Looking ahead — and for a fork

I realize I'm supposed to get all contemplative at this time of year. 2007 is almost over. People everywhere are compiling lists of their favorite music, movies and celebrity scandals of the past 12 months. Well, phooey on that. Here, in no particular order, is what I'm going to remember from the year that's about to wrap up: I bought a house. That's pretty much it. I realize there was some other stuff going on. Some of it was fairly important. I keep hearing things about a Presidential election. I know one of the candidates is a Mormon, one used to be mayor of New York City and one used to be an actor on Night Court or something. I suspect at least three or four of them are just plain nuts. But that's all about that I can tell you about the campaign. I'm sure someone will let me know when I need to start paying attention. I'm fairly confident we celebrated Christmas recently, but I can't be sure. People gave me gifts. I gave some wrapped packages to other people. There were family members in town I hadn't seen for a while, and I kept hearing annoying, Christmas-related songs on the radio lately. For the past month or so, though, I haven't thought about much besides buying and moving into my first home. I'm sure you know that, though. I keep writing about it. Don't worry. I promise I'll stop soon. For weeks now I have been surrounded by boxes. I'm awash in cables and cords. I've got so many wires connecting my DVD player to my TV and my TV player to my speaker system and about a dozen other audio-visual components to each other that I'm not sure I'll ever be able to puzzle them all out. I'm a little afraid I'm going to push the wrong button and trigger a situation right out of WarGames, the 1983 classic in which Matthew Broderick nearly causes a global nuclear war while playing a computer game. I'm not sure how that would happen, but I'm not taking any chances. Slowly but surely, I've put away most of the bags and boxes I used to move my possessions to my new house, which has simultaneously made the house seem both cleaner and much emptier. I'm not sure if that's better than cluttered and full. I hauled the final load from my old home on Tuesday night — a fan, a jar of gumballs and four sheets of wood I'd been using in place of the box spring that didn't fit down the stairs to my bedroom. It was an odd collection of stuff, I'll admit. I still can't find my silverware, though. And pretty soon I'm going to run out of things I can eat with my fingers. I have cable TV (finally). I have an Internet connection. I have done dishes in my new dishwasher and laundry in my new washer and dryer. Sometime this week I'll have to write my first mortgage check, although I'm kind of hoping the bank will kind of forget about it. That happens sometimes, right? I didn't sleep very will my first night in the new house, but that's gotten better. I've had to shovel a couple of times since I moved in. It wasn't bad. And it was certainly better than the two times I had to shovel before I had a single possession in the house. I'm not sure the house feels entirely like a home yet, but I'm sure that will happen. The heck with looking back, then. I'm looking forward to that.

International relations

Dear unidentified Venezuelan woman, Please stop calling me. Seriously. Enough is enough. It was actually kind of funny when you called the first time last Thursday and tried to speak to me in Spanish. But when you left a voicemail message that consisted entirely of you singing unintelligible words to me, I started to worry I was in some bizarre Spanish-language sequel of The Ring. I spent the next few days waiting for a creepy girl to come crawling out of the TV at me, only in this case I imagine she'd be dressed like a bumblebee or something. When you called me 15 more times over the next four days, I started to feel like I was the victim of the least efficient stalker ever. Honestly, you called me two times as I drove from Farmington to Rosemount and three more as I sat in McDonald's trying to eat my lunch. It just seems like overkill. I hope you don't take this personally. It's not that I dislike you. How could I? To the best of my memory, the sum total of our intelligible conversation would, if transcribed, look something like this: Unidentified Venezuelan woman: Do you speak Spanish? Confused Minnesotan editor: No. UVW: What ... city ... are ... you? CME: Farmington, Minnesota. UVW: What ... city ... are ... you? CME: Farmington. UVW: I ... am ... Venezuela. It goes on like that for a while, but you get the idea. I can hardly claim I know you well enough to form an opinion of your personality. For all I know you're perfectly pleasant when you're talking to people who understand you. It's just that I'm not one of them, and I'm starting to question the value of continuing this long-distance conversation. I have no idea why you're calling me so much. I know everyone in your country is very excited about Twins pitcher Johan Santana, but I promise I don't have any inside information for you on his status with the Twins. Even if I did, what good would it do? You don't speak English, remember? We're kind of at a stalemate there, you understand? Of course you don't. As I write this it's been two days since I've heard from you, unidentified Venezuelan woman. Maybe you've grown tired of trying to figure out what city I am. Maybe you've finally figured out the intricacies of international dialing and are finally calling the person you've been trying all along to get through to. I hope that's the case. If I've heard the last of you, unidentified Venezuelan woman, I hope life treats you well. I hope the weather is nice in Valencia, which according to the city code in your phone number is where you're calling from. We've had a lot of snow here in Minnesota (That's a serious chubasco to you, if about.com has that translation right.). I can't say I'll miss you, unidentified Venezuelan woman, but you certainly made four days of my life a little more interesting. Seriously, though. Stop calling. Sincerely, Nathan Hansen

Wanna hear something scary?

A few weeks ago I heard the most terrifying words anyone has ever spoken to me.
I was sitting at home at the time. Minding my own business. Chances are I was watching TV. Probably something terrible. Then, the phone rang. It was my realtor.
"He accepted your offer on the house," he said.
Gulp.
I realize this was supposed to be good news. Most people, I understand, make an offer to buy something with the hope that offer will be accepted. In theory, that's what I did when I made a bid on this particular one-and-a-half story home. In that particular moment, though, my most immediate thought was something along the lines of, "Nonononononono! Take it back! Take it back! You can't make me!"
I'm paraphrasing, obviously. And more than likely editing out a few less than printable words.
I've had a little time now to adjust to the idea of home ownership. I've bought supplies. I paid a whole bunch money that could have gone to something important like a new iPod or a few Playstation games for something silly like an inspection to make sure the home is structurally sound.
On Tuesday I officially closed on the purchase, a process that largely involved someone pointing at a line on a piece of paper and me, blank stare on my face, signing my name. They told me all of the documents were related to the purchase, but as far as I know, in addition to my mortgage and loan documents, I signed away the rights to any oil discovered on the property, my entire baseball card collection and my first born child.
I signed my name so many times Tuesday morning I started to understand how professional athletes must feel, only without the legion of groupies or the steriod rush.
I'm looking forward to moving into my new home now, although I've discovered the line between excitement and terror is surprisingly thin. I think it will be good to move out of the room I've rented for the past year or so in the basement of my step-sister's house. I understand moving away from my 5-year-old nephew will seriously cut down on my opportunities to play with Thomas the Tank Engine toys, but nobody ever said owning a home was perfect.
Really, what's not to get excited about? Now that I own a home I'll have a lawn to rake and mow. I'll have a sidewalk to shovel and gutters to clean. I'll have mortgage and insurance and property tax payments to make. But I'll also have an opportunity to borrow tools from my neighbor and never return them. This, I've come to understand from comic strips and situational comedies, is what neighbors do.
Buying a house means I can finally get a puppy, although given the amount of time I'm actually at home these days that seems like a bad idea. It means I can throw big, loud parties without worrying about disturbing people in neighboring apartments. Scrabble parties can really get out of hand when people start arguing about triple letter scores.
I suppose it's appropriate that this particular purchase takes place just a couple of weeks before my 33rd birthday. If anything, buying a home is just another part of getting older.
Like I said. Gulp.


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Searching for patriotism

I would certainly never suggest that veterans of the United States Military do not deserve recognition for their service. The men and women who have served this country, even those who returned home safely, have made significant sacrifices in the name of protecting the rest of us. They fought bravely and they deserve our respect.
It's just, in "lets support the veterans" efforts, as in war, it's important to pick your battles.
Livable conditions at Walter Reed Medical Center and efforts to help Iraq and Afghanistan veterans adjust to life at home? That's an important way of supporting veterans. Patriotic logos on the home page of search engine Google for Memorial Day and Veteran's Day? I mean, that's got to be a little bit farther down the priority list, doesn't it?
Possibly not.
Several conservative groups seem to have gotten themselves worked into a tizzy in recent years over the fact the search company, which frequently modifies its logo for special occasions, had until this year not made an effort to recognize either Memorial Day or Veteran's Day. In a web log posting last year a group called California Conserv-atives called it "utterly disgusting" that Google would fail to recognize U.S. veterans while using its logo to pay tribute to such obscure events as Persian New Year and the birthday of Sherlock Holmes creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
If that's the group's reaction to the lack of a military-themed cartoon, I'd hate to see it's reaction the local paper ever pulls Beetle Bailey.
The questions about Google's perceived lack of patriotism have gotten so serious that the Los Angeles Times last month published a story about the controversy. In the story, a conservative blogger named Giovanni Gallucci who clearly gets too emotionally involved with his Internet searches, calls Google's logo shortcomings "A kick to your belly."
The story also quotes Joseph Farah, whose worldnetdaily.com site clearly has issues with Google. The site has no fewer than 15 stories about the evils the world's most popular search engine has visited upon this country and the world at large. It's a lot of anger to build up over targeted advertising.
Google's response to the controversy had been to suggest its logo alterations, generally light-hearted doodles, were not solemn enough to capture an event like Veteran's Day. According to the Times a web site called zombietime.com took that as a challenge and sponsored a contest to solicit suggestions.
Certainly we must take something called zombietime.com seriously as a source of political discourse. If you'd like to see the suggestions they're on the site somewhere among links to photos of San Francisco's World Naked Bike Ride and a topless protest at a Hillary Clinton rally.
A word of warning: You really, really don't want to click on those links. Talk about utterly disgusting kicks to the belly.
This isn't the first time the lack of overt displays of patriotism have caused problems. Presidential candidate Barack Obama took heat recently for failing to wear a U.S. flag lapel pin, and shortly after 9/11 a women's college basketball player caused a stir by choosing not to face the flag during the National Anthem.
I'm all for displays of patriotism, but wearing a flag pin so everyone knows how much you love America is a little bit like driving a Toyota Prius instead of a more traditional-looking hybrid so everyone will know how much you love the environment. Saying the Pledge of Allegiance out loud doesn't make me any more patriotic in my heart than reading the Vikings' playbook out loud makes me qualified to play quarterback in the NFL.
(OK, that's a bad example. At this point, I think I might be a better option at quarterback than anyone currently playing the position for the Vikings. And I can't even throw a decent spiral.)
For the record, this Veteran's Day Google's logo sported World War I-era Army helmets on both of its Os and its E.
Now that we've got that taken care of we can turn our attention to the next blatant example of disrespecting this country: McDonald's, which honors St. Patrick's Day with a Shamrock Shake but has yet to introduce red, white and blue McNuggets.
Shame on you, Ronald.

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Searching for patriotism

I would certainly never suggest that veterans of the United States Military do not deserve recognition for their service. The men and women who have served this country, even those who returned home safely, have made significant sacrifices in the name of protecting the rest of us. They fought bravely and they deserve our respect.
It's just, in "lets support the veterans" efforts, as in war, it's important to pick your battles.
Livable conditions at Walter Reed Medical Center and efforts to help Iraq and Afghanistan veterans adjust to life at home? That's an important way of supporting veterans. Patriotic logos on the home page of search engine Google for Memorial Day and Veteran's Day? I mean, that's got to be a little bit farther down the priority list, doesn't it?
Possibly not.
Several conservative groups seem to have gotten themselves worked into a tizzy in recent years over the fact the search company, which frequently modifies its logo for special occasions, had until this year not made an effort to recognize either Memorial Day or Veteran's Day. In a web log posting last year a group called California Conserv-atives called it "utterly disgusting" that Google would fail to recognize U.S. veterans while using its logo to pay tribute to such obscure events as Persian New Year and the birthday of Sherlock Holmes creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
If that's the group's reaction to the lack of a military-themed cartoon, I'd hate to see it's reaction the local paper ever pulls Beetle Bailey.
The questions about Google's perceived lack of patriotism have gotten so serious that the Los Angeles Times last month published a story about the controversy. In the story, a conservative blogger named Giovanni Gallucci who clearly gets too emotionally involved with his Internet searches, calls Google's logo shortcomings "A kick to your belly."
The story also quotes Joseph Farah, whose worldnetdaily.com site clearly has issues with Google. The site has no fewer than 15 stories about the evils the world's most popular search engine has visited upon this country and the world at large. It's a lot of anger to build up over targeted advertising.
Google's response to the controversy had been to suggest its logo alterations, generally light-hearted doodles, were not solemn enough to capture an event like Veteran's Day. According to the Times a web site called zombietime.com took that as a challenge and sponsored a contest to solicit suggestions.
Certainly we must take something called zombietime.com seriously as a source of political discourse. If you'd like to see the suggestions they're on the site somewhere among links to photos of San Francisco's World Naked Bike Ride and a topless protest at a Hillary Clinton rally.
A word of warning: You really, really don't want to click on those links. Talk about utterly disgusting kicks to the belly.
This isn't the first time the lack of overt displays of patriotism have caused problems. Presidential candidate Barack Obama took heat recently for failing to wear a U.S. flag lapel pin, and shortly after 9/11 a women's college basketball player caused a stir by choosing not to face the flag during the National Anthem.
I'm all for displays of patriotism, but wearing a flag pin so everyone knows how much you love America is a little bit like driving a Toyota Prius instead of a more traditional-looking hybrid so everyone will know how much you love the environment. Saying the Pledge of Allegiance out loud doesn't make me any more patriotic in my heart than reading the Vikings' playbook out loud makes me qualified to play quarterback in the NFL.
(OK, that's a bad example. At this point, I think I might be a better option at quarterback than anyone currently playing the position for the Vikings. And I can't even throw a decent spiral.)
For the record, this Veteran's Day Google's logo sported World War I-era Army helmets on both of its Os and its E.
Now that we've got that taken care of we can turn our attention to the next blatant example of disrespecting this country: McDonald's, which honors St. Patrick's Day with a Shamrock Shake but has yet to introduce red, white and blue McNuggets.
Shame on you, Ronald.

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Solidarity

I thought about skipping this column. I wanted to show solidarity with the members of the Writers Guild of America, who went on strike this week after failing to reach a deal with studios. In the end, though, my sense of devotion to my loyal readers, all baker’s dozen of you, was simply too strong. Also, this was a light week for letters to the editor and I couldn’t find anything else to put in this space. This strike is serious business. According to Reuters, the motion picture and television industry generates $30 billion in annual economic activity for Los Angeles County alone and the U.S. film and television industry, which will in many cases be idled by the strike, employs 200,000 people. Economists estimate a 22-week writers’ strike in 1988 cost the entertainment industry roughly $500 million. That doesn’t even take into account the impact on the poor families who might now be forced to hold a conversation while they eat dinner. You can’t put a price on that kind of psychological trauma. Some of the strike’s effects have already started to show up. Late night talk shows went to re-runs on Monday. Apparently Jay Leno needs a full staff of writers to prepare him for reading wacky headlines. (City council runs out of time to discuss shorter meetings? Precious!) The film industry, which prepared for a possible strike by stockpiling scripts, will likely not be affected. But the impact elsewhere could be significant. Though the producers of television series typically work ahead a long strike could mean more reruns for prime time shows. This could actually be good news for fans who want to catch up with their favorite shows. It could be even better news for viewers looking for an excuse to finally stop watching Two and a Half Men. If there are too many reruns we could ultimately lose some of the weaker shows on the schedule. If things get really bad we could find ourselves cutting down to just six or seven CSI series and only a couple of dozen Law and Order spin offs. It’s the law of the television jungle. Ultimately, the strike could mean more reality shows popping up in the months ahead. In other words, the studios might finally listen to my “Strand seven unstable strangers on an island, make them dance and have an angry British guy yell at them” pitch. I call it Real Dancing with the Idol. It’s going to be huge. I shouldn’t make jokes, though. This strike is serious business for the people involved. And it’s hard not to feel some sympathy for the writers. According to most reports all they really want is a bigger cut of the roughly $315 million expected to be spent this year on Internet downloads of movies and television shows. That’s a whole lot of money. And who are we to say the writers don’t deserve every penny? Without the talented members of the Writers Guild, after all, we wouldn’t have quality television fare like Cavemen, the half-hour sitcom based on a series of insurance ads, or Cane, which is about Jimmy Smits being sexy and probably evil or something. I haven’t actually watched the show, but the commercials are pretty annoying. It’s hard to know how this will play out from here. The smart thing would be for everyone involved to work out their differences and get back to business before Americans realize they can fill the time they used to spend watching TV by reading a book or taking a walk, a process that by most estimates will take until somewhere in mid-2013. Then again, this is the entertainment industry we’re talking about. It’s hard to count on an industry that keeps Rob Schneider gainfully employed to ever do the smart thing.


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Your Halloween history lesson

Earlier this week children and adults in Rosemount and across the country celebrated Halloween, a popular holiday that in its modern incarnation is largely associated with excess.
For children, Halloween is an excuse to dress in costumes that are typically either adorable or horrifying and go door to door extort massive amounts of candy from friends and neighbors.
For adults, Halloween parties are frequently an excuse to consume excessive amounts of food and alcohol, and to dress in excessively revealing outfits. In this way, Halloween has followed an evolution similar to many other popular holidays in the United States, from New Year's Eve to the Fourth of July to Arbor Day.
But to focus on the modern trappings of Halloween is to ignore the holiday's proud history. Halloween at its beginning looked little like the holiday we celebrate today. Originally called All Hollow Eaves, Halloween began in 1783 as a way for roofers of the day to show off their work. Essentially an early ancestor of our modern Parade of Homes, construction companies would use the promise of sweet treats such as sugar cubes and caramel apples to lure children and their parents to view what were then remarkable advances in roofing technology. In fact, had the advent of modern gutter technology not coincided that year with a bountiful sugar beet crop the last day of October might look very different today.
There were no costumes at the first Halloween. It is widely believed the first instance of dressing up for the holiday occurred the following year, when Jack O'Lantern, then one of the most prominent roofers in of the day, decided he could draw more people to his homes if he gave prizes for the best dressed visitors to his homes. Among the most popular costumes that first year were John Wesley, who had gained fame in February of that year when he chartered the Methodist church, and Carl Friedrich Gauss, a pioneer in the field of summation.
Also common in those early years, though frowned upon by many, were costumes we see still today such as the slutty nurse and the cat woman.
O'Lantern's Halloween inventions did not stop with the costume, of course. As you may have guessed he is also widely believed to be the first to carve a face in a pumpkin, which grew in abundance that year, and place a candle in it as a kind of torch so people could admire his handiwork well into the night. He called this innovation the punk-o-torch. The name was changed later, but surprising to honor not the creator of the punk-o-torch but an entirely different Jack O'Lantern whose direct connection to the carved pumpkin remains shrouded in mystery but there are those who believe he was the first to perfect the now common "pointy-teeth" carving method.
Halloween has continued to evolve over the years. Bobbing for apples, though now a popular and lighthearted event common at Halloween parties, has a surprisingly tragic origin as a commemoration of the Great Apple Drownin' of 1832.
The name of the holiday was officially changed during the Great Depression as a way to save on printing costs, and the association with with roofing gradually faded away, replaced with overtones of the occult as people decided witches and ghosts made way cooler costumes than roofers.

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Don't make me chime you!

I'm....
I just....
I don't....
I'm sorry if I seem a bit incoherent at the moment. It's just ... have you ever read something that inspired so many thoughts and emotions you didn't quite know which one to follow? That's the way I feel right now.
I mean, how am I supposed to react when Time freaking Magazine runs a story on its web page about the growing trend in Japan that involves using a cell phone application to fight public train groping?
I don't mean groping public trains, obviously. I mean ... well, you know what I mean.
How do I react to the news that Japan, a country with a reputation for good manners, apparently finds itself the victim of a happy hands epidemic?
Should I be concerned it's become so difficult for Japanese women to keep their private parts private that many have turned to technology for an answer?
Should I worry that interpersonal skills have degraded to the point someone would rely on the assistance of a cell phone in a situation when a more direct response seems called for?
Should I hop a plane to Tokyo to find out just how effective this new kind of hands-free phone is?
I honestly don't know.
Here's the thing. According to Time this so-called "Anti-groping appli," released in late 2005, has recently climbed to No. 7 on the list of most popular cell phone applications. The free, downloadable program works by flashing what Time describes as a series of increasingly threatening messages from the gropee to the groper. The messages progress from, "Excuse me, did you just grope me?" (Does anyone ever actually admit this?) to "Groping is a crime." To "Shall we head to the police?"
There is not, so far as I can tell, a message that reads, "You want to keep those fingers, buddy?"
A "warning chime" accompanies each message, and users can advance from one to the next by hitting a button labeled "anger."
In other words, Japanese women are responding to blatant violations of their personal space with a chime, possibly the least threatening warning sound ever.
Citing numbers from the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Time reports that 1,853 people were arrested in 2005 for groping passengers on trains in Tokyo. Experts (in groping? In trains? It's not clear) say the actual number of incidents in which passengers are harassed is much higher, but women are embarrassed to report them.
I respect Japanese culture. I really do. It's given us reliable hybrid cars and dancing robots and cartoons about adorable creatures that fight to the death. But there are certain situations that call for good, old-fashioned American directness. Women shouldn't be embarrassed about getting groped. They should be ticked off. Not button-pushing, chime-ringing ticked off, either. I'm talking about in-your-face, call-attention-to-the-creepy-guy, "Buddy, your hand better not be where I think it is," angry.
Dealing with subway gropers doesn't call for an anger button. It calls for a button that makes a giant boot pop out of the top of the phone and kick the mister grabby hands somewhere that will get his attention a whole lot faster than a digital threat to call the cops.
Now that's some useful technology.

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@%*&#!

This is a big week for swearing-related news. Turns out, letting loose with a few choice expletives every now and then has certain benefits and certain drawbacks.
The week's better news for fans of blue language comes from the University of East Anglia, which reported earlier this week that, far from being inappropriate, spewing the occasional four-letter word in the workplace can benefit everyone by reducing stress and helping people get along. Because who hasn't felt better about their co-workers after letting loose with a long string of obscenities?
Randomly cursing at a computer when it won't print the document you want isn't causing a disruption, says the study, published in a recent edition of Leadership and Organisational Develop-ment Journal (Darn, and I just let my subscription lapse.). It's blowing off steam.
"In many cases, taboo language serves the needs of people for developing and maintaining solidarity, and as a mechanism to cope with stress," Barach told England's Sun newspaper. "Banning it could backfire."
Basically, the co-workers who curse together stay together.
Finally, a f***ing management style I can get behind.
Baruch seems to believe swearing at work is simply too common to control.
"Employees use swearing on a continuous basis, but not necessarily in a negative, abusive manner," he said. Apparently there is a way to swear in a positive, nurturing manner. "I love you, you little @#!*."
Though it is never specified, I can only assume the University of East Anglia has a lot of sailors on the payroll and that Baruch and Jenkins conducted the bulk of their research in the locker rooms of professional sports teams.
The news isn't all good on the pottymouth front, though. While swearing at work is apparently all the rage across the pond, in Pennsylvania the occasional curse word aimed at a malfunctioning potty can land you in jail.
According to web site ananova.com a West Scranton resident faces the possibility of up to 90 days in jail and a fine of up to $300 after her neighbor, a police officer, heard her swearing at an overflowing toilet. The police officer asked the woman to quiet down. When she didn't, he reported her.
I have to be honest, if this is the kind of trouble you can get in for swearing at inanimate objects in the privacy of your own home I just might go away from life.
For the record, the woman said she doesn't remember exactly what she said to her backflowing porcelain throne but admits she was frustrated and might have used some off-color language. She is fighting the charge with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union.
"You can't prosecute somebody for swearing at a cop or a toilet," ACLU representative Mary Catherine Roper told the Times-Tribune.
Darn tootin'.


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If you don’t read this column....

Back when I was spending my junior year of high school in Sweden there was a series of ads for self-adhesive bandages — they might have been Band-Aids, they might have been some Scandinavian equivalent that users had to assemble themselves with an allen wrench; I can't be sure — that featured adorable young children about to suffer some kind of misfortune.
One adorable moppet, no doubt blonde-haired and blue-eyed as adorable Swedish children tend to be, was about to step barefoot onto a piece of broken glass. Another was on the verge of scraping himself on a nail or some other such sharp, menacing object.
The tagline on these ads, roughly translated, was, "Accidents happen so easily."
I always found them immensely disturbing. Why, I wondered, do the advertising efforts of Sweden's bandage industry sound so much like they were written by a low-level mobster running a protection racket.
"That's a real nice kid you got there," these Nordic bandage thugs seemed to be telling potential customers. "Be a shame if something happened to him."
Is the Scandinavian Mob (The Møb?) really so heavily invested in the home healthcare industry?
That could be, I suppose. But I'm starting to suspect there's more to it than a cunning crime syndicate that wants to both break your thumbs and sell you splints to set them with. I realize now that vaguely threatening advertisements involving children are far more common than I realized.
Take my trip out West earlier this year. I mentioned this a few months ago, but it seems worth bringing up again, if only because it was seriously creepy. Somewhere in Montana there was a billboard that featured a stark, black-and-white picture of a young boy aiming a firearm at the camera. "If he doesn't believe in God," the tagline read, "will he believe in you?"
In other words, take your kid to church or he'll shoot you in the face.
Then there's the ad I saw Wednesday night. The one that brought this all back to mind. It features a woman getting ready for what appears to be a night on the town. Her daughter, presumably about to be left behind with a babysitter while Mom and Dad whoop it up, is playing dress-up along with Mommy. They're laughing. They appear to be having the kind of happy mother-daughter moment they’ll both treasure in their later years. But then Mom does something terrible. She puts some lipstick on, then turns to apply a little to her daughter's lips. Meanwhile, an ominous-sounding voice-over warns us that if we adults fail to get our flu shots, "You're not just fluin' yourself."
Awful puns aside, I'm not convinced this is really the best way to push flu immunization. I'm not sure a message like, "Get immunized or BIRD FLU WILL KILL YOUR CHILDREN!" really makes me want to rush out to the clinic. Mostly it makes me want to lock myself in my bedroom and not come out until spring.
I’d do it, too. But I'm afraid there's something sharp in there. And accidents happen so easily.


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Up in smoke

Boy, did I choose the wrong week to start smoking.
Just when I figured out the best way to fit in with the cool crowd is by sucking on a flaming tube of dried leaves and chemicals, the state of Minnesota tells me I can’t light up when I go out for a drink. If there’s a better time to fill your lungs with cancer-causing agents than when you’re soaking your liver in alcohol, I don’t know what it is.
I don’t know why it took so long for me to see the Zippo-fueled light when it comes to smoking. I made it through high school and college without once feeling the urge to pick up a cigarette. I’d like to think I was above that kind of peer pressure. Or that I was smart enough to recognize the many health risks associated with tobacco. Or even that I was so committed to my role as a mediocre junior varsity soccer player and cross country skier that I didn’t want to jeopardize the health of my lungs. You have to be able to breathe deeply if you want to cheer adequately from the sidelines.
More likely, though, I just knew I was unpopular enough that taking up smoking would never make me cooler. Just wheezier.
Things are different now, though, and I’m not sure why. I can only assume that exposure to countless images of celebrities smoking cigarettes has helped me to realize just how totally awesome I could look with a cigarette in my hand.
I’ve seen lots of pictures of Britney Spears smoking, and everybody thinks she’s cool. Right? And Lindsay Lohan? I’ve seen pictures of her smoking and she’s pretty much the epitome of Hollywood glamour these days. Isn’t she?
Anyway, I see both of them on the covers of People and US Weekly just about every time I go to the grocery store, so I figure they must be doing something right.
Celebrities are always smoking in movies, too. Although, now that I think about it, most of the characters that smoke are villains. Batman is dark and mysterious, but you never see him with a bat-cigarette lighter in his utility belt. Superman was a stalker and a deadbeat dad in his most recent movie, but he never used his heat vision to fire up a butt.
Heroes only smoke when they are in their darkest hour. Or maybe when they need a cigarette to create a delay for the fuse of a bomb. So, I guess cigarettes are useful for foiling evil plans, too. There’s pretty much nothing they can't do.
Now our state legislators want to take the cool-making, world-saving power of cigarettes out of our hands when we’re out at dinner or at the bar for a drink. And what do they offer us in return? Healthier workplaces for members of the service industry? Clothes that don’t reek of exhaled chemicals after a Friday night out? Free reign to look down our noses at people huddled outside bars in the middle of winter just so they can satisfy their urge for a cigarette?
Is it really worth it?

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Now playing: Teddybears - Cobra Style
via FoxyTunes

A long time coming

Somewhere in next week’s issue of the Town Pages, and I'm not going to tell you where, is a story I wrote 10 years ago this month. It is the first story I ever wrote for this newspaper. Actually, it's the first story I wrote for any newspaper. I strongly recommend you not read it. It is not what the kids these days would call competent.
On the level of things that should never been issued for public consumption I'd rank it somewhere between those first-day performers everyone likes to laugh at on American Idol and Britney Spears at the MTV Video Music Awards. I like to think that in the decade since I've progressed at least to the level of contestants on one of those karaoke shows that has been airing over the summer.
I don't mention this story, which I wrote about a new contract for District 196 teachers and nurses on my first day at work in September of 1997, because I think it's somehow a milestone worth recognizing. I don't have a lot of fond memories of that story, beyond the fact it was the start of what has turned into a surprisingly long and mostly happy association with the city of Rosemount. Mostly what I remember is walking into our office for my first day of work having never so much as taken a journalism class and having the guy who owned the paper at the time keep threatening as the day went on to send me to a school board meeting. It’s not that I was diametrically opposed to attending a school board meeting — having never been to one I didn’t know better. But I felt a little sick that day and, you know, really didn’t have any idea what I was doing. The story I ultimately produced might be the most enthusiastic story ever written about what was essentially a straightforward approval of a new contract. I know District 196 has lots of excellent teachers. I’m just not sure I needed to mention that 34 times in the space of three paragraphs.
Like I said, the story's not very good. And while reading the small part of it reprinted this week would not take long, there are definitely better ways to use that time. Go for a walk. Watch some of the exciting new programs premiering now as part of network television's fall season. Read to your children. Just, you know, don't read them the story. Trust me, this is one of those rare instances where a parent reading to a child could actually hamper that child's academic progress.
Mostly, seeing that story pop up again reminds me I've been here for a long freaking time. It's a realization I have from time to time. I had it a few years ago when a group of seventh graders with whom I traveled to southern Minnesota my first year on the job graduated from high school. I had it again more recently when I realized those same students are now going into their senior year of college. I can only imagine how I'll feel when I start writing stories about their kids. Do you think it'd be weird if I started out by mentioning I once played kickball with their dad?
There are people working in this office now who were in middle school in September of 1997.
A lot has changed since I wrote that first story. Roads that dead-ended in corn fields in 1997 now wind through fully developed neighborhoods. Fields that used to be empty are now filled with houses. In some cases, developments have been planned three or four times for the same property.
The city of Rosemount has changed administrators since I've been here, and the Independent School District 196 has hired a new superintendent.
The District 196 School Board has been remarkably stable in the years since I started covering meetings. Five of those original seven members are still on the board. Things are different at city hall, though, where there has been a complete turnover among city council members. I'm starting to worry it's something I said.
In the grand scheme of things, of course, 10 years isn't all that long. In geological terms a decade is nothing. Lots of people have done their jobs longer than 10 years. I should know. I've written stories about them.
Maybe I'll even let you read them.

When B movies attack

Remember that movie The Island of Dr. Moreau. Probably not. I don't think it was very good. I don't mean the one that came out in the 70s. This one came out, like, 10 years ago. Based on an H.G. Wells story. It starred Marlon Brando, possibly in the first role he filmed after his death, and Val Kilmer. I think. I didn't see it, either. Like I said, I don't think it was very good.
Anyway, the movie's about this crazy scientist (Marlon Brando's possibly decomposing corpse) who lives on an island filled with bizarre human-animal hybrids of his own creation. Then things go wrong. No. Not that one. You're thinking of Annie Hall.
Anyway, that's all apparently happening now. According to the BBC, regulators in Britain have cleared the way for the use of human-animal hybrids for stem cell research. I don't think Marlon Brando is involved, but somehow that only makes things a little bit less creepy.
There's a reason for all this mad science. Scientists plan to fuse human cells with animal eggs for the purpose of extracting stem cells, which can then, at least in theory, be used to create cures for everything from Alzheimer's to athlete's foot. The embryos created by these science experiments — which sound a lot like something that started with two scientists who'd spent one too many Friday nights together in the lab daring each other to create dogs with human ears or ducks with stylish pompadours — will be destroyed when the stem cells are extracted. Long before they have the chance to gestate into full-fledged freaks of nature.
Actually, this kind of hot human-cell-on-animal-cell action isn't exactly new. Just look at Vin Diesel.
According to a January 2005 National Geographic story Chinese scientists in 2003 fused human cells with rabbit eggs. Oddly enough, this bunny boy would have been born in the year of the ram.
At the time the article was written scientists at Stanford were considering creating mice with human brains, presumably to win some maze-related bet. And in 2004 scientists at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester created a pig with human blood running through its veins. I've never been so conflicted about eating bacon.
British researcher Lyle Armstrong was in favor of his government's decision, although he admitted some people might now live in fear of our eventual overthrow by an army of super-smart, super-agile man-squirrels.
"It's not our intention to create any bizarre cow-human hybrid," Armstrong told the BBC. "We want to use those cells to understand how to make human stem cells better."
Others, of course, are less excited. One protester complained such hybrids harm the dignity of man and animal like. Honestly, though, I've been on a cattle drive. You will never convince me a cow has dignity.
I have mixed feelings about the whole thing. I will always be a little bit more wary now about the chances there will be a freakish human-octopus waiting for me around the next corner, tentacles flailing and hungry for blood. On the other hand, it's hard not to get excited about when the plots from bad movies start to become reality.
I'm hoping Plan 9 from Outer Space is next.

Thoughts while boiling an egg

Something terrible happened to me last week. Something life altering. Something that dramatically impacted my ability to do something as simple as feeding myself.
My microwave broke.
As food-related disasters go, this was miles worse than the great hot plate meltdown of ’04 or that spinach recall from a few months ago. If I had to make a comparison, I'd put it right up there with the Potato Famine.
Maybe you think I'm being melodramatic, but this was a major blow to my cooking routine. Gone from my home-cooked meal rotation are staples like frozen burritos and Hot Pockets and, for the love of Emeril Lagasse, Easy Mac. I can't go back to regular mac now. Boil water? On the stove? Are you crazy? I'm a busy guy. I've got things to do. I've got television shows to watch and video games to play.
I've tried to cope the best I can, but a man can only live on frozen pizza and Chipotle burritos for so long.
I've had to resort to drastic measures recently. I even fired up the grill. I cooked pork tenderloins. I had meals with actual vegetables. My digestive system is still recovering.
Anyway, all this waiting I have to do as I explore non-irradiating cooking methods has left me with a some time to think. And that's always a dangerous thing. Here are a few of the thoughts that have crossed my mind as I waited for the toast to pop up.
• I'm going to start a list of people I'd like to punch in the face. Up first, the guy quoted in the current issue of Newsweek who says he bought a hybrid Honda Civic but traded it in for a Toyota Prius because the Honda looked too much like a regular car and he wasn't getting enough credit from strangers on the street for being sensitive to the environment.
Second on the list is Michael Vick, but only if he's strapped into one of those Hannibal Lecter-style restraint systems.
• The NFL season starts soon, which means football fans nationwide have spent countless hours in recent weeks combing through magazines and web sites and police reports in an attempt to put together the best possible Fantasy Football team. If we devoted this much effort to saving the environment we could solve global warming and Al Gore wouldn't have anything to talk about at parties.
• I've never actually played Fantasy Football, but I see the appeal. It gives the average fan a chance to experience all the the glamour and excitement and prestige of managing a professional sports franchise, but in a way that nobody other than you actually cares about.
With the possible exception of the weather, Fantasy Football might be world's leading cause of incredibly boring conversations. If someone tries to tell me what receiver they drafted in the third round or how many yards their backup quarterback threw for I might actually try to punt him.
• Seriously, there has to be a Fantasy Football league somewhere that uses team arrests as a statistic, doesn't there?
• Fine, two words of advice for anyone out there with a high Fantasy Football draft pick and no idea how to use it: Tarvaris Jackson. But you didn't hear it from me.
• On the bright side, I continue to dominate my one-man Fantasy MLS Soccer league.
• In other super-geeky news that somehow seems acceptable because it's vaguely sports-related: The latest version of the Madden football video game allows players who win their virtual Super Bowl to design and order their own championship ring. And yet somehow people think I'm weird when I wear the "King of Pac Man" cape I made with a shower curtain and a Bedazzler.
• I bought a pack of plain white t-shirts the other day. They came in a resealable package. Why in the world is this necessary? Are my new undershirts likely to go bad? Should I keep them in the refrigerator rather than in my dresser drawer?
If you're ever standing near me and notice an odd smell, I guess now you'll know why.
Whoops, gotta go. My water is boiling.

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Now playing: Radiohead - Pyramid Song
via FoxyTunes

Who wants to live forever?

A researcher at Cambridge University who runs something called the Methuselah Mouse prize for lengthening the age of mice (Motto: Because the world needs more crotchety old mice.) told the BBC recently he believes the first human to live to 1,000 might already be 60 years old. I imagine this will come as wonderful news to people who hold out hope of seeing Michael Vick play another professional football game.
Geneticist Aubrey de Grey, who appears to be shortening his own life expectancy by devoting considerable energy to maintaining a beard massive enough to hide an Olsen Twin, told the BBC he believes lifespans will increase dramatically in the years to come as new technologies evolve to fight the effects of aging. I don't claim to have a strong science background, but as I understand them the reasons for de Gray's beliefs boil down essentially to, because. Come on, though. If we can't trust science geeks with crazy-ass beards, who can we trust?
De Gray argues the technology to combat aging already exists in preliminary form, which sounds a little like arguing scientists are on the verge of building a working time travel machine because Doc Brown slipped on the toilet and invented the flux capacitor.
Still, de Gray is confident. He believes the technologies in question will be in use in mice within 10 years — finally bringing life to the dream of nigh-immortal super rats whose only natural enemies will be super-old cats — and in humans within a decade after that. Once that happens, we can kiss good-bye the frailty that currently comes with old age. Science, de Gray says, will correct all the wrongs that nature and millions of years of evolution have decided are a good idea. After that? Forget dying of old age and start watching out for passing trucks.
Seriously, getting hit by a truck appears to be de Gray's choice for leading cause of death in the anti-aging future. He mentions it at least twice. I see things a little differently. I see the number of deaths attributed to fights started over stupid little things that happened three centuries earlier skyrocketing. Alternately, I figure we'll all slowly starve to death as the population of undying humans and super-mice slowly grows too large for our natural resources to support.
Mostly, though, it's going to be the stupid fights between two 964-year-olds about whether the Timberwolves were stupid to trade Kevin Garnett or who got a raw deal in a fantasy football trade back in 2142.
Face it, if we're going to live to 1,000 we're going to have a lot of free time on our hands. And a lot of time to hold stupid grudges.
De Gray seems to think this eternal life deal is a good thing. I'm not so sure. I know plenty of people I wouldn't want to have around for 10 minutes, much less 10 centuries. I don't think I want to live in a world where I have to spend the next 967 years getting news reports of a centuries-old Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan beamed directly into my brain by the soon-to-be-invented neural-news networks. You think it's hard to get away from stupid reality shows now? Wait until everyone on the planet is all connected at the brain.
Hasn’t de Gray seen the movie Highlander? That was one unhappy immortal Scotsman.
Living for 1,000 years without a significant decline in mental or physical ability would presumably mean 1,000 years of getting up for work every day. These days people are worried about putting away enough during their working years to live comfortably from 65 until their death, which with current, non-made-up science, is likely to occur sometime in the 35 or so years that follow (runaway trucks notwithstanding). You think your 401k contributions are going to be enough to last you more than nine centuries?
And, ultimately, there's the whole natural resource thing. If global warming is a problem now, what's going to happen when we can legitimately count body heat from the undying hordes as a contributing factor?
Actually, I might have a solution for that last problem. By de Gray's beard-influenced logic it may already exist in preliminary stages. It's called Soylent Green, and I hear it's delicious.


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Now playing: Atmosphere - Cats Van Bags
via FoxyTunes

Two of a kind

Dear Tiger Woods,
Hey, Tiger. Congratulations on your win last weekend at the PGA Championship. And congratulations on collecting your 13th major tournament title faster than any golfer in history. That's pretty sweet. I bet you're pretty excited.
I played a little golf last weekend too, Tiger. Around the time you were tying a major championship record by shooting a 63 in front of a crowd of thousands of cheering spectators, I was teaming up with Independent sports guy Pat Rupp to whup former Independent general manager Chad Richardson and the sports guy at our company's paper in Hastings. I realize our round didn't get quite as much news coverage as yours. But we won by 14 strokes. What'd you win by? That's right: two. Don't feel bad, though. Some people just perform better than others in the heat of competition.
Was that out of line, Tiger? Sorry about that. I'm not trying to make you mad. Actually, I think we're a lot alike, you and I.
Consider this: You play golf for a living. You spend countless hours refining your game and you make millions of dollars every year in tournament winnings and endorsements, including one for Buick where you talk about breaking the window of your car. My round Friday was the first I've played this year. When I got to the course I had to shake glass out of my shoes, because they haven't left my trunk since last summer and they were in there when someone threw a rock through my window a few weeks ago.
I know. Spooky, right?
You are known for your powerful golf swing. I often swing really, really hard. You can hit your pitching wedge something like 200 yards. I can hit my driver that far. On a good day. With the wind at my back.
Need more? How about this: You're married to a superhot Swedish model who recently gave birth to your first child. I'm single at the moment, but I've been to Sweden. Also, we just got a dog in the house where I live. I realize a dog and a baby aren't the same thing, but a lot of the same issues come up. You know: feeding, walking, flea baths.
It's like looking in a mirror, right? And that's not all.
You have your name on a video game. I play video games (not yours, though; I'm not a big fan of golf games). You have clubs made to your specifications with the latest golf technology. My dad made most of my clubs something like 15 years ago. Millions of people read about you in newspaper stories. Literally fives of people read this column every week.
Life's not easy for guys like you and me, Tiger. You've set such high expectations by performing so well at such a young age. Likewise, now that I've helped power my two-man team to a score of 84 people expect more from me. Like that I continue to hit the ball without causing it to slice viciously into the parking lot and maim innocent bystanders. Or that I actually play golf again at some point. We've got the weight of the world on our shoulders. There's you, there's me and there's Atlas, Tiger.
I guess what I'm saying, Tiger, is that we should hang out sometime. Drop me an e-mail. We can go bowling or something.

There will always be stories

I will always remember where I was when the Space Shuttle Challenger blew up. I'll always remember where I was on 9/11. And now I suspect I'll always remember that I was in the Town Pages office, waiting to conduct a job interview, when I heard the I-35W bridge over the Mississippi River had collapsed.
I'm not sure I'll remember quite so well how I felt at that moment, but the emotions are still clear now. There was confusion, of course. Surely they couldn't have meant an interstate highway had just fallen into the river. Clearly it was a bridge over the highway that had fallen.
Right?
There was amazement. An urge to to talk about the tragedy with anyone and everyone. "Did you see that?" I wanted to ask and be asked. "Can you believe it?"
Ultimately, as I drove home listening to reports of the collapse on the radio, there was a kind of intellectual adrenaline rush. A desire to be at the scene not so much to see the wreckage but to tell the stories. To dig around — literally, perhaps, but mostly figuratively — and find out what had happened. Why things had gone so wrong. Who had been affected and how.
Maybe it's a reporter thing, but as I pointed my car north on Cedar Avenue that's what was going through my head. On top of the confusion and the amazement and the sadness for the people who had lost their lives there was that desire to talk to people. To find out what they had experienced. And most important to put those stories into words. To share them with as many people as I could and to get it all done to meet a deadline that wasn't even mine to worry about.
There has been no shortage of stories in the weeks following the collapse. That much has been obvious to anyone who has opened a newspaper or turned on a television news broadcast since early last Wednesday evening. Even earlier this week Twin Cities daily newspapers are dedicating entire front pages to stories coming from the collapse. Some of those stories are based solely in fact. They're the stories that attempt to explain what went wrong. What could have been done to prevent such a catastrophic failure.
Many other stories are rooted more strongly in emotion. They're the stories of the people who were touched by the disaster. Those who made it off the bridge and those who didn't.
There are local stories, too. Some of them have happy endings. Farmington resident Jeremy Schutte was on the middle section of the bridge when it collapsed. He was on the phone with his wife at the time, on his way home from work. The last words he said before his cell phone lost contact were "Oh my God, I'm in the water. Help me."
Schutte's truck ended up in the water. He had to crawl out the window and swim to the bridge deck, but he made it. He was lucky.
Other stories lack that happy ending. Some, like Peter Hausmann’s story on the front page of this issue, don't have an ending at all. At least not yet. It is all but certain Rosemount resident Hausmann was also on the bridge. According to at least one report rescuers have found his car in the bridge's wreckage but not any sign of Hausmann, who last week was one of eight people officially listed as missing by the Minneapolis Police Department.
In the week since the collapse newspapers in Minnesota and around the country have dedicated thousands of pages to telling those stories and more.
It has been popular in recent years to predict the demise of newspapers. And there is evidence to support many of those claims. Clearly the newspaper business is changing, even in places as relatively small and out-of-the way as Rosemount. In recent years we have embraced new technology in our office. We've added web pages. We've bought video cameras. We've tried to find new ways to reach readers.
But here's the thing: In the end it all comes down to stories. And whether they are about a tragedy or a triumph, whether they're delivered online or in print, in words or in video, there will still be a need for stories. And for people who get excited at the opportunity to tell them.


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Now playing: Bright Eyes - Bright Eyes - The First Day Of My Life
via FoxyTunes

Wait for it ...

These days it seems like anything really worth having has to be worth waiting in unreasonably long lines to buy. No major product can launch, it seems, without news stories about all of the dedicated fans who have pitched tents outside stores so they can be the first person to get one.
Take Harry Potter. When the most recent movie in the series debuted last month fans around the country attended midnight screenings. When the final book in the popular series hit stores a few weeks later dedicated Potterphiles — many dressed in costume, at least two straight foregoing their own wedding reception, according to one news report — loitered for hours at book stores so they could be among the first to discover whether the titular wizard died, as he was rumored to do. Or whether he killed his arch enemy. Or whether he turned out to be not actually a wizard but a leprechaun who lived in constant fear of children stealing his overly sugary cereal.
I haven't read any of the books, but I wouldn't be surprised if that last option turned out to be true. Writers love to throw in twist endings.
Anyway, whatever you think about Harry Potter it's hard to argue this: nobody ever dressed up as an old fisherman to wait in line for Ernest Hemingway books.
People waited in line for the iPhone, though. According to news reports hundreds of people camped outside of Apple stores for the earliest possible chance to seem even more pretentious while using their cell phones.
Don't get me wrong. I think the iPhone's awesome. I'd probably buy one if I was in a position to spend $600 for a phone — plus whatever early termination fee my current cell carrier would charge me so I could move to a provider everyone I know hates. I just think if I were going to do it I'd happily be a day or two late to the party if it meant I didn't have to curl up in a sleeping bag outside a mall.
Every new video game system seems to launch with massive lines these days. When Sony launched its much anticipated Playstation 3 earlier this year the truest nerds camped outside electronics stores for days for the chance to drop several hundred dollars on a souped-up Atari.
Actually, many of the people who waited for the Playstation 3 were there in hopes of putting their newly acquired systems on ebay and turning a quick profit. Thing is, so many would-be free marketeers had that idea it was hard for many of them to turn a profit. Some reportedly lost money on the consoles they spent as much as a week of their life camping outside Best Buys for. When you think about it, that's pretty hilarious.
Even the less anticipated Nintendo Wii, which remains the video game console with the most obscene-sounding name, drew lines when it launched a few days after the PS 3. One person outside a Woodbury Best Buy waited in line dressed as popular Nintendo character Luigi.
It's not just geeks who camp out for new products, though. These days people will put their dignity on the line for something as simple as a canvas shopping bag, as long as it's from the right designer. People clamored earlier this year for designer Anya Hindmarch's "I'm not a plastic bag," which was basically a simple canvas shopping bag with the phrase "I am not a plastic bag" printed on the side. Honestly, why just feel superior to people for being more sensitive to the environment when it's possible to feel superior to them for having better fashion sense at the same time. As of Tuesday, the bags, which originally sold for around $10, were going for upward of $100 on ebay.
How's that for a twist?

What a bunch of dopes

For the past few years baseball fans have been forced to wonder whether some of their favorite players have been using performance enhancing substances. It's become something of a guessing game, trying to figure out which popular major-leaguers owe their success to illicit substances.
Barry Bonds' pursuit of Hank Aaron's all-time home run record has been tainted by suspicion he used steroids. Bonds, of course, denies doing anything inappropriate other than being kind of a pain in the rear end.
I, for one, believe Bonds. There are plenty of logical explanations for the change in his appearance over the years. I attribute his freakishly enlarged head, for example, to a little-known but relatively easy plastic surgery procedure commonly referred to as "the Charlie Brown." Everyone knows Charles' Schultz's adorable cartoon characters inspire some pretty loyal fans.
Fans of professional cycling have been playing a similar game for more than a decade now. Until last year, though, when American Floyd Landis had his Tour de France win challenged on the basis of a test that showed elevated levels of testosterone, very few Americans got in on the action. It's hard to blame them. Identifying cyclists who use performance enhancing drugs is way too easy.
Here's how it works. Find the rosters of the teams competing in this month's Tour de France. Point at a rider. That's pretty much it.
Maybe that's cynical. It's possible there are some of those tiny, emaciated-to-the-point-of-being-translucent men who haul themselves over thousands of miles of mountainous terrain without the benefit of blood doping or steroids or testosterone patches on their naughty parts. It's just getting harder and harder to believe that.
Just this week, pre-race favorite Alexandre Vinokourov, who required more than 60 stitches after a crash early in the race and has since been more erratic than Britney Spears in Vegas, tested positive for receiving an illegal blood transfusion. Surprise race leader Michael Rasmussen has aroused suspicion by failing to appear for drug tests and neglecting to tell Danish cycling officials where they could find him if they wanted to spring a test on him. There have been allegations he asked a friend to carry a shoebox filled with synthetic blood for him. Less commonly reported are suggestions he has replaced his entire skeleton with a lighter one made mostly of styrofoam and baling wire.
The cycling world seems to be nearly equally divided among riders who vehemently deny they would ever do anything illegal, riders who are defending themselves from positive tests and/or mounting suspicions and former riders who pop up to say, "Hey, you guys remember when I won all those races a few years ago? Yeah, I was filled with pigs' blood and horse uppers. But I really feel bad about it now."
It's a shame, really, because cycling can be a lot of fun to watch. I spent much of my morning last Sunday watching these skeletal men push themselves to their limit to ride up mountains nearly as big as Barry Bonds' ego. I, meanwhile, lounged on the couch and ate Cinnabons. It was awesome.
Fortunately, the riders are only part of the appeal. Races like the Tour de France are a spectacle unlike anything else in sports. Oakland Raiders fans get a lot of attention for showing up eight times a year dressed in black leather and spikes but there's one cycling fan who has become famous for showing up at just about every stage of the month-long Tour de France dressed as a devil and running alongside the riders. There are thousands of these fans, and for the most part there is nothing between them and the riders. As cyclists peak mountains they ride through a sea of screaming spectators who only clear the road for them at the last second. Fans pour water on riders or pat them on their spandex-covered rear ends. They run alongside wearing giant antlers or chicken costumes or, in one particularly disturbing instance, only a thong. In fairness, that's probably a good way to get riders to go faster.
Now that I think about it, as long as the fans stay off steroids, we should be OK.

Career counseling

I didn't grow up wanting to be a newspaper editor. I didn't study journalism in college. I never worked on a school newspaper in high school or college. I got into this business, I used to say, because I enjoy writing and because I was looking for a job where I didn't have to wear a tie to work.
Taking that kind of path into newspapers makes me wonder once in a while if I made the right choice. If I'm on the right career path.
Mostly I wonder after we've written something someone disagrees with and people call and yell at me.
Whatever the cause, though, it's nice in those moments of uncertainty to know there are jobs out there for which I am even less well suited than I am for this one.
Those kinds of reminders don't come with any kind of regularity, and when I come across them it is often in the course of doing my job.
Several years ago, for example, the publicity crew from the Red Barron pizza company was in the area and invited me to go for a ride with a member of their biplane stunt-flying team. I accepted, expecting to have a chance to take some great aerial photos of the Farmington area. I never got the photos, but the experience taught me I would never have made it as a World War I-era fighter pilot. It's not that I'm afraid to fly. I just think it would have been hard to dogfight and throw up all over myself at the same time.
At any rate, it was one potential career path off the list.
Around the same time, I explored the possibility of becoming a professional bicycle racer by sending letters to the heads of the United States Cycling Federation and the United States Olympic Committee. I asked them if I could ride for the USA in the Athens Olympics. I even promised to bring my own bike, one of those old fashioned deals with the big wheel in the front. In the spirit of the Athens games I offered to ride in a toga.
No deal. All I got for my effort was a hat and a couple of pins. On the bright side, I can use those to convince people I actually did ride in Athens. In a way, that's even better. I get all the glory without having to do any of the actual work. It's as close as I'll ever get to knowing what life is like for Paris Hilton.
I haven't officially ruled out the possibility of becoming a world famous male model, but so far responses from potential agents have not been promising. I assume this is because the bike-shorts-and-toga look I've used in my promotional photos is simply too far ahead of its time.
The latest item on my this-career-is-not-for-you checklist is actually a return to the world of antiquated air combat. Over the weekend three World War II-era bombers visited Holman Field in St. Paul. Because my grandfather flew one of the models on display during the war several members of my family went to visit. My grandfather came dressed in his old flight suit, which earned him free admission. I'm not sure if it was a matter of respecting a veteran or of humoring a guy who was actually willing to walk around in public wearing a World War II flight suit.
Whatever the case, I had an opportunity to make my way through two of the three planes on display. And the planes, while presumably a good size by World War II standards, clearly were not built with ideas of accommodating someone who stands somewhere in the area of six foot six. Ceilings were low. Walkways were roughly the width of Twizzlers. Making my way from one end of a plane to the other required acts of contortion that would tax a contortionist (another career path off the list!). Were I required to move around one of those planes in any kind of hurry there is a very good chance I would either fall out a window or wedge myself so securely into a crawlspace I would still be there today.
I'm not too disappointed, though. I'm not sure I'd want to be a World War II-era bomber crewmember anyway. I'm not even sure what you'd have to major in to get into something like that.

Lessons learned

You can learn a lot when you take a few days to do something as simple as drive halfway across the country. For example, you can learn there is a whole lot of space between the Twin Cities and the West Coast, and not a lot of stuff to put on it.
Much of that empty space is contained in North Dakota and Montana, two states that exist primarily as a place for the United States to keep prairieland it has no use for now but feels it might need later. Crossing Montana alone takes long enough that a good typist has time to conceive, write and edit a novel, three short stories and a typical Michael Bay movie.
I learned that while the average Montana city has fewer residents than a good-sized high school each city seems to have enough casinos to serve all of Las Vegas and then some. There are casinos on every corner, although each is roughly the size of a convenience store and offers little more exciting than keno and video poker. They have names that make them sound like they belong in the Old West (Lucky Lil's) or in James Bond movies (Casino Royale) and lighted signs on their walls that tempt would-be gamblers with payouts as big as $800. As jackpots go, Montana casinos rank somewhere between a good day at the track and a decent meat raffle.
Thanks to a billboard along the highway near Helena — it featured a photo of a child pointing a firearm at me and the message along the lines of, "If he doesn't trust God, does he trust you?" — I learned that if I do not teach my children about God they are likely to shoot me in the face. It's the most terrified by a roadside display since I was driving through Mississippi on the way home from my first year of college and saw three handmade crosses along the road along with a sign that read, "Prepare to meet thy God!"
I learned that in Miles City, Mont. — population 9,000 people and 700 casinos — it is possible to buy a home for $15,000. I also learned I have no actual interest in living in Miles City, Mont. Despite what the city's web site touts as its famous annual bucking horse sale. Although I know where I'm going next time I need a horse with a bad attitude.
I learned that sneaking stuff into Canada is probably a whole lot easier than sneaking anything back. The border guard who checked our IDs as we crossed the border going north couldn't have seemed less interested in the questions she was asking. I suspect I could have told her I had a trunk full of nerve gas and she would have shrugged it off and waved me through.
Coming back into the U.S. was a different story. By the time I got over the border headed south I was half convinced I was up to something.
I learned that Vancouver, B.C. is a nuclear weapons free zone. There was a sign that said so. That might actually explain the lax attitude of the border guard, now that I think about it. There's no need to search anyone for weapons when the city has an ordinance to take care of things.
I learned that life would be a lot easier if Canada would stop using that silly metric system. I can't tell you how much trouble I almost got in after we crossed the border and the speed limits went up to 120. Stupid kilometers. And can you imagine what a letdown it was when I realized gas prices were by the liter rather than by the gallon?
You could hear my cries of frustration for meters.
I learned it's good to have a responsive insurance agent. While I was vacationing in Whistler, B.C., I learned someone had thrown a large rock through the rear window of my car, which was parked in front of my home nearly 2,000 miles away (roughly 70,000 kilometers, I think). It was frustrating to be so far away, but one call to my insurance agent got everything taken care of except the vacuuming up of the broken glass.

And no leaving your blinker on!

Last week the Vatican's office for migrants and immigrant people issued what has become widely known as the Ten Commandments for drivers, a kind of Biblical appendix designed to make the world's roads safer and happier for everyone who uses them. Among other things, the decree issues warnings against drinking and driving and advises drivers to help others in the case of accidents.
According to the Vatican's web page, the June 19 announcement also covered pastoral ministry for the liberation of street women, the pastoral care of street children and the pastoral care of the homeless. That's right. Street children, prostitutes and road rage. The office for migrants and immigrant people has a lot on its plate.
At the top of the list for drivers is a Commandment that should look familiar to anyone with a working knowledge of either the Bible or old Charlton Heston movies: "You Shall Not Kill." The double-dipping seems unnecessary — and I can only assume bumped a much-needed prohibition against fuzzy dice and "Calvin peeing" stickers out of the top 10 — but apparently, the Vatican wanted to make sure everyone realized God doesn't look any more favorably on vehicular homicide than He does on other forms of murder.
Second on the list is, "The road shall be for you a means of communion between people and not of mortal harm." Honestly, this seems a little redundant after the first Commandment. I suspect the Vatican was padding its list here. To be fair, The Nine Commandments doesn't have quite the same ring to it.
My personal favorite Commandment, though, is number five, which reads, "Cars shall not be for you an expression of power and domination, and an occasion of sin." Apparently even God thinks Hummers are stupid.
I can only hope this Commandment also covers vanity license plates. At least the ones like the "5-7HEMI" plate — a reference, so far as I could tell, to the size of the driver's ... engine — that I saw Sunday on the back of a Jeep. I'm not sure if I was more annoyed that the plate was so boastful, that it was boastful about something so stupid or that the driver was going so slowly in front of me. I was seriously in danger of abandoning the courtesy, uprightness and prudence that Commandment three claims will help me "deal with unforeseen events."
Even more remarkable than the list itself, though, is the way it was delivered to the public. There were no stone tablets. Nobody had to climb Mount Sinai. The Vatican Information Service just issued a press release and news organizations spread the word around the world. Imagine how much hassle Moses could have avoided if he could have posted "Dude, God says not to look at your neighbor's wife that way" on his blog.
Some might think reading the Catholic church's new rules online lacks some of the drama of the old way of doing things, but I think this opens up a lot of doors for getting God's message out.
I'm looking forward to the day I can get the word of God sent to my phone as a text message. Cell phone etiquette seems like a natural first topic. You know, things like, "You shall trn off yr phone in movee thtrs." Or, "OMG! Dnt covet yr nghbrs ringtone! LOL!!!!"
Amen.

The messy reality of weight loss

People are willing to put themselves through a lot in the name of losing weight. They'll exercise until they're sweaty and red in the face. They'll try fad diets of all kinds — No bread! Cabbage soup! All pimiento! — as long as someone was persuasive enough to convince a publisher to put out a book about it. They'll even give up having full control of their toilet habits.
I'm basing this last claim on the introduction of something called alli, an over-the-counter diet drug recently given a big thumbs up by the federal Food and Drug Administration. Need proof that it works? That "a" in its name used to be an upper case letter.
According to the drug's web site (www.myalli.com, which, strangely, doesn't come up anywhere on the first page of a Google search), alli works by preventing your body from absorbing about a quarter of the fat you eat. That's the good news. The bad news, also according to the web site, is that using alli has a tendency to hinder a person's ability to control his or her bowels. Among the side effects listed: loose stools and "more frequent stools that may be hard to control" and gas with "oily spotting"
Oily spotting? So, I'll lose weight but my undershorts could end up looking like the paper towel you blot the bacon with?
Clearly this drug works. I'm losing weight just reading about it.
The drug's web site is full of useful instructions. For example: "You may not usually get gassy, but it's a possibility when you take alli. The bathroom is really the best place to go when that happens."
In other words, get somewhere nobody can see, hear or smell you, and fast.
The site also warns: "Until you have a sense of any treatment effects, it's probably a smart idea to wear dark pants, and bring a change of clothes with you to work."
I don't know about you, but when a drug makers make suggestions about wardrobe I start to get nervous.
Also, eww!
On the bright side, alli sounds perfect for anyone interested in reliving those diaper-wearing days of their childhood.
According to Fox News the FDA has dismissed claims from a group called the Public Citizens' Health Research Group that alli causes colon cancer. Honestly, though, I'm starting to feel like cancer is alli's most pleasant possible side effect.
The alli diet isn't just about popping pills and soiling yourself, though. Like any good diet these days there's a book that goes with it. According to promotional material, the book — called The alli Diet Plan — is a "doctor-designed plan to make the most of this blockbuster product's extraordinary potential." Presumably it includes helpful advice like, "Eat less fat and there's less chance you'll mess yourself when you least expect it." Or maybe, "Sure, dark pants are a good idea. But might I also recommend rubber shorts? They're hot and they bunch but they're totally worth it!"
Reports from users of the drug seem mixed. The web site Medical News Today shared a sampling of e-mails from its readers. Some were positive: "It is the only thing that has worked for my very obese patients who did not want surgery" or "If you stick to a low fat diet it works really well." Some were more neutral: "It cannot replace exercise and a good diet."
And others? Well, they were ... um ... discouraging? Unsettling? Queasifying? I don't know. You pick the adjective: "The drug forced me to avoid fatty foods if I wanted to keep my underwear clean. I lost a lot of weight." Or, "I had to give up as my underwear was soiled all the time."
The bottom line? alli might be great for the size of that bottom, not so much for the clothing you use to cover it.

Just call me Mr. Fixit

I am not what any reasonably observant person would call handy. Never have been. In junior high, my shop class bird house was so unappealing birds chose to go homeless, sleeping under tiny bird newspapers outside the school. The scale model wall frame I built might actually have been condemned. I don't remember.
For the most part, tools and I have an agreement. I don't try to use them to build or fix anything and they don't horribly maim me or anyone else unfortunate enough to be nearby when I attempt a tricky home maintenance task like installing a doorknob or replacing a light bulb.
I know this about myself and I'm generally OK with it. I have rarely had much urge to build anything. All of which makes a recent decision to tinker with an old bike especially puzzling.
I've had this particular bike, a Cannondale, since shortly after I graduated from college 10 years ago. It served me well for a few years, but I didn't care for it well and eventually, as I started to get more serious about biking I replaced it with something newer and lighter and all-around spiffier. The chain rusted. The gears rusted. It started refusing to shift in weather colder than about 80. So, I decided to strip those troublesome gears off, strip off everything related to shifting and rebuild the bike with a single gear.
The logic seemed sound at the time. If the project failed, I'd only have lost a bike I didn't ride anyway. If it worked, the bike would have new life as something on which I could cruise around town.
Plus, I'm pretty sure chicks dig guys on singlespeed bikes. Right?
Caught up in the excitement of the moment, I didn't give any consideration to my significant and well demonstrated lack of mechanical ability. I didn't care about little things like whether I'd be able to put everything back together again. I just wanted to start pulling things off the bike.
In fairness to me, the pulling-parts-off part of the job went pretty smoothly. Then again, I've never had a problem breaking things.
In retrospect, I probably didn't plan quite as well as I should have. None of the parts I ordered right off the bat seemed to work together. The chainring, that big gear wheel in the front of the bike that looks kind of like the disc weapons Xena, Warrior Princess used, was the wrong size for my pedals. New pedals were cheap on e-bay, but they didn't come with the right bolts to hold them to the bike. And nobody I knew seemed to have the right tools to either take everything apart or put it back together.
I never gave up, though. And after multiple online bidding wars, several trips to the bike shop for new tools and slightly less cash than it would have cost me to just by a new bike I had everything put back together.
Still, the completed project didn't exactly inspire confidence in the people around me. My brother said he wanted to be there the first time I rode the reconstructed bike. Not, I suspect, to share in my moment of triumph so much as in anticipation of the whole thing falling apart and me hitting the street face first the first time I tried to turn the pedals.
I chose not to invite him to the bike's maiden trip around the block. He would have been disappointed, anyway. Much to everyone's surprise, the bike held together. To my even greater surprise it has continued to hold up under the few short trips I've taken on it since.
The bike isn't fast. If my bike that replaced it is a greyhound then the newly be-singlespeeded Cannondale is, I don't know, a three-toed sloth. Only a lot heavier. It's like a cross between a three-toed sloth and a particularly lethargic moose.
That's OK, though. I built it. It stayed together. If only those snooty birds could see me now.

Much ado about nothing

I know way too much about people I don't know anything about.
Know what I mean?
OK, maybe that's not as clear as it seemed in my head. So, an example.
Take Anna Nicole Smith. I have never in my life made even the smallest effort to know more about Anna Nicole Smith. And yet I know she married some rich old dude. I know she died of a drug overdose and I know roughly a third of the world's male population claimed to have fathered her child. I don't know why I know this. I don't want to know this. And yet there all that information is, taking up space in my brain that could otherwise be occupied with things like the best way to grill a hamburger or an idea for a movie script that will make me millions. If the knowledge has to be Anna Nicole-related, couldn't it at least be something like the date when she first appeared in Playboy? That's information I could use.
Or, take Paris Hilton. I'm still not even clear why anyone knows who she is (something to do with a home movie?) and yet I know she went back to jail recently, and I know she was crying when she went. I know this at least in part because Newsweek dedicated most of a page to telling me about it.
I know Lindsay Lohan held a knife to a friend's throat. I know Nicole Richie is so thin it looks like someone wrapped a blanket around a coat rack. And I know Britney Spears has as much chance of getting through rehab successfully as I have getting Britney Spears' phone number. Fortunately, I also know enough about Britney Spears and her decline from the days when men around the world were having criminally lustful thoughts about her that I probably wouldn't want her phone number anyway.
Everyone wins, I guess.
These days, thanks the increasing options for sharing information with the world, it's not just the inexplicably famous I know way too much about. I also know far more than I care to about the explicably non-famous.
I realize that as a person who dedicates 600-some words each week to telling people whatever inane thought is on my mind (how I know too much about people, for example) I'm on shaky footing when I come out against blogs, but I'm doing it anyway. I know people I have blogs, or web logs. I read one regularly to keep track of a former co-worker who has since moved out of the state. But that's it. I don't need to know what some dude in Milwaukee thinks about the latest episode of American Idol, or about what some lonely blogger's cats did that was really cute.
Full disclosure: I made a page on MySpace, a social networking site where teenage girls and aspiring musicians share intimate details of their lives. I did it because I wanted to see if I could locate any long lost friends. I abandoned it almost immediately because I don't need the world to know my favorite color (It's blue!) or favorite band (At the moment it's the Hold Steady!) or my favorite kind of soup (I don't eat soup much!).
By the way, if you want to check any of this later, you can read this column on the Town Pages blog, areavoices.com/townpages. Oh, the irony.
Blogs are just the beginning, though. A new program called Twitter lets people provide instant updates via cell phone to tell people exactly where they are at any given moment. Sites like flickr let people share their photos with the world.
A recent study by five psychologists, led by San Diego State professor Jean Twenge, found that college students today are more self-centered than at any time since 1982. Twenge suggests that is due at least in part to the growth of technology like MySpace and YouTube. Young people assume that the fact they can share the intimate details of their life — or at least videos of them getting hit in the crotch — means other people are actually interested in those details.
We're not, of course. Unless knowing some random college student in Portland is a terrible dancer and has no shame can help me forget Paris Hilton has a dog named Tinkerbell. Then it might be worth it.

Words of wisdom

This being the graduation season there is no shortage of people willing to offer advice to the young men and women of America as they prepare to receive their diplomas. As commencement day nears for Minnesota high school students graduation speakers and newspaper columnists who never get asked to speak ,even though they would be totally awesome at it, prepare to share their wisdom, such as it is, with one more group of students about to head off to the real world. Or at least to college which, let's be honest, is only slightly more like the real world than that show on MTV where people spend all their time drinking and yelling at each other.
Live life to the fullest, graduates will be told. Aim high, speakers will advise. Always wear clean underwear and remember to call home, parents will admonish.
Words of wisdom come from all kinds of places this time of year. Places like the editors of the American Heritage Dictionaries, who recently released a list of 100 words they believe every high school graduate should know.
Some of the words on the list make sense. Nano-technology, for example. The science of really small things is an increasingly important part of everyday life, so it seems fair to expect high school graduates to at least know what it is. Plagiarize is a good one, too. It's important for college students to do their own work, so I guess students should understand what plagiarism is all about. Deciduous? Photosynthesis? Everyone knows discussions about trees and their ability to turn carbon dioxide into oxygen happen all the time in the hallways of college dorms.
It's a little harder to figure out why some of the other words made the list.
Take abjure, the first word on the list. It means to solemnly renounce, as in a belief. And while I realize college students change their views on any number of subjects, I don't see why they'd have to be so snooty about it.
Then there's expurgate, which the dictionary on my computer says means to remove material thought to be objectionable. This actually sounds like part of what I do in my job, but I think people would look at me funny if I started calling myself an expurgator. They might also start expecting me to pull this column out of the paper if they knew my job was to remove objectionable material.
I don't like the fact xenophobe is on the list, but that might just be because it's such a foreign-sounding word.
American Heritage Dictionary senior editor Steven Kleinedler calls the words on the list a benchmark against which students can measure themselves.
"If you are able to use these words correctly, you are likely to have a superior command of the language," he said.
That may be, but use them too often or in the wrong company and you are likely to have a superior wedgie, too.
With that in mind, I'd like to offer my own list of words and phrases every soon-to-be college student should know.
Ramen: A staple of any college student's diet. True story: A college friend of mine actually started yelling at a complete stranger after hearing him tell a friend he had no idea what ramen was. You don’t want to take that chance. Also acceptable: Easy Mac.
Nothing before 10: This phrase should be considered above all else when planning a schedule.
Snooze button: Understanding its proper use is important for any college student. It can be your best friend or your worst enemy.
Send money: Ramen and Easy Mac are cheap. Not free.
Priorities: There are a lot of distractions in college. Stay focused on what's important.
My computer crashed: Great for those nights when you're supposed to be writing a paper but Ferris Bueller's Day Off is showing on campus.
Good luck, graduates.

Crank up the tacky factor

Last May my father, my brother and I took a week and biked something like 430 miles from Hayward, Wis. to Mackinac Island, Mich.
In case you're not familiar, Mackinac Island, located in Lake Michigan, is best known for its lack of motorized vehicles — everyone gets around either on bicycles or in horse-drawn wagons — and for fudge, which is available in roughly every other shop on the island. The buildings all look like they could be made of gingerbread, the businesses are staffed primarily by people who move to the island for the summer and its economy is based primarily on the sale of candy, tacky t-shirts and any number of other things nobody actually needs.
It's a tourist trap, but in a vaguely classy, oldey timey kind of way.
This year, we decided to take things to a new level.
Last Friday morning the three of us drove to Red Wing and set off by bicycle to LaCrosse, Wis. and from there to Wisconsin Dells. The trip itself was scenic and pleasant. With the exception some of the worst navigation since Columbus tried to find a new route to Asia -- what was supposed to be two 100-mile days in the saddle turned into 110 miles on Friday and 123 on Saturday -- it was uneventful. The trip's end, though was anything but.
Mackinac Island is quaint in its tourist trappiness. Wisconsin Dells, on the other hands, is about as gaudy and in-your-face as a city of 1,200 people can be. It's like the Midwest's answer to Las Vegas, only instead of gangsters it appears to have been built by harried parents looking for ways to keep their kids occupied for a week every summer. It may be the only city in the world with more mini golf holes than permanent residents.
In recent years Las Vegas has tried to lure people with the addition of high-end shopping malls. My mom remembers the Dells primarily — and fondly — because it once had a store called Chenille world.
In Las Vegas they build giant theaters for dubious stars like Celine Dion. In the Dells they built a theater for magician Rick Wilcox.
Vegas has gambling and is a prime destination for a certain kind of bachelor party. The Dells has go-karts and would probably be a sweet place to have birthday party if you were, like, 8.
It's hard to know quite what to make of the Dells. Back before I hit puberty and had the patience to wait 10 minutes in line for a two-second waterslide ride I'm sure I thought it was really cool. Now that I'm too big to fit comfortably in a go-kart (seriously, I've got a bruise on my knee now) some of the shine is gone. I still enjoyed my three go kart races and my 18 holes of "adventure golf," but I was also happy to go back and read my book. I could have wandered through the shops downtown, I suppose, but a person really only needs so many "Female Body Inspector" shirts.
I think it's great a place like Wisconsin Dells exists — people all over the Midwest need a place they can drive with their kids for a summer vacation — I'm just not sure I need to go back there anytime soon.
It's hard to know how we’ll top this with our next trip. Although people have already started talking about Vegas. I suppose it's the natural next step.