Month: June 2004

Most Americans depend on faraway countries for their fuel; Paul Michalke depends on Quang Deli in Minneapolis. Michalke, a cheery and energetic man who publishes trade-show directories, siphons used cooking oil from a dumpster in the alley behind Quang’s, a popular Vietnamese restaurant on Nicollet Avenue. Later, in his garage in South Minneapolis, he converts the grease into gas and uses it in his 2001 Volkswagen Jetta.

Michalke makes biodiesel by adding methanol, lye, and a little elbow grease to the oil. The end product is an egg roll-scented, biodegradable fuel that performs a lot like standard diesel. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, biodiesel emits nearly fifty percent less carbon monoxide than standard diesel. It costs Michalke less than fifty cents a gallon.

Initially, friends thought he was crazy, especially when he decided to test homemade biodiesel on his new Jetta. “They said, ‘Can’t you try it out on a lawnmower?’” Michalke recalled. “But there aren’t many lawn mowers around with diesel engines.” Although he admitted he was “scared as hell” when he first poured biodiesel into his car three years ago, it has led to trouble-free, economical driving ever since. Michalke worries about high fuel prices only in the winter, when it is too cold to use his stir-fried diesel. Most biodiesel begins to congeal at around thirty degrees, whereas standard diesel stays liquid well below zero. (On the upside, biodiesel exhaust contributes almost no greenhouse gases and smells like popcorn.)

Michalke learned the basics of home production from Joshua Tickell’s how-to-book From the Fryer to the Fuel Tank. Tickell told me his book has sold about twenty thousand copies, and estimated that twenty percent of his readers have tried to make biodiesel at home.

Homemade biodiesel is unlikely to catch on in the United States, since only one percent of U.S. automobiles have diesel engines. And of course most people would be afraid of killing themselves or ruining their cars. But Michalke swears that Tickell’s book puts home brewing within reach of even the most clumsy garage chemist. “It’s like a cookbook with pretty pictures,” he said. “It’s like making brownies.”

In fact, the biggest challenge may be asking ethnic restaurant owners for their used oil. “It was hard to explain what I wanted because of the language barrier,” Michalke said of his first grease run to a Chinese restaurant. “When they finally understood me, one girl looked at me like I was an idiot and said, ‘Why don’t you go to a gas station?’”

After filtering out any bean sprouts or bamboo shoots, Michalke takes a titration to determine how much lye he will need. He then dissolves the lye in four gallons of methanol. At ninety-nine dollars for fifty-five gallons, methanol is Michalke’s biggest expense, but that is enough to make about 250 gallons of biodiesel. Methanol also presents the biggest danger, especially when it combines with lye to form a hot, flammable, and corrosive mixture. Michalke mixes the two wearing rubber gloves and a gas mask, making him look more doughboy than environmentalist.

Once the lye dissolves in the methanol, Michalke pours the solution into a plastic barrel with twenty gallons of used vegetable oil. An enormous fish-tank heater keeps the mix above seventy degrees, and a mixer attached to a drill stirs it for an hour. Then the mixture sits overnight (most of the process involves waiting). In the morning, about twenty-three gallons of biodiesel have separated and are floating on top of the by-product, glycerin. Each batch of fuel will keep his Jetta running for 830 miles.

“I got into this because I wanted to leave as small a footprint as possible, and to live simply without being a Luddite,” Michalke explained as he washed the grease out of his jugs. Like other biodiesel folks, Michalke tends to be obsessive about doing good, minimizing pollution, and eliminating waste. Holding a sludgy mass of soap, he said proudly, “I made this from the leftover glycerin!”—Matt Dueholm

On a typical workday, Jeff Speed arrives at work at six-thirty in the morning. He has half an hour to climb twenty stories up to the little capsule where he works, which is at the top of a crane. He brings food with him—with only half an hour for lunch, there is no time to climb down, then back up again. While his fellow construction workers use Port-a-Pottys down on the ground, he keeps a jar up in the crane for nature’s call. “You learn not to drink too much coffee,” his site supervisor joked.

Speed has been running equipment on construction sites for twenty-five years. His training was not formal; he says he just got lucky. He started by operating smaller machinery—bulldozers, forklifts—and then had the good fortune to be around when someone needed him to operate something larger and threw him in front of the controls. He gradually moved on to bigger and bigger machinery, until he found himself two hundred feet off the ground. He’s been operating cranes for about fifteen years.

The first time was a thrill, he said, but now, “It’s kind of second nature.” He’s not always in the tall cranes; it depends on the job. He still operates forklifts and bulldozers sometimes; “I do whatever needs to be done.”

But if a crane is being used on a site, Speed is usually the one in it. “It’s hard to find good crane operators,” said Mark Brown, the superintendent at the construction site of the new Guthrie Theater. “Everyone is dependent on them.” The Guthrie has two tall cranes, including the one run by Speed, which daily perform a careful pas de deux.

Each carries heavy loads from one side of the site to another, delivers construction materials to workers on the upper floors of a building, keeping everyone working by keeping them supplied with what they need. The crane operator, in turn, is dependent on riggers on the ground, who strap on the materials and let the operator know via walkie-talkie when things are ready to be moved.

It’s a lot of stop-and-go, Speed said; sometimes everybody wants him at once, and he finds himself working through breaks, even skipping lunch. Other times, there may be a long lull when he’s not needed. “I read a book, I read a magazine,” he said. He keeps all of that stuff with him up in his miniature glass office.

Speed said he’d always wanted to operate machinery. He started on earth movers at age fourteen. “I like the challenge of being able to control something, I guess.” He appeared to set his mind on the problem from another angle, then stopped. “I’ve never really thought about why I do it. I just do it.”

His only complaint about the job is the erratic hours. He never knows in advance how long he’ll be at work. He could be stuck for fourteen hours, or he could get rained out and find himself unemployed for a week. His pay rate also varies—the taller the crane, the more he earns. Not all construction sites require the tallest kind of crane. “It’s hard to schedule life around work,” he said.

Overall, though, Speed is happy with his job, and seems to have a natural affinity for it. “You have to get to know the equipment,” he said. “You don’t want its movements to be clunky like a machine. You want them smooth. You have to control it like it was your own arm.”—Katherine Glover

There is a rock god on stage at the Triple Rock Social Club bestriding the speakers like a colossus, his Loverboy T-shirt sacrificed to a Dionysian frenzy, his tongue out and waggling, his fingers pulsating. With a quick kick and flip, he’s down in the crowd, then up on the back bar, strutting around the beer bottles and whiskeys as he brings the music directly to the people. The fact that he has no instrument is of no consequence; this is rock ’n’ roll.

At the Minneapolis regional of the Air Guitar World Championship a couple of weeks ago, nine contestants took the stage to see whose mimicry of real rock-star moves would be good enough to win a slot at the L.A. nationals. There, one lucky American would be chosen to represent the red, white, and blue at the world tourney of “airaoke” in August.

Though amateurs have practiced the art of air guitar for generations (you only start feeling stupid doing it sometime in your thirties), the formal World Championship first took place in 1996 in the city of Oulo in northern Finland. Though the annual Finnish event has been a reliable source of silly-season news stories since then, only last year did the nation that invented the electric guitar finally send a competitor. Davie “C. Diddy” Jung swept the title just the way the U.S. dominated Olympic basketball after NBA players were allowed to compete. And there are signs that the world’s newest Sport of Kings is headed straight for the Hollywood machinery that builds American Idols.

The championship is set up in that mode, with the contestants playing to both the crowd and a panel of three local judges (rock critic Melissa Maerz, Cities 97’s Brian Oake, and Andy Lindquist of Willie’s American Guitars) who are hamming it up as much as anyone.

In the first round, contestants freeform for sixty seconds to the song of their choice. Things have been heavily stage-managed; all contestants have outlandish costumes and goofy stage names, and it’s impossible to miss the camera crew filming the proceedings for Ben Affleck and Matt Damon’s production company, Project Greenlight.

All contestants were entertaining, though maybe in spite of themselves. One, who used the nom de guerre “Iron Ranger,” had a peculiar floppy style, as though she were trying to get a handle on a twenty-pound trout instead of teasing power chords from a guitar. And the mullet-wigged “Ax Action,” concentrating with furrowed brow on the riff to AC/DC’s “You Shook Me All Night Long,” almost fatally misjudged the length of the Triple Rock stage. He told me later, “Falling off the stage is a classic guitar thing. I really should have gone down to the ground, played for a second, then come back from the dead.” So that was on purpose, then? “Oh, sure,” he deadpanned, then burst out laughing.

The best was “Bob the Murderer,” an orange-haired Triple Rock employee who enthralled the crowd with a perfect punk pantomime of Sex Pistol Johnny Rotten and The Young Ones’ Vyvyan. Though he did little in the way of actually mimicking a guitarist, he stomped and glowered and spazzed brilliantly. An added plus: That was not technically a costume, since it’s the way he dresses all the time. Even in air guitar, authenticity adds extra weight.

After the second round, in which all contestants performed “Cat Scratch Fever,” the judges declared a tie, leading to an “air-off” between Jon “Jackicaster” Maki, who performed in a painted-on seventies pornstar ’stache and orange jumpsuit emblazoned “Stroke This,” and the clear crowd favorite, Michael “Mother” Rucker, in the Loverboy T.

“It’s a Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock ’n’ Roll)” erupted from the speakers. Jack and Mother strutted homoerotically. Jack flashed his nipple ring, but Mother stripped to his Calvins, and the screaming crowd sealed his win.

Of course, there was one little thing: Mother was a ringer, an L.A. actor and story editor who’s worked on (surprise!) the Project Greenlight TV show. But it seems churlish to complain about fakery in an air-guitar contest, especially when there was no real attempt to hide the setup. Minutes after the closing jam, Mother basked in air fame as he answered questions from two journalists and signed a T-shirt for a besotted female fan, who was greatly saddened when his Sharpie pen turned out to be dry.

In the end, air guitar is all about love. Nick “Swami” Swanson, who took third place, told us: “Air guitar comes from you expressing what you wish you could have done yourself. You want to be like the real thing. It lets you forget for a moment.”—Christopher Bahn

It’s nice to see former Senator Rudy Boschwitz still flying the flannel after all these years. Like any self-respecting legislator on the receiving end of a populist pink slip, he’s gone quietly into the private sector. There, the glad-handing, expense accounts, and corporate logrolling aren’t scrutinized by every craven reporter and party activist (as if there is a difference) with an axe to grind. For a price, a former senator will throw his considerable weight behind just about any cause, even a specious one. Today, Boschwitz is taking up the cause against alternative farming techniques.

What on Earth could possibly be wrong with organic food? You’d be surprised. We recently learned that among Mr. Boschwitz’s many roles in public service, he is the chairman of something called the Center for Global Food Issues. We must admit that under normal circumstances, we wouldn’t have noticed. But he stepped out from behind the curtain few weeks ago, in a letter to the Star Tribune complaining about that paper’s intolerable position on food that contains genetically modified organisms—hybrid corn and other produce usually identified through the cautionary acronym “GMO.” According to the letter, Boschwitz and a CGFI colleague named Dennis Avery believe that GMOs can have a positive impact on Third-World economies and farming by increasing yields of pest-resistant crops. This sounds perfectly reasonable. Why, then, is it so creepy to realize that Boschwitz and Avery are shilling for the companies that stand to profit the most from the idea? Perhaps it is because the truth is not even salient, because they have forfeited their authority; they are essentially writing advertisements for their corporate benefactors.

The Center for Global Food Issues is run by the Hudson Institute, a conservative “think tank” that is funded by Cargill, Monsanto, Novartis, and McDonald’s—among many other corporations. A full list of Hudson’s underwriters reads like an all-star roster of petro-chemical agribusiness.

If mercenary lobbyists like Boschwitz and Avery actually believed what they say about the benefits of big-business farming, we think they would be less disingenuous in their rhetoric. In promoting their brand of high-volume, low-quality, non-sustainable agriculture, they are shameless about arguing all sides. All is fair in love and war; agribusiness has been taking it in the gut for a decade now. Why wouldn’t they marshal their forces to fight back against the insidious tide of hippy-dippy paranoia about proven modern farming techniques? (The only thing petro-chemical farming ever killed was the family farm, duh!)

Boschwitz and Avery say that genetically modified crops are preferable because they reduce the need for pesticides and herbicides; suddenly and inexplicably, they are worried about Third-World farmers trudging through their fields with backpack sprayers. This is surely a recent and isolated case of dementia, rather than a prick in their conscience, since their supporters continue to claim that glyphosate herbicides and pesticides are perfectly safe for man and beast alike. This old saw is still a good one, it turns out. Many experts agree that GMOs—excused as a technology that would make pesticides and herbicides obsolete, after that nasty business with DDT a few years back—actually increase farmers’ reliance on chemicals. As GMOs have spread around the world, pesticide use has increased. How odd.

There’s more of this brand of double-talking dishonesty. Organics are wasteful and inefficient, says the Center for Global Food Issues, because they allegedly require a lot more acreage to produce the same yield as “conventionally grown” produce. This is the first we’ve heard that Cargill, Monsanto, ADM and the rest are worried about land-use issues and the preservation of wilderness and wetlands. (They might ponder the considerable evidence that monoculturing—planting millions of acres of the exact same hybrid of, say, “Roundup Ready” corn—is destroying the basic building block of biology: diversity.)

Worst of all, the Cargills of the world have cynically peddled at least one Dennis Avery prevarication. Avery invented and spread the falsehood that organic foods are less safe than non-organic foods (because, he said, they use manure as a fertilizer—which conventional agribusiness does too, but never mind). In a widely syndicated article, he cited an epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention saying that organic foods are eight times more dangerous with regard to bacteria like E. coli. The problem was, that source is a CDC scientist named Paul Mead. Mead never said anything of the kind. He merely hung up on Avery when he called to beg someone at the CDC to confirm his views on the matter. In fact, the CDC subsequently clarified the issue, and retractions were published all around: Avery’s claim was as bogus as it was self-serving. No less an authority than the New York Times gave Avery the public scolding he deserved.

So what is the honorable former senator doing in the same byline as this industry flack who is prone to stretch the truth, or simply invent his own? Funny how these sorts of people never seem to espouse beliefs that are independent of their corporate benefactors—or undertake any “public service” that isn’t somehow connected to commercial interests.