Things I Love: NPR

I love NPR. It's the only radio I listen to, period.

And as much as I'd love to launch into a polemic about my love for NPR, it would probably kill you with vicious, brutal dullness. Everyone knows why people love NPR -- you hear the reasons about a hundred times each pledge drive. They give the context and analysis of news stories, they don't have ads, they don't insult your intelligence, etc.

I suppose I could add a few more things to like that you don't hear that often. Like the fact that they don't have a Morning Zoo program. Their version of a Morning Zoo program is 130-year-old Carl Castle calmly reading the news. Occasionally they throw in a BOIIINNNGGG! sound effect, but that's usually only after Carl mentions the secret phrase, "Rwandan genocide."

And then there's the fact that none of the correspondents are ever allowed to have ordinary names. Lakshmi Singh, Corey Flintoff, Ina Jaffe ... there's no end of cool names to be had.

My new favorite is the foreign correspondent in Dakar, Ofeiba Quist-Arcton. The best part is that after she says her bang-up name she always says "Dakar" in a cool way, like "Dakaaaahhh!!" It sounds like a Klingon woman trying to be saucy. And it's said so confidently -- she really ought to throw in a "yeah, muthafucka!" after it.

Granted, it's usually a bit of a tone shift given the nature of what she's always reporting on. It's always like "... and now Guinea has exploded into ultraviolence, with everyone dead and the undead continuing to kill the recently dead with the limbs of the superdead. One of history's great civilizations has just collapsed because their ruler wanted more money to buy fancy cars. Truly, this is the saddest moment in the history of civilization. I don't think this reporter will ever recover from devastation and horror that has been seared into her soul. Sigh. Ofeiba Quist-Arcton, DakAAAAH, MUTHAFUCKAAAA!!!!"

But back to the point, which is funny names ... even NPR's go-to commentators about certain issues have to have funny names. Whenever there's a story about gas prices, they go to Trilby Lundberg. You'd think a Trilby Lundberg would be an adorable, small, furry, Jewish alien who's a friend to children everywhere, but no, it's a person who's an expert on oil and gas. And the fact that she's in the field of oil and gas -- I'm willing to bet that's that's a field full of guys with names like Mack Brown and Colton J. Stetson and T. Boone Pickens. I'll bet they had to really search for a Trilby Lundberg in that bunch.

Sometimes, it must be said, NPR goes too far. Occasionally I'm happily listening to some wonderfully dull report about the economy, minding my own business, and then I'm struck in the temple with "Let's go to Hugh Johnson ..." What? Are you fucking kidding me? Hugh Johnson? Is Ben Dover also in the studio? Where's Mike Hunt?

It's not only a very stupid joke name, but it also puts me in mind of those "Big Johnson" T-shirts people wore in the 90s that had cartoons of a little nerdy dude doing something suggestive with big-breasted bimbos. I don't need to be reminded of that, NPR. If I wanted to be reminded of "Big Johnson" T-shirts, I'd listen to the Morning Zoo on KROCK. I'm sure those guys are still wearing those T-shirts and laugh at them often. Thus I listen to NPR.

Already Almost Broke My New Rule

But I was asleep almost all morning! Which is a minor miracle for me.

I have lots of sleep problems. I have insomnia, sleep apnea, and restless leg syndrome. The latter sounds like it's a joke but it isn't -- it's where your leg twitches uncontrollably while you sleep, sometimes waking you up.

Yeah, I know, it may be real but it's still stupid. But all sleep disorders are stupid. Sleep is a necessity of life, yet for many people their brains or legs prevent it, for no good reason but just out of apparent spite. It's like if you couldn't eat one day because you had restless arms that uncontrollably threw food at your crotch. You'd be like "Hey, arms, man. What's your damage? We're all in this together. You need this food too. Why are you making this difficult for the rest of us?"

So all the sleep stuff has been a chronic problem lately. I'm sleepy all the time, going to bed early, always getting up at weird times, etc. I'm even lamer than usual in the evening, usually feeling like bed around 9 or so. It sucks.

Finally I decided I had to admit I had a problem and I went to an overnight sleep clinic, which I wouldn't recommend doing for fun by the way. I was kind of looking forward to it in a weird way. It seemed like a wild experience, being hooked up to machines and watched while I slept. Very original at least. It sounded like an interesting experience that someone could talk about slowly and calmly on that NPR show "White People Talking Slowly and Calmly About Something Sort of Interesting." But like most things that sound like a wild weird experience, it was actually very dull. It takes about an hour for them to stick all the diodes on you, during which small talk is strained at best.

The only kinda cool part is that they have a camera trained on you the whole time you're in bed. And they write down everything you do. So even as you're lying in the dark, looking around quizzically, with sort of a "What the fuck?" look on your face, they see it and write down "Patient looks around quizzically, with a sort of 'What the fuck' look on his face."

INTERMISSION

I just thought that if I were to write an pro-environment song, I'd want to rhyme "earth" with "turd." So it would be something like "She is our mother, we must love the earth .... Not flush it away like a moldering turd." It's evocative imagery, especially the "moldering" part. It would get a laugh, and then maybe people would stop and think. I think it could do some good.

END INTERMISSION

So anyway, I didn't sleep terribly well in the sleep clinic, in part because I had a dozen diodes all over my skull. The weirdest part was when I woke up and saw that it was 6:20 and wanted to get up for good. So I just kind of said, "hello?" And then a voice came over the loudspeaker, "Hello?" That's a creepy feeling, really bringing home the fact that you're being watched very carefully while you sleep. You feel like you're center stage in an extremely long and boring production of "Man Sleeping Uncomfortably." Then you decide that it's performance art and therefore brilliant.

It took about two weeks for them to interpret the results. And then I called and they said they couldn't talk about the results over the phone, which I thought was weird. But I thought maybe it was sensitive information because my sleep disorders made me a perfect candidate for a CIA job going undercover in a ... are you ready for this one ... sleeper cell! HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!

Whew, feels good to laugh. So anyway, I had to wait another two weeks to get the results. Meanwhile I'm struggling to get through some days, and feeling like I have a very short attention span and could drop off very easily. I worried it was really affecting my performance at work. HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!

Whew, sorry, still getting over that "sleeper cell" gag (hee hee ...). So the short version is that it all kinda sucked. There's a special brand of low-level suckiness reserved for illnesses and disorders that aren't serious enough to keep you at home laid up for a few days, so you have to just live with them for weeks.

And then I finally met with a doctor to see the results, and it was actully a nurse (which was fine of course, but I kinda wonder what doctors actually do these days), and it was a lot of very interesting stuff, charting my entire night in the sleep lab in great detail. And the final conclusion was ... I need to sleep on my side. When I sleep on my back, I start snoring and my throat closes up and my legs twitch and my hands start flipping off random people and my genitalia dance the cabbage patch and basically it's a big wild party. When I sleep on my side everyone calms down and helps out with the sleeping.

So that's it. The last few days I've been sleeping on my side and already I have the energy of a man half my age. I've taken up competitive ballroom dancing and already won a few medals in local competitions. I can jump over even the largest sleeping housecats and do so regularly. When I see a loose board lying around, I chop it in half, whereas before I would have given maybe a token tap and slumped away. And the changes in the bedroom ... woo! Now I sleep!

Every Saturday Morning From Now On

I was feeling like I might lose my two fans becuse I don't post often enough, and when I do it's unpredictable. So now I pledge to post every Saturday morning. Whether I have something interesting to say or not. I promise.

I Made a Quiz!

You know those annoying online quizzes where it's like "What Type of Ungulate Are You?" And then you through a bunch of multiple choice questions and then at the end it says "You are a musk ox!" I made one of those!

It's called "How Old Are You" and it's, like, totally fun. It's on Facebook, though, so you have to be a member of Facebook to do it.

http://apps.facebook.com/superquizcreator/?quiz=1229178950&_fb_fromhash=9cf845320761add4a10981f634f87e53

Quizzes are where it's at, man. Blogs are so passe. Nobody does them anymore. You say you're reading one right now? Pshaw. Lame!

Music Is Painful

Know what I mean? I mean, obviously bad music is painful. But really good music is painful too. In a very different way.

Maybe I'm just predisposed to thinking that everything is painful its own special way. But I notice that when a really great, deeply affecting song comes on, I tend to wince. It's as if it depicts some powerful emotion so completely ... but in the end it's still secondhand. It's still vicarious. You're hearing someone else experiencing this perfect moment, and you're with him or her a hundred percent, but deep down you know you're still not really experiencing it yourself, and you know you never truly will. It's like how you feel after being transfixed by a gorgeous movie star and then coming to the sudden realization that man oh man in the real world she would never look at me twice, would she.

I sense that I'm not making much sense here. OK, take a truly great song, one that channels the ineffable kernel of the human soul ... let's say 2 Live Crew's "Me So Horny." From the first few bars you are transported by this Platonic ideal of extremely stupid people feeling horny ... OK, I'm undercutting my real point here by being silly. I can't help it. It's just that true, honest emotion makes me feel bashful.

Maybe that's part of the problem. I'm too much in my own head and stuck within my own folds of irony to really feel strong emotions genuinely. I feel "pretty good" emotions often. But when I do, I'm usually simultaneously thinking "this will make a great memory someday." Bah! What is that? I'm already remembering wistfully what I'm still experiencing. That's crap!

Sigh ... well, I guess there are worse fates. After all, I'm happily married, gainfully employed ... wait, there I go again. Undercutting the emotion. It may be spoiled and irrational to be angry that music seems somehow incomplete, but hell, why can't I be irrationally, stupidly, ungratefully sad/angry?

Can I drop some over-analytical ballistics on y'all? What if we all become so self-aware and self-conscious that we can't be stupidly genuine any more? What if everything becomes a snarky comment on something that happened before, so that no one can ever feel license to pour out their souls without stifling themsleves with restraint over the probable resulting ridicule? Wouldn't that be awful?

Luckily, we're pretty far from that. There seems to be no shortage of genuine and stupid people out there wanting to pour out their souls.

At this point I'm reminded of a TV ad for a recent Mariah Carey album. You see her in the studio doing her typical thing, stretching one poor, hapless word beyond its breaking point, forcing it into 43 syllables in 55 different registers, and her voice-over says "This is the album that really captures my soul." Then you hear what she's singing, and it's "OOH, TOUCH MY BOOOOODY!"

So apparently Mariah Carey's soul, when captured, says "OOH, TOUCH MY BODY!" That is perhaps the least interesting soul in the universe.

On the other hand, you have Radiohead. Radiohead, in its own way, is just as genuinely soul-baring as Mariah Carey. Radiohead has no self-effacing irony. They have no sense of humor. They're not here to do winking, post-modern cleverness, i.e., the stuff I usually go for. But every time Thom Yorke sings "I'm not here ... this isn't happening ..." in Kid A's "How to Disappear Completely," I want to cry but I can't.

I've felt that, Thom! Just like that! But ... wait, no, I haven't, not really. Not like that. Not that truly, not that genuinely. All I ever did was feel like I wanted to disappear. Radiohead caps it off and makes it complete. They make it what it it's supposed to be.

So what am I saying? I guess that people who can express something deeply honest are very rare. And of those people, those whose deep, honest expressions communicate something worth hearing constitute a very, very small group. But that little group -- wow. They are somehow separate from the rest of us, the sorry ones among us who can only settle for listening, commenting, and appreciating ... all second-hand.

Still Lazy After All These Years

In fact, I'm still feeling so lazy about this world wide web log of pointless ramblings that I'm going to just do the equivalent of a clip show. Here are all the posts I had on a different blog, one that was supposed to talk up a St. Paul neighborhood of 55102. I rarely stuck to even that simple restriction, but that's not why I got fired and all the content got obliterated -- that happened because the company, called Marchex, is a bunch of jerks. They canceled everyne's blogs with no warning, right before the end of the month, so we couldn't do the requisite 12th post necessary for payment. Punks.

Anyway, here for posterity, for the benefit of the legions of future Keedei scholars who will devote their careers to reinterpreting individual sentences from a psycho-social-crypto-fascist-anti-podal perspective, here is everything I wrote for that site. In typical world wide web log fashion, it's upside down, so read the bottom one first.

Minneapolis-St. Paul Film Festival
Sunday, April 27, 2008

Every year, I go to the Minneapolis-St. Paul Film Festival. It's tons of fun. None of it actually happens in 55102, but bah. Close enough.

It tends to be pretty rare stuff, stuff you would never find in Netflix, much less Blockbuster, and much, much less the regular theaters. Most is foreign, lots of documentaries, etc.

This year, we've seen two movies so far. The first was pretty much par for the course of the flim festival. It was a documentary about an eccentric old Danish academic who strived to make an old castle he owned into a Russian Orthodox monastery. Surprisingly funny and touching -- again, par for the course.

The second, "Public Enemy: Welcome to the Terrordome," we saw last night, and I'm still steamed about it. I was hella excited to see it, and I only use the word "hella" when I'm really excited. It was a documentary about Public Enemy, a hip-hop group that I basically devoted my life to when I was 15, and still probably my favorite group of all time.

The documentary started well, introducing the band, talking about their origins, and getting some glowing praise from the likes of Henry Rollins and DMC. OK, so good so far.

Then they talked about one band member. Then the next. Then the next, down to increasingly uninteresting ancillary members. Then they talk about one song. Cut in footage of Public Enemy clowning around at the airport. Then another song. Henry Rollins fulminates at how great this song is. Then more clowning at the aiport. Then another song. More glowing praise from Henry Rollins. Then more clowning at the airport. Then another song. I think you see the problem. The filmmakers basically had about 6 sets of footage, and cut them together over and over again.

It burns me because it's such a wasted opportunity. They took such a fascinating subject and made a fawning puff piece. Public Enemy has a wild history, going from unlikely mainstream powerhouse to lightning rod of anti-rap controversy to the underground cult oddity they are now. They also had plenty of inter-group tension, brushes with the law, etc. This history was barely alluded to in the documentary. Even the phrase "barely alluded" might be a bit strong.

And Public Enemy touched on so many political issues in their music. You did hear this fact in the documentary, that they touched on issues. But you didn't hear about any of the issues, what P.E. said about them, how people reacted, nothing.

I dragged my poor wife to this mess, and I felt really bad for her. I'm a superfanboy of the group, and I found this documentary amazingly dull. I can't imagine how she was suffering. Well, I sort of can, because she told me. Still.

Well, I just had to get that out. More wackiness next time. They can't all be winners.

Il Foreigny Nameio
Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Plodding on through the places of 55102 -- there is this one place with a very foreigny sounding name. Il Vino Vesco, maybe? It used to be called The Vintage, which was easy to remember. Now it's El Vinto Value or something. El Vez Voluptuo? Al Ventura Vandelay? Something like that.

Anyway, I haven't been there since it became Ol' Vanderkamps Valentine, but the wife and I were thinking of going there for Easter brunch. Allow me to reenact the scene in a short one-act play I call "Al Vesty Va-Voom: Why We Didn't End Up Going."

The Wife: Hey, we could go to El Very Vantastico for Easter brunch.

Me: Sounds fun! I enjoy patronizing restaurants I have not before visited, especially places in the 55102, the single best neighborhood in the United States, a neighborhood that makes 92106 look like a pile of dead rats covered in phlegm.

The Wife: Yeah, that's great, hon. Let's see ... it'll end up being $25 a person.

Me: Blawwwwwrk! (Falls off chair. Has heart attack. Dies.)

Aaaand ... scene. Good job, everyone. Take five.

I did go there when it was called the Vintage, and it had a terrific outdoor seating area that's quel romantico. Sort of a wine garden, if that's a thing. The inside was lovely too, an old Victorian home tastefully decorated.

But who knows if it's like that now that it's no longer the Vintage. Perhaps when it became Ol' Voluminous Velcro, they changed the charming wine garden into a pit of fire and jagged rocks and converted the interior to house the world's smallest, most boring rollercoaster. I really can't say.

Wow, this was perhaps the worst, most unhelpful post I've ever written. What do you think, loyal reader(s)? Which was the worst post? Was it the irrationally angry "Computer Rage" one? Was it one of the several where I try and fail to talk about Fabulous Fern's? Or perhaps one of the other ones? So many choices! Register your vote in the comments section below.
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Posted by Ed Dykhuizen at 8:47 AM 1 comments
Ed Dykhuizen's Bio Tags: Il Vino Vesco, St Paul, Cathedral Hill
Comments
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
This is a tough one, because there have been so many horrible, horrible posts. Choosing just one is like choosing between the audiobook version of American Idol, Season Five: The Book Version and the video version of The Beginner's Guide to Braille; you want them both so bad! But, being forced to choose, I'll go with the one about the convenience store from awhile back. Not sure why - it just didn't have that 55102 verve that we've all come to expect. So that's my vote.
Posted by Guy from the Phlegmy Dead Rat Place at 12:50 PM

Bon Vie: Great Food, Better Exploitation!
Sunday, April 20, 2008

I've been sick, and I'm still a bit under the weather, so maybe my bad mood will force me to write a straight, normal post for once. I'd like to discuss Bon Vie.

Bon Vie is a beautiful, quaint little French breakfast/lunch place on Selby in the 55102. It's expensive but very good, with the best Eggs Benedict in town (and I've probably tried them all at this point). Like all good red-blooded Americans, I love hollandaise sauce, and at Bon Vie they make it from scratch. My wife and I actually met the Bon Vie chef, and he explained what a careful procedure making real hollandaise sauce is. Now I'm not exactly a foodie -- often I can't really tell why some fancy food is supposed to be better than the fair-to-middlin' stuff -- but once you go real hollandaise sauce, you never go back. So it's a lot like having sex with black men.

ANYWAY, before we were married, my wife and I would go to Bon Vie every so often when we wanted to treat ourselves. So my mom thought it would be a perfect place for our rehearsal dinner, where you rehearse eating dinner so that at your wedding you won't try to stuff food in your ears.

So we sat down with the owner, a very nice lady, who laid out the costs. There would the regular food costs of course, plus a fee for renting the place the whole evening. And a special fee for each server and each chef. And a rental fee for linens, silverware, etc. And a fee for the oxygen we would consume. And a fee for all the fee-charging. And so forth. We said "uh, we'll have to think about it," and ran away quickly.

That night, my wife and I searched a bit and called another of our favorite restaurants with an equally pretentious Frenchy name, Muffuletta. This place was just going to charge for the food and wine we would consume, like a normal restaurant would. We figured out that it would be about half the cost of Bon Vie, for equally good food. Muffuletta it was.

I think we've been back to Bon Vie only once since then. It just leaves a sour taste in your mouth when a place tries to take advantage of your pre-wedding enthusiasm by nickel-and-diming you to death. Not that Bon Vie is all that unusual in this regard -- much more unusual was Muffuletta, which didn't try to squeeze us on our special day.

Throughout the whole process of planning our wedding, we got a huge look at the big, ugly wedding industry, which exploits those people who just HAVE to have X at their wedding by saying, well, X is going to cost outrageous prices and all sorts of extra fees, but how can you object? It's your wedding, after all! It's a once-in-a-lifetime experience! Money should be no object, right? Even if the average wedding is now around $30,000, which is incredibly stupid amount of money to blow on one night of anything, even the most important day of your life.

Mostly, though, I was annoyed for the sake of my mom. She was really excited about her Bon Vie idea, and I could tell she was really disappointed that it didn't happen.

So anyway. If anyone out there is thinking about having a special treat for breakfast or lunch, I recommend Bon Vie. And if anyone is planning a wedding, steer clear. If you look hard enough, you can find all sorts of vendors that aren't plugged into the exploitative wedding industry, and Bon Vie apparently ain't one of them.

Analytics Are Fun! Ask Ragnvald Manger!
Wednesday, April 16, 2008

I'm sorry, I just have to diverge from talking about the 55102 (Ed. note: because Lord knows you stick to that SO well) and talk ... hey, editor, who asked you? No one's forcing you to edit these things. (Ed. note: Hmph.)

The reason for this divergence is that I just got the "analytics" for this web log, and holy Moses-lovin' crap are they fascinating! So "analytics," for those of you who aren't very smart, are a whole mess of data about how many people are visiting a site, what search terms brought them there, the people's names, addresses, social security numbers, and credit card numbers, what sites they visited next, what they bought on those sites with their credit cards (Ew, Jim. Ew. That's all I have to say), and about a thousand zillion other little stats.

For instance, I learned that this site got 41 visits. Take out the visits by my sisters, Joe, and his sister Steph, and that probably leaves about one half of a person. So I've conquered two families so far. If I add one family per week, I will rule the Internet by 3012. By then, of course, the Internet will control us, and we'll all be part of a Borg collective hive-mind in which every site will be viewed by everyone simultaneously. So that won't really count I guess.

More fascinating are the search terms that brought people to my (extremely) small corner of the Interwebs. Three people actually searched for "Martin Schmutterer" and got my site, which makes me feel a little ooky, since that's a guy I know and mentioned in a post, and I'd rather not taint his character by associating him with this site. But luckily, those people spent only an average of 42 seconds on the site and then turned away in disgust.

My favorite fact is how many people got my site by either the search terms "Russian fat" and "fat Russian." Three for "Russian fat" and two for "fat Russian." I searched for "fat Russian" in the Google and my site popped up seventh! All of the people searching for those terms spent precisely 0.00 seconds on my site, which I don't quite know how that's possible exactly -- they must all have lightning-quick Back buttons. But regardless, my life's mission is complete. If I accomplish nothing else in life, I can die with the knowledge that I managed to rank well in Google for the term "fat Russian."

Some people apparently wanted information about a few of the 55102's institutions -- ha! Joke's on them! The poor saps came for an incisive review of Fabulous Fern's and Box Office Video and instead got my self-indulgent ramblings. Still think the Internet is a boon to mankind, suckers?

The strangest search term by far is "Ragnvald Manger." I think that's a person, some no-doubt well-respected professional whose ad appeared in the corners over there. So now that I've dominated "fat Russian," my new mission in life is to come up first in Google for "Ragnvald Manger." I'm putting it in the title, in the tags, and I'm going to say "Ragnvald Manger" over and over so that Google understands that this site is the preeminent source for information about Ragnvald Manger. Any other Ragnvald Manger site doesn't have quite the Ragnvald Manger-osity of this Ragnvald Manger-orium. Ragnvald Manger? Ragnvald Manger Ragnvald Manger, and Ragnvald Manger Ragnvald Mangered the hell out of that Ragnvald Manger.

So anyway, I think that proves beyond the shadow of a doubt that analytics are fun. And Ragnvald Manger.
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Posted by Ed Dykhuizen at 8:39 AM 1 comments
Ed Dykhuizen's Bio Tags: ragnvald manger, analytics, fat russian
Comments
Thursday, May 1, 2008
Yeah, I've got to claim at least a couple of those. I make no apologies for the fact that I'm a loser. More fun with SEO: I've still not gotten a google alert for the unique terms I'm watching, many of which were in that post. Google must have changed their algorithm. Cheers, M
Posted by Martin at 1:29 AM

All Apologies
Monday, April 14, 2008

For my loyal readers out there (a.k.a. Joe), I apologize. My last post was downright mean-spirited. I'm usually a pretty mellow, level-headed guy, but there are a few things that turn me into a raving madman every time. They are, in increasing order of severity: windshields, printers, people who make a lot of noise when they eat, and overcomplicated computer stuff. I'll spare you a tirade about each.

Anyway, let's discuss happier things. Zander Cafe, for example, is probably the best restaurant in the 55102. It's fancy in a modern way, with creative, delicious dishes invented by a celebrity chef of some sort, and a decor that looks like it could have been designed by David Bromstead of HGTV's "Color Splash." (Yes, I know that I just revealed that I know an incredible amount about HGTV shows, thus essentially removing my own testicles and handing them to you on a platter. But the wife loves the channel, and I love my wife, ergo, ipso facto, alea iacta est, I love HGTV.)

Zander Cafe is one of those places that made me wish I had a vocabulary to describe restaurants. As it is now, I'm not very good. I basically describe everything as either "fancy" or "not fancy." So since I don't have the words, I'll have to make some up.

Zander Cafe is "fromdern." It's fromdern exactly in the way that W.A. Frost is not. W.A. Frost is more "fromditional." Moscow on the Hill is "fromthnic." Basically, I'm just putting "from" on front of regular words. My imagination stinks.

I suppose I could start over on that last paragraph using regular words. But it's too late now -- see, I never learned how to use the "delete" key. Overcomplicated computer crap. I prefer to scream commands at the computer, and then when it doesn't do what I say, I smash it with a hammer.

Back to Zander Cafe. Little spendy, but great place to go for, say, a fifth date, when you're really trying to impress your future wife. On the date in question, I was dressed to the nines, lemme tell ya. I had my best smock on, and was wearing a long penis sheath to demonstrate my virility to my potential mate.

We ate some sort of good food, and some sort of wine. We also had a discussion about "going steady," and she was up for it (lesson to the fellas: penis sheaths work), though we didn't want to call it that because we didn't want to sound like we were in 8th grade. "Dating exclusively"? We thought that would work, but it sounded a little corporate. We finally settled on "Number One Cutesy-Schmoopie-Poo."

So I leave you with that. If you take anything from this post, take away the mental image of me in a penis sheath handing you my testicles and calling my wife "Number One Cutesy-Schmoopie-Poo." You're welcome.
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Posted by Ed Dykhuizen at 7:42 AM 1 comments
Ed Dykhuizen's Bio Tags: Zander Cafe, St Paul, Cathedral Hill
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Tuesday, April 15, 2008
I would like to take this occasion to announce the formation of the official Ed Dykhuizen Fan Club. Ed, what this means for you is that you get a ten percent discount on any electric fans I have in stock. That's right - ceiling fans, portable fans, those fancy oscillating fans - all at great savings to you, the Ed Dykhuizen. If you act now, I'll even pay your sales tax until 2012. That's two THOUSAND twelve! And not just on fans, but your sales tax on whatever you happen to buy in the next four years. All for joining the official Ed Dykhuizen Fan Club. (Initial registration $50. Annual dues $75. All proceeds go directly to me, the operator of the official Ed Dykhuizen Fan Club.) So hurry! don't delay! act now! strike while the iron is hot! a penny saved is a penny earned!
Posted by A Loyal Reader at 5:22 PM

Computer Rage
Saturday, April 12, 2008

I spend a lot of time on computers, between my job and my hobbies and my love life ... uh, scratch that last part ... my point is, I feel relatively computer-literate. So I thought it wouldn't be a huge leap of faith to buy and play a freakin' computer game.

A few moths ago, I got "Lego Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy" (which is a confusing title, in keeping with George Lucas's apparent disregard for the numbering system that the world has universally accepted. I picture him sitting at home counting "4, 5, 6, 1, 2, 3, 12, 45, 92, 1" on his fingers and then laughing evilly).

I played the game and loved it. It's adorable, and it's Star Wars, and I was a Star Wars-obsessed kid. I finished it for the most part, and was ready to move on.

Perhaps foolishly, I assumed I'd be able to buy and play the earlier "Lego Star Wars I: The First 3 Episodes, Except Not the First Three that Were Made, But The First Three In the Timespan of The Series -- You Know, the Prequels." First I asked for it at Best Buy. The clerks looked at me disdainfully, because I had apparently asked for a game that was more than a year old, and their minds could not fathom such a distant time. I then went to used game store, but they only carried games in other platforms, not PC. I don't know why this restriction exists, or why we need so many different platforms, but oh well.

In the past, I bet my frustration over all things computer, and how overcomplicated they often are, would have overtaken me at this point and I would have given up. But I was determined to waste countless hours pressing buttons to make a Lego version of R2-D2 fly, and nothing was going to stop me.

Like most people, I discovered that the best option was to go to Amazon. It cost only $15, so I ordered it, and then found something else to buy so I could get the SuperSaver Shipping (because any economist will tell you that you save the most money by buying additional stuff you don't need), and waited with baited breath for a week.

I got the game in the mail this morning. I plugged it in, pressed whatever buttons they told me to press to install it, and then ....

"You can not run this game because you don't have Power Spibbleedoowop Card on your computer. We are now shutting down."

What? Don't toy with me, you piece of crap. I wasted most of my life getting this game and I intend to waste the rest of it playing it. Let's try it again.

"You can not run this game because you don't have Power Spibbleedoowop Card on your computer. We are now shutting down."

AAAAUAUAAUAUGHHHH!

After I finished trashing my house, I settled down and researched what it would take to get this Power Spibbleedoowop Card on my computer. I actually found some helpful instruction -- written in good, comprehensible English, which was a surprise -- and they all basically said that I would have to spend $50-$100 on this card.

Then the real trashing began. The entire neighborhood is now on fire. I'm writing this from a cave outside a post-apocalyptic hellhole of my own making. Surprisingly, the cave has wi-fi.

This my friends, is what drug dealers call "the first one's free; the rest will cost you." Except it's worse than a drug dealer, because you don't know up front that the rest will cost you. You don't have a degree in Computer Dork, so you have no idea that you're supposed to check the game and the computer for some weird "card" thing you've never heard of. How many other weird little bits and bobbins do you have to verify just to play a freakin' game? Why does this have to be so complicated?

I refuse to spend this money to get this card. I will not be extorted. I would rather spend $1000 traveling to the house of the person who made this so complicated and shoving the game down his throat. It shouldn't be legal to use these kind of bait-and-switch tactics (though killing computer people with their own products should be).

I tell you what I'm really going to do -- I'm going to open a gas station. I'm going to sell the gas for cheap and then let people buy it, and wait until they fill up and put the key in the ignition ... and then nothing will happen. And I'm going to say, "whoops, I'm sorry! You have to go buy an Engine Fibledeeflopadee Card now. It costs Ten Zillion Dollars. You should have checked beforehand to see if your car was compatible with my gasoline. Dumb-ass."

My point for all the computer dorks of the world is this: Make it simple. We don't care how it works; we just want it to work. If that means simpler games with less thrilling colors, then so be it -- just make sure we don't have to learn about "cards" and crap we don't care about. And my other point is this: Die. Die a horrible, slow death. And also, make it simple.

I guess this has absolutely nothing to do with the 55102. I'm sorry, I just had to vent my computer rage. I feel a little calmer now. Thanks for listening. I like you ... I will kill you last.
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Posted by Ed Dykhuizen at 9:32 AM 0 comments
Ed Dykhuizen's Bio Tags: I hate computers and everyone who has anything to do with them

And Why Is This Gnome So Happy?
Thursday, April 10, 2008

Because he drinks lots of beer. That's the joke answer for the headline there. And drinking beer tends to make people happy. Oh, and I probably should have mentioned -- there's a bar/restaurant in the 55102 called "The Happy Gnome." There, now the joke is complete. Why are you not laughing?

Point is, the Happy Gnome is a great place to get beer. The don't have a thousand varities, instead selecting a few dozen very good ones, including many you've probably never tried before. I definitely hadn't tried Belgian wheat beers before I went there, and I was stunned how much I liked them.

Basically, Happy Gnome made me a beer snob. Before it, I used to be the most extreme of beer communists -- all beers were equal in my eyes, and I drank them all. I really didn't care what they tasted like, as long as they had bubbles and alcohol.

The Belgian beers at Happy Gnome changed all that. Now, if I'm offered a Budweiser, I sniff haughtily and turn my head with scorn. The sight of a Miller will bring forth cutting, vicious bon mots by the truckload. Just hearing the word "Coors" turns me into Oscar Wilde watching a Nascar event. (That was as snobby a sitation as I could think of. The wackiness just ain't free-flowing this morning. Perhaps that's for the best.)

The food at The Happy Gnome can be hit or miss, with more hit than miss. It's all mid-range on the fancy-meter, with things like elk burgers and plates of sausages and cheese. Probably ordinary bar food in Belgium, where the elk and sausages run free, but by our standards it seems pretty gussied-up.

I guess I'm saying that Happy Gnome is a Belgian restaurant. Is it? I honestly don't know for sure. Let's go with it though.

So, anyway, if you want a taste of Belgium, and to drink Belgium, and to pass Belgium through your lower intestine, and so forth, then try the Happy Gnome in St. Paul. And remember their slogan, "He's happy because he's an alcoholic."

Fern's, Fabulous!
Tuesday, April 8, 2008

So anyway. I've been trying for about a week now to get out some sort of interesting tidbit about Fabulous Fern's, one of the mainstays of the Cathedral/Crocus Hill neighborhood of Minneapolis (nee St. Paul -- see comments under previous post). I keep getting distracted, and I'm not sure why. Perhaps because OHMYGOD, a cat! Right over there! Oh, that's my cat. Hi, kitty. Yeah, meow. I agree.

So anyway, back to Fabulous Fern's. I guess I really, deep down, feel that OHMYGOD another cat! Oh, it's the same cat. Sorry. Never mind.

OK, focus, focus! Fabulous Fern's! Fabulous Freakin' Fern's! Fabulous Flippin' Freakin' Fern's Fantastico! Fern's comma Fabulous!

Fabulous Fern's is a pretty unremarkable place. It's probably the most meet-market-y of all the bars in the 55102, though in that respect it pales in comparison to about any place in Uptown Minneapolis (nee Minneapolis). It has darts and video trivia and big Budweiser signs and mostly young loud people, although you will see older folks in there too.

Supposedly August Wilson hung out at Fern's quite a bit when he lived in town, so that's an interesting tidbit, eh? I picture him sitting in the restaurant part of Fern's, looking out the rain-streaked window with a soulful look in his eyes, contemplating the narrative structure of "Fences," chewing on some pretty crappy food, and thinking, "Why the hell am I eating at Fern's?" Because the restaurant portion, which is as big as the bar, is basically just an Applebee's wannabe. And that is a very sad thing to want to be. That's like a kid who dreams of growing up to be an insurance salesman.

So that's all I really have to say about Mediocre Fern's. I've gone there many times to play darts and eat buffalo wings, and it dutifully fulfills that function. This concludes my essay on Fabulous Fern's. I have now come to the termination of the information that I intend to communicate. The end.
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Posted by Ed Dykhuizen at 8:06 AM 0 comments
Ed Dykhuizen's Bio Tags: Fabulous Ferns, Mediocre Ferns, my cat, Minneapolis nee St Paul, CathedralCrocus Hill

Results of the "Rename St. Paul" Contest!
Saturday, April 5, 2008

Last time on 55102.net, I started a contest to rename St. Paul something a bit more memorable and evocative of St. Paul's unique identity, something like "Niceville" or "FreakinColdington." I'm proud now to announce that the results are in, and ... there was not a single entry! I can interpret this one of two ways:

1. Nobody reads this.

2. Everybody reads this. I am an internationally known raconteur, beloved by millions for my thrice-weekly nuggets of wit and wisdom. My influence on the zeitgeist of modern life has been recognized with three Pulitzer Prizes, four Peabody Awards, twelve VH1 Soul Vibe Awards, and thirty-five Nobel Prizes in chemistry. I have been given a knighthood, an earlhood, a jesterhood, and was recently named the Queen of the Prussia. But, despite having billions of mindless minions hanging on my every word, not one decided to take two seconds to make up a silly name for St. Paul.

Hmmm ... tough choice. But if I use Occam's Razor and assume that the simplest answer must be right, I choose number 2. So then the question becomes, why did all of you ungrateful mindless minions snub my cute lil' contest?

I think the message is clear. No one wants St. Paul renamed. We all like the illogical way places get their names, and even though is very little connection between the founder of the Christian church and the capital city of Minnesota (little known fact: St. Paul actually wasn't from Minnesota), we have come to enjoy the apparently randomly chosen name of our city, and we ain't changing. So consider me reformed, dear readers. I will never threaten to rename St. Paul again. I will holster the awesome power over time and space that you have entrusted to me through your slavish devotion.

I was hoping to talk a bit about Fabulous Fern's in this post. But now I gotta go commune with the gods. They always throw a fun party, but I just know that the Christian God will corner me and chew my ear off about his son. It's all "Jesus did this, Jesus did that, Jesus died for your sins," yadda yadda. It's like, yeah, I get it, he's great!
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Posted by Ed Dykhuizen at 10:05 AM 5 comments
Ed Dykhuizen's Bio Tags: St Paul, clinically deranged delusions of grandeur, pathetic attempt at a contest, covering up failure of said attempt with bucketloads of silliness
Comments
Monday, April 7, 2008
Hey! I thought I had responded to the Great Renaming in Theory of St. Paul Contest! I'd sent in what I thought was a super humorous suggestion, and I figured it was simply ignored, as it ought to have been. Check your email, Ed; maybe it's still there.
Posted by An angry letter writer at 12:25 PM

Monday, April 7, 2008
I didn't get it, I swear! Good Lord, maybe millions desperately tried to enter but they all got lost! Well, reverse what I said above. St. Paul is, as of this moment, called whatever this person suggested.
Posted by Ed Dykhuizen at 2:05 PM

Monday, April 7, 2008
Hey, no harm, no foul, you know? As long as I get to rename a city, I'm as happy as a clam. So here we go. In my supposedly "lost" post, I threw out the suggestion that you rename St. Paul as "Minneapolis". Mainly because most people have already heard of that one. And they'll be even more of twin cities if they both had the same name. So I don't know how you enact that or whatever, but that's not in my bailiwick. I'm more of an "ideas" person.
Posted by An instantly appeased letter writer at 2:30 PM

Tuesday, April 8, 2008
I liked "Cincinnicey."
Posted by Nate, MyZip at 4:23 PM

Tuesday, April 8, 2008
Yeah, me too, but it's too late now. I already talked to the Greek God of City Names (met him at the god party -- nice fella) and St. Paul is now offically called Minneapolis. Minneapolis is still called Minneapolis as well. I suggested calling all cities Minneapolis, but he thought that might make things a bit confusing.
Posted by Ed Dykhuizen at 5:01 PM

Fabulous Fern's (Slight Return)
Thursday, April 3, 2008

So. Last time I got distracted from my insightful and trenchant critique of Fabulous Fern's, one of the mainstays of the Cathedral Hill neighborhood ... which reminds me, I'm starting to realize that people call this neighborhood "Crocus Hill." I wonder if I'm the only one who calls it "Cathedral Hill." I prefer "Cathedral Hill" -- it's a got a big old cathedral, and it's at the top of a hill. Nice and logical. Meanwhile, I don't think the area is known for crocuses, more than any other area. Lame. Sounds like a PR firm made it up.

I'm all for logical names. Makes life so much easier. I think all capital cities should just be called "Capital City." You could have "Minnesota Capital City" and "Texas Capital City" and so forth. Wouldn't that be about a zillion times easier than spending weeks trying to teach third-graders that the capital of Vermont is Montpelier? It's unecessarily complicated. Besides, what does the word "Montpelier" really say about Vermont? When we think of Vermont, do we think of French mountains and Pele? No, we think of cows and liberals. Maybe Vermont's capital should be "Liberal-upon-Cow." I can accept that as well.

What would Minnesota's capital city be called then? Maybe "Coldville"? "Niceburgh"? "Cincinicey"? "YouBetchatown"? Make up your own and log them in the comments section below. I'm expecting a deluge from the vast three-person horde of people who read this. And I'll choose my favorite next time and then use it exclusively when referring to St. Paul for the rest of my life.


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Posted by Ed Dykhuizen at 8:56 AM 0 comments
Ed Dykhuizen's Bio Tags: Fabulous Ferns, Cathedral Hill, Crocus Hill, St Paul, Vermont, capital cities, YouBetchatown

So On To Fabulous Fern's
Monday, March 31, 2008

So the latest place in our tour of the Cathedral Hill neighborhood of St. Paul is Fabulous Fern's, a bar in which ... ohmygod, the Twins are on! Opening Day! What am I doing writing this crap? Turn it on! Opening Day in a snowstorm, no less! How Minnesotan is that?! Gotta love it! Crap, bases loaded, no outs for the Angels! They have Torii Hunter now! We hate them! We kinda still like Torii though! He's very affable! The wife always says he's "a nice-looking man"! I don't think that makes me jealous! Perhaps because Torii is so darn affable! Hey, they got a double play! That's not bad! Just one run in and now two outs! Why am I still writing!? I think I'm just writing each thought as it comes! Kind of a stream-of-consciousness Marcel Proust thing! Except much, much less profound! And with more exclamation points! That shows I'm excited! About the Twins! On Opening Day! Woo! Crap, Chone Figgins hit a single and tied the game! He pronounces his first name "Shawn"! That's extremely lame! Remind me to tell you sometime how much it annoys me to see normal names spelled in a weird way for no reason! I think I hate Chone just for that! I think if I ever met him I'd call him "Chone" and pronounce it as it's actually spelled over and over until he punched me in the face! Then I'd explain my distaste for normal names that are misspelled for no reason! But he wouldn't understand me because I'd be crying and bleeding! Hold on, the inning's over! Phew. Ah, Menard's. Wonderful old Menard's. Will you never stop selling household appliances at such reasonable prices? But why would you? It is your very nature. You would as soon ask a bird not to sing.

Ohmygod, the game's back on! Gotta go!
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Posted by Ed Dykhuizen at 7:41 PM 0 comments
Ed Dykhuizen's Bio Tags: Fabulous Ferns, Twins, opening day, writing a load of silly crap to qualify me for 12 posts this month and ensure I get paid

Curling Up In Here!
Sunday, March 30, 2008

So, you think your neighborhood has character, eh? You live in one of those painfully hip cities like Seattle or New York and think that wild eclecticism flows through your town's collective veins? What's that you say -- the Midwest is nothing but cows and large, boring people who could never appreciate the variegated urban cultural pastiche that you regularly wipe off your overly expensive shoes? Well, let me ask you this, hotshot -- does your neighborhood have a curling club? No? Aw, that's a shame. Cuz mine does.

You might argue that curling is not exactly an exotic cultural expression. But that's only if you take "exotic" as meaning "done by people who live near the equator." If you go by the real definition, that of something unusual, I think curling qualifies.

You've seen curling on the Winter Olympics, I imagine. Everyone sees it and laughs at it for a few weeks and then everyone forgets about it. It involves a big rock with a handle on it and some guys with a broom and a shuffleboard court on ice. It looks like a lot of fun.

"Looks like" being the key, because I've never done it. (This is kinda where my argument about me reveling in varied cultural experiences falls apart. Well, it was fun while it lasted.) There is indeed a curling club in the 55102, and I've tried to go a few times, and each time I get scared off. It doesn't look very inviting. Each time there were a couple of 50-ish Minnesotan men loitering at the door, and if there's one kind of person you don't want to step to, it's 50-ish Minnesotan men. They'll pop a cap in yo ass, you betcha.

But I'm glad it's there. I love it when things like that stay alive. Odd little cultural things that grumpy old men would complain are dying out because of television and the Internets and those darn Victrolas that make the kids dance all hurdy-gurdy. Contrary to the "grumpy old man" argument, people still and will always like to get out and do things together.

And I also love to see different areas of the country doing different things. Curling is very Minnesotan, or at least Northern, and it's a goofy little part of our unique character. Just a small part, mind you, but an important one nonetheless.

So the point is, you Seattle snobs can keep your overly intricate coffee drinks and overly mopey rock bands. New York, you can keep your pretentious boutiques and your off-off-off-off-off-Broadway plays where a guy shouts nonsense to a crowd of two. We got our own thing going on, thanks.
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Posted by Ed Dykhuizen at 8:33 AM 0 comments
Ed Dykhuizen's Bio Tags: Curling Club, St Paul, Cathedral Hill

Roll Call! (and Costello's)
Thursday, March 27, 2008

Roll call!
My name is Ed! (yeah!)
I'm from St. Paul! (yeah!)
And when I'm there, (yeah?)
I have a ball! (yeah!)

Hook-a-chak-a-hook-a-hook-a ... Roll call!

It's Ed again! (... yeah?)
I'd like to say (sigh ... yeah?)
Costello's Bar, (yeah, I've heard of it ...)
Is a basically adequate place to get a drink in the Cathedral Hill neighborhood! (faint praise!)

Hook-a-chak-a-hook-a-hook-a ... Roll call!

Ok, Ed again, real quick! (not again!)
I didn't mean to malign Costello's back there! (you did!)
It's a fine place, not too divey, not too yuppie! (your point?!)
It's unremarkable, but that can be a good thing for a bar! (no one cares!)
Oh, come on, that seems a bit harsh. (truth hurts!)

Well, anyway, Costello's is a nice, relatively quiet place to get a beer. It's the kind of bar where you can watch sports and not be surrounded by chunkhead white guys who wear fitted baseball caps backwards. Which really should be illegal at this point. Now I'm no racist, but I were, I'd be racist against white chunkheads who wear fitted baseball hats backwards. I can't explain what's so objectionable about it -- maybe I shouldn't try. Some things just are.

Oh, and they gots pool tables. (yeah!)

Roll call!

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Posted by Ed Dykhuizen at 8:07 AM 0 comments
Ed Dykhuizen's Bio Tags: Costellos, St Paul, Cathedral Hill, roll call, white chunkheads who wear fitted baseball caps backwards

City Livin', Complete With Crappy Convenience Store!
Wednesday, March 26, 2008

One of the things I like best about the Cathedral Hill neighborhood of St. Paul is that, for a block or two at least, it feels like a big city. I suppose St. Paul is a big city, sorta. Kinda. I don't know that it feels that way most of the time though.

The Twin Cities have 3 million people and represent the nation's 16th largest metropolitan area, the largest within a several-state radius. And we have more culture than many of the nation's larger areas, with everything you need -- great restaurants of every variety you can think of, a theater scene second only to New York in terms of theaters per capita, many vibrant and diverse immigrant communities, teams in all major sports, world-class museums, etc. Maybe the night life isn't wild, but we're Minnesotans. Wild night life would be impolite.

So it's a big city. But I've lived in Chicago, and man oh flippin' man does it make the Twin Cities seem like a small town. Chicago has about 3 times the population of the Cities, but it feels like about a hundred times. While the Twin Cities has two small downtowns set apart by several miles, Chicago has one monster one. While the Twin Cities has lots of houses with yards, Chicago has miles of skyscrapers and four-story brownstones. Chicago is knit together with a wide-ranging public transportation system of trains, buses, etc. Twin Cities ... well, we have a limited bus system. Oh, and we got a light rail. One. As in, one rail.

Honestly, I don't miss Chicago that much. The downside of a big city is the crime and congestion and chaos. I prefer a more sedate and comfortable city existence, with all the amenities but less hassle. But sometimes I do miss the tight, pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods of Chicago. They seem more like genuine communities than do the collections of bungalows and strip malls you find too often in the Cities. The bottom line is that walking around town creates a feeling of community. Driving around town does not.

BUT, and this is my point, you can find that big-city feeling in some spots in the Cities. The Cathedral Hill neighborhood is a prime example. It even has the hallmark of a big-city community: a crappy convenience store.

The AA Market, right off the neighborhood's main corner at Western and Selby, is everything you want in a big-city crappy convenience store. It's got terrible cheap food, none of which is, or has ever been, fresh. The aisles are nice and constrictive. Sometimes you'll meet some shady characters inside. The clerk is of some ethnicity that I can't quite identify, and doesn't speak English very well. It's overpriced and everything!

So I like it. Can't say I go there much, but I'm glad it's there. It just makes me feel more like I'm living in a big city, and I need that.

P.S.: The name is also a pretty lame attempt to show up at the top of the Yellow Pages listings. "AA Market?" What could the AA stand for, pray tell? And moreover, who looks in the Yellow Pages for a convenience store? Do people really scour the listings and call up convenience stores and say "I really need old, dusty boxes of cereal! Please tell me you have some!"

Back to Earth (and Videos)
Monday, March 24, 2008

So anwyay, dialing back a bit form the wackiness of the last post (sorry, sometimes I get a bit carried away), let's talk video stores. Specifically, let's talk about the best video store in 55102, Blair Box Office Video.

That could sound like faint praise, I suppose, seeing as how it's the only video store in 55102. Indeed, it's the only surviving one in St. Paul proper, to my knowledge, besides Blockbusters. Such are the times. Because of Netflix, it is currently the twilight hour of video stores' day in the sun, and someone should really do a respectful eulogy. That someone probably shouldn't be me.

I did grow up with a romantic vision of video stores. They started cropping up during my childhood in the early '80s, and at that age they were chiefly a medium through which I could get Star Wars movies. As a teenager, though, my fancies turned away from Star Wars and toward ... well, toward girls, actually. And since girls' fancies did not turn to me in kind, the video store became the place to learn about women and sex. Specifically, there were no shortage of educational documentaries with names like "Hardbodies" and "Hot Dog ... The Movie" and "Revenge of the Nerds." All that careful study of human behavior later proved fruitful, as I snagged my current wife after my ragtag bunch of nerd friends and I beat Graham Winchester III and his pack of prep-school snobs in a climactic web log writing contest. True story.

But when you rented a movie like that, you always had to get a legitimate movie as well to use as a cover -- maybe if you picked up "Raging Bull," the cute clerk behind the desk wouldn't notice that you were also taking home "The Last American Virgin." You could say, "Yeah, I came in because I really wanted to see 'The Magnificent Ambersons,' one of Orson Welles' underappreciated masterpieces, but I didn't see it on the shelf, so I went with 'Raging Bull' instead. I can never get enough of DeNiro's electric performance. Oh, yeah, and, uh, also, do you have 'Meatballs 3'?"

And because I actually did start watching the cover movies, I became quite a movie buff. I figured the perfect place to work would be a video store, where you could just sit on stools, watch movies, wear flannels, get off the stools occasionally to stock some shelves, chat with movie-buff patrons, who would also sit on stools (maybe I just liked sitting on stools), write the next "Pulp Fiction," tell celebrities who come in to the store how their videos are doing ("Sorry Mr. DeNiro, 'Raging Bull' just isn't flying off the shelves these days. Maybe you should have tried harder in that performance, eh? But I'm optimistic, because 'Revenge of the Nerds XII' is coming out soon."), etc., etc.

That romantic vision was dashed as soon as I started working in video stores. I first worked at Hollywood Video, which was a frenzied chop shop where you had to wear ridiculous faux-tuxedos and weren't even allowed to sit down, ever, on stools or any other implements of sitting. Seriously, one time I thought I was finally alone in the place, and the manager was in the back room, so I sat on the front counter for a second. The manager immediately saw me on a closed-captioned camera that he had trained on the front desk, and told me through the intercom to stand back up. I quit after about two months.

I figured the problem was just that I had been working for the MAN, and needed to try a cool, funky little independent place instead. So I started manning the counter at "Discount Video" in Minneapolis. It was often called the best video store in the Twin Cities by the City Pages. Indeed, its selection was A+ all the way.

Everything else about the place, however, deserved an F----. The videos were horribly overpriced (the "discount" part of the title was cruel irony) and were not even organized on the shelves. This was 1999, and the check-out system still used an old DOS machine from about 1985. It involved lots of screens to go through, lots of typing, and lots of opportunities to screw up and then call the manager over to fix it. And that was always a treat, because the managers/owners were the two worst human beings I have ever met. After one of them physically pushed me for something that wasn't my fault, I quit. When the place was replaced by a cell phone store, I laughed long and heartily.

But the point of all this is that long after I gave up on my romantic vision of video stores, I found one that actually fulfilled it. Blair Box Office Video, on Selby, is a lovely little place where clerks wear flannel and sit and watch movies -- and get to sit on real-life stools! And they have wonderful selections of foreign films, documentaries, and oddball movies that aren't even available through Netflix.

Box Office Video isn't a large place, but it goes for quality over quantity. You may not be able to find "Bring It On 5: Because 'It' Wasn't Brought On Sufficiently the Other Four Times," but you will be able to find all of Peter Jackson's early films -- and by the way, if you liked the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, you'll love "Bad Taste," "Meet the Feebles," and "Dead/Alive"! They're all inspirational, heartwarming epics about the triumph of good over evil, I swear! (Editor's note: No, they're not.)

So the moral of this long and winding tale is that Blair Box Office Video is everything that video stores should be, and hopefully it'll survive the worst that Blockbuster and Netflix can throw at it. After all, as successful as those companies are, do they have any stools? No? I rest my case.

Post Script: Hey, I just thought of a great concept for an early-'80s teen sex comedy. It's about a ragtag bunch of young, geeky tort lawyers who take on some stuffed-shirt Ivy-League attorneys in litigation that will determine whether hot girls can get naked and wild on the beaches of Santa Monica. It's called ... are you ready ... "Beach of Contact." Eh?

A Little Coffeeshop ... of MURDER?
Friday, March 21, 2008

LAST TIME on 55102.net ...

Ed made the shocking revelation that he enjoys Common Good Books.

(Shot of Ed with a thin black moustache, eyebrow raised, looking sexily into the camera)

ED: I can't deny it any longer -- I love Common Good Books!

BUM BUM!

(Morgan Fairchild, circa 1988, falls into his arms. His head over her shoulder, he shoots a look of strength and seriousness off into the distance.)

But there was an ace up his sleeve ... there is also a coffeehouse nearby!

BUM BUM!

(Ed stares into the camera with a devlish grin.)

ED (ominously): That's right. You can also get coffee! Mwa-ha-ha-ha! Mwa-ha-ha-ha!

(Cut to a black sports car bursting through a blockade and jumping a ditch. Freeze frame in mid-jump.)

WILL HE LIKE THIS COFFEE?

WILL HE LIKE THIS COFFEESHOP?

WILL MORGAN FAIRCHILD AND THE BLACK SPORTS CAR PERTAIN AT ALL?

FIND OUT ... IN THIS WEEK'S VERY SPECIAL ALL-CAPS EDITION OF ... 55102.NET! STARTING ... NOW!

Hello! This is Ed. Yeah, I do like this coffeeshop, Nina's, quite a bit. Classy place, looks like it's been around a while, which is more than you can say for most coffeeshops. Good sandwiches too, that they make to order. All in all, great place.

BUM BUM! BA-DA-DEE-DA-DA-BUM!!! BUM-BA-DA-DA-DA-DUM! BUM-DOOODLEY DOO-DOO-DA-DUM! WAP-A-DAP-A-DA! AND SO FORTH!

(Roll credits.)
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Posted by Ed Dykhuizen at 8:06 AM 0 comments
Ed Dykhuizen's Bio Tags: Ninas Coffee, Cathedral Hill, St Paul, 90 percent nonsense

March Indifference! (and Books)
Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Guess what, sports fans -- it's time for March Indifference! This is the crazy time of year when some college teams play basketball and there's a bracket that people get excited about and I ignore it all completely.

What else could I possibly do with my time, you ask? How can I fill that empty chasm within my soul that should be occupied with agonizing over whether one university I've never been to or even heard of in any non-sports capacity will beat a similarly uninteresting university? Well, I get ready for baseball season (which is WAY more worthwhile ... in some way I haven't figured out yet). And I visit my favorite bookstore, Common Good Books.

Common Good Books sprung up recently kitty-corner from the YWCA on Western and Selby, in my beloved Cathedral Hill neighborhood in St. Paul. It is owned and operated by Garrison Keillor, yeah yeah, but the real attraction is ... assistant manager Mr. Martin Schmutterer! I used to work with this guy, but he escaped the harsh, dog-eat-dog world of ConHugeCo and nestled in the warm, loving bosom of Garrison Keillor. (Figuratively speaking, of course. But it did put an image in your mind, didn't it?)

So if you go to Common Good and see Martin Schmutterer there, say hi from me. Go up to Martin and say "Hey, Schmutty, how the Schmut are ya, you Shmutface?" He'll know it's from me. And then give him noogies and an Indian burn. Then a wedgie, and a swirlie, and a punch in the gut. He will probably get very angry and call the cops on you. That's all part of the fun. You'll then be thrown into a holding cell, get arraigned on an assault charge, spend a month or two in jail, get fired, lose your family, and waste the rest of your life as a shell of your former self, a shadow of regret and longing. Don't worry, Martin will get the joke.

Anyway, enough nonsense. Common Good came along, I presume, to fill St. Paul's gaping need for neighborhood independent bookstores. We have always had several used bookstores, but if you wanted a new book in the old days, you had the tremendously difficult choice of the Barnes and Noble in Roseville or the Barnes and Noble in Highland Park. Now you can choose the charming and well-stocked Common Good bookstore, staffed by knowledgeable book fans, which come in both the Schmutterer and non-Schmutterer varieties.

It's just generally a more pleasant place to buy books, in my opinion, than any other place in St. Paul. And if you're used to Barnes and Noble and need to have coffee while book shopping, there's a coffeeshop just above Common Good. What do I think of this coffeeshop? Well ...

WILL Ed like this coffeeshop?

WILL he describe it?

WILL he find some way to shoehorn in some bizarre nonsense?

FIND OUT next time ... on 55102.net!

Why?
Sunday, March 16, 2008

And we're continuing our tour of the Cathedral Hill neighborhood of St. Paul ... and we're walking, we're walking, and ... we're stopping. To your right you will see the YWCA, which is a terrific place to work out if you enjoy working out while surrounded by other people who actually look like they could use a workout. That is, if you're looking to feel even more inadequacy and self-consciousness about the body you're trying to improve by surrounding yourself with hardbodies in spandex, the Y is not for you. It's for middle-aged people in grungy sweatshirts, not the cast of the movie "Perfect," starring John Travolta and Jamie Lee Curtis. (Look it up. It's great. It's from 1985, and it's a tale of lust and power set in a health club. It's so '80s it will make your leg warmers jump up and start walking like an Egyptian.)

Not that I actually exercise at the Y. I don't exercise at all. Exercise is for wimps. The true test of a man's character is to cultivate a terrible, decaying body and still survive to a ripe old age. Anyone can live to their 90s when fully toned and healthy. But few can defy nature and make it through a long lifetime of heavy smoking, drinking, and meals of fried lard. Those who can are the Clint Eastwoods of the modern world.

Anywhoozle, I did experience the Y when the wife and I took a yoga class there. (Which is also very manly, by the way. I swear. If Clint Eastwood were alive today (Editor's note: He is), he'd be permanently shaped like a pretzel.) So I got to see the clientele, and they seemed like good folk.

Not that the yoga class was a rousing success. At the beginning we were bent into unnatural positions and taught how to breathe, which was great, because that's what we came for. Then at the end of every class we had to sing a song about "the long time sun," which is not only grammatically incorrect, it is also just generally a baffling choice of words. (Does calling it "long time" really make it better? Don't we want the sun to go down regularly?) But anyway, the class didn't jump the shark until the sessions became little besides low chanting and waving our arms around. It was like a aerobics class held by those growl-y monks that were big in the mid-90s. Bah.

But still, if for some bizarre reason I had to start exercising regularly -- say if I were approached by Jamie Lee Curtis, John Travolta, and the late Clint Eastwood (Editor's note: He's still alive, dammit!), and told that I could star in my own feature, a tale of lust and power set in a yoga studio, but first I had to do ten push-ups without dying -- well, then, I'd start working out at the Y. It would be the long time best choice. Long time.
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Posted by Ed Dykhuizen at 8:04 AM 0 comments
Ed Dykhuizen's Bio Tags: YWCA, Yoga, Perfect, the late Clint Eastwood, Cathedral Hill, St Paul

Big Fat Russian Dynamo
Thursday, March 13, 2008

In our tour of the Cathedral Hill neighborhood of St. Paul, we have just left W.A. Frost, having drunk deeply from their well of old-world charm (and their well of scotch). Hat at a rakish tilt, we stroll down the street, jaunty, jolly, jaunty, jolly. "Hello, neighbor!" we say. There is no one there, but the sentiment still stands.

Suddenly, we are halted in our tracks by the sight of the largest man we have ever seen, sitting in a restaurant window. He's not repulsive -- on the contrary, he's fascinating. Like Homer Simpson when he tried to go on workers' comp for becoming obese, this man is a big fat dynamo. He has a big black beard, is wearing a fetching muu-muu, and just seems pleased as Punch. And something about him screams "Russian."

Not many things scream "Russian" in the Twin Cities. It's not exactly a Russian mecca, at least to my knowledge. But this big cheerful fella is just as Russian as the day is long and painful. What is it about him that's so gashdurn Russian?

I think it's the happiness. See, Russians just know how to be fat better than Americans do. You'd think we'd be good at it, since so many of us have a lot of practice. But Americans put the "morbid" in "morbidly obese." They either shuffle around sadly, as if apologizing for their fatness, or they lope along dumbly unaware, looking like they just don't give a crap. Russian fat guys seem like they couldn't be happier about how fat they are. "Check me out!" they seem to say. "I'm massive -- isn't it wonderful? More food makes me stronger!"

Anyway, enough about the freakin' fat guy. It's just that I see him every time I go to Moscow on the Hill, which probably is as much of a Russian mecca as you'll find in the Twin Cities. It's right across the street from W.A. Frost, and oh man is it ever Russian. It's as Russian as Vladimir Putin drinking vodka while throwing a Molotov cocktail in the face of Yakov Smirnoff. I think you'll agree that that's pretty Russian.

They got all yer Russian-nesses covered in spades. You want borscht? They got some great borscht. You want vodka? They have approximately a thousand million varieties. You want an oppressive, militaristic oligarchy? Well ... the owner can be a bit brusque sometimes. You want to be made to feel slightly uncomfortable by a foreign guy walking up to your table and playing loud folk songs on an accordion? Welcome to your wildest dreams.

The food can seem a bit pricey, and since it's Russian food, some of it's not exactly a taste sensation. But it's a terrific place to have a dinner party. I've gone there several times with a few friends and had a grand old time. And you're not going to get a similar experience anywhere else in the area. I'd recommend it.

Just try not to stare at the gigantic, beautiful Russian guy in the corner. He's not a piece of meat, you know. He has feelings. Big, fat, happy feelings.

You Know, Where W.A. Frost Is
Tuesday, March 11, 2008

Most of the people that I know in the Twin Cities are hip young transplants from other states, and most live in Minneapolis. See, Minneapolis is for young, swingin' hipsters, while St. Paul is for nice, quiet young families who are still too cool for the suburbs. If the Twin Cities were "Two and a Half Men," Minneapolis would be Charlie Sheen and St. Paul would be Jon Cryer. (Jesus, how depressing is it that "Two and a Half Men" was the first thing I went for there? Actually, it wasn't even the first one -- I originally thought of Mary-Kate and Ashley, because I think one is supposed to be serious and the other is supposed to be "punk," but I thankfully don't know which is which. Maybe St. Paul is Miley Cyrus and Minneapolis is Hannah Montana? Good Lord, what have I become?)

ANYWAY, my point is that my Minneapolis friends typically don't know St. Paul from Paul Westerberg. (And ... my hipster cred is restored. Phew.) So when I talk about the Cathedral Hill area of St. Paul, they never have a clue what I'm talking about until I mention the cornerstone of the neighborhood, W. A. Frost.

I've been to W.A. Frost four times, which is kinda pathetic because I used to live less than a block away, but it's not exactly the kind of a place a cash-strapped cubicle jockey like me can frequent. It's always considered one of the most romantic spots in the Twin Cities, complete with Victorian architecture, fireplaces, and a beautiful outdoor seating area. Indeed, I've tried to have three dates there, all of which were disastrous. The fourth time I went involved drinking scotch with my dad on my birthday, which was quite nice.

The bar area is definitely a "drink scotch" kind of area, and the restaurant is solid fine dining, with organic ingredients and a menu filled with words like "reduction" and "remoulade" and "emulsion" and "and." But it's not one of these hipster places where some brash young chef is trying to infuse shiitake mushrooms with essence of grapefruit or something -- it's fancy in an old-world, unpretentious sort of way. You're more likely to rub elbows with old civil servants in suits than the silk-shirt-wearing ad execs shouting into cell phones who you find in a lot of fancy Minneapolis places.

I guess I feel a lot more comfortable in places like W.A. Frost. I guess, deep-down, I'd rather be an old civil servant in a suit than a silk-shirt-wearing ad exec shouting into a cell phone. And I guess that's why I'm a proud St. Paulie, happy to sit back and let everyone else compete for hipster cred in Minneapolis. Hm, I feel downright centered right now. I think I'll go watch "Two and a Half Men." That Jon Cryer is a hoot!
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Posted by Ed Dykhuizen at 7:33 AM 2 comments
Ed Dykhuizen's Bio Tags: Cathedral Hill, St Paul, minneapolis, WA Frost, Two and Half Men
Comments
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Mary Kate Olsen is totally the punk one.
Posted by Stephanie at 2:04 PM

Wednesday, March 26, 2008
Dang it, I came here to leave a comment, and my own sister beat me to it! Stephanie is totally the punk one, if you ask me.
Posted by Joe at 4:31 PM

The 55102
Sunday, March 9, 2008

So! The 55102. Or, if you prefer, "the '02." Or "the '2." Or "the 't'." Whatever you call it, it's a land burgeoning with optimism, where the air is filled with dreams, the children radiate joy, the dogs crap out hope, and the starry-eyed starlets start to star or starve. Or something. What was I talking about?

Oh yeah, the 55102. But what is this 55102, this neighborhood of ineffable radiance, of coy luster, of hidden sparkliness? Well, it's mainly West 7th street from downtown St. Paul to Lexington and the Highland area, plus the Cathedral Hill area between Dale and Western.
The West 7th starts out well around downtown, including some nice Irish pubs and restaurants and such. Then it gets kinda "meh" as it goes along, covering the likes of auto parts stores and laundromats. Meh.

The latter, the Cathedral Hill area, is for my money the best area in the Twin Cities. In a few tight, pedestrian-friendly blocks, you get several classy bars and terrific restaurants, the best video store in town, the best coffeeshop, a great bookstore owned by none other than Garrison Keillor (no joke), the gorgeous St. Paul Cathedral, and a whole lot of wonderful old architecture. It's a dignified "old money" kind of area, which one could describe as "tony" if one were not aware that most people find that word pretentious and/or confusing.

So in the next few posts, I'll think I'll go through my favorite spots in the Cathedral Hill area. Are you excited? Of course you are. You are the most excited group of non-existent readers in history. I can tell.
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Posted by Ed Dykhuizen at 5:06 PM 0 comments
Ed Dykhuizen's Bio Tags: Cathedral Hill, West 7th Street, St Paul

The Anti-Blog
Thursday, March 6, 2008

Well, not really. This won't really be an anti-blog. It'll be a series of random, self-indulgent musings from someone who is not really qualified to publicly express an opinion on anything. So it will be a blog.

But I just won't call it a "blog." I've always thought that was the most revolting-sounding word imaginable. It sounds a college kid's slang term for "puke." "Dude, I got so wasted last night, I totally blogged all over Chad's car. You shoulda seen me, I was all like, BLAWWWWWG!"

If I refer to this at all, it will be as a "Web log." Or maybe a "World Wide Web log," just to be contrary against the general tendency of hip people to abbreviate everything they talk about. Or perhaps "World Wide Web log of random, self-indulgent musings." That has a certain ring to it.

Oh, and this really will be about 55102 (or, as hip people would call it, "the '02") and Saint Paul in general. I am determined to stick to the topic, because I genuinely do love my neighborhood and my town, and love to find excuses to explore it. So that's the plan.