Posted 10:45 PM by Floyd

Evan Kirchhoff has an excellent blog called www.101-280.com. I don't know if the name is because he lives near the confluence of those freeways in San Francisco, or because he lives between those freeways somewhere in the Peninsula. (Based on those criteria I could register domain names for 35-84 or 1-280.)

Kirchhoff had an entry a week ago in which he lamented that

... the North Dakota Senate has declared my lifestyle illegal ...

I thought of Akbar telling Jeff "I hate it when you use the word 'lifestyle'". But apparently the Peace Garden State (distance from hand to almanac: 30 inches) has banned not homosexuality, but cohabitation. Kirchhoff did some Googling and found some other legislative silliness originating from Bismarck (stupidly had to make second trip to almanac: true).

One gem that he did not list came to me while I was idly thumbing through Northwest's in-flight magazine. They profiled some North Dakota pol who proudly mentioned that North Dakota prohibits the sale of any small farm to a larger conglomerate. This sounds populist but is actually a disaster for Dakota farmers; if you cannot make a living on your farm, you can sell your land only to some other sucker willing to have a try at ekeing out a subsistence living.

Evan said that North Dakota is "bent on combining the most intrusive features of California, Europe and Singapore." Add to that list the planned economy of fourth-century Rome, where people were fixed in their professions and could not leave them even if they were going bankrupt.