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pharyngula | August 11, 2006
This is what living in the rural midwest is all about: the county fair! The place was packed yesterday with amazing numbers of people having a good time.
I've put a few photos below the fold.
Animal:
We've got barns full of beasts.
That horse wanted to eat my camera. Most of the animals cowed, or sheeplike, or swinishly lazy, but that guy was at least alert and interested enough to do something.
Vegetable:
These displays were even less active.
I will spare you the sheds full of 4H and FFA crafts.
Mineral:
Farmers have a fascination with huge hardware, I think.
The cannon in the…
pharyngula | August 10, 2006Our local chapter of Drinking Liberally will be meeting at a special place and time tonight: it will start at 7:00, at the American Legion Beer Garden at the Stevens County Fair. After everyone has had enough beer, we will adjourn to the Tilt-A-Whirl to relive those sensations we all experienced in the 2004 elections.
pharyngula | August 8, 2006What do you do with a local politician who claims that public education is her #1 issue, while accepting money from supporters of the Alliance for the Separation of School and State? That's our Michele Bachmann, claiming to be a supporter of education while endorsed by people who say this:
I proclaim publicly that I favor ending government involvement in education.
Take a look at the people who favor completely gutting public school education at the Separation of School and State site, too: D. James Kennedy, Tim LaHaye, Tom Monaghan—it's like a chorus line of the freaky religious right. And…
pharyngula | August 7, 2006
This is the week of the Stevens County Fair, right here in bucolic Morris, Minnesota. It starts on Wednesday, 9 August and runs through Sunday the 13th, so you all still have time to start heading out this way. It's your classic rural fair: there will be accordions, deep-fried anything on a stick, pig-judging, carnies, a demolition derby, country-western music, lawn mower races, 4H kids, and tractors, snowmobiles, and ice houses for sale. You have not lived until you have experience a midwestern county fair.
(Oh, and don't eat the food if you want to continue living. It's like jabbing your…
pharyngula | July 31, 2006A reader discovered this fascinating graffiti in downtown Minneapolis, near the transit center on Hennepin Avenue.
In Minneapolis! So far from the sea, but I'm not alone in pining for it.
I may have to look this up. This is a travel week for me, as I have to run around taking care of some essential pre-school year duties—I'm actually sitting in the St Cloud mall right now, watching the senior citizens do their laps, while waiting for our car to get some minor repairs and maintenance—and tomorrow I have to run in to the university to attend a meeting and to the airport to dispose of one of my…
pharyngula | July 26, 2006Smilin' Norm has a reputation as a bit of a horndog, and now we learn where he got it from. Honestly, I really didn't need to know.
(via Minnesota Politics)
pharyngula | July 26, 2006The Wege is back, and he fires off a riff on Minnesota politics.
I like Tild's take on this rebirth.
pharyngula | July 25, 2006…because Pam Spaulding at Pandagon had a kind word to say about James Lileks. Not his Bleat or Screed blog, fortunately, or for his regular column in the Strib which I find tediously twee, but for his masterful book, Interior Desecrations. You have to have lived through the 1970s to be able to understand how tacky things got for a while there—someday I'm going to have to dig up that old photo of myself in a polyester paisley print shirt and bell bottoms just to put the younger generation of readers here into shock.
While I'm in a "what were they thinking?" mood, I'll mention one shock we had…
pharyngula | July 22, 2006The Strib has an article on Camp Quest of Minnesota, the secular summer camp that is starting up this week. It's a fairly good story, although it's unfortunate to see it overwhelmed by the gigantic rah-rah story on crazy Pentacostalism spread over the next two pages of the paper, by the same reporter.
By the way, I'll be volunteering at Camp Quest on Friday, to show the kids how to deal with creationists.
pharyngula | July 16, 2006They even show up on the weather radar. I think a weather report that predicted a chance of buzzing clouds of arthropods would be cool.
pharyngula | July 16, 2006I'm going to be giving a talk tomorrow and Tuesday in St Paul and Minneapolis—if you're free at the noon hour, stop on by! The title of the talk is "Science and Secularism in a Demon-Haunted World," and it's sponsored by the Atheists for Human Rights.
On Monday at noon I'll be at the St Paul Landmark Center, 75 West Fifth Street, in the Ramsey County Room.
On Tuesday at noon I'll be in the Minneapolis Downtown Public Library, in the Robins Kaplan Miller & Ciresi Room.
If you aren't in the Twin Cities area, be patient…I just agreed to do an interview with the Infidel Guy sometime in…
pharyngula | July 13, 2006I just finished a brief interview with Tom Crann of Minnesota Public Radio's All Things Considered show, so if you hear me calling the creationists idiots while you're driving home sometime in the next few days, don't be too shocked. (Sorry, I didn't ask exactly when it will be aired.)
Here's a link to the radio program.
pharyngula | July 5, 2006Reading some of my favorite blogs today, I can't help but feel the looming hand of fate preparing to destroy us all.
Jon Voisey is praising a director of the Oklahoma ACLU, Joanne Bell. You're in Kansas, Jon. It's not that far from Oklahoma. What happened to Bell could happen to you.
Ophelia Benson is saying harsh words about Mother Theresa. An uppity woman criticizing an icon of Christian charity? Someday, you could be in a hospital with a hatchet-faced nun looming over you, contemplating how best to chastise your body before your immortal soul meets the god who will fling you into the…
pharyngula | May 20, 2006Seeing ourselves as others do can be a strange experience. Here's an article in the Humboldt County Times Standard that discusses Morris, Minnesota, and pretty much exclusively praises us.
Recently I was listening to Garrison Keillor's "A Prairie Home Companion." I had to pull my car over to the side of the road after he said that Morris -- a city located in Stevens County in his home state of Minnesota -- had a high school dropout rate of less than 1 percent. In addition, 95 percent of the high school graduates in that city and county go on to some kind of postsecondary education.
Well, yes…
pharyngula | May 17, 2006We become more cosmopolitan day by day. As of tomorrow, our fair city will have its very own Drinking Liberally chapter (it's even on the map!). I can walk to it, instead of driving for three hours. Here's the info:
When: Thursday, May 18, from 6:00 pm to 8:00 or whenever.
Where: Old #1 in Morris, near the horseshoe-shaped part of the bar.
Why: To have a relaxed, informal place for progressive political
discussion and socializing.
For more information, visit drinkingliberally.org, or contact local
host Jeff Lamberty (Lambo) at morris@drinkingliberally.org.
pharyngula | May 6, 2006Bill O'Reilly is upset that little kids are using profanity, and he has a ludicrously sentimental vision of small town America.
OK. That happens every day, all day in the public schools here in New York City. And I know it happens in Chicago and Los Angeles and Boston and Washington, D.C. In any major urban center. It doesn't happen in the small towns; it happens in the cities. I live in New York. I'm not gonna have my 6-, 7-, 8-, 9-year-old go to a school where they're saying that stuff in the hallway and the teacher doesn't do anything about it. You know, private school, that does not…
pharyngula | April 27, 2006My life isn't easing up just yet as we wend our way to the imminent end of the term. I'm going to be flitting about over the next few days.
I'm chauffeuring #1 son to a job interview in Minneapolis today, and then returning him home to St Cloud again sometime this evening. I'm planning to be in St Cloud in time for a painful event: Kent Hovind is speaking there.
Date :April 28, 2006
Time :7:00 pm - 10:00 pm
Title:Dr. Kent Hovind (Dr. Dino) -- Creation v. Evolu.
Description:Dr. Kent Hovind or the more popularly known Dr. Dino, is one of the most requested speakers on the Creation and Evolution…
pharyngula | April 25, 2006We're having our last Café Scientifique Morris of the 2005-2006 school year tonight, at 6:00, at the Common Cup Coffeehouse here in beautiful downtown Morris, Minnesota. Our speaker is Mark Logan of the Mathematics discipline, who's going to be talking about "Origami in Math and Science"—that wonderful interdisciplinary stuff we liberal arts colleges do so well, tying together math and art.
It's a good thing we're doing it tonight so that we don't suck away Sean Carroll's audience for the Café Scientifique Chicago tomorrow.
pharyngula | April 5, 2006There are still a few pocked and dirty piles of it across the street, but as of this morning, all of the snow in my yard was completely gone. We're catching up with those Californians!
pharyngula | April 3, 2006In the rural fastness of Western Minnesota, a legend grows. A man so nerdly that his infamy spreads far and wide; when people see shell-less molluscs, his name leaps to their lips; when geeks and nerds gather, they all whisper the same thing: "Pee-Zee" (or, as the Canadians and Dr Who fans would say, "Pee-Zed.")
Yes, in yet another of a string of geek honors, I have been invited to the GeekProm, to be held in the Science Museum of Minnesota on 22 April. There will be spaz-dancing, cow-eye dissections, and a talent show, and some couple will be crowned King and Queen Geek.
Obviously, I deserve…