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High Profile Pride

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I usually don’t read ads that show up in my e-mail inbox, unless they come from old friends who are trying to set a record for the number of !’s in a single message!

Hiya, Wally from Wally’s Intimida here to remind you that SUV’s are making a comeback! Yes! Just a few years ago you couldn’t give one away. I know. I tried! But some attitudes have changed. Or to be more exact, some attitudes have gone back towards where they were ten years ago! Why? Who knows? Maybe it’s that Tea Party thing. We’re rolling back the clock on everything, all the way back to colonial days!

Of course, people haven’t forgotten 4 dollar a gallon gasoline, but here’s the difference today – Everybody’s so completely broke and totally discouraged, they’re willing to say “What the heck, I’m gonna buy a Sherpa anyway!” And I’m ready to answer with a “What the heck, I’m gonna sell you one” type of deal! It’s a race to see which one of us can sign on the dotted line first!

Gas sipping electro-auto-snobs will say a thirsty Sherpa doesn’t make sense, but I say making sense is overrated. All you have to do is watch the political ads on TV to see that the people who don’t make sense are having all the fun! So what the heck? Why not get a Sherpa, especially if you grew up rattling around like a loose BB in the back of your mom and dad’s giant car? Now that you’re grown you want to have a car that’s AT LEAST that huge, and when the family’s not looking you can jump back there and roll around some more just for old time’s sake!

Worrywarts will say “high profile” vehicles are a dangerous rollover hazard in high winds like the ones we’ve had lately, but that’s so negative! High profile has never been a bad thing in America! When high profilers fall, they land on low profilers, so which would you rather be? Better to keep your head above the crowd so people can see you! If you’ve got rollover worries, just outfit your new Sherpa with the “Tumbleweed” package, featuring an extra set of wheels on the roof in case you do become inverted. No problem in the Sherpa Tumbleweed – just keep on going!

So throw caution to the prevailing 38 mile per hour northwest wind. Drive on, roll on or blow on down to Wally’s Intimida for the best deal I can possibly give you on a mammoth ride – the Sherpa from Intimida.

Why? Why the Heck Not?

It’s good to see Wally hasn’t lost his bubbly spirit and exclamatory extravagance, even in the face of this economy and these winds.

How have you fared against the great “land hurricane“?

79 thoughts on “High Profile Pride”

  1. Rise and Blow Away Baboons:

    I’ll let you know more throughout the day–right now I have the Weather Change Headache starting — that is a combination of the barometric pressure plummeting and all of the particulate matter in the air triggering sinus and migraine processes. Ugh. Otherwise, when I opened the back door to let the dog out to do her duty there were little white flakes dancing around. The eaves extensions blew off the house, too. “Tumble-eaves.” Some of the mums and fake pumpkins blew around the yard, and my poor, dear scarecrow blew down. The house is creaking also. Going to the gym now, so I may have more reports by 8:00 a.m.

    Renee in N. Dak should have the most dramatic stories to tell — I looked at the new story about the moose and the lawnmower. Oh My. Impressive moose. Too bad I am not a girl moose.

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    2. Gym update. Lots of mixed rain and snow. Any garbage cans standing anywhere have blown over. The headache is intensifying. The wind really is very strong. I am very glad I do not live in a log cabin today.

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  2. Morning all. Nice to see Wally hasn’t lost his sense of humor!

    Part of my Halloween decorations in the yard include some styrofoam grave markers – I moved those inside yesterday morning. But I left the little ghosts outside (styrofoam balls on sticks, covered w/ sheets tied together to make it look like they’re playing ring-around-the-rosy). By the time I got home, two were down and the other two were quite bedraggled, not to mentioned completely soaked. They are all now lying in a soggy heap inside on the front porch.

    Of course the good thing about the inland hurricane is that I’m not going to have to rake this weekend! Hope everybody is ok, especially those in places were it’s worse (Renee? Clyde? Jim? Everybody hanging in there?)

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    1. Fine, here. Got to work about 20 minutes, riding right into the winds, which are much milder right now, and it is down hill. But my rear brake broke so it was dragging on the rim, increasing my work load quite a bit. Was not going to stop to fix it in the dark. For the record the straight three mile ride here is on a bike trail or side walks; only cross a street three times at well-lit corners. So could you call my wife and tell het to quite worrying. I am not aware of any wind damage in the area, but then I do not pay much attention to the news.

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  3. Last night’s drive home was an interesting game of dodge the trash cans. My neighbors didn’t anticipate that gale force winds would blow them into the street.

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  4. Good morning baboons! I’m in a good mood. I won a photography contest yesterday and got a delightful surprise Thanksgiving invitation.

    I’m going to run with this topic in a slightly different direction, recalling the most bizarre weather event I’ve been involved with. On November 7, 1989, I was driving home from north-central Montana. It had been a drought year, and that somehow encouraged tumbleweeds to grow in unprecedented numbers. My car was an Isuzu Trooper, which was light, weak and very large in profile.

    When I turned south at Wolf Point, I couldn’t believe my eyes. It felt like I was on a drug trip, or what I’ve always assumed a drug trip was like. The whole landscape was one massive brown-tan river of tumbleweeds flowing from west to east across my path. Tumbleweeds would spin, hit something, go flying high in the air and then go back to spinning eastward. At any given time I was looking at thousands of tumbleweeds, each rushing toward the Dakotas, and it felt a little like driving through a river of tumbleweeds, a river that covered the whole earth.

    As the wind buffeted my old Trooper, it was all I could do to keep the thing on the road. Tumbleweeds were whacking the side of the Trooper whack whack whack whack but doing no apparent damage.

    At Glendive I was able to turn east, running with the tumbleweeds now. Pushed by a gale-force wind, I was able to manage freeway speeds with hardly any input from the Trooper’s engine. I could push in the clutch and blow homeward at a merry speed.

    That tumbleweed storm became famous for the way it inundated Mobridge (in northern South Dakota). Tumbleweeds filled in the town to depths of 14 feet. Old ladies got trapped in their homes by packed tumbleweeds in front of their doors. Cops were fighting their way through the tumbleweeds going door to door freeing people trapped inside. The city snow plows were called out to carve a path for cars to drive through. The Sons of the Pioneers song “Tumbling Tumbleweeds” has always felt a little different to me after that trip!

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      1. It’s a minor thing, Clyde. Bless you for your interest! I am on another forum when not here, a group of people who shoot Olympus digital cameras and who meet to discuss photography. We have contests among ourselves from time to time. This one challenged us to come up with an image to illustrate the oriental concept of wabi sabi. I photographed the hand of an old (87 years old) friend, her hand resting on the bible that belonged to her husband of 61 years.

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    2. The Indians around here, and maybe in other areas of the plains as well, say that tumbleweeds are the souls of dead children. Creepy or what?

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      1. reminds me of the time I went into a steak house with the costume shop when I was working in Maine, and proudly displayed and labelled with a red ribbon embossed with gold letters– a Genuine Nebraska Tumbleweed!

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  5. Greetings! We’re intact here in Big Lake, although we lost power for an hour and a half last night. It was dusk, so just enough light to find the flashlights and candles. My 15-yr old had just bought a Zune, so we watched “Galaxy Quest” on his little Zune for a while until power came back. No trees or yard decorations here to worry about. I just might drive by our old house just to see if those big, dead branches right over the house finally gave way. There were lots of trees in our old yard — at least 3 dead that needed to be removed, but we didn’t have the money or motivation to do it ourselves. Take care out there, Baboons!

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      1. Took a drive by and they haven’t yet. That big old maple right in front hanging over house is still intact, too, luckily. That home equity loan that did us in got us all new windows (2 nice bay windows, too), new siding, new doors, and a storm got us a new roof. Ah well …

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  6. Its pretty windy here today, but our trashcan hasn’t blown away yet and our trees are still standing in place. The little snow we had is blowing around but I can see across the street. Its really bad in north central ND, where the wind is blowing waves across the road near Devils Lake, leaving debris on the road as well as icing up the highway. It’s supposed to be almost 60 on Friday, so it will be a nice weekend.

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    1. We have winds gusting to 47 right now. Bismarck is supposed to get gusts up to 60. That’s a little breezy, even for out here!

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  7. I went home early yesterday with a migrane (I’m not prone to them, so I’m still not sure what the cause was), and missed all the fun. This morning I saw one of those metal newspaper kiosks turned over into the street, but nothing worse…unless you count the slush on the windshield.

    The worst weather I’ve ever dealt with was the Halloween blizzard. I was a commuter student at St. Kates, and stupidly decided to go home instead of letting the college find me some crash space. I was on 494 S from about 3:30 and didn’t get home until 8:00 PM. I drove a 1984 Ford Tempo in those days, and she overheated, so I had to pull over somewhere around Inver Grove Heights. I’m sure I didn’t have a cell phone back in those days, so I must have gotten to a gas station and called my dad, who took the back way across the old bridge in St. Paul Park to pick me up and bring me home. I’ve been in bad snowstorms since, but nothing like that, and never again I hope. For one thing, I hope I’m smart enough to not go out in dangerous conditions like that…

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    2. I remember that storm – I drove home from White Bear Lake to Mpls in it across on 694 (in a similar car to yours – a Chevy Chevette). Took me about 3 hrs to get home and then got stuck in the alley one house away from our drive. The dog enjoyed the snow, though.

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    3. That was a terrible storm. I was caught coming home from Colorado. The worst was I35 between Iowa border and home. Traffic was down to one lane. Windshield hopelessly encased in ice. Because of the ruts I couldn’t even pull onto the side of the road. Couldn’t see the car ahead of me, so I figured the car behind couldn’t see me. Only choice: drive the same speed we had been driving and hope we all continued to do the same because going faster would be deadly and slowing down would result in a crash.

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  8. When I went downstairs to let the dogs out, it was snowing and blowing a little. My Irish Setter set about her business, which always involves only 3 feet on the ground. Right at the crucial moment, one of the big big gusts of wind came along and knocked her right over. She got up and looked around sheepishly, as if wondering if anyone saw her. I’m still laughing!!!

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  9. Morning!

    Our house is nestled in a valley so we’re protected on the North and West– the world could end on that side and we’ll never know about it. But it’s open to the East and South so we can see what’s going on over that way…

    I lost one large dead tree branch that I had been meaning to cut down anyway so that took care of that- Thank You.
    Lots of little branches down, garbage cans around the athletic field at the kids HS blowing around but they’re all trapped inside the fence. And one porta potty tipped over… eeww.

    I’m almost out of my big project / hole (Show opening). Preview tonight, open tomorrow night and I think most of the paint should be dry…

    Later!

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    2. Ben, if that paint isn’t dry, those costumes are not going out on that stage!

      Sorry, old habits die hard.

      Break a leg and hope you get to sleep in when it is over.

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      1. This is why fans and blow dryers were invented (that, and turning all the stage lights on 100%…not that I’ve ever used any of these techniques to speed paint drying on opening night…).

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  10. Good morning wind blown people,

    The wind is really howling where I live in Southern Minnesota, but I haven’t seen or heard about any major damage from the wind. I am worried that more large limbs will break off a tree in our yard that lost a big limb earlier this year. A tree removal service has agreed to cut down this damaged tree and I am waiting for them to do this.

    Apparently this wind storm is not as bad as a couple of storms that contained straight line winds earlier this year and did a lot of damage to trees in this part of Minnesota. The winds have not died down and might even increase in speed. I will be glad when thisstorm ends.

    Wally’s comment about the low profile people breaking the fall of the high profile people reminds me of a song by Malvina Reynolds. This song contains the line “when a rock falls on an egg, too bad for the egg”.

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  11. OTR, but I loved this: in our Barnes and Noble they have for Halloween a display of horror stories and the like. Right in the middle sits C. S. Lewis’s “Screwtape Letters.”

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  12. had to take the ladders down. if this doesn’t create a senxe of urgency for those two boys of mine to get doen with the painting before the weather turns , i don’t know what will.

    i was thinking of my off topic story because last night i went to the downtown mpls public library to meet and hear ian frazier discuss his new book on siberia. as i pulled into downtown it was feeking like the weather had turned to be certain, but then as i turned onto the first of the streets in the grid of the downtown skyscrapers, where you go from the three story buildings to the 20-50 story buikdings i noticed that the trees that are planted in the nedian of the raod to beautufy the cityscape were doing a near 90 degree bend. when that 50 mph wind that was whipping across the urban landscape gets venttruied down to the 30 foot wide expanse between the two highrises on either side of the street its exactly like putting your thumb over the end of a garden hose. the wind goes from 50 to 100 in about 12 feet. well, i drove past the horizontal plumage of the recently planted area and lo and behold 15 feet further in …nothing. the leaves rippled in the gentle breeze like a pond ripple from the dropping of a pebble. then to the next corner and turbulence renewed for 20 feet then the building shielded the shrubbery again. when i came out of the library there was a mini tornado with all the news papers form one on those newsboxes you see downtown. the papers had found there way into the perfect spot and were whirling in a mad spiral that went up 60 feet in the air. again i turned the corner and the violent wind was gone.

    i think i have told the story before about being in downtown chicago near the art institute with my two oldest kids age then 5 and 3 or thereabouts. we had started walking back to the jackson street station 5 or 6 blocks away from lakeshore drive when i looked up and saw a cloud coming toward us down the road and the buildings disappearing in succesion as the cloud straight out of a bad science fiction movie advanced quickly. i shouted to debbie (then my partner not yet my wife) to grab the 3 yer old and run. i threw the 5 year old on my shoulders and she threw the three year old on her shoulders. we started running but were way too late. within 1/2 a block the flat winds hit. we saw people get blown over and rolling down the raod, we saw news paper boxes going end over end down the road. debbie was pushing as hard as she could (good german stock) and i watched her start to go over backwards with the weightand wind resistance of the 3 year old on her neck. a man came up from behind her and pushed her off to the side of the road where the wind was not so severe. we tried to get into the office building we were in front of but a piece of steel flashing had blown off a nearby building and jammed the revolvong doors. we waited it out but those 5 minutes were the most memorable weather moment so far. last night was reminiscent but only a memory inducer, sitting in the car on a cold night vs standing on the naked street on an 80 degree chicago afternoon.
    don’t like the weather…. wait a minute.

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    1. tim, used to live in Chi. Kept waiting for this terrible windy cold changeable weather. After two years I realized I was expecting something worse than the North Shore, which it was not.
      I am reading his “Siberia” right now. Travel books are my favorite. I have about 100 in my collection, many of which I must get rid of. I have several books on Siberia, one way or another, such as Paul Theroux’s books. “Siberia” is good, tends to the wordy. I like his books, but I am not as wild about them as are some people. I do not think all that highly of his “Great Plains” book. In “Siberia” he just throws in details that do not really have an apparent connection to the topic. I think he is trying to write like some of the great Russian writers. Colleen Therboun’s “In Siberia” is vastly better.

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      1. i like ian fraizer and enjoyed chatting with him. he seemed to think of himself as a comedic writer from the new yorker, his non fiction is a way to stretch a bit but it does not feel like a natural fit for him.
        i will check out therboun.
        my prior experience with frazier was the rez which was interesting but not captivating. i hope siberia is better. he had some good stories to tell about his 6 trips to learn the territory.

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      2. i can see the siberian tie in. i remember you had a fondness for the arctic explorers. there is a kindred spirit alive and well in siberia or maybe alive and well is a poor choice of phrase.

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      5. Do not think I have told this before: I was flown around the top of Alaska in a four seater plane by a crazy, fun-loving Russian pilot who had stolen a plane in Siberia and defected to Alaska. As we flew he told me wonderful tales, gave me special treatment because my wife is 1/2 Russian. When he was in Siberia he let a woman talk him into carrying a cow on the plane. As he was approaching the airport, the ground crew let him know the authorites were there and he would be in trouble for carrying anything prohited, which they would asume he was likely to have on board. So he circled back over the taiga and relieved the plane of the cow.
        I know I once told how he flew us at 400 feet over six polar bears leeeping as a ball on the beach on Barter Island.

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      6. sounds like a fun bush pilot. great real life stories alway top the list.
        the cow in the taiga is an illustration. you can’t make that stuff up .

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    2. I hope to be as funny as all of you some day. I’m working on it….

      The power went out at work yesterday afternoon and the generator kicked in. We’re two miles west of Waterville and are on MN Valley Electric Cooperative power. They’re truly cooperative and provide great service, but we need the generator because of the fish hatchery.

      I struggled with a sinus headache and lumbar back pain at about an 8 out of 10 yesterday. Ow. Misery. I went home and didn’t get back on the trail or finish any housework. I landed on the couch at 5 p.m. with a heating pad and didn’t get back up. Poor Pippin didn’t get much of a walk. We usually go 2 or 3 miles but not yesterday. It still hurts today but is at about a 5 out of 10 – taking lots of ibuprofen.

      My neighbor’s big spruce tree blew right over with the root ball and everything during the night. My other neighbor’s red oak leaves are packed solidly around the front of my house and in my front entry. I couldn’t have mulched them around the foundation of my house any better than the wind did. That red oak tree is really magnificent. When I moved into my house I stood in the street admiring it. I called to my neighbor, who is a little like a combination between Yosemite Sam and a hibernating bear, that he has a really beautiful oak tree in his yard. He called back, “Yew better hope it don’t blow over – yew’ll git a reelly good look at it!”

      My downspouts blew off and part of the rain barrel blew off, but no obvious damage was done. I’m always surprised that the dead limbs from the black walnut tree right over the garage don’t go crashing through the roof.

      I’m hoping for less pain today. So far so good.

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  14. On my way to work all the stuff we buried yesterday, was blowing around — silvery CD’s, clunky Walkmans. No old computers, though. An 8 track tape hit my windshield.

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  15. We have a Rubbermaid-type shed in the back yard that lost its doors and its roof yesterday. Husband stepped in dog poo trying to fix it in the wind. This seems to be our only collateral damage.

    Kinda wishing the wind would blow away the 750+ emails in my work inbox to be dealt with (this is *down* from over 900 yesterday). Would rather read about dogs being blown over and tim’s musings. Sigh. Nose back to the grindstone…

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  16. Just played ‘Alice’s Restaurant’ for a couple students…. they really didn’t get it…

    …but I enjoyed it and sang along.

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    1. Sad statement of the times. I’m sure the teenager has no clue who Arlo Guthrie is. I used to be able to do most of AR along with the recording.

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  17. just got our internet back – hello all you blownabout baboons!
    we have a bit of snow on the ground, still windy but 41 degrees so snow will melt soon. Duluth canceled school today – i heard they had much more snow than we.
    no sleep last night. i must have gotten up 10 times to look out the window to be sure that the pole barn was still standing and sheltering the Girls.
    been busy, busy lately but so enjoy reading and giggling at your posts. thanks so much

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  18. My grandfather was a newspaperman in NE Iowa. He was always disgusted by the way the paper exaggerated storm stories. After a mighty wind blew through town, Grandpa Clarence wrote up a parody of the kind of story the paper usually ran. In his story, the shrieking winds denuded chickens and blew their feathers right through the sides of barns. The wind picked up “Ansel Johnston’s prize bull and dropped him astraddle a barbed wire fence, then blew him along that fence, ruining him for further farm chores.”

    You can guess what happened. The boys in the linotype room preferred my grandfather’s story to the real one, and they ran it until they were caught. That issue of the paper was a collector’s item.

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  19. Dear Dr. Babooner:
    I find myself more and more impatient with people in public. I do not know which is worse, doddering old idiots like me or the rude insensitive young. Is there somewhere I go to register as a hermit?

    Siscerely,
    “I’ve Had Enough”

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    1. dear i’ve had enough,
      dr baboon is away on vacation but dale may be able to summon billy marty barry to help you identify the feelings that are causing you such difficulties. it seems clyde that you are aware of the problem, the cause of the problem, the way to avoid the problem and the solution to the problem. the problem with wanting to have the whole world behave as you believe it should is simply that you are so often disappointed. if you assume the world will treat you as if you are intruding on their space and understand that communication is not something you do anymore in person unless absolutely needed. they need some role models on face to face communication. you know finishing sentences. making eye contact, discussing a thought without googleing the reference material for the reply, they are just not there yet. give them a decade or two to go through the need evolutionary change. now i don’t know if billy marty can be summoned but you can always come to your blog and be among friends that share your view on how the world should be. there is something to be said for real interaction but then again, its not always all its cracked up to be., which kind of is back to your original point isn’t it. see you in the morning

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  20. Hi Kids,
    Yesterday I had two recess duties. It wasn’t fun.

    We’re learning about weather this week and today we made those crepe paper streamer wind vanes that I wrote about the last time I guest blogged. We took them outside and the wind flipped and flapped them, snipped and snapped them, whipped and whapped and zipped and zapped them. Then we came inside and wrote rhyming words.

    Wally’s sales pitch is ingenious. Wheels on the roof – who would have thought? BUT! Will they reinforce the top of the car enough so what happened to the lady in Illinois during the great land hurricane won’t happen to any Sherpa owners? “In the Chicago suburb of Lindenhurst, a woman was injured when a branch fell about 65 feet from a large tree, crashed into her car and impaled her abdomen.” Before I buy any automobile I have to have it in writing that it’s safety features will protect my innards.

    Clyde – you need some of Barb’s cajeta. Works like ketcup.

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  22. Wow it’s great to have Wally back, Dale: Worrywarts will say “high profile” vehicles are a dangerous rollover hazard in high winds like the ones we’ve had lately, but that’s so negative!

    Sherrilee, loved the Irish Setter image!

    Loved the stories: tumbleweeds, Chicago — the Alaska story, Clyde, could’ve been an episode from Northern Exposure.

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