I was in great self indulgent form today. I went out to buy some art supplies. And I came home with a guitar. I dropped into Music-Go-Round and when I saw this axe I thought now that’s a pretty guitar, a Gretch, it was priced way below what I’d expect to pay. Considerably below what I was figuring to spend for a folk guitar, something I, well needed is probably too strong a word. Now you have to understand that I’m not a rich man and I just popped for a camera. It was funny, me on the phone in the music store trying to sweet talk my wife into not killing me if I brought it home. I appealed to her love of good deals and it’s one of those instruments that dresses up a room, so I risked a couple of weeks of domestic unrest and now I own a Gretsch Hawaiian Style acoustic guitar with built in pick-ups so I can play through an amp.

Yesterday on Public Radio I heard someone talking about blogging. I can’t remember who it was and I can’t identify the source of the quote he used but here it is. “The only people that have freedom of the press are the ones who own one.” Or something like that. His focus was the way that bloggers are effecting the presidential campaign, but I think what he’s saying applys to blogging and the internet in general. It’s a new paradigm for publishing. It’s never been easier or cheaper to publish to a huge audience. So, blog brothers and sisters, BRING IT ON!

Vonnegut fan takes up running
Becomes endorphin crazed freak!

Believe it or not this is a quote from the first site I landed on this morning:

Today in History: January 23
Do you know I’ve never voted in my life, never been able to exercise my right as a citizen because of the poll tax?

“Mr. Trout.”
Homer L. Pike, interviewer,
Atlanta, Georgia.
American Life Histories, 1936-1940


History_Pig

I’m taking today and Monday off. Four day weekend. I wanted to enjoy the weather. Not. I’m actually working on a site that I’ve wanted to get going for awhile.

Lady Lions crush Gophers behind record setting Mazzante.

Kelly Mazzante showed the silky smooth shooting touch and quick release that earned her the record for most points scored by any Big 10 players. With a tough supporting cast that out hustled the Gophers throughout the second half Kelly and the Lions pulled away at the end to win by 19. Mazzante got a steal early in the second and went coast to coast for the record eclipsing hoop. The victory puts Penn State in the driver’s seat for the Big 10 title. They play the Gophers at Williams Arena on February 8. Mazzante is about 300 career assists behind Lindsay Whalen who also is a 2000 point scorer. And I’m sure no one thought I was goiing to continue to be magnanimous thoughout this paragraph.

I do most of the cooking at our house. I enjoy it and frankly I can cook circles around my wife. I am blessed with a great memory for taste. I can still call up the flavor of a Special Export or Wild Turkey in my imagination even though it’s been almost twenty years. I’m always looking to expand my repertoire. So on Saturday when my eyes fell on a can of lima beans at the grocery store, I decided I would take on the ultimate culinary challenge, make lima beans edible. Remember when you were a kid and your mom tried to get you to eat lima beans. The texture of soggy cardbooard, flavored with yard clippings and dandelion milk. And it seemed like each bean was about the size of your fist.
I decided to do a variation on a theme that I’ve seen before with other legumes. The real trick to making those vegetables that you hated as a kid taste good is to straighten out their PH balance. You have to add some acid to the mix to cut the bitterness. If you are into heart healthy food, stop now, just reading this recipe is worth a .1 jump in your cholesterol level. I cut up four strips of bacon and fried them up with onions and garlic. When the bacon was done I added balsamic vinegar and brown sugar and chopped up a sprig of fresh rosemary that happened to be in the fridge as well as a dash of port that I bought for cooking. I opened the cans of beans and discovered that they weren’t the kind that are the size of your fist, but tiny like a regular navy bean. That’s a big plus right there. I nuked the beans and stirred in the sauce. I liked them, I’d do it again, Princess Q had seconds.

STATE OF THE UNION LINKS
The official spin
Move on ad.
Trash Bush
Token positive press
Shoulda posted this one yesterday

Send me more, I’ll post them!

Buy the Poster…I’m not an affiliate but if I give them a link maybe they’ll be less pissed off about me using their image.

Princess Q and I crossed paths this morning at 3:40. I woke up for some reason and knew I wouldn’t get back to sleep. She was just finishing up her homework after a three day weekend. The acorn didn’t fall too far from the tree here. My motto has always been, “Never do today what you can put off ’till tomorrow.” I’m a little concerned though. In her defense, the big stumbling block was a group project, sort of a procratinator’s mind meld. But if she’s reached this level at 15, what’s she going to be like in college. She’s also discovered coffee. Poor kid, way too much like her father. Wouldn’t it be nice if I could sit her down and say “OK, we share these traits and this is how they will bite you in the ass, so avoid X, Y and Z and you can skip a shitload of the pain I went through getting my gray hair.” But I guess there’s a reason why everyone has to live there own lives.

Maybe it had something to do with the circumstances of her birth. She came, in the tradition of our children, a couple of weeks early. Beck and I were attending a Twins game. It was Oakland. When you leave the metrodome, there is a terrific air pressure drop, you practically get shot our the door by the rush or pressurized air. Something to consider if you’re pregnancy is dragging on and you want to get the ball rolling. So as we walked to our car, Beck got a strange look on her face and said, “My water just broke.” This in the middle of a huge crowd of people. So we went home, experienced baby producers that we were, to calmly get ready to head for the hospital. That’s all great, but I had two spot drawings due at the publisher the next day. I brought my drawing stuff with me and we settled in at the hospital, with the usual, “We’ll see how it goes and if nothing happens by morning, we’ll induce.” So I got to work on the drawings, but fatigue, nervousness and the strange environment conspired to grind my creativity to a halt. I called the art director in the morning, “Hi, the good news is, we’re having a baby. The bad news is, I don’t have your drawings done.” This is the same art director that had told me earlier that she didn’t give me false deadlines because I was always on time. Fortunately for me the a.d. called my good buddy and fellow emancipated animation slave, Steve Mark, who whipped the job out and made the deadline. So my putting off the work until the last minute (I probably had a week to work on it) created an aura that was directly assimilated into her young brain.
Someday, I might tell about the delivery, but that’s another story.

Egad, a base life defiles a bad age

Evidence that I was the founder of the Grunge movement. At the time the photo was taken (and credit to the photographer, but I can’t remember his name) I was bartending in South Minneapolis. I had a coat that my Dad’s employers had given him, it was a great winter coat, insulated with a hood. He never wore it because it just wasn’t classy enough for him. It had a huge Siouxland Dressed Beef logo embroidered on the back and “Bill” stitched on the front. My Dad could have manure on his boots, but he wasn’t going to be seen in somethig like that. It was about the coolest thing a guy like me could wear. And the warmest.
One night it was about -20° and somehow I had ended up at the bar late. I positioned myself by the waitress station between the bar and the kitchen because it was the best place to watch the show and also chat up the waitresses. As the evening passed I got, as usual, pretty tuned up. When it came time, protected by my insulated stockyards coat, I trudged the mile or so home to the upper duplex I was sharing with BB and his future wife. I do not recommend this behavior to anyone! Minnesota winters are serious, they can kill you. But I made it home safely with all toes and fingers intact.
The next day I put the coat on and headed out the door for a new adventure. When I put my hand into the left pocket, I discovered it was coated with a syrupy substance. “What the hell?” It turns out that while I had been leaning on the bar the night before, I had also been leaning on the Dr. Pepper dispenser and was blithely filling my pocket with Dr. Pepper. At least the bar owner didn’t find out that I was stealing. It’s a good thing I sobered up!

Gophers lose.
sportsgoddess: I pefer my crow braised in wine sauce with leeks and wild mushrooms, heavy on the garlic.

Sex-aware era waxes

Went to Intolerable Cruelty last night. I loved it. A romantic COMEDY. Farce is probably a better word. Do not see this movie if you don’t have a tolerence for cornball humor. I’m a big Coen Brothers fan. After all I grew up in Moorhead, which is the sister city of Fargo. Marge…know her. St. Louis Park High School produced the Coens and Al Franken. Someone last night was listing other notables from there, but my memory is toast and I’m way to lazy to research it. I’m not much of a fan of George Clooney as a serious actor, but I think he’s a great comic actor. His portrayal of a shallow, vain, divorce lawyer is hilarious. If you like cornball satire and slapsick humor, this three stooges meets Pat and Mike is a must see. Plus Catherine Zita-Jones is fun to look at. I’m told the same thing’s true of George.
The whole family went to church this morning. They walked behind me on the way to the garage. I was working on this post. It brought this Rockwell painting to mind. One of my favorites of his.

Check out skrawler’s entry for 1/17.

Drawn Inward

Three days and I’ve only used the first person singular once.It was tough but ultimately worth it.

Warning: This is going to be a long, nostalgic post.

One of my college art professors, Timothy Lloyd, is retiring this year. Last night was the opening of one of two exhibitions honoring him. Bec and I drove down, her sporting the beautiful pin, made by Tim, that I gave her for our 25th Anniversary last year. Carleton College, my Alma Mater, is located in Northfield, Minnesota, the town of Cows, Colleges, and Contentment, or so they say. I can vouch for the cows and the colleges. There are two colleges, St. Olaf (boooooo) and Carleton (Yeaaaaah) being by far the more prestigious. You may recognize it as the place where Senator Paul Wellstone taught since way back when I was there. Northfield also is famous for a big shootout at the bank on Division Street where Jesse James and the Younger brothers got their asses handed to them by the local farmers. Lesson: don’t mess with an armed Minnesota farmer. Another significant feature of the town is the Malt-O-Meal plant. My entire college experience was flavored by the constant smell of Malt-O-Meal. To this day, when someone is cooking Malt-O-Meal, I get pangs of guilt and feel that I should be studying more.

Tim Lloyd is an amazing artist. A jewelry maker with pieces in the Smithsonian, who’s work has evolved into the making of Japanese influenced vessels crafted out of sheet copper and other metals. The show featured the work of four Japanese kettle makers and two Americans, Tim Lloyd and Wayne Potratz, inspired by their work. Stunningly elegant pieces, I wish I could show you more of but my camera battery went dead.

The evening began at Boliou Hall with a lecture on the Tea Ceremony in the Art History lecture room where I spent so many mornings happily sleeping through lectures. We got there late and didn’t get seats. I spent the time wandering around the building where I spent most of my college career. The students still look the same. I stopped one young girl and asked her if she was Pat Anthony’s daughter, she looked so much like Pat way back then. She wasn’t. I visited the expanded printmaking studio and saw Old Ironsides the litho press that I fought for so many hours printing editions of my student work.

The other exhibit honoring Tim was an alumni artist show (gosh I guess my invitation got lost in the mail). One of the exhibitors was David Hero a potter and classmate of mine, who now lives on the Olympic Peninsula. In 1970 David and I dropped out of school, he bought a Volkswagen bus at the factory in Hamburg and we drove it around Europe for three months. I was sure David would be there and was relishing the thought of the spectacle he would make when he saw me. I knew I had a bear hug coming. The lecture went on forever, a half hour past when it was supposed to end. My anticipation of seeing David was about to boil over. I paced. The lecture ended and the crowd filed out on their way across campus to the opening at another gallery. No David. I saw Tim and ask him if he was there. He was supposed to be. We went to the opening, the usual thing. Professor types wearing Dean buttons, students there just for the food (they served sushi), artsy types and of course all kinds of people that I thought I recognized but couldn’t quite place. I positioned myself for a good view of the entry and watched for David. He never showed.

Of course, the disrespecting of St. Olaf is all in jest. It’s a great Lutheran Liberal Arts College in the Minnesota tradition of great Lutheran Liberal Arts Colleges. They have a Choir that will knock your socks off, competitive sports teams (regularly whipping the Carls and hence the animosity), excellent Academics and really great sweaters.

No, Mel, a sleepy baby peels a lemon.

“blogging makes your brain work.  that’s why it is better than crashing on the recliner.” sportsgoddess.

“I think it’s a wonderful window into people’s thoughts” History_Pig

On January third History_Pig wrote a philosophical entry about how blogging has begun to fill the fellowship and community role of church for him. If you follow his blog, you will see he’s built quite a congregation for himself.
The internet and email seemed to hold this promise for personal communication. The ability to connect so quickly and so universally across the globe would bring forth a revolution in the art of correspondence. What it did was bring about AIM speak, bizzare abbreviation, flames, spam, and forwarding jokes around the planet without a word of comment or greeting. Talk about your vast wasteland. The information super-highway is cluttered with roadside garbage.
And then there’s here. Come to Xanga for laughs, art, advice, new perspectives, tears and ordinance (History_Pig’s New Year’s Eve Blast). The internet makes it so easy for anyone to publish to a huge audience, it’s a dream come true for the closet writer set. So you start publishing your blog and you get responses. “This is cool.” And now you have a readership. And you feel some responsibility to supply fresh material and to not bore them silly. You become accountable. It’s no longer enough to sit in the rocker and say, “that’s something that might make an essay or story.” You need to perform.
Then you realize that no one comes to see you unless you go out and visit them and leave your tracks. So you participate. And you learn different perspectives. And now you have a community. And your brain is working. And you are writing.

Gophers 74 Illinois 59
ISU (Princess L’s future school, I think) beat Texas Tech
leaving the Gophs the last undefeated team in the nation.