|
Open Forum: Jackson's death dominated network news
I guess the people who loved Michael Jackson, probably feel the same way I did when Elvis died. I was never a fan of Jackson and paid little attention to him, so far be it from me to say anything good or bad about the man, and his music, and dancing. Guess he just wasn't my cup of tea. But if he made some people feel happy with his music performances, then I his honor his memory for that. We all love to be entertained and like our taste buds, we all have different things that please us.
What I fail to understand about any performer, and especially those who excelled in their careers, is the lengths the media in this country will go to honor them or spotlight their lives. After all the world is filled with good people who mean so much to all of us, and they are lucky if they can get a mention. Michael's death dominated the networks for a week. One person in Congress went so far as to try and get some kind of congressional honor for him. Entertainers and Congress make strange bedfellows.
My kind of singer is the one who can just take a microphone and sing without accompaniment of any kind - a cappella, if you will - and still knock your socks off with their music. When Michael Jackson performed there were more people on stage than Lawrence Welk had. You could hardly hear his voice over the din of the instruments and the background chanters. The light show that went with it was a show of its own. I give him credit for the productions, but a great singer - I'm not so sure. Elvis made a lot of noise too, but in the end he could sing.
Mike Holst
Crosslake
Goodbye incumbents
I'm old enough to remember when Jesse "the body-slammer" Ventura and the Minnesota Legislature couldn't figure out what to do with the large budget surplus. So they wasted several months and thousands of dollars before coming to a compromise whereby they divvied up the spoils along party lines so that all of the funds were squandered on pet pork projects and none was returned to the hapless taxpayers from whom the surplus had been extorted. This disgraceful failure on the part of our elected officials correctly resulted in the ouster of several representatives, one of whom expressed surprise and dismay at the voters' memories and reactions. "Doh!"
Once again we see the Minnesota Legislature failing to do the work of the citizenry by refusing to balance a budget and deal intelligently with a $6.4 billion deficit. Not one of these numbskull nabobs of nonfeasance deserves to be re-elected. They can do nothing in their own homes as well as they can in St. Paul And we wouldn't have to pay them.
Goodbye, incumbents!
Stephen A. Busch
Pequot Lakes
Oil field offers marginal returns
"The Bakken Oil Field. America's Saudi Arabia!" trumpet the promotions which arrive regularly in my e-mail box. Are there really 400 billion barrels of recoverable oil in the Bakken Formation as the stock sellers suggest? Actually, we have to divide by one hundred.
The latest USGS Bakken report adds 3.6 billion potential undiscovered recoverable barrels to the Bakken's discovered 500 million for a total of just over 4 billion barrels. That's good, but it's not enough to send the Saudis packing.
Recovery of much of that oil will require high oil prices because of the nature of the Bakken. The field occupies roughly the northern third of the big Williston Basin of the Dakotas, Eastern Montana, and a bit of Canada.
The Bakken oil is in narrow reservoir layers of sandstone and dolomite (limestone) sandwiched between shale layers. Your $5 million well has to drill down as much as 2 miles, then travel horizontally into the reservoir layers, using hydraulic fracturing to get the most oil. Production per well is in the range of 100-150 barrels/day. When the Bakken is fully developed, the field is estimated to produce about 250,000 barrels/day, nice, but that's just over 1 percent of total U.S. oil consumption.
Bakken oil is light sweet with an API density in the high thirties and low sulfur content. Drilling in the Bakken doesn't carry the usual exploration risk of coming up with a dry hole. If you drill you will hit oil. The risk is whether you will produce enough oil at a high enough price to cover drilling and production expenses. At today's oil price, much of the Bakken potential offers only marginal returns.
Rolf Westgard
Deerwood
To Subscribe to the Brainerd Dispatch, Click Here.
Note: Comments are not edited and don't represent the views of The Brainerd Dispatch. Please read our posting rules in the terms of service policy. To report a post that may be inappropriate, click the triangle alert icon.
|
|
Top Commented Articles
