With 38 years of Flagfest behind us, the celebration truly is a Spencer tradition, a good one. I must confess I was tempted to miss festivities this weekend and head northeast to my hometown Mapleton, Minnesota, sometimes known as the “Curling Capital of Southern Minnesota.”

The gangs all here for the “final” go around with modern day dinosaurs in “Jurassic World: Dominion.” Mixing the three heroes form the original “Jurassic Park” trilogy with the duo who have battled through the past two films, we’re introduced to a world where the prehistoric beasts and humans are thrown together and forced to live side-by-side.

One thing that they left out when teaching the civics of making laws in the U.S., is that after they are written they still have to be implemented. That process starts with rule-making where bureaucrats take license to tweak and even reverse the intent that Congress had when making them. This process is heavily influenced by stakeholders. Big Oil has had undue influence over the rule-making process of the RFS to where U.S. Sen.

In a recent message that I preached, I tried to connect God’s relational capacity and His desire to connect with you and me by using the very first words of the Bible. See if this makes sense to you.

Genesis Chapter 1, Verse 1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

The word Elohim translated “God” means deity. He is the God of all creation — everything!

Delbert McLain was seen going into Marvin Pincus’s house the other evening. We wondered on it a bit, because those two were less likely to become friends than any other two people in the valley.

But Marvin, an old curmudgeon, is an amazing tier of fishing flies, and Delbert, who thinks blizzards are wonderful because the grass will be greener in the spring, is also an amateur fly tier. But Marvin is the real expert.

Gannett, publisher of USA Today, hundreds of newspapers across the country, and most recognizably in our state, The Des Moines Register, announced in recent days that it is reducing editorial pages in its markets. The company said it would be instead doing a more reader interactive format. Editorial pages will not completely disappear from Gannett properties, but they will be less frequent.

Two items in Gannett's announcement struck me.

This statement on shirts and bumper stickers says it all: “Guns Don’t Kill People, People Kill People.” Or “When you ban guns, only the criminals will have guns.” Good guys buy guns from legitimate dealers and register their guns. Bad guys buy guns from other bad guys, who seem to have an endless supply of whatever they wish to purchase. If there were laws to stop this particular flow of guns into the wrong population of people, and it was enforced, that could make a difference.

General Fund revenue for the state continued to come in strong, as tax receipts in May were 43.6% higher than what the state collected in May 2021. While some of this increase is attributable a variety of tax filing deadlines falling on a weekend at the end of April, the strong revenue number continues the state on a path to collect more revenue than what the Revenue Estimating Conference projected.

Since I was a kid growing up (probably around age 4) in north-central South Dakota, I’ve been fishing. It just kind of came naturally because my dad and mom enjoyed fishing. To begin with, it was a short 4-mile trip to Turtle Creek to catch bullheads! Well, now at age 74, I’m still at it, and so are my son and grandson.

What a great time of year this is. We’ve had some good rains, everything is lush and green, the flowers are blooming, and the crops are off to a good start. Water levels on smaller sloughs and ponds are up, and Big Spirit has started to fill. It’s gained well over a foot since its low point this spring, and as of last weekend, it was about 10 inches below the spillway.

When I think back about the people that I’ve had the privilege to share a boat with, there are some similarities in their personalities. Many of the most successful anglers have been very curious. They’re always wondering what if and why. Why are the fish where they are, and what if I used this bait instead of that bait?

Don’t worry if you have already spent most of your plant budget for the year. Fill voids in your gardens and containers with heat tolerant annuals planted from seeds directly in the garden.

Zinnia and marigolds are traditional favorites often started from seeds planted directly in the garden. These germinate quickly and begin flowering in about eight weeks.

PRODUCE BASICS

When I first began my admittedly (so far) brief career in journalism, it was in the shadow of a county-level primary election. Back then, I hardly could care about politics, to the point I wrote a column titled "Political atheist."

But of course, one can't avoid the topic of politics in this line of work, and later that same year I felt as though things had become so polarized that anyone hoping to pull someone off the fence would actually end up pushing them onto the other side.

Without much to review this week ahead of the third “Jurassic World” release this weekend, I thought I would do a little categorizing and prepare a list of my top 10, all-time favorite superhero films. Yes, it’s true, I embrace my comic book fandom. Growing up, I always had a collection of new 25-cent stories to read as we traveled. For many years I moved a collection of close to 5,000 wrapped and boarded books in my collection.