Tag Archives: oil patch

The Good, the Bad and the Abysmally, Painfully Awful

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Apparently, the movie Battleship is about as bad as you would have expected it to be. I have a hard time believing any movie could be as bad as Transformers was, but apparently this hits that low mark, at least according to one reviewer. (Warning: Some mild profanity!) (via BoingBoing)

“So yeah, if the trailers weren’t your first sign, rather than have the movie revolve around naval combat like the board game, and might have actually made a decent film, they chose to have it be Transformers 4, and yet achieves a level of stupidity in terms of plot and script that makes Transformers (any of them) look like Inception, Independence Day look like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Pearl Harbor look like Saving Private Ryan.”

Ouch.

The review’s probably a lot more enjoyable than watching the movie, though.

Then again, it is possible, with a movie as bad as Transformers, that having nails pounded into one’s eyeballs is more enjoyable than watching the movie.

Let’s talk happier links!

  • We are living in a golden age of proverbs. And before you laugh, think about it: “If you build it, they will come.” (via the Boston Globe’s wonderful Brainiac blog)
  • There is a blog out there devoted to posting pictures of people eating on Law & Order. No, I don’t know why. No, I don’t get it either. (via BoingBoing)
  • Have you ever wanted to kill someone using poisoned clothing? I can’t honestly say that I have, but I’d consider it as a writer of murder mysteries. Has it happened before? Snopes examined the question. There was much discussion on Livejournal. And there were also questions about whether it would work to poison someone’s hair. (I don’t know how you could do this without poisoning the person whose hair you’re… poisoning.)
  • Sad news: A white buffalo was killed in Texas. Sad and very awful.
  • Some highly entertaining and informative audio journalism from the Oil Patch, well worth listening to, that originally aired on Prairie Public Radio in North Dakota.

News from–and in–the Oil Patch

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The oil boom is affecting newspapers in western North Dakota just as much as it is every other industry, it seems.

Three people in the newspaper business had a roundtable discussion Friday morning at the North Dakota Newspaper Association conference, which I attended, and all three of them and the moderator had a lot to say about how their businesses had been affected.

Forum Communications Company Reporter Amy Dalrymple, whose work we often run in the Jamestown Sun, covered the discussion. Her story’s great, check it out!

There are a couple of other things I’d like to add:

  • At least one paper has so many ad purchases coming in that it’s having a hard time keeping the ad content down to 75% of its pages. If it doesn’t do that, it’ll lose its favorable mail rate, which is bad.

The obvious solution is to hire another reporter to write for them so they have more content to fill pages with. Unfortunately, hiring reporters to work in the Oil Patch, like hiring anyone else to work there, is hard.

They hire people, who then can’t find a place to live, and go work somewhere else. Or they hire someone, who decides they don’t like the job, and then just literally wanders off because they can get ten other jobs in ten minutes.

This means the newspapers sometimes hire people right off the street, because if they leave, they might not get another shot at that person.

That’s how scarce workers are. And of course they have to pay them more, too.

  • Staff members are so short that when the three joked about poaching each other’s people, I had the uneasy feeling that there was a little bit of truth to the jokes. They needed people badly, in other words.

I was surprised no one tried to recruit me on the spot, or lure me into a parking garage to make me an offer I couldn’t refuse. But nobody did.

The Oil Patch: It’s Not What You Think

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I visited North Dakota’s Oil Patch last week and discovered the truth about the area, often compared to the Wild West and considered frightening, dangerous and filled with men who would shoot you just to watch you die.

Unsurprisingly, after a visit to Williston and a general tour of the area, as well as a quick stop in Walmart there and a brief hour or so in a bar, I found it’s really not that bad.

Caveat: I have actually lived in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood in Minneapolis, which is… well. As a Minnesotan all I can really say is “It’s not a nice neighborhood.” Partly because we’re Nice and partly because I can’t remember how long after I left that guy was shot to death a block from where I lived, or how bad the stabbing in the parking lot was. And yes, I did get held up at gunpoint there. So it’s not a very nice neighborhood.

Williston is going through massive changes. That much is stunningly obvious. There’s construction everywhere, there are man camps everywhere, at Walmart they can’t keep certain items on the shelves.

A few words about Walmart, as it’s been a locus of rumors. They stopped allowing people to park campers in its parking lot, and they staff a 24-hour security guard. My colleague Logan Adams and I visited it at about 9 p.m., and there were about 5 men to every 1 woman shopping. The women were generally not unaccompanied, but whether they were with men or in pairs with other women varied a bit. The lines were very long.

Many of the men there were blue collar guys, either oil field workers or construction guys, or maybe they worked in various other fields. Plenty of tattoos, plenty of people from various ethnicities.

Not one of them seemed the slightest bit interested in making trouble of any kind. They were just shopping. In fact, while we were waiting in line to buy something, one of them politely waved us forward to the checkout counter instead of jumping in front of us when we were slow.

Picture from Logan Adams: https://twitter.com/LoganCAdams

It was very obvious the Walmart in Williston is having trouble keeping certain things on shelves. There were quite a few things on pallets waiting to be shelved, and there were quite a few items that were completely gone. The shelf containing water, for example, was completely empty. Many campers don’t have running water, so people living in them have to buy it.

A lot of other shelves that were empty had contained what I called “dude food,” meaning food an 18-25-year-old guy would buy–ramen noodles, frozen dinners, meat, and frozen pizza. I haven’t ever seen such a large selection of frozen pizza in my life. It took up a little more than half of a very long freezer aisle. The meat section had been decimated, so maybe some of these guys have grills. That would be nice, I thought. Dudes like to grill. It’s a total stereotype, but there’s some truth in it too.

Movies were obviously popular, as a bargain bin of DVDs had been decimated and clearly certain flicks were selling well. You had to wonder about some of them. “The Fox and the Hound”–are these guys nostalgic for their youth? Maybe. I did notice that the stack of Twilight movies was completely untouched.

On a tour of the Williston area, we drove past numerous man camps, some of which looked sort of liveable, and others of which looked like people warehouses, drab, soulless and dormlike beyond belief. I don’t mean nice dorms. I mean icky dorms.

Houses are being built too. This isn’t an area of emphasis for most press coverage, because houses are being built everywhere, but it’s still pretty interesting from my perspective.

No care at all is being taken to stop or even limit erosion at any of these sites, or at least, none that I saw. There’s lots of exposed soil, all of which I’m sure ends up in the waterways every time it rains. I suppose high-turbidity water isn’t first on anyone’s list of concerns over there at this point.

The houses being built in nice suburb-type areas vary quite a bit, but they are being built very, very close together compared to suburbs in, say, Plymouth, Minn. Land values must be at an extreme premium even for people who can afford massive houses.

Not one person made me feel the least bit uncomfortable the entire time I was there. That’s not to say bad things don’t happen in the Oil Patch; I just don’t think it’s quite as bad as people make it out to be.

Sure, if you’re from a really rural area, like the Oil Patch used to be, and you are used to small-town life, it may be a shock to you to suddenly have to lock your door at night. It’s just not what you’re used to, and you may very well not like it. That’s entirely fair. Then again, these days, it’d be a good idea to take that precaution no matter where you live.

But from the perspective of this outsider, it’s really not that bad.

Westward! To the Oil Patch!

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Tomorrow I’m heading out with a colleague to the modern-day Wild West, filled with oilmen, money and trucks so big they will make you say “That’s no moon!” and back away with horror.

I’m going to a newspaper conference, but along with some shiny continuing education-type stuff, there will also be a tour of the Oil Patch.

I’m greatly looking forward to getting out there, and I’m really glad I won’t have to drive. My car, though normal-sized, would turn into a bumper car out there in the Oil Patch at worst and a golf cart at best. My assistant editor has a TRUCK. So we’ll fit in with everybody else out there who isn’t driving a semi.

I’ll try to post a couple of times while I’m out there–just some observations on what it’s like, nothing too complex–and hopefully I won’t get smushed by a truck or anything like that.