Troubling Information

On the way out after his last negotiation attempt, he said to me, "Hang in there, buddy. Don't forget Orchard Street." He was talking about the morning in our junior year in high school when a woman sat down suddenly in the grass in front of us, and her grocery bag tipped over. He ran to call an ambulance while I sat with her. She was gray and sweaty and hung onto my shoulder and started telling me about how she had met her husband. How it was because he went back for his sweater, and how for a while she worried she didn't deserve to be so happy. Every so often whatever it was would grab her, and she'd clench my shirt in her hands. The ambulance went to Orchard Drive instead of Orchard Street, so it was twenty minutes getting there. I laid her down, and she kept my shirt in her hands. Chick stayed half a front yard away, watching. I had my hands on both sides of her head. When the ambulance finally came, they went about getting her ready to be loaded in; when they tried to separate my shirt from her fist and I saw her face, I said I'd ride with her. She nodded to them over and over again, and they figured I was family.

-- Jim Shepherd, "The Gun Lobby"

Ermanno Furlanis, "I Made Pizza for Kim Jong-il" 1/3
Ermanno Furlanis, "I Made Pizza for Kim Jong-il" 2/3
Ermanno Furlanis, "I Made Pizza for Kim Jong-il" 3/3
Andrew Holloway, A Year in Pyongyang
Byron Schmuland's North Korea page

George Plumb . . . bought a site measuring just over an acre in 1962; a
year later, he set to work with 5 000 bottles. A former carpenter, he built
his little five-roomed house out of every conceivable type of bottle,
collected from local industries and donated by neighbors and visitors. Over
the years, he used a total of 200 000 bottles. The structures around the
main building included a Leaning Tower of Pisa, a Taj Mahal, a well, and a
giant bottle of Coke, all constructed of bottles and cement. Plumb
surrounded his buildings with animals, some of them sculpted inn the
gardens, paths between low walls led past flower beds to a small waterfall,
water-lily and fish ponds, a totem pole, and a small studio. After his
death the complex was run as a low-grade tourist attraction, but it has
since fallen into disrepair.

-- Angelika Taschen, ed., Fantasy Worlds (Cologne: Taschen,
2007), p. 138.

WCCO.com:

A fire broke out in a building in downtown Minneapolis Wednesday, destroying a popular downtown bar and the historic building it was in.

Firefighters were called to a commercial building near 12th and Washington Avenue South around 10:45 a.m. The building is behind Maxwell's Bar.

The fire started on the first floor and quickly spread through the building to the roof of the building.

Firefighters had to fight the fire from the outside because the roof started to collapse.

Authorities evacuated a business adjacent to the building on fire. About an hour after the fire started, the fire spread to the roof of the building that houses Maxwell's Bar.

A ladder was brought in for firefighters to try to help fight the fire from the roof of Maxwell's Bar, but the bar was destroyed.

Metro Transit buses were brought in to help keep civilians and firefighters warm. No injuries have been reported.

KARE11.com:

With the wind chill, it was 15 below when firefighters arrived at a fast moving fire at Maxwell's in Downtown Minneapolis Wednesday morning. "Are you comfortable?" Deputy Chief Alex Jackson asked reporters. "It's absolutely miserable, because first of all it's flat out cold," he added. "When it gets this cold, I guess what it does, it makes your gear not work right," Captain Staffan Swanson said.

Firefighters believe the fast-moving fire started in the third floor of the 3 story building just north of the Metrodome. There are a dozen apartments above Maxwell's bar and restaurant. When crews first arrived, they entered the building but were soon forced out after part of the roof collapsed.

"We're concerned about the collapse because it's got that billboard on top," Jackson said. The massive billboard never fell, but the rest of the building was basically gutted.

FOX local evening news video

As they customarily do for crossing the equator, the crew of the Aurora Australis gets ready for a ceremony to mark crossing the Antarctic Circle. The Antarctic Circle is located at 66°33’ south, where our work will be in full swing. The initiation ceremony, like Christmas, will take place early while we are underway. Martin Riddle first carefully went to each cabin and made a list of those who did not yet hold certificate of passage of the line.

Preparations are made in secret and involve the crew, who readily take on this new role. The ceremony follows ancient traditions. The initiates, dubbed ‘neophytes,’ pass under the forked trident of the god Neptune (diabolically interpreted by Roger).

Edi, for the occasion, assists the crew, dressed up as Neptune’s daughter.

Nearly every member of the expedition bows gracefully to custom. Among the French team, only Catherine Ozouf, making the trip to the Antarctic for at least the tenth time, is exempt from this infamous ordeal. It’s thanks to her that you can enjoy these novel photos!

After painting our faces with black marker, the organizers assemble us in the dining room to subject us to tests. On our knees, five in a row, at Neptune’s feet, we have to kiss the king’s salmon, incurring a number of blows from its teeth. Bertrand’s lip will remember the occasion: even a dead salmon can bite!

Special treatment is reserved for the French. We must eat a huge vegemite ‘lollipop.’ People who have never tasted this blackish-brown paste don’t know how lucky they are. Could it taste worse than cod-liver oil?! It may be rich in vitamin B and a staple for Australian children, but the French palate finds it very difficult to appreciate this concentrate of yeast extract. Fortunately, a liquid of salty tasting, fluoride blue stuff helped almost all of us swallow valiantly in the end.

Finally, Neptune’s assistants capped the ritual by energetically shampooing our heads with chocolate and corn.

Collateral damage: dining room laid waste, toilets stopped up, grains of corn in the showers.

Our courage will be rewarded with a certificate delivered by the captain, Ian Moodie, after we actually cross the Antarctic Circle.

Last week, I emptied out my storage locker and brought everything here to my apartment. I don't have much except the Y'all archives, which consist of several boxes of videotapes, recordings in various formats (many of them obsolete), and a couple boxes of memorabilia, mostly things given to us by fans: drawings, letters, cards, etc. I feel like the curator of a very important collection. . . .

One thing I unearthed is a watercolor sketch my grandmother made many years ago, in the 60's I think. It's a panoramic view of the downtown intersection near where she lived in Waukegan, Illinois when I was very young. The crosswalks are busy with all sorts of people, stylish-looking men and women, children, even a sailor. (There's a big naval base in Waukegan and I remember visiting my grandma and seeing sailors in their bell-bottoms and Popeye hats, almost always walking in two's and three's.)

The painting reminded me of how my grandmother used to say that she was a "city person" and how much I liked the sound of that, because I thought my grandmother was the coolest person in the world, and I loved visiting her in her little downtown apartment, I loved the door buzzer and the accordian gate on the elevator, I loved eating crackers and canned sardines for dinner, and I loved going down to the candy store in the storefront of her building for caramel popcorn.

Starting with that first taste of urban life, I grew up knowing that I'd eventually move to New York, and I did, and I lived there for many years thinking that I'd never leave. But I did. And when I discovered the outdoors, the pleasures of living near the land, desert, mountains, forest, weather, animals, for a while I thought I might not be a city person after all or not any more.

Maybe some day I'll move to the desert. It seems like a good place to end up. (A good place to die at any rate because it's so dry your body will become dessicated and return to the elements faster.) But when I came to San Francisco last year to finish Life in a Box, I knew I would stay. I had the same feeling I had the first time I visited New York. The same feeling I had when I used to visit my grandma in Waukegan.

-- Stephen Cheslik-DeMeyer at the late and missed luckygreendress.com, February 2006

I've been all over the world and have lived among every kind of culture and I can say, without any hesitation, that the most ignorant, rude, selfish, and self-centered people on earth are babies.

-- Dan Liebert

The concept of the welfare state edged into the American consciousness and into American institutions more through the scientific bureaus of government than by any other way, and more through the problems raised by the public domain than through any other problems, and more through the labors of John Wesley Powell than through any other man. In its origins it probably owes nothing to Marx, and it was certainly not the abominable invention of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Brain Trust. It began as public information and extended gradually into a degree of control and paternalism increased by every national crisis and every stemp of the increasing concentration of power in Washington. The welfare state was present in embryo in Joseph Henry's Weather Bureau in the eighteen-fifties. It moved a long step in the passage of what Henry Adams called America's "first modern act of legislation," when the King and Hayden Surveys were established in 1867. . . . it would assume almost its contemporary look in the trust-busting and conservation activities of Theodore Roosevelt at the dawn of the next century. But what Powell and the earlier Adams and Theodore Roosevelt thought of as the logical development of American society, especially in the West, was by no means universally palatable by 1890 -- or by 1953. It looked dangerous; it repealed the long habit of a wide-open continent; it recanted a faith.

-- Wallace Stegner, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West (Lincoln, Neb.: Bison Books, 1982 [orig. pub. 1953]), 334.

IT - IS - HARD - TO
UNDERSTAND - WHY
OUR - TOWN - MUST
BE - DESTROYED - TO
MAKE - A - BOMB - THAT
WILL - DESTROY - SOMEONE
ELSE'S TOWN - THAT -THEY
LOVE - AS - MUCH - AS - WE - LOVE
OURS -- BUT - WE - FEEL - THAT
THEY - PICKED - NOT JUST
THE - BEST - SPOT - IN - THE - U.S.
BUT - IN - THE - WORLD

WE LOVE THESE
DEAR - HEARTS
AND GENTLE PEOPLE
WHO LIVE
IN OUR
HOME TOWN

Usually when I teach, my door is unlocked. Kids know that if they are running late, they should just walk in quietly, get to work, and I'll deal with it later.

Once in a while, I accidentally leave the door locked, and a late kid will just stand there. Eventually, someone will tell me, "There's someone at the door." When too busy to run over there, I say, "Give 'em the finger."

Invariably, three or four kids flip the bird, and I'm left shouting, "No! Wrong finger! The one-minute finger. Give 'em the one-minute finger!"

It's usually funny. The kids laugh. I pretend I was misunderstood. And life goes on. Unless . . . if it's an adult at the door. Like today . . . a very serious special-education teacher came knocking to check up on a student. Let's just say she was not amused about having the middle finger flashed at her by several of my kids. Of course I thought it was hilarious. But then it got me wondering:

• Why are some adults so damn serious around teenagers? Is it even possible?
• Why do special-ed teachers think they can barge in during the middle of class and expect me to answer their specific questions about one student when I have a whole class to deal with?
• Will I ever get tired of telling my kids to "give 'em the finger"? Will I ever grow up?

No matter how many ribbons for valor a Thai officer may wear, if he parks in the wrong place, or shows up late for work, or is seen dropping a bit of litter on the sidewalk, he can be ordered to wear the insignia.

"Simple warnings no longer work," said Pongpat Chayaphan, acting chief of the Crime Suppression Division in Bangkok, who instituted the new humiliation this week.