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Our friendly staff at the Infomercantile assemble data under the watchful eye of quality control debutantes.

Welcome to the Infomercantile

When you get information for free, you can't expect to walk away with much. However, I've got the most cost-effective zero-value information available on the internet. My ideas, while malformed and without support, should be at least interesting. Just don't forget, you get what you pay for.

What I'm working on

• Everyday Science and Mechanics, November 1934: one of those excellent magazines that mix sci-fi with hard science. Modern magazines avoid this, but back in the day it seemed like nothing was going to keep us from our flying cars. This will be an ongoing series, wherein I go through the interesting pages and add my pithy comments, a'la Lileks.

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  John Till
  John Till, the Somerset Doctor arrived in my life as a crushed-corner postcard bought at a Wisconsin antique shoppe. Who was this doctor, famous enough to get a postcard? To have extraordinary P.R. you need to do extraordinary things, and Till promised such magic.

• Has a well-wishing friend forwarded you a warning about unsolicited parking-lot perfume sales? Most of them mention Fargo at the very top -- here's why.

• Do you know Ole Sageng? Schoolteacher, farmer, and representative of his neighbors in the Minnesota state senate; he tried for US Senate twice, but failed.

• Updated: A place I didn't know existed, even though I probably passed it a million times when I was a kid: The New Palace Hotel. Like oh-so-many 'second floor' flophouse hotels that existed in Fargo through the 1970s and 1980s, it lived hidden-away above retail storefronts. in 1990, it burned down; arson is the prime suspect. I found a number of clippings about it in a box of ephemera from The Rage, one of the stores destroyed in the fire.

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  The big sign on the Pioneer Mutual Building came down on Thursday and I was there; new pictures on the PML building page.

• On a walkabout in Downtown Fargo on a quiet Sunday morning, we found ourselves in the midst of a half dozen interesting little buildings: the Marjorie Schlossman Roberts Street Chaplet Project.

• A new category, given the number of such objects I'm interested in scanning: Maps. Most are extremely large 300-dpi files, so that their information can remain useful.

• A variety of local print media: Forum, Howard Binford's Guide, Valley Midweek Marketplace(updated), The FM Extra.

• A list of obscure musicians, who may have recorded an album or performed, but are otherwise unrepresented on the internet.

• The Category List allows you to view most/all content, and browse topically.