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My favorite local sportswriter is Patrick Reusse. We used to have two terrific scribes, but Dan Barriero became sick of the Star Tribune's internal political petulance and took his act to the radio waves for good.
It appears as though our state legislature will soon pass a funding mechanism for a new outdoor ballpark for the Minnesota Twins. Reusse, who has refrained from commenting on this issue for years, finally broke his silence and summed up my feelings on the matter better than I ever could. Yesterday, he wrote:
"...The Twins and their backers have said this new structure is needed to make the franchise financially viable in Minnesota. They have said this will bring in the dollars to allow the Twins to be consistently competitive.
What has not been a significant part of their pitch has been this: If you're a person who wants to be proud of Minneapolis, this area's major city, you will be joyful when you see this gem appear in that vacant area on the edge of downtown.
This will be a place where you can feel a ballgame -- nine innings passing at their own pace, with their own cheers and hoots and distractions, with their small early dramas, building perhaps to a big finish. On some spring or autumn nights, a spectator will be required to show up in a parka.
On enough nights, the fans will be able to watch in shirtsleeves as the center fielder races across the emerald expanse, and makes a diving grab, and a roar explodes and someone nearby says: 'That Denard Span is almost as good out there as Torii Hunter.' ..."
Some of my libertarian-leaning friends will disagree vehemently with this post, but let me say this. I am fired up at the prospect of attending outdoor games with BENRY and my friends. And it is about freakin' time that my tax dollars will contribute to something that a regular guy like me will actually enjoy.
I'm absolutely aware that this could and probably will open the floodgates for even more profligate spending on social programs that don't work, schools that don't teach, trains that make no economic sense and other artsy toys for the pampered, screeching class.
However, allow me to sit back for just this moment, take a deep breath and envision myself right here on a warm summer afternoon. It may soon become a reality.
I'm entering into traitorous territory here, because I've been a Minnesota Twins fan ever since, well, ever since I became a twin. Which was five minutes into my life when my sister popped out of Mom.
However, what I'm about to say must be said. The Minnesota Twins will never become a gritty, scrappy, likable team as long as catcher Joe Mauer is its centerpiece.
This is very difficult to say as a huge baseball fan in general and a passionate homer in particular. Joe grew up in the Twin Cities and is a truly gifted player. I should love him, and would if he weren't devoid of all emotion on the field and so silky-smooth that he ostensibly puts no effort into his game. And it doesn't help his case that he looks like this:
I mean, look at him. That luxurious skin, those full, sensuous lips... I like my ballplayers to spit lightning and crap thunder, not wax eyebrows and exfoliate elbows. And don't get me started on those damned sideburns.
As far as home-town heroes, I'll take this big lug anyday.
#2 recently turned 7. I realize it's terribly trite, but it seems like yesterday he was just a little blob.
A sobbing little blob, that is. And it actually seems like four years ago because the only thing I remember from his first three years was painful, relentless wailing. Pretty & I joke that were it not for this tortured cacophony, we would've found the energy to make #2 a middle child.
It's probably a good thing; we all know what happens to middle children. Look at Peter Brady. At least I won't wake up thirty years from now to see my son hawking Ab Squeezers or Bun Munchers on late-night infomercials.
Needless to say, #2 is a sensitive little guy who's had to live in the shadow of #1 - the boy who knows all. I understand this must be tough on him, so I do my best to provide paternal encouragement whenever possible. Like peeing into the toilet, not around it. Or reading.
After years of trepidation in the face of incessant correction by #1, something recently clicked & he got his reading groove on. Cereal boxes, newspapers, magazines - the kid now bellows out multi-syllabic words at least as well as Patrick Kennedy on Ambien.Last week, I was in our bathroom shaving and heard, "NWA (nwah) Pie-lot strike av-ert-ed". I smiled. #2 was watching the morning news. Then, "Twins sta-dee-um scores big run". Awesome, #2. Keep 'er going!
"Man sets fire to wife, child"
Oops. Gotta get in there before...
"Sex off-end-er on loose"
Shit. Must. Get. To. Tele...
"Child porn ri..."
Click. I frantically turned it to "George Shrinks", that bizarre PBS show about a dwarf kid who overcomes his physical insignificance by using household items like shoelaces and tampax to save his wack hippie parents from imminent doom. Long ago, #2 and I renamed it "George Stinks".
Blood coagulating in my fresh razor wounds, I then enjoyed 20 minutes of chicken soup for a dad's soul.
From the Star Tribune editorial page today, this headline:
"Martin Sampson: Iran's Confusing Threat to Israel"
Mr. Sampson is an associate professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota. He doesn't actually reference a specific threat in his column, but I assume that he's referring to this head-scratcher from Iranian president Mahmoud AhmadRashadinejad:
Washington Post, October 2005: "There is no doubt that the new wave in Palestine will soon wipe off this disgraceful blot from the face of the Islamic world. Israel should be wiped off the map."
Perplexing, to be sure. But I also haven't a clue what Jack Nicholson means when he states, "Darling. Light of my life. I'm not gonna hurt ya... I'm just gonna bash your brains in. I'm gonna bash 'em right the fuck in. Ha ha ha..."
And to think I attained this level of intellectual sophistication with a mere Bachelor's degree.
It was a tough week at work, which contributed to my posting lethargy. So to take my mind off of things I went to a movie Friday afternoon. Alone.
This was only the third movie I've attended alone. My first solo flick was during my watermelon days in Seattle, when I skipped work to see "Bob Roberts" - Tim Robbins' mockumentary lampooning a folk-singing, conservative politician. Walking out, I remember feeling quite smug about indulging in such irreverence on company time. Stickin' it to the man!
My second was "Miracle" - Minnesota boys taking on the Soviet Red Army. This was pure red meat for a Minnesota boy who always wanted to take on the Soviet Red Army.
Yesterday was different. It was a murky, sodden day, and after my week I was in dire need of some inspiration. So I trudged to the theater and bought a ticket to "Benchwarmers".
I did so hoping to witness a duplication of Jon Heder's rousing role as maladjusted hero; however, five minutes into the movie a sullen dread seeped into my conscience. Wasn't it too soon for another Heder "teenage outcast turned hero" film? What about Napoleon - what would he think of my attending this movie a mere two years after his triumph? Quickly overcome by feelings of betrayal and exploitation, I stood up, yelled "Not Now!" and marched out. The two stoners I shared the theater with must have shared my angst - they stumbled out and straight into "Scary Movie 4".
Lost, confused, but still yearning inspiration, I scanned the cineplex movie roster for something that would start shortly - "Larry the Cable Guy", "Failure to Launch"... Both seemed like strong candidates, but I just wanted something... more. I settled on "United 93", and stepped into the theater just as the opening credits were rolling.
There, I spent two of the most searing, agonizingly poignant hours of my life.
I just visited an official Earth Day website and completed an Ecological Footprint Quiz, which supposedly measures the extent to which I abuse Our Mother. If the results are indeed accurate, the Menendez Brothers have nothing on me.
I knew I was in trouble after reading the first question - How often do I eat animal based products? Growing up, my parents walked a side of beef through a warm room and called it dinner. Or breakfast. Unfortunately, I've yet to kick that habit, so I undoubtedly started off in ecological chaos.
As I progressed through the exam, I learned that I'm a garbage-spewing, space-hogging, fuel-wasting brute. And if everyone lived like me we would need 12.8 planets to sustain our collective lifestyle - quite the footprint.
Just call me Sasquatch.
Without a doubt, the most grating Minneapolis media personality is meteorologist Paul Douglas.
For those reading this post who are not "one of us", I should explain that Minnesotans don't want someone to simply recite the day's events to them -- we want to be tucked into bed, given a cup of warm milk and softly hummed to sleep by our newscasters. This is why, in the mid-'80s, our local NBC affiliate changed its call letters from WTCN to KARE (get it?).
KARE's production featured down-home, hug-a-bear cute anchorfolks and Paul Douglas, who fed this nauseating mush by pioneering the "Let's step out onto the patio and have a look" weathercast. Sure, he was creepily effeminate, but gol' darnit he was one of us and look -- he's outside!
Minnesotans devoured this tripe & catapulted KARE to perennial ratings dominance. Unsatisfied, Paul seized on his saccharine celebrity and left us for the big bucks of WBBM Chicago, where he was slapped down like a Durham stripper and within months crawled back to the safety of "We Like it Here" Minneapolis.
He's as queer as ever (queer means many things, people), performing his schtik at another Minneapolis station, but the ass-pounding he received in the big time changed him. Yearning to be taken seriously, he has fervently adopted the Global Warming cause and incessantly proselytizes about upcoming environmental upheaval.
I don't monitor the tv ratings much, but I don't think we're buying into the New Paul. Minnesotans are suckers, but like the nation as a whole, we will not stand for our peculiar Pauls overstepping their bounds.
Gainesville, Fla. (AP) - A small plane crashed into a sport utility vehicle parked outside an airport Sunday, hurling it through a terminal wall, officials said. Three people in the plane were killed.
Apparently, had the SUV not selfishly positioned itself at that very spot, those poor folks would be alive today. Not to mention that helpless terminal wall...
Murder by land, sea, air, rail... If we're not vigilant, they may become accomplices to psychopaths committing unspeakable atrocities.
What next, I ask you. What next?
I don't understand why infrequent churchgoers select Easter as one of their "must see" masses.
Christmas is easy to get -- it's a birthday party. And you can derive a fair understanding of the holiday by watching the Charlie Brown special.
It's tough to deduce much from The Easter Beagle.
This morning, we got all dolled up and went to church. Since we send BENRY to the church school, we're common fixtures in the back row and recognize many of the parishioners. We of course arrived late (Pretty worked really hard to look, well, pretty), so the usher herded us into the balcony, where I recognized no one.
Now standard Catholic proceedings are difficult enough for children (Stand up, Sit down, FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT!); however, Easter is a different gig altogether. The hymns are longer (Look at me, I'm playing the piano!), the homily is insufferably drawn out (Listen to me, I know my book!) and simple prayers & responses are transmogrified into torturous sing-song that doubles the length of the entire event.
It's a production not unlike the Super Bowl. Except no one really knows why they're there because Linus never explained the meaning of Easter in the first place. At least before the Super Bowl, Dad will make it clear to his unknowing kid that he has a hundred bucks on the blue guys so root for them, damnit.
At Easter mass, children hopped up on a breakfast of jellybeans and chocolate are supposed to figure it out themselves. Like the squirt in front of us. I'll say he was four years old and had not attended church since his baptism -- the little shit was a whirlwind of kicking, jumping, banging, squirming and chattering. Finally, after slapping his sister and pulling his mom's hair, he stood up during the homily and screamed, "I AM THIRSTY! I WANT SOME WA..."
He never completed his thought. Dad's hand came out of nowhere, and, with the force of a cruise missile cupped the kid's mouth vacuum-tight. Clearly startled, the guttersnipe looked wide-eyed at Dad. Then, at Mom, who was staring back, aghast, at Dad. Then this kid, who couldn't or wouldn't display a rudimentary understanding of civilized behavior before this occurred, showed the social moxie of Dr. Phil. He cried. Screamed, bawled, flailed and let Mommy and everyone else around know what Daddy did to him. Mom angrily gathered their belongings, grabbed their coats and said to Dad, "Are you happy now?"
As the family shuffled out, I smiled reassuringly at the dad while recalling the great line from "Vacation" - "Are you happy now, Clark? She's deaf." Ahhh, marriage.
I don't blame the dad. I don't blame the mom. Hell, I don't even blame the bratty kid.
I blame Linus.
When my good friend Eric at whataworld convinced me to start a blog, the conversation went something like this:
Eric - "You should start a blog."
ckoz - "OK."
I'm very impressionable and easily convinced to do things that I probably shouldn't consider, like climbing that 100-foot crane in Madison after attending a Brewers double-header on nickel-beer day. Or blogging.
I've always been a tortured writer, one who needs to express his thoughts just so and will re-formulate sentences and paragraphs a myriad times before settling on a final product. This stream-of-consciousness thing is painful.
However, I must admit that a mere 3 days into this endeavor, Eric was right.
This morning, while scanning the AP wire, I came across this story:
Granada, Colo. (AP) - Six migrant workers apparently leaving jobs on a farm were killed when a freight train collided with a sport utility vehicle driven by a 15 year-old boy near the Kansas state line, authorities said.
This is, of course, a tragic story. And the fact that the boy was driving an SUV is utterly irrelevant. Nonetheless, this AP writer, Melissa Trujillo, acknowledged that a human being actually took the steps to ignite the vehicle and propel it forward -- the SUV did not act alone.
More importantly, she mentioned it in the story's first paragraph.
Would this have happened four days ago? Or did Ms. Trujillo stumble upon this little blog and subsequently take a small step toward instilling a modicum of reason into her organization?
As they say in the Tootsie Pop commercial, "The world may never know..."
It seems like yesterday that #1 came into our lives. Unbelievably, he's close to 9 years old and in the 3rd grade.
#1 is an extraordinarily intelligent little guy, but he's always had difficulty dealing with life on a social level. At 3, we noticed that he became fixated on certain things and couldn't stop talking about them -- trains, space shuttles, railroad crossings -- and simply couldn't grasp the meaning of our facial expressions. I viewed this as a cute idiosyncracy that he'd outgrow (although it did get a tad frustrating that he'd laugh when I'd scream at him not to use our CDs as skates on the hardwood floors). My wife Pretty did not.
Over my objections, she arranged for a 3-hour evaluation of #1 conducted by a team of Child Psychiatrists. After studying his play & thinking patterns, they arrived at a diagnosis: Aspergers Syndrome, a mild form of infantile autism.
They handed us various psychiatric abstracts describing this condition: "Average to superior intelligence... Disinhibited in social situations... Profound difficulties understanding abstract concepts, etc." Yep, that was him.
However, they also provided lists of therapists and instructional booklets on how to secure additional government funding for his "Special Education" needs. WHOA there, Nellie! No f'ing way was my kid going to ride on the short bus right out of the chute! I envisioned some Matt Dillon-like teacher putting him in a cage and calling him "Mongo" while the students pelted him with rotting fruit and poked him with sticks...
We were two years away from kindergarten so I agreed to enroll him into a very supportive school in Minneapolis. Pretty quit her job to focus on this bump in the road, and within a year, he was much better able to cope with the world around him.
After a huge battle with our public school system who damn near kidnapped him to secure their extra cash (subject for another post), we placed him in the local Catholic school.
He's had his ups and downs, I'm sure just like any young pup, and to this day he displays minor difficulties in reading social situations. However, he has surrounded himself with a nice core of good boys and last week was invited to his first slumber party. This morning he couldn't stay in his skin, excitedly jabbering about all the junk food he was going to eat and the video games he was going to play.
Have fun, #1. If you get lonely, I'll be sleeping by the phone.
So it's "too soon" to promote & release a movie that accurately depicts the events of 9/11? I invite everyone who falls into this camp to study the release dates of the following movies about Pearl Harbor:
"Secret Agent of Japan," Twentieth Century Fox, 1942
"Little Tokyo, USA," Twentieth Century Fox, 1942
"Across the Pacific," Warner Bros., 1942
"Remember Pearl Harbor," Republic, 1942
"Submarine Raider," Columbia Pictures, 1942
"December 7, 1941," U.S. Navy, 1943
"Air Force," Warner Bros., 1943
"Blood on the Sun," United Artists, 1945
Amazingly, The Academy awarded "December 7, 1941" director John Ford an Oscar for Best Documentary (kindly note that this was a US Navy propoganda film!).
My, how times have changed...
No, this blog will not solely focus on the ongoing media war against those malevolent beasts. But this just in, from today's Star-Tribune:
Henderson, KY (AP) - The last of six people killed when a sport utility vehicle plunged into the Ohio River more than a week ago has been recovered.
They kill by land, they kill by sea...
A few years back, I noticed a strange phenomenon. Local newscasts and my hometown paper began reporting accidents involving SUVs as though the vehicles were living organisms performing dastardly deeds on their own:
"SUV Rolls, Kills Family of Four"
"Pedestrian Crippled as SUV Hops Curve"
"SUV Plows through Outdoor Market, Maiming 14"
As an SUV owner, I began to wonder if this was a concerted effort to demonize these vehicles or if 2-door sedans were just better-behaved. So I wrote a letter to the editor.
In it, I politely stated my case that unless the SUVs themselves were malcontents, weren't the drivers responsible for these calamities? Or is this just a politically-motivated attempt to stigmatize this vehicle genre by Group-Thinking Vehicle Nazis?
The paper published my letter, but of course parsed it to make me look like a rabid anti-PC revolutionary. My friends rib me to this day about the slogan I seem to have coined.
In reality, I'm no social agitator. What I am is a sales manager & father of two boys -- Benjamin & Henry (aka BENRY). My wife Pretty and I live in suburban Minneapolis, where I do my best to behave.
I'm starting this blog because my good friend at Whataworld told me to. Guess that's as good a reason as any... Along with the ability to circumvent those snot-nosed commie bastards at the Star-Tribune!
Should be fun...
