Writer, lawyer and consultant with over thirty years of writing and photography experience.
While my areas of writing expertise include history, travel, politics, foreign affairs, aviation, the environment and law, I believe a good writer should, with enough research, be able to write about anything.
Good writing is good writing.
Todd D. Epp, LL.M.
News Law Foreign Affairs Aviation History Travel
Harrisburg, SD (Sioux Falls metro area)
Writer, lawyer and consultant with over thirty years of writing and photography experience.
While my areas of writing expertise include history, travel, politics, foreign affairs, aviation, the environment and law, I believe a good writer should, with enough research, be able to write about anything.
Good writing is good writing.
Saturday night, a large group of us ate at the Legion Lake Lodge restaurant in Custer State Park. Here’s my review. It’s the Black Hills, for goodness sake! Rustic but clean, on the shores of Legion Lake. With over 20 people in our group, we put the waitstaff through their paces, particularly when about 2/3 were teenage boys.
They're born, they live violent lives on the South Dakota prairie, and then they die. And a fine art photographer from Los Angeles, Calif. captures their lives in black and white. Copyright 2013 Todd D. Epp and Northern Plains News. All Rights Reserved. Columnists syndicated on NPN retain all rights to their works.
So why should you care about Iraq and the MIddle East?
As residents of central South Dakota, perhaps you should care more than anyone.
Back around Veterans Day 2011, I interviewed, for The Daily Republic, a number of local National Guardsmen who were serving or had served in Iraq or Afghanistan. Some had been on multiple deployments. But the U.S. -- and our Guardsmen -- were leaving Iraq.
South Dakota paid a heavy price for its lost sons. According to icare.org, 20 South Dakotans were killed in Iraq; 141 were wounded.
You and me as typical South Dakotans can't really understand the Middle East.
It's not that you or I are stupid or prejudiced or uneducated. We're not. But we come from a society and ways of thinking that are unlike those in Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, etc.
After a year and a half working and living and working in northern Iraq, after spending a month in Palestinian villages and refugee camps and after visiting and representing a former client in Syria, I believe I understand less about the Middle East now than I did when I made my first trip to the region in 1985.
It is a sparsely populated, largely ignored land of grass, stretching from Texas to the Dakotas. It is a diminished realm because of agriculture, urbanization and all kinds of dividing lines, real and imagined. However, it is a dominion not totally Balkanized by those things. The heart of the Republic of Grass still remains in east-central Kansas.
John M. Davis loved his wife, Sarah. And when she died, he carved his love for her in stone. The testament to his love is 11 life-size marble and granite figures that depict the couple from courtship through old age. They stand in a small cemetery on the outskirts of this northeastern Kansas farm town. John loved Sarah so much he spent more than $100,000 dollars in the depths of the Depression when he commissioned an Italian sculptor to carve most of the figures.
MEDICINE LODGE, KANSAS--It's like some rustic poem, the view out my windshield on state Hwy. 2 in south central Kansas during wheat harvest season:
Arrow-straight blacktop
Through golden wheat
Into an azure sky.
Before McDonalds planted arches on South Dakota's prairie and long before the Colonel offere buckets of fried chicken on the state's busy thoroughfares, there was Bob's Cafe in Sioux Falls
The ballet is playing, but the stage is a marsh, the dancers are grebes, the critics are blackbirds, and the family sedan is the best seat in the house.
SISSETON--This weekend and next should be the best time to se the blazing reds, oranges, and yellows in the hollows near Sisseton.
Sumacs are about at their reddest. The sugar maples are red-orange. The ash and cottonwoods are changing to yellows and browns.
Teri Ellis Schmidt with the Sioux Falls Convention and Visitors’ Bureau recalls a trip to Tulsa, Oklahoma about a decade ago to the Summit League Championship, played in a small gym to a small crowd. “There was literally so few people in the gymnasium watching the tournament, we wanted to whisper so our voices wouldn’t carry and people might hear us about what we could do better,” Ellis Schmidt said.
Several Northern Plains states — including the Dakotas — are among the highest in the nation for most traffic deaths per miles driven, according to a new report.
A new study conducted by the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute found North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana and Wyoming were among states in the “high” category of traffic deaths per miles driven. This category has 13.25 or more deaths per one billion miles driven.
They’re born, they live violent lives on the South Dakota prairie, and then they die. A fine art photographer from Los Angeles captures their lives in black and white. Mitch Dobrowner, 56, has been chronicling the “lives” of massive thunderstorm in the American West and Plains — including South Dakota for nearly five years.
I am one of probably few Americans who have actually been to Syria. When journalists report about gassings and bombings in Damascus' suburbs, they may be places I've visited. It was 2003 during the throes of the second Gulf War. I was visiting Damascus because I had a client in Damascus that my law firm was representing.