Author: rakemag

Mina writes: How did I spend my summer vacation? With my husband and sons in Hiroshima, Japan for the anniversary of the Atomic Bombing, “Peace Day”. We shared the day with our Japanese hosts, the wonderful Nogamis, and 60,000 other Peaceful People from all over the world! That’s me in front of the A-Bomb Dome, an eerie remnant of that terrible day. The rest of the city is completely rebuilt and modern. I highly recommend the Peace Museum (we should have one here). I also recomment reading the autobiographical comic novel “Barefoot Gen” by Keiji Nakazawa. He was seven when the A-Bomb exploded over his hometown. A survivor, “Hibakusha”, a witness, a great artist and story teller, his hero, little Gen, really tells it as it is, War is Hell, especially for children. No More Hiroshimas! Your peacenik pal and (TV’s) Wife Swapper, Mina — Peace out.

Red Handed photo taken outside the Police Academy at Fort Saint Elmo in Valletta, Malta in July.

Here’s Barb Pratt of Minneapolis taking a little rest on her van trip with Alan Kahn (also of Minneapolis) in upstate New York—–yum!! What a pie it made!!

I greatly appreciated the thoughtfully written article on the Outdoor Scripture Sign Crusade [“The Ruin,” by Joe Hart, September]. Kudos to Hart for gracefully rendering the sincerity of his subject’s Christian faith. Mr. Hart’s personal theological commitments, however, seem marred by some muddled thinking. While he admits to having “a kind of rueful respect for the great mysteries of life and death,” he says that he has “come to believe it necessary not to name them. Because as soon as they are named, they cease to be mysteries and become human interpretations, steeped in all our folly and hubris.” Now human interpretations are, as Hart rightly notes, inevitably susceptible to human folly and hubris. But does attempting to use language to describe any mystery necessarily do violence to that mystery? This seems to me an untenable assertion. Does it hold true that that when we assign names to “things” that are externally transcendent to us, that they cease to be mysterious? Think of Love.

Dan Olson
Minneapolis

In your October cover story, “We Live Here,” you wrote about the new mosque being built in Rochester. Your writer said, “When complete, it will be the first new mosque ever constructed in Minnesota.” I would like to let you know that this is not true. There has been a new mosque built in Richfield, Minnesota, and the name of that mosque is Masjid ul Rahman. It was built a few years back, I think in 2003.
Asbah Hadi
Minneapolis

Congratulations on your article about University Grove [Sweet Spot, October]. Your large photo of the building with colorful panels is a two-story library addition to a fifties Close house now owned by professors Helen Foster and Fred Cooper. The firm’s “Wolfe House” next door (now owned by Dudley Riggs and his wife) featured panels with wood battens. For the library addition, the current “Close Associates” chose to cover the panel joints with aluminum cover strips. The owners arranged the strips according to LeCorbusier’s “Modulor.” The colors are the owners’ choices from a Josef Albers palette. This lively newcomer respects the past while celebrating the spirit of the Grove your article chronicles.
Gar Hargens
President, Close Associates Inc., Minneapolis

I read with amusement the hand-wringing implicit in the article “Newspapers in Turmoil” by Brian Lambert [October]. What is noteworthy is that this is newsworthy at all. I have been avoiding the likes of the Star Tribune and the Pioneer Press since 1985, when I first moved to Minneapolis. Even by the standards of American journalism—notoriously self-centered—such newspapers have not been serving their readers well for these twenty years. Sure, there was an occasional investigative article in the Pioneer Press that was informative, but by and large these two papers wrote at a sixth-grade level of English and required about the same level of complexity of thought. That their standards have declined even further because of the onslaught of weblogs and pressure from the right-wing pressure groups should come as no surprise. There was not much of a core to sustain.
Bharat Pant
Minneapolis

In regard to the article in your October edition “Newspapers in Turmoil,” if daily newspapers are in trouble, first and foremost they should be in trouble for destroying old-growth Canadian forests. Most newsprint used in the U.S. comes from Canada, and ninety percent of all logging in Canada is done with clear-cutting. Newsprint, which is the paper used to make newspapers, has an average recycled content that runs between zero and thirty percent. So many daily newspapers in America (more than sixty million of them) are seventy percent virgin forest. Nothing eats more forests than daily newspapers, they may be the most destructive and wasteful product in America. Newsprint is the principal wood product that comes out of Ontario, and the boreal forest in Northern Ontario is being destroyed. Our local papers get much of their newsprint from Northern Ontario, and continue to write editorials about saving America forests, while they are playing a large part in the destruction of the last intact old-growth forest in North America … odd.

Frank Erickson