ND Go Boom

North Dakota Went Boom

Kevin Tschetter, 34, hauls water to and from active wells for KNS Enterprises. Originally from South Dakota, he was meeting with other KNS employees at the Scenic 23 Club in New Town.
By CHIP BROWN
Published: January 31, 2013

Long before the full frenzy of the boom, you could see its harbingers at the Mountrail County courthouse in Stanley, N.D. Geologists had pored over core samples and log signatures and had made their educated guesses, and now it was the hour of the “landmen,” the men and women whose job was to dig through courthouse books for the often-tangled history of mineral title and surface rights.

Apart from a few fanatics who sometimes turned up at midnight, the landmen would begin arriving at the courthouse around 6 a.m. In the dead of winter, it would still be dark and often 20 or 30 below zero, and because the courthouse didn’t open until 7:30, the landmen would leave their briefcases outside the entrance, on the steps, in the order they arrived. And then they would go back to their cars and trucks to wait with the engines running, their faces wreathed in coffee steam. Sometimes there were more than 20 briefcases filed on the courthouse steps. The former landman who told me this — Brent Brannan, now director of the North Dakota Oil and Gas Research Program — said he sometimes thought he could see the whole boom in that one image, briefcases waiting for the day to start, and it killed him a little that he never took a picture. Moar

WoW! Not Quite Wot I Remember...

Mpls Trio

The Andrews Sisters, with Patty at center, in a 1947 publicity still.
By ROBERT BERKVIST
Published: January 30, 2013

Patty Andrews, the last of the Andrews Sisters, the jaunty vocal trio whose immensely popular music became part of the patriotic fabric of World War II America, died on Wednesday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 94...

A final salute to the Andrews Sisters came in 1991 in the form of “Company B,” a ballet by the choreographer Paul Taylor subtitled “Songs Sung by the Andrews Sisters.” The work, which featured nine of the trio’s most popular songs, including “Rum and Coca-Cola” and, of course, “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy,” underscored the enduring appeal of the three sisters from Minneapolis. Moar

WoW!

Samsung's disk cloning program can clone the C drive while the computer's in use! Ittsa miracle! (Seagate's has you set up the clone operation and then reboots into some kinda DOS system which tries to entertain you with spinning characters and some kinda percentage gizmo.) They both want one of their drives on the system. Seagate does not care where it is, not sure about Samsung.

Of course, it took it the whole goddamned night and it did hang up somewhere, still it boots! We iz living in the future!

Allspice Dram

Lake Wine and Spirits just called. They have St. Elizabeth Allspice Dram in stock. I gotta get me some!