11/23/2005 – 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.
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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.