Spend enough time fishing, and chances are that you — or someone you know — will have an unpleasant encounter with a fishing lure at some point.

A fish hook in the hand, perhaps, or any number of other places on one’s body.

As the old saying goes, “You’re not a real fisherman until you’ve been caught yourself.”

Been there, done that.

I was reminded of the inevitability of fishing lure unpleasantness last weekend, when a friend and I spent a couple of days trolling crankbaits for pike and walleyes on a certain undisclosed body of water. I’d hoped to entice the fish by jigging, a more relaxing approach to time in a boat, but the fish weren’t having it. Only by covering water using shallow-running lures with multiple treble hooks could we entice the fish into striking.

You can probably guess where this is going by now.

The first time Griffin Blegen used his underwater photo equipment, he captured this image of northern pike and white suckers in the Mississippi River near Bemidji, Minn. in April 2024. Because the water was so cold and he had no wet suit, Blegen improvised by using a PVC pole to submerge the equipment. (Courtesy of Griffin Blegen)

We’d been on the water a couple of hours last Friday afternoon and had already landed a respectable number of pike, along with a couple of bonus walleyes, when my friend and fishing partner reeled in a particularly boisterous pike.

As he tried to free the lure — a No. 12 “Black Wonderbread”-colored Rapala Husky Jerk — the thrashing pike made one of those nasty jerks they’re notorious for making.

Just like that, my friend found himself with a barbed treble hook impaled in the bottom of his left thumb — not the fleshy part on the palm side, fortunately — and the other part of the lure still hooked in the fish.

His options for rectifying the situation were limited.

I know there’s a way to remove an embedded fish hook using a piece of string, but I wasn’t familiar with the technique, and calling up a YouTube video to watch a demonstration didn’t seem like a prudent use of my time at that particular moment.

“I think I’m going to have to go to the ER,” my friend said as the spots of blood dripping from his hand and onto the bottom of the boat grew larger and more prevalent.

The first order of business, I knew, was to free the fish, and fortunately, a set of needlenose pliers was in easy reach. I then unhooked and released the pike as I pondered the options for unhooking my friend.

Another option for removing a fish hook, I’d heard, was to cut the hook and thread the barb through the skin and out a second opening. Using the needlenose, I snipped the hook to remove it from the lure, and sure enough, my friend was able to thread the barb out of his thumb.

The crankbait that hooked both man and fish during a recent fishing excursion. (Brad Dokken / Grand Forks Herald)

Fortunately, this was just a smallish-size crankbait with lightweight hooks. Had it been a big muskie lure with thick treble hooks, a trip to the emergency room may have been the only option.

With the offending hook now removed, the bleeding quickly subsided, and aside from a couple of small puncture wounds (and a crankbait in need of new hooks), the damage was minimal. Instead of a trip to the ER, my friend was back to fishing minutes later. He was ultra careful the rest of the weekend to avoid repeating the mishap and pinched the barbs on the crankbaits he used just to be safe.

Anyone who’s ever handled a thrashing northern pike — even a small one — knows how easily it can happen.

I know I sure can.

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Just off the top of my head, I can think of at least four encounters with fishing lures, all involving crankbaits and all but one involving thrashing northern pike. On at least two occasions, I’ve had fish hooks embedded in the meaty area at the base of my thumb — if that sounds painful, it is — once in my right leg and, many years ago, a crankbait in my scalp that resulted from a fishing partner’s overenthusiastic cast while I was helping him prefish for a walleye tournament on Devils Lake.

The cap I was wearing saved me from the brunt of that one, and it wasn’t nearly as bad as it could have been. As for the others, I used the “yank and pray” technique while closing my eyes and gritting my teeth to pull the hooks free.

Amazingly, none of my encounters have required trips to the emergency room, either.

My goal is to keep it that way.

This week in Skywatch, I want to go back to basics when it comes to the moon. So why does the moon change shape? Why is it a crescent on one night, a half-moon another night, and a full moon on yet another? Why is it that on some evenings we don’t see the moon at all? It all comes down to two things – the moon’s orbit around the Earth, and the sun’s light reflecting off the moon.

The moon generates no light of its own. It’s all sunlight being reflected as the moon revolves around the Earth. The changing angle between the moon, the Earth, and the background sun is responsible for the shape or phase that we see. The best way to explain the moon’s phases is to look at the different positions in its orbit.

As the moon orbits the Earth, the angles between the Earth, the moon and the sun continually change. (Mike Lynch)

New moon

This is when the moon lies roughly in a line between the Earth and the sun, and the sunlit side of the moon faces completely away from Earth. The moon is invisible to us, and its position in the sky is close to the position of the sun, rising at sunrise and setting at sunset. Every once in a while, the moon will lie exactly in a line between Earth and the sun, and we have a solar eclipse. That doesn’t happen every new moon because the moon’s orbit around the Earth is inclined by 5 degrees with respect to Earth’s orbit around the sun. The new moon has to be at the right place at the right time.

Waxing crescent moon

A few days after the new moon, the angle between the moon, Earth, and sun opens up a bit, and we Earthlings begin to see a little sliver, or crescent, of the sunlit part of the moon. It rises shortly after sunrise and sets shortly after sunset, and we can see it for a few hours after twilight in the western sky. This is a great time to see a phenomenon called “Earthshine.” That’s when you not only see the crescent shape of the moon but you can also see the rest of the moon’s disk faintly bathed in secondhand sunlight bouncing off our Earth and onto the lunar surface. It’s a lovely spectacle!

First quarter moon

A week into the phase cycle, we have a first-quarter moon. It’s called “first quarter” because the moon is a quarter of the way through its cycle of phases. It doesn’t mean that you only see a quarter of the moon. You actually see a half moon because half of the sunlit part of the moon faces Earth. The Earth, moon, and sun are at a right angle to each other. The moon rises around midday and sets around midnight. This is a wonderful time to start viewing our lunar neighbor with a telescope. Especially take a look at what’s known as “the terminator.” That’s the line between the darkened part of the Moon and the sunlit part. Along the terminator the shadows are long, revealing features that are otherwise harder to see. You can even see the mountain peaks poking above the shadows on the dark side of the terminator.

Waxing gibbous moon

Ten days after the new moon, the angle between the moon, sun, and Earth opens up to more than a right angle, and we see more of the sunlit half of the moon. That’s when the growing moon takes on an oval football shape and begins to “kick” out a lot of light. The waxing gibbous moon rises in the middle of the afternoon and sets around 2 or 3 in the morning.

The full moon

Fourteen days after a new moon is a full moon. We’re now halfway through the moon’s 29-day cycle of phases. The moon is on the opposite side of the Earth from the sun, and from Earth we can see the complete sunlit half of the moon. The full moon rises at sunset and sets at sunrise, and while moongazing is wonderful for love and romance, stargazing is toast! Not only that, this isn’t really a good time to explore the moon either. Everything on the surface is in direct sunshine and there are no revealing shadows. Around the time of the full moon is when you see the classic “Man on the Moon” and other images like the poodle on the moon.

A poodle on the moon? (Mike Lynch)

Sometimes the full moon gets into the reddish shadow of the Earth and we get to see a lunar eclipse. That happens once or twice a year on average.

Waning gibbous moon

Around 17 days after the new moon we see an oval-shaped moon again, but this one is the mirror image of the waxing gibbous. The angle between the moon, sun and Earth begins to close up. The waning gibbous moon rises after sunset and sets after sunrise. That’s when you see the moon in the western sky in the morning after the sun is already up.

Last-quarter moon

Twenty-one days after the new moon we have a last-quarter moon. Once again the moon, sun and Earth are at a right angle. We see the opposite side of the moon than we saw at first quarter. The last quarter moon rises about midnight and sets around noon. Just like the waning gibbous moon, we see the last-quarter moon in the western sky after sunrise.

Waning crescent moon

About 24 days after its new phase, the moon is down to a crescent again as the angle between the sun, moon and Earth gets smaller and smaller. The waning crescent moon rises two to three hours before sunrise and sets in the early afternoon. It’s so close to the sun that it becomes invisible shortly after sunrise. Before sunrise though, you have another chance to see “Earthshine” or “secondhand sunshine”.

Back to new moon

29.5 days later, the moon is once again new, and the whole cycle of phases, called the synodic month, starts all over again.  As the moon orbits the Earth, not only does it change shapes, it also migrates eastward among the stars about 13 degrees every 24 hours. Because of that, the moon rises later and later each day.

Enjoy our lunar neighbor. It sports a new face every night…and day!

Starwatch programs

Monday, Aug. 25, 8:30-10:30 p.m, Shakopee, at Eagle Creek School. For more information and reservations and location, call Shakopee Community Education at 952-496-5029 or visit www.shakopee.k12.mn.us/Domain/1835.

Tuesday, Aug. 26, 9-11 p.m, Square Park in Minneapolis. For information, check out Minneapolis Parks and Recreation at www.minneapolisparks.org.

Thursday, Aug. 28, 8:30-10:30 p.m, Plymouth, at Northwest Greenway Park. For more information, call 763-509-5000 or visit www.plymouthmn.gov/departments/parks-recreation.

Friday, Aug. 29, 8:30-10:30 p.m, Lake Elmo Park Reserve, Lake Elmo. For information and reservations, call 651-430-8370 or visit www.co.washington.mn.us/index.aspx?NID=532.

Saturday, Aug. 30, 8:30-11:30 p.m, Forest History Center, Grand Rapids, Minn. For more information, call 218-327-4482 or visit www.mnhs.org/foresthistory?utm_source=extnet&utm_medium=yext.

Mike Lynch is an amateur astronomer and retired broadcast meteorologist for WCCO Radio in Minneapolis/St. Paul. He is the author of “Stars: a Month by Month Tour of the Constellations,” published by Adventure Publications and available at bookstores and adventurepublications.net. Mike is available for private star parties. You can contact him at mikewlynch@comcast.net.

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On an evening in late July, just blocks from the Washington, D.C., row house my wife and I share with our two boys, a shootout erupted between two groups of people. Injuries resulted; cars and homes were riddled with bullets and police determined more than 140 shots were fired.

With criminal activity like this still a daily fact of life in the nation’s capital — and with Americans nationwide often uneasy about their families’ public safety — Democrats are playing political Russian roulette by citing encouraging crime statistics to declare President Donald Trump’s takeover of DC’s Metropolitan Police Department wholly unnecessary.

The same goes for his flooding of the city streets with National Guard troops and federal law enforcement. A not-insignificant portion of the electorate in crucial 2026 midterm election battlegrounds might conclude that at least Trump is doing something and acting within the law.

Yes, statistics prove crime is dropping, these same voters might acknowledge. But if conditions haven’t improved sufficiently to assuage voters’ concerns — if they feel unsafe — then citing crime stats to insist nothing at all needs doing is liable to push voters toward Trump, however imperfect his solution to the problem.

Similarly, just because FBI statistics released earlier this month showed the rate of murders, rapes, aggravated assaults and robberies dropping across the U.S., that doesn’t mean that they reached levels voters find acceptable. It’s not unlike the political risk of arguing to voters anxious about paying their bills that the economy is fine because the stock market is booming, unemployment is at historic lows and statistics show inflation is slowing.

“You never win in politics by telling people something’s not a problem when they feel it is. Democrats have long had a trust deficit on crime and public safety, and voters start by being skeptical that they are willing to hold criminals accountable. Trump is well aware of this vulnerability and is masterful at exploiting it,” said Lanae Erickson, vice president for social policy, education and politics at Third Way, a centrist Democratic think tank in Washington.

I live on Capitol Hill and will have been here 20 years later this month. My wife has called the Hill home even longer. If we felt the neighborhood was prohibitively unsafe for our family, we would have followed many of our friends to the suburbs.

Over the past roughly 18 months, we have felt safer than during the crime spike that occurred at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and the two years-plus that followed, when DC was plagued by carjackings and other violent crime. Year-over-year stats compiled by the Metropolitan Police Department showing violent crime down 26% year-to-date would appear to fit our experience. (Some DC police officers are accusing the department of falsifying statistics, although FBI tracking seems to confirm the city’s official numbers.)

But a Washington Post-Schar School poll, conducted this past spring, suggests that many residents are still waiting for the district to feel as safe as it did before the pandemic — when affordable housing, not crime, topped their concerns.

As Democratic DC Councilman Charles Allen conceded in an email to constituents denouncing Trump’s law enforcement action in Washington, “If a crime happened to you, someone you love, or on your block, all the stats in the world are meaningless.”

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Trump on Aug. 11 announced he was invoking the Home Rule Act of 1973 granting DC limited self-governance to assume command of the Metropolitan Police Department and deploy the National Guard and various federal law enforcement agencies to the city. The president suggested he might do the same elsewhere, although the legal basis for expanding these actions beyond Washington is questionable and carries some political peril.

“People believe their own feelings more than government statistics,” said Alex Conant, a Republican operative and cofounder of the Washington public relations firm, Firehouse Strategies. “Both sides risk overplaying their hands. But Trump has the advantage here.” Still, as a matter of pure, crass politics, Democrats are not in some box canyon requiring them to rubber-stamp Trump’s policy in Washington or approach to crime generally.

As Democratic strategist Dane Strother told me late last week, his party has strategic options for opposing Trump’s “theatrics.” His advice: validate voters’ insecurities, offer compelling explanations for why the president’s strategy is counterproductive and propose concrete alternatives. “Democrats must publicly support cracking down on crime — and who wouldn’t,” said Strother, who when not in DC spends time in California and Montana.

The bottom line is that Trump isn’t politically invulnerable.

His average job approval rating is a middling 45.5% and per the most recent YouGov survey for The Economist, voters rate his handling of crime about the same: 45%. With Trump’s penchant for stretching executive authority beyond the Constitution’s intent, and his excessive declarations of national emergencies putting many Americans on edge, those mediocre numbers suggest voters will listen to strong arguments that there are more effective ways to reduce crime and improve their quality of life.

Of course, those arguments must first be made.

David M. Drucker is columnist covering politics and policy. He is also a senior writer for The Dispatch and the author of “In Trump’s Shadow: The Battle for 2024 and the Future of the GOP.”

For leaders in business, failing to learn the lessons of a crisis can be disastrous. For leaders in government, when millions of lives are at risk, such disasters can be catastrophic. Unfortunately, that’s where the U.S. is heading, thanks to the disagreement that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has with his boss, President Donald Trump.

A little history: On Jan. 10, 2020, a Chinese scientist posted the genetic sequence of a “mystery virus” that had sickened dozens and caused at least one death. Forty-two days later, as COVID-19 spread across the globe, researchers near Boston sent the first shipment of an experimental vaccine to U.S. regulators. Three months after that, Trump announced Operation Warp Speed, an $18 billion effort to accelerate the development, approval and distribution of vaccines.

Within a year, billions of vaccine doses had been administered worldwide — saving millions of lives, including those of many Americans. As Trump said: “Operation Warp Speed, whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican, was one of the most incredible things ever done in this country.”

He was absolutely correct — but his health secretary disagrees. The question is: Will Trump allow Kennedy to destroy his legacy?

Kennedy recently canceled $500 million in contracts for the research and development of so-called messenger RNA vaccines. His defense — that mRNA technology is ineffective against respiratory infections — is wrong. Jay Bhattacharya, director of the National Institutes of Health, must know that, so he subsequently offered a different defense: There is insufficient public confidence in it.

Bhattacharya didn’t mention, of course, that Kennedy has fueled that public distrust. Regardless, the correct response to misperceptions about lifesaving medicine is not to throw up one’s hands, cancel funding for it and walk away. It’s to use the power of the bully pulpit to bring people together — community, faith, civic and other leaders — to spread facts and overcome hesitations. That’s leadership.

Not content to peddle misinformation and halt existing projects, Kennedy also effectively terminated additional federal funding for research on mRNA vaccines. The two edicts put countless American lives at risk.

To see the scale of the danger Kennedy is creating, it helps to understand how revolutionary mRNA vaccines are. For many decades, traditional vaccines have injected a small part of a dead or weakened virus into a healthy person. This stimulates the immune system to create antibodies, which protect people from serious infection when they encounter the real thing. In some cases, millions of chicken eggs are used to develop and produce these traditional vaccines, by incubating the viruses. In other cases, cell cultures are grown in bioreactors. Both processes are complex and time-consuming.

New mRNA vaccines are faster to develop. Messenger RNA is a strand of genetic code that gives cells instructions. For decades, scientists worked to design a synthetic form of mRNA, which would then tell the body to fight specific infections. Such a discovery, in theory, would also enable drugmakers to manufacture a vaccine without using a virus, cutting months off development. Yet despite significant advances, an mRNA vaccine had never been produced or tested at scale.

Operation Warp Speed helped overcome the obstacles and produce vaccines in record time. The speed of this breakthrough led to fantastical theories, including that the shots change one’s DNA, insert microchips into the body and cause infertility. It was all nonsense — the ultimate fake news. But it spread nonetheless, amplified by skeptics like Kennedy. Countless studies proved the vaccines safe, and the two scientists behind their development won the Nobel Prize.

The misinformation couldn’t be contained, but Kennedy can be. All that’s needed is a call from the White House directing him to reverse his recent decisions. Otherwise, when the next pandemic strikes, other countries — including China — will be equipped to distribute a shot within weeks, while scientists in the U.S. will be left to fiddle with outdated technology as Americans wait in line.

U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy, whose vote was critical for Kennedy’s confirmation, lamented this month that the secretary has “conceded to China an important technology” and is imperiling the administration’s goals. He’s right — yet Cassidy and his colleagues in Congress have stood aside while Kennedy puts American lives at risk.

Without government leadership, the private sector is unlikely to fill the funding gap. Research on treatments for a hypothetical pandemic is financially risky, so public funding is essential to saving lives.

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Kennedy’s actions will also have a chilling effect on other potential mRNA developments, including work on Type 1 diabetes, HIV, genetic diseases and myriad other illnesses, especially cancer. That bears repeating: mRNA research could lead to a cure for cancer. How many Americans who have family members suffering from cancer are ready to sacrifice them to Kennedy’s dunderheaded paranoias?

The White House should remember and celebrate its extraordinary first-term success — and build on it by reining in Kennedy. If it does that, the president who sped the development of the COVID vaccine might go down in history as doing the same for a cure for cancer and other diseases.

Michael R. Bloomberg is the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News, and the founder of Bloomberg Philanthropies.