In case you missed Britney Spears’s wretchedly uninspired performance at the VMA Awards, suffer through it now.
Category: Blog Post
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See C Riders
C riders can rejoice. (e.d. I mean to say that Mercedes is going back to showing their face–i.e. the grill.)While I am not one to make predictions (only bad businesspeople do that, stupid foo’ businesspeople) I will offer an observation.
I think the new Merc C class looks really “hot” in silver. That may mean (while I am not one to make predictions) that you may soon see alot of them on the road. In fact, I am so dumbfounded by how cool this car looks that adjectives fail me.
I have to admit that I did not always feel this way about the new C. The first time I saw one it was done up in a dark blue hue that made me ask Mercedes “now see what you have done.” I mean, it looked a little bit like a 3-series. And all things being equal, I would rather have a 3-series than a C class.
Till I saw this new C-class in silver. That is when I realized that Mercedes has done something different with this new car. The design is better resolved than the BMW. It also handles like the BMW while preserving a torque curve that’s about as flat as Gwen Stefani (nothing over developed, which is nice). Best of all, it costs about the same as as that milky white rice cake called the Toyota Avalon.
And I don’t see any Road Rake reader, or rider, in that kinda car.
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Zapata Comes to Powderhorn
Southside Pride reports on a statue of Emiliano Zapata presented to the city on behalf of the State of Morelos. Will we have a new statue in Powderhorn Park?
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Companion book to "The War" Film
Head to Luverne tonight for your copy of The War: An Intimate History, 1941-1945.
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Sup like a steelworker
The latest Parasole restaurant opened for dinner last night in Maple Grove. It’s called Pittsburgh Blue, named for the way he-men in the Rust Belt eat their steak: charred on the exterior, cold and bloody inside.
Why, you may ask, is a restaurant geared toward steelworkers located in the pink collar capital of the Midwest? Will the mega-cineplex and Olive Garden set suddenly grow incisors? All I know is, Phil Roberts (the man behind the curtain at Parasole) measures the market and gets things right. He brought Salut to Edina, Oceanaire to the downtown Hyatt, and Buca di Beppo to the world. If he says northwest metro residents are ready for viscera, I believe him.
Also, the menu is vast. Oysters Rockefeller, Spinach and Applewood Bacon Salad, Corn-Crusted Halibut, Spinach and Mushroom Gratin. That and lots and lots of beef. Prices are at the tipping point: $27.95 for that halibut, $17.95 for a dry-aged sirloin steak sandwich. Sides are shared, as at Oceanaire and Manny’s: monster portions of onion rings and asparagus with hollandaise. A root beer float goes for eight bucks.
But if in this era of sustain-the-earth speak the mighty Roberts predicts Twin Citians will get into their cars and drive miles on I-94 to a stylish supper club with a “very, very mean-looking bust of a bull” (according to the restaurant’s ad hoc press release) hanging over the hearth, in order to eat as carnivorously as the men who do back-breaking work in fiery foundries, 12 hours at a shift, pouring molten pig iron into ingots. . . .they will. Bank on it.
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The Daily Mole
Minnesota Monitor gives us the dirt on Steve Perry’s new website. Check out the great teaser.
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Cue, Once Again, Barber's Adagio for Strings
We shall find peace. We shall hear the angels. We shall see the sky sparkling with diamonds.
–Chekhov, Uncle Vanya
It’s all just history now, that still incomprehensible day six years ago, history buried under history, with more awful history heaped on top of it. It gets buried deeper all the time. Rubble and ruin the central metaphor of the years since.
How, you wonder, could such a day possibly be eclipsed by something so inconsequential as the passing of time? And yet it has been eclipsed, reduced now to token, knee-jerk political justification for virtually any new outrage, and reduced as well to fodder for entertainment –sensationalized films and television movies and books. A real, jarring leviathan of a memory collectively transformed into something sordid, a lurid, almost mythological spectacle from recent history, something that happened to other people and continues to be used to explain away terrible things that continue to be visited upon other other people in elsewheres near and far.
All over the world the horrors of that day live on in brutal abstract and concrete concussion, a cruel cycle of visitations and revisitations and recrimination. But not, for the most part, here.
Americans are accomplished at nothing so much as rolling with the punches that are thrown at other people, at slowing down briefly to gawk and tsk-tsk at the wreckage before moving on. We move swiftly out from under things and right back under our own things.
Other people: the great shadow abstraction and peripheral nag of modern psychology.
We all, certainly, can find reasons to feel ashamed of ourselves. All sorts of reasons. There is really no end to our shame, and no end in sight.
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Minnesota at Forefront of Magnetoencephalography
The Economist’s recent article “Magnetic Personalities” reveals University of Minnesota scientist Apostolos Georgopoulos’s studies on the brain’s magnetic impulses.
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Keep Your Baby Safe from Flying Bullets
Bullet Proof baby is actually a promotional site for the new movie Shoot’Em Up, but, man, if you don’t know that it can pretty startling.
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Escape Telemarketers
You have just a few more days, until September 15th, to register your phone number(s) with the National Do Not Call Registry. Do it now.