We made a road trip down to the Harbor View in Pepin, WI, yesterday, stopping for art and junk shops. In Maiden Rock, we visited “Swan Song,” and met Faye Passow, creator of the “Principal Hot Dishes of Minnesota.” It’s a map showing where these hot dishes allegedly reside.
She has a whole line of similarly entertaining stuff on her Keep The Faye web site.
We bought a “Favorite Fantasy” magnet set – it comes with a individual cartoon images of different fantasies plus a couple of figures to add to today’s favorite.
Continue reading 'The hot dish map'»
Harvard Medical School is planning on killing its Primary Care Division since it needs to make budget cuts. This is the (relatively small) part of Harvard that promotes the notion of its physicians being on the front line of health care instead of being the ones called in as sub-specialists.
There’s an on-line petition to support primary care at Harvard Medical School.
Continue reading 'Support Primary Care at Harvard Medical School'»
Our US 61 bridge is supposed to be replaced Real Soon Now. After the I-35W bridge collapsed in Minneapolis, someone somewhere in MNDOT was told to take bridge safety seriously. So they reviewed every bridge in Minnesota. We’re told that our very own US 61 bridge was among the worst, and may have been the worst that was not abruptly closed.
Last week they hosted a meeting at City Hall about potential bridge designs. It was definitely worth the trip. While the bridge concepts themselves were worth discussing, even better were backdoor discussions of other improvements, notably a Spiral Bridge-like pigtail connecting the bridge’s walkway with downtown. There’s also discussion of using the bridge project as an excuse to get rid of the power substation eyesore on the river bank.
Continue reading 'The New Hastings Bridge – What’s Up?'»
Here’s a bit of perspective on President Obama’s scoffing at DC closing schools for snow. I grew up in Northern Virginia, just outside of McLean. My mom grew up in Fargo, North Dakota, which taught her a bit about snow. She rarely drove in the snow, partly because she didn’t trust the Washington area drivers.
Now I live in Minnesota. You’d think that all of us around here would know how to drive in the snow. In fact, we seem to re-teach ourselves every winter after the first “real” snow falls. The problem in DC is that they don’t get enough snow to really learn how to behave. The get just enough to be dangerous.
And, as a kid I thought it was great to have school canceled because an inch of snow fell.
Here are links to our 2008 photo albums for family and friends. If you click on a photo on an “index” page, you get a large version of that photo. You can browse through the pages by clicking the tiny arrows on the page headers.
I’ve migrated everything else to a “photo gallery” site. Our site uses an open source web server called Gallery2, that stores and organizes our photos. Before this, I relied on the web page-building feature of Apple’s Aperture program. Now I’ve found an Aperture add-on that loads photos directly from Aperture to our Gallery2 web site.
Continue reading 'Our 2008 and Older Photo Galleries'»
Composer and video artist GeHof contacted me a while back for permission to use the Hastings May Day photos in a video.
He posted the result on YouTube: Continue reading 'May Day Video'»
I’ve posted this as background information for the Maypole Dancing pages on this site.
This text was taken from a site created and maintained by johnj@sysx.apana.org.au. Adapted from the BBC TV Series “About Time” by John Berger and others. Continue reading 'Pagan Origins of Mayday'»
Hastings, Minnesota
More often than not in the final decade of the 20th century, spring in Hastings, Minnesota, was ushered in by a crowd of children decked out in flowers, satin ribbons, and flowing skirts, dancing about a Maypole. Continue reading 'A Decade of Maypole Dancing'»
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which we hosted back in February. 
Themocracy