doodledee

We went down to the Field's flower show this morning and my nutshell review is this: outrageously great. Full-on knock your face off great. Great great great. Seriously.

We got there right when it opened and there were maybe 15 other people walking around with us - in other words, it was basically empty - and you could stand back from the displays and just soak them in quietly, which I think really helped because a lot of them were big and complicated and they wouldn't have come off the same if there were 1000 other people standing in your field of view taking pictures and yapping and drowning out the peaceful Japanese music that was being piped in. In that case, I'm sure I would have left with a much-less-enthused review. As it was, however, it was great.

Kudos to Bachman's and to some Belgian floral genius named Daniel Ost. Totally blew my mind.

(Today was the last day. I hope you made it down there.)

According to today's paper, there's a business here in town that will 'rent' you a bunch of models to come to your next party. Why, you ask? Well, I guess I'm not really sure, but the article claims the following:

[The models] don't cater or cook, but they will show up to your gig, look nice, and perhaps hand out drinks or play the piano. Promotional materials tout the workers as an attractive "accessory" to your next shindig, like twinkle lights or balloons.

Ok, so they don't cook, but they do hang out and they do look good and 'perhaps' they'll hand out some cocktails and/or play a few songs on a piano or something. So far I'm not seeing anything that Huna and I couldn't handle other than the fact that we'd probably skip the keyboard and show up with a guitar and a wireless mic instead. "If you're party's rockin', we came a knockin'".

When asked where they came up with the idea for something as shallow as Fake Guests R Us, the founder chick says:

I was at a party and everything was beautiful, except the servers. I thought, "Why not replace them with models?"

I haven't stopped laughing since I read that. Can you imagine the bolt of lighting that went off at that party? "I just feel so bad for all these ugly people. *Sigh* We should really set up a business so the public doesn't have to see them ever again." It's like they think they're doing us a favor or something.

The models have a website. On the website is a questionnaire where beautiful people can apply to be validated as model-y enough to be hired. Here's my application, sans the physical attribute questions, natch:

If you know a foreign lang., which?
Java. I also know about 75 sign language signs including: 'cheese', 'cracker', 'milk', 'cheerio', and 'poop'.

What, if any, musical instrument do you play?
I can beatbox like a mutha. I also have a mandolin, which, I can assure you, is killer at parties.

Do you sing? What type music?
Do I ever! Mostly kids songs lately, but I think I also may have accidentally memorized the lyrics to that 'Lumps' song last summer if that counts for anything.

Are you familiar with the rules for Texas Hold 'em? Blackjack? 5 Card Stud?
Yes. Yes. Yes. 3 times yes. All in.

Whew! What a brain drain. It's no Wonderlic, but it's clearly for real. Here's hoping I make the cut. Although I guess if I do, it only proves it's an even stupider idea than I thought it was.

An Entertaining Business Model [strib]
Model's Who Mix [mwm]

I noticed an interesting editorial choice on the Strib's op-ed page yesterday. I debated with myself for awhile about writing it up here because, as you may know, I'm not normally the kind of guy who does that whole 'rip the Strib in my blog' routine. For the most part that's because I find that flavor of blogging to be so profoundly cliché - to the point of almost being offensive in it's very nature - but also because I'd way rather write about biscuits and gravy. Lucky you.

But then I thought about it some more and it's not really a rip, per se, it's just an observation and maybe a little something to think about from a "huh, I wonder what they were thinking" point of view. Plus, this whole thing will make me look well read, so there's upside for me personally, too. Translation: blog on.

So anyway, yesterday under one of those 'official' Strib editorials - titled "Perception of youth crime not reality" - some anonymous editorial writer lays out a bunch of statistics showing how criminal activity among juveniles aged 10-18 has gone down dramatically in the last 10 or so years. This apparently flies in the face of the public's opinion that teenage violence is out of control. (At this point one could ask where the public could possibly get that impression, but one won't.)

Anyhoo, the piece goes on to rehash some [theoretical] reasons why crime is down:

Experts say a combination of factors deserves the credit, including the improved economy of the 1990s, better programs for delinquents and improved policing and parenting. Another contributor was the decreased use and sale of crack cocaine. The sharpest drops in teen crime since 1993 were among inner-city black males, who once dominated crack sales. Teen crime also dropped in suburban and rural areas, even as the drug meth picked up popularity there.

When the economy is doing well and more part-time jobs are available, fewer kids get into trouble. During the decade that ended in 2000, the number of older teens who were not in school or working dropped by nearly a third, according government labor statistics. Keeping adolescents busy and giving them good alternatives to crime make a difference. So do effective school security, locking up adults who lure youngsters into crime, mentoring and good foster care.

Standby for the interesting part.

Now clearly the author(s) of this piece did a little research. They at least looked up some stats and read a few papers and gathered enough data on which to build their rudimentary argument. Given that, it seems odd that they elected not to mention easily-the-most-controversial-yet-arguably-most-impactful reason for the drop in youth crime: the legalization of abortion in the 70's.

I mean, seriously, those quasi-celebrity Freakonomics guys have covered this in magazines, books, tv, fancy economics papers, everywhere. (They also just blogged about it, which is where I suspect the editors got the idea for this column.) The true nature of the correlation has been debated inside and outside of academia for years, from every perspective you can imagine. I refuse to believe the Strib editors aren't aware of the supposed causality, and I think they left it out on purpose.

Anyway, it's not a big deal or anything, just kind of a thinker. My hunch: the editors didn't want to deal with all the letters from the wackjob Strib-haters who would have undoubtably had a meltdown in a case like this.

Can't say that I blame them.

Editorial: Perception of youth crime not reality [strib]
Understanding Why Crime Fell in the 90's [uchicago] - 4 factors that helped, 6 that didn't really matter

Tonight after junior went to bed I ran over to Target to grab a few sundries. I was dressed down - dirty baggy jeans, snowboard sweatshirt, etc. Also worth noting is that I'm a couple weeks past due for a haircut and I haven't shaved in a while.

As I'm walking through the store, I see this doof guy wearing hipster jeans, a track jacket, and a sideways retro Twins hat. He's not pushing a cart or carrying one of those basket things. I immediately tag him as one of those 'undercover' loss prevention guys. Way to blend in, genius.

I go about my business. Toothpaste: check; generic Purell: check; browse the ink cartridges on clearance: check. Hey, look, there's that doof guy again. Over to the plastic rubbermaid tub section. Find matching lids. Hey, look, there's that doof guy again.

Wait a second.

You got it - I now look so scruffy that I meet some official Target profiling guideline. I laughed out loud when I realized it. The dude left me alone after that. When I checked out I noticed him chatting up the 'police' looking Target security guy by the front door. I'll assume he was telling him how one of their shoppers really needs a haircut.

I've been out working at a new client site for a few months now. On the first day I started, I went down to the cafeteria to find some coffee and check out the breakfast offerings and was woo-hoo-thrilled to see that they were offering a biscuits and gravy special. See, a good biscuit and gravy is easily one of my top 3 breakfast foods. Cheap, filling, and even the 'bad' ones aren't usually that bad. I don't run into them very often up here in the north country - in fact now that I think about it I'm not even sure where I'd go in the Cities to get some - but when I run into one, it's usually given the serious consideration that it deserves.

Being the first day on the job, I wasn't about to load up a plate and haul it back upstairs to my desk. It's just not something you do when you're trying to make a good first impression. A breakfast of biscuits and gravy comes with baggage. It's such an uncommon thing to eat in Minnesota, people look at you funny when you do. At some places, they even make you wear a scarlet 'B' on your business casual outfit.

So instead of ordering, I just made a mental note and figured I'd get my chance next time they were on special.

And then a week went by. Then two. Then a month. No biscuits. Six weeks. Still no biscuits. All the other breakfast specials repeat most every week, and never go more than two. Now two months. I get worried. Time to take matters into my own hands. I befriend the grill guy, who doubles as the breakfast cook.

"Hey, what happened to the biscuits and gravy?" I say.

"Nobody buys them, so we don't make them anymore," he answers.

"WHAAAA?!!" I say

After some small talk and butt kissing, he says he'll have the cook make up a batch sometime soon. He actually seems excited that this doof guy from upstairs is so excited for his cooking. I love it when a plan comes together.

A couple more weeks pass. Then finally yesterday I go down and YEEHAW they're back! The cook guy sees me coming and yells "THERE MY GUY!!!" and starts dishing me up a big plate full. He even offers to double me up for free. I'm in heaven.

I ask him how many he's sold that morning.

"You're my second order."

"That's a shame," I say.

He goes on, "Tell you what, I'll save these leftovers and I'll set you up for the rest of the week. You can heat them up in the microwave."

"Cool!" I say, totally caught up in the moment and not really thinking about what I'm saying.

And now I've got a problem. Fast forward to today. I go down to get coffee. I've got no interest in day old biscuits, but this cook dude and I have this thing going now. It's like what do I do if I walk in and he's got some special plate all made up for me? Would I have to pay? Or worse yet, what if I go up there and say "Hey cook buddy, you got those day old biscuits for me?" and the dude didn't really save anything? It's like a total lose-lose.

So instead of dealing with the issue, I just put my head down and power walk over to the coffee pot. Thinking back, I may have even jogged to the fridge to get half-and-half, just to emphasize how big of a hurry I was in. Over to the cash register, pay, run back upstairs, no eye contact, problem avoided.

Now the only question is how long I have to keep it up. A couple more days? I'm thinking by Friday I'm in the clear and I can start pretending it never happened, but that's like 3 cafeteria trips from now. Good thing the salad bar is so far from the grill.

This got way too long. Kudos to you if you stayed with it.

Alton's Southern Biscuits [foodnetwork]
Make Sausage Gravy [about]

On Friday night my parents were in town and we met them down at The Indoor Park and played with junior on the giant big toy. In a truly bizzaro St. Patrick's Day moment, one of the parents started yelling at her kids to stay out of the green slide because it had throw-up in it. I'm thinking she wasn't the only one yelling about green throw-up that night in the Twin Cities. Eww.

Saturday was JoePa's birthday. He had a cake from A Baker's Wife that was outrageously thick and whipped cream filled and chocolaty and delicious. Unfortunately I ate like 25 shrimp and a bunch of salsa and a couple of beers before the cake got cut, so I didn't get to savor the flavor as much as I would have liked to. Also from the 'bummer' column: no spanking machine. In fact, crazy as it sounds, when I asked his wife if we could form a spanking machine, she had no idea what I was talking about. WTF is that about? It was still a fun time, though.

Oh, and how's this for excitement: we rented a storage locker. If that's not getting serious about trying to move, I don't know what is. In related news, my giant half finished subwoofer has been relocated from our basement to its new 5x7 foot home in St Louis Park. If anyone wants to go visit it with me, shoot me a note.

• How the heck does The Polyphonic Spree make any money? I was watching a rerun of their Austin City Limits performance off the faketivo the other night and I counted like 18 people on stage. So what, after each gig they take home like $10 each? It just doesn't make any sense. Could it be that my tax dollars are somehow being used to subsidize a bunch of choir robe clad neo-hippie rockers singing about the sun? I guess I'm cool with that.
• Why people bring their cellphones to meetings, leave the ringer on, then let the phone ring over and over again? Each time it rings the process goes like this: look down, see who it is, push the 'silent' button, put phone back on table, wait a few seconds, voicemail alert thing goes off, pick up phone again, push silent again, put phone back on table, rinse, repeat. It's embarrassing to humanity.
• Why Seacrest doesn't say "Seacrest OUT" at the end of Idol anymore. It was always one of my favorite parts.

The picture on the left was taken last Friday afternoon. The small river of water you see in the street was - at the time - basically all that remained from this season's pathetic snow accumulation. It was sunny and warm and galoshes were the order of the day.

The picture on the right was taken this afternoon, around 72 hours later. In case you can't tell, the weather - and the clothing required to endure it - has changed.

I think I got whiplash. Must be spring.

Today's snow totaled around 10 inches and was a multi-layered affair consisting of a few inches of soft-n-fluffy powder over the top of maybe 5 inches of soaking wet and heavy snowcrete. The top wasn't bad, but the bottom just sucked. I read some local blog that called it "heart attack snow" [presumably] because people have work so hard clearing their sidewalk that they run the risk of keeling over mid-shovel from the exertion. Sounds about right to me. Thankfully, I survived.

Unfortunately my $2.77 Black Friday Mendard's shovel didn't. For those keeping score at home, that's Giant Wall Of Snow At End Of Driveway: 1, Cheap-ass Menard's Shovel: 0.

Poor little guy, he never had a chance. Good thing I had a back up.

And here's something. While I was outside I observed a snow removal etiquette issue that I hadn't considered when I wrote my rules up a while ago. Neighbor.old.lady hires a service to plow her driveway. When the dude pulls up, he backs into her driveway, drops the blade, and plows all the snow out of her driveway and up onto the boulevard of the neighbor across the street. I say that's totally bad form, but I guess I'm willing to listen to those who say otherwise.

Here's a pic.

Winter on.

Late the other night while flipping around I stumbled on a UEFA Champions League (soccer) game on ESPN2. What a most excellent surprise. It was the direct-from-Europe feed with the local announcers and everything. They're all rowdy and excitable and just so insanely reverent about their game. Lots of fun.

The match lasted until a little after 1:30 in the morning and ended, predictably, in a 0-0 tie. (When the final whistle sounded, American sports fans everywhere stood and shouted "See, we told you it's boring!") As soon as it was over I started scrolling through the listings to see if any of the other matches from this round were being broadcast over here. It didn't look like they were, but while searching for 'soccer' I found A WHOLE FRICKIN' CHANNEL that shows all soccer and only soccer 24/7. Woo hoo! Downside: I don't get the channel. "Call to sign up" the screen says when I flip to it.

So that's what I did.

The dude on the phone is nice. He also seems to be somewhat of a soccer fan, though who knows, maybe he's just got a card he's taught to read from when some soccer fan calls in to ask about the channel.

"It'll be $6.95 a month," he says.

"Sold," I say.

"Oh wait," he says. Then there's a pause. I instantly know I'm not going to get my soccer channel. He starts to explain. I don't subscribe to the fancy digital stuff. First I need to get the "base" digital, then I can get the "expanded digital" and the "expanded digital" is where the soccer channel lives.

I inhale and ask "How much for all that stuff?" even though I know it's going to be too much.

He pounds his keyboard a little bit and says, "It's only $37 more a month than you're paying now.

Ha. "Only".

"Come on dude, just sell me this one channel, I don't need the rest of it."

"I wish I could," he says.

So there you have it. I call them up and TRY TO GIVE THEM MY MONEY and they won't take it. Now I know nothing about the cable television industry, but that seems like a broken business model to me. It also seems kinda unfair, but whatever, the point is that these are the people who should be pioneering the next generation of consumer driven content distribution, but instead of truly innovating, they're pointing at the 25 movies they offer "on demand" and insisting that it's good enough. Well it's not. It's just stupid. And it's also so not ready to compete with Generation Napster, but that's another topic for another time.

The chairman of the FCC likes ala carte, too [usatoday]
Change may come sooner than I think [usatoday] – Who knew?
Fox Soccer Channel [foxsports]

Digging through the papers I was surprised to see that United Health BigShot Bill McGuire is talking about forking over $5 million of his own money to build a new "urban park" in downtown Minneapolis. I wasn't so much surprised that Billy Mac was donating the money – lest we forget, he brought home a cool $125MM in 2005 - I was more surprised that the option of a downtown park was back on the table at all. Didn't we pretty much close that opportunity window when we built an Applebee's on Block E?

Hey look, some letter writer to the Strib agrees with me:

I've always thought Block E would have been a signature space for gathering. While many of the current City Council was not in office at the time Block E proposal was voted on, I believe city leadership at that time dropped the ball on a great park opportunity.

So now instead of a greenspace that bridges the business and warehouse districts, we're left with a block along the river that is a) more or less unreachable during a lunch hour from most cubicles b) too far from most of what's actually going on downtown to help support a true community space and c) still probably the best option we've got. What a bitch.

But hey, I'm all for building this new version. I can't honestly see it being the 'landmark downtown park' Minneapolis has always needed, but I really can't see it hurting too much, either. Plus, it'll probably play nice with the new Guthrie, so that could make for a nice evening stroll before a play or something. Maybe they'll even fill it up with sculptures and stuff. I hear that's worked in the past.

Park sought to tame Minneapolis' urban jungle [strib]

The other day Colin mentioned that he was heading off to Lutsen by himself. I kinda thought that was sad, so I invited myself along. To make up for my self-invite I finagled us a free night's stay at Chez Sondag in Duluth. I love it when a plan comes together.

Now we're back. It was a blast. I think people here in the cities forget how good the skiing up there really is. It's steeper and longer and they get lots of snow and even when it's 'crowded' it's never crowded like the metro area hills can get. Add in the fact that they just finished a gorgeous new chalet on top of Moose Mountain - with views from the patio that arguably rival anything in Tahoe - and there really isn't an excuse for getting up there at least once a year.

I skied for the first couple of hours on Saturday before switching out and boarding away the remainder of the weekend. I used muscles I haven't asked much of in awhile. I also took a couple of good frontside slams. Since we got back I've been having trouble moving without whimpering. On one hand that sucks, but on the other, much bigger hand, it was totally worth it.

Favorite story from the trip that doesn't involve me wiping out under the chairlift and/or paying $6 for a tiny bowl of mediocre chili: I'm riding a lift with some local kid from Grand Marais. He says he was there on Friday, too. Apparently every "midquarter" the kids who are getting good grades get to skip out for a Friday afternoon and "do something fun". "Like what?" I ask. He says,"Well, this time we could either go snowboarding, go curling, or go ice fishing." Almost too awesome for words.

Winter on.

Thomsonite Resort [thomsonite] - we stayed our one night here; nice people.
Gunflint Tavern [gunflinttavern] - we ate here on Saturday; good beer, good food.

Over the last couple of nights I've been enjoying digging thru the 14 days or so worth of newspapers and magazines that piled up while I was in my olympicoma. Turns out I didn't miss much. Lucky you.

One of the better things so far is a Strib piece from last Sunday about organic food and how it's maybe kind of good for you if you can afford it, but you most likely can't because it [probably] costs a lot more than 'conventional' food does. (I've commented on this before), and I stand by what I said.) The article hits on all the key points: parental guilt for not feeding their kids more organics, silly Cub managers explaining how “supply and demand" drive organic prices, and - my favorite - tons of discussion about the undisputed organic food wunderkid: Whole Foods.

Before I say more, let me say that I occasionally shop at Whole Foods and I'm a proud member of my local co-op and I go to the farmers market and I eat granola and I ride a scooter and I think I may even have some Grateful Dead on my iPod. I'm generally down with all that crap.

But I'm also no sucker. Whole Foods is successful for two reasons: marketing and stupid customers. (Surprisingly, not the same in this case.) By marketing I mean they have an awesome brand and I'll leave it at that. By stupid customers, I mean two things. First, as a rule, their prices are criminal. Seriously, I think $2.69/lb for grapefruit is actually against the law in some states. Second, WF 'accidentally' mis-charges so often that I honestly think it's built into their business model. Need proof? Try this at home: go to WF, buy a mix of conventional and organic produce and go check out. They'll ring you up for organic everything, often to the tune of like a 50% markup over what you should be paying. A cheapass price watcher like me notices stuff like that in a heartbeat, but tons of other people don't, and when they don't, it's pure organic gravy for Team WholeFraud. I'd love to see a systematic study of this issue.

So why do I go? Well I don't really go all that often, but when I do, it's mostly for stuff like [fancy] cheese, [fancy] chocolate, bulk items, or frozen stuff. The sensible shopper in me has found these items to be the most reliable and competitive. When you go, I suggest you stick to those sections as well.

You're welcome.

Consumers willing to pay price for organic food [strib]