{"id":53989,"date":"2015-06-25T08:00:58","date_gmt":"2015-06-25T13:00:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=53989"},"modified":"2015-06-25T09:44:37","modified_gmt":"2015-06-25T14:44:37","slug":"yudive-dive-dive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=53989","title":{"rendered":"Dive! Dive! Dive!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Prodded by the outburst from the peevish, moralistic hipster in this week’s\u00a0City Page<\/em><\/a>, I met a couple of friends at\u00a0the Gopher Bar last night.
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Unlike most of the “dive bars” so beloved of today’s hipsters, it actually\u00a0is\u00a0<\/em>kind of a dive. \u00a0It reminds you of that one bar on mainstreet in every small town in the Midwest – the Wonder\u00a0Bar in Jamestown, the Ace in Carrington, the Sportsman\u00a0in Thief River Falls, or fill in the blank in whatever town of less than 20,000 you can think of.<\/p>\n

Although the Gopher is a little like that guy every talk radio station used to have back in the eighties, back before talk radio was political, who used to want to offend a little bit of\u00a0everyone\u00a0<\/em>as his gimmick.<\/p>\n

Even the front door has something to piss of both liberal and “libertarian” hipsters:
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…although their sentiments are pretty clear.<\/p>\n

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Still, the place doesn’t take itself all that seriously…:<\/p>\n

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…certainly not nearly as seriously as the kinds of hipsters who write letters to the City Pages\u00a0<\/i>(most of whose staff couldn’t find the Gopher Bar, or Saint Paul, if it occurred to them to try).<\/p>\n

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Of course, while the\u00a0City Pages\u00a0<\/em>doesn’t know much about Saint Paul, the Gopher has read the\u00a0City Pages<\/em>. \u00a0The staff had heard\u00a0plenty\u00a0<\/em>about the letter to the editor.<\/p>\n

And so there it is – the worst flag in the world, without which all racism would disappear:<\/p>\n

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Of course, if the petulant hipster had turned around, he’d have noticed two more, flanking an apparently racist sailfish.<\/p>\n

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And there was one other thing the hipster might have noticed had he turned around, observed, and shut his precious yapper; African-American customers.<\/p>\n

There were no less than seven in the house when I was there last night (no, I didn’t take pictures of people who just wanted to have a coney and mind their own business).<\/p>\n

By the way, that’s seven more African-Americans than have\u00a0ever\u00a0<\/em>worked for the City Pages.<\/i><\/p>\n

They were no more there to see and be seen than and my dinner companions were. \u00a0They were there, like us, for a beer, a coney and fries for under $10. \u00a0And as much as I personally hate chili dogs (lots and lots and lots. \u00a0Don’t test me on this), the Coneys at the Gopher are really, really tasty.<\/p>\n

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I know – not a great picture. But trust me; the Coney is as tasty as the photo is blurry.<\/p><\/div>\n

Anyway – keeping ahead of the ire of Twin Cities social justice warriors is introducing me to some great eats (as I discovered at the River Oasis<\/a> last summer).<\/p>\n

Keep ’em coming, Warriors!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Prodded by the outburst from the peevish, moralistic hipster in this week’s\u00a0City Page, I met a couple of friends at\u00a0the Gopher Bar last night. Unlike most of the “dive bars” so beloved of today’s hipsters, it actually\u00a0is\u00a0kind of a dive. \u00a0It reminds you of that one bar on mainstreet in every small town in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-53989","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-war","category-st-paul"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53989","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=53989"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53989\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54006,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53989\/revisions\/54006"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=53989"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=53989"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=53989"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}