Across the Great Divide

Fiery Illumination.

Fires are a pretty common news item out here, usually meriting a photo and brief story — whether the structure affected was a high-end home, tract house with melted vinyl siding or a remote trailer.

When this fire photo ran in the paper last week, it was black and white, which made a salient detail a bit harder to pick up.

What do you see?

Daily Sentinel photo by Dean Humphrey

Grand Junction firefighters battle a blaze on a frame structure at the Rocky Mt. Court at 1211 South Fifth Street early this morning. A man living there fell asleep with a lit cigarette while on oxygen, which investigators believe started the fire. With the help of neighbors, the man and his dog escaped.

Can Economics Explain Hot Tomato Cafe?

We biked out to Fruita, a small town west of Grand Junction, for the reopening of a local pizza cafe that had moved into a new building after failing to come to terms with its former landlord.

The Hot Tomato Cafe renovated an empty building around the corner once occupied by a dry cleaners. (Around the corner is about as far as you can go in Fruita and still be downtown.)

We arrived sometime around 1:00 and the line stretched from the order counter to the door. It was the same way when we left, and the festivities involving bands in the street hadn't even begun to take shape yet.

You can see the improvements the two women owners have made to the building — adding a spacious outdoor seating area along the side. Landscaping is still in process, and the bike parking might need a little work, but no one was complaining.

Less apparent than the paint job and the cheery interior is the role a unique and beloved business can play in a community. The pizza and beer at Hot Tomato are good, and cycling is part of the vibe, but it was clear that most of the people showing up today were there because they wanted this little institution to exist in their lives.

I get really tired of hearing about how the market is all-important, and how economic principles (are you listening, Craig Westover?) should determine how governments and societies make decisions. The adherents to this thinking would have us believe that we have made the choice when we have a Domino's instead of a Hot Tomato in our neighborhoods. And that if a Pizza Hut franchise can come up with the financing where a Hot Tomato can't, well, that's as it should be.

You could try that line of thought in this pizza joint this afternoon, but I don't think you'd get any takers.

Timewarp, With Tacos.

Spent some time at the century-old Elks Lodge in town, where many moons ago a band of mine played a dance in this hall.

Photo: Christopher Tomlinson

Tonight, it was filled with folks who'd come to tour the place (check the photo link for more views), eat tacos, hear music and raise money for a program that commissions sculptures of localluminaries.

Without even being that connected here any more, I could run into a former classmate, my ex-English teacher, and — seeing a familiar name on a name tag in the taco line — suppress the impulse to say, "Are you Jim's parents?"

Fortunately, because the old folks in front of me proved to be Jim and his wife — another classmate.

A greater highlight, though, was trying to order beers from the bar. The only "microbrews" they had, said the waitress, were Corona and Guinness. I was away at the taco table for $3 seconds, or probably would've gone with a margarita, but my brilliant domestic partner came up with the idea of a microbrew Black & Tan, which I poured very nicely into the plastic cups, using the Corona bottle neck as the spoon to drizzle the Guinness.

The other highlight was the roll of past presidents of the Lady Elks. Allow me to share some of them here:

• Leta Peep
• Dorothy Dollar
• Beryle Apps Belt
• Wilda Fortune
• Lois Sorter
• Maude Dooling
• Caroline Huck
• Norabelle Easely
• And, best for last, Aura Moon

Local Color Finds its Way.

I'm in low-blogging mode, but it's hard not to pass on one connection I feel with my old home place as I work on a novel based in this valley.

Wait... a bobcat just walked past my door.

No, that wasn't it.

It's the names. Writers like to stretch names to the limits they can, nudging them toward the realm of improbability. But here in western Colorado, I grew up with great names all around me — fiction-worthy names like Janet Toogood, Verna Tibbetts, Mira Doss and Floyd Smallwood.

I thought of this especially today as I read the newspaper.

Summer Chastity Honesty Hazel, 31, 2956 Parkway Drive, was arrested Thursday on suspicion of second-degree burglary, first-degree criminal trespass and theft of less than $500.

Puck Stair of Salt Lake City practices kiting with her paraglider just off North Avenue this morning while she waited for a trailer hitch to be installed on her vehicle. 

“We came out ready to go from the get-go and it’s something we’ve emphasized with the kids, being ready to go first pitch to last pitch,” Montrose coach Landon Wareham said. “They did that today.”

I don't need to make things up when it comes to names.

And the bobcat is real, too.

Ma'am, I'm Going to Need to See Some ID.

Missed this year's Lions Club Parade in my hometown, where members dress up in drag and come out for Lions Pride. 

Just one of the local traditions that help explain my across-the-great-divideism.

Photo by William Woody, Grand Junction Daily Sentinel

In other news, formerly white-hot gun sales have slowed some with the economy, but a local seller notes: “There’s actually a lot of gals coming and getting small handguns.”

Well, maybe.

Bush Billboard Sponsor Would Get My Business.

Fox & Friends Gretchen Carlson strives mightily to make one sponsor of the "Miss me yet?" billboard into an anti-Obama small  businessman, and Mike Rivard declines the opportunity more than once.

(Carlson says Rivads has a "gardening business." In fact, it's a wood products business.)

I think Rivard came across as a decent guy, and Carlson as a partisan pot-stirrer.

We Don't Need No Stinkin' ID.

A suspect described as an Hispanic in his 20's brought a 40-0z. bottle of beer to the cashier at a Grand Junction liquor store and pulled a gun when the clerk asked him for identification. He also pulled out his wallet, paid cash for his purchase, and left the store.

Some local liquor store clerks are not pushovers, however.

My hometown has state representative named Steve King who might some day give the Iowa Congressman a run for his money. King recently dodged an ethics probe after paying back some double-dipping on his state expense account. Meanwhile, he's introduced legislation to come down on public masturbation, or as the local paper wrote: King seeks stiffer penalty for lewdness.

Concrete Poetry and other Public Art in the Twin Cities.

To follow on the discussion of public art in Minneapolis, here's a cool St. Paul project I had somehow missed. 

 

The Everyday Poems for City Sidewalks project works in tandem with St. Paul’s sidewalk maintenance program and installs poetry where city sidewalks are replaced. The cost of the art installation is negligible, since the material has to be laid anyway. A stamp, inspired by contractor's stamps, impresses the text into the wet concrete.

In its first year, the project had the goal of one hundred stampings of twenty poems written by St. Paul residents, chosen from 2000 submissions.

Here's a map of locations so far. Minneapolis lists where its public art, such as these manhole covers, can be found. You may have to wait awhile before enjoying either of these projects, though.

Body Farms.

A college professor in my hometown says graduates who watch bodies decompose at the school's proposed body farm will be more marketable to prospective employers.

And down the road, a museum that reanimates long-dead bodies springs back to life.

Link Blog Wednesday.

Too many acres of badly built generic spaces selling the same crap everyone sells but no one needs, surrounded by asphalt wastelands and owned by over-extended speculators who are walking away from their mortgages.

When you put it that way, the home foreclosures don't sound so bad.

From TC Sidewalks:

It also reminds me of how overbuilt the US retail sector is, in general. In her book Big Box Swindle, ISLR author Stacy Mitchell describes how we have way more retail real estate than we would ever possibly need. Our cities and suburbs are way past saturated with big box stores, malls, and everything else under the sun. And for a long time, due to a lucrative regulatory climate (tax breaks for depreciation, up-front tax money from cities), these have been rock solid investments.

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Glenn Miller writes about different sort of commercial abandonment — the Linden Hills Coop moving out of Linden Hills.

What the co-op leaders might be overlooking is what marketers call sensation transference — that is, the enjoyment one gains from shopping in the co-op because it’s located in the heart of Linden Hills. A key part of its brand is its location — it is part of a larger, balanced econ-system.

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Switzerland issues tickets for speeding with fines based on ability to pay.

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What do France, Iceland, New Zealand, Germany and Russia have in common? Same as Denny Hecker. [Both via Visualizing Economics]