Periodically, I highlight – er, “lowlight” – dismal moments in my dating life (Parts I and II). 

But it could  certainly be worse:

The victim, 45, and [accused vampire wannabee Tiffany] Sutton, 23, were lying in bed naked at early Wednesday when Sutton asked if he wanted to be tied up and he consented, police said.

But that’s when Sutton reportedly pulled out a knife and cut the victim’s leg, police said.

Sutton reportedly told him that she “likes to drink blood” and made several cuts to his upper body, police said.

He also said Sutton drank a “little bit” of his blood, police said.

He was able to break free, run out of his home, but Sutton reportedly followed with a pickaxe, police said.

The victim passed out before his friend found him covered in blood called the police, police said.

You really have to read the fine print on Match.com…

Al Franken announces.

Poll number bounces.

The poll shows Coleman getting 57 percent of the vote and Franken getting 35 percent.

The poll also looked at a possible matchup between Coleman and attorney Mike Ciresi, who is also expected to seek the DFL nomination. Coleman also wins that match by a margin of 57 to 34.

The margin of error on the poll is +/- 3.9 percent; 632 registered voters were polled on Feb. 12 and Feb. 13.

The signs?  Coleman trounces…

…but the Strib?  It renounces (any claim to objectivity; it will be in the bag for Franken, or whomever the DFL anoints.  Look for a campaign dirty enough to make Alan Fine feel lucky).

Actually, some modestly good news from the Capitol on the DFL’s proposed statewide smoking ban; thank goodness for outstate DFLers:

The momentum toward a statewide smoking ban was slowed on Wednesday in a key Senate committee. But the bill survived a crucial amendment that supporters say would have “gutted” the proposed legislation if it had passed.

By one vote, the Senate Business, Industry and Jobs Committee refused to pass an amendment that would have exempted bars that derive more than 50 percent of their sales from liquor from the ban. The committee faces another key vote on whether to allow bars to put in ventilation systems, a move that ban opponents say would effectively protect workers and others from the dangers of second-hand smoke.

Well, duh.  The ban isn’t about health.  It’s about social control.

Pushed by Iron Range DFLers, several amendments were introduced to either send the bill to more committees, effectively slowing its path to the floor, or to exempt some groups from the ban. One amendment, from Sen. Tom Bakk, DFL-Cook, would allow workers who lose their jobs because of bar and restaurant closings to apply for training from the state’s dislocated worker program. Another, by Sen. David Tomassoni, DFL-Chisholm, would study the economic impact of the loss of charitable gambling from banning smoking in bars and restaurants. Both will require stops in other committees. Both amendments passed.

I’m not going to kid you; as a lifelong nonsmoker (but for about four cigars a year), I don’t mind smoke-free bars.  As someone who used to work in bars, and come home reeking of smoke every work night for over three years, it’s a little refreshing…

…until I see how my bar-owner friends are suffering over the regulation of a voluntary activity.  The pros and cons of bans have been debated endlessly by people smarter than I at these sorts of things, and the cons have won everywhere but in the legislature.

A [committee] vote is expected Monday.

The bill would prohibit smoking in all public places in the state, including bars and restaurants. Supporters say it would eliminate a patchwork of smoking bans in counties and municipalities and provide a level playing field for businesses. It would exempt certain American Indian rituals, smoke shops, hotel rooms and scientific studies of smoking.

Depressing, sure.

This next part – that’s different.

Indian casinos would not be covered under the ban, but Gov. Tim Pawlenty, who said he supports a statewide ban, said on Wednesday that the state should consider approaching the tribes about participating if the proposal passes.

That part is just wrong.  I have never had a problem with giving Native Americans a monopoly on gambling; for all its problems, it’s a form of reparations that actually works (if sanity doesn’t prevail on  the whole “reparations to slaves” issue, I’d be all for compromising by legalizing marijuana and granting it as an exclusive franchise to documented descendants of slaves).  There’s a difference between alloting an exclusive, non-competitive (leaving the Mob out) market to a group, and giving a group a government-sanctioned advantage at something that everyone is involved in.

So we have to put our “confidence” in the outstate DFL contingent to reel in the lunacy of the DFL-controlled legislature, or for Governor Pawlenty to veto its dumber effluvia.

It was Sunday night (really Monday Morning, February 15-16, 1987. I was in the studio at KSTP, getting ready to do the “Mitch Berg Show”.

I was talking with one of our engineers. Most of the station’s engineering staff was in their sixties, and had been with Hubbard Broadcasting since the late forties. Between them, they had eighty-odd years of engineering experience.

I was sitting up, killing time with one of them. My confidence level was up to the point where I could actually sit and talk before a show, rather than frantically planning and making sure I had every conceivable base covered.

The thing about engineers (back in the days when stations still had to have them) was that there was no keeping secrets from them. In an industry where air talent and salespeople had about a 100% annual turnover, engineers – who tended to survive cutbacks in those days – provided the institutional memory for most radio stations.

We got to talking about the boss, Pervy LeDouchebag [1].

The engineer told us a story from Pervy’s past.

“Back when he was working at (a Hubbard station) in about ’74 – no, ’75…no, I think it was ’74. I should ask [another engineer], he’d know if it was ’74 or ’75…”

The engineer tended to fly easily off onto his own tangents. But he came back on point eventually.

“Anyway, Pervy was working news back then. He left the studio after his 3PM newscast to go get lunch.”

“And he didn’t come back at 4. Or 5. Or 6…”

“He didn’t come back the next day, or the next day, or all weekend, or the first two days of the next week. Finally, the following Wednesday, he comes back to the studio in time for his 4PM newscast – reeking of booze, wearing the same clothes he’d been wearing when he left. He grabs some copy , and tries to walk into the studio to do his next newscast, like he’d never left. He got really pissed when they wouldn’t let him on the air”

“The checked him into detox. He had no idea where he’d been!”

“Finally, they went over his credit card receipts. He’d been in Detroit, then New Orleans, and then Memphis, and finally back to the Cities.”

I’d started in radio when I was 16. It’s not like I’d not run into egregious alcoholics in the business.

But this was the guy running the station.

I shook the story off and did my show. And had a ball with it.

(more…)

Learned Foot gives Mandy Marcotte – and everyone who thinks that shrill shrew was a “strong woman” – the kiss-off they have coming:

The point is, I doubt Your Little Amanda can be accurately described as a “strong woman.” For, I can’t help but notice that in your view, being a “strong woman” entails little more than exhibiting an in-your-face attitude and slavishly towing the Identity Feminism (as opposed to Equality Feminism) line. The like minded womyn and the dickless turds who try and ingratiate themselves to said womyn (and do please give up the act – it’s not going to get you laid) lap it up.

I see this Marcotte weasel held up as some sort of example of what a “strong woman” looks like, and then I look at my wife: her hair falling out from the chemo; constantly queasy; unable to sleep some nights, and on the nights she is able to sleep, it takes all the energy she can muster to get out of bed. When she is able to get vertical, she has to tend to two extremely hyper children. Yet, at the end of the day, she’s still able to joke about her hair.

Strengthwise, to any rational human being, the two aren’t even close.

Give Marcotte and her “admirers” time.  Maybe they’ll figure it out. 

Maybe.

It was Valentines’ Evening, 1987.

Another gig!

My band had had the worst gig ever – no, the worst. gig. ever. – about a month earlier, at the old “McReedy’s Pub”, in downtown Minneapolis.  We’d schlepped our gear in, set up, and played three sets of music.

Actually, the story of the three sets of music was better (much better) than the gig itself.  We’d absorbed our new guitar player, “Casey”, the hard way; we practiced four hours a night, four nights a week, every week from New Years on. 

And it wasn’t just covers, either.  We learned three hours of originals – mostly my stuff, but Casey had five or six tunes that people kinda liked, and Bill and Mark (the drummer and bass player) each contributed a song.  Out of thirty songs, we played maybe five covers – “Gimme Some Lovin'” (I could fake the keyboard parts really well back then), a badly-misbegotten rap version of “You Shook Me All Night Long” (which was a funny idea that we could never pull off), a country-western version of Prince’s “Erotic City”, a bad-jazz reading of “Bastards of  Young”, and – what doesn’t fit into this picture? – a very straight version of Badfinger’s “Baby Blue”.  The rest – 18-20 songs – were all mine. 

So we played.  To a house with maybe three people in it.  We didn’t bother charging at the door, naturally – why?  And the sound system – a creaking antique with a reverb tank possessed by demons – gave us hell.  In one song, I sang “you can be a very big fish…”.  As I finished the next line of the song, I could still hear the system echoing “fish fish fish fish fish” from the speakers.  We gradually got things squared away, though – so by the end of the night, near the end of the third set, as we were playing to one guy and his girlfriend, things came across well enough when we did “Baby Blue” that he stood up after the song, walked up to the stage, and handed us $10.  “That was my favorite song of all time”.

That was our take for the whole night.

But it was a month later.  We were a lot tighter.  A lot better.  We knew more stuff (the rap cover was gone, although “Erotic County” survived in our repertoire for a few more years). 

Tonight’s gig – “Fernando’s”, on 15th and East Lake Street. 

Things got off to a rocky start; the bar was supposed to advertise the gig in City Pages.  We’d opened it up the previous Wednesday, to see us plugged as…”TBA”.  (To be fair, Fernando’s screwed up the ad every time we played there, ever.  We thought about changing the band’s name to “TBA”, eventually).

We took the stage at 9:30, ready to go…

…and played to almost as bad a crowd we’d had the previous month.  Casey’s girlfriend Rachel.  Bill and Mark’s sister.  A couple of friends from college, who had agreed to help “work the door”, but quickly wound up as audience, since there was no “door” to “work”.  They left after a set.

And, by the end of the evening, one lonely, broke bartender who cheered gamely along (I ended up leaving a couple of 100% tips out of thanks and sympathy), and a couple of very drunk guys who yelled “Play Comfortably Numb” so many times…

…that we finally gave up and did it.

Who’da thunk – people not wanting to go to a ratty bar in a crime-infested toilet of a neighborhood?  On Valentine’s Day?

We loaded out at the end of the evening and wondered what we were doing wrong.  I resolved to try to get us into a better grade of crappy bar.

As a side note:  One of those college friends who gutted out the first set is not only an occasional reader of this blog, but in fact one of the purchasers of my classic old “What Would Reagan Do” bumperstickers. 

Hiya, Mike!

Rent-a-blogger Jeff Fecke constantly tries to ding on Vox Day (where “ding=casually insult”) as in this bit here that tries to beat Day over the head with a facile strawman.
You know this can’t end well – as indeed, for Fecke, it doesn’t:

This is precisely the same argument that Joseph Heller put into the mouth of Frau Scheisskopf:“I dont believe, she sobbed, bursting violently into tears. But the God I dont believe in is a good God, a just God, a merciful God. Hes not the mean and stupid God you make him out to be.”

Any time your argument is so blatantly stupid that it echoes that of a mouthpiece named “shithead”, you would do well to have another think on it. The point that Fecke is completely failing to grasp is that morality is created by God, it is defined by His Will. One cannot judge the Creator by the metric of the created. This is akin to an AI created by a programmer attempting to judge the efficiency of the programmer by the programmers use of CPU cycles; it simply doesnt apply.

There’s more. It’s like watching Christopher Hitchens debate Lindsay Lohan.
Wonder if Soros those unnamed, not-Soros-at-all, nosirree-bob benefactors want their money back yet?

…which rarely plays videos that are more than a week old…

…is playing “I’m Not Ready To Make Nice”.

Wow.  Who’da thunk it?

In honor of Valentine’s Day, this is a follow-up to one of my most popular posts.

CASE 1: Flinty fortysomething executive type – let’s call her “Lynnette”. Kicks off a conversation with “I tend to be too direct”. As she’d only been divorced less than a year, after nearly twenty years of marriage, I expressed some concern – I’ve been bitten by that whole “rebound” bug too many times. This brought on a litany of pique, the upshot of which was her contention that, despite conventional wisdom, plenty of research, and oodles of my own personal experience, she really was an emotionally-available, completely-recovered outlier to reality.

WHAT I SHOULD HAVE SAID: “Er, what you call “Direct” most of us call “rude and self-absorbed. And I don’t think you’re nearly as squared away as you think you are. Check please…”

CASE 2: Cute, if somewhat way-too-thin-for-my-tastes accountant. Let’s call her “Ann”.

After two fairly nice dates, a phone call. “I’m narrowing down my list of guys to [names another guy she’s also been going out with]. Sorry”.

WHAT I SHOULD HAVE SAID: “Are you Paula, or Randy? Because I do a much better Simon…”

CASE 3:  “I am crazy about vampires”

WHAT I SHOULD HAVE SAID: [clattering of chair, cloud of dust as I ran for door].

Lars Walker was nonplussed by Ed’s choice of music last Saturday on the NARN:

On the Northern Alliance Radio Network show on Saturday the second act, featuring Mitch Berg from Shot In the Dark and Captain Ed from Captain’s Quarters, they used up valuable radio time playing Frankie Valli’s cover of Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice,” in its entirety. I’m still not sure why. I think it might have been an oblique comment on something Nancy Pelosi said. [Actually, it was a commentary on Amanda Marcotte]

In any case, it’s been my off-and-on earworm all week, and it’s a weird one. Strangely fascinating, though repellant, like seeing Mickey Mouse in a Tennessee Williams play, or watching a man dancing the tango in clown shoes.

Yow. Now I have a brainworm…

It’s February 13, “Rejection Day” – the day for everyone who doesn’t have anything special to celebrate tomorrow.

Even if I do have someone interesting in my life, Valentines is one of my two most dispensable “holidays” of the year (along with Halloween). 

Little Miss Attila on Marcotte:

Actually, deep down I feel sorry for Amanda Marcotte—in the same way I felt sorry for Monica Lewinsky in the 1990s, and Washingtonienne two years ago or whenever: when I was young and did stupid things only a handful of people knew about them.

Now it seems that whenever a young woman behaves like an idiot, everyone knows about it. Forever.

It’s sympathy speaking, though…:

And of course I relate to young Marcotte: the shrill feminism, the all-yang-no-yin personality. The hyper-emotionalism, and its corrosive effect on her writing.

I was like that. Still am, in a lot of ways. But to the degree that I’ve grown up at all, I’m glad I was able to do it out of the public spotlight.

If blogging has done one thing, it’s given idiots, defectives and the grossly immature a forum for making those adolescent mistakes in front of millions.

Although I’d be amazed if Marcotte’s not north of 35. 

Leftybloggers served up the idea of trying to rat out Bill Donohue – the outspoken Catholic anti-defamation activist with the Catholic League who went a long way toward ensuring Mandy Marcotte’s “resignation” from the Silkypony campaign – to the IRS for alleged violations of non-profit organization tax law.

Learned Foot returns the serve with a 100mph slam to the backhand side.  Foot – an actual lawyer – presents a bit of actual law, showing that Donohue and the Catholic League were well within the League’s mission – and, hence, non-profit tax laws – in attacking Marcotte’s hate-drenched writing.

Foot concludes:

Notably absent from any of these statements – incendiary and rage-flecked as they were – was any mention on how people should vote. If anyone would like to take the leap from the “bad press” Donahue is trying to lay on Edwards for hiring these freaks to intervening into a political campaign, I still have a nice big stack of “independently produced” left-wing campaign literature foisted on me through the mail last year by some 501(c)(3) organizations whose own tax exempt status would be in peril given that same standard.

Oh, but I’m sure those were somehow different.

It always is.

But let’s see how many leftybloggers fall for it, anyway…

Not many things will get me to miss a two-hour 24.  But it was worth it.

I attended a “Lincoln’s Birthday” fundraiser for Minnesota Senate District 62 last night, at Minnehaha Academy in Minneapolis.  Dan and Karen Mathias and their kids organized the event, and did a fantastic job.  About sixty of the hardcore faithful (including BuddhaPatriot and the ubuiquitous Pink Monkeybird) turned out to see a panel hosted by Annette Meeks and including Katherine Kersten, David Strom and (who doesn’t belong in this picture?) me discussing the state of conservatism today – the way we got here, and where we go. 

I had a blast, of course.  Great company, great dinner, and a great time. 

(more…)

The wages of frivolity are lunacy.  Minnesota is starting to pay the piper for our neighbors’ little brainfart last November. 

If you missed NARN III “The Final Word” last Saturday, the first (3-4PM) hour was one of the best hours of radio that the NARN has ever done (Podcast should be available shortly).

Michael and King spent most of the hour running down a list of some of the worst bills our newly-DFL-dominated legislature has on the docket.  They range from the ridiculous (Phyllis Kahn wants the state to force De La Salle High to shield light from their new football field from the neighbors; Phillis Kahn, as it happens, is one of the neighbors) to the chilling (sex ed for kindergartners, sending state bureaucrats to visit new parents to check up on things and start addicting them orient them to available state programs).

They’re taking a straw poll for the Most Ridiculous Bill.  Follow the link, and vote.

And then call your legislator and tell him/her that you are not amused.

Amanda Marcotte has apparently resigned from the Edwards campaign.

Malkin links to a number of bloggers who’ve had a very low profile, to date; liberal Christian bloggers.  One such is “Faithful Progressive” from the “Christian Alliance for Progress” blog, who writes:

Little has been written (at least as far as I have seen), about the need for blogs on the left to demonstrate more respect for the majority of Americans who are religious. We have made that point at least five times in widely linked posts. These two posts in particular generated a lot of debate:1.)An Open Letter to Liberal Bloggers; 2.)I’m Not Sick of Atrios or Digby: Building a Team Means Religious and Secular Liberals Hearing Each Other Out. But most of the responses were hostile and the debate generated more heat than light.

No shock, that last bit there.  Crossing the nutroots is a good way to get your comment section pumped full of hot, black, sickly bile.

Rent-a-blogger Jeff Fecke – a local long-time leftyblogger who spent the last campaign season on the payroll of an organization that has never made its finances public (to my knowledge) but that shares office space, agendas and talking points with George Soros’ Media Matters for America – has been working overtime to rationalize Marcotte.

No, rationalizing is the right word.  After spending most of the last week saying “Oh yeah? Your bigots are worse than our bigots! (Note to Jeff: Bill Donohue doesn’t work for a presidential campaign, and never will):

I don’t believe Amanda’s characteristically blunt comments crossed a line, and I certainly don’t believe that one angry line in an angry essay is proof of anti-Catholic bias.  It may be a sign that one strongly disagrees with the Catholic Church, but those are not the same thing, and in a pluralistic society cannot be the same thing; if we are not free to criticize other religions we are not free to practice our own.  Amanda didn’t say Catholics were evil, or weak-willed, or (as my Grandmother was once taught) that they drink the blood of newborn babies.  That’s anti-Catholic bigotry.  Show me where Amanda wrote that, and we’ll talk.

Strawman, of course.  She never wrote that.  She’s spent most of her misbegotten, splittle-flecked career panting about what idiots Christians are; yapping about “godbags”; gargling about how pro-life Catholics just want to create more titheing Catholics. Her entire body of work is suffused with a contempt for christians and Christianity that only the willfully obtuse, or someone who has an interest in obfuscation, or just someone whose entire worldview is slanted that way, could miss.

And while Fecke spent several posts focusing on talking points about one Bill Donohue – a Catholic writer/editor with a way for agitating anti-Catholics – the fact is that Donohue’s anti-Catholicism was just one noxious weed in her boquet.

If you have faith in anything higher than Al Gore, Amanda Marcotte has a problem with you.

Don’t want to call it bigotry?   Fine . Amanda Marcotte has some really sick attitudes about people of faith.

Does she have the right to criticize religion?  Sure.  She can do it any way she wants; she’s chosen to do it in a hateful, cliche-sodden, degrading, insulting way.

That’s her right!

But rights have consequences.  Insult, degrade and hate people, and they have a right to call you on it.

It’s that part that the nutroots seem to have trouble with; rights with consequences.

Barack Obama digs at Australia, via Scott Johnson:

Australian Prime Minister John Howard criticized Obama’s call for immediate American withdrawal from Iraq. When Obama was asked to respond, he declined simply to express respectful disagreement with a loyal American ally. Instead he insulted Australia’s contribution to the war effort, belittling the 1,600 Australian troops in Iraq. He said that if Australia was so dedicated, maybe it should raise its contribution to 20,000.

Obama not only insulted our ally, he formulated the insult in the inelegant fashion of an intellectual thug. CNN reports that Obama said if the Australian prime minister was “ginned up to fight the good fight in Iraq,” he needs to send another 20,000 Australians to the war. “Otherwise, it’s just a bunch of empty rhetoric,” Obama said.

Not as empty as Obama’s.  Australia doesn’t have 20,000 combat troops.  The 1,600 men they currently have in Iraq are a very large share of their active military. 

Please, Democrats;  nominate this hamster. 

Join Chad in supporting the Misericordia Orphanage.

It’s his regular project.  Please pitch in.  Leaving aside the good it does the kids, it makes Chad…er, a lot easier to deal with when the fundraiser goes well, let’s just say.

The latest New Yorker features a fascinating piece on 24 producer Joel Surnow.

Macalester College tries to square its relentlessly liberal image with its students’ growing sanctimony fatigue after some Mac students were found throwing a party with racist overtones:

Macalester is just the latest in a string of colleges nationwide to investigate student parties and incidents this year that have involved racial overtones.

Officials are checking to see exactly what happened at the party, and Macalester will have a campuswide discussion on issues of stereotyping on Tuesday.

“We hope to take the teachable moment and engage our campus community a little bit more deeply,” said Jim Hoppe, Macalesters associate dean of students. “We hope we can start a deeper dialogue on … why these types of activities hurt people and why they get the kind of response they do.”

I’m pretty un-PC; I’ve always figured tact and manners were enough in this world.  While the professionally-indignant crowd has done this nation – especially this nation’s colleges and universities – immense damage in the past 25 years, I’ve never seen much humor in intentionally picking at other peoples’ emotional scabs.  And so even I cocked an eyebrow at what the kid involved were alleged to have done – some wore “costumes depicting negative stereotypes of race, religion and gender”, according to Mac’s president.

Of course, Macalester does more than cock its eyebrows at this sort of thing:

“Several of the attendees allegedly wore costumes depicting negative stereotypes of race, religion and gender,” [Mac prez Brian Rosenberg] wrote. “It is important to understand that the college condemns and will not tolerate activities of this type. It is deeply disappointing that Macalester students would be so insensitive and demonstrate such a lack of understanding of the colleges values and mission.”

Earlier this school year, two other very selective colleges — Trinity College in Connecticut and Whitman College in Washington state — had parties where students showed up in racially offensive costumes or blackface.

“PC for thee, but not for me”, apparently. 

I have to wonder – if a school adopts a relentlessly PC attitude about society’s seemier historical aspects, and drives all non-“PC” thought  underground (as, indeed, Mac has – they have a notable-repressive speech code), does it have to find some way to get out?

Because maybe it’s just me, but I don’t see so much of this at less-PC schools…

The Strib’s editorial this morning clucks about the way Saint Paul’s University Avenue strip – one of the most successful areas in Minnesota, both in terms of big commerce (Midway Center, with its row of big-box retailers) and smaller enterprise (the two miles of Asian businesses that turned the Avenue, over a couple of decades, from a wretched decayed toilet to a generally decent place) is scaled.

They have a plan, you see:

The plan, prepared by Urban Strategies of Toronto after months of discussions with residents, is extraordinary. It depicts clearly the challenges St. Paul faces in remaking one of Americas ugliest urban strips in a way that doesnt chase away immigrant shops or low-income residents but adds vitality, beauty, safety and convenience. The plan lists 90 initiatives, including the infilling of big-box parking lots with sidewalk-oriented businesses — a gradual transition from suburban to urban form. “The result will be stronger businesses, more vibrant neighborhoods and a more beautiful urban place,” the plan proclaims.

One of the options they don’t list, unfortunately, is “changing the type of transit chosen for the strip”.

The Met Council has committed Saint Paul to “light rail” for the Central Corridor – the same big, fast trains used on the Ventura Trolley. This option will require University – Saint Paul’s backbone (forget about I94) to be torn apart for the better part of a decade.

Leave aside the advisability of rail transit in a relatively low-density city like Saint Paul (I’m not dogmatically anti-transit, but the Met Council’s choices in this area give one plenty of room to be agnostic about the issue and still have plenty to rage against) for a moment; the Met Council had several options that would have done a vastly better job of connecting the downtowns and not gutted the middle of Saint Paul:

• Build a Ventura-Trolley-style light rail line along existing rail rights of way along the tangle of tracks already connecting the two downtowns – between Energy Park/Pierce Butler and Como Avenues – connected to the rest of the area by feeder buses. This would combine the (relative) speed of light rail, the flexibility of buses, and not tear the hell out of the Midway, and save a zillion dollars by using existing rights of way.
• Use a lower-impact form of rail – “Streetcars” instead of “light rail”, something more like a bus on rails, only with vastly higher capacity and its own right of way. It’d disrupt the street vastly less, be a huge improvement over University’s teeming bus lines, and (this is big) encourage the sort of smaller-scale, more organic development that the editors purport to want. Streetcars wouldn’t require big, elaborate, expensive, disruptive stations, as does the Ventura Trolley – the sort of things that disrupt neighborhoods, and also shimmy urban planners into trying to change the fundamental character of the areas around the stations – as has happened around the Ventura Trolley.

Of course, I read things like this…:

On that front, Minneapolis has moved well ahead of St. Paul in anticipating light rail along its portion of the avenue. Discussions with the Prospect Park neighborhood and university officials have produced detailed plans and rezoning for the station area around 29th Street SE., which promises to be the most dynamic stop along the line.

Here, in close proximity, will be the quiet, leafy Prospect Park neighborhood on one side, and on the other a new Gophers football stadium, a new bioscience campus, a commuter rail line, the universitys inter-campus bus transitway and space for private enterprise to build bioscience laboratories and perhaps 1,000 new homes. One idea is to make this an area attractive to alumni, who might like to retire near campus on an LRT line. Already, the plan, offered by consultant Daniel Cornejo, includes an urban-scale grocery store as part of the rail station.

In other words, they want the sort of cataclysmic neighborhood-shaping that accompanies the disruption caused by the sort of construction they support.

Sorry, Strib. I like the city I live in just fine. Most of us who live here voluntarily do. Go and shape your own city in your image.

Because you’ve done such a fine job in Minneapolis.

I lost the schedule for today . Let’s see if I can remember:

On NARN I, John, Brian and Chad will be talking about politics and drinking, from 11-1.

Ed and I will argue about something or another on NARNII from 1-3.

And King and Micheal will make some Democrat look and feel like a monkey from 3-5.

I know I’m missing something.  Tune in to AM1280 to find out what – or check out the web stream

Update and Bump II:  It’s tomorrow! 

Our producer on the NARN, Matt Reynolds, and his wife Amber are currently busy trying to adopt a child from Guatemala. This is not an inexpensive proposition – so they’re holding a bit of a fundraiser:

Fundraising Fiesta for Hezekiah is on Feb 10th from 6-9 pm with a silent auction and a Mexican dinner. If people are interested in attending or donating they can check out our website at www.kiahskapers.8k.com or email us at kiahskapers@gmail.com. Or if they prefer they can make a tax deductible donation online through Life International at http://www.lifeintl.org/donation.html, then click the “make donation” button and it goes to PayPal. For a donation to go to our specific account, they need it to say “Mathew and Amber Reynolds” in the “payment for” box. Thanks for your support and help.

I’m planning on being there on Saturday. I invite you and yours can spare a bit of help for the Reynolds’.  Oooh – and the food is from Chipotle!

The event is being held at the Maple Grove Evangelical Free Church from 6-9PM Saturday night. Email them at kiahskapers@gmail.com to reserve a spot!

Ed writes about the event today, too.

I’m all about tackling the big questions.

For example:  Why do people build even numbers of urinals in men’s rooms?

Follow along here:  If men are following proper men’s room etiquette, they NEVER stand at adjoining urinals (unless there are dividers present – and there never, ever are).  Proper etiquette requires one to leave at least a one-urinal gap between you and the next guy over. 

Picture a men’s room with, say, three urinals – 1, 2 and 3.  Ideally, one guy will take 1, and another can use 3, while 2 will remain fallow, as it were, serving as the “no-man’s land” between the two.  (Only the hopelessly gauche, when entering a men’s room, will use #2 barring an emergency; to do so would render 1 and 3 unusable). 

So let’s say you have a men’s room with four urinals, 1 through 4.  Only two can ever be occupied – 1 and 3, or 2 and 4.  In effect, one urinal is wasted, since no more than two men can ever use the setup at a given time.  Better to either tear one out, or build another. 

The logical conclusion is that there is never a reason to build a men’s room with exactly two urinals; one will always be unoccupied, barring emergencies; men with class will either use an unoccupied stall or just grit their teeth and think of walking through Death Valley rather than use the adjacent urinal.  It is, in effect, wasted resources and effort to install two urinals.

Architects?  Please see to this.

One of the reasons I loved the movie Hi Fidelity so much was that, at one point in my life, it was about basically me. At one point, single and in my early twenties, I had a notebook crammed with lists of the Top Five Songs, or Albums, for any given situation.Most are long-forgotten. Some come back enough to keep themselves imprinted in your brain.

Such is Shoot Out The Lights, the 1982 album that Richard and Linda Thompson wrote and recorded as their ten-year marriage was skittering into oblivion.

If love has eaten your brain, left trash around your head, and scattered for parts unknown taking all your beer and keying your car, there’s no better album to marinade your brain in.

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