June 2010
4 posts
1 tag
1 tag
May 2010
2 posts
April 2010
5 posts
'Love'
Love means to learn to look at yourself
The way one looks at distant things
For you are only one thing among many.
And whoever sees that way heals his heart,
Without knowing it, from various ills
A bird and a tree say to him: Friend.
Then he wants to use himself and things
So that they stand in the glow of ripeness.
It doesn’t matter whether he knows what he serves:
Who serves best...
“This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence towards people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated...
Obama to give bicycling same importance as cars →
adambez:
theopie:
“One congressman suggested LaHood was on drugs.”
/ via iaminlikewithmybike | libraries /
LaHood is the man.
“I’m not going to apologize for any of it,” he said in the interview. “I think this is what the people want.”
Yes.
Random Gmail tip
Pressing [?] brings up the rest of the keyboard shortcuts.
March 2010
8 posts
2 tags
1 tag
Kieran's new Block E location opens today
hennepinave:
“Kieran’s new location, inside the former Bellanotte, is not just an opportunity for the pub, but a new direction for Block E. As it now stands, Block E possesses a movie theater and a few chain restaurants — let’s pick that apart. With a limited number of downtown residents, the complex’s success hinges on 2.5 million other metro dwellers as well as tourists. But an...
February 2010
11 posts
“Organizations like the IOC (and NFL … and NBA …) have to learn that, in most cases, fans like to see players acting naturally instead of in some sort of pre-packaged, sterile way. You can’t expect them to devote years of their lives to train for a sport and then react exactly how you want them to react once they experience the greatest moment of their playing careers...
Al Nino
“El Nino winters tend to be cooler, wetter/stormier for the south and east, but drier/milder for many of the northern tier states of the USA, and that seems to be playing out so far this winter. Canada: third or fourth warmest winter on record, to date, and most climatologists are pointing a finger at El Nino. Just be glad your name isn’t “Al Nino.” During the severe El...
Black History Month Special Day of Programming on...
“Tune into KFAI all day on Tuesday February 23rd to hear a full day’s programming devoted to celebrating Black History Month. You will hear music and discussion from 6am to 6pm produced by KFAI and members of the community.”
Schedule:
6am-9am: Dee Henry Williams, Host of A Great Blend of Watercolors, presents The Politics, Art, and Music of Chicago.
9am-11am: Akhmiri Sekhr-Ra...
It never ceases to amaze
From Mother Jones,
Yesterday, Pomona College senior Nicholas George, backed by the ACLU, filed a lawsuit in federal court alleging that TSA and FBI agents stomped all over his First and Fourth Amendment rights by detaining him for five hours after they discovered a set of Arabic flashcards and political science books in his backpack. The complaint is worth reading in full (here’s the pdf...
Spring is coming (eventually)
For those of you eagerly looking for signs of spring right now, or just enthusiastic about the natural world we inhabit, I have a few local recommendations.
The Updraft blog on MPR News Q wrote yesterday about “diurnal temperature variations,” which are essentially large swings in temperature between morning and afternoon. Paul Huttner writes,
So why the big daily temp swings this...
About those crows
From Twin Cities Naturalist,
Crows coming into cities to roost in massive numbers in the winter is a relatively new phenomenon that started in the 1960s and increased each decade. There are now many massive crow roosts around the country with populations in the tens of thousands each. Crows have always roosted together at night but it is presumed that as cities expanded, they overtook the...
The law of love
In a letter from Tolstoy to Gandhi,
The longer I live–especially now when I clearly feel the approach of death–the more I feel moved to express what I feel more strongly than anything else, and what in my opinion is of immense importance, namely, what we call the renunciation of all opposition by force, which really simply means the doctrine of the law of love unperverted by sophistries. Love,...
The growing war in Pakistan
Jeremy Scahill,
The former CENTCOM member said that what is unfolding in Pakistan is part of the Bush-era philosophy, continued by the Obama administration, of “preparing the battlefield.” He sketches out a pattern wherein “black” operations are followed by “white” operations and then conventional US forces. That “preparing the battlefield”...
3 tags
Hope in the dark
Rebecca Solnit,
“An extraordinary imaginative power to reinvent ourselves is at large in the world, though it is hard to say how it will counteract the dead weight of neoliberalism, fundamentalisms, environmental destructions, and well-marketed mindlessness.
But hope is not about what we expect. It is an embrace of the essential unknowability of the world, of the breaks with the present,...
January 2010
9 posts
Dark Days
Paul Douglas,
Speaking of subzero - are you enjoying your Tuesday? Yes, this is an acquired taste. But keep in mind our coldest days are usually sunny, blue sky draped overhead. Today the sun will be as high in the sky as it was back on November 15! O.K. I’m grasping at (cold) straws here, but my point is this: we’re just about to turn a big corner. Within a mere 30 days we’ll...
Simon Johnson:
The White House background briefing is that their proposals would freeze biggest bank size “as is” — this makes no sense at all.
Twenty years of reckless expansion, a massive crisis, and the most generous bailout in human history are not a recipe for “right” sized banks. There is a lot of work the administration hasn’t done on the details — this is a classic policy scramble, in...
"Perhaps worst of all, it converts what was once a... →
— Glenn Greenwald, “Obama to indefinitely imprison detainees without charges”
“O! ye that love mankind! Ye that dare oppose not only the tyranny but the...”
– Thomas Paine
The shadow war
Tom Engelhardt and Nick Turse on TomDispatch.com
Add this all together and you have the grim face of “intelligence” at war in 2010 — a new micro-brew when it comes to Washington’s conflicts. Today, in Afghanistan, a militarized mix of CIA operatives and ex-military mercenaries as well as native recruits and robot aircraft is fighting a war “in the shadows” (as they used to say in the Cold...
Welcome to the machine
From “Barack Obama Inc.: The birth of a Washington machine” (Ken Silverstein, Harper’s Magazine, November 2006 Issue)
The question, though, is just how effective—let alone reformist—Obama’s approach can be in a Washington grown hostile to reform and those who advocate it. After a quarter century when the Democratic Party to which he belongs has moved steadily to...
Happy New Year
Just getting this thing started again. Please pardon the dust as things may look slightly different around here going forward.
“Ultimately, a genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus, but a molder of...”
– Martin Luther King, Jr.
November 2009
1 post
October 2009
2 posts
Farewell to the Dome
Jim Caple has a nice piece on ESPN.com on the Dome,
OK, the Metrodome has some issues. But the place always deserved more respect than it got.
It was built in that era when communities had this quaint belief that function was more important than owners’ revenue streams, when the primary goal was to provide a home for as many sports as possible for the least amount of public money (those...
September 2009
5 posts
David Byrne likes our lakes!
David Byrne on cities,
Bigger is not always better, but we do need periodic breaks from buildings. Industry abandoned the waterfronts over previous decades, and as the docks and the industry that went with them moved elsewhere our cities have begun to reclaim these areas—river walks (look how many people use Manhattan’s Hudson River paths!), lakefronts (the beautiful Minneapolis lakefront...
A quick one while I'm away
Damn. Just realized I missed the Twin Cities Tumblr Meetup #2. Hope everyone had fun. I’ve been away too long. At some point I will return to blogging, socializing, checking Tumblr/Facebook/Twitter. For now, though, I am super busy (in a good way).
August 2009
40 posts
Twins meetup tomorrow
wintwins:
WinTwin-ers,
The Twins game meetup is tomorrow (Tuesday). Plan on meeting at Grumpy’s downtown and then heading over to the Dome around 6:30. I’ll be at Grumpy’s by 5:30.
If we’ve never met and you have no idea what I or anyone else on this internet thing-a-ma-jig looks like I will be wearing this U of M bucket hat so you can identify our party. Also, if you think you might be late...
“A good narrative is a rudimentary structure, rather like a kidney.”
– John Cheever, from George Plimpton’s Writers at Work