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One Spicy Bear

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Here’s a note from an old friend – Bart the Bear! His comments have been translated into English from the original Usus Textish.

Hey, Bart here.

This is my most favorite time of year in the woods – the stretch that comes after the 4th of July and before the State Fair. We get families on weekends and there are loads of kids with different camp groups up here the rest of the time. It used to be there was only one place nearby – Camp Shortsheets – where kids went to get harassed and abused by each other. But now they can harass and abuse each other just about everywhere, so you don’t have to go to camp for that. Instead, camp has become more of a career opportunity where you can work on the thing you love most, like writing novels or playing the piano or grooming cats.

That worries me – all the specialists up here in the woods nowadays.

We bears are all pretty much generalists. Gotta be. Everybody is good with scattering garbage. We all like to pull open the doors of cars. And you can’t last very long up here if you don’t know how to lay waste to a campsite.

I do have a talent for looking fearsome and it works pretty well as long as I don’t forget myself and crack a smile. But I wouldn’t want to be a “scary” bear all the time. “Scary” is just too one-dimensional. So I try to seem “nice” and “friendly” every now and then. And at least a couple of times a year I’ll go for “pensive”, which is a feeling most bears don’t know how to do. Variety is the spice of life, they say. And I do like my spice!

I didn’t think I would but there was a family up here just last week – the Patels from Fridley (I managed to nab a wallet along with the dinner). Nice folks. Not too careful about cleaning up, which is good! I like people to leave a little bit of a mess. And this mess was wonderful and tasty and talk about spices! Exotic stuff. Not your average mushroom soup in the hot dish, I’ll tell ya. I felt like I’d bitten into a nest of bees, and I mean that in the best possible way.

I’d like to follow the Patels wherever they go but I don’t want to seem like I’m stalking them. Bears who look like they’re stalking people wind up with a dart in the neck. Then they throw you in the back of a truck and you wake up in the Boundary Waters with a headache and a whole bunch of new problems.

Oh yeah. The tranquilizer gun. We know all about it. It’s those wilderness shows on TV. Word gets around.

If you were going to be tranquilized and transported to a new location to make a living with only the clothes on your back, where would you want to be taken?

95 thoughts on “One Spicy Bear”

  1. Good morning to all.

    I hope that I can avoid being tranquiized and taken away, and I also hope this doesn’t happen to Bart. I’ve never been very good at finding paying jobs and it really would be a problem if I had nothing and had to quickly find a job. Maybe I could be transported to some places where I could do gardening in exchange for a place to stay. There might be some gardening operations that could use me near San Franciso or some other hot spot for growing and selling vegetables locally.

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  2. Good Morning, Babooners!

    I missed you-all when I was up at the cabin, which is one reason I came home early. I thought I’d beat traffic that way, but was wrong. I was on I-35 when a thunderstorm opened up and doused us in so much water I couldn’t see a car a dozen feet ahead of me. That’s a real thrill, rushing along on the freeway blind as a bat, hoping none of the other cars is about to do something creative.

    Today I’ll try to answer Dale’s question instead of running around like Roger Rabbit making OT comments. I’d hope to be dropped off in a mellow, beautiful area where clothing is pretty much optional. It would need to be an English-speaking place where I could make a few bucks writing and doing other light work. I’d be happiest in a place where government is comically inept and unobtrusive.

    I think Christmas Island (in the Pacific, south of Hawaii) might do quite well. It has an easy climate and is so informal even my clothing would look okay there. And it has the world’s best bonefishing. Give me a week or two of practice and I could hire out as a fly-fishing bonefish guide. I’d make good money during the day and then at night I would tell amusing stories to my clients as long as they keep pina coladas coming around.

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  3. Rise and Swim through the Muggy Air Babooners:

    I woke up early this morning — must have been the influence of the doomed nap yesterday. After it stopped raining a bit, I rescued the laundry from the clothesline after it drained itself, rewashed it, and dried it the high energy way. We received 2.5″ of rain here in EP yesterday. And much of it arrived in 45 minutes. The air is oppressive, though. The dog and I are headed out for the morning walk — we may swim part way.

    I can’t think of an answer to this question. Is this question a metaphor to becoming unemployed? Suddenly you wake up in a different life that you are unprepared for? I can think of times in my life that certainly felt that way — facing the first ear infection as a parent, getting a divorce, moving away from rural Iowa and taking a city bus not knowing the numbers meant routes, getting into graduate school, then feeling like my brain atrophied in the workplace between college and grad school.

    But generally, I think I like the life I have now and I don’t want to be tranquilized then wake up elsewhere and have to cope with only my wits and the clothes on my back. But if I think of something I’ll write back.

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  4. i was thinking if i was to be transported with nothing but the shirt on my back i would like to go somewhere that would sufice. hawaii was the first place to come to mind but that is a bit pricy and touristy, maybe the beaches in thailand would be better. very low key very cheap to live. like gauguin to tahiti with beautiful native women canvas and a bottle of wine. but you might want to ask your wife dale. she probubly wants a little input as to where you get transported to but in reality you are a free man aren’t you? nice daydream though, the mountains, the ocean, any foreign county, the best cliamates in the world all seem to have an appeal and yet here we sit in minnesotawhere its 100 degrees this week and on its way to 20 below in 4 or 5 more months. there must be something here. ”and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.”(declaration of independance) unless of course you are shot with a tranquilizer gun and transported to a place without your knowledge with only the shirt on you back.

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    1. There are some lovely non-touristy parts in Hawaii on the Big Island, come to think of it. I’d go there in a minute.

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    2. I had a great aunt who bought a small plot of land on, as I recall, the big island. It’s kind of dumpy (my parents have visited) and full of native weeds (and possibly some non-native, um, “alternative vegetation”), but I bet there’s room for a couple of us to pitch tents…

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      1. Yes, but it is a dumpy part of the Big Island, which somehow still beats the swanky part of say, central Indiana (no offense intended, just my personal preference) for me.

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      2. Having lived in Southcentral Indiana for a year, I don’t think there is any place there that would qualify as swanky.

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  5. Nice to get to know a little more about Bart. Sounds like a well rounded kind of bear.

    Add $200 and friend to stay with temporarily and some temp. secretarial agencies and I’ll go anywhere… have done that twice in the 70s, but that requires a city (and by now, more than $200). I like Steve’s idea about an island. Will think about this some more.

    Off Topic: Bandshell concert tonight at Lake Harriet is Dan Newton’s Café Accordion Orchestra, 7:30.

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  6. Nothing like being threatened with a tranquilizer dart in the back to put me on MY best behavior. I’ll behave–honest!–just don’t unexpectedly transport me in the back of a pickup truck/cargo plane/container ship, bound for a place where there’s enough room for the likes of me to keep from annoying anyone! I’m all about new locales, but Bart doesn’t make it sound like “choice” is any part of this you’re-a-nuisance-you-need-to-move-on-Buddy scenario. With my luck, when I woke up from that tranquilizer, I’d be in graduate school again.

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  7. Hard to choose the where because there are so many places I’d like to visit for a long time- Grand Marais, Washington State, the Canadian Rockies, British Columbia, the vineyards of Northern California ,Bordeaux, or Champagne; Switzerland, Toronto, and the list goes on.

    I suppose my best bet for immediate gainful employment would be as a worker of some sort in a vineyard or winery. I’d be best as one of the pourers in the tasting room who schmooze the customers into believing that this particular wine is the best they’ll ever taste. (But I’m a lousy schmoozer- just full of useless trivia and opinions about thousands of wines. I also am pretty good at pairing wine and food- so maybe work my way up to becoming a sommelier at the winery’s award-winning restaurant?)

    Quit laughing! I’m still dopey from the tranquilizer. 😦

    Chris in Owatonna

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    1. Before you commit to this choice, Chris, rent a copy of “Sideways” and study the scene where Miles tangles with the pourer in the tasting room. Miles manages to take the romance out of that job.

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      2. Saw the movie and I am undaunted. I’ve been to a lot of tasting rooms and have determined that Miles represents the exception rather than the rule. Besides, those Pinot Noir lovers are all sort of strange, anyway–said the Pinot Noir lover. 🙂

        Chris

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  8. A really interesting question, starting all over again with nothing. It would be a fun challenge to try.

    How about waking up on a college campus somewhere and you adopt a Bart the bear attitude of scrounging for your existence. You could say you were a sociology student running an experiment. After a while you might even scrounge up a degree.

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  9. I’d like to be transported to the Library of Congress or Oxford or Cambridge University and work putting books back on the shelves. Think of all the book browsing I could do!

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    1. Working at the Library of Congress is the only way you would get to browse the stacks, otherwise, you have to request the books, so many at a time and have them brought to your space on one of the big tables. Can’t check them out, so you can spend a lot of time (and money) in the copy room too. (used to have a Library of Congress library card, should have kept it just for fun).

      I’d say your best bet would be to be transported right into the stacks, as you might not be able to clear security if your id wasn’t in the clothes you were wearing.

      If you could find a secret way in and out, there is a lovely farmer’s type market and some great old cafes in the area that might offer excellent scrounging.

      I’m liking this as the premise for a book, but no writer am I.

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      1. Nicely written, Catherine, in spite of your demurral. When I was a kid, the highest responsibility of librarians was to hide and protect the books that they thought pimply adolescents shouldn’t ever read. I assume they spent most of their days reading novels, trying to identify those with passages where men and women tear off their clothing. That always seemed like a nice gig to me.

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  10. Greetings! If I could choose where I would be rudely kidnapped to, I would like the Valley of Longevity area in Ecuador. Spring-like weather year round, good soil, clean air, nice people, inexpensive to live, gorgeous landscape, but is modern enough to have full infrastructure and hi-speed internet. It would be fun to comb the markets for inexpensive and high quality hand-made textiles, leather and other goods — then import them to USA and sell for a reasonable profit — and still be considered bargains. A win-win-win situation for all.

    And as the name suggests, people tend to live long, healthy lives in this particular area of Ecuador. It’s also close to beaches, mountains, Galapagos Islands, rainforest, etc. A fascinating area to live in … someday.

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      1. With $5000-$10,000 I could easily travel to Ecuador, stay a week or two and shop for exquisite things at the Otovalo(?) markets, ship back the goods and sell them. While a storefront would be nice, it’s too expensive — maybe just hit the nicer craft sales, flea markets and an online presence is my thinking. But without any money, totally ruined credit and a foreclosed house, it’s still in the dream stage. Although nice, cozy condos in town can be had for $40,000 according to the Ecuador Living emails I get.

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      3. i checked it out and am going in sept for 750 round trip. the accomadations will be on the cuff and i’ll bet i spend more on panama hats than anything else.

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  11. RH played Back to the Wild by Langhorne Slim….do you suppose that was Jasper’s choice, or is Mike Pengra lurking?

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      1. Thanks for that! I enjoyed hearing JP on Prairie Home Companion over the weekend.

        Missed the Prairie Sun song yesterday, but thought it was probably just because it was a holiday for you, Mike.

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      2. nice to know you are out there mike. hope all is well in a vacant studio. do you still work the early am hours?

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      3. Yesterday was a holiday for me, but the Prairie Sun song did play at 7am, Linda. It just didn’t make it into the visual playlist on the website.
        And hi tim…I’m not as early to work as I once was, but I still get here early enough to snag the primo parking places in the ramp!
        The studio, as well as the desk next to me is indeed sadly quiet and vacant.

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      4. Glad to hear that Prairie Sun was there – it’s a short song, one of those blink-and-you-miss-it things.

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      5. Hi Mike! You’ve got me hooked on Romi Mayes. Thanks for your work next to the sadly empty desk.

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  12. Hmm – perhaps I am finally ‘coming to’ from a tranquilizer dart, because I am presently in a place other than home, doing things other than my usual occupation and enjoying every minute of it! Sleeping late, walking in the woods, staring at the river in a meditative, perhaps semi-drugged state, and looking for food in unusual places. Might just run into Bart up here. Or maybe Bart is at my job and I am at his? Don’t know if my co-workers will notice any difference. Hope Bart likes hospital food.

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  13. If I Were a Bear to Be Transported

    Summer biologist, does your grant include time travel?
    I wish a serum that takes me back a decade or three.
    But not to be young again.
    Please, leave me old.
    I just don’t want to be caught in the wrong age.
    I know and believe things which make the young now sneer.
    I prowl to rhythms too slow and end up blocking the path.
    I growl and snap, curling back my lips.
    But with old and broken teeth,
    the snarl is only a mockery of myself.
    I remember smells and tastes not tainted
    by the chemicals that wash though everything.
    and knew not then to cherish them.
    I remember night skies so full of stars
    I thought I could walk across the sky.
    And one day soon will.

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    3. Well, this is the most tragic post I have ever read. Who knew, going into this morning’s TB, that I’d need a FULL box of Kleenex to get through the thing? The image of the decrepit old bear with bad teeth and good memories is too poignant to dismiss.

      I have to wonder, Anachronism, how you came to sympathize with an old bear dislocated in time and space? I hope this is nothing you have personally experienced.

      My one suggestion, if I might make one, would be to find a comfortable bar stool in a busy country tavern. Try to compose yourself, looking approachable and wise. And if someone seeks you out to buy you drinks in exchange for wisdom, work it for all it is worth. “Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah! We never scrounged garbage in them days!” etc.

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    6. dale i think we need the writers blog for poems haiku bawdy drinking songs and bear laments as well as limericks

      there once was a bear from nantucket
      whose tounge was so long he could suck it
      he said with a grin
      as he wiped off his chin
      oh look theres some mud in my bucket

      cooking book club and writers den. up to it?

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  14. I’d go somewhere cool (temperature-wise) with occasional but not relentless sun. Lake Superior or British Columbia comes to mind. Nowhere with fireworks (I stayed in the lurker category this weekend because I’m the ultimate firework curmudgeon and no one needed to be subjected to that).

    Or San Lucas Toliman, Guatemala, if the deal included less hardship for the Mayans I’ve come to know and like.

    Maybe a goat farm if it meant hanging out with Barb, Steve and other Babooners.

    Somewhere with music and animals. And chocolate.

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  15. Did not mean to get anyone down. Nor to really hide. I’m on the computer where I don’t long in. Assumed all regulars would know it is me.
    I was thinking of my mother and several very old people I used to visit in nursing homes telling me how they had lived too long and were so out-of-touch with young people and what they would not know to call popular culture (well, my mother did) they saw on TV and thus had not even that to enjoy anymore. They would tell me how they wanted to die or wanted to go back to an earlier time but not to be young. My memory of this was triggered by a couple of things that made me feel past it this weekend.
    Steve–working my way through “To Be a Man.” Some of my above memories were triggered by it, for we two are of the same era and background in many, but not all, vital ways. Do you do your own editing? I am a poor proofreader but I do tend to catch things in a new text. So can I tell you a small error: p13, sixth line from, the bottom “student” should be “students.” I am most impressed by the nearly flawless easy flow. Your ear for cadence is very very good.

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    1. You have reminded me of a friend of ours, now in hospice, but as of 2 months ago, still living at home and getting to church every week.

      When asked how it felt to be 105, she answered “peculiar”.

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      1. Let em add that I also knew many very old people who did not feel that way, at least until the very end.

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    2. clyde, you are the most uplifting downer there is. keep your head up high. you do it better than anyone. the ability to climb into a situation real or imagined and transform that into a poignant memorable moment is what you do again and again. which reminds me how did the med free experiment turn out? different meds or more effective with a cleansed system? i am serios about the writers blog . what a group to pull from.

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  17. Question: if I take this trip do I have to work when I get there? I’d love a trip and lots of simplicity right now–things at work and in family life have been very complicated the last two years. Maybe a desert island/palm tree scenario with no where to go. No wardrobe needed. Wondering if I can procure just the tranquilizer and not the transport.

    Clyde/Old Anachronism: love the poem and the reference to the stars. Quite lovely. You just came up with that?

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  19. Do I have to go someplace real? Do you suppose I could go into a book and apprentice with Miss Havisham in the Thursday Next books?…I’d love to travel inside books with Thursday and the gang.

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    1. Anna, I think you are on to another blog idea-if you could be inside a book, what would it be? Dale, what say you?

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    2. Definitely need to get inside of “Fool” by Christopher Moore (though it may alter my language in inappropriate ways for small children – “f**kstockings” being a common epithet throughout). Probably a Tony Hillerman or two as well, mostly for the landscape, but also to meet the people. A stroll through the Hundred Acre Wood would be in order as well. I’d try a Tom Robbins, but that might get so trippy I’d never get back…

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  20. “They wanted to show Miss Maple how wonderful a simple, nonthinking sheep life coulde be.” Three Bags Full

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  21. All of you have listed these wonderful places that you’d like to be dropped… although I really like Anna’s suggestion that perhaps it doesn’t have to be a ‘real’ place.
    I don’t know how to answer.

    So, Rochester’s late fireworks. The paper said they were “AWESOME” and “… a crowd pleaser…”.
    They sounded fairly raucous from our house… Our 17 yr old son attended and he said they were “OK”. My wife, daughter and myself stayed home… daughter started summer school today so she was in bed before they began.

    Hey- (off topic) does anyone here read ‘Smithsonian’ magazine? This months issue is ‘Forty Things you need to know for the next Forty Years’ and one of the articles regarded how reading has changed over the centuries. (I’m paraphrasing:) How people said when TV came out people would stop reading or writing but really, there is more being written and read now than ever before. And I thought of these blogs…
    Interesting.

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    1. mark twain
      hermann hesse
      kurt vonnegut
      issac bashevish singer
      gabriel garcía márquez
      ee cummings
      dr suess
      shel silverstien
      billy collins
      amy tan
      pat conroy
      edward albee
      william shakespeare
      louis l’amour
      etc

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      1. Dang! I forgot about him. How about if I put him on a bus and send him up to Blackhoof? He’s pretty handy with a pitchfork.

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  23. Drop me off in Hawaii. When the clothes on my back wear out I’ll make a grass skirt and get some coconut (sp) shells and teach hula dancing.
    Tim and Catherine, I replied to yesterday’s ?s. You guys are up late and up early.

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    1. Your lobstering days sounds pretty amazing to me (who never gets enough time on the water). Rehobeth is on the Delmarva penninsula (that chunk of land that forms the eastern side of the Chesapeake Bay-and is made up of Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia-get it? Del-mar-va). I believe it was originally a religious community, but the postcards I saw when I was there showed a beach with no visible sand, so covered by sunbathers was it.

      Fall, a great time to visit.

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      1. I will be making a visit to Maine in the fall. Wish I had time to check the Delmarva (yes, clever) area out but won’t have time for any side trips.

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  24. Reading all these posts, I’ve yet to come upon a single place I wouldn’t gladly live for awhile–yes, including (south)central Indiana, a place I actually DID live for a bit. That’s just it; the world keeps getting “innerestinger and innerestinger,” filled with more places into which I’d like to insinuate myself and pretend to belong. For instance, would I have thought, a few short years ago, “gee, it’d be fun to find myself transported to Guernsey–Guernsey!–for a while?” But how to choose, how to choose?

    I guess this doesn’t count as a real problem, since it’s not like I’m really going to have to decide, say, at dart-point. (And, as I’ve noted already today, if the dart is pointed, chances are good that I’m not going to be in the position of deciding where I’m going. The dart wranglers will simply send me to a place where I’ll be safe, blend in, and be neither threat nor nuisance to the locals.)

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  25. I’ve started posts and deleted them several times today. Truth is, I don’t know where I’d want to end up. It seems so limiting to have to choose… I haven’t had a chance to travel much, so if I could be beamed into a nice Chevy conversion van with a full tank of gas and a wad of cash in the glove box, I think that would work nicely.

    If I’m not allowed those material things, then set me down somewhere on the U.P. Maybe somewhere near Marquette? Say Yah to the U.P., eh!

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      1. British Columbia, Canadian Rockies, both coasts, put it on a boat and finally go to Italy….. endless….

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      2. Au contraire! I’ve had many a veggie pastie in the UP! they are godawful. but i gotta say i feel the same way about the unveggie ones i used to eat….

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  27. clyde i realized i left the twins tonight after turning it on with the twins down 5 2 after pavanno gave up 4 in the 5th and then the twins come up mauer to the wall morneau hr
    kubel hr cuddy single thome double intentional walk to delmon and a punto pop up. change of pitchers and i leave to go to a real live ballgame. this is after a week in rapid city to watch 9 games in 6 days. son got the double with two on and his team down by two in the bottom of the last inning. third base coach held up the winning run correctly scored the following batter on a sac fly to end the game. i am the baseball junkie. (liked your comment on the triplet righthanded neophites this morning. i thought blackburn might be something but now have my doubts) life is there and you squeeze in what you want when you can. that is the beauty of the blog today vs the 6-9am version of the previous 18 months. i trust dale will get the music going sooner or later and then we will be able to choose. music is our soma but writing happens at all times of the day and night

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