Doctor Michael Fox

It's our monthly pet call-in segment on Friday's Morning Show. Dr. Fox is an entertaining fella, to say the least! And, he'll answer your pet and animal questions or emails.

Pet food has been a big issue lately, with over 60 million cans and packages being contaminated. What food is okay to feed our cats and dogs? Dr. Fox always suggests people make homemade pet food - I haven't made the leap yet. Have you? What do you feed your dogs and cats? Here's one of dr. fox's pet food recipes:

Dr. Michael Fox's Homemade 'Natural'Dietary Supplement for Dogs
2 cups uncooked whole grain rice (or barley, rolled oats,
or pasta noodles)
Pinch of salt1 T. vegetable oil (flax seed oil* or safflower oil)
1 T. wheat germ
1 T. cider vinegar
1 t. brewer's yeast
1 t. bone meal or calcium carbonate
1 t. dried kelp
1 lb. lean hamburger, ground lamb, mutton, one whole chicken or half of a small turkey.

Combine all above ingredients. Add water to cover ingredients, simmer, stir, and add more water as needed until cooked. De-bone chicken parts and do not feed cooked bones since they can splinter and cause internal injury. The recipe should be thick to be molded into patties (add oat bran or meal to help thicken).Mix well into the stew while it is still very hot, a cup full of raw, grated carrots, sweet potato or yam.. Serve 1 cup full of this recipe for a 30 lb. dog with the rest of his/her rations, and freeze the rest into patties and store in the freezer. Serve thawed, or frozen to gnaw on outdoors in hot weather.

For variation, you can use cottage cheese, plus well-cooked lentils, chick peas (garbanzo beans), lima beans or other pulses or a dozen eggs as meat alternatives.. All ingredients, ideally, should be organically certified. (Note: some dogs are allergic or hypersensitive to some foods, especially soy, beef, eggs, wheat and dairy products.).
T = Tablespoont = teaspoon
* Add flax seed oil after the cooked food has cooled down to room temperature.
For dogs under 30 lb, and for over-weight and less active dogs, use 2 cups of uncooked rice in the recipe..

You can leave your questions or comments for Dr. Michael Fox here and we'll pass them on to him on Friday...

-Heidi

*photo by John Bauer

A Weekend For Memories

It's Memorial Day. The Sunday edition of the Mpls Star-Tribune featured pictures and brief notes on the sixty one Minnesotans who have died in the current Iraq War. Three of those killed were from communities in the KAXE listening area. We send our sympathies and best wishes to the family and friends of Army Staff Sgt. Dale Panchot, 26 years old, from Northome. He died on November 17, 2003.; Marine Lance Cpl Levi Angell, 20 years old, from Cloquet, April 8, 2004; and Army Specialist Dwayne McFarlane, Jr., 20 years old, from Cass Lake, on January 9th, 2005.

Also, the Washington Post recently profiled a number of families from northwest MN. Their stories focused on how they are coping with the long absence of their family members. Everyone hopes for, and eagerly awaits, the safe return of their soldier, but circumstances at home and in the veteran's experience can make coming home a difficult transition.

Many members of the MN National Guard are curently serving the longest continuous deployment of any Guard unit in Iraq. Right now, they are expected to return some time around the end of July or early August. According to Nicole Felton, some members of Charlie Company based in Grand Rapids may be home before that. Nicole and her family live in the Virginia area. Her husband, David, is with Charlie Company, but won't be one of the early returnees. Nicole is a family readiness group coordinator, which means she keeps in touch with northern MN families who have a loved one serving in Iraq or Afghanistan. Members of the group help each other anticipate some of the problems and uncertainties that may arise after they are reunited with their loved ones.

On a lighter note, Heidi Holtan and her guests on Between You and Me last Saturday, talked about life at the cabin on the lake. That triggered a lot of memories for me. My brother and I spent 17 summers at our grandparents place near Hackensack in Cass County. No phone, no TV or radio. We did the usual things - fish, swim, explore the woods, play ball in the back yard. I especially remember going berry picking with my grandmother. She made jams and jellies and biscuits and breads to put them on. Electricity came to their place at the end of the road some time after World War II, but they were set up to do just fine without it. Storms often knocked out the power, some times for 3 or 4 days. We'd fire up the cook stove and kerosene lamps, pumped all the water anyway. It was fun for two young boys.

When we were kids at the lake, our neighbor across the lake, Stan Hawkinson, was already a legendary muskie fisherman. At least once each summer we would see one of Stan's 4o to 50 pound lunkers in the bait shop window in Hackensack or Walker. I just talked to Stan last week. He still gets around 30 muskies every summer, but it's all catch and release now. I think he has a personal relationship with a lot of the muskies on the lake. This Memorial Day and Musky Opener will be the first for Stan without Carolyn, his wife of almost 54 years. Carolyn died lat summer from e.coli poisoning at a church dinner in Longville. This Saturday is the musky opener. All muskies less than 48 inches long caught on Leech, Winnie and Mille Lacs and 43 other lakes must be immediately released. ALL muskies caught in the Mississippi River between Grand Rapids and Coon Rapids must be immediately released.

More memories: Maria Muldaur put on a great show in Hibbing Saturday night. She did two sets over an hour each and came out after each set to sign CDs and talk to people. KAXE Board Member and good luck charm, Carolyn King, showed Maria an old vinyl album Maria had signed for her 35 years ago and gave her a polaroid shot of her and the Jim Kweskin band from 1969. Maria is on tour now mainly to support her latest release "Naughty, Bawdy, and Blue", another one of her tributes to Bessie Smith, Alberta Hunter, Sippie Wallace and other great women blues performers. She mixed in a lot of songs from her 2006 release, "Heart of Mine - Love Songs of Bob Dylan" and stories about Bob. Lots of KAXE people at the concert and the sweet potato fries at Zimmy's were good as usual.
-Scott Hall

Being a Tourist in Northern Minnesota

For many of us, summer can be the busiest time of the year...we get to the end of the summer and wonder where the time went.


We're thinking about starting a Morning Show segment on places to go in our own neck of the woods. State parks, trails, the Greyhound Bus Museum....


Do you know a place that can't be missed? Where do go on afternoon or day trip?


-Heidi
KAXE Outreach Producer

Morning Show highlights for May 21-25

Dylan Days starts Wednesday in Hibbing with the first Midwest showing of the documentary "Gotta Serve Somebody: The Gospel Songs of Bob Dylan", 7 o'clock, at the Hibbing Community College Theatre.

This Monday morning KAXE's Aaron Brown reviews a jam-packed week of Dylan Days events, including Maria Muldaur in concert at the awesome Hibbing High School Auditorium, 7 o'clock, Saturday night. You've heard Maria's music on KAXE over the last 31 years, including her 2006 CD, "Heart of Mine: The Love Songs of Bob Dylan".

Maria will be John and Heidi's guest on Friday morning.

Also on Monday: Peg Julson from the state "Firewise" program talks about the growing threat posed by wildfires as people move into areas of the northland that not so long ago were uninhabited; the legendary, omnipotent, blasphemous Binary Boys review another video game; DNR wildlife biologist, Pam Perry reports on her ongoing survey of wildlife habitat on Cass County lakes; and birder Molly Hoffman shares her recordings of the courtship hoots of some barred owls.

Tuesday morning: wild times with John Latimer and the Phenology network, Bobbie Kleffman on All Things Equine; and Bryan Stenlund returns. Bryan and Marlene Stenlund and their son, Kai, spent three weeks in February in India at a retreat studying Hindu meditation. Bryan will tell us about it Tuesday morning at 8:10.

Wednesday: Maggie gives us an update on building a local food network; the President of MN Waters, Bruce Johnson, on shoreline restoration, clean water, and those exotic critters and plants invading our lakes and streams; Don Boese continues to chronicle the rise of the Roman Empire; and John and Bogey Bob hone your golf game on Diamonds in the Rough.

Thursday morning we'll talk to World war Two veteran, Larry Houg. Larry will tell us about the Veterans' Memorial site in Bemidji and the effort to bring a VA Clinic to Bemidji.

Oh Sweet Spelling

Today on The Friday Morning Show, Dj the Dj won the spelling sensation that's sweeping the nation, May We Have Word With You. If you missed it, these were his words:

nocturnal
facade
banal

DJ got them all but nocturnal.

I get a little too big for my britches sometimes, and ASSUMED I knew the spelling of facade. I didn't. I put in an s.

What words do you misspell? Let us know!

Heidi Holtan
Spelling Coordenador and Outreach Producer, KAXE

Some thoughts from Scott Hall

KAXE commentator, Aaron Brown is a unique character in many ways, but his media use habits are pretty typical for people under thirty. That is, the Internet is his preferred source for a lot of the news and other information he gets on a daily basis. If he were forced to choose between radio, TV, newspapers and the Internet, Aaron would take the Internet. This is from a guy that was once editor of the Hibbing Daily Tribune and still writes a weekly column for the paper. He's done radio work for KAXE and the Wisconsin Public Radio affiliate in Superior. He loves radio, but isn't sure about the future of radio, for a career or as a popular medium.

A recent article in the American Journalism Review interviewed young journalists at the Charlotte Observer, a Pulitzer Prize winning newspaper that has about 225,000 subscribers. The Observer employs 250 people in its newsroom, more than 40 of the staff are under 30. With few exceptions, the younger reporters love their jobs, but don't think they have a future in the newspaper business. They respect their elders in the newsroom, but call the product dull and out of touch. They read their paper on-line.

So, why should we care? We're community radio, right? We're different! Yeah, right. Even if that were true for now, where's the next generation of community radio staffers and volunteers coming from? They're probably coming from growing up in the digital age, with the Internet and the more wide open media world it offers. So what can we do to sustain the legacy of community radio? Frankly, most of us boomers aren't sure.

There's some denial out there too. Some of us fogeys think the Internet and the digital media world is shallow and "as bad or worse than TV", the benefits not worth the broader electronic wasteland.

Here at KAXE, we don't buy that, or rather, we can't afford to buy that if we're serious about a the future of community radio, or community media. We're trying to imagine future media habits and needs. So, we are building a multi-media web site we think and hope will be useful to people in northern Minnesota. In the spirit of community radio, we want to create a place where listener, viewer, and reader access is more wide open than ever, and for people in the smallest towns and most remote townships as well as the major commercial centers here. It's a big idea and we're not sure exactly how it's going to look or how it's going to be received. We're launching this project over the next six to eight months and want all kinds of people from all over northern MN to help build it. We hope the web project will be useful to people now, and we hope it will continue the legacy of community radio for generations to come.

What do you think? Want to be involved in the project? Let us know...

Scott "Fogey" Hall

KAXE's Senior Correspondent and Community Access Coordinator