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On a recent night near Norwood Young America in Carver County, more than a dozen people arrived at Baylor Regional Park and headed toward the high, arched roof and warm, red glow of Onan Observatory. As the sun set, Tim Hagen threw his six-foot-seven-inch frame against a manual lever inside. Hagen is a volunteer with the Minnesota Astronomical Society. He rolled back a corrugated-steel canopy, giving the observatory’s half-ton telescope an unobstructed view of the night sky. The white aluminum cylinder with a 16-inch-diameter mirror inside looked like the jettisoned stage of a small rocket. It stood eight feet high, mounted on a mechanical tripod.

A line formed to the side, where there was a small educational display. It was lighted with small red bulbs, giving it a kind of sci-fi flair. Dana Bloom, who is earning her Earth Science teaching license, was looking for ideas she could use with her students. Her son, almost two years old, reached out and tossed Uranus and Neptune to the floor. They were softballs in an exhibit designed to show the relative size of the planets. Nearby Jupiter was a basketball. Mars was merely a marble, and the Earth appeared to be a jumbo-sized gumball.

At the telescope, some older kids studied the moon with their parents. Magnified 130 times by the observatory telescope, the lunar landscape revealed itself in astonishing detail. Surface craters looked close enough to touch. The view resembled famous footage shot from the Apollo spacecraft. Still, Justin Fasula, an enthusiast who is “six and three-quarters” years old, wanted to see more. He kept Hagen busy with requests for views of the Andromeda Galaxy and the Ring Nebula.

Outside, Hal Yngve from Plymouth unloaded a telescope from his car. Bundled in a pointy-hooded parka against the gusty, 40-degree night, he set up his gear and discussed his interests in a deliberate, serious manner, though not an unfriendly one. Yngve welcomed newcomers. He politely asked their names, and encouraged them to peer through his equipment, even offering a specially designed padded chair to optimize viewing angles. Many astronomy buffs focus their passion on a specific category of celestial bodies. Yngve likes “open galactic clusters.” On this night he named and easily located several of the star groupings, including the Perseus Double Cluster and M45. A purchasing agent by day, Yngve was awestruck by the sight of Halley’s Comet in 1986. During last year’s Leonid meteor shower, he counted 300 shooting stars in six minutes. Tonight, he wasn’t expecting anything so dramatic.

Earlier in the day, amateur astronomers converged at Radio City, a Mounds View store that sells telescopes alongside short-wave radio equipment and robotics magazines. During “StarQuest,” a one-day sales event, longtime hobbyists mixed with relative neophytes. John Porter recently received a gift catalog from his employer, Lockheed-Martin. He skipped the clocks and tie tacks in favor of a telescope. He’s happy with his choice. “Even with my dinky little scope, I can see the rings of Saturn,” he said. “Now I’m starting to dream about fancier scopes.” Porter’s coworker Chuck Zdeb has been staring into space for years and remains fascinated. “Jupiter looks different every night you look at it,” he said. When the planet got slammed in 1994 by the Shoemaker-Levy comet, he recalled, “You could see the marks where it was hitting!” Zdeb has often encouraged others to join him during his nighttime outings. “It’s a great way to pick up girls,” he said.

In the Radio City parking lot, Astronomical Society president Ben Huset answered questions and passed out flyers about Quaoar, an orb recently discovered about a billion miles past Pluto. During occasional cloud breaks, passers-by could peer at the sun through a powerful red filter. There were sunspots. To the untrained eye, they resembled specks of mildew or seeds from an elm tree.

Radio City owner Daniel Fish, stocky with a white mop of Andy Warhol hair, has watched the skies for more than 50 years. He and his wife, Maline, live in Ham Lake, lured north by the darkness. They recently fought City Hall to stop a neighboring development from using decorative lantern-style lights that would have generated what astronomers call “light pollution,” an increasing problem in sprawling metropolitan areas. Fish observed its effects when he taught a class at a Twin Cities elementary school. “None of those kids had ever seen the Milky Way,” he said. “They didn’t know what I was talking about. Is that a real loss? I guess I think it is. I’ve always wondered why we don’t have access to guaranteed dark space. We can have parks and nature conservatories and ice arenas, but us poor little people who just like to have one place where it’s dark are considered freaks.”

Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper, from St. Paul, knows a great way to get around light pollution. “From the space shuttle, you don’t have any light from the ground, and you get less obscuration from the atmosphere because you’re above it,” she said. Plus, the vehicle orbits the Earth in 90 minutes, affording frequent views of both the northern and southern hemispheres. “It gives you an opportunity to see a sky that you don’t normally see,” she said. She’ll get that opportunity. In May, the 39-year-old NASA mission specialist takes her first journey into outer space, aboard Endeavour.

There is no such thing as “Shaanxi Nice.” For three weeks, I’ve tried to make an appointment with someone—anyone, really—in Shaanxi’s provincial government building on the basis of being a Minnesotan. Obviously, Minnesota residency doesn’t get me far in most Chinese cities. But Shaanxi is not most Chinese cities. In fact, it’s not a city at all, but a province, and it happens to be an official sister province—or sister state—to Minnesota.

Prior to my arrival I sent four letters (translated by native speakers) and made three phone calls expressing my desire to report on relations between our states. There was no response. Maybe someone’s still mad that Governor Ventura scratched a Shaanxi visit from his 2001 China travel itinerary. I don’t know. Whatever the problem is, it’s clear that I’ve made a mistake in arriving with no appointment, no letter of introduction, no press credentials. Matters are not helped by the fact that I speak a rare dialect of Chinese known as “Phrase Book.” The Uzi-armed guard at the entrance gate to the capital building is already speaking too fast for me to look up his meanings, and by the time his colleague from the guard shack across the road joins him, I am left with no choice but to pull a newspaper photo of Governor Ventura from my briefcase. “Woe-day shen-chang,” I explain in a poorly pronounced attempt to say “my leader.” The guards go quiet and stare at the bald-headed official.

“Wode shengzhang?” the larger one asks. At this point, the plainclothes officers arrive. While one of them debriefs the guards, the other addresses me in English. “Why you here?” I explain that I am from Shaanxi’s sister state in the U.S., Minnesota, and that I would like to speak to a representative of the government about relations between our two peoples. I remove a bag of wild rice that I have stowed in my briefcase. “Gift from Minnesota,” I offer.

“Passport?”

“No problem.” I reach into my interior coat pocket, but it’s not there. I check my briefcase, and it’s not there either. “Forget passport,” I say, suddenly speaking broken English with a Shanghai accent. “At Bell Tower Hotel.”

“At bell tower?”

The plainclothes officer begins, I think, to explain the situation to the guards, and I begin to wonder if The Rake would be interested in publishing an account of my time in a Chinese prison. “What Minnesota?” The plainclothes officer demands. I reach into my briefcase and pull out a Minnesota road map. Tucked between its folds is a photo of Kevin Garnett that I’d torn from the Chinese version of NBA Insider.

“NBA!” One of the guards shouts with glee. “KG Mini-sohta!” He takes the photo from my hands and speaks rapidly to his colleagues. After the hubub dies down, one of the plainclothes officers points me to a nearby cab stand. “Go Minnesota.” I have no idea what my options are here, but I’m not going to stand around waiting to find out. “Go Minnesota!” I reply, and rush to catch a cab back to my hotel.

The public’s inclination to tithe is unpredictable, but demand for beer is pretty much constant. That truth explains the genesis of a new homeless shelter funded in part by beer sales. It’s the result of an interesting coalition: Love Power Church, St. Stephen’s Catholic Church, and Finnegan’s Irish Ale.

Love Power Church had a space, St. Stephen’s had start-up money, and Jaquie Berglund had experience marketing beer for Kieran’s Irish Pub. “I’m just trying to sell beer and I’m just trying to raise money for the poor. I’m trying to make a difference in a very creative way,” said Berglund over pints at The Local recently. “You can’t keep going back to the same pockets for the same money.” To that end, Berglund founded the Spud Society, a charitable foundation devoted to raising funds by marketing potato-related products.

Pairing consumerism with charity is not new. Paul Newman’s self-proclaimed “Shameless Exploitation in Pursuit of the Common Good” has been going on for 20 years. His salad dressings and spaghetti sauces have generated $125 million for various causes. It’s been tried with beer before, too. Professional contrarian Dean Crist spent three years campaigning against Native American fishing rights in Wisconsin via sales of “Treaty Beer.” Defunct by 1990, the brew did find its clientele, but Crist never managed to keep contract brewers committed to a product that got the public pissed in the wrong way.

Berglund has run into no such trouble with Finnegan’s Irish Amber, the first product commissioned by the Spud Society to generate income for the Love Power Shelter. You can find it at MGM and many other liquor stores, and the kegs are in rotation at 30 local watering holes, including The Local. Presently, Finnegan’s is brewed under contract with Schell and James Page, but the Spud Society plans to consolidate production with a new contract at Summit. “The product is really taking off,” said Berglund, thanks in part to a pro-bono ad campaign crafted by a pair of anonymous mavericks from a trendy downtown ad shop. Finnegan’s, they say, is “mentioned in four out of five Irish confessionals,” a claim not yet verified by St. Patrick’s.

If you’re going to argue the merits of charitable brewing, it’s best to do it over a pint. Samples conducted liberally over the last few weeks have found Finnegan’s worthy of its goal, though Berglund declined to reveal exactly what role potatoes play in the recipe. The draft version presents a creamy, malty body akin to the honorable Irish stouts, but much lighter. The bottled version is less complex, and more crisp with a slight hoppy bitterness. In the Gastronomer’s home, it has so far been matched nicely with chorizo quesadillas and Big Mike’s Italian subs, making Finnegan’s the least painful tithe of fiscal 2002.

Everyone knows Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, but did you know that it’s merely the best known among dozens of Victor-ian ghost stories traditionally told in the context of Christmas? Here, our old friend Steve Schroer—who gave up his gig as The Rake’s theater expert to get back up on the stage himself—and his Hardcover Theater Company have adapted three lesser-known spooks from the same era. By the way, this a great alternative to the Guthrie’s classic offering, especially for kids; we’re told there is nothing quite as scary here as the Dickens adaptation, and there are quite a few laughs to keep mom and dad chuckling too. Playwrights’ Center, (612) 332-7481, www.pwcenter.org

One of the problems with seeing films like Pedro Almodóvar’s latest, Talk To Her, is that it inspires a profound guilt for all the time we’ve wasted on the latest Hollywood drivel. It’s doubly regrettable that this marvelous film will make its way to town during the holiday release frenzy and will probably get lost among the explosion fests. So, please let the brats off at the multiplex to see Bond or Potter, and bring a friend with whom you can share something deeper than a box of popcorn. Almodóvar, whose All About My Mother won the 1999 foreign film Oscar, has again plumbed the depths of sorrow, loneliness and difficult loves—but this time from the men’s point of view. Benigno and Marco befriend each other when they are both caring for lovers who have been put into comas as a result of trauma. But while Marco has known his Lydia for a long time, Benigno’s only spoken with Alicia once before her accident. During their time together at the private clinic where the two women are cared for, Almodóvar tells their stories via the men’s monologues with the comatose women and through effortless movement through the past and present. All this is not to say that the director abandons his infatuation with bizarre behavior—in this case it’s an act so out of bounds that one can’t help but be intellectually repulsed. At the same time, Almodóvar leaves us enchanted by the humanity and sympathy of the character who perpetrates the outrage. Allegories abound here, and you’ll have to pay close attention to get everything Almodóvar throws at you, but that’s an effort that will be rewarded with something more than the regret you’ll have at wasting another $15 on something you can see on cable in six months.