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Somewhere in the middle of the nation’s heated debate about gay marriage, a new billboard popped up on one of my usual routes. The ad, for Cub Foods, features two women positioned in friendly proximity to each other and to a bag of groceries. The tag line says, “Real People. Real Values.”

Wow, I thought. That may be the most progressive ad campaign I’ve ever seen. Good for Cub. Gay families are real families, whether the law acknowledges them or not, and everyone needs groceries. If you can’t make it to Massachusetts, walk down our aisles!

It hadn’t occurred to me before that in the cutthroat grocery market, ten percent of the population might have gone unattended as a targetable marketing group. Trading in on the media frenzy over one of the nation’s hottest buttons, Cub had found a fresh approach to vying for the Rainbow shopper.

A risky approach, no doubt, in a country that values its heteronormativity, and with an administration that insists on it. Could a campaign like this successfully lure the Queer Eye without offending those who are Touched by an Angel?

On the other hand, wasn’t it a little crass to coast a marketing campaign on the back of a struggle for basic freedoms? You can’t get married but you can get tomatoes?
Mostly, though, it seemed a brave nod of acceptance for what’s still billed as an “alternative lifestyle” instead of just family. Could this really be the case?

Had anyone else seen this ad? And what did they think about it? I asked a group of friends, by email naturally, and this produced a trickle of disinterested responses. Apparently, no one else had noticed it.

So I called Cub headquarters. “They’re supposed to be a mother and a daughter,” reported Chris Murphy, senior manager of public relations, after consulting with his staff. “Really? Because from the freeway, they look like lesbians,” I said. “It’s supposed to demonstrate the generations who have shopped at Cub,” Chris told me. But if that were true, shouldn’t they have included some little kids, some grandparents? “Well, I looked at it up close, and you can tell that one’s older than the other,” Chris said.

But whizzing by on I-94, they definitely didn’t look to me like mother and daughter. One looked possibly Italian, a bit of a fireplug, vaguely like Rhea Perlman playing Carla Tortelli on Cheers; and the other looked like, well, her pleasant Midwestern and perhaps only slightly younger girlfriend. Even in stalled traffic they wouldn’t represent a May/December romance. At best, May/July.

“Do you want to talk to anyone else at the company?” Chris politely asked me. No thanks, I told him. I had called hoping that “Real People, Real Values” meant what I thought it meant: that acceptance of life in its enormous variety should be our primary value, and that somebody besides the AIDS Walk organizers was finally brave enough to advertise it. But I pretty much figured even before I called that it probably didn’t. And the truth is, I live closer to Kowalski’s.
—Shannon Olson

In a sweet little house several miles south of mine, a girl named Esmé keeps a box on her dresser. In the box is a collection of necklaces—a painted chime ball, Thor’s hammer, a polished unity stone, and her favorite, a sterling angel. These are all trinkets I’ve given her over the years that I’ve been her primary class teacher. Next year, she’ll be going to a new school, which made us both cry as we said our good-byes and exchanged gifts and letters, celebrating the school year’s end. It was through Esmé’s parting letter to me, four pages carefully handwritten in dull pencil, that I learned how closely she guards those gifts. I’m moved by the way she keeps them enshrined in a special box, and even more so, I’m humbled that she does so, as she explained, to “protect your family.”

To protect my family. Surely I’ll never put one of my children on an airplane, or send my daughters to baby-sit, or watch one of them fall uncontrollably in love, or walk out my own front door into a world of lost keys and slippery roads and dread diseases and real-estate bubbles without thinking of Esmé’s box.

You bump into a lot of people in your life. Some of them are extraordinary in their goodness. There’s no way around it. I tend to think of these individuals—and I’m not among them—as old souls who’ve been by this way before. Many times before. They’ve acquired a certain wise patience for those of us who are still bumbling along in our selfishness and our spite. “You’ll grow out of it,” they seem to say, “sooner or later. And if you don’t, there’s always your next lifetime or the one after that.” It’s this very acceptance that makes the extra-good people stand out. They’re not like me, always in a hurry to improve themselves and everyone around them—a trait that’s a dead giveaway of the many remaining practice lives to come.

My sister just had a baby, her first. A perfect little boy named Henry. He’s a few weeks old now, recovering nicely with his parents, who are frequently worried about his well-being. At first he did not poop, and so they called the doctor, who suggested putting a thermometer in his rectum to “dislodge” any remaining meconium. I think Henry overheard, because he immediately let loose, and has been doing so with gusto ever since. But it’s not always so easy.

Two days after Henry was born, he and his mom and dad were hanging around nursing and napping in their “family-style” hospital room in the East Village when a nurse stepped in to announce that it was time for Henry’s bath. “Be back in a bit,” she said as she took Henry a few doors down the hall to the nursery. But she never came back. Instead, a different nurse rushed into the room to announce that there’d been an incident, and my sister and her husband needed to come right away. Henry, the first nurse said, had stopped breathing and turned blue during his bath. He needed to be admitted to ICU immediately. “He looked fine,” my sister told me later on the phone, defeat hanging heavy on the line, “but it turned out I didn’t have a choice.” So Henry was taken off to the ICU, three flights up, and my sister spent the next twenty-four hours going back and forth to nurse him, camping out in the ICU as much as they’d let her. In the small plastic bassinets around her she saw babies in pain, impossibly small babies, like featherless birds, bodies taut with the effort of screaming.

My sister is thirty-eight. I’m thirty-six. When I’m thirty-eight, my oldest stepchild will be twenty. When I was twenty-two, I was married with a house and a baby and another soon to be on the way. Neither my sister nor I knew what we were getting into when we had the audacity to produce innocent, perfect new beings. Nobody knows, no matter how many times they do this foolhardy and brazen thing. If we knew we would simply have to change our minds, not because it’s so much work, and you never sleep again, and oh, the pain and the misery—not because of any of that, but because not a single one of us is big enough or strong enough to shield somebody else from the ravages of the world. No other inadequacy could ever be more painful than this one. And that, I believe, is why Esmé keeps my gifts in her box to protect my family, and why it will always make me cry to think of it: Because she is loving and wise enough to know that I could never be powerful enough to do all the protecting myself.

Maybe they were emboldened by the frank talk of Dick Cheney. Or maybe they’re feeling a little overextended by their thrilling new store in Bloomington, which finally opened in mid-July. Maybe they just aren’t comfortable with their English yet. But Ikea, the upscale Swedish company that sells lots of unassembled Scandinavian furniture, has recently seemed a bit irritable.

On bus shelters in Norway, Ikea has posted ads of supermodels wearing blank expressions and urbane duds. They look preoccupied with the complexities of the good life, lounging among their minimalist home furnishings. Then there is an uncivil invitation spray-painted beside the company’s yellow logo. It says, “Screw Yourself.”

At first, I thought this graffiti must be the work of witty Norske vandals expressing their opposition to this corporate giant from the repugnant nation of Sweden. Upon closer inspection, I noticed that the job was perfectly uniform—as if it had been produced by the same computer that produced the rest of the poster. Oi! No jaded rocker did this. It was Ikea itself, apparently warning its customers of the perils of its wares.

I rang up Ikea in Oslo to ask if they understood what their ad campaign meant to Anglophones. The customer service representative responded in perfect English. “We’ve had many complaints about that. What we meant was ‘build-it-yourself.’ I don’t think that the advertisers understood the other meaning when they made the posters.”

My Norwegian friend Knut didn’t buy it. “Oh, they knew what they were doing. They wanted to appeal to a younger audience, so they used American slang.” Even so, this bizarre double—or triple—entendre is surprising in a country where most people speak nearly flawless English.

Ikea’s line that it was a simple mistranslation also seemed suspicious, because the word skrue (screw) in Norwegian can mean “crazy old kook.” (Norwegians, for example, know Disney’s Uncle Scrooge as Onkel Skrue.) What kind of company would want to associate itself with that old pinchpenny?
Perhaps the ad was meant to revive the friendly rivalry between Sweden and Norway. “See the yellow and blue? That’s very bad for Norway because it’s the Swedish colors!” joked Norwegian banker Arne Wahlstrøm, while pointing at the local Ikea store. “We don’t shop there,” he added. “It’s mostly for students and young people.”

Although they are not backing off in Norway, it’s not likely that Ikea will bring this edgy campaign to the States. At least not before Häagen-Dazs rolls out its “Eat Me!” concept.
—Eric Dregni

Every year under the sunny skies of a June weekend, the Minnesota Street Rod Association stages its dazzling annual hot-rod show, “Back to the Fifties,” at the Minnesota State Fairgrounds. With the fifties receding further and further into history, however, it takes a greater effort with every passing year to heave yourself out of the recliner to get back to them. Fortunately, and not a moment too soon, the collapsible canvas chair with integrated beer-can holder and footrest has now reached such an advanced stage of development that today you can carry one of these around in a bag slung over your shoulder, open it up, and instantly recline just about anywhere. There must have been thirty thousand of these chairs at the fairgrounds this year, where the sudden, amazing convergence of ten thousand street-legal hot rods makes for a show second in size only to the Street Rod Nationals held each year in Louisville, Kentucky. At least two or three chairs were deployed around every car, many with their slings being put to the test by people who’ve porked up a little since 1959. Aside from the chairs, the other must-have accessory at the show was the foam-rubber beer cozy insulating the can of pop or beer in everybody’s mitts.

Let’s take a second to think about what the term “hot rod” means.

Okay. Now let’s go see some.

All day long, and on into the dusk as the street lights flutter to life, an endless conga line of custom cars snakes and winds slowly through the fairgrounds, the streets and intersections lined three deep with people raucously cheering from their distended canvas pouches. The parade creeps and lurches along at about three miles per hour, engines snorting and growling. Whenever anybody yells “Let’s hear it!” or “Show us your tits!” a driver obliges by revving his engine loud enough to crack the pavement. At one halt in the proceedings, a pickup truck that with the press of a button can tilt up sidewise as though letting a fart, does just that, to the great amusement of the crowd.

Not every rodder is a lout, however, nor were all the cars in the show traditional street rods. In fact, any car from the epoch of tail fins or earlier—that is, with a body manufactured before 1964—is eligible for display (this eliminates monster trucks, the imbecile spawn of wankers in windowless basements. It also excludes the new, elaborately tricked-out, million-dollar custom show and concept cars seen rotating like layer cakes on lazy Susans at auto shows.) Included are classic cars that have been restored with scrupulous concern for the authenticity of original details: stately old Packard Phaetons, vintage Oldsmobiles, Al Capone getaway cars, Chrysler Airstreams, Bugatti roadsters, vanished Cords and Tuckers, and all kinds of ancient trucks.

The understated elegance of the restorations next to the screaming paint jobs of the bad-boy street rods gives you some idea of the range of aesthetic preoccupations exhibitors bring to the show. The vintage cars are more about motoring the countryside in style. A classic hot rod, meanwhile, is built to rip from zero to Mach 1 without stopping to take in the sights. To gulp enough air to cool things down, a hot rod has a louvered hood or no hood at all, and its immaculate, supercharged engine and chromed manifold pipes are all left exposed. Add in the bitchin’ paint-job—essentially the street rod’s “D.A.” (duck’s-ass haircut)—and you have the look that everyone’s after: It’s all about the strut and command of the street.

Regal or raunchy, it makes no difference. The workmanship on the cars in the show is often exquisite. What draws me to hot-rod shows is not the noise or the chance to rub shoulders with a lot of yahoos, but the outrageously inventive, radical, and personal intensity of this world of design, where for more than fifty years ordinary people—auto mechanics, body-shop guys, electricians, engineers—have been scavenging junkyards for the raw material of creation. Detroit proposes, but Man disposes. The first church of the hot rod—a garage in the alley—is where people (mostly working-class guys, but also, in recent years, yuppie dilettantes) seize on the tools and rusting relics of industrial wage slavery for their own artistic purposes. Most of these guys don’t give a rat’s ass for what the art world calls art, but their cars—in their own way and on their own terms—are highly impassioned works of art, kinetic sculptures richly coded and layered with technical, functional, and aesthetic meaning, their every detail saturated with decision and significance to those familiar with the language of the tribe.

The paint jobs hit you right between the eyes. The colors are lustrous and incredibly deep—pure retinal candy. You want to go over and lick them. No segment of the spectrum is left uninvestigated. A lot of the action is in the realm of rapidly vibrating yellows, from the canary of Yellow Cabs to the colors of egg-yolk, banana, flower pollen, and the yellow of crime-scene tape. Not much lemon, because who needs to drive a lemon? Then the reds: ripe-tomato red, fire-engine red, Mao Tse-Tung red, candy-apple red, on through a hundred shades of lipstick. Next are sweltering oranges and scalding, acid lime greens; lurid, grape-juice purples; nocturnal cobalts and deep midnight navy blues, often combined in two-tone restorations with elegant shades of cream. There are pale mints, soft pearlescent whites, and cars done in sinister flat black primer, and finally, there are pinks, ranging from the delicate pink of panties to a bubble-gum pink so nauseating it can bring up your lunch just to look at it. The pinks and fuchsias and magentas suggest the hidden hand of women, or of brave men indeed.

Half the cars on the fairgrounds are painted to look like they’re on fire from the untamed ferocity of their engines. A custom flame job is like a tattoo; it announces that a meteorically sizzling street rod has just entered the atmosphere and is headed straight to hell, tearing through space with such blazing speed that its engine has burst into flames and the driver’s pants have caught fire. The hot-rod tribe has a whole iconography of fire, with different schools and styles concerning the shape of flickering tongues of flames. The classic flame job starts out molten white-hot at the nose of the car, the hissing airbrush then pushing the color from yellow through orange to red as the thing cools. But these are chemically uncertain times and there is much experimentation with toxic variations: sulfuric green flames slithering over metallic blue or orange bodies; or blue gas flames lapping at the skirts of a ’49 Merc painted that queasy pink. Flame is cool; it is to hot-rodders what camo is to survivalists. It seems to be plastered over everything sold at the show—shirts, pants, hats, bras, sneakers, codpieces, kiddies’ pajamas.

Certain classics like the archetypal ’32 Ford three-window coupe, generally considered the mother of all hot rods, are often treated in a more formal manner, and modified in ways particularly respectful of tradition. The whole outlaw thing aside, strict conventions—orthodoxies—exist in the world of hot rods just as they do in the hidebound world of antiques. They hover over anything you might think to do, so if you happen to find the hulk of a ’32 Ford overgrown with weeds in some field, you don’t just have at it and trick it out any old way. You feel the weight of history. You do not mess with the look of that squared-off bustle at the back, and you keep the roof nice and flat even if you chop it, and you make sure the graceful outlines of the grill and fenders remain recognizable as those of the classic. If you’ve got a ’32 Ford coupe, the issue (for some, at least) isn’t so much one of asserting a defiant originality; it’s the discipline and knowledge you bring to your own rendition of a classic. It makes for a strange creative tension between conformity and invention, between restraint and that ol
d desire to kick out the jams.

There are competing creation myths, but one has it that the hot-rod culture began in southern California with men trained in the military returning from World War II. Racing on the dry flat lakebeds east of L.A., welders, motor-pool mechanics, electricians, pipefitters, and steel- and sheet-metal workers started looking for ways to reduce aerodynamic drag. They souped up engines for greater power and quicker acceleration, stripped down bodies and chopped the roofs to reduce weight, giving the dragster its raked profile: low in the front, high on the haunches powering it from the back. They got their cars from junkyards. Their approach was based on the indelible experience of the Depression: Throw nothing away, make do with what you’ve got. What you had after the war were old Fords from the twenties and early thirties. These became the chassis and bodies of the first dragsters, the ones built in the late forties through the fifties, the heyday of the art, before the hobby grew explosively and customizing cars got to be big business and decadence set in.

Today, of course, there’s no reason to bust your knuckles, no need to get down and mine the ore, smelt the steel, hammer the thing out at the forge. You can just go out and buy a hot rod, just like you can buy yourself the look of hard-won experience: Drop a couple of hundred bucks on pre-torn jeans and a distressed leather jacket and you’re all set. “Back to the Fifties” has a street-rod auction, and cars are being bought and sold all over the fairgrounds throughout the run of the show; it’s as much a hot-rod marketplace as it is an exhibition.

Not that there aren’t still plenty of restless and ingenious men building street rods from scratch in grubby garages behind the house, but now a lot of the cars at the show are built or worked on by professional speed shops. It’s the Age of Specialization; even if you’ve done the work on the body and engine yourself (and a lot of these guys still have the skill to do it in spades), most of the paint jobs are now farmed out to airbrush virtuosos, some of whose names are legend. (In 2002, Von Dutch, a renowned pinstriper of cars and motorcycles in the fifties, was given a posthumous retrospective at two university art galleries in California.)

Next to the dented old jalopies the whole thing started with, the modern street rod is a deliriously baroque confection—a motorized Fabergé egg—but I have to admit, when I see a pack of them cruising low to the ground down University Avenue on a summer night, those tiny teal or purple lights under their chassis reflecting off the pavement, each one gliding on its own mysterious lagoon of light, they look pretty damned cool.

Glenn Gordon is a writer, sculptor, and photographer.

So you’re as excited as anyone about the new light-rail line—it’s a real step toward sustainable development in the Twin Cities. Your only complaint is that there is not ample parking at the stations for your Toyota hybrid. Also, the rules prohibit consumption of your daily dose of wheatgrass juice on the train. But dig deeper. Admit it: Isn’t there a part of you that thrills at the prospect of going out for a night of adult beverages without worries about driving, as if you were in a “real” city like New York or Chicago?

Aside from the many salubrious joints at the northern end of the line (downtown), farther south there are lots of quirky neighborhood joints within stumbling distance of our delightful new rail stations. The drinking railroader is wise to double-check the schedule, to avoid getting stranded during the late-night hours, when trains go from scarce (after 10 p.m.) to non-existent (between 2 and 4 a.m.).

Fort Snelling Station: Fort Snelling Club
Fort Snelling Building 89; 612-725-2272
Open until 1 a.m. Friday and Saturday.
Five-minute walk south and east of station.

Once a club for employees only, it has been
open to the public for the last decade. It’s administered by the V.A., but its ambience is
Holiday Inn lounge circa 1985, accented by white Christmas lights.
Bonus: No sales tax on food or drink
Downside: Crimes committed on federal property become felonies, so mind your Ps and Qs!
What’s on the walls: Rural sunset paintings
Pull-tab charity: Disabled American Veterans
Music: Joe Walsh-into-Weezer jukebox,
at surprisingly high volume
Smoke level: Fleece-permeating

46th Street Station: Sunrise Inn
4563 34th Avenue South; 612-721-3137
Open from 10 a.m. to 2 a.m. Three-minute walk west of station.
To be clear, the Sunrise Inn is not a motel and it does not open at sunrise. It is a 3.2 bar/restaurant that has been around since 1937, one that still retains its original iceboxes and bar, and a vintage Peter Max 7-Up sign, complete with psychedelic rainbows and flowers. Food and bottles of aspirin can be purchased at the bar.

Bonus: $1.75 beers
Downside: Drinks purchased after midnight are assessed a twenty-five-cent fee to pay for the extra licensing cost of staying open until 2 a.m.
What’s on the walls: Photo of Kevin McHale scoring for the Celtics; a sign cautioning “No public phone, don’t even ask!”
Pull-tab charity: Roosevelt High School Boosters Club
Music: None
Smoke level: Tolerable with door open

38th Street Station: Cardinal Bar
2920 East 38th Street; 612-724-5837
Open until 1 a.m. Next to station.
After three decades, the Cardinal has a new, bright-red awning, a new patio, and a gravel parking lot that got sacrificed to the adjacent light rail station. These are just a few of the changes at this mullet-friendly Southside institution, which caters to softball players, pool shooters, dart throwers, and broomballers. The bar serves strong beer and wine, and the kitchen is open with a full menu until 11 p.m.

Bonus: Meat raffle (Wednesdays at 6:30 p.m.)
Downside: Restrooms—especially the women’s
What’s on the walls: Outside sign proudly proclaiming, “We patty our burgers fresh daily”
Pull-tab charity: MN/USA Wrestling Incorporated
Music: The Guess Who
Smoke level: Noticeable bluish haze

Lake Street Station: The Schooner Tavern
2901 27th Avenue South; 612-729-4365
Open until 2 a.m. Eight-minute walk—two blocks west and one block north (next to Rainbow Foods)
A no-frills, no-nonsense joint that has been serving up drinks since the end of Prohibition. Draft beers are $2.05 and are served in jars. There’s no kitchen, but frozen pizza and free popcorn are available. The entertainment includes two projection-screen TVs, karaoke on Tuesdays and Saturdays, and pool sharking throughout the day.

Bonus: Bar doesn’t feel as tough as the neighborhood
Downside: Booths in back look cute but are uncomfortable
What’s on the walls: “Check cashing for bar patrons only” sign
Pull-tab charity: Roosevelt High School Boosters
Music: Hank Williams Jr. into Al Green into Cher
Smoke level: Not horrible

Cedar-Riverside Station: Palmers Bar
500 Cedar Avenue South;
612-333-7625. Open until 2 a.m.
Five-minute walk west to Cedar Avenue, turn left.
Palmers attracts a truly West Bank crowd:
gray-haired hippies, body-pierced punk rockers, East Africans, college students, and general hard-luck cases.

Bonus: Good beer selection on tap
Downside: You may be hesitant to have “everybody know your name” here
What’s on the walls: Faux fireplace with flickering electric lights
Pull-tab charity: No pull tabs
Music: Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust in its entirety
Smoke level: What does it matter now?—Dan Gilchrist

Never mind those thin-lipped, controlling dog ladies with their utterly bizarre fashion sense. Alexander Vyatkin is the most serious trainer you are likely to come across in this overfed, underworked nation. He has no time or tolerance for people who let their dogs in the driver’s seat. Today for example, up at Red Star Kennel in Hudson, Wisconsin, he’s doing “bite work” with one of his Presa Canarios, and his corrections leave no doubt about who’s the big dog. When the eager, hundred-pound animal is released, she goes flying at the “agitator” like a rocket made of muscle. The agitator is also large; he is a well-muscled volunteer wearing a padded suit, who is yelling and slicing the air with what looks like a large wooden riding crop. Eighteen-month-old Jedda leaps on the agitator and clamps her teeth onto his arm. Dog and man go reeling around and around, the dog airborne, jaws locked, a ballet of will and aggression. The guy yells. He hits the dog with the stick; she couldn’t care less. This is thrilling but not amazing. How hard can it be to get a dog full of drive to bite? The surprise comes when, at a single word from Vyatkin, the dog drops the sleeve, turns around, and walks calmly back to his side. It’s like watching a freight train instantly reverse.

My saucer-eyed bulldog looks up at me, his body tense with desire to get in on the action. Someday, maybe. We’re still in basic obedience. In fact, it’s me who’s getting trained; I keep walking left instead of right, stumbling into my dog. I just want our heel-sit-stay to be a little more, uh, precise, and for him to stop chasing after mountain bikes.

Back in the Ukraine, Vyatkin won medals in the Russian Army’s canine unit. Here, he continues to exude a military mystique. Breeders, firemen, and animal control officers speak about him in glowing, almost worshipful tones. More to the point, they make up a big chunk of Red Star’s clients.

In America, trainers often come in two breeds that we’ll call Strange Lady and Soldier Guy. Vyatkin and his spouse, both Soldier Guys (though Irina is not a guy, and was never in the military), came here in 1993, partly to escape Kiev, a city only forty-five miles from Chernobyl. Once here, they began breeding Presa Canarios—large, sleek-coated, Mastiff-type dogs from the Canary Islands originally used as guardians and fighters. They now own one of America’s best-known kennels.

The Vyatkins are passionate about ethical breeding. If you sound thuggy on the phone, Alexander will quote you a puppy price of fifteen thousand dollars. He operates as if he were in Europe, where the business is regulated, and he favors tighter controls. Here—where a kind of mind-your-own-business libertarianism rules, especially at the more rustic end of the dog-breeding spectrum—Vyatkin has been told more than once to take his Commie ass back to Russia. This is ridiculous on several levels, not the least of which is that Vyatkin is a big believer in private property.

“When people come up and ask can they pet my dog, I say no.” He smiles devilishly. “If you want to pet a dog, buy your own dog and pet him.” This, oddly, is part of his sales talk. “People are always amazed at how my dogs come right to me in the dog park with all the other dogs and distractions… When I walk by my dogs, they follow me with their eyes, asking, ‘What can I do now, what do I do next, how can I please you?’ I am like a god to them.”

In the kennel, the worshippers of this god eagerly await his arrival. The door opens and a gamey canine smell saturates the air. The dogs do follow him, anticipating orders from their general. They’re the cream of the crop; while mastiffs like them are often slow, these dogs are fast, agile, and “drivey.” Red Star animals frequently win the Iron Dog Triathlon, an insane contest involving the same kind of endurance trials in the human version of Iron Man, with the added bite-work required of protection dogs. Imagine running two miles, jumping over barrels and through hoops, then having some monster in mutant hockey equipment jump out of the bushes to pick a fight with you.

Today Vyatkin is returning to its quarters a German Shepherd puppy he’s holding for a client. The puppy does not want to go; it stiffens its fluffy little body, splaying out its oversized paws in a show of passive resistance. Little puppy, you are about to incur the wrath of God. But Vyatkin just tugs a little bit on the leash, laughs at how the dog wants to stay outside with all the people, and picks him up. Even a deity can display tenderness toward his subjects, as long as everyone knows who is who.—Emily Carter