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EDITORIALS
By Richard Peterson
Seattle's waterfront streetcars are being taken out of service and
it is believed they will not be replaced. Former Maddock Standard
editor Stan Stiles sent a copy of The Seattle Times which reported
this sad development.
The late Eldo Kanikkeberg of the Maddock area was a legendary driver
of these streetcars. He frequently burst into song to entertain his
passengers.
Kanikkeberg asked his conductor, Ira Sacharoff, if he had ever eaten
lutefisk. When Sacharoff replied that he had not, Kanikkeberg heated
the lutefisk on the streetcar's baseboard heater. "While the
lutefisk didn't taste all that bad, the odor wafted through the
car," Sacharoff told The Seattle Times. When passengers boarded the
comments were, "Did someone die on here?" and "What's that putrid
odor?"
Eventually an older Norwegian fellow got on and said, "If I wasn't
drunk and didn't know better, I'd swear it smells like lutefisk in
here."
Kanikkeberg and his wife, Carol (Westby) graduated from BCATS.
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Well, we reached a milestone on November 16 when the first below
zero temperature reading was recorded at Baker. The low that night
got down to -3.
Despite that, the weather generally has been exceptionally nice.
There's no snow on the ground and it got up to 48 on Sunday at
Minnewaukan. The only people unhappy about the weather are the ice
fishermen . . . er, ice fisherpeople, to be perfectly politically
correct.
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Speaking of politics, you Medicare recipients are faced with
decisions that will affect you the rest of your lives. Thanks to the
Republican-dominated Congress you have to wade through a myriad of
plans to come to a decision.
You see, the conservatives think government is bad and private
business is good. So they handed the insurance companies a gravy
train instead of having Medicare handle the entitlement. It's forced
privatization that will result in higher administration expenses
than Medicare could do it for. To say nothing of confusion for the
common person.
But the insurance companies that greased the palms of the
Republican-dominated Congress will make a fortune.
Writing in the Sunday Grand Forks Herald syndicated columnist Paul
Krugman ended his column by saying, "The Medicare drug bill was
devised by people who don't believe in a positive role for
government. An insistence on gratuitous privatization is a byproduct
of the same ideology. And the result of that ideology is a piece of
legislation so bad it's almost surreal."
Thank goodness the people had the good sense to rebel against
President Bush's plan to privatize Social Security.
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You'll see some color in this issue. I don't know how it's going to
turn out because this is the first time this newspaper has ever run
a photo in color. We've had a handful of colored ads, but the color
separations were made at the Devils Lake Journal, where this
newspaper is printed.
To print a photo in color, one has to have red, blue, yellow and
black ink.
One unit of the press contains red ink, one contains blue ink and
one contains yellow ink. The other three units of the press contain
black ink.
The paper is printed with the three colors and then the black goes
on top of that. Everything has to register perfectly. There's a lot
that can go wrong and you know how that goes: if it can go wrong, it
will.
It's a learning process. As I write this, I don't know if I screwed
up or not, but now you know. If I failed, we'll try again. If I
succeeded, we'll do it again.
---000---
We had a sticky door at our place last week. Suddenly, I couldn't
get our wooden storm door closed after working fine for many years.
It simply refused to go over the stoop on the bottom and close
tightly as it was supposed to.
I checked the hinges and they didn't look like they drooped or
anything. I figured maybe the door swelled from the moisture and
needed to be shaved off at the bottom. I was considering breaking
out my Norelco which I put away more than 20 years ago. But getting
the door off the door frame would be a problem because I'm not sure
how to use a screwdriver.
One of the guys at the Fountain of Wisdom (the table at Oddens'
Grocery in Minnewaukan where coffee is drunk and advice is freely
given and no problem is too difficult to solve) said it might be ice
built up between the door and the door frame. I checked and didn't
see any ice.
I was about to put the job out for bids when my wife, Hollys, fixed
the door. She loosened the screws in the hinges, pulled the door up
and tightened the screws. It works just fine. Now if I could just
get her to do some wiring we'd be in good shape.
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