They’re prepared.

…for a “liquor-free” Vikings game in the neighborhood.

Value Liquors — which is right next to TCF Bank Stadium in Minneapolis — tells TMZ they’re preparing for huge business since officials nixed alcohol sales in the college stadium for the matchup with the Chicago Bears.

We’re told the store ordered 50 cases of flasks, and over 4,000 airplane-size bottles of liquor. Hmmm … wonder what fans are gonna do with those?

Peeps at the stadium say flasks and alcohol are strictly prohibited … but fans tend to forget the rules when it’s 20 degrees and snowing.

…and I have a feeling there are a lot of frisk-free places to hide a flask or wee bottle of whiskey.

PS: Don’t ask me what I was doing on the TMZ web site. I wasn’t. I got a verbal tip, Googled it and ended up there.

From the wayback machine, fifty ads that’d never get shown today.

The above may be the least objectionable to modern tastes.

Of course, things have swung way too far in the other direction; try to find an ad that doesn’t portray “Dad” as a moron anymore…

Here’s a typical argument that I’ve been having with more than a few lefties lately:

ME: Here’s some more evidence that fraudulent votes were cast in the election.

THEY:  You shouldn’t say that.  Minnesota has the best voting system in the country.

ME:  Maybe, maybe not – but there’s some room for improvement, as these stories show.

THEY: But you shouldn’t impugn the voting system.  You’ll discourage voting.

ME: No, I’m encouraging people to hold their idiot government accountable.

THEY:  But your “evidence” is wrong.

ME: Why?

THEY: Because we have the best voting system in the country.

ME: (Looks for ways to change the subject)

It’s called “Begging the Question” – which may be the most mis-used term in the whole world of logic, by the way.  Correctly used, it means “Using the presumption that your claim is correct as evidence that your claim is correct”.

Constant repetition that Minnesota has the best electoral system in the country, even if it’s true (and it’s becoming clearer and clearer to me that it’s a ludicrous claim, unless the sole goal is to rack up vote counts, which is a stupid goal) doesn’t pre-empt evidence that there are issues.

Nothing sets off an ad that says “this a car for a responsible parent who needs to haul a bunch of kids around safely” like…

…the “If I Should Fall From Grace With God” by The Pogues, a band led by Shane MacGowan, an alcoholic so prodigious he makes Keith Richards, Pete Townsend and Ozzy Osbourne look like Phyllis Schlafly.

Not that I don’t love hearing the Pogues on prime time TV, don’t get me wrong…

…but this odd parody add campaign made me laugh.

But, fittingly, lnot too much.

Tagline of new Jesse Ventura “Conspiracy Theory” promo:

VENTURA: “I’m going to expose things that’ll blow your mind”.

The rescue of 33 Chilean miners, is underway.  The men, trapped for 69 days half a mile undergound, are supposed to start coming out soon.

The missile-like capsule that will carry 33 miners to fresh air and freedom was lowered into a nearly half-mile-long rescue tunnel Tuesday night. Steam rushed from the hole into the frigid desert air — a sign of the humid, sauna-like conditions the men have endured for 69 days.

It’ll be one of the great rescues in history:

The rescue attempt is risky simply because no one else has ever tried to extract miners from such depths, Davitt McAteer, who directed the U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration during the Clinton administration. A miner could get claustrophobic and do something that damages the capsule. Or a rock could fall and wedge it in the shaft. Or the cable could get hung up. Or the rig that pulls the cable could overheat.

“You can be good and you can be lucky. And they’ve been good and lucky,” McAteer told the AP. “Knock on wood that this luck holds out for the next 33 hours.”

Prayers, invocations of karma, or best wishes of whatever kind you prefer are all pretty much required here.

Video from the scene.  As this is written, it looks like the capsule is being pulled up.

9:06 – looks like the capsule is near the surface – wow, there is is.  Looks like a tight fit, in the tunnel and inside the cage.   Empty – must have been the dry run.

9:09 – they’re loading up Manuel Gonzales Pavez, the mine rescue expert.

Pavez

It looks like the President Echenique of Chile was giving him a pep talk.  There was a loud cheer…followed by more waiting.

9:19 – and Pavez is on his way.

9:30 – Group at the shaft head is singing songs to pass the time.  Accoridng to the schedule, Pavez should be half way down.

9:36 – Video from the mineshaft.

Courtesy ABC/Chilean State TV

9:51 – the capsule is loaded and ready to haul up.

Capsuled hauled up just before midnight, Chilean time.

10:11 – The first miner makes it to the surface.  His son and wife were there to meet him; the boy – sixish – burst into tears as he ran to meet him.

The first miner out.

32 to go.

10:16 – Roberto Rios Seguel, a Chilean Navy special forces medic, is going to go down in the next car to help triage the men below.

Seguel

10:41 – Seguel arrives 2,000 feet below the surface.

Chilean Navy medic Seguel arrives in the mine.

11:08 – Mario Sepulveda is getting near the surface:

Wife of Mario Sepulveda

11:10 – Mario Sepulveda, the second miner to get out, is on the surface.

Mario Sepulveda sees the first air in over two months.

If you use Google Chrome for your browser, you may have had trouble reaching Shot In The Dark or a number of other Minnesota Organization of Bloggers’ blogs this past few days.

“Blogrolling.com”, the site on which we maintain the “MOBRoll”, or list of links to MOB blogs, apparently became linked to a site that distributes “malware”.  This has bubbled into the virus-watching system used by Google (and possibly others), which trips a big, ugly “warning” page when you try to access pages using Blogrolling.com blogrolls.

I have temporarily removed the MOBroll until either Blogrolling resolves the problem, or a workaround presents itself, or I have the time and energy to move all 100-odd MOB blogs to a private list.

(I’m hoping Blogrolling gets on the stick, just between us…)

Because the headline you’ve all been waiting all your careers to write has been written.

It’s all over.

To:  Madames and Sirs

From:  Mitch

Re: Huge Mistake

To whom it may concern,

Get  “Mike’s Hard Limeade” back on your shelves immediately or face the consequences.

That is all.

Mitch Berg

I was thinking about long lost loves the other day.

And I walked into a grocery store – and from half a store away, I saw a familiar profile – one I’d not seen for…years?  Decades?  A generation?

I walked over there, telling myself “there’s just no way”, setting expectations nice and low.

But is was true; it was that long-lost love.  I figured as I walked across the store that it was just a trick of distance and years, but as I got where I was going, I could see that the years had changed nothing.  Just as beautiful as ever.

Nesbitt’s Orange Soda is back:

I haven’t seen Nesbitt’s on sale in over 30 years.  It was the taste of my teens; going to the pop machine at the M and H station to buy cans of Nesbitt’s for a quarter.  The soda was a light, crisp, naturally-flavored concoction that was infinitely better-tasting than any other orange pop.  Forget Fanta; club Crush; especially be rid of “Minute Maid”, the brand that the Coca Cola Company replaced Nesbitts with.  Sickeningly sweet, it was an abomimation…

…especially against the dry, sweet perfection of Nesbitt’s.

I thought “certainly this is just a baby-boomer stunt; they must have some generic orange swill poured into a bottle with a Nesbitt’s label.

Nope.  Cane sugar, natural flavor. At least the label read right (and yes, I did remember the key parts of the label from when I was a kid)

I bought three.  I drank one.

Precisely the same.

My daughter – who doesn’t like orange pop – had one too.  “This is the bomb”.  That means its good…

It’s more than the bomb.  It’s like finding the first love of your life, thirty years later – and it’s even better than it was back then.

Mmm.

…but one poll is going very well indeed for Emmer.

I never really “got” Louisiana.  It always seemed to me that the big selling point of the entire state’s culture was indolence interspersed with bouts of toxic drunkenness.

Bloomberg says there’s a reason for that;  it’s a statistical fact:

In Louisiana, where the humidity is as thick as the gumbo, people prefer to take it slow. Hunting, fishing, and outdoor sporting activity may have earned Louisiana the nickname “Sportsman’s Paradise,” but new data indicate that the more popular pastimes are sleeping, goofing off, and watching television.

In a new ranking by Businessweek.com based on data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), Louisiana claims the top spot as the country’s laziest state. To be clear, by “lazy” we do not mean lacking work ethic or engagement. Rather, it is a measure of leisure time spent doing sedentary activities compared with activities that require more physical effort, such as exercising and even working. Mississippi and Arkansas came in second and third, and while states in the south and southeast are represented heavily in the list, such East Coast states as Delaware and New York placed in the top 20.

The average for the U.S. population: 8 hours, 35 minutes sleeping; 2 hours, 38 minutes watching television; 44 minutes socializing; 18 minutes relaxing; and 3 hours, 23 minutes working. Looked at another way, Louisianans over the course of a year spend on average 3,285 more minutes sleeping and 9,855 more minutes watching television than the national average.

But while growing up why would I, in particular, find the whole “Big Lazy” culture so foreign and incomprehensible, when so much of the rest of our culture seems to lionize it so?

In North Dakota, the least inactive state, people sleep 8 hours, 4 minutes; watch 2 hours, 19 minutes of television; socialize for 40 minutes; and relax for 22 minutes. The average time North Dakotans spend working is just over 5 hours.

Ah.  Now I get it.

I still laugh at this one:

I’ts mighty tempting to bring the same skill-set to process analysis…

I’ve been driving, walking and riding by this shop for 23 years, now.  And I figured I finally needed to pay them their due.

It’s a little Vietnamese repair garage in the Midway.  And on top of the building is a flagpole.  And atop the flagpole is Old Glory.

And below it…

…even 35  years after the fall of Saigon, is the old Republic of Vietnam flag.

They had one for many years that finally got ripped to shreds in the wind.  So this year they replaced it.  The Stars and Stripes are brand new and im-friggin-maculate.

More immigrants like this, please.

While sorting through my logs for the month, I took a detour through the browsser stats.

And I saw that someone – one person, really – hit my blog using “OmniWeb”.

Which means someone, somewhere, is still running “OpenStep”.

I feel like an archaeologist who not only discovered Atlantis, but walked into a nightclub and spent the night carousing with hot Atlantean movie starlets.

I’ve lived in the Twin Cities for almost 25 years, now.  And for most of that time, being from North Dakota has meant I’m my entire social circle’s connection for Everclear (the full-strength 195 proof stuff, not the pantywaisted 175 proof swill they sometimes sell in Minnesota), fireworks (the NATO-graded stuff) and cheap cigarettes.

But never let it be said that Terry Keegan will miss a trend.  Apparently noting the hottest economy in the land, Terry is pandering to the people with the money next week…:

The pub is holding our first ever “NODAK NIGHT” on Friday, July 23. We are encouraging everyone with a North Dakota conection, of any kind, to come in and mingle with other North Dakotans. We are offering the first drink free for anyone with a connection.

…perhaps to curry favor and make connections for an expansion to Minot or Dickinson or someplace else out in the oil patch with low taxes and high beer consumption rates?  We dont’t know, but Terry’s no dummy.  (Marty is, but since he’s from NoDak too, I keep that quiet).

It starts at 7PM.

I’ll be bringing my JHS ’81 annual…

(via one-time temporary Grand Forksian Chad at Fraters Libertas)

I almost hoped Queen Elizabeth would come out the door of the palace…

…but apparently the Royals don’t have the keen eye for comedy that the rest of us do.

As AP at Hot Air notes, Pam Gorman – who’s running for Congress in Arizona CD3, but first faces six other conservative Republicans in the primary – has upped the ante on “memorable” ads.

AP takes a whack at summing it all up:

The real question isn’t so much “is this what political advertising is about today?”

No.  It’s “what will an opponent have to come up with that’ll make a bigger impression than a 1928 Thompson?”

Suggestions solicited.

You never know.

I’m fairly sure it is.  But I don’t want to commit…

 As part of my ongoing series of reviews of the great bathrooms of the Twin Cities, I reviewed Flash’s newly-reopened master bathroom, the “Flash Mahal”. 

A frequent stop on visits to Flash’s Garage – the social center of the Midway – Flash’s master bathroom was once a fairly undistinguished little cubbyhole –  just a toilet, shower and sink.

But with his latest remodel job finished, the Flash Mahal may be perhaps the finest single space of any kind in Saint Paul.

It was a risky job – the all-white motif could have risked comparisons to 2001: A Space Odyssey  – but Flash and Mrs. Flash carried it off, somehow.  You feel like you could film a commercial,  throw a swanky party, even host a rave, in a space like this.

Some might say that, compositionally, the architecture is derivative of 1950’s Spanish Bano Blanco, but let’s be honest, there are worse influences to pilfer!  

I give it three and a half stars.  Zagat says four, but I don’t like to spoil people…

So kudos to the Flashes – who will be sharing Flash Mahal with one fewer kid next week!

“My other car is Dadaism”

Eleven-foot “King Herring” washes up in Sweden:

The Regalecus glesne, known as the King of Herrings or Giant Oarfish, was found dead in the small fishing village of Bovallstrand on Sweden’s west coast, about 90 kilometers (56 miles) from the Norwegian border.

“Down at the water, there was something big floating. At first we thought it was a big piece of plastic. But then we saw an eye. I went down to check and saw that it was this extremely strange fish,” Kurt Ove Eriksson, the passer-by who found the specimen, told daily Svenska Dagbladet.

The rarely seen regalecus, the world’s longest bony fish, can reach up to 12 meters.

No, it is a big deal:

“The last time we saw a King of Herrings in Sweden was in 1879,” the House of the Sea museum in Lysekil, where the fish was taken to, said in a statement.

Some say the fish is dead.

I think Herring the Grey will be replaced by Herring the White.

I love this story:  the world’s biggest beaver dam has been discovered in Canada:

A Canadian ecologist has discovered the world’s largest beaver dam in a remote area of northern Alberta, an animal-made structure so large it is visible from space.

Researcher Jean Thie said Wednesday he used satellite imagery and Google Earth software to locate the dam, which is about 850 metres (2,800 feet) long on the southern edge of Wood Buffalo National Park.

Average beaver dams in Canada are 10 to 100 metres long, and only rarely do they reach 500 metres.

First discovered in October 2007, the gigantic dam is located in a virtually inaccessible part of the park south of Lac Claire, about 190 kilometres (120 miles) northeast of Fort McMurray.

The dam’s been underway for decades.

Impressively, it’s a bit of infrastructure that’s been built with no debt and no tax hikes on the local population.

In other Canadian rodent news, the Lemming population is working on their mass transit system.