Across the Great Divide

Drinking with the Enemy.

The other day I poked some double fun at the upcoming happy hour "hosted" by MN Publius and MDE.

As someone who founded his blog on the premise of figuring out how people who disagree can still build a decent world, I owe the organizers an explanation of why I look on this opportunity with little excitement.

Yes, I know there are differences between this happy hour and meeting of heads of state, but the question is still pertinent. Why would I or any progressive attend a branded event that seems calculated to create a veneer of bipartisanship for perhaps the most partisan attack blog in the state?

Mitch Berg makes one pass at a reason, reminiscing about a happy hour of yore:

[I]t was just a tiny bit harder to flame on people that I’d met in person.  That I’d actually met as humans, rather than as mere brain-damaged big-government-coddling tax-and-spend liberal drones.  And a few of them wrote as well, saying they could maybe be a little more tolerant of uncaring, selfish conservatives now that they’d actually met some of us — something they didn’t do much of in real life.

It made an impression.

Oh, it only lasted so long, of course. 

And his commenters swoop in to prove the point.

I do agree that such face-to-face contact can encourage civility, but I don't need to bike to St. Paul for a beer to learn its virtues. And I have no interest at all in fake civility that does nothing more than help Michael Brodkorb go back next week and slag more Democrats with more utter B.S.

Real community and real civility — civitas — come about when antagonists find something important they truly want in common. Something they cannot have without respecting the other's perspective, values and rights.

Jonathan Thompson, of High Country News, edits a publication that attempts to bring an environmental audience face-to-face with the complex realities of the American West. They write about inevitable collisions involving die-hard opponents. In the process, they have learned a thing or two about how people who've fought bitterly for years can move on to something better.

The magazine's current issue has a story about how native tribes and farmers along the Klamath River had one fundamental thing in common:

They rely on the river for their food and their livelihoods. While those needs have competed with one another in the past, they are also what kept these guys at the bargaining table until an agreement came together.

It wasn’t easy. Before the farmers and tribes could hold hands, they both had to endure a lot of pain — massive fish kills, dried-up fields and the tedium of the negotiations themselves.

Perhaps that’s the lesson here: Unlikely alliances don’t happen by magic, they take work. Sometimes the situation needs to become so dire that the two sides have no other choice but to get along. Then they can find a bit of common ground, and their reverence for and reliance upon the land will finally win out over age-old animosities. And then they will discover that their alliance was never that unlikely after all.

I'm conflicted about attending. What do you think?

Photo Riddle: Double Musical Encore.

Discussing this riddle with a reader who was also a cab driver during this bar's heyday, I realized that one of my earlier clues was off. I could blame my misdirection on the similarity between two names and my aversion to corny musicals, but it probably really came down to drinking while typing.

To recap, the challenge was to identify this location and the notorious business it once housed. The original, edited clues have some new information appended.

The building was formerly a Twin Cities landmark, at least for cab drivers, who refused to take calls from this bar.

Though it had a cheerful name, the place did not have a welcoming reputation. Personally, I think the problem for cabbies was mainly trying to collect one fare from the pooled change of five drunks.

Now painted maize, it was once known for being being red, but its namesake was brown.

Its namesake was a pre-70s musical, and this street is also the name of a musical.

Signs of Decline?

If the housing market falls in the woods, does anybody hear?

Foreclosures aren't just hitting America's cities. The crisis may be even more pronounced in small towns and rural areas, where there's less competition among financial institutions, small banks aren't required to report lending activity and about 12 percent of homes are trailers or prefabs purchased on personal or installment loans. When those loans go bad, the properties are repossessed,  and the defaults aren't included in the foreclosure numbers.

*****

An errand took me to a small company that sells business forms along with secretarial services. I noticed this sign on one of the forms cabinets.

At first, I laughed. But then I began to wonder.

Might not customers wanting to return bankruptcy forms be a sign of economic recovery?

Why single out bankruptcy forms?

Had counterfeiters been discovered forging bankruptcy forms and returning them for cash?  Well, no more easy money for them.

*****

In Minnesota, according to the Federal Reserve, 56 percent of "nonprime mortgages" were current through December 2007. ARMs made up 77 percent of the loans and of those, 37 percent were due to reset in 2008. This interactive map [h/t SCSU Scholars] covers the entire country and allows you to drill down all the way to the local level.

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Also via King Banaian, this item from MPR about a U of M study that suggests a link between the ready availability of malt liquor and higher homicide rates in African American communities.

Malt liquor is often packaged in 40 oz. bottles that are sold cold directly from a retailer's cooler. That makes immediate consumption much easier, Jones-Webb says. Typically the lager beer contains 6 to 8-and-a-half percent alcohol by volume, compared to 4 to 5-percent for standard beer. And it's cheap. The U of M study found that the average price of a 40 oz.bottle is $1.87 in the neighborhoods it studied. That's significantly less than a gallon of milk.

Hmmm. I thought beer didn't kill people. People kill people.

Bulletin to the research team: Most beer is sold cold directly from a retailer's cooler. That's one reason America's roadways are littered with Miller Lite, Busch, Keystone and Milwaukee's Best.

It is true 40s place fewer impediments to immediate consumption than those faced by upper crust drinkers, whose choices typically require bottle openers, corkscrews, cocktail shakers and proper stemware.

Convenience is designed into the packaging, certainly, as it is easier to drink from a 40 in a paper bag on the street than to lug around a six-pack of glass bottles. And did the researchers consider the social benefits? 40s reduce waste by requiring less packaging per ounce.

As for the 6 to 8-and-a-half percent alcohol content loosing the bonds on criminal behavior, I checked the alcohol content of the brews I have ready for immediate consumption or have rhapsodized about here over the past year.

• Bell's Hopslam  10%
• Two Hearted Ale 7%
• Inversion IPA 6.8%
• Victory HopDevil 6.7%
• Palisade Dually 10% (est.)
• Cold Hop 6.5%
• Hennepin 7.7%
• Avery Kaiser Oktoberfest 9%

If yuh see me comin' better step aside...

I Feel I Should Show Up.

The boys are at it again, and I promised not to miss the next one, but I'm a bit out of range to make it to Intermedia Arts on April 1st.

Instead of repeating themselves with another speed lecture series, Troy Gallas and Colin Kloecker, young designers who brought us Solutions Twin Cities, are curating an exhibit and other events that merge "data visualization, artistic expression, and interactive installations."

It's called W(e are)here: Mapping the Human Experience, and the gallery speak may not get you too excited, but there's a beer prelude at Herkimer Pub & Brewery at 5 pm Tuesday and a mapping mashup /meetup and...

The promo site will give you a better idea of what to expect on Tuesday as well as the rest of the exhibition run.

While there, I ran across We Feel Fine, which I gather is part of the exhibition, but you can also explore it online. It searches blogs for versions of the phrase "I feel" and then incorporates the statement in an interactive "exploration of emotion on a global scale."

I feel certain I'll be showing up there soon.

Rootless Beer Float.

I had wandered into the Palisade Brewery hoping to fill our growler with the potent Dually, a hoppy Imperial double IPA, but it's available only off and on, and now it was off. However, we were just in time to have the first taste of the new Porter, except for the small glass already being downed by the brewmaster.

It had a light fore edge to the darkness, not blunt on the tongue like some porters.

He and the owner were kicking around what to buy from Sam's Club for the salsa recipe, but my ears really pricked up when I heard the other item on the list: Good ice cream. They were going to do beer floats.

Tonight, I tried it. Porter and a caramel ice cream. I am a kid again.

Do you need any more recipe than that?

Everything I Know About Beer I Learned on Television.

"A lager is one of the most difficult beers to brew. A darker, cloudier beer can be more forgiving of flaws."

If flawless beer tastes like Budweiser, I'm willing to forgive.

Hopslammed.

An errand took me past my friendly neighborhood beer vendor and it turns out that Bell's Hopslam is back in stock. This is why we take the bike with the basket, pilgrim.

Hopslam is labeled as "Ale Brewed with Honey."  I don't recall that appellation on the 2007 batch, but it fits with my fondest memories of mead-induced... Never mind.

At $12.99 a six pack, it is pricey. Is any domestic brew worth more than $2 a bottle off the shelf?

Oh, my gracious, yes!

Tell Me If You Think This is a Bad Sign.

Blowing into a 12 oz. Cold Hop beer bottle produces an F#. An empty 1 pint, 9.4 oz. Hennepin bottle blows an A. (I've noticed the Hennepin label also states two different alcohol/volume numbers — "Cellared at the brewery 7.5%" and 8.5%.)

However, striking the Cold Hop with a mallet gives a G#, while the Hennepin delivers an F. A Flying Dog Dogtoberfest 12 oz. bottle has a slightly different shape than the Cold Hop. It's difficult to distinguish a difference between the two when blown, but to my ear, the Dog is a 1/4 step or so lower when struck.

A wine bottle from Chateau La Gorce produces a jug band B. The struck note, though not as clear as I'd like, is also a B!

It's been a while since my piano was tuned, but I'll stand by my field observations until proven otherwise.

Musicologists and design engineers are hereby free to steal this idea for their thesis. From the rest of you, I expect sympathy or advice, but no interventions, please.

Nothing to Report Except a Perfect Day.

Though I went to high school in Grand Junction, my youthful exploration of the valley was limited to places I could get to with a case of beer and/or a girlfriend. So coming back here after all these years was bound to be a revelation, even if the town hadn't changed — and it has.

In many ways, for the better.

It's still a place where the local newspaper readers vote J.C. Penney the Best Place to Shop for Men's Clothes and Dos Hombres wins Best Mexican restaurant.

But it does just fine in the beer and biking departments, from one end of the valley to the other.

Until September, there was a brewery at either end, with several brew pubs in the middle of town. This enables a nice easterly route to Palisade Brewery (where selected seasonals are available only on tap) for 42-mile loop that on certain days could take in the Peach Street Distillers, too. (Peach Street has an excellent Vodka and a new Jackalope Gin I'm still making up my mind about.)

Unfortunately, Boneyard Brewery at the west end in mountain biking mecca Fruita has closed, taking with it the area's best reuben as well as cutting the number of local craft brews available. It also removed one excuse for dallying on yesterday's 30+-mile loop in that direction. Just as well, because when the sun drops behind the mountain, the temperature does, too.

If beer isn't your thing, the valley is dotted with wineries on bikeable back roads.

Today, we headed away from civilization and tried a trail with a long stretch of slick rock that took us on a long downhill — with a manageable but blood-pumping return uphill. It's a double track open to motorized traffic, so we encountered a dirt bike, ATV and a couple four-wheeling pickups, plus one other mountain biker.

You have to be willing to share in some places out here, and better the vehicles have a place to play that doesn't entail tearing up the desert.

Of course the trail ethic — like any ethic — isn't universal. But why make yourself crazy on a beautiful day in a beautiful country?

A Westworld Weekend.

You probably missed the news that a six-time presidential candidate died last week. Earl Dodge ran on the Prohibition Party ticket. Yeah, that Prohibition Party. In 2004, he only made the Colorado ballot and won 140 votes.

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Here's one more reason ethanol is a bad deal.

Microbrewers are facing ingredient shortages and rising prices as farmers shift crops to grow corn for ethanol, or plant feed crops on other acres now that they're selling their corn for fuel. Some craft brewers are tweaking their recipes because they've had to change hops varieties, for example. It's enough to make a guy feel more warmly about oil burners.

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The LDS Church has apparently been reading up on DNA, with earthshaking implications. Church elders have approved a change to the introduction to the Book of Mormon that apparently acknowledges evidence that American Native peoples originated in Asia.

Of course that's not to say the genetic data disproves the revelation of Joseph Smith that the Americas were settled by Lamanites, one of the supposed tribes of Israel.

There are scientists employed by institutions of higher learning who will go on record in support of Smith's invented religion and his Hebrew Hiawathas. For example, BYU's Michael Whiting, an assistant professor of integrative biology, who several years ago said:

...the Book of Mormon was not written as a scientific book, and therefore cannot be wholly proved or disproved using scientific methods.

"If Joseph Smith turned it into the National Science Foundation, he would have received no funding," Whiting said. "DNA analysis can neither refute or corroborate the lineage history as put forth in the Book of Mormon."

Good point. Neither can DNA analysis refute or corroborate the lineage of the Seven Dwarfs or Princess Summerfallwinterspring.

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Do you think bridges are an important infrastructure issue? Well, just wait until Atlanta faces another year of drought, western farmers start returning acres to desert and Phoenix says no to more growth. A Georgia Republican Congressman is leading the effort to address national water shortages and Senate GOP leader Trent Lott supported the override of Pres. Bush's veto of a $23 billion water projects bill.

*****

Yesterday, I tried a new trail that took me up on one of the small mesas hereabouts. There was a nice view of the valley from the top, and I could see a trail leading down to a familiar road and historical area where in 1900 a large brachyosaurus fossil was found.

I began to wonder if biking wasn't allowed on the trail. After all, I'd seen no other tire tracks.

Before long, it became apparent why that might be the case. The route down was mostly walk and carry. Maybe not for a 25-year-old with shin guards, Kevlar body armor and a double-shock bike. But for a guy still picking spines out of his thumbs?

Better part of valor...

I did return to the scene of the previous day's tumble today and negotiated the trouble spot just fine. Principle No. 2 — have a plan before you hit trouble — got me over Iraq the rocks.