Forks area.
• WXGal's World is a personal blog (moved in 2004 to a new URL) - regularly updated, documenting the minutiae of her life, as a good blog should.
• Welcome To My Brain Dump was a personal blog, but no longer exists.
• Why Not Minot went the way most blogs go: start out strong, then fade away, existing forever as an untouched ghost town.

Posted by: AzraelBrown on 6/24/2006 at 4:50 PM | Comments (1990) | Permalink