•September 30, 2020•
By Jim Baumann

The story pitch went a little something like this: “A new business is seeking permission from the village board to open an aqua-based crematorium. As proposed, human and animal remains would be cremated by a water-based solution, as opposed to the more commonly known flame-based method.”
Well, that’s a story I simply must read.
During my days at Prospect High School, I was unknown by most of the student body, except my cadre of nerds, a few sympathetic athletes and those who desperately wanted to copy my chemistry homework. I enjoyed surreptitious chemistry experiments in those days, when you could still get your hands on a bottle of mercury and didn’t worry about how dangerous it was. I knew that if you took a hunk of sodium out of its mineral oil bath and dropped it in a bucket of water, you would get a nasty exothermic reaction with fire and sparks and a lot of noise. I learned that day SODIUM BURNS IN WATER. I was not a bomb-maker, mind you. I was just curious about real-life reactions to that which I was reading about in class. It was stupid behavior that belied the A’s I was getting in class. Read More

•September 30, 2020•
By Jerry Ginther
NP Guest Writer

Not many years ago, while browsing the Internet looking through agricultural magazines, I unexpectedly came across some family history. Actually, I was searching for an idea, food for thought that I might expand on for an article I could write for a paper or magazine. There were plenty of farms and farmers on both sides of our family, so why wouldn’t there be some aspect of the industry I could relate to, possibly more than one. Well, that isn’t the general topic that stopped my search almost at its inception. In a very old magazine I spotted an advertisement that immediately started me on another venture, one with a more specific focus. Read More