In the Winners’ Circle… Your votes, your best bets.

Tonight—Thursday—is our Best Bets Awards Party. We literally just finished counting ballots yesterday. It is safe to say this is the biggest voting result we’ve ever seen. Hundreds upon hundreds of ballots for 55 categories.

There are some upsets, for sure. One tie: for best bartender. Some old standards who easily rise to the top of the pile. And at last, one absolutely huge new dicovery in the music world.

We embellished the ballot this year with some new categories. Best stylist. Tattoo artist. Best original band. Best cover band. And we took out some old categories that seemed outdated.

Winners this year—and this is an experiment—will only be first place winners, i.e. The Best of the Best. We will not be awarding any second or third place or honorable mention awards.

Several hundred HPR readers voted online. The biggest portion of voters hand wrote ballots the old-fashioned way, mailing them in or dropping them in ballot boxes scattered about town.

Some categories are very focused, best pizza, for example. It does not take long for a few front-runners to surface in the voting. Other categories are all over the place with literally dozens upon dozens of names voted for by readers. It would actually good to share more of the overall voting patterns as opposed to simply saying who won best of any given category.

Be that as it may, be there Thursday night or be square. Winners are announced at The Aquarium at a social get-together that starts at 8 p.m. The music starts at 10 o’clock. Dempsey’s will be serving food for us to munch on during the social portion of the event.
You’ll be in good company. You’ll be hanging with the best crowd in town, according to HPR readers.

Next week’s HPR will feature the 2009 winners in print. It will be a keeper edition.

Cleaner, Greener Fargo

Last week, the American Lung Association ranked Fargo as the U.S. city with the cleanest overall air quality. Rankings in the “State of The Air Report” placed Fargo above all metro areas in all categories. Meanwhile, according to the report, six out of ten Americans “live in areas where the air can be dirty enough to send people to the emergency room, dirty enough to shape how kids’ lungs develop and even dirty enough to kill.”

If Fargo is where you would want to live, according to the American Lung Association, you’ll likely not want to live in the Los Angeles-Long Beach-Riverside region of Southern California or Houston-Baytown-Huntsville and Dallas-Fort Worth in Texas. The most short-term particle pollution or soot was reported in Pittsburgh-New Castle, Pa.; and the California areas of Fresno-Madera, Bakersfield and Los Angeles-Long Beach-Riverside.

By measuring the air we breathe, Fargo certainly comes out cleaner and greener. If you look down at your feet, however, we have a lot of garbage still left over from the winter. What with the flood battle this year, we are not pointing fingers. However, we do offer up a solution:

HPR would love to help organize and sponsor a Downtown Fargo Clean-A-Thon. We pick a day. Businesses and organizations sign up workers to clean for up to four hours. Those same workers and organizations secure hourly monetary sponsorships for a good cause (something downtownish, of course), and we all roll up our sleeves and clean up our downtown like never before.

We call on any individuals and organizations to help spearhead this. HPR will provide the ink.

Email us at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) and let’s start now.

Welcome Marathoners

Downtown Fargo will be best place to watch thousands of Fargo Marathoners Saturday. After reworking the route, the race goes through our downtown not once but twice.
This event is more than spectacular in more ways than we can begin to count. It grows each year beyond the expectations of its organizers. It is a huge motivator to spur folks on to be more fit and to maybe even don some running shoes.

We join in welcoming folks from all over the world to Fargo this weekend. We hope you come back often.

Congrats to Jon and James

The beautiful new Fargo Public Library has opened its doors. You all need to drop in and give it a look see and to get your own membership/library card so you can be an active participant in the library community.

And, while you are there, take a few minutes and find the “Wellspring for the World” art installation permanently installed on the north side of the library toward the east entrance. It was commissioned by Wellspring International and funded primarily by Gate City Bank. Artists James Wolberg and Jon Offutt did a remarkable job, and we join in celebrating this example of significant public art by local artists.

Go see it. And throw some change in the well for others to have water for basic sustenance and existence.