The Rake Magazine

Month: June 2005

  • Pinot Noir for Picnics

    How I hate modern motor roads. Come let me count the ways. First there is the intimate shame of personal inadequateness. I know my reactions while driving are not swift enough to be safe at fifty-five miles per hour—in fact, they are unsafe at any speed, as my family says. All too often I will barrel up Highway 100 (Highway 100 is the worst), having missed my turn, heading unwillingly for Manitoba, and knowing that the only solution to my plight is to barrel right on down it again. Heraclitus knew a thing or two; the way up and the way down are one and the same, and they are equally terrifying.

    Then there are the other idiots, whose reactions are surely no swifter, but who lack the self-knowledge to admit it. These are the ones who drive as though the rapture has already occurred, or at least as though they have lost all fear of death. (In case of rapture, can I have your car?) Other folk suffer from what the amiable Augustine termed superbia and the late and somewhat less amiable Andrea Dworkin called phallocentricity (sed de mortuis nil nisi binkum).

    These include the sort of tow-truck operator, from what is so aptly named a wrecker service, who can blithely remove your car from its appointed parking space without cause in the middle of the night (and in serious contravention of the Fourth Amendment protection against search and seizure), and heave it down the highway to a fastness on the far side of Lyndale, whence it is released after a whole day spent on the telephone, with the barest minimum of apology.

    I suppose I should be thankful that American drivers are at least predictable. If the other idiots are British, things are twice as bad; the way that my fellow countrymen demonstrate their wit and originality by tailgating on the M4 at seventy-plus miles per hour is enough (in the expression of my father, a medical man) to cause a rush of cold faeces to the left ventricle.

    But worse than the horrors of driving on them are the effects of freeways on the countryside that they carve up, the way they turn the ups and downs of a real journey into a blind swoosh of naked concrete. Imagine, then, my joy to find recently, returning from delivering a lecture in the deep south (that is, halfway to Iowa), that it is possible to pick one’s way across the landscape on one of the original roads of Minnesota. This particular road has its origins in an Indian trail stabilized in 1853 by navigators under a militia officer called Dodd. Little is known about Captain Dodd, but he liked a drink and lies buried in the churchyard of the Episcopal Church in St. Peter (where three or four are gathered together, so Episcopalians say, you will always find a fifth).

    It took the gallant captain and his crew a whole Minnesota road-building season (the time of year elsewhere known as summer) to build the Dodd Road. In some places, alas, the fruit of their labors has been turned into six-lane highway; elsewhere, in some southern suburbs, it is pleasingly bordered by McMansions and the sort of lawns that seem to imitate Astroturf. (When will this happy landscape find its Betjeman?) Yet there are stretches where Dodd Road is a real country lane with grit, ditches, and dandelions. I look forward to teasing further reaches of this thoroughfare out of the Minnesota terrain—it will be quite like looking for Roman roads at home.

    Not least among the joys of the jolly film Sideways were its roadside vistas, particularly those with vines marching up and down the California hills. More so than any of its human characters, this film’s truly Big Star, as far as the wine trade is concerned, is the Pinot Noir grape. All of the ambient publicity ensured that this variety, the grape from which the famous red wines of burgundy have been made since the Middle Ages, became the next grape that everyone wants to drink, following in the wake of White Zinfandel, Chardonnay, and Merlot.

    There is a snag. Pinot Noir is hard to grow; not all of it turns into wine as grand as the great vintages of Burgundy. It may well be as mellow as Merlot (and a lot mellower than Cabernet Sauvignon), but it can sometimes lack body. Allow me, then, to recommend a real pleasure, Mark West Central Coast Pinot Noir 2003, a pellucid red made by people who have long specialized in this variety. Costing just around ten dollars locally, it has a fruity flavor leading to a taste of black pepper and then to a rising aroma of elderflowers (the fresh ones you smell by the roadside, not the more sugary sensations of elderflower cordial). It gave tomato and basil soup an added mileage ingredient. And the following morning, the little that was left over had a noble structure, even after the more evanescent scents had evaporated. Take some along on a summer picnic.

  • Pickled Tink

    How is it that so many of us draw no association between the salty, crunchy tidbits from Granny’s relish tray and fresh cucumbers that came from the earth? Is it possible to get so far away from a once-common practice that we no longer even recognize the result? Pickling used to be a seasonal activity that families undertook to ensure a decent food supply once the growing season was over. Generations gathered around a harvest and, using age-old recipes, created a tradition. Balancing salt levels, choosing spices, painstakingly cleaning and processing jar after jar—all of this was simply assumed to be necessary for survival. Now there’s no need to pickle; when it gets cold, we go to Arizona. So it is that another domestic art falls by the wayside, while companies who can do it faster and cheaper—if not necessarily better—take on production.

    So stands our relationship with pickles, whether you have a lonesome jar lurking in the back of your Frigidaire, with one or two thick greenies bobbing in their murky water ever since who knows when, or whether you excitedly grab a jar at the market and bring it home to three other jars that you were once equally excited about. Nevertheless, there is a level of pickle passion that runs deep in this country, even in our own state. For proof, one need only visit the Creative Activities building at the State Fair to see that the pickle-packing process has been passed on to a new generation. What drives someone to willingly spend hours up to their elbows in brine, cramming jars with cucumbers and closely guarded spice mixtures and briny liquids? They must share something with the alchemists of legend, turning what is plain and ordinary into gustatory gold. Moreover, this passion for pickles is not limited to state and country fairgrounds. Boutique brands and innovative pickling practices are surfacing in the food world, on stylish shelves and restaurant kitchens around the country. For as long as pickling has been going on, there is no other renaissance more deserved.

    Cleopatra believed that pickles contributed to her legendary health and beauty, while Julius Caesar found them invigorating, if you know what I mean. The men who built the Great Wall of China sustained energy for their long workdays by snacking on pickled cabbage. Pickles found their way to the New World with Columbus, as they were known to last for long journeys and, like the more commonly known but also far more perishable citrus fruits, to help prevent scurvy. (By the way, the businessman who stocked Columbus’ ship with said pickles dreamed of becoming an explorer himself and leaving his pickle-packing days behind. Amerigo Vespucci would eventually realize his dream and be the first pickle man to have a continent named in his honor.)

    When we say “pickles” in the United States, we most often are referring to pickled cucumbers, whereas for the Brits, it’s pickled onions. Gherkins, or cornichons as the French call them, are simply immature, midget cukes that have been pickled. But there’s a vast world of pickles beyond cucumbers and onions. Koreans pickle cabbage to make kimchi; you’ll find pickled duck eggs in China and herring (sil) in Scandinavia. Japan’s astounding array of misos are basically pickled soybeans. Peter Piper had nothing on the Italians when it came to pickling peppers, and American colonists had a grand old time pickling everything from beans to mushrooms and asparagus to get them through the winters.

    While the choice of food to be pickled is nearly unlimited, it is the process that calls for exactitude. Pickling may be one of the trickiest forms of canning. The journey from raw food to skillfully flavored and preserved delicacy is seldom recognized as the art form that it is. At its most basic, pickling a vegetable (or some other food—pigs’ feet, say, or salmon) in an acidic, biting liquid—either brine or vinegar—kills off the “bad” bacteria that makes food rot. This may sound simple, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to do. Those who decide to join the elite order of picklers must be prepared for a long journey to perfection. The type of solution, the addition of herbs and spices, the amount of soaking time, and even the temperature of the room will all have an effect on the final product. These variable elements impact the process of curing, during which colors and flavors will change as acidity increases. Not all pickles go through a rigid fermentation process, however. Fresh-pack or quick-process pickles (as in the recipe here) use an initially high-acidity vinegar or brine solution to preserve the food.

    Maybe that dual nature of the process is the thrill that is driving the food-obsessed to rediscover pickles. In one sense, pickling poses a challenge for would-be kitchen masters, and yet Granny did just fine, so it can’t be too hard, can it? Another factor to consider is how the pickle, with its longstanding reputation as a plain-Jane food, is just ripe for glamorization, like a sweet Norma Jean Baker waiting for someone to unleash her inner Marilyn.

    Sure enough, chefs and artisans have responded with jalapeno-lemon pickles, red-hot cinnamon cukes, saffron-infused pickled asparagus, and pickled beets in rosemary brine. Rick’s Picks, one of the new faces in the pickle game, has concocted what it calls Windy City Wasabeans—green beans in a soy-wasabi brine. The Indiana-based Sechler’s is raising eyebrows with sweet pickled orange and lemon peels, and Mad Pat’s Hot Fire & Ice Pickles start out with a hint of sweetness but end with a habanero-worthy burn. Locally, the 112 Eatery and Tryg’s both offer zesty house-made pickles on their charcuterie plates, a natural setting for pickles (as a snappy starter, pickles aid in the digestion of other foods). Stella’s Fish Café has overnight pickles as a side dish, a prime opportunity to shun the carbohydrates and grease of fries and crunch into some salty freshness instead.

    Since future grannies will be more likely to teach their progeny about spreadsheets and conference-calling than pickling and canning, the practice will be left to enthusiasts of all types who seek it out and make it their own. Be they chefs, small-batch artisans, or gardeners overwhelmed by a bumper crop of snaky cucumbers, those who excel at the art of pickling will most likely find it addictive.

    112 Eatery 112 Third St. N., Minneapolis;
    612-343-7696; www.112eatery.com
    Tryg’s 3118 W. Lake St., Minneapolis; 612-920-7777; www.trygs.com
    Stella’s Fish Cafe & Prestige Oyster Bar 1400 W. Lake St., Minneapolis, 612-824-8862; www.stellasfishcafe.com
    Rick’s Picks 212-358-0428; www.rickspicksnyc.com
    Sechler’s www.gourmetpickles.com
    Mad Pat’s Hot Stuff www.madpatshotstuff.com

    Zippy Refrigerator Pickles

    12 pickling cucumbers
    2 cups water
    13/4 cups cider vinegar (at least 5% acidity)
    11/2 cups packed coarsely chopped fresh dill
    8 garlic cloves, coarsely chopped
    1 cup finely chopped red onion
    11/2 T coarse salt
    1 tsp. mustard seed
    1 tsp. crushed bay leaves
    1/2 tsp. turmeric
    11/2 tsp. fennel seeds
    1 tsp. dried crushed red pepper

    Combine all ingredients in large bowl. Stir, let stand at room temperature two hours until salt dissolves. Transfer four cucumbers to each of three sterilized 11/2-pint wide-mouth jars. Pour pickling mixture over to cover. You may wish to place a few dill sprigs in each jar. Cover jars with lids and close tightly. Refrigerate for a minimum of seven days; go ten days for real zippiness. Pickles will stay crispy-fresh for about two months. Keep refrigerated. Makes three 11/2-pint jars.

  • You Are What You Meat

    The little tag on a tray of Smart Chicken brand breasts at the Byerly’s
    meat counter said, “One hundred percent vegetarian-fed chicken.” Does
    this mean the Bush administration has finally found a use for all those
    pesky, liberal vegetarians? Or does it mean I might somehow obtain by
    proxy some vegetarian virtue from the animal that will sustain my
    carnivorous vice?

    Fortunately, the people at Smart Chicken are eager to say what value is
    added to poultry when animal products are subtracted from their diets.
    Yes, there is much waxing sentimental about “land stewardship” and
    “birds raised free range with access to fresh air and sunlight.” But
    vegetarian feed for the animals is mostly promoted as part of the
    basket of consumer health benefits, along with antibiotic- and
    hormone-free organic production methods. These claims include lower
    rates of salmonella and camphelobacter contamination in addition to
    preservation of “natural flavors.”

    And, of course, there’s the issue of those little brain-eating proteins
    called prions.The most notorious prion is the one that causes bovine
    spongiform encephalopathy, mad cow disease. BSE was introduced to the
    human food chain via cows that had been raised on feed enriched with
    sheep brains infected with a prion. British cattle acquired BSE,
    passing it along to about two hundred beef consumers in the form of
    variant Cruetz-feld-Jakob disease.

    Statistically, prions are a very rare encounter, not much more
    dangerous to the general public than standing between a TV camera and
    Michael Osterholm. But prion expert Will Houston admits they “stimulate
    the imagination.” Houston also pointed out that “risk” is tricky to
    assess; likelihood of infection can be very low, while outcome if
    infected can be catastrophic. Houston went to Great Britain to
    investigate BSE in 1991 for the U.S. Agriculture Department and is now
    the director of the Center for Animal Health and Food Safety at the
    University of Minnesota. He generously supplied a number of prion facts
    that justify their unusual grip on our attention. “They aren’t sexy,”
    he confessed when asked what they look like. “They look kind of like a
    twist tie.” But they can’t be destroyed with cooking the way most
    pathogens can. One reason is that they are not alive in the first
    place; they are just protein. They can also withstand temperatures of
    up to one thousand degrees Fahrenheit.

    Of course, the real attention-getter is what the prions actually do to
    their unwilling host. They don’t make copies of themselves, like
    viruses, Houston explained. “A prion is more like a domino effect. We
    all have normal prion proteins in our brains. When that abnormal-shaped
    protein encounters a normal-shaped protein, it converts it. The body
    can’t recycle the abnormal-shaped proteins and they accumulate into
    amyloid plaques.” The plaques then make holes in the brain. Centers for
    Disease Control descriptions of symptoms include “seizure, depression,
    appetite loss, ataxia, aphasia, combative behavior, memory loss, and
    coma.” Prion disease is untreatable and fatal.

    Producers of vegetarian-raised meats do not currently promote claims of
    prion safety with their products. But Mark Haskins, founder and chief
    executive of MBA/Smart Chicken, believes that especially in the case of
    poultry products, demand is partly driven by BSE fears. “I believe the
    consumer has become very discerning in the marketplace,” Haskins told
    me. “They know that the BSE challenge has come from animal proteins.”
    This sentiment was echoed by Ed, a meat-counter staffer working at the
    Wedge Co-op when I stopped by. “We have a very well-educated
    clientele,” he said, and other staff confirmed that “mad cow” is much
    on the minds of meat shoppers there.

    But prions appear to be getting educated, too. Deer and elk now appear
    to exchange the chronic wasting disease prion without the intermediary
    step of eating each other, leading to concerns about potential contact
    with farm animals. “If such transmissions were to occur,” states a 2004
    CDC study, “passage of the agent through a secondary host could alter
    its infectious properties, increasing its potential for becoming more
    pathogenic to humans.” Hopefully, smart, free-range chickens will read
    the memo: Don’t hang around the elk.—Joe Pastoor

  • Random Blackouts

    One Sunday evening in June, three regular guys are settled into a
    corner of the bar at Figlio in Uptown, within spitting distance of one
    of the room’s three flat-screen televisions. On the tube: men’s beach
    volleyball on Fox Sports.

    My friend and I plant ourselves across from them, armed with a stealthy
    little device that hangs from my keychain and looks vaguely like a
    Batman toy or a keyless entry fob. Invented by a forty-eight-year-old
    guy named Mitch Altman, TV-B-Gone can turn off almost any television,
    anywhere. However, it doesn’t seem to be working today on the TV
    hanging from the ceiling just ten feet away—or on any of the bar’s
    other large, looming monitors. As a result, TV-Was-Still-Here, and I
    gave the gadget to the guys to try. It didn’t work for them, either,
    but their curiosity was piqued.

    “Who would come up with something like this?” asked one, incredulous.

    Perhaps, I suggested, an antisocial person who doesn’t approve of
    television. “Well, that person shouldn’t be allowed in public,” he
    replied.

    I asked the guys if they would have been upset if the device had
    actually blacked out the beach volleyball game. Even though they’d been
    devoting only occasional glances to the game, they agreed that its
    sudden absence would have been irksome. “I don’t have this channel at
    home,” one of them said.

    In another corner of the bar, there was one remaining TV I hadn’t tried
    to zap. It was an older model on which a 60 Minutes broadcast had just
    started. I walked across the bar casually, keeping TV-B-Gone out of
    sight at waist level (shooting from the hip, as it were). I hit the
    button, and the TV went dark. No one seemed to notice.
    Back in our corner of the bar, the guys cheered. When I sat down again,
    they confessed they were beginning to think I’d made up the whole thing
    about TV-B-Gone and was just using the gadget to pick up men—a
    corollary activity for which it actually seems to work moderately well.
    (Though wouldn’t that make it—ahem—a turn-on?)

    Rachel, a young woman seated next to me, said, “My ex-boyfriend used to
    watch TV in public all the time. Whenever we went out. It’d be just the
    two of us and he’d be staring at the TV. I go out to socialize. It
    drove me crazy.” She gestured at her Argentine boyfriend, Ozzy. “That’s
    why you have to date someone from another country. He doesn’t care,”
    she said. Ozzy said he would care if it were a soccer game. “If you
    went to a bar in Argentina during a soccer game and shut off the TV,”
    he said, “people would go crazy.”

    Angering sports fans seems to be one of TV-B-Gone’s easiest and most
    cruel amusements. The day before, at Billy’s on Grand in St. Paul, my
    friend and I had walked onto the patio, where the bartender and several
    of the waitstaff were engrossed in the second game of a Twins-Yankees
    series, their backs to the restaurant. I aimed from the hip and one of
    the bar’s two outdoor televisions went out. The bartender’s head
    snapped around as if someone had fired a shot from the grassy knoll. I
    had never seen fury erupt so quickly. He scanned the patio patrons and
    the peripheral bushes for snipers (no one ever suspects the blond) and
    finally turned the set back on warily.

    Seated inside, I turned off the big-screen TV above our table. And
    though there were three other televisions still on, a twenty-something
    dude nearby screeched, “What the—? Shit!” as his wafer-thin girlfriend
    continued nibbling at her salad and baked potato. The waiter scratched
    his head and went looking for the remote control.

    Inciting public riots, as it turns out, is not the inventor’s
    intention. A self-described former television addict, Altman invented
    TV-B-Gone in the first place “so I’d have one for me.” For the record,
    he never turns off a TV that people are actually watching. Instead, he
    says he takes aim at those televisions tucked in the corners of
    laundromats and hovering over bar stools, those boob tubes that are
    adding only noise or silent yet distracting images to the atmosphere.
    “Even people who love television don’t like to have toothpaste sold to
    them during dinner,” Altman told me. His original inspiration came
    about twelve years ago when he was out with some friends and noticed
    that they all, at various times, were distracted from conversation by a
    nearby television. Altman admitted that if he’s out in public and a
    television is on, “There’s no way I can stop looking at it. We’re all
    helpless in the face of it.” He laughed.

    TV-B-Gone’s arrival on the market was greeted with a frenzy of media
    coverage, and the initial inventory sold out in two days. After almost
    a year, people have purchased nearly fifty thousand of the
    feather-light zappers. “You could easily go to an electronics store and
    buy a universal remote,” said Altman when I asked about any legal
    issues regarding “tampering” with private property. “This is just a
    little more stealthy.”

    Back at Figlio, a very tall man who’d joined our conversation decided
    to take matters into his own hands. He got up and turned off the
    flat-screen TV the old-fashioned way: by pushing the power button. No
    one seemed to notice or care. And though 60 Minutes’ hour was up long
    ago, that TV was still dark, too. Something even Andy Rooney might find
    amusing.—Shannon Olson

  • No Mas

    Okay, honest to God, that’s just about enough of this nonsense. I believe we’ve reached the point where the bump in the road has officially turned into a rut, and it’s damn hard to explain what’s happening to this team right now.

    This is one of those times where you could point your finger in just about any direction in the Minnesota clubhouse and you’d be looking at somebody deserving of a share of the blame for this stretch of sustained wretchedness. It’s especially painful to be reminded of what a miserable game and utter waste of time baseball can be.

    Under the happiest of circumstances baseball requires a ridiculous time commitment from the serious fan –a game like tonight’s, for instance: let’s say you got down to the Dome at five o’clock for the virtuous Admission Possible picnic; then you sat through nine excruciating innings in which the Twins managed just five hits and two runs against Detroit’s Jeremy Bonderman, and Kyle Lohse got the snot knocked out of him by the Tigers.

    It was an ugly game all around, a well-rounded exercise in futility, yet dispatched in a mercifully brief two hours and thirty-eight minutes. Still, that’s almost five hours carved out of your life right there. By the time you got to your car, negotiated your way out of downtown, and got home it was probably 10:30. Presumably you worked today as well, and it was a weeknight.

    If you’re a serious fan, though, you likely tuned into Baseball Tonight or checked out the internet when you got home to see how the White Sox did (they won again, of course, behind another splendid performance from Jon Garland, stretching their lead in the Central to a truly dispiriting nine games).

    So: You just buried seven or eight hours of your day in a hole in the ground; you’ll never get a single minute of any of those hours back, and, with the exception of the pleasant and inspiring prelude of the Admission Possible event, you don’t have a single fond memory to show for your evening.

    You can’t even begin to imagine how exhausting this sort of thing must be for the players, who got to the ballpark hours before you did and had to drive home through deserted streets long after you departed. You’d think, though, that it must be very exhausting.

    And you certainly hope they’re as tired of it as you are.

  • Trans

    Maybe it’s in the air, I dunno. But I’m hoping yesterday’s storms–seen to be literally a wall of brown out the windows of Bunker’s–cleared about ten days’ worth of bad karma. You know, an accumulation of weird breakdowns, bad communication, minor automotive hiccups, moving violations, unspeakable regression, birds gathering in strange symmetric formations on top of billboards, potentially song-ending skips of the needle across the twelve-inch dance-mix of life. (Karl dying, for example.) Sometimes we try too hard, fight too much, get too wrapped up in ourselves. I do, anyway.

    So I’m riding my bike, which I do instead of lunch on Tuesdays, on the bike path past Mill City Musuem just beyond the new Guthrie skyway-to-nowhere. Hot as a two-peckered billygoat. I can see four figures ahead on the bike path: One, a city worker with a weed-whacker, not far from her little John Deere lawn tractor. What appears to be a very large woman in a green tank-top, a lunch-time walker, standing nearby making conversation. And beyond, a doughy couple, recently retired yuppies on nice mountain bikes.

    It goes down like this: I pass the weed-whacker and the woman in the green tank top, who turns out to be a deep-voiced man with huge breasts. She or he is holding out her hand to the weed-whacker, as if to shake hands. The weed-whacker does not take the hand, but keeps holding the whacker, not unfriendly, really, just busy–which suddenly makes me think the man-woman is pointing at something with an open hand. S/he says, “Well, don’t work too hard, it’s awfully hot out here.” His/her hair is really frizzy straw blonde, could be a wig I suppose. My thought was not cynical or sarcastic. I said to myself, That’s a transgendered person. My city. My bike path. My people. Cool!

    As I peddled a little farther, I reached the yuppie couple, who were struggling against a light wind and the powerful heat, same direction only much slower. They were in shorts and tee-shirts, big bubble helments. He was ahead of her. And she called up to him, plainly referring to the person we’d just passed. “What was that?” she said, with plain disgust.

    It made me sad. And a little mad. Like I said, maybe it’s in the air. It can never rain hard enough, I guess.

  • Ho! What Fools These Fardels Be!

    always time for you.jpg

    This guy comes in and says to me, “What’s your goal here? What’s the big idea?” He was a huge man, seriously overweight and clearly laboring to balance there before me at the counter. Moist, wheezing, one of these characters who’s always swiping at his forehead with a handkerchief, and something of a throwback, I suppose, in this regard.

    I took a quick glance at his shoes. Perhaps, actually, a glance is always quick, but I’ve made a long study of the shoes of huge men, and I’ve noticed that they’re always strangely worn. This particular fellow had worn down a good half-inch on the inside sole of each of his shoes. The man was possibly pigeon-toed, I thought, or perhaps the damage to his footwear was simply the inevitable result of bearing the weight of such a resolute human glacier.

    I knew instantly that I didn’t like the tone of this fellow’s voice, and frankly wasn’t much interested in whatever it was that he might have to say. I didn’t like the cut of his jib. There was a compensatory rudeness that one often finds in the very unhappy or the excessively overweight. I am well aware, believe me, of the bigotry implicit in my attitudes toward the very large, and it is people like this character who are largely responsible for it. It seemed like I was always having to deal with them.

    The man swung one of his big arms up on the counter. It sounded like someone had dropped a fat, metropolitan phonebook. He commenced to drumming with his thumb, in the process blowing a wet wheeze in my direction, a wheeze that carried with it across the counter the stale smell of what I thought might have been chocolate milk. I noticed with a combination of fascination and disgust the film of sweat his arm had deposited on the counter top.

    He began to reiterate. Guys like this, I’ve learned, are masters at reiteration, generally of the inexplicable.

    “I would just like for someone to explain to me what it is you people think you’re trying to accomplish here,” he said. “That’s all I’m asking.”

    “I’m sorry” I said. “But you’re asking entirely too much.”

    sweetheart load.jpg

  • The Wages of Sid

    Sid Hartman’s in a bit of hot water over at the Strib, and we’re not talking jaccuzzi time. Sid is evidently of the opinion that certain silly ethics rules don’t apply to him–and it will be interesting to see how (or even whether) his editors manage to slap the old duffer’s wrists. Kate Parry is certainly taking her whacks, and you can bet Sid’s not going to take any lip from the upstart publisher’s reader’s company spoksperson flack representative, or whatever her title is and whoever it is she actually serves. (The Strib’s twelve summer interns, we guess.)

    There is some truth to Sid’s contention that he’s been the anchor man on the team tug-o-war rope for longer than anyone can even remember, and that different rules should apply to him. It’s just that Sid is not Sid’s best apologist. Allowances have been made. This has long been the spirit if not the letter of the law, which is why Sid can continue to be such a loveable jerk in the press box of every major sporting event that ever takes place in our fair city, and why he has for five decades drawn a paycheck from both the city’s newspaper and its “hometown” AM radio station. Half the edit staff at the Strib weren’t even born before most of Sid’s grand-kids were bouncing on his knee, and Anders Gyllenhaal wasn’t even in knee-pants when Sid was general manager of the Minneapolis Lakers. (While a reporter for the paper. How’s THAT for a conflict of interest, you snotty kids?!)

    See the problem here is that Sid has never been the most diplomatic fella, and this may be a case where, no matter how many stripes he figures he’s earned over the years, that ain’t going to carry a lot of water with the troops. (If Sid can juggle three or four careers, we figure we can mix our metaphors.)

    Does age demand respect and deference? Sure, to a point. But when you grow cavalier and thankless in your grizzled old age, it pays to remember the little folks who will bury you. Sid, it’s never been your strong point, but a little modesty would help your cause. And lose the martyr complex, it’s not very becoming; we know and appreciate your many fine contributions to the Newspaper of the Twin Cities, but have you bought the Strib’s fact-checking department a beer recently? (They may see things a little differently.) Other than that, knock yourself out lending your celebrity to noble causes hither and tither. Just don’t forget the little people–that is, your editors.

  • Uncle Jumbo's Playground

    uncle jumbo-7.jpg

    –Illustration by James Dankert

    Sunday night –the worst handful of hours in the week– finds me a complete wreck, hoarse, hungover, and ruined by a weekend of stale air and even worse baseball. It doesn’t help matters that my attic apartment is so damn hot that I’ve spent the entire evening sprawled on the floor in my underwear in front of the fan, chasing giant Gary Gaetti souvenir cups full of grape Kool-Aid with Tylenol PM and cans of lukewarm Milwaukee’s Best.

    There’s a cat that I inherited when I rented the apartment, and every time the thing creeps near me I have to summon enough energy to bellow and lash out at the creature lest it try to straddle me and lick the sweat from my chest. I’m not cruel enough to throw the cat out into the street or dump it at a shelter, but neither am I enough of a pervert to take any pleasure or consolation from its caresses.

    Perhaps, actually, I am perverse enough to take pleasure from its caresses, which is why I am so vigiliant about keeping the animal at bay. I recognize what a slippery slope that could be, but lord knows, at the moment I am a man who is sorely in need of consolation.

    Sundays are good for something, at least, and I thank God I don’t have to worry about turning on the radio and hearing the voice of Mike Max, or I’d gouge out my eyes with a soup spoon. Tonight I have no intention of turning on the radio or television, period. I don’t even want to hear a score from the White Sox game.

    What I’d really like to do, if I could summon the energy, is horsewhip the entire raggedy-ass crew of imposters that seems to have taken over the Twins clubhouse. I’d like to lash the bastards within an inch of their lives for the pain they’ve inflicted on me in the last week.

    Did you ever notice that the Twins seem to climb aboard the crap wagon every year about the time the NBA playoffs comes along? Or maybe it’s just the finals; I’ll have to look. But to me that’s the sign of a team that doesn’t have any focus. There are, of course, a whole lot of signs that this is a team that doesn’t have any focus.

    Right now they’re just dicking around, and they look simultaneously desperate and lazy. Ask any reasonably competent psychologist (not that I know any): there’s nothing more dangerous than someone who’s desperate and lazy, other than someone who’s drunk, desperate, and lazy. Take it from someone who knows, and who’s paid a terrible price for that knowledge.

    Maybe I’m overreacting, and should try to sleep off the weekend before making this pronouncement, but this is the closest this team’s been to total ruination since the miserable slide late in the 2001 season. Someone should check the handwriting on the line-up card Ron Gardenhire posted today, in fact, because I’d swear it had Tom Kelly’s fingerprints all over it. That was a line-up from 1999, for God’s sake.

    Yeah, great, let’s move Cuddyer back over to second, push Rivas to short, and toss the Australian out at third in hopes of at the very least dredging up some sort of feel-good storyline. This guy –whatever his name is– is Dan Masteller with an Aussie accent. This is all a terrible joke, and all those promising young players we were gargling like hyenas about at the beginning of the season are either back spinning their wheels in Rochester or doing absolutely nothing to justify the hype. This team couldn’t hit Wayne Terwilliger right now, the pitching is a shambles, and half the roster has some sort of strain.

    Tell me this: what the hell is a strain? A pull, a tear, a fracture, those are all something, but a strain? A strain is the whiny second cousin of a cramp, and neither of them is anything more than an aggravation. Believe me, I’m feeling severely strained at the moment, but I’ll be good and damned if anybody’s going to allow me to use that as an excuse to take the day off tomorrow.

    This team better shake the shit out of its shorts in a hurry, because, I swear, it’s not too late for me to take up a real hobby. I’ll even take up fishing before I sit through too much more of this nonsense.

  • A Brand Is Worth 10,000 Words

    There’s an interesting article on product placement in this week’s Business Week (via Romenesko, naturally). But not product placement like you know and love it–we’re talking product placement in the edit space of magazines. Toyota Corporation apparently approached Hearst, Conde Nast, and Meredith and asked executives to consider “product integration” in their pages.

    The thing is, it’s not the most terrible idea. Well, maybe it is, but there are more interesting things to say about this than merely “never!” The written language has evolved to the point where certain brands are so well marketed and branded that they often communicate an entire lifestyle, attitude, world-view in a single word. Writers, without any extra compensation at all, are beginning to rely on brand names as useful tools of brevity and concision. Rather than using words like “She drives a dependable, mechanically sound, well designed car, kinda cheap sheet metal, corners cut for unecesssary cost, but integrated amenities and options as standard, so-so gas mileage, depending on the model, great 4X4 legacy, a yuppie mobile that appeals across age and gender demographics, a smart little crossover utility vehicle that circumvents the bad reputation of behomoth SUVs, lots of useless but somehow strangely comforting headspace” you can simply say “She drives a Toyota RAV-4.”

    Now of course writers should never be paid, by anyone, for using the WRONG word, if in fact “She drives a Buick Le Baron,” which would surely be a completely different person.

    Aside from using brands as short-cuts in description, which seems like a venal sin at worst, there are several problems with a business model that tries to incorporate product placement into print. FIrst, the comparison to placement in other media is misleading and wrong. Product placement has never been attempted, that we know of, in a non-fiction context. It’s easy enough to insert a can of coke into the latest Tom Cruise vehicle, quite another to insert it into the latest Vanity Fair interview of TOm Cruise–if it wasn’t in fact there. We suppose Toyota could suggest that Vanity Fair interview Tom Cruise in the cabin of his brand-new Toyota Tacoma, but you know, there’s probably a limit to everyone’s patience on this sort of scene manipulation. Lord knows it’s hard enough to get to Tom Cruise anywhere or anytime, and trying to bring in a partner, no matter how much money they’re willing to throw at the problem, seems a lost cause on the face of it.

    All that said, there is this: Google smart ads. We’ve commented on this before, and it’s interesting. It works like this. Google crawls the editorial content of an online magazine, and places ads on the page that correspond to keywords in the edit. This is widely seen as acceptable because editors and writers have no control over the ads that get placed adjacent to the copy. In fact, neither do the advertisers. Thus, on any editorial page that, say, excoriates George Bush for lying, warmongering, and fomenting class hatred, there might be a dozen ads for the GOP or Powerline or whoever has paid google to place their ads next to any “Bush” high-hit edit content. So they run the risk of advertising next to the opposite kind of copy they would choose to advertise next to.

    We thought briefly about how this might actually crossover to print–that is, during the production process, allow some kind of keyword search on magazine edit that also placed keyed ads on the printed page, and we realized that would and could never work. Why? A couple of reasons. Readers, editors, publishers, and even writers are trained to smell this is a big, fat, stinking rat in print. There is the assumption made in print that the people who put the magazine together have full control of the content, and that this sort of bait-and-switch is being done on purporse in order to extract money from the reader and deliver it to the advertisier and to the publisher. Why is that assumption not made with Google smart ads? Because of the technological interface–you’re reading on your computer, dude–you are automatically reassured that it is merely some logorythm (to coin a cool new homonym) at work. Even though humans wrote that code, they were apparently motivated by a more general, universal desire for you to spend your money in a way that would benefit advertisers and publishers

    As the Businessweek story points out, there has been a great hue and cry even online, when this sort of thing happens with any human involvement or agency, or the appearance of it. When people got in a lather earlier this year about the New York Post’s version of keyword ads, courtesy of a Vibrant Media search spider, it was the fact that the technology actually highlighted the keywords in the editorial text itself. That was crossing the line.

    What does all of this have to do with Lucky, Cargo, and their hundreds of city-mag copycats? Uh… we think product placement in editorial is alive and well, and pretty damn lucrative. It’s just that the placement isn’t really happening in a magazine, in that case. It’s happening in a catalog, the print equivalent of QVC.