Paul Schmelzer – one of the good reporters at the Minnesota Monitor – points us to an amazing story of survival.  Or, really, two:

One of the most amazing images — of many — to emerge from the collapse of the Interstate 35W bridge was a photo of a man in a wheelchair staggeringly close to the edge of the fallen-away highway, the ramp of his van aiming like a bobsled chute into the abyss.

 

The image I found on the internet didn’t identify its source, but the Minnesota running blog Down the Backstretch reports that the man is Marcel Ordaz Cruz, a 26-year-old Mexican native who lives in Crystal. In 2005, he  finished sixth in the wheelchair division of the Twin Cities Marathon, and this year he finished ninth in the wheelchair division of Grandma’s Marathon in Duluth.

Left paralyzed after a shooting in North Carolina seven years ago, Cruz was driving across the bridge in his modified van Wednesday when the roadway started heaving. He says he saw as many as 20 vehicles plummet into the river as he veered into the guardrail to prevent the van from continuing down the steep decline that appeared in front of him. When he came to a stop, he said he “felt hopeless because I couldn’t do anything.” Quickly, rescue workers appeared to help him.

Read the whole thing, natch.

William Kristol, in an article that notes the huge changes in…well, not so much the war, as the public’s media-driven perception of it, over the past month, sums up:

In terms of U.S. national interests–and in terms of its own political well-being–the Republican party faces a moment when, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, honor points the path of duty, and the right judgment of the facts reinforces the dictates of honor. General Petraeus will deliver the facts in September. If Republicans can keep their nerve under media and elite assault, then they will have the honor of following the path of both duty and the right judgment of the facts. I suspect all will come out well. Americans can sometimes be impatient and short-sighted. But when a choice is clearly presented, they tend to reject the path of defeat and dishonor.

Read the whole, vital thing.

It was Tuesday, July 28, 1987. 

I’d arranged with my new free-lance job – a month’s worth of technical writing – to come in late, around 11-ish, so I could catch up on my phone calling.  I was hoping to pour on the gas, and have a talk radio job lined up by the time the freelance contracting gig ended. 

As I made calls, I’d make notes on my calendar telling me to follow-up with one talk-radio program director or another, somewhere around the country.  I was getting a few nibbles, out there.  A station in New Bedford, Massachusetts liked my tape and was interested in bringing me out for an interview…sometime.  Another, in Fall River Massachusetts, thought they might need an afternoon guy…eventually.  Another in Hammond, Indiana thought they might need a news guy…someday soon.  And there was that headhunter with that gig in Raleigh that was still floating out there…more or less.

And then, at about 10:30AM, the phone rang. 

It was a program director at a big blowtorch of a station in Cleveland, Ohio.  They liked my resume and the tape of my “producer” stuff with and recommendations from Don Vogel and Geoff Charles.  I might be the perfect guy…

…to produce for a very temperamental  prima-donna who’d been hired for afternoon drive. 

Cleveland, I thought.   All the little chicks with their crimson lips know Cleveland Rocks, Cleveland Rocks.  My Town.  A job, back in my beloved talk radio.

“I’m interested”.

He described the job; not-spectacular pay (although way, way better than I’d gotten at KSTP), and a weekend show of my own to sweeten the deal. 

I fought to control my breathing.  It was sounding too good to be true.  I started sizing up whether everything I owned would still fit into my Jeep.

“Oh”, the program director added, almost as if it were an afterthought, “you would need to be here to start the job by Friday”.

I fumbled for a second as I turned it over in my head; could I duck out on my freelance job, stick my roommates with the lease, abandon the band with a few gigs lined up, and walk away from a couple of articles I’d sold? 

Hell, yeah.

Could I do it and be in Cleveland by the end of the week?

My heart bounced off my liver and kept falling.

“I don’t think I can do that.”

“Ah, that’s OK.  Sorry to hear that.  We’ll find someone local…”

And that was that. 

———-

Hard as that was, I found out I probably got the better end of the deal.  I heard through the grapevine that the prima-donna host went through three producers in nine months, when the whole show got gassed.

Still.  So close.

Today on the Northern Alliance Radio Network:

• Volume I The Opening Act The First Team – John, Brian and Chad – will do the voodoo they do, presumably with Loons and all. 
• Volume II “The Headliner” – Ed and I’ll be talking with Stephen Hayes about his new book, Cheney, picking up where the Volume I guys left off last week. 
• Volume III, “The Final Word” – King and Michael will presumably hammer on the Dems’ politicization of the 35W River Bridge tragedy.

All that, plus ambiguously-oriented Russian pop bumper music (never mind, I see Matt’s on the board rather than Irina tomorrow) on the Northern Alliance Radio Network, 11AM-5PM Central on AM1280 The Patriot, and at Townhall.com!

Yesterday, I noted that a local backroom politico had blamed the 35W River Bridge disaster on “No New Taxes”; that if the state had only raised more taxes, the bridge would still stand.  Nick Coleman echoed (literally and metaphorically) the same sentiment (and drew the only response that really fits).

Of course, it was BS (via Ed).

So who is accountable?  And what can “the system” do about it?

More later – or Monday. 

UPDATE: Sarah Janecek beats Coleman like a baby seal:

“No New Taxes” has nothing to do with what happened, yesterday.

A few facts for Coleman. In general, the major bridges the federal government has built become the responsibility of states to maintain, and states routinely seek and are granted federal funding to help with the maintenance. The maintenance work being done on the I-35W bridge by Progressive Contractors, Inc., out of St. Michael, Minnesota, was on the list of projects of the 2007-2009 State Transportation Improvement Program (STIP) list. Right there on page 116 of the report is the I-35W bridge. The $3.3 million price tag was being paid mostly by the federal government ($2.97 million) and not the state ($330,000).

The National Bridge Inventory conducted by the federal government in 2003 reported that the bridge had a “sufficiency” rating of 50% on a scale of 120. That’s not great, but that’s where about 80,000 of the country’s bridges stand. The significant finding of that Inventory, however, was that structurally, the bridge “meets minimum tolerable limits to be left in place as-is.”

The federal government didn’t flag structural issues; neither did MnDOT.

That’ll leave a mark.

…that I’d pay to see.

Via Rosenberg

Friday, we noted that Cucking Stool, the City Pages’ “Best Leftyblog” for 2006 (and thus either the most overrated blog in the Twin Cities or the most cursed one) hinted at smack to be laid down…eventually.  By…someone.  About…something:

a small cadre of Minnesota bloggers is preparing to prove it. It will probably start off as just a sprinkle; then it will rain harder, and finally all of the collected grime of empty moralisms will be washed away. Or something like that. It should be fun.

And to track and document this surge in righeous niggling, the Cucking Tool proposed…:

In order that the blooming of the thousand flowers can be collected, Spot suggests using a Technorati tag and/or category “judgmentalism.”

And after a week, the fruits of their “labor” are…

…well, I hate to be, um, judgementalist, but…ow.  Cuck – there’s not a lotta righteous, or anti-righteous, Minnesota indignation (counterindignation?), is there?

The moral (or “moral”) world awaits the wave of tribulation.  I guess.

Oh, and by the way, Cuck?  While I don’t go to you for blazing insight (although the City Pages thinks you’re cute and all, so don’t mind me), I should point out that in my bit about leftybloggers’ response to the death of Norm Coleman Senior, I wasn’t wanting them to send me condolences, as you put it, so much as chiding some of your scumbag friends.

Again, a fine distinction. 

Y’know.

My dad never had all that many records when I was a kid – but the ones he did have, I remember pretty clearly.

Common weekend listening was his Clancy Brothers record, with Tommy Makem.  I can still hum/sing most of the stuff; “The Rising Of The Moon”, “Dirty Old Town”, and a bunch whose names I can’t remember but whose tunes I can’t forget.

Makem died Wednesday after a long battle with cancer.

Red?  Sure she remembers him:

Dear Tommy Makem: Your voice basically WAS my childhood. I still listen to those old Clancy Brothers & Tommy Makem albums, and it’s always the oddest feeling, a mixture of present/past. Am I a child? Are these records playing on a battered turntable as I dribble a popsicle down my T-shirt? Or is it now? These songs are woven into my life, they’re just a part of who I am. I will leave it to others to talk about how the Clancy Brothers influenced an entire generation of singer/song-writers (Dylan is eloquent on this) … For now, I mourn the loss. A fragile thread of connection to my childhood, the continuum.

Very, very true.

Kevin Cullen has a wonderful obit (what, you thought it’d be by Lars Tostengaard?) at the BoGlo:

Tommy Makem was an Irish soul singer, and souls don’t die. His music is preserved, on the old vinyl LPs he made with his pals, the Clancy brothers, more recently on CDs, more intimately in memory, in the hard drive of any brain that heard his basso profundo voice.

To hear Tommy Makem sing “Four Green Fields” was to hear Enrico Caruso sing “Vesti la giubba,” or James Brown sing “I Feel Good.” He was for Irish traditional music a great ambassador, and a consummate performer.

Sigh.

I watched a bunch of coverage of the Bridge disaster last night. 

I wanted to figure out how to criticize Don Shelby’s unctuous – and eventually revoltingly-politicized – commentary as succinctly as possible.

Fortunately, The Elder – who at least works in the same building as engineers – is on duty, wielding deft satire…:

 The Don Shelby Credibility Bridge–spanning the divide between the local anchorman’s ego and reality–collapsed without warning shortly before 10pm this evening. Preliminary indications are that a massive failure in Shelby’s structural integrity led to the collapse.

 …and a fact-checking machete:

The man’s self-importance knows no limits and it was on display for all to see this evening. At a time when the news coverage should have focused solely on rescue and recovery efforts, Shelby almost immediately launched into discussions about the possible causes of the collapse and where blame could be assigned. He was obviously getting all his information on bridge structures and engineering from other sources, but he rarely if ever mentioned them, giving the viewer the impression that HE DON SHELBY knew all about such matters and was able and willing to start drawing conclusions while the rubble was still settling. It was a disgusting display of arrogance with an almost total absence of wisdom.

RARE COMPLIMENT ALERT:  The Twin Cities daily newspapers have, at first glance, done a decent job with their coverage. 

Fraters has an eyewitness account from “Sisyphus”, the normally-hilarious wag from MOB blog Nihilist in Golf Pants, who saw the entire collapse from river level, on an excursion boat just upstream from the bridge, at the Saint Anthony lock.

Go to Fraters to read the whole thing – to my knowledge, so far the best eyewitness account of the collapse anywhere.

Excerpt:

I remember seeing the bridge buckle, and a white vehicle fall into the water. Then, the span of the bridge on the east bank side crumpled up like an accordion and the entire bridge fell towards the river. It was over before my brain could comprehend what I had seen – you just don’t expect to see a bridge collapse right before your eyes with no warning. And not being accustomed to looking at the city from on the river, I didn’t immediately realize that the bridge I had just seen fall into the Mississippi was the I-35W Bridge.The minutes after the collapse were eerily quiet. As we stared in disbelief at the wreckage, it began to sink in that we had just witnessed a major catastrophe. The east bank side of the bridge was bent like an accordion and there was a blue SUV or mini-van and two other vehicles on the downward slant toward the river. It seemed odd that the only evidence of a disaster, as of yet, was the fallen bridge itself – no sirens, no helicopters overhead, no flashing lights. Of course, it was far too early for any of that, but it did add to the surrealism of the moment.

One of the things you learn in concealed carry training is the tricks your mind can play on you at times of extreme stress.  Sisyphus’ account is a great case study:

Time seemed to crawl by, everyone onboard was shaken and we began discussing what we had seen amongst ourselves. Each of us who had been looking at the bridge while it collapsed, remembered seeing one and only one car falling – and each of us remembered a different car. Another oddity is that none of us remember hearing any noise from the collapse at all.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE:  Leftyblogger “Noah” from “Blanked Out” lives in one of the buildings closest to the bridge, on the East Bank by the U of M.  He gives his eyewitness account here.  (Via Jay Reding)

My pal and neighbor, Flash at Centrisity, notes the part of Minnesota’s response to the Bridge Collapse that we’d all like to focus on:

Minnesotans have shown their true colors with displays heroism and unconditional support. Through this tragedy we will rediscover the pride we have in our fellow citizens.

What he said; except that there’s no “re”-discovering.  Minnesotans have much to be proud of, especially during crises. 

Not all of us, of course.  After a couple of contentious sessions in which Governor Pawlenty held the line on the DFL’s demand for more tax money, one might expect this disaster to bring out the ugly side of someone.

And indeed it has.  A Saint Paul DFL operative blames the Governor and all Republicans for the disaster (in a Saint Paul politics email discussion forum; I won’t link it or list his name, for reasons that I think might be obvious):

You can all scream at me for being the first to throw stones, but here is
what I know this bridge was inspected in May of 2006 and found to have cracks in the supports. It was placed on the watch category. One only can wonder if it should have been put on the critical list. It had been listed as having fatigue details from as long as 2001 and by 2006 they were able to take pictures of the fatigue cracks.

Governor NO MORE TAXES AND LET THE RABBLE DIE was just on the tube claiming that the bridge was given a “clean bill of health.’ He knows that what he was saying is as full of crap as he is.

This is the result of Minnesota not raising the gas tax in years.

The Governor has now directly killed people by his policies.

Pretty stupid?  Of course.

Worse, in its own way, was my “represenative”, DFLer Alice Hausman.  Girders hadn’t finished falling into the river, and the blazing truck was still on fire, last night when she went on WCCO Radio and hinted – without really coming out and saying it – at basically the same thing. 

The bodies were barely cold, and some (by no means all) DFLers were ready to blame the Governor and the MNGOP.

The NTSB has barely gotten their luggage unpacked.  The engineers are months away from having an answer.  I’m no engineer, but the simultaneous collapse of nearly 2,000 feet of bridge just might be a sign of a major design flaw, as opposed to a deteriorated girder failing.

In any case, I don’t recall Governor Pawlenty making any bones about the fact that he’d rather spend money on roads (and bridges) than on boondoggles like the Ventura Trolley and the Central Corridor. 

Wow.  Imagine how many bridges we could fix if we could get that billion dollars back that we spent on the Ventura Trolley…

Anyway; no more politics for now. 

Leave the tragedy aside for a moment; I never liked that bridge.

It was the product of a dismal age in bridge design, when the Interstate Highway system’s philosophy for bridges was “you shouldn’t know you’re on a bridge”; among all of downtown Minneapolis’ bridges, it never really fit in with its surroundings architecturally; it was like a delivery van in a parade of Dusenbergs.

But on the bridge?

One of the most piercing memories of my life was my first winter in Minneapolis, in 1985-6.  I was driving home down 35W from a friend’s place in Forest Lake one bitterly-cold evening, after midnight.  For the first time, I crossed that bridge late at night going south over the river.  The view was, literally, breathtaking; the lights of the city, looking sharper than normal in the cold, were gemlike in their brilliance; the light reflected off the water and dimly outlined the gorge below, by the Falls and the lock and dam, sparkled off the parts of the river that weren’t frozen.

Minneapolis looked beautiful.  And it was one of those moments when I first felt like I really belonged here.

The view has stuck with me; every time I welcome a friend or relative or newcomer to the Twin Cities, one of the stops on my night-time tour always involved driving south across the bridge, after dark (and thence to Saint Paul, driving into downtown from the south over either the Lafayette or the High Bridge, which is equally stunning). 

The loss of that view is the least of today’s tragedies.  But it’ll stick with me, too.

I have little to add to the news; by now, the world world knows that the 35W River Bridge collapsed last night.  Ed’s done a good job of covering it – there will be much more to come.

I can add nothing to the facts of this story.  Not yet, anyway.

I was ten miles away, up in Fridley at an event with my son.  We walked out at 7:15, and saw the coverage with a group of other families.  Like all such visceral, physical disasters, it took a moment or two to realize it was real, and it was huge; it took longer to sink in that it was here.

As I said before; my thoughts and prayers to out to everyone involved; those who survived, the families of those who didn’t, and all the people working on the site, the hospitals, and on the investigation today, trying to rescue, recover, heal, plan around, and solve, and help the Metro recover from this catastrophe. 

For those of you from out of town, the importance of this bridge to this metro area can not be overstated.  The Twin Cities are famously dependent on bridges, since the Cities are cut into three distinct regions by the course and confluence of two great rivers, the Mississippi and the Minnesota. 

The Mississippi flows like a big “S” that’s rotated 90 degrees counterclockwise, separating most of Minneapolis from most of Saint Paul.  The Minnesota River, in turn, joins the Mississippi where the two cities come together, by the airport and the Mall of America, dividing most of the booming south suburbs – Burnsville, Shakopee, Mendota Heights and Eagan – separate from the rest of the city. 

So – if you need to go from south to Northeast in the metro, the 35W Bridge was the main link.  And it was heavily used; the Minnesota Department of Transportation estimated 140,000 cars a day used the bridge as of 2002; people commuting from the north-east ‘burbs to jobs downtown or on the Southtown strip (the huge commercial district along 494 from Eden Prairie to the Mall of America).  All the major detours are bad; jogging across the 694 River Bridge to I94 leaves you with the perpetual mess at the Lowrey Tunnel and the 35W Commons; Minnesota 280 (through Roseville and the Midway and thence to I94) isn’t a freeway (although they’re jury-rigging it today), plus I94 through the Midway back to Minneapolis over the I94 River Bridge and the Commons is already a congested nightmare; taking 35E to 94 via downtown Saint Paul is a 10-20 mile detour (and southbound 35E is already horribly congested every morning, and northbound is even worse at night), and leaves one back to the same bottleneck on 94 at the river; for those working south of Minneapolis, taking 35E to 494 is a long detour, and the traffic there is, yep, already kinda bad there. 

I remember talking with someone with knowledge of these kinds of things when I was at KSTP, twenty years ago, back when “terrorism” still killed people in ones and tens and twenties; he said “if you wanted to shut down the Twin Cities, all you’d have to do is take down the 35W and 94 River Bridges – or even make them inoperable.  This city couldn’t function”. 

We’ll see. 

Please direct whatever form of prayer, imprecation or wish your worldview recognizes to the victims, their families, the survivors…

…and today, all the Fire, Police, Sheriff’s Department, hospital workers who will be untangling this mess looking for victims and (God willing) more survivors.

To everyone who called last night; I was no where near the bridge.  But thanks for thinking about me.

More on that later.

Obama would pull out of Iraq, and dive into Pakistan – which, with its bigger population and much-more-difficult terrain, would be a much worse place to fight.

Good one, Barack.

I’d started hanging around KEYJ Radio – a little 1000-watt station on First Avenue in Jamestown, tucked up above a White Drug in the same studio where it’d gone on the air in 1953 – sometime during my sophomore year of high school.  My pal, Dick Ingstad – who was a junior at the time – worked there, and he let me (and, at one point, practically every other kid in the school) hang out there.  It was a classic old radio station, with rooms full of musty old LPs and 45s, stacks of old (very old) equipment, and a control room full of equipment that had seen the announcement of the Pearl Harbor attacks.

In hanging around at least one or two days a week with Dick (who, I should point out, comes from a big radio family; his big brother is legendary über-disc-jockey, voice talent, Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson-staff-announcer and Jim Ramstad-classmate Shadoe Stevens, who’d started at KEYJ in 1957 at age 12), I’d figured out (I thought) some of the basics of doing the job – and figured I might like to give it a try.

My dad knew the station’s owner/manager, Bob Richardson – everyone in town knew both of them, frankly – and around the end of tenth grade, Dad urged me to go downtown and apply for a job.  Bob made a point of keeping a few high school kids on staff, and one of them had just graduated, so, with butterflies visibly shaking me, I gave Bob a call and applied.  He said he’d sure think about it.  That was in May.

In early July, he called back.  “I think we should give this a shot”, he said.  I spent three weeks coming in early in the morning, having John Weispfenning (a summer employee from Moorhead State, who went on to a brief career in the business) show me the basic ropes on the shift that would eventually be mine; Saturday mornings, from 5AM to 3PM.  The shift went a little like this:

1. Get in around 5AM
2. Fire up the transmitter; the station signed off at 11:55PM every night, and sat idle until sign-on, at 5:55AM.
3. Gather up the night’s backlog of AP wire copy, sort it into National, State and Local news, Weather and Sports stacks.  Pick out the stories I’d want to read.
4. At 5:55, sign on; “KEYJ Radio in Jamestown North Dakota is on the air!”. 
5. Play the national anthem.
6. Read two minutes of news headlines and weather, then go to five minutes of network news. 
7. Do a regular hour of music, while getting ready for…
8. …nearly an hour of news, weather, sports and community info at 7AM, again at 8AM, and another at noon.
9. Plus regular hours of music from 9AM-noon and 1-3, during which time I spent most of my time ripping, stacking (and, later, writing) news.

But since it was my first time soloing, I’d do a month on Saturday nights – Dick’s usual shift.  Mostly music, except for another one of those news/weather/sports hours at 5PM.

But that was all a couple of hours in the future.  I’d come in around 1PM, just because I was too excited to hang around the house anymore.  Finally, it was three.  I settled in behind the board – which had been built sometime before World War Two, and was a huge, vertical metal thing that looked like the front end of a ’52 Buick, with big metal toggle switches and large ceramic rotary pots, utterly unlike the sleek, chintzy plastic pushbuttons and slide faders on every board I’ve seen since then – and took my customary three deep breaths.

The AP News ran – all five minutes – and then it was my turn. 

I hit the “KEYJ!” jingle, and launched my first record (as in, “a vinyl 45RPM disk”), “Bright Eyes” by Art Garfunkel.  After that, I introduced myself; nothing new, really – I’d been on the mic a few times during my weeks of training, but this was different; I was solo. 

And, as I recall, I didn’t screw it up.

Well, at least that break.  There were plenty of them later in the evening. 

What do I remember?  Some of the music – “All Things Are Possible”, by Dan Peek (formerly of “America”, if you’re a real trivia geek); “A Little More Love”, Olivia Newton-John; “We Live for Love”, from a just-released Pat Benetar.  Some of the news – there’d been a fight at the State Hospital.  Mom and Dad brought me a burger from the cafe downstairs around 7PM.  Getting phone calls from high-school friends, saying I didn’t suck.

And signoff, read from a yellowed, laminated sheet in a battered old three-ring binder; “At this time, Radio Station KEYJ leaves the air.  KEYJ operates on a frequency of fourteen hundred kilocycles, and is owned and operated by KEYJ Incorporated of Jamestown, North Dakota.  KEYJ operates from studios at 220 First Avenue South in Jamestown.  We invite you to join us tomorrow morning, at 5:55AM, when we return to the air.  Good night”.

And then, as the station did every night, I played “The Lord’s Prayer” by George Beverly Shea, on a rattly old “cart” tape, took my final readings and signed off the transmitter and programming logs, flipped the three switches to shut off the transmitter, locked up, and walked the five blocks home through the muggy summer evening.

I never had much of a radio career – but what I had, started that night.

John Edwards – son of a rendering-plant vat-hauler (or whatever it was he said his dad did)-become-supremely successful trial lawyer, with a carbon footprint the size of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s feet and recipient of haircuts that cost more than all but two of the cars I’ve ever owned – is oppressed!

“We have to fight back against these people. We can’t let them do this kind of stuff to us. And they’re always going to be very powerful forces that don’t want us to hear my voice, and the voices of those like not just me, the voices of those like us.

They want to shut all of us up, Ed. That’s what this is all about. I’m amazed you’re still able to talk on the radio.

Um, Silkypony?  Senator Edwards?  Not only has nobody, anywhere, ever, discussed shutting down “progressive” talk radio (other than for non-payment of bills), in fact I think that it might almost be worth keeping some form of libtalk alive and kicking; it gives people like you a forum on which to embarass themselves.

Perhaps the huge cabal of right-wingers that supports conservative talk radio against the wishes of the American people should pony up a few bucks to keep lame-o-zoids like Schultz, Stephanie “Like Laura Ingraham, Only A Lefty” Miller and some of the FrankenNet Air America hacks on the air, under the guise of “giving them enough rope”.

Thomas P.M. Barnett – one of NARN Volume I’s best guests ever – engages Barack Obama’s abdication on genocide and its long-term meaning:

Tell me if this crowd gets back in that they won’t feel compelled to turn many blind eyes across eight long years. And, if so, are we not headed to the same ex post f–ktos as watching ex-prez Bill Clinton whine his way through Rwanda, telling everyone in sight he should have done something–anything?

Do you want to explain to your grandkids why your nation did nothing to counter the Holocaust-size totals in the Gap in the 1990s? Care to go through that again?

Why does Obama play to that base instinct? With Samantha Powers as one of his top advisers?

I sit back at times like this and realize there is no room for me and mine in either party: I don’t demonize the military or interventions so I can’t be a Dem, and I don’t demonize China or want to invade Iran so I can’t be a Republican.

Like all Barnett, the whole thing is an interesting, sometimes infuriating, always fascinating read. 

Last April, when I noted that I am the Twin Cities’ best feminist, there was a phalanx of phumphering from frothing, faux (compared to me) feminists – and one “scientific” attempt to debunk me.  “Tild”, from “Norwegianity”, noted that at that according to this website, personal pronouns on Shot In The Dark broke 71% male, 29% female. 

Just thought I’d point out that as of today, I’ve moved to 70/30.

The juggernaut advances.