Category Archives: Uncategorized

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Beechly’s Betrothal Brainstorm

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Today’s guest post is really a travel pitch from a partisan player, tourism-wise. I usually refuse to take these blatantly promotional offerings, but it’s late and I’m stuck for a blog entry. Plus, the writer is well known to us all as Minnesota’s 8th district Congressman, Loomis Beechly.

Beechly Officiates While Couple Canoedles.
Beechly Officiates While Couple Canoedles.

Greetings Constituents,

This is the time of year when Minnesota’s picturesque 9th district fills up with temporary new residents.

Welcome, cash cows!

I say this in the most loving way possible because we do rely on you to drop a bundle of dough while you are visiting the district. Our people are both desperate and grateful for your support, so whether it’s a wildly expensive lunch on a dock or an overpriced boat excursion or an extremely costly but smallish cup of earthworms, I hope you’ll be quiet and gladly fork over the bucks whenever we ask and not make a fuss about it.

After all, you’re on vacation! What’s the point of getting mad?

I also want to acknowledge that this is Pride Weekend in the Twin Cities, and coming as it does at the end of a week that included the Supreme Court’s overturning of the Defense of Marriage Act, now seems like the perfect time for someone to suggest in a public forum that a group of people who really set the tone for style in our culture ought to initiate the yet-untried concept of in-the-lake weddings.

And I don’t say this merely because I represent all the water surface area in the state or because gay weddings are bound to be outrageously spendy affairs or because religious people might think they’ve cornered the lake ceremony market with their baptisms and making shallow water the go-to place for gay and lesbian unions would be a subtle but delicious in-your-face move, but just because this is something that could become amazingly stylish and it hasn’t been tried before.

As far as I know.

I would love it if two people getting hitched with their four feet in six inches of water at some Minnesota resort became a genuine GLBT (Gay Lake Betrothal Tradition).

Of course we’d have to think of some way to make this work in the winter, too. Possibly involving chainsaws, waders and heated tents.

Your Congressman,
Loomis Beechly

Describe the classiest (or most memorable) wedding you’ve attended.

Uncategorized

Ask Dr. Babooner

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Dear Dr. Babooner,

Ann_Landers baboon 2 copy

Summer has just begun and I feel like its already over.

The rain has been constant and the mosquitos have been huge. I’ve been working like crazy at my job and spending the rest of my time cutting up trees knocked over by the violent storms we’ve been having. Plus, I had to eat the entire contents of my freezer in one afternoon last weekend because the power went out. I still feel dangerously overstuffed and on the verge of exploding, I can’t sleep and I think I gained 40 pounds in spite of all the physical activity.

What’s worse, I made a bet with my sister-in-law that the Supreme Court would uphold the Defense of Marriage Act, and now that I’ve lost I’ll have to pay her by watching every minute and taking detailed notes on every episode in her boxed-set collection of Season 3 of Glee.

I haven’t done any of the enjoyable warm weather stuff I said I was going to do back in February when I was dreaming about right now, and I can feel the time slipping away.

This might be the worst summer ever.

Dr. Babooner, I know my attitude stinks and I’m focusing on all the wrong things. How can I deal with my frustration, guilt and regret, and still have a good summer in the (almost no) time that remains?

Sincerely,
Fallen Behind

I told Fallen she should resist the temptation to grade her summer. Once you establish a set of expectations you become too much like the stock market – everything is measured against what you thought would happen rather than what actually does happen, and you become tiresome to other people who are not in on the secret reasons for your suffering.

In Summertime, adding any project to your “to-do” list should require Congressional Action – that’s the only way to keep your schedule clear.

And you should never, ever make political bets with anyone. Especially not a relative. But if you have to wager with punishment by “Glee,” choose Season One, which was much better than Season Three.

But that’s just one opinion. What do YOU think, Dr. Babooner.

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Charged Up!

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Today’s post comes from perennial sophomore Bubby Spamden.

drained_battery

Hey Mr. C.,

I’ve really been loving the power outage we’ve had since last Saturday. I know my plan for summer was pretty much to sit in the basement at our house and play video games with my buddy Oscar other losers who also don’t have jobs. But all that gets thrown out the window when the power dies and your devices don’t work.

Then I realized this was a business opportunity!

So I grabbed my dad’s gasoline powered generator and went down to the nearby strip mall and found a table outside the Starbucks and put up a sign that said “charge your phone for $5”!

You wouldn’t believe how popular that was!

I ran the generator all day and using a power strip from the garage I was able to charge six cell phones at a time. It took about 2 hours to charge each phone, and I worked a 10 hour day, so do the math!

No, I mean literally, do the math, because I have no idea how to figure this out.

All I know is that running the generator all day long took ten gallons of gas at 3.54 per gallon and I think I wound up with more money than I had when I started. But it also cost me something in explaining time, since I had to argue with people pretty much nonstop about the noise and the fumes.

I think what with our infrastructure breaking down and all these mega-storms popping up, this could be my career – cell phone charger mogul. I hear they do it all the time in those “third world” countries, and my Uncle Dan says that’s what we’re turning into.

He’s kind of sour most of the time.

He also says that the word to remember for a young person looking to find a career used to be “plastics”, but today it’s “batteries.”

So anyway, I think this is going to be my great strategy – to charge batteries in places where the power has gone out.

Or I could just try to meet this girl I saw on CNN and convince her to marry me. Then I’d be set for life because she’s going to be rich. I’m pretty sure she’d like me a lot, though it would take some effort on her part because people say I’m not easy to know or understand.

But that’s OK – she seems like the type who isn’t afraid of a little work!

See you on Easy Street!

Your Pal,
Bubby

Describe a Get Rich Quick idea of yours that didn’t pan out.

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Blackout Haiku

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Power_tower

I was just a kid delivering newspapers along Sunset Road in Montrose, New York when the power went out across the Northeast and parts of Canada back in November 1965.

Lots of Minnesota kids had a similar experience this weekend, as power outages from storms on Friday darkened large parts of the Twin Cities and central Minnesota.

The blackout I experienced as a ten year old was memorable for the way adults reacted – up to that point I had never seen my parents so helpless. And of course every blackout, no matter how long it lasts, reveals to us just how completely we rely on having an uninterrupted power supply. Habits are exposed and we realize how fragile our infrastructure is the moment we flip that switch and nothing happens. It takes a blackout of several hours before I can begin to change my expectations.

Whether you have power or not, I’m guessing you’ve had enough experience with outages to summarize it in three lines – with five syllables, seven syllables and five syllables.

I.
I enter the room
anticipating a light
that does not come on

II.
Every appliance
gets its button pushed again
before I say “duh”

III.
Refrigeration
Doesn’t happen without help
on Summer’s first day

Share a Blackout Haiku.

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Pirates and Their Preferences

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Today’s post was scrawled on a soggy boot that was fished out of a holding pond for parking lot runoff in Inver Grove Hights.  The lab analysis is incomplete, but apparently it comes from the outlaw commander  of the Muskellunge, Captain Billy.

Artists Approximation of Captain Billy
Artists Approximation of Captain Billy

Ahoy!

I is writin’ this here missive in an effort to clarify a few points regardin’ a new study of pirate behavior.  It simply ain’t correct that true pirates favors one African coast over another when it comes to choosin’ a location from which to plunder vessels an’ plague civilians.

The very idea that lawless fellas such as ourselves would take local ordinances an’ crime fightin’ techniques into account when establishin’ our bases of operation suggests that we recognizes th’ authority of shore-based entities t’ regulate our activities.

We don’t.

Bein’ lawless don’t mean simply bein’ in the habit of breakin’ laws!  Rather, we holds an abidin’ disdain fer th’ very activity of law makin’ an’ enforcement!  Now it may be th’ case that that certain rank amateurs has entered into pirate-like activities an’ favors a particular area as bein’ close t’ home.  So be it, but don’t confuse such characters with actual pirates, for whom the very concept of “home” is unfathomable.

Th’ entire world is our home, an it ain’t allowed by our Code of Conduct t’ foul it without good cause. Th’ outlines of our code is confidential only t’ us, in order t’ keep it from bein’ misinterpreted by unworthies. An’ them what would point out that havin’ a code of conduct runs counter t’ th’ very thing I just said about “disdain fer law makin'” is exactly the sort of individual I has in mind when I says “unworthies”.

Suffice it to say that stories of cruelty perpetrated by impostors claimin’ t’ be pirates is certainly regrettable.  Me and me boys would never be cruel t’ another human unless they truly deserved it!

Likewise, we shows no particular preference with regard to riches.  I sometimes overhears folks sayin’ “Oh, my booty’s too big,” or “nobody is interested in my booty on account of it ain’t sufficienly well rounded.”

Me and the boys says “hogwash”.   All booty is equal in our eyes, an’ equally subject t’ appropriation.

Let that be a warnin’ t’ ya’s, an’ a guarantee!

Yer humble swashbuckler,
Capt. Billy.

It appears the Captain sees himself as a moral man, as measured by secret standards of his own design.

What would be a principal tenet of your Code of Conduct?

Science, Uncategorized

Your Name Here

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I love this new picture from NASA of the surface of the planet Mercury.

Image of the Day from NASA
Image from NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington

This past March, the Messenger spacecraft (launched in 2004), achieved its goal of photographing 100% of Mercury’s surface. Since it is the closest planet to our Sun, I assumed Mercury’s surface was nothing but a molten mess of bubbling goo – not too inviting as a tourist destination. But now I can see that the surface is solid and it has craters. What’s even better, a naming convention has been established to pair Mercury’s pockmarks with dead writers, painters, musicians and other artists.

One of the most recent names approved for a surface feature on Mercury honors the Hawaiian slack-key guitarist Gabby Pahinui. Alvin Ailey, Bela Bartok, Glinka, Goethe, Goya, Grainger and Grieg are other names attached to similar Mercurian blemishes .

There are more standards when it comes to bestowing space names. On Venus, the International Astronomical Union names craters for women no longer on our planet, who, while they were here, made outstanding or fundamental contributions to their chosen field.

If you want to get your name on a crater of our very own Moon, you need to be an astronaut, cosmonaut, scientist or polar explorer. All dead, I’m afraid. It appears you can’t plant your name on a distant planet as a living person, which makes sense. Otherwise everything out there would already be tagged with the names of politicians and tycoons.

There are other guidelines for naming features on various bodies in outer space, though to qualify you would have to be, among other things, a mythological deity, a character from Shakespeare, or a coal field.

I’m guessing, were you able to take a survey of those who have received this unusual honor, only the astronauts, cosmonauts and some of the scientists might have taken a moment to consider that their life’s work would someday cause their name to be permanently attached to a crater. But I’m fairly certain it never crossed Vivaldi’s mind.

Walt Whitman, however, probably knew it was going to happen for him. And it did!

What in the world (or outer space) should be named after you?

The Baboon Congress, Uncategorized

Surrounded By Ideas

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Today’s guest post comes from tim.

I was in the bookstore waiting for my wife the other day. I still use it for a meeting place but have begun to think maybe a park is as good a spot now with the internet serving the purpose that the bookstore once did. The diference being that the book store has stuff to put your hands on and touch and suggest that your brain would never come up with on its own.

Or would it? That is the question.

bookshelves

If left to your own design you would be able to come up with all the cool stimulation of thought to send you surfing into infinitium and off into uncharted worlds like a book store can do. You don’t have to do anything other than pick up a copy of whatever is on the shelf to see if you care. How many times have you picked up a book at the bookstore read 10 words and put it back down. A look at a cover an author a theme that takes you off to somewhere else where you see a realted idea you would never have googled but as long as it is this easy you just pick it up and browse for a minute. It may be that I am more of the mile wide and an inch deep than the average person but I love the ability to walk through the bookstore and breathe in all the possibilities for avenues to cast my brain into.

I think of the time I waited in barnes and noble in galleria to get jimmy carters signature on my book. I got there an hour or so before the book signing was to begin and found the end of the line was already a good ways back through the lower level of the store. Jimmy being the overly conscientious man that he is has anticipated the demand and was there over an hour early signing a book in a little over one thousand one one thousand to one thousand three with a pair of assistants on either side one ot place the next book in front of him, one to take the signed copy form him and prepare for the next and the next and the next. The line in this scenario kind of inched alone even ½ a mile back which is about where i believe when I began.

As I wound my way through the bookshelves I recognized all the authors topics genres as the went by. The line organizers did me the favor of running it through the fiction section and the Margaret atwood kickoff followed by the brontes the and so on past faulkner, hesse, hemmingay twain, Vonnegut, wolfe and into the genre stuff of travel and poetry western and I realized how much I enjoy the process of seeing the title and author and the idea that comes to mind with the snap associaton.

Today I was looking at dc comics and marvel comic section across from manga that new form of picture books that are action stories where the pictures tell the stories and the words go along instead of the other way around. I was looking for the brother of a friend who is a gifted comic book artist. And I came across anne rice who I had been telling my daughter about and suggesting she look into as kind of the grandmother of the vampire flying death angel genre my daughter is very into these days. I thought it was in the wrong place then I discovered it was a picture book version of the story and it did a decent job of telling the story. I looked next to that and there was a copy of farenheit 451 by ray bradberry. He had writen a preface about how farenheiht 451 came to be with a 50 year hindsight viewer as an aide he hadn’t been able to use before. He talked about how he arrived at farenheit 451 from a little incident that happened to him a couple weeks earlier and that he had always attributed that to the origins of the story only years later did he ralize that the story came from deep down in his subconscious and he recommended that when you write you allow the ideas to flow and follow them rather than thinking you have an idea of what you are doing,

Ray bradberrys close on the preface was this: if you had to memorize one book like the people in farenheit 451 did for preservation and to contribute to the furthering of the world, which book would you chose and why?

Uncategorized

It’s a Bird!

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I’m pretty sure it’s impossible to satisfy all the people who want something special to come out of the new Superman movie. But if one is all-powerful and represents Earth’s only hope for survival, one must try.

UltimatePowersSuperman

I haven’t seen the film, but I read a review that faulted actor Henry Cavill for giving us a Superman who is no fun. But that’s in his DNA (if he has DNA). He’s relentlessly able, stiflingly moral and thoroughly boring. I’m a top authority on this topic because I had a Superman suit when I was 10 years old. I didn’t have any super powers, except when it came to influencing one person. On the question of the suit, I used my pleading vision to shoot pity rays out of my eyes, which forced my mother to sew it. She did a fine job on the cape and the “S” emblem, though I would have liked a better pair of appropriately manly mid-calf high bright red boots.

And no, I did not wear the suit to school. I was an enthusiast, but not reckless. In fact, there are no photos that I can find, so you’ll have to take my word for it. If such a thing had happened at my house with my own son, there would be enough of a visual record of the Superman phase to fill several bookshelves. Perhaps there was an intentional effort made to spare me future embarrassment. Just like the real Superman, I guess my parents did everything in their power to protect me.

But back to the character’s lack of personality. The Superman I knew from comic books was one-dimensional, just like the the movie cowboys and TV cops of the day. Think about Sgt. Joe Friday’s monotone. To be human was to be imperfect. Competent in every regard and totally bland – that was the style. Remember that Superman’s vacation spot was called The Fortress of Solitude. That pretty much says it all. Not really a people person.

Part of Superman’s problem is that he’s always trying to win folks over by rescuing them from burning buildings, intercepting bullets and catching disabled airliners as they plummet groundward. You don’t really see him taking much time to sit and talk with people. He’s not interested in getting to know anyone. He’s always rushing off to save the world, never stopping to make a friend.

No wonder he’s dull.

Maybe we need a hero who’s extra powerful only when it comes to connecting with people.

What one super power would you like to have?

Uncategorized

Riding A Rail

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This is the anniversary of the opening of the Disneyland Monorail System in 1959.

monorail

I’m old enough to remember when monorails were the future of transportation. Back when I was nine I knew that by the time I became the age I am now, I would be zipping to and fro in a sleek bullet shaped train that glides on a single rail between gleaming skyscrapers that were all monuments to my greatness.

I never paused to wonder why such a great personage as myself would be traveling with the unwashed masses on the monorail.

Today, monorails seem to be doing all right in Asia and Las Vegas, but elsewhere, like at the Minnesota Zoo and in Sydney, Australia, they are on the way out.

Too bad, since I have a working HO scale model of Sydney’s Darling Harbor Monorail boxed up in my basement.

Most things, (the weather, the stock market, the Kentucky Derby, our transit choices in the next century) are hard to predict.

How will we travel 100 years from today?

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One For The Record

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I was intrigued by this article about the ongoing effort to document theater productions in New York by making archival videos. For many reasons this is a superb idea, and it would be great fun to have this as your job – capturing timeless performances to inform the work of artists of today and tomorrow.

videocam

Of course it’s one thing to do this as a line of paid work and quite another to attempt to make a video and photographic record of your own life and the lives of your loved ones. That can turn out to be time consuming and more than a little wonky. I am guilty of the Cam Dad Syndrome. I spent too much time watching my son growing up through a viewfinder rather than just watching him grow up. And now I’m left with many hours of videotape that must be transferred to digital memory and organized for posterity, though as a 23 year old man with important work to do and lots of obligations, I’m fairly certain he does not want to spend much time in front of the TV, watching himself cavort around the yard as a carefree 7 year old.

Not right now, anyway.

But there is a basic watcher/doer conflict there. You can record your activities for posterity, or you can do things worth remembering.

But you can’t do both at the same time.

What kind of visual record will you leave behind?