What a chore

Every once in a while, mostly when I am not overly bothered by little things like financial realities, I think about buying a house. When I do, I often think about chores -- about mowing lawns and painting fences and fixing leaks and shoveling walks. The fact I find myself looking forward to these things is something I can only attribute to some form of early-onset dementia or the warning sign of diminishing mental capacity.
Clearly I have forgotten those years earlier in my life when I was pressed against my will into doing this kind of work. I mowed so many lawns growing up that they mostly blur into one long session either walking behind or sitting upon a mower. Sometimes I got paid. Sometimes I didn't. But did I ever actually enjoy it? No more than I enjoyed going to the dentist or smashing my head repeatedly into a concrete wall. And I've never enjoyed that much.
My only distinct lawn mowing-related memory involves snagging a lever on a riding mower in a volleyball net I had presumably left up in the interest of saving time. It is a story I remember mostly because it has been told frequently in the decade-plus since it happened, but the incident has been so warped by constant retelling that most people don't know the truth of it. If you believe my father, he came home from work to find the mower still running and me cowering -- apparently fearful of some violent retribution -- in a tree house.
The story is usually good for a few laughs, but makes some big assumptions. One, it assumes I was either so ignorant or so flustered by becoming ensnared I did not have my wits about me enough to turn the mower's key.
Second, it assumes the younger me believed my father placed such importance on the integrity of his volleyball net he was likely to punish me severely for foolishly befouling it with a riding lawn mower.
It's possible my father believes he was a more imposing figure than he actually was.
For the record, the lawn mower was turned off and I was inside when my father got home, most likely watching TV.
In any case, I'm not sure where these fond feelings about household chores originates, but the more I think about it rationally the more foolish it seems.
In recent week's I've had the chance to put these feelings to the test. Housesitting for a co-worker last month I was asked to water plants and mow the lawn. The lawn was not large and there was neither a volleyball net nor any other lawn-related games to impede my way. I won't claim it was difficult, but after walking behind that self-propelled mower for half an hour I found myself thinking less about the satisfaction of a job well done than about the wisdom of planting large wildflower gardens.
More recently, I offered to help as a sister, in an effort to keep water from seeping into her basement and collecting in a low spot that happened to be more or less under my desk chair, regraded an area along one side of her house. On Saturday and again on Monday we shoveled rocks, hauled dirt and put down plastic. My nephew helped from time to time. He picked up rocks for a while until a bug scared him away. Then he mostly climbed on the rock piles we had created and tried to rub his dirty hands in my hair.
It was hardly backbreaking labor, but it was hot. Especially on Saturday, when my efforts came after a 48-mile bike ride. The finished product seems to be making a difference, but I take no particular satisfaction in that. Mostly it makes me angry at a wall that couldn't even be bothered to keep out a little moisture. And there's nothing worse than getting mad at masonry.
I like to think things will be different if I'm ever doing this kind of work on a house I own. I like to think I'll take a kind of pride of ownership that will make me enjoy the neat-looking lawn or the leak-free basement I helped to create. More and more, though, I imagine myself doing these chores while thinking of all of the other fun things I could be doing. All of the books I could be reading. All of the bikes I could be riding. All of the reality television I could be watching.
Townhomes are pretty popular these days, aren't they?

We’ll always have Paris

When celebrity bubblehead Paris Hilton recently declared herself a generation’s iconic blond — comparing herself to figures such as Marilyn Monroe and Princess Diana — it was enough to spur at least one Time magazine reader to action. That reader wrote a letter declaring, in short, that Paris is not fit to carry those women’s night-vision handicams.
Now, a person could argue the merits of debating anything Paris Hilton says. Spending any amount of time considering anything that comes out of the “Simple Life” star’s mouth seems like it would be as stimulating as holding a three-day conference to discuss the merits of Coke versus Pepsi. Either way, you’re going to feel empty and a little bit gassy.
In this case, though, it’s especially foolish. Because in this case Paris might actually be right.
Trust me, it hurt to type that just now. Aside from her notable contribution to the “‘Stolen’ sex tape as publicity device,” boom of recent years, a notable accomplishment in its own right, I can’t see any value Paris Hilton has brought to this world. I’m vaguely surprised she was able to use the word “iconic” in the proper context.
But the letter-writer’s claim that Paris did not belong in the same category as Monroe or Princess Di because she lacks the “inner beauty” those women had overlooks one important factor: Paris Hilton’s generation is not about inner beauty. It’s about skin deep. It’s about judging books by their covers. It’s about Dancing with the Stars and Us magazine’s Style Watch.
Consider this: We live in a world where Paris Hilton, who in some bizarre circular fashion appears to be famous solely because she is famous, and who does not appear to have any discernible talent, has published a book. Even worse, we live in a world in which Paris Hilton has published multiple books and continues to appear in a regular television show. Worse still, it’s a world in which even Paris’ obnoxiously tiny dog has published a book. And people apparently are buying them. I’ll admit I haven’t read any of these books (I assume this puts me on an even playing field with Paris), but I can’t imagine people are buying them for their deep philosophical insight. Kant she ain’t.
America, it appears, is fascinated by Paris Hilton. I know this because I see her vacant, vaguely plasticine face everywhere I look. For crying out loud, I can’t even flip through Time without seeing her name.
Who better than Paris Hilton, then, to serve as the iconic blond of a generation of Real World-watching, American Idol-voting, Paris Hilton-listening (Oh, yeah, she’s got a CD out now, too. It’s as terrible as you might imagine and it’s got a cover of Rod Stewart’s Do Ya Think I’m Sexy.) Americans.
I find it somehow ironic that the letter in question appeared in an issue about high-achieving high school students choosing the right college for them.
Besides, are these other so-called blond icons the writer jumps to defend really so great? Sure, Princess Di did a lot of good. She appeared on more People Magazine covers than anyone in history, and there’s the whole landmine thing. But what else was she going to do? It’s not like she had to worry about the rigors of shooting a reality TV show and launching a perfume or going to, like, lots and lots of parties. Text messaging wasn’t even invented in those days.
And Princess Di had palaces full of servants to help her every day. Poor Paris only has mansions full.
I’m pretty sure Princess Di wasn’t even American, although she gets credit for inspiring Elton John enough that when she died he changed like, two words in his song about Marilyn Monroe to create a tribute to her.
I can’t claim any firsthand experience with Marilyn Monroe. I would have liked to have known her, but I wasn’t even a kid.
Based on what little I know, though, I see more parallels than differences between Marilyn and Paris. Paris has her sex tape. Marilyn had her appearance in Playboy, the celebrity sex tape of its time.
Paris Hilton has appeared in terrible movies. Marilyn Monroe appeared in several classic films, although it could be argued her acting played a relatively minor role. Be honest: is The Seven Year Itch a classic because Marilyn Monroe so thoroughly inhabited the role of “The Girl,” as imdb.com credits her, or because she was willing to let Billy Wilder blow hot air up her skirt?
In her defense, Paris Hilton has not died of a drug overdose. Yet.
And if she really wants to be the icon of this generation she won’t. She’ll die of a heart attack brought on by eating every meal at McDonalds and never exercising. And it’ll happen while she’s watching “The Biggest Loser.”

Raise your glasses

Beer is back.
At least, that’s what I’m led to believe by a story on the front page of last Saturday’s St. Paul Pioneer Press business section. American brewers, it seems, have found ways, through marketing and the introduction of new products, to lure back the fickle drinkers who — perhaps enticed by a desire to feel more sophisticated, perhaps drawn by an unhealthy attraction to corks — had forsaken beer for wine.
Frankly, I have a problem with this premise. Not with the idea beer is back, but with the suggestion it ever went anywhere. Temporary sales fluctuations aside, beer has always had an important place in American culture. Nobody goes to tailgate parties with a bottle of Chardonnay, at least not without risking serious injury or at the very least a sound mocking.
For the vast majority of Americans beer has never really gone away. And if LL Cool J has taught us nothing else, it’s that you cannot call it a comeback when someone or something has been here for years.
So, that’s my problem with the article. But brewers do not get off the hook entirely. Though none of them are related to sales figures or market share, I have had growing concerns with the beer industry. My problem is with the same new products this article claims have drawn beer drinkers back into the fold, and the advertisements with which they seem to be selling increasing numbers of them.
According to the article, American brewers have started to pitch their products as cooler, classier and, I swear, healthier. Because nothing makes a person feel more vital (or more high-society) than waking up the morning (or early afternoon) after enjoying a few too many Buds.
Brewers, it seems, would like us to believe beer has all of the same health benefits attributed to red wine. Although presumably without the smugness associated with buying an expensive port. Unless you’re drinking Guinness.
Take Michelob Ultra, a lite beer introduced a few years ago when Atkins-obsessed Americans were caught up in a frenzy of counting carbs. Though the anti-carb movement has died down some since people discovered Dr. Atkins was horribly bloated when he died, Michelob Ultra then and now has been marketed as a beer for active people. “Are you a runner?” the ads seem to ask. “A swimmer?” Then this is the beer for you. Apparently the beer’s reduced calorie and carbohydrate counts make it the next best thing to Gatorade. Never mind the reason many people run or swim or bike is so they can spare the calories involved in drinking beer that’s darker than the water in your average aquarium.
More recently, Budweiser has introduced something called B-to-the-E, a beer-based drink that features, according to the article, “sweet flavors, caffeine, ginseng and guarana, a Brazilian stimulant.”
In other words, Budweiser has come up with an answer to energy drinks such as Red Bull despite the fact nobody ever even considered asking them the question.
I saw a can of B-to-the-E a while back (the logo is a Budweiser “B” with a lowercase e hovering over it as though it’s some kind of alcohol-based mat notation) but couldn’t work up the nerve to try it. Beer was never intended to give people energy. It was created by the mythical beer fairies to reduce people’s energy level to the point baseball seems exciting. What’s next? Amphetamine-based sleep aids?
The beer world used to be so much simpler. The major American brewers made regular beer and they made lite beer. Most Americans drank one or the other and those who wanted something with actual flavor could choose a beer from a smaller brewery or find something imported.
Advertising, too, was simpler. Find an attractive woman or a washed-up sports figure or a cute dog — or better yet, all three — and put her or him or it or them into a commercial. Make it funny and show lots of cleavage (the woman’s not the former defensive lineman’s).
Let’s see the wine industry top that.

Let freedom fry

I can’t decide if this is good news or just plain ridiculous.
According to An Aug. 2 story in the Washington Times, the last two cafeterias on Capitol Hill to serve Freedom Fries and Freedom Toast have given the food items their French names back. In other words, the most childish incident of foreign relations-related defiance since our Founding Fathers voted to collectively stick their tongues out and go, “Thpppbbbbt!” at Parliament has finally ended a mere three years and four months after it began.
I’ll admit, the Freedom Fry issue fell of my personal radar a long time ago. If I’d bothered to think about it in the last three-plus years I probably would have imagined Congress, which presumably has more important things on its schedule, sheepishly put the French Fry signs back up around the time our President admitted there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Or perhaps when our Fearless Leader proclaimed from the deck of an aircraft carrier that our mission had been accomplished.
At the very least I would hope most legislators did their best to ignore the change over the past few years, asking cafeteria workers for plain “fries.” Or maybe just ordering potato chips — or even better, a nice fresh fruit plate.
In any case, I would never have imagined our nation’s leaders holding on to their hold-my-breath-till-I-turn-blue-style protest against French non-violence would stretch nearly the full length of a Presidential term. I don’t think even the raincoat-wearing serial killer in the “I Know What You Did Last Summer” movies held a grudge that long. And there have been at least three of those awful things.
None of the United States Representatives involved was interested in talking to the Times. A spokesman for Ohio Rep. Bob Ney, one of two Republican Representatives who called for the Franco-fryo-phobic change three years ago refused comment.
At the time he asked for the change Rep. Ney called it “a small but symbolic effort to show the strong displeasure of many on Capitol Hill with the actions of our so-called ally, France.”
French President Jacques Chirac reportedly responded at the time by vowing to personally head butt any American he encountered in France.
A spokesman for Michigan Rep. Vernon Ehlers, who chairs the committee that apparently has the power to change the names of the junk food our nation’s leaders snack on, told the times, “I really don’t see how this is a story.”
It is a story, though. Maybe this change is not as significant as some governmental decisions — naming blueberry Minnesota’s state muffin, for example — but it is a sign of significant changes in our country’s attitude toward the French. According to a Pew Global Attitudes survey conducted in June and cited by the Times 52 percent of Americans have a favorable impression of France. Last year that number was 46 percent and in May of 2003 only 29 percent of Americans thought the French were good for anything but making wine and surrendering to anyone who looked at them funny.
It is not clear why 48 percent of Americans still dislike the French but it is suspected that number is split nearly equally between people upset about France’s opposition to the U.S. invasion of Iraq and people who “just don’t get that whole Jerry Lewis thing.”
First, the United States and France work together to broker a cease-fire in the Middle East. Now we are once again willing to put their name on our fatty fried potatoes and egg-soaked breakfast breads.
That’s what I call progress.

The straight dope

Imagine if you will a press conference. Television cameras line the room, and photographers with still cameras are dotted here and there, all jockeying for the best position. Reporters, notebooks and tape recorders held at the ready the way an Old West gunfighter might clutch a Colt .45, sit in orderly rows, waiting for the action to begin.
A prominent athlete, his identity not important at this moment, approaches the podium. He speaks:
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for coming. I will make my comments brief.
There has been a lot of talk lately about drug use among professional athletes. Tour de France winner Floyd Landis, who clawed his way back into the tour and won the hearts of Americans desperate to hold onto the tour title in the post-Lance Armstrong era with an epic solo ride through the mountains was later found to have hormones more out of whack than an entire Spring Break’s worth of liquored-up frat boys.
Justin Gatlin, the Olympic champion and world record co-holder who can run 100 meters in faster than most Americans can get up from the couch has also been found to have unusual levels of testosterone in his system.
And for whatever reason a nation clamoring for answers continues to insist baseball star Barry Bonds’ gigantic party-balloon head is the result of something more sinister than a grossly overinflated ego.
Given these cases I want to take this opportunity to insist once again I have never taken banned substances to improve my athletic performance.
I see some of you have questions. I expected that. Please, though, let me finish and hopefully I will address most of what you want to ask.
First, there is the issue of my sudden weight gain. Yes, I am more muscular than I once was. I suppose three months is a quick span in which to add 115 pounds of muscle. But I promise you this weight gain is natural. I hit the gym three times a day to build this body. I am proud of the work I have done and to have you sitting out there at your press tables lined with donuts and hot dogs questioning my dedication to the sport I love offends me.
Also, while it is true doctors were recently unable to puncture my skin with a needle to draw blood I maintain this is due solely to a naturally callousey skin, not to the effects of any illicit substance.
Second, I’m sure many of you are curious about rumors I produced a blue sample during a recent surprise urine test. This is true, though I believe claims the vial could have lit Yankee Stadium are exaggerated. At most the glow from the sample was powerful enough to serve as a nightlight. Possibly a desk lamp.
Let me assure you, there is nothing unnatural about this sample. My nutritionist has simply had me on a food-coloring-heavy diet. Also, I really like blue raspberry freezie pops. That coloring simply worked its way into my system. It is all entirely natural.
There have also been some concerns about my recent behavior. I admit some of it has been unorthodox and there are incidents I am not proud of.
Yes, after a recent win I ripped the head off of the opponent’s mascot and screamed obscenities at the 16-year-old girl inside. I am embarrassed by my actions in that situation. It is 45 minutes of my life I wish I could have back. But I was excited. It was a big game and I lost control. I apologize, but I promise you I am in full control of my emotions.
Yes, I occasionally run, naked and screaming at the top of my lungs, through the streets of our fair city. Is there something unreasonable about this? Can a man not express himself in the way he sees fit? Shame on you for trying to cage my joy.
Finally, yes, I have recently grown this second head. Trust me, this is not as unusual as it seems. Second heads are currently all the rage in Europe. Soon people everywhere will be growing second and even third crania. Just you wait.
I hope I have answered these concerns to your satisfaction. I promise I will continue to defend myself against these unjust charges for as long as they are leveled against me. I only hope this media speculation does not do further harm to the sport I love so much, curling.

Vote now! Win fabulous prizes!

I’m hardly in a position to criticize other people’s voting habits. Before the 2004 Presidential election I had never cast a ballot in an election more significant than college class president. I might have voted once on the color of a new M&M, but I can’t be sure. In any case, I have yet to see any polka dot M&Ms.
I can’t defend my voting record. It’s not that I felt my vote wouldn’t matter. It’s more that I could never quite motivate myself to really get to know something about the candidates and thus didn’t qualified to involve myself in the process. At least that’s what I told myself when it was time to get off the couch on Election Day.
I’m not sure what could have convinced me to get more involved in the process, but a measure currently being promoted in Arizona might have made a difference. According to the New York Times, an Arizona man named Mark Osterloh, whom the Times describes as “a political gadfly,” and a “semiretired opthamologist,” would like to include a measure on the November ballot that would, if approved, establish a kind of voter lottery that would award $1 million to a randomly selected voter following every general election.
Osterloh’s slogan for the proposed measure is, “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Vote!” But awful slogans aside, Osterloh makes some fair points. Voter turnout in recent years has been as low in Arizona as it has been, well, everywhere else in the United States. Anything that can increase that number, Osterloh reasons, is a good thing.
The money from the prize would come from unclaimed state lottery money. Which, of course, raises another interesting question: If people in Arizona are too lazy to claim a collective $1 million worth of lottery winnings, can we really expect them to take the time to vote? In their defense, though, it’s pretty hot in Arizona.
According to the Times, 2 million people voted in Arizona’s 2004 general election. If Osterloh’s measure had been in place then each voter would have had a 1 in 2 million chance of winning. That is significantly better than the roughly 1 in 146 million chance people currently have of winning the Powerball but, as the Times helpfully points out, not nearly as good as the 1 in 55,928 chance they have of dying from a lightning strike at some point during their life.
For further comparison, according to the national safety council, a person’s lifetime odds of being accidentally poisoned or exposed to “noxious substances” are 1 in 212 and the odds of dying in a streetcar accident are 1 in 931,246. According to my father, the odds of finding a typo in this column are roughly even.
Osterloh’s plan is not perfect, of course. Some critics have complained that turning the electoral process into one massive $1 scratcher somehow cheapens the idea of democracy. People, they say, should vote because they feel a sense of civic responsibility, not because there is a small chance they will hit the jackpot and finally be able to get those gold teeth they’ve been thinking about.
Also, it’s probably illegal.
According to the Times, one federal statute calls for a one-year prison term for anyone who “makes or offers to make an expenditure to any person, either to vote or withhold his vote, or to vote for or against any candidate; and whoever solicits, accepts, or receives any such expenditure in consideration of his vote or the withholding of his vote.”
Osterloh, though, is undeterred. The lawyer who helped him draft the proposal told the times he didn’t think “federal law would cover this kind of situation,” though he declined to say why, exactly.
I’m torn on this issue. I don’t think people should be bribed to vote, and I don’t think it would lead to people getting more informed before they went to the polls.
I am, however, in favor of winning $1 million.

Superstalker?

Dear Superman,
Can I be honest for a second? You can take it, right? You’re the Man of Steel after all.
It’s just, well, I’ve never really liked you. I guess that sounds a little strange, you standing for Truth, Justice and the American Way, and all. It’s just never really worked for me.
I’m not sure what it is, exactly. It’s just, you’re too … perfect isn’t the word. Nobody with that fashion sense can really be described as perfect. I’ll never be a Vogue model, but even I know the underwear goes on the inside. And knee-high leather boots? What kind of kinky things do you get up to in that Fortress of Solitude? America’s ultimate Boy Scout? I don’t think so.
I guess you’re just a little too much to take. Spider-Man has to live with the belief he’s responsible for his uncle’s death. The X-Men are persecuted by an entire society. And you? As far as I can tell your biggest problem is making sure nobody figures out that when Clark Kent takes off his glasses he looks a whole lot like you. You don’t have any weaknesses. Nobody can even hurt you unless they happen to find some rocks from your home planet that happened to cross the Universe and end up on Earth. I mean, how many of those can there really be lying around.
You’ve even got that cool forehead-curl thing in your hair. Do you know how much I’d give to be able to make my hair curl like that? Actually, not all that much. But it’s still pretty cool.
Anyway, now you’ve got this new movie. And it’s pretty decent. We get to see you flying around and catching a falling airplane and it’s pretty great to see how people react when they realize you’ve come back to them after five years away. Even though nobody seems to put together the fact that you and Clark disappeared and reappeared at the same time. First the glasses thing and now this? There was a survey recently that showed Minneapolis residents were among the most educated in the country. I’m not sure anybody in Metropolis even finished high school.
But, like I said, the movie’s pretty good. Lex Luthor’s one of the best villains around even if it’s never entirely clear how he’s going to stop people from just taking the land on this new continent he’s creating. Or why they’d even want to live someplace that looks like the surface of the moon would look if it were slightly less hospitable. The movie was worth the price of admission, is what I’m saying.
But it raised certain uncomfortable questions. What, I have to ask, is the deal with all the stalking?
I realize you missed Lois Lane. Love of your life and all. And it probably got pretty lonely in those five years you were flying around looking for the remains of your homeworld. But hiding in the trees outside Lois’ house and using your x-ray vision to check out what’s going on inside? That’s just creepy. The movie never shows you looking in on anything inappropriate, but come on — what’s the point of having x-ray vision if you’re not going to put it to good use. Am I right?
Seriously, get over it. There must be tons of Super-groupies out there.
And sneaking into the kid’s room at the end? I know Lois seemed OK with it, but come on. That’s a Michael Jackson move. You’re better than that.
While we’re on the subject, I have some other issues related to your relationship with this kid. But some people probably haven’t seen the movie yet and I don’t want to give anything away. I just hope saving the world pays well because I think you’re going to have some checks to write.
So, where does this leave us, Superman? I know it probably hurt to hear some of these things. I know we’ll probably never be friends. But I hope you understand where I’m coming from. I hope you lay off the stalking thing. And maybe ditch the cape, too. I mean, what does that thing even do?
Regards,
Nathan Hansen

Tall tales

I am six feet, six inches tall.
This is significantly taller than average.
I understand this.
There are certain advantages to being tall. I can usually reach things on the high shelves, for example. And I hardly ever have to worry about someone sitting in front of me in a movie theater.
There are also certain disadvantages. Like having to search the Twin Cities to find pants that fit. Or having to find a car with enough headroom. Or always having people ask me to get things off of high shelves for them.
Many tall people get asked by complete strangers if they play basketball. I used to get annoyed when this happened to me, but it seems to happen less often these days. Maybe it’s because I’m starting to look old enough that even if I had once played basketball bringing up the subject no would at best cause me to tell long-winded stories about the time I made the winning shot at the section tournament. Or maybe people have finally realized that typical basketball player has a physique that’s a little more Charles Atlas and a little less Charles Darwin. (I write this, obviously, assuming the man who popularized the theory of evolution is not particularly buff and that he couldn’t even dunk on a nine-foot rim. Although I hear he had a quick first step and a great crossover.)
Whatever reason, the basketball questions have for the most part gone by the wayside. In their place, however, is a conversational tactic that I find perhaps even more confounding. More and more, people I have just met feel the need to make conversation by explaining that they have a friend (or a relative or a dentist) who is also very tall.
I’m honestly not sure how I’m supposed to react. Should I feel better about myself if they know someone who is very tall but not quite as tall as me? Should I feel threatened if they know someone who is, say, six-eight? Should I simply feel better knowing I am not the only unusually tall person in the world? And if that’s the case are those comments really necessary considering the existence of the National Basketball Association?
Do people do this in other conversations? When they meet someone who is especially short, do they say, “Oh, I know a guy who’s a jockey”? When they meet someone who is heavyset do they say, “I know a guy who’s on a diet”? When they meet someone unattractive do they say, “I know former Minnesota Timberwolf Sam Cassell”?
Do people who tell me about their uncle with a glandular problem expect me to say, “Oh, sure. Chuck. I saw him the other day at the tall guy’s club.”?
I don’t have any answers to these questions. I never know where a conversation should go after a comment like this. But I will tell you this much: I really like the idea of a tall person’s club. We will have high doorways and extra long couches for when we want to take naps. We will give each other extra-high fives and laugh dismissively at guys who are shorter than five-eight.
And maybe, with enough thought, we’ll figure out what to say the next time someone tells us their podiatrist is six-nine.

The sharp, glassy edges of reality

A few weeks ago I used this space to assert my theoretical superiority to every other bicyclist on the road. As long as I am safe in my car, I argued, I believe I am faster than anyone I see riding.
In the absence of objective proof, why should I give some other sucker the benefit of the doubt? Sometimes, though, reality rears back and smacks you down like broken glass puncturing a tire.
For me, one of those broken glass moments came last weekend.
On Sunday afternoon I drove out to Stillwater to watch the final stage of the Nature Valley Grand Prix, a five-day bike race that also had stages in St. Paul, Cannon Falls, Minneapolis and Mankato. The final stage was roughly 25 miles and the leading riders finished it in about an hour. So, you have a pretty good idea what kind of speed they were going.
The race course one short, very steep hill. According to the race’s web site the hill is a 24 percent grade. By way of comparison, the site explains, federal law does not allow highways to have a grade steeper than 6 percent. In other words, this particular hill is at least four times as steep as any highway you’ve ever driven on. At just a couple of blocks long it’s the next best thing to a wall.
The course also has a long downhill, this one several blocks in length, that runs from down the bluff into downtown Stillwater. It’s not as steep, but racers approach 50 miles per hour on the way down, then immediately whip into a 90 degree corner, never appearing to slow down or even consider that they are one slick spot from ending up stuck to the side of a building.
These racers are not the best of the best. They’re professionals, but they’re like minor league baseball players or golfers on the Hooters tour. They travel around the country, put in hours of practice and make very little money but they’re doing something they love to do. They are trying to earn their way to bigger things and some of them make it, but most have reached their highest level of competition. They can dream all they want about becoming the next Lance Armstrong, but they’re more likely to be the cycling equivalent of a star player for the St. Paul Saints.
They don’t even get to compete in events with cool names like “The Hooters Tour.”
Every one of them could kick my butt.
It’s not easy for me to say that, but while I haven’t actually raced the course these guys competed on, I can’t argue against what I saw. Mostly, that was a blur of brightly-colored jerseys whipping past me on both sides.
I’m not the greatest hill climber in the world. At six feet, six inches tall I carry too much weight to make riding up mountains a sensible thing to do. I’m pretty sure, though, that the racers who competed Sunday would gain more time on me on the downhill part of the Stillwater hill than they would on the up. To put bike handling ability in automotive terms, they are exotic, highly-tuned Italian sports cars while I am more like a school bus.
Fully loaded.
Pulling a semi.
With flat tires.
In other words, while they were zipping around the corner and heading back toward the uphill, I would be somewhere in the middle of the downhill, squeezing my brakes in a death grip and rethinking my decision to save a few bucks on discount tires. I don’t want to sound like I don’t trust my bike to hold up, but I weigh somewhere around 210 pounds and my bike weighs between 15 and 20. I’m just saying it seems like a lot to ask. It’s not a bet I’m willing to make with the good health of my skeletal structure.
So, yes. I’ll give these guys the benefit of the doubt. I will admit the professional bike racers who dedicate hours to their sport are faster than me. It hurts, but it’s the truth.
I’m still pretty sure I’m faster than everyone else, though.

Improving the world's game

The World Cup started last week. Around the world, soccer fans are on edge as they follow their team’s fortunes. Countries are declaring national holidays so their citizens can stay home and watch their team’s games.
Meanwhile, in the United States, people are wondering why it’s taking so long this month to the golf highlights on SportsCenter.
It’s no secret soccer’s in the United States has a popularity that ranks it somewhere in the vicinity of lawn bowling and dwarf tossing. Every time the subject comes up — essentially every four years during the World Cup — Twin Cities newspaper columnists renew an argument against the game that has been going on at least since I played soccer in high school. This time around, one actually suggested liking soccer was just a few steps removed from burning the flag. “We’re Americans,” the message seemed to be. “We know better than to like that silly no-hands game.”
Ask them and Americans will give several reason for their dislike of soccer. A nation raised on the thrill-a-minute pacing of baseball does not believe the game is exciting enough. A country where fans frequently celebrate sports championships by turning over cars and starting fires tut-tut over the soccer hooligans who celebrate their team by fighting with the hooligan fans of rival teams.
Admittedly, there have been reports of Polish fans trying to schedule fights against rival fans. I don’t condone the violence, but it’s nice to know it’s so well scheduled. Although presumably the Poles would be wary of an planned brawl German fans, though.
Granted, soccer is not the easiest game to watch on TV. It’s hard to appreciate the individual work players do without seeing them up close, but it’s hard to appreciate the tactical aspect of the game — the reasons a team would pass the ball all the way back to its own goalkeeper when the goal is to get the ball in the net at the other end of the field — without a wide view.
Our sports do not lend themselves to moving backward, and it’s not a notion we accept readily. A runner would never voluntarily move back a base in baseball and a football team would never give up a sack just because it gave them more plays to choose from. About the closest we come in this country is a center in basketball passing the ball out for a three-pointer. But in Minnesota, home of the Timberwolves, even that must seem like a foreign concept.
I could argue the merits of soccer as a game, but that has been done before. Americans have their arguments and there isn’t much soccer fans will ever be able to do to convince them the game the rest of the world adores might be at least as entertaining as a rerun of According to Jim. Maybe what we need to do is find ways to make the world’s most popular game more appealing to the American public. With that in mind, I propose the following:
• At halftime, the team that is behind has to eat a tub of cow intestines.
• Two words: alligator pits.
• Every 15 minutes, someone gets voted off the team.
• Replace referees with women in striped bikinis.
• Speaking of scantily-clad women: where are the cheerleaders? How are we supposed to take a sport seriously when there are no dance squads? Come on, Sweden. Bring out the bikini team!
• Miss a shot, do a shot.
• Come on, you can use your hands just a little bit, can’t you?
• Is it too much to ask to have an occasional fight? And how about some kind of car crash?
• Two more words: exploding ball.
• No more letting goals decide the results of games. From now on, America votes. Think South Korea played the better game? Text your vote to 3845. Think Togo deserves the win? Text 3846.
I’m not sure any of this would actually be enough to make soccer appealing to the average American fan, but I’m pretty sure it’s a step in the right direction. If you disagree and would like to fight about it, please call to schedule a time.

Lessons learned

Things you learn when you ride your bicycle 450 miles in five days:
1. Bringing an extra chain is a good idea.
2. The farther you go, the bigger the hills get.
3. There are more ways than you would expect to sit on a bike seat.
4. Number three really doesn’t matter, because by the middle of day two sitting on a bike seat hurts no matter how you do it.
The last time I wrote a column for this space I knew it might very well be the last time I ever wrote for the Independent. As that newspaper arrived in mailboxes around Farmington, I was on my way with my dad and my brother to Hayward, Wisc., to begin a bike trip that in less than a week would take us across northern Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to Mackinac Island, a city that exists solely to fill tourists with fudge and caramel corn. In five days of riding we covered distances of 95, 89, 93, 83 and 68 miles. This is what happens when my family plans vacations after a few drinks.
I didn’t know what to expect from the trip. I’m comfortable riding my bike long distances, but I didn’t know how I would feel riding so far so many days in a row. And there were some trying times. There was a while toward the end of a hilly, windy third day when I started mentally divvying up my earthly possessions (a disappointingly brief exercise, at least when we’re talking about things anyone would actually want) and wondering whether my riding companions would roll me into the ditch or just leave my body on the shoulder after I collapsed. Other than that, though I felt pretty good.
Even better, thanks to big breakfasts and bigger dinners I managed to burn all of those calories without actually losing any weight. That’s when you know you’re eating well.
We rode through a lot of remote forests, but we didn’t exactly get back to nature on this trip. With my step-mother and my brother’s girlfriend meeting us at our hotel at the end of each day, the closest we got to roughing it was staying in a bed and breakfast the fourth night and not being able to watch TV.
We all made it through the ride in pretty good shape. I broke my chain 93 miles into the first day’s ride, requiring me to walk the remaining two miles to the motel and forcing our support crew to spring into action a day earlier than they planned. They drove late into the night to meet us with a replacement. My brother broke his crank somewhere along the way, but that wasn’t as painful as it sounds and he was able to finish without any other major problems.
We were even lucky with the weather. While my co-workers back in Farmington dealt with a broken air conditioner in 90-plus degree weather, I was riding my bike in temperatures that never got much above 80. There were occasional threats of rain, but even the thunderstorm that greeted us on the morning of the fourth day cleared up early enough for us to ride and provided a nice tailwind for most of the day. Altogether we rode in the rain for about 15 seconds.
I don’t know that I’ll be in a hurry to try a bike marathon like this again anytime soon, but it’s at least nice to know I’m capable of doing it. Next time, though, I’m bringing a cushier seat.

A Rhose by any other name...

Until you’ve tried to identify kids for a picture that will run in a newspaper, it’s hard to understand just how many ways there are to spell what otherwise seems like a straightforward name. For every Erin, it seems, there’s an Aerin or an Aryn. For every Justin there’s a Juston or a Justyn.
Things seem to get more difficult the younger the children are. I can imagine a day in the near future when I will take a picture of a group of smiling fourth grade students and not know how to spell a single child’s name.
“What’s your name?” I will ask the first girl.
“Taylor,” she’ll say.
“OK. Taylor,” I’ll say, writing in my notebook.
“That’s T-A-E-Y-L-O-R-R.”
“Um, OK. And you?”
“I’m Zachary.”
“Zachary?”
“Z-A-K-K-E-R-Y.”
“Really? And you?”
“Matthew.”
“Well, that one’s easy.”
“M-A-T-T-H-U-E.”
“No.”
“Yep.”
“I’m Ashley.”
“And how do you …?”
“A-S-H-S-L-E-I-G-H.”
“Ash-slay?”
“The S is silent.”
“Of course it is.”
There is some fundamental aspect of baby naming I just don’t understand. I realize parents want their child to have unique names, but things seem to be getting out of control. We live in a world with Madelines, Madelyns, Madelinns and, for all I know, Maddelyinns.
The unique spelling trend seems to be most common among girls, but there is enough of it on both sides of the gender gap that that on the Social Security Administration’s recently released list of Minnesota’s most popular boys’ names for 2005 there were entries for both Aidan (No. 38) and Aiden (49), Caden (69) and Kaden (79).
Maybe it’s because I work with words, but I’m all for predictable spellings. Someone I know recently named his baby girl Maya. It’s a unique name. Before she was born the only other Maya I’d heard of was a character on the mediocre sitcom “Just Shoot Me,” although I’m not sure that’s a ringing endorsement. But the name was spelled exactly how I would expect it to be spelled — like the people who built all those pyramids in Mexico — not with vowels and consonants placed willy-nilly to serve as linguistic landmines to otherwise well-meaning journalists just trying to do a job.
I don’t understand how certain names become popular, either. Some parents name their children after relatives, but I can’t imagine there are enough young girls being named after Grandma Destiny to account for that name’s popularity (No. 90 on the list, apparently setting the stage for a large influx of exotic dancers in Minnesota sometime around 2023). There are hardly any baby Margarets these days, a fact I blame mostly on the negative portrayal of Margarets in the Dennis the Menace comic strip. The first Kayla I ever knew was a Farmington High School student who mentored with me a couple of years ago. Now every third elementary school girl in the United States is a Kayla. How does that happen?
According to a story in Tuesday’s St. Paul Pioneer Press, the hottest name for girls these days is Nevaeh, at No. 55 last year on Minnesota’s baby names list and apparently climbing like a monkey on amphetamines. The name is “Heaven” spelled backward and is pronounced nuh-VAY-uh, which mostly makes me think of lotion.
What might be most frightening, though, is the story gave at least part of the credit for the name’s popularity to the fact a member of the Christian rock band P.O.D. named his own daughter Nevaeh, a fact he apparently revealed on the MTV show “Cribs.” In other words, America is taking it’s baby-naming tips from a show where mid-level celebrities show off their cars and swimming pools. And, apparently, their newborns.
When I mentioned the growing popularity of Nevaeh to someone in my office he threatened to name his firstborn son Lleh. I would never go that far, although might name one of my children Yrotagrup, which I would of course pronounce “Frank.”

It's a going thing

There are certain things a person has to know when he chooses a place to eat. What is the menu like? How’s the food? What are the prices? And, last but certainly not least, how’s the can?
For too long, public bathrooms have been a hit-or-miss affair. Often literally. But no longer. Thanks to Minneapolis-based web site restroomratings.com, diners can find out in advance the quality of water closets from St. Paul to Seattle to Sao Paolo.
The site is flush with toilet reviews. By my quick estimate, the site currently features reviews of close to 460 toilets worldwide, including one for Minneapolis restaurant Yummy! that features an unsettling capsule review that reads, simply, “Yummy!”
The site reviews public bathrooms of all kinds, from restaurants to parks to gas stations. So, the next time you’re cruising through Breezewood, Pa. with a need to make a pit stop you’ll at least know the Shell station has a bathroom that is, according to the site, “Nothing to write home about, but decent enough to poop on.”
Don’t say you never learned anything from this column.
I have no idea, aside from the obvious cleanliness issues, what makes one bathroom superior to another. I found the facilities at El Meson, a restaurant where I ate dinner a few weeks ago, entirely ordinary. But the site’s reviewer gave it an eight out of 10, claiming it reflected the restaurant’s “rustic textures of a quaint Spanish villa.” Having spent limited time in the bathrooms of Spanish villas, I am forced to take them at their word. The cramped and generally uninspiring men’s room at The Chatterbox Pub, one of my favorite places to have a drink, got good marks for the cartoon characters painted on the walls.
I have never found a Taco Bell bathroom inspiring in any way, but one of the fast food chain’s restaurants got credit for its “sturdy and satisfying lock.” A toilet in New South Wales, Australia got bonus points because most of the water used for flushing is snow melt. And while the bathrooms at the Uptown Theater in Minneapolis lost points for being dirty and having stalls that are “uncomfortably close to each other,” it benefitted for a certain undefinable hipness.
On the flipside, the toilet at Afton State Park lost points because someone had, um, used the urinal for the wrong kind of relief. Actually, that ones is pretty easy to understand.
While I haven’t had time to thoroughly review the site, the capsule reviews for bathrooms can range from disturbing (One for Pizza Hut in Mauston Ill. gets, “Well kept place to eat and poop.” Eat? Really?) to odd (Pizzaria Uno in Phoenix, Ariz., gets, “Beware of crouching dwarves.” I have no idea what that means.) to predictable (The Phi Tau fraternity house in Hanover, NH gets, “Eewwww, just eeewww,” yet still somehow scores a six in the full review.).
The site has gotten its fair share of media attention. In a 2004 Pioneer Press story, Ami Thompson, who founded the site with her husband, Jon, explained the project began when she complained during a car trip that it was impossible to know which bathrooms were suitable for use. Making the decision where to stop, she told the reporter, was a crapshoot. I can’t be sure, but I choose to believe she intended to make a pun there.
Most of the reviews also feature pictures, although that presents certain issues. Some people, you might be surprised to know, do not take well to people taking pictures in the bathroom.
“If there’s a crowd, I plan my escape,” Jon says in the Pioneer Press article. “I’ll take a photo and run out so people don’t think I’m a pervert.”
This raises an interesting question: Are you more likely to consider someone if they snap a picture of a toilet and run out or if they take a photo, hang around and comment on the feng shui of the toilet stall? I have to imagine it’s a tossup.
Either way, we owe the Thompsons a debt of gratitude. In a world filled with disgusting bathrooms, it’s nice to have someone there to tell us where to go.

Do I make you angry?

Benjamin Franklin gets a lot of press for being one of this country’s Founding Fathers, or for tying a key to a kite during a lightning storm or for inexplicably supporting the wild turkey over the bald eagle as the symbol of the United States. He gets far less attention, it seems, for his role in the early development of American newspapers.
Maybe it’s because I was out of the country the year most students in my high school studied American history, or maybe I just never paid much attention, but until last weekend I knew next to nothing about Franklin’s role as a newspaperman. He did not publish the country’s first newspaper, but his Pennsylvania Gazette, which he founded after ending an apprenticeship with his older brother, James, is, according to Infamous Scribblers, Eric Burns’ history of the beginnings of journalism in America, one of the first respectable publications in the country.
I mention this because, according to Burns, Franklin published an essay in 1731 that does a pretty good job of defining the role of newspapers from the Washington Post to the Farmington Independent. He intended it, he wrote, to be “a standing Apology for my self.”
As quoted in Burns’ book Franklin asked those who disagreed with or were angered by something he printed to consider the following:
“1. That the Opinions of Men are almost as various as their Faces….
“2. That the Business of Printing has chiefly to do with Mens Opinions; most things that are printed tending to promote some, or oppose others.
“3. That hence arises the peculiar Unhappiness of that Businesss ... they who follow printing being scarce able to do any thing in their way of getting a Living, which shall probably not give Offence to some, and perhaps to many; whereas the Smith, the Shoemaker, the Carpenter or the Man of any other Trade may work indifferently for People of all Persuasions, without offending any of them….
“4. That it is unreasonable in any one Man or Set of Men to be expected to be pleased with every thing that is printed, as to think that nobody ought to be pleased but themselves….
“8. That if all printers were determined not to print any Thing until they were sure it would offend no Body, there would be very little printed.”
In other words, Franklin told his readers that if they read his newspaper long enough he was bound to make them mad. The same can be said of this newspaper. At least, I hope it can.
Maybe I should clarify: It is never our goal to make our readers angry. That would be irresponsible and unprofessional. But with so much happening around us we are bound to touch on some sensitive subjects.
Our readers, we hope, have opinions about things like the site of the new Farmington High School or the superintendent’s contract or the state of business in downtown Farmington. And while we believe our news reporting is free from our own opinions and as balanced as possible, there are bound to be items that hit a nerve with one reader or another.
Cover enough sensitive subjects, and we are certain to upset one person or another. It is not something we strive for, but neither is it something we can shy away from and still believe we are doing our jobs to the best of our ability.
So, yes. Sometimes we make people mad at us. We know there are readers who believe we cover some subjects too much and others not enough. Sometimes those readers let us know how they feel. More often, they don’t.
We don’t mind the criticism. We wouldn’t last long in this business if we did. But too often small-town newspapers have a reputation for being the Polyannas of the journalism world: focusing on good news to the exclusion of anything that would rub someone the wrong way and serving always as cheerleaders and rarely as critics. We believe on balance our pages contain more good news than bad, but we also believe we cannot shy away from the bad when it is there to be reported.
I guess what I’m asking is, the next time you read something in this paper that really gets your blood boiling, stop for a minute and think of Ben Franklin’s message.
If that doesn’t work, imagine how ridiculous a turkey would look on the back of a dollar bill.

Large and in charge

I understand that at six feet, six inches I am taller than the average person.
It’s hard to get asked on a nearly weekly basis if you play basketball without starting to suspect something your dreams of becoming a jockey are best put behind you. Although, for a long time I convinced myself as I wanted to believe people were seeing in me some as-yet untapped natural athletic ability. It’s an thought few people who have ever seen me perform an athletic activity would understand.
I don’t typically think of myself of tall. It’s not until I get right up next to other people that it occurs to me, hey, I can tell whether they’re starting to go a little bald on top.
I don’t know that being tall has ever really been good for much beyond guaranteeing I can always reach things on high shelves or have a good view at concerts. Mostly, it’s created challenges. Over the years I’ve gotten really good at ducking. And it’s always been hard to buy clothes. You try finding a pair of pants with a 38 waist and a 36 inseam. It’s like looking for a four-leaf clover or the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow or the real O.J. killers.
Still, for years I’ve resisted shopping at so-called big and tall stores. I’m not sure why, exactly. I guess I just didn’t like the idea of being singled out to shop at a special store just for abnormal people like me.
Lately, though, I’ve been looking for a new sportcoat. As near as I can figure, I need a 46 extra long, another size that does not exist in nature. After a few fruitless attempts, I decided it was time to give the big and tall world its opportunity. Approaching the store, located in a perfectly nice-looking shopping center, I started to feel like I should be wearing a trenchcoat and sunglasses and looking around to make sure nobody recognized me.
I should have known the store would be trouble the minute I walked in. The first thing I saw was a shirt that, while it seemed stylish, would have been big enough to power a competitive America’s Cup yacht or get the Kon Tiki across the Atlantic. There were pants big enough to serve as windsocks at most major airports. It quickly became clear the emphasis in the typical big and tall store rests much heavier, so to speak, on the first part of the name than on the second.
Extra wide seemed to be a much higher priority than extra long in the sportcoat section, and the selection of pants appeared to start at a waist size of about 40 inches. In the big and tall section at JC Penny I found a pair of pants with a 54-inch waist and a 30-inch inseam. Outside of Humpty Dumpty, I have no idea who those pants would fit.
I’m starting to worry there might be a problem with obesity in this country. Has anyone ever looked into that? It might make a good subject for some kind of investigative report.
I’m not sure what to make of my first big-and-tall shopping trip. My circuit of the store didn’t last more than five minutes, so I didn’t have much chance to form a strong opinion beyond, “Who are these people and why don’t they eat more salad?” I’m not sure whether I should feel good my uninformed opinion of big and tall stores fit so neatly with my slightly-better-informed opinion or bad because even the stores that claim to be made for me can’t even come up with my size.
Mostly, I guess I’m just glad I don’t need pants with a 54-inch waist.

The wheel deal

I have come to realize that getting moderately serious about biking has made me both more and less tolerant of other bikers.
On one hand, I support all other bikers. I want other people to get out and enjoy this hobby. I want them to have fun and get fit and spread the word to all of their friends. Just so long as they don’t weave like Billy Joel leaving a party when I try to pass them.
This is the hand that makes me look good. It’s the hand on which I am an ambassador for goodwill among the bicycling community. Unfortunately, compared to the other hand it is small and withered not all that appealing. It’s like the Strom Thurmond of theoretical hands. On the other, much more robust, hand there is a long list of bike-related pet peeves.
Most of these have to do with types of bikes. In roughly ascending order I am annoyed by:
• Tandem bikes. I suppose there are situations where these are of use. Like when two fugitives find themselves chained together in a comical fashion, or when you’re courting someone in the 1920s. Mostly, though, I find them ridiculous. Ride your own bike. Show a little independence. This is America, after all.
• Recumbent bikes. Again, I realize there is a use for these. Some people have back problems and can’t ride a regular bike without horrible pain. They get a pass. Still, if you have to put a flag on your bike so cars can see you, we’ve got a problem.
Recumbents also seem more likely than other bikes to be modified in some unspeakable ways. I have seen recumbent bikes encased in aerodynamic fiberglass shells. It’s like watching an egg bike down the street, only without the possibility of a giant omelet.
Then there’s the tandem recumbent. I have seen these, but I refuse to acknowledge their existence.
And still, none of these is as bad as:
• The tall bike. Have you seen these? Apparently here is a certain subset of the Twin Cities bicycling community that has decided it is a good idea to weld one bike frame on top of another. Riders have to climb on top of cars or walls or tall friends to mount them, and I don’t want to think about what happens if they have to stop suddenly. Essentially, they have created the Paris Hilton of the bicycle community: kind of intriguing at first glance yet awkward-looking and vaguely useless the more you think about it, relying more on unique looks than actual usefulness to get attention.
I try to be accepting. But when I see someone riding a tall bike, I mostly feel like pushing them over. Which, now that I think about it, is actually how I feel pretty much every time I see Paris Hilton, too.
Maybe this all makes me sound petty and elitist. I don’t think that’s the case, though. Biking has changed the way I look at the world. I pay more attention when I drive. I watch out for bikers on the road. Although when I see them I’m mostly thinking about whether I’m faster than they are. Usually, I figure I am. I’m pretty sure if I saw Lance Armstrong and his entire team rolling down the road, as long as I was safe in my car my first thought would be, “I could take ‘em.”
Confidence is important, I think.
There is one final issue I want to address today, and it’s going to take a little explaining. It goes back to tandems, and who should be riding them. I made some jokes about this earlier, but there really are situations where tandems are acceptable. If one member of a couple is really into biking and the other isn’t, I’m open to tandems as a compromise. The biker gets his or her partner to go along for the ride and the non-biker gets to make his or her partner look ridiculous. Everyone wins. I think they’re also nice for parents and their children.
But they are never acceptable for two dudes.
This isn’t a homophobic thing. I think two men should be able to do just about anything they want together. They can get married as far as I’m concerned, or compete in doubles luge. But ride a tandem? That’s just a little too weird.
Two women on a bike, though? Everyone knows that’s hot.

This one's for the peeps

I need to take a moment here to wish everyone out there a very happy Easter.
I realize I might well have just offended half of my reading audience. To those four of you, I apologize. But I’ve never backed away from controversy. If there are hard things to say about frog guns or turkey funerals or flaming mice, well, I’m going to say them.
So, yes, I’m taking a stand. I’m speaking out about the removal of holidays from our public lives. I’m pretty sure I’m the first one to do this. At the very least I imagine I’m the first to do it while also talking about frog guns.
On the surface it sounds a little strange to talk about the elimination of Easter. Most stores are currently filled with egg-themed decorations and marshmallow candies shaped like bunnies and birds. Families everywhere will be up to their rabbit-ears in chocolate for months to come.
But those are all commercial components of the holiday. They will be around for as long as there are people in the world willing to decorate their yards with six-foot tall inflatable eggs. What I’m talking is far more disturbing.
That’s right. More disturbing than giant inflatable lawn ornaments. Can you imagine such a thing?
The city of St. Paul made the news recently when it removed Easter decorations from its offices. The fear, as I understand it, was that the display — presumably Easter Bunnies and eggs and not Jesus on the cross — would offend non-Christians. Meanwhile, nobody seems to worry who might be offended by those “I can only please one person today ... today’s not your day” signs that seem to be in nearly every government office I’ve seen.
The whole thing is a little bit ridiculous, although it has the benefit of leading to one of my favorite political statements of all time, in which people piled marshmallow peeps at the base of the stately Vision of Peace statue at St. Paul city hall. It was a kind of peeps-ful resistance, I guess.
According to the St. Paul Pioneer Press, one protester added a sign renaming the statue, through the Easter season, “Vision of Peeps.” I haven’t been so entertained by a sign since the impromptu memorial a couple of years ago to the turkey that lived along Pilot Knob Road.
Last Saturday, the city of Rosemount held its annual egg hunt. It was not, parks and recreation officials were clear, an Easter egg hunt. It was just a chance for Rosemount kids to gather and scrounge in the grass for plastic eggs filled with toys and candy. It’s the kind of thing that I’m sure takes place year-round in some communities. The fact Rosemount’s hunt took place just a week before Easter was a coincidence, I guess.
I don’t see what the problem is with Easter. My churchgoing experience has mostly been limited to the occasional performance in my youth as a member of the St. Croix Valley Boy’s Choir, but that never stopped me from enjoying a hunt for brightly-colored eggs or kept me from eating a piece of candy. Although I always felt a little guilty eating the chocolate rabbits.
If other religions want in on the action, that’s fine with me, too. If Hallmark can find a market for Ramadan cards or Yom Kippur gift baskets, then so be it. More fun for everyone.
Our holidays are being taken away from us one by one. First, we weren’t supposed to wish anyone a Merry Christmas. Now we’re losing our only major bunny-based holiday. What’s next? Will we be forbidden from putting up handprint turkeys at Thanksgiving?
I realize Thanksgiving isn’t actually a religious holiday, but I couldn’t think of any good jokes about Ash Wednesday.
I think this is a dangerous path we are on. The more we worry about being entirely correct in all situations — about not offending anyone in any situation — the more we will foster a backlash against that kind of behavior. And when that happens people start mistaking being “politically incorrect” as being entertaining. Then terrible television shows like “The War at Home” turn political incorrectness into a marketing campaign. And if “The War at Home” wins, we all lose.

Making tracks

At the end of February, desperate to get away from an apartment with a collapsing ceiling and non-functioning light fixtures in two rooms, I rented a room from my step-sister.
So far, it’s working out pretty well. The rent is a lot cheaper, getting to work is easier and I don’t have to worry about getting hit on the head by falling chunks of plaster. It’s pretty much good news all around.
The new living arrangement also means I share the house with a dog, a semi-dopey black lab mix named Sophie, and my 4-year-old nephew, Mackinley, whose mother would probably not appreciate it if I described him as dopey. I don’t think even semi-dopey would go over very well.
I like both Sophie and Mackinley a lot — honestly, I’d missed living in a house with a dog — but both present certain challenges I’m not used to dealing with.
Sophie is probably a little easier to deal with. She can be a little pushy, and some of my clothes are more covered with dog hair than they have been in years. But if she ever gets to be too big a nuisance I can always let her outside to run around in the yard for a while. My step-sister made it very clear after the first time that is not an acceptable solution with her son. In my defense, it was only raining a little that day.
Living with a 4-year-old has introduced me to skills I never realized would be so important in day-to-day life. I’m still developing the ability to step around toys on the floor, for example, but it’s getting better. With Mackinley, that mostly means threading my way around the large, elaborate train tracks he sets up in the living room.
Mackinley is crazy about trains. He loves Thomas the Tank Engine, a children’s series with surprisingly bad animation and creepy trains that think for themselves yet still for some reason have people driving them. In the time I have lived there he has watched his Thomas movie (specifically, Thomas and Friends: Making Tracks to Great Destinations, a name I know only because that’s how Mackinley refers to it every single time he mentions the movie) more times than I have seen any movie in my life.
Spend any amount of time around him and there is a good chance you will be asked — although “asked” might be too mild a word for this particular circumstance; instructed is maybe better — to “play trains.” Mostly, this means working on the track while Mackinley runs his Thomas toys back and forth. Mistakes made while playing trains — there are more ways to mess up than you might expect — bring swift and fierce corrections.
Playing trains with my nephew also frequently means being witness to terrible tragedies. In the weeks I have shared a house with him I have seen enough plane and train crashes to occupy the front page of USA Today for months. Although, for all the collisions and collapses, there seems to be very little loss of life. Even the plane full of kids that crashed into the ocean one day seemed to be having a fine time living underwater. If Mackinley weren’t too young for it, I’d suspect he had actually crash-landed a plane full of Snorks, the deep-sea Smurfs rip-off that had their own cartoon for a while when I was a kid.
It’s a good thing, I guess, because there seemed to be discouragingly little interest in mounting a rescue effort.
Living with Mackinley has also broadened my music knowledge, albeit very slightly. Thanks to my nephew, I now have two songs — I have no idea what they’re called, but one is about clocks and the other one is about broccoli — permanently burned into my mind. That kind of thing can happen when you listen to the same song about 20 times a night. From time to time I’ll find myself sitting at my desk and singing — usually in my head, thankfully, “No, don’t give me that broccoli.” It’s a little unsettling.
This new living arrangement takes some getting used to, I’ll admit. On the bright side,though, I’m better than ever at putting together train tracks.

It's Madness!

This time of year always reminds me why I don’t spend more time covering sports.
Like millions of Americans, I filled out a bracket for the NCAA basketball tournament that started last week. Actually, I filled out four. Each one was slightly different, and yet, improbably, after just four days of games each one was somehow equally wrong. I picked upsets that didn’t happen and didn’t pick the ones that did. I picked a team for the national championship game that lost in the first round. I’m not sure how it happened, but I think I might have picked one team that didn’t actually make the tournament and another school that I don’t think even has a basketball team.
None of it was pretty, but none of it was particularly surprising. I have a history of poor performance in tournament pools. My family has held a friendly competition since 1993. I have won just once, and I have the lowest cumulative score over the 14 years of the competition. And while my brother holds the honor of recording the lowest single-year score, I have the next-lowest score. And I’ve gotten it twice.
(A quick side note here: I just rattled off a whole lot of statistics about a competition that has been going on since I was in high school. I am able to do this because my father has tracked every year’s bracket in an Excel spreadsheet. He can tell you how any individual family scored in a given bracket, how many points a family member scores on average, even, I think, what each family member tends to eat while watching games. My dad’s kind of a dork.)
I’ve developed a reputation over these years of competition. It’s what my brother, as he looked over my picks for this year, called my “crazy-ass” upset pick. It’s a proud tradition that dates to the year, early on in the competition, that I picked Ball State to go to the Final Four. For the record, this year’s “crazy-ass” pick was 14th seed South Alabama over third seed Florida. For the record, Florida will come to the Metrodome this weekend to play in the Sweet 16. For the record, South Alabama won as many games this year as Ball State did the year I picked them. In other words, the Vegas sports books are not clamoring for my services, although they might like me to place a few bets.
I don’t know how to explain such consistent poor performance. I try to pay attention to college basketball. It’s one of the few sports in which I have more than a passing interest. I consider the brackets carefully. I try to play things safe with the occasional crazy-ass exception. And yet, year after year, I end up with a bracket that might as well have been filled out by a blind hermit who has never seen a basketball game and is unfamiliar with the entire bracket concept. Even the year I won my family pool was one of the worst years for scoring overall. This might start to get discouraging after a while.
There’s always next year, though, and I can feel my luck starting to turn around. I think South Alabama is going to bounce back strong.

The journalism game

I never studied journalism formally, but if I’d known there might be opportunities to play video games, I probably would have given the idea some more serious consideration.
The University of Minnesota’s journalism school recently turned a heavily modified version of the online role playing game Neverwinter Nights into a teaching tool for its students. Early on, students in the U of M’s Information for Mass Communication class played through a scenario that still had lava pits, editors who looked like ogres and librarians who wore breastplates, but more recent versions feature a version of the typically medieval-themed game updated to look like a modern city. In it, students must gather information about a train crash and hazardous chemical spill in the fictional city of Harperville. There are dozens of characters to interview, and a library filled with online resources.
"We know that students today are used to interactivity and that they don't like to sit still in lecture classrooms being 'fed' information," Kathleen Hansen, a U of M journalism professor, said in an article posted on the school’s web site. "What we don't know is if educational gaming is going to be an effective method of enhancing conceptual mastery of subject matter or complex processes.”
When conducting interviews with characters ranging from retired railroad engineers to hospital workers, in-game reporters can choose from four conversation options, each with a different level of assertiveness. Come off as too much of a jerk, and the subject will end the interview.
Some people might think it’s strange using a fantasy-based game to teach future reporters real-world skills. But when you consider how many people think journalists make up most of their stories, it starts to make a little bit more sense.
At least one other part of the simulation seems to fit well with the public’s opinions of journalists, too. Scenario designers had originally wanted to have a crowd of characters hanging around at the scene of the accident, but a bug in the program meant that any time the reporter approached a group of characters he was immediately attacked and killed. And people wonder why reporters drink.
Using computer games for something other than simple entertainment is not an entirely new idea. When I was in high school we used a flight simulation program that consisted solely of planning a destination and picking a route, then watching to make sure your never-seen plane didn’t crash. It was really boring, but it taught me ... actually, I have no idea what it taught me. Or what it was supposed to teach me.
There are more successful examples, though. More sophisticated flight simulators are used to train real-life pilots, and the United State’s military uses versions of popular first-person shooting games to help train soldiers in tactics. There are plenty of other options, too. For example:
• There are several good Indiana Jones games out there. These seem like ideal training tools for budding archaeologists?
• The two main characters in the Super Mario Brothers games are plumbers. Couldn’t these games be useful to a trade school somewhere looking for a way to teach its students how to deal with the killer turtles and walking mushrooms found in sewer pipes?
• There is a game out there called Crazy Taxi. This seems pretty self-explanatory.
• Dancing games, in which players stop on specific parts of a floor mat at appropriate times, are very popular these days and seem like an ideal tool for training future generations of professional cheerleaders or possibly music video backup dancers.
• Classic game Burger Time could be useful to fast food workers everywhere — especially as portions get so large they might actually reach the point making a cheeseburger will involve running up and down ladders and jumping on top of giant hamburger buns.
• Tetris, the maddeningly addictive puzzle game that involves stacking falling blocks, could be useful for warehouse workers.
• And, of course, future spies everywhere could benefit from a few good games of Elevator Action.

An open letter to Bill Cosby

Re: Your sense of humor.

Mr. Cosby, you are undoubtedly a funny man. Your comedy routines about parenting and ... um ... Jell-o, I guess ... will go down as some of the greatest of all time. You have made great contributions to the history of television, from Fat Albert and his friends to I-Spy to young kids being coached to say slightly inappropriate things. Your "Cosby Show" allowed NBC to create the Thursday night Must See TV block that it uses to this day to shove crap like "Joey" or "Will and Grace" down our throats.
Actually, I have mixed feelings about that last one. I can't give you all the blame for "Union Square" or "Four Kings", but I feel like you deserve at least some of it.
Your movie career has been less distinguished, although no less notable. I don't recall hating Ghost Dad, although I admit I was young when I saw it and might not have known any better. In its defense, it appears to have been directed by Sidney Poitier. I'll admit I didn't see that coming when I looked the movie up on IMDB. They call me Mr. Ghost Dad.
I'm not sure I've ever seen Leonard Part 6. but I can't imagine it's as bad as everyone says. If nothing else, it has given us years of hilarious jokes. Seriously, what happened to parts 1-5? It never gets old!
I don't bring all of this up simply as an excuse to practice my linking skills. I bring it up because I'm concerned. When did the sense of humor disappear? When did you lose the ability to take a joke? When did you become the cranky old man yelling at kids like the people behind House of Cosbys to get off of your metaphorical lawn?
Granted, House of Cosbys is a silly little thing. It's sophomoric and stupid and crude. But it's also kind of funny. I mean, at least a little. I mean, seriously: a remote compound filled with superpowered Cosby clones? It's worth a chuckle, at least. And despite what you claim in your Cease and Desist letter it doesn't besmirch your name any more than "The Cosby Mysteries."
Is this really the way you want to be remembered? As the humorless old coot who can't take a joke anymore? As the formerly funny man who is now best known for drugging and assaulting women? Maybe it is, but before you answer I want you to ask yourself one thing, and I want you to consider it carefully: What would Mushmouth do?
I'll leave you with that.
Thank you for your time.
Nathan Hansen

Isn't it romantic?

I’m not trying to suggest women’s ideas about romance are unrealistic, but have you seen romance novels lately? According to the Feb. 27 issue of Time magazine, the hot new trend in the genre is vampires. Apparently there’s a big crossover between fans of the X-Files and fans of poorly written, vaguely obscene literature.
I don’t know how to react to this. I could handle women getting excited about a shirtless Fabio. I could at least understand that, even if I didn’t understand his particular beefy appeal and happened to take great pleasure a few years ago when a goose smacked into the hunky Italian’s face as he rode a rollercoaster.
But this? If I’ve got this straight, the women of America are fantasizing in large numbers about men who are interested in sucking the life from their bodies. And despite what television sitcoms would have us believe about men being stupid and lazy, I’m not sure any of us is ready to go toe-to-toe with the undead in that department.
I’m not saying women should be fantasizing about plumbers or janitors or newspaper editors, but undying minions of evil? What’s the appeal?
“I think  vampires are very dark, and women have a tendency to want to save them,” Christine Feehan, whose vampire romances regularly sell more than half a million copies, told Time by way of explanation. I don’t buy that. These are vampires we’re talking about. They don’t stay out too late or drink too much or forget to call from time to time. They plunge their teeth into people’s necks and turn them into bloodthirsty creatures of the night. That seems downright antisocial.
Meanwhile, in the real world, women get upset when men leave the toilet seat up.
It’s not just vampires, either. These books are also about shape-shifters and werewolves, even though I have to believe the shedding would be a major turn-off in real life.
There are all kinds of other unrealistic fantasies out there, too. A few years ago someone described to me a romance novel that involved a Viking warrior being transported forward in time – in the mouth of a magic killer whale, no less – and finding tender, passionate love with a modern woman. It’s a nice story, but I think it ignores some pretty commonly held wisdom about the general temperament and hygiene habits of the typical Viking. Not to mention the time travel ability of the common orca.
This isn’t an isolated example, either. Apparently modern women are so fed up with modern men they have created an entire genre of time-travel romance novels. A woman named Tess Mallory has written a trilogy of novels about a Highland warrior transported backward and forward through time. I have no idea what else happens in the books, but I really enjoy the claim in one reader’s review of Mallory’s “Highland Dream” that “Another problem arises when Jamie shows the girls his ansestral (sic) sword.” Isn’t that always the case?
In another book, called “A Blast to the Past,” a modern American explosives expert is transported to 14th century Scotland by the explosion of an “unidentified device.” There, he is mistaken for one of Braveheart’s soldiers, finds love with a young, widowed healer and finds the ingredients to create black powder. According to a Booklist summary on Amazon.com, the book “will appeal to readers who can’t enough of romances set in Scotland featuring a protagonist from the present.” This is a demographic I worry about.
Actually, I think we should be encouraged in some ways by the ability of ancient people’s to so readily adapt to modern conveniences like electricity and flush toilets. Apparently, even when they find themselves in a strange place surrounded by cars and skyscrapers and McDonald’s apple pies they’re still all about finding a solid, long-term relationship. Love really does conquer all, I guess.
Earlier in this column I laid these romantic fantasies at the feet of women. I suppose it’s possible men read these books, but I doubt it. I don’t think men’s fantasies are ever that involved. All we need is a few risqué pictures of Jessica Alba and Scarlett Johansson and we’re set.
Now that’s realistic.

A shocking photo

A few weeks ago I wrote about getting Tasered. Here's a photo, courtesy of the Farmington Police Department.

Men in tights, men in caves

I can’t think of any good reason I would ever need a hastily researched, 12-year-old essay on the origins of the Robin Hood legend. And yet, as I discovered over the weekend, I have one.
I found the essay, which I wrote for an English 101 class my freshman year of college, in a box tucked away in one of my closets as I made a half-hearted attempt to get ready for a move next weekend. As a result, I find myself suddenly a little better informed on, among other things, Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, gender roles in Alice Munro’s “Boys and Girls,” and the role alcohol played in three novels I have no clear recollection of ever reading. It’s a little bit like I imagine Milli Vanilli or Ashley Simpson must feel every time they hear a song they supposedly recorded.
The essays themselves aren’t particularly informative. Plato might be a little disappointed to learn the best an 18-year-old me could come up with to discuss his allegory about enlightenment is, essentially, “learning is hard,” but I try not to get too worked up about bad reviews from anybody wearing a toga. And it was still at least mildly interesting to see what my writing was like back then. Honestly, it’s not as bad as I might have guessed.
I certainly had a predilection for using song quotes in my younger days. Nearly every essay I found is either titled with a quote from a song I happened to like at the time or uses one between the title and the opening lines. Some of them had both. My essay on “The Legend and History of Robin Hood” begins with a quote from the REM song “Superman.” The essay about the Allegory of the Cave, which is, at least on the surface, about dragging people out of a cave and into the sunlight, is titled with a quote from the Matthew Sweet song “Looking at the Sun.” Although now that I think about it, given the message of the essay, maybe the Pink Floyd line “We don’t need no education” would have been more appropriate.
As you can see, I was really clever back then.
I was also big on superheroes. In one essay I compared Robin Hood to modern comic book heroes like Spider-Man and Batman. And while writing about Bede’s “A History of the English Church and People” made an argument by creating the character of “Super Bishop.” So, clearly I had a pretty broad view of literature.
The writing itself is, aside from a few awkwardly worded passages and some evidence of really halfhearted proofreading, surprisingly not horrible. I’m not sure why I thought it would be — I got good grades on all of the essays — but when I look back at some of the earliest stories I wrote for this paper it’s painful. I just assumed this would be the same.
Take this passage from the Robin Hood essay: In this difficult time, when peasants lack even the most basic of fights, they need a hero to rally behind.” If you can ignore the similarity to a Tina Turner song, that’s not entirely bad.
On the other hand, there’s this description of the Sheriff of Nottingham: “He is the evil man, enemy of all that is good. He is a bad man who must be struck down by the goodness of Robin Hood.” Even the writing in Keanu Reeves movies isn’t that overdone.
The feedback isn’t all positive. On an essay that starts “Isn’t there some old saying, something along the lines of ‘Hell hath no fury like a Greek guy scorned?’” the professor accused me of being too flippant.
It’s good to see I’ve grown out of that.

Do you have the time?

Apparently, I'm behind the times when it comes to telling time.
I've been looking for a new watch lately. I like the one I have, but it's starting to look a little worse for wear. The crystal is cracked, and the gold plating on the case is starting to look a little rough after something like a decade of use. Like all of us, it's just plain getting older.
I don't need anything flashy. I'm a newspaper editor, not a rapper. I don't need the bling. Just something simple that looks good. I've found a few things that are close to what I want, but nothing that's exactly right. At least not for less than $1,000.
But now I lean the fact I'm looking at all means I'm about as with it as MC Hammer.
According to a Dec. 23 article in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, none of the cool kids wear watches anymore. They all keep time on their cell phones and iPods. Watches, they say, are good when you want to dress up for fancy occasions but not for much else. Like tuxedoes and underarm deodorant.
"I have the cell phone, and it's all I use to look at time," 21-year-old Nathan Hoeppner told the Journal-Sentinel reporter. "It would be a duplication of time devices if I would wear a watch."
Another person quoted in the story referred to a friend who regularly wears a watch as "a dork."
I can think of several good reasons people wouldn't consider me cool. For example, I'm a 31-year-old white guy who just used the word "bling." I just don't think regularly wearing a watch is one of them.
I'm not sure what disturbs me more: that people think watches are obsolete and uncool or that I'm giving any real weight to fashion advice from people who live in Wisconsin.
In any case, I disagree with the idea watches have outlived their usefulness. And it will take a lot more than a bunch of Wisconsinites in their teens and early 20s to convince me watches are uncool.
Except for those digital watches with the calculator built in. Those are pretty dorky.
Other watches, though, have a lot going for them. I've worn a watch nearly every day since probably junior high school. The one I'm wearing now was a gift to replace a watch that fell off my wrist at a concert. I found it after the crowd cleared out — plus one other watch — but both had been trampled beyond repair. Before that, I wore a series of unremarkable watches, most of them probably digital. Now, I don't think I'd feel quite right without one. And while most people already probably think I'm not quite right, I'd at least like to feel normal myself.
I like watches, and I don't care what a bunch of punks hanging out at some Milwaukee mall have to say. Being able to tell time is nice, but it's only part of the appeal. I've gotten used to the feel of one on my wrist, and I like the way they look. I like the idea that mechanical systems invented more than 100 years ago are still useful in at least one small way. And I like the idea of all those little pieces working together to keep something resembling accurate time.
There's a metaphor in there about society and everybody working together, but I'm afraid commenting on it would make people think I'm an even bigger dork.
It's true I can probably keep more accurate time on my cell phone, which sets its clock according to the signal it gets, or on my iPod, which resets itself every time I plug it into my computer. But neither one feels quite as satisfying as using a watch. Besides, I don't take my iPod with me everywhere I go and I think I'd feel too much like a Star Trek character checking his Tricorder if I pulled out my cell phone every time I needed to know whether I was going to be late for an appointment.
The expert consulted for the story, mall watch kiosk manager Chuck Reardon, said business has suffered due to the lack of interest among young people in using watches to tell time. He holds out hope, though, that yet-to-be invented high-tech communicator watches "like (in) Dick Tracy" will renew interest in watches as functioning timepieces. I wish him luck, but I'm not sure a 75-year-old comic strip is really the thing to appeal to the kids.
I don't know what the future holds for watches. And I guess I don't care all that much. As long as I can find something that works for me it doesn't matter if the rest of the world thinks I'm a giant dweeb.
You know, more than they already do.

Eat, drink, be (a little) merry

The other day, as a group of people from our office sat around at the Minnesota Newspaper Association Convention, one of my co-workers announced that one of her goals in life — or at least in her current job — is to see me get really, really drunk.
This concerns me for a number of reasons. First, and probably most important, it makes me worry I’m working with people whose priorities in life are questionable at best. Are people around here really that starved for entertainment?
Second, it puts a lot of pressure on me. The way I see it, at some point I’m going to have to decide between either drinking too much and acting foolishly or disappointing a co-worker. I hate the idea of letting people down, but frankly, with a few notable exceptions, I have never drunk to excess.
At least not since I graduated from college. But that was New Orleans. That doesn’t count. I’m pretty sure drinking is required there.
(Kids, I’d like to take a moment here to point out you really shouldn’t drink alcohol. It’s bad for your liver and it causes you to make questionable decisions — things painting large cartoon cats on your wall, as someone I know once did, leading police on a high-speed chase while pantsless, as a man in Denver did, or, like British man Tony Alleyne, going broke turning your apartment into a replica of Star Trek’s Starship Voyager. Although that last one would probably require more than just a one-night drinking binge.)
I really don’t have many good stories about drinking too much. The first time I had too much I threw up on a friend’s socks in the lounge of our dorm. In my defense, though, there wasn’t much in my stomach at that point and I’m pretty sure I’d loaned him the socks, anyway. The last time I had at least a little too much was a few weeks ago. That night I apparently agreed to bike 500-some miles from Hayward, Wisc., to Mackinack Island, Mich. with my dad and my brother.
Like I said, alcohol can impair your ability to make rational decisions.
There are probably a few other stories in between, but nothing I need to share with the general public. And certainly nothing I need to tell my mom, who I imagine is already preparing the appropriate disapproving look for the next time she sees me.
I don’t mean to suggest I’ve matured beyond the point in my life where getting falling-down drunk is a good time — mostly because I continue to argue I am no more mature now than I was 10 years ago — but maybe that’s not all that far from the truth. Maybe as I get older having one or two drinks too many has more of an effect on me than it used to. Or maybe I’ve just decided that acting foolishly is just as easy sober as it is after a bunch of drinks. Cheaper, too.
Besides, there are too many risks to overindulging.
I don’t want to end up like US Olympic skier Bode Miller, who caused some controversy when he admitted showing up for competitions after tying one on. I’m not sure I see what the problem is. If I were going that fast down a hill I’d want a little bit of buzz, too. Besides, with a name like Miller he’s created a perfect promotional opportunity in the beer industry.
I also have to be careful for the sake of my job. Because our company’s insurance policy requires a clean driving record, getting arrested for a DUI would cost me my job. And anyway, I know enough police officers around here I wouldn’t want to be pulled over for something like that. They’ve already Tasered me once, and they may just be looking for an excuse to do it again.

Truth, trust and flaming mice

As a reporter, I like to believe everything printed in the pages of a newspaper is true. It is part of the trust between a newspaper and its readers, that we will do our best to report a story fully and accurately and that you, after reading that story, will use the pages on which it appeared to line the bottoms of your bird cages.
Still, sometimes it's hard to know what to believe. There has been a disturbing number of stories in recent years about reporters who fudged facts and in some cases simply made up stories. New York Times reporter Jayson Blair is the best-known example, but I have my doubts about Dear Abbey, too.
Then there are the stories that are so fantastic you want to believe them no matter how hard it might be.
Take my favorite story of recent weeks. It is perhaps the best tale of revenge since the nerds taught the Adams College jocks a thing or two with an improbably well-produced talent show number. It comes from New Mexico, and it involves a flaming mouse setting fire to the home of the man who first trapped him, then threw him in a pile of burning leaves. Really, how can you go wrong?
As reported on CNN.com, the story began with an 81-year-old man named Luciano Mares. Mares, it seems, had a mouse problem. And he did what just about anybody with a rodent infestation would do. He set traps.
Mares told reporters he caught this particular spiteful mouse in a glue trap Jan. 7. When he couldn't get it unstuck, he threw the mouse, trap and all, into a pile of burning leaves in his yard. The fire melted the glue. The flaming mouse scampered back into the house - possibly screaming, "vengeance" in a high-pitched mouse language as it ran - and set the house on fire. The house was destroyed.
"That dang mouse crawled in there," Mares reportedly told the media from the hotel where he was staying with his nephew. "I have an awful hate for those critters."
Frankly, who can blame him? If a flaming puppy had burned down my house, I'd think twice before my next trip to the pound. Even if the puppy was really cute.
If the story had stopped there, it might have been the best news story of the year. But then, a few days later, Mares changed his mind. The fire, he said, was the result of high winds, not revenge-minded vermin. I'm not sure I've ever been more disappointed.
And if the story had ended there, well, it might have gone down as one of the biggest disappointments of the year, somewhere close behind the Super Bowl that will be played a couple of weeks from now.
But then, the very next day, Mares changed his story again, this time back to his original story. Yes, he said, it really was the mouse.
And apparently this time he really, really meant it.
For the record, Fort Sumner fire chief Juan Chavez, whose department responded to the fire, believes Mares' original story. According to CNN.com, the department's record of the fire will include the mouse-related incident as the cause.
I don't know what to believe. If the mouse really did cause the fire, it would be great. If it didn't it would be a big letdown. For now, it's mostly just confusing.

Legend of the fall

It doesn't usually show itself in polite company, but I have a competitive side.
I lost more than 30 pounds two summers ago, and I did it mostly because I got tired of being the last one up hills on bike rides with my dad and my brother. It worked, too. Now I'm almost always second.
So, maybe it's not the most competitive side in the world, but it's there.
I'm tell you this now as a way of explaining why I spent most of the weekend nursing a headache and sore ribs. It is, I have to believe, the result of my unwillingness in any way to be outdone by the people around me.
Maybe this doesn't make sense right now, but bear with me for a minute.
A couple of weeks ago, one of my co-workers, Michelle Leonard, wrote in this space about a fall she took on New Year's Eve. She was putting a crock pot full of mini hot dogs out onto the deck when she slipped on some ice and fell. The crock pot broke and Michelle ended up with 66 stitches.
It was a good fall, I'll admit, but I was pretty sure I could do better. I've certainly seen more impressive falls. Once, on a family vacation, a step-cousin fell off of a cliff in Spain. He broke both of his arms in several places, then had to climb back up the cliff to find help. He spent the rest of the vacation with his arms propped out to the side in heavy plaster casts. So, the bar for spectacular falls has been set pretty high in my mind.
My own fall last weekend wasn't nearly that dramatic, but it was still pretty good. I was on the way to meet a former co-worker at a Minneapolis bar at the time. I jogged across a street and jumped - gracefully, in my mind - over a small pile of snow in the boulevard.
I came down with my right foot on a patch of ice and before I knew what was happening I was on the ground. My head hit the sidewalk hard enough that I saw stars. Fortunately, I don't think anyone saw me.
At the bar, I cleaned blood off of my face, although I like to think
I looked pretty tough with the scrapes on my right temple. I had a couple of drinks with my friend before my headache got too bad. I'm pretty sure alcohol is one of the recommended treatments for potential head injuries.
I was sore the next day, and had a headache almost constantly until
Monday night. My teeth still hurt when I chew on the right side and my ribs still hurt when I move to vigorously. Sneezing is especially bad.
Worst of all, though, even after all of that I'm pretty sure I can't legitimately make a claim of best fall in the office. For one thing,
"I fell on the ice," doesn't get nearly the reaction that, "I fell on a crock pot of mini weenies," does. And I'm clearly far behind when it comes to lasting evidence of the fall, too. I was hoping I'd at least get a big bruise on the side of my face to help me impress people, but when I sat down next to my brother at a basketball game
Sunday he asked me why I had a rash on my face. Rashes don't say "tough" as much as they say "possibly contagious," so that was hardly impressive.
Clearly, the fall story is a loser. So, if anyone asks, I got into a bar fight.