Twitter as Fall Begins

September is over, but Twitter goes on.

Heterosexual men, you know I think you're the greatest, but please stop doing this forever and ever and ever:

By Julieanne Smolinski

Let's get teachers to follow programs and then wonder why kids are good at procedures but not good at ambiguity.
By Sisyphus38

"Go to a good college to get into a good grad school to get a good job to get into a good nursing home..." --Robert Sapolsky
By David Dalrymple 

A sign your child might be a programmer:


By Kobus Brummer 

Stop chasing professions that are only leading to the corrosion of the planet.
By Nikhil Goyal

Too bad we can't shut down Congress and leave the government folks who provide real services running.
By Jonathan Foley

"Room" = room for cream, "Social" = Social Security number.
By Chris Steller

Authentic learning, AKA the learning that happens most often while not sitting in a desk with a textbook.
By Sisyphus38

Capitalism is one way of organizing human interdependence (via myth of rational self reliance). Alternatives would reorganize our reliances.
By Robin James


Is it just me or are the puzzles on The Guardian website really easy?
By Jamie

If the world is something you accept rather than interpret, then you're susceptible to the influence of charismatic idiots.
By Neil deGrasse Tyson

I am soooo glad I'm not that man right now:


By Rod Dale

Metadata may not catch many terrorists, but it's great at busting journalists' sources, as the @AP case shows.
By Freedom of the Press

Using the word hack when you're a journalist is like a medieval peasant using the word magic to explain something scientific.
By Joel Ross Housman

"NSA employees spying on members of opposite sex goes against everything I know about human nature," said no one ever.
By Tom Tomorrow

If you set up your fingerprint sensor with your tongue print, that's like two levels of theft deterrence. Nobody wants YOUR phone.
By Amy Jane Gruber

Ever wonder how a transatlantic cable is laid? Wonder no more:

By John Resig

So the Iranian president is talking detente with America, and the US and Russia reached a deal on Syria. Will Obama's defeats never cease?
By Max Fisher

Mourn nothing and you're a monster. Mourn everything and you'll crack. Mourn selectively and you've chosen sides.
By Teju Cole

If someone makes a racist/sexist joke, say, with total seriousness, “I don’t get it, can you explain it?” Then watch them crash & burn.
By Louis C.K.

I just read your book F. Scott. Someday I think it will make excellent fodder for a scantron test.
By Sisyphus38

If hating stuff made you happy, it seems like there'd be way more happy people. So far, it looks like that's not working out so great.
By Merlin Mann

"It is not working!" says @tedcruz about Obamacare. GAHHHHHHH IT HASN'T STARTED YET say Americans with brains.
By Jason

Anyone who says you can't buy happiness has clearly never spent their money on books.
By Nikhil Goyal retweeting WstonesOxfordSt

"Hey, nice job picking out this mat. Okay, bye!" -- door-to-door secular humanist.
By Julieanne Smolinski

I think we should all just remember that Dick Butkus is a person and giggle for a minute.
By evelyn pollins

The next time somebody complains about millennials, maybe remind them which generation linoleumed over all those beautiful hardwood floors.
By Julieanne Smolinski

Human kindness is already here — it's just not evenly distributed.
By Paul Ford

The correct term for a group of high school students is an Eyeroll of Teens.
By rstevens

Are you bad with people and hate money? Consider grad school!
By rob delaney

"I don't understand why people are frightened by new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones." -- John Cage
By Jamie Millard

Great point made in son's college orientation re sex/safety/respect/etc: "Consent is really too low a bar. Hold out for enthusiasm."
By Rachel Vail

Try button-down tops if you love never knowing when your breasts will burst forth like exuberant Dickens characters opening a French window.
By Julieanne Smolinski

I would prefer my kids spend time on music/theater/art than prepping for a standardized test.
By Shana Crosson

"My motto for the home, in education as in life, is this: For heaven’s sake, let people live their own lives." --A.S. Neill
By Nikhil Goyal

Million dollar idea: jeans, but for people with human legs.
By Julieanne Smolinski

Doing great in my Fantasy Football league, in which I fantasize that football is actually a delicious 3-foot hoagie.
By Stephen Colbert

I've never understood those who assert that killing people with chemicals is worse than blowing them to bits with a bomb.
By Neil deGrasse Tyson

I hate germaphobes. The world is a toilet. No one is safe. You think I need to touch you to infect you? You're already dead.
By rob delaney

Trolling student affairs. I want students like this, this term:


By David Wearing

Sure they okay the way they are, but hot glue some ribbon and glitter to them and deer become pretty spectacular.
By Bigfoot TheBigfoot

Someone went to a grocery store once and described it to someone who had never been to a grocery store, and Aldi is what they imagined.
By §

Women need to understand that "boys will be boys"? No. Men need to understand that pass expires when you're no longer a boy.
By Gina Trapani

The idea that people should have to "work" 80 hours a week at a horseshit "job" to earn a living is so dumb it hurts.
By umair haque

I like when people say that men are "visual creatures," because women aren't and that's why we'll often just blindly lick at your hair.
By Julieanne Smolinski

Sorry you were offended by what we said when you shouldn't have been because the way we meant it wasn't at all offensive.
By Gina Trapani

Nice yarn bomb on 36th & Bryant. I like subtlety in my non-sanctioned public art:


By Ali Lozoff

FACT: 100% of people telling me Europe/Canada/UK health care involves deadly-long wait lists, rationing, "death panels" are US residents.
By Christopher Keelty

FACT 2: 0% of Canadians/Europeans I've heard from back up American criticism about their health care systems.
By Christopher Keelty

One of the common ironies of our time: GOPer accusing Dem of "dividing the city" by pointing out the divide.
By Robert O. Simonson (discussing the New York City mayor's race)

If food waste were a country, it would emit more greenhouse gas than any other except China, U.S., per UN report.
By ProPublica

Just think of the brogrammer stories we've heard this week. Now imagine those guys get NSA gigs. Everybody comfortable with that?
By Tom Tomorrow

THIS is exactly the point, perfectly stated. #feminism #respect:


By snipe ツ

Toby has learned this rhyme from daycare: "You get what you get and you don't get upset." Useful for a toddler, strangely Republican though.
By Paul Fidalgo

Why Headlines Start with Why
By Chris Steller

So did it just never occur to us until now to ask Syria to turn over their chemical weapons? I'm confused.
By Jonathan Blake

Right now, the best individual plan I can get is $240 a month. $5k deductible. 20% after that. And no coverage for "pre-existing."
By Molly Priesmeyer

I am the poster child for Obamacare. My premiums and deductible go down. My "pre-existings" go away. Goodbye, $5k deductible and 20%!
By Molly Priesmeyer

Corgi, cuddling with a toy:


By Emergency Cute Stuff

The right to possess and use strong crypto is even *more* in line with the spirit of the 2nd Amendment than gun ownership itself.
By Parker Higgins

Sometimes I worry I'm not good enough to suffer from imposter syndrome.
By Pinboard

"This painting is not available in your country." New artwork for the @EFF office:


By Maira Sutton

Amazing, really, how often people get ‘freedom of speech’ confused with ‘freedom from consequences.’
By bobbie johnson

Is it weird that I hate the word "squee." Because I think it might be the worst.
By Kate N.G. Sommers

I love what the phrase "conscience vote" implies about 99% of other votes.
By Benjy_Sarlin

Prediction: Metaphorical use of the word bookend will outlive use of actual bookends.
By Chris Steller

You are now running on reserve anger. You need to connect your computer to Twitter. If you don't, you will become happy in a few minutes.
By Gary Bernhardt

Feminist posts ... this, EVERY SINGLE TIME:


By Sarah Caseberry

Don't die a virgin! Terrorists are up there waiting for you.
By Slip Nuts™

America magically somehow gives a "market value" to public transit but gives "socialism" for highways.
By jibreel riley

I thought it was impressive when Obama turned Republicans against golf. But now he's even turned them against war.
By Molly Ball

If Flickr can afford to host 1 terabyte of my photos, why is Wells Fargo unable to store more than 18 months of my banking transactions?
By Harry McCracken

Tip: rename your hard drive “jihad plans” for free remote backups in the US and UK.
By Matt Legend Gemmell

How to be a better photographer: Physically get near something that’s interesting.
By Dan Cederholm

On Labor Day we give thanks to the immigrants who fought for working conditions we circumvent by sending jobs to the countries they escaped.
By Mike Monteiro

"For those of you who are tired of hearing about racism, imagine how much more tired we are constantly experiencing it." -- Barbara Smith
By Henry Louis Gates Jr

Star Wars (1977, PG) a group of terrorists enlist the aid of a drug smuggler and a religious fanatic to bomb the seat of governmental power.
By S. Flaherty

"When I was a boy, I had to walk uphill to school... BOTH WAYS!" -- M. C. Escher
By Jason Sweeney

Turns out that my daughter has always thought that Arby's is a hat shop.
By Mike Morrow

I wonder why the American news media shows us dead kids in the run-up to war but stops showing us dead kids once America gets its war.
By David Feldman

A Common Problem That I Didn't Give a Shit About Until It Happened To Me
By False Medium

The Six and the Three

A stellar layout from today's Star Tribune:


Raise your hand if you thought the photos at the bottom were part of the layout, like the photos at the top of the page.

Sugar: Bad History and Bad for You

Sugar has to go from my diet, I decided after reading the National Geographic story on why we can't resist it.

I already know this. I've already done this. I've been reading about it for years and have quit it before but, as Tony Soprano's consigliere Sil always says, "Every time I try to get out, they pull me back in again."

We're not meant to eat it in anything near the quantity we do, and the fructose that makes up half or more of the stuff we generally eat is part of what causes metabolic syndrome. The average American eats 22.7 teaspoons of added sugar a day, not counting what naturally occurs in the foods we consume. It's made up of:

• 11.6 teaspoons of sucrose (50 percent fructose, 50 percent glucose)
• 8.2 teaspoons of high fructose corn syrup (55 percent fructose, 45 percent glucose)
• 3 teaspoons of other sweeteners, including honey, maple syrup, or molasses

That's 25 percent more than we ate in 1970 and almost four times as much as the recommended daily limit of six teaspoons. In that time span, the diabetes incidence rate has gone from 2 percent to 7 percent of the population.

Time to stop for good.

The thing I didn't know about sugar until recently was its history. Sugar cane is native to New Guinea, where it was domesticated 10,000 years ago. It reached mainland Asia in 1000 BCE and by 500 CE was being made into a powder in India. It reached Persia soon after, and when Arab armies conquered Persia, sugar spread throughout the Islamic world, which reached a lot of places.

That process of making a powder from the cane was refined by the Arabs as well.

The work was brutally difficult. The heat of the fields, the flash of the scythes, the smoke of the boiling rooms, the crush of the mills. By 1500, with the demand for sugar surging, the work was considered suitable only for the lowest of laborers.

The lowest laborers = slaves or prisoners, of course.

And then Europe, with its increasingly wealthy economy -- drawn largely from exploiting natural resources in colonized lands -- got ahold of the sweet treat and demand skyrocketed. Columbus wasn't so much looking for the "spice islands," as we think of that term, as he was for the "sugar islands" (sugar was considered a spice at the time).

Unfortunately for the peoples of the Caribbean and Brazil, their land, with its perpetual warmth and drenching rains, is perfect for farming sugar cane. The increased supply of sugar killed the price, which stoked demand all the more, which fed production.

By the 18th century the marriage of sugar and slavery was complete. Every few years a new island—Puerto Rico, Trinidad—was colonized, cleared, and planted. When the natives died, the planters replaced them with African slaves. After the crop was harvested and milled, it was piled in the holds of ships and carried to London, Amsterdam, Paris, where it was traded for finished goods, which were brought to the west coast of Africa and traded for more slaves. The bloody side of this “triangular trade,” during which millions of Africans died, was known as the Middle Passage.

Until the slave trade was banned in Britain in 1807, more than 11 million Africans were shipped to the New World—more than half ending up on sugar plantations. According to Trinidadian politician and historian Eric Williams, “Slavery was not born of racism; rather, racism was the consequence of slavery.” Africans, in other words, were not enslaved because they were seen as inferior; they were seen as inferior to justify the enslavement required for the prosperity of the early sugar trade.

The original British sugar island was Barbados. Deserted when a British captain found it on May 14, 1625, the island was soon filled with grinding mills, plantation houses, and shanties. Tobacco and cotton were grown in the early years, but cane quickly overtook the island, as it did wherever it was planted in the Caribbean. Within a century the fields were depleted, the water table sapped. By then the most ambitious planters had left Barbados in search of the next island to exploit. By 1720 Jamaica had captured the sugar crown.

For an African, life on these islands was hell. Throughout the Caribbean millions died in the fields and pressing houses or while trying to escape.

I know I learned about triangular trade in high school, but no one made it this real. (Remember, after those British enslavers wiped out Barbados, they moved on to places like South Carolina and reestablished their slaveocracy growing tobacco and cotton.)

By coincidence, I also recently read Tom Reiss's book The Black Count, about the father of novelist Alexandre Dumas. Dumas Pere's pere was the child of an African slave in Haiti, fathered by a French nobleman. The book mostly focuses on Dumas's life in France during the French Revolution, but it also provides the context for his birth and early years.

As Reiss writes about sugar and Haiti:

[It was] the most valuable colony in the world. And its staggering wealth was supported by staggering brutality. The "pearl of the West Indies" was a vast infernal factory where slaves regularly worked from sunup to past sundown in conditions rivaling the concentration camps and gulags of the twentieth century. One-third of all French slaves died after only a few years on the plantation.... The cheapness of slave life brushed against the exorbitant value of the crop they produced. Even as the armies of slaves were underfed and dying from hunger, some were forced to wear bizarre tin-plate masks, in hundred-degree heat, to keep them from gaining the slightest nourishment from chewing the cane (page 29).

Obviously, mechanization has replaced slavery for the most part, and sugar beets, grown in cooler climates like Minnesota, make up more of our sucrose sources, not to mention the Iowa corn that goes into HFCs. Industrial agriculture has changed shape because of cheap fuel and human innovation.

But the white crystals continue to make us sick, even if where they come from isn't sickening.

From the Road

I just finished a seven-day drive to and from Washington State. Six days of sitting in the car, mostly listening to A Clash of Kings, book two in the George R.R. Martin Game of Thrones saga. Yes, yes, I've read it a number of times before, but the audio is 38 hours long and we all could agree on it.

Here are a few of the sights along the way.


No matter what it does, the red horse never catches the grotesque, guitar-playing bear. (Seen at Goodwill in Olympia, Wash.)


The building is a billboard. Those are some gigantic stick-on letters. (Along the I-90 corridor in central Washington.)


And I started out concerned about ticks. (At a rest area along I-90 in Montana.)


One of the most offensive historical markers I've ever seen. It's unconscious of so much. It reads:

In 1876, this was strictly buffalo and Indian country. From 1876 to 1881, the U.S. Army rounded up the Indians and forced them onto reservations while buffalo hunters cleared the range for the cattle boom of the Eighties.

Pierre Wibaux ran one of the biggest cattle spreads around here in the early days. A native of France, he arrived in Montana in 1883 after studying the cattle industry from calf to packing house. Within a decade of his arrival, he amassed a herd of 65,000 cattle and prospered from business investments throughout the region. Wibaux had boundless optimism for his adopted state and once said that "If a man is intelligent, has courage, and can see things clearly, he can make money." .... When Wibaux died in 1913, his will provided a fund to erect a statue of himself in the town named after him.

I didn't stop in the town to check out Pierre's statue. (Seen at a rest area along I-94 in eastern Montana.)


Western North Dakota is home to the Bakken oil field. Every hotel in the area is busy with people working the oil fields, as evidenced by the much-used boot cleaner contraptions outside their doors. (At a Ramada Inn in Dickinson, N.D., but also seen at other hotels in the area.)


Ugly logo alert! Get that "The" and its inappropriate chancery typeface off the name of your paper right now. (On the door of a convenience store in Dickinson, N.D.)


Rest stops in North Dakota are not as bad on the subject of native people as those in Montana, but I can't help thinking it's romanticism rather than respect. (At a rest stop along I-94 in central North Dakota.)


It took me more than a minute to figure this sign out. That word is supposed to be Villains, as in Villains Month. It's both spelled wrong and made possessive for no particularly good reason. See, life really would be simpler without apostrophes. (In downtown Bismarck, North Dakota.)

Paying for Campaigns, Legally or Not

An odd confluence of news today -- my old friend Ben Suarez of Canton, Ohio, was indicted for campaign finance violations at almost the same time Elizabeth Warren and legal scholar Larry Lessig were discussing an upcoming Supreme Court case that would make Suarez's actions -- get this -- legal.

You may remember my earlier mention of how Suarez was being investigated by the FBI for funneling money through his employees to make contributions to his favored House and Senate candidates. Somehow, his employees who live in $140,000 homes were able to make $20,000 annual contributions.

Well, the FBI decided there was indeed enough evidence to charge him. According to the Cleveland Plain Dealer,

The 35-page indictment charges Suarez, 72, with conspiracy to defraud the U.S. government; conspiracy to violate campaign finance laws; violation of campaign finance laws contributions by a corporation; making false statements, obstruction of an official investigation; witness tampering; and obstruction of justice. The indictment also charges Michael Giorgio, 61, of Cuyahoga Falls, the chief financial officer …with assisting Suarez in writing large campaign checks in the names of employees and their wives in an effort to "disguise and conceal from the public and from federal agents" the true source of the illegal contributions.

Where do Warren and Lessig fit into this? Well, it turns out they were almost simultaneously speaking about the upcoming McCutcheon v. FEC case, which could completely do away with all limits on individual contributions to politicians. A kind of Citizens United for actual citizens, I guess some would say. The link provides an overview and an hour of them speaking on video. Warren starts speaking at about the 9:00 minute mark, with Lessig starting at about 17:30.

Lessig is discussing his recent research, which will be entered as an amicus brief in McCutcheon. It's a textual analysis of the Constitution's authors, finding the Founders cared not just about quid pro quo corruption (the classic idea of the bribed politician) but also about the corrupting influence of group power and money. As Lessig says, he's attempting to supply the originalists like Scalia with a smoking gun of original intent, rather than taking the usual progressive argument that the Constitution is a living document.

I found Lessig's facts and argument pretty convincing, of course. Let's hope the Supreme Court does too, or Ben Suarez will be able to give all the money he wants without using his employees to do it.

_____

My first post about the wonderful world of Ben Suarez.

Gamer's Cafe in Butte

If you like to eat your breakfast eggs in a setting that looks like it could have served you 80 years ago, stop in at Gamer's Cafe next time you're traveling through Butte, Montana. After checking out the beautiful signs and buildings, you'll find Gamer's in the Uptown business district right next to the Saturday morning farmers market.

It's located in one of Butte's many historic brick buildings, but the outside sign that said CASINO almost kept me away. Montana law seems to allow casino gambling just about anywhere, and usually they're not auspicious places.


As soon as I went through the door at Gamers, though, I knew it was something special. There's a mirrored, dark-wood bar back on the left and a nice art deco display case on the right in the front room, followed by the main seating area with mezzanine seating above.


The counter, with its beautiful chairs and detailed cabinet woodwork, looks like a fun place to sit.


But the booths are also great. They have seating along the far wall as well as the sides, so you can easily get five or maybe six people in each one.


The restaurant has been in continuous operation since it opened, and they have the newspapers to prove it.


The front room display cases hold several candy boxes with this Gamers Confections logo, which matches the one used in the restaurant. I'm not sure if the candy used to be made at the restaurant, or if the restaurant took its name from the defunct candy company. The presence of the casino makes me suspect the latter, but who knows?

______

Update: All questions about Gamer's have been answered by the grandson of the owners.

Punctuation Thoughts

It's National Punctuation Day, and Gawker celebrated by publishing a list of the "most needed" punctuation marks.

Their list:

1 . period

2   space

3 ! exclamation point

4 ; semicolon

5 — em dash

6 " " double quotation marks

7 ' apostrophe

8 ? question mark

9 , comma

10 - hyphen

11 : colon

12 – en dash

13 ( open parenthesis

14 ... ellipsis

15 ) close parenthesis

16 ' ' single quotation marks

17 ] close bracket

18 [ open bracket

A pretty silly list, I'd say. Does anyone really classify the space as punctuation? If so, that's the most important one of all. I agree that the period would be near the top of the list, but after that, I'd go with the question mark and probably the colon. Commas soon after.

Semicolons (number 4!) are, in my opinion, on their way to becoming archaic, and we all know the em dash is way over-used, especially by me, so that's too high on the Gawker list. Not to mention the over-used exclamation point. And can you really separate the open and close parenthesis? How can one be number 13 and the other 15?

The apostrophe also rates pretty highly at number 7, which reminds me of an argument I recently read in favor of getting rid of the apostrophe altogether. While I find some contraction apostrophes essential for intelligibility (we'll/well, I'll/Ill, he'll/hell, she'll/shell), I could be persuaded to go along with getting rid of the possessive use of the curly devil.

And hey, Gawker, what about the slash? You've got the en dash and the square brackets (though not the curvy ones), but you forgot the slash. What century is this?

More Art Bikes

A followup to an earlier post about the way-finding art bikes in the Saint Anthony Park neighborhood of Saint Paul:


This multicolor bit of fun is located at Energy Park Drive and Raymond Avenue, pointing the way to the local elementary school to the north and Hampden Park Co-op to the south.





Steam punk meets the bicycle in the piece parked at Cromwell Avenue and Territorial Road.


This four-wheeler has signs pointing to the Saint Anthony Park Community Council, which is just inside the park building next to the bike, and the large community garden a half-mile away.

Signs of Butte

Butte, Montana; who knew? A boom town constructed in an era of building craftsmanship is a beautiful thing. Brick, terracotta, and tile everywhere. And signs. Lots of signs.

Here are a few of the old and not-so-old ones I saw around the Uptown area.


Layers of ghost signs create a beautiful collage.


Shot through an ugly late 20th-century parking garage.


A classic.


Two for one.


Beautiful. The lower line says "Cures the Blues."


This is a more recent sign for a store with a name that could be bad for business.


Mixed messages in an antiques-and-collectibles store.

A Food Co-op in Regent, North Dakota

If you ever get to western North Dakota, be sure to visit the Enchanted Highway. It's a 32-mile stretch of two-lane road dotted with giant sculptures made from scrap metal, all on topics related to rural life in North Dakota. The road starts at I-94 and runs south to a town called Regent.

I'll post more about the sculptures (with photos) when I have a better internet connection, but today I wanted to tell about an added surprise at the end of highway.

The town of Regent is home to a food co-op.


Not only does it have a beautiful sign...


it's been in business for 74 years!


It's a full-service small-town grocery with the co-op difference: it's owned by the community, which probably accounts for the fact that it's still in business and offering such a full line of groceries.

More than a Silly Billboard

I thought this post would be just a picture of a funny billboard I saw in Minneapolis:


But it turns out there's more to it than the odd juxtaposition of models and Christ. AMTC, it sounds like, fits into the my sucker born every minute category best.

Here's how it works. Prospective models come for a two- to four-hour audition/religious lecture, held as an advertised special event at your local convention center or similar location. Then the "best" applicants are asked to attend a conference that costs up to $5,000 (not including travel, hotel, or food).

Let's guess what "best" means and how hard it is to get invited to that conference. Probably not too hard, I would predict. The complaints about AMTC verify my suspicion.

And get this. They even a registered a domain name called AMTCscam.com to head off griping. (The is not active, but the domain is owned by Carey Lewis of AMTC, according to a whois search.)

I was intrigued by the .org address shown on the billboard, and it turns out that AMTC does indeed have 501(c)3 status with the IRS.

So it's a scam for Jesus, set up to line the pockets of crooks. And it's tax-exempt to boot.

Get with the New (Old) Program

This morning I heard about Pope Francis's interview with America magazine. In it, he said the Catholic Church should focus less on prohibitions on abortion, contraception, and same-sex marriage, and, by implication, leave more time and attention for what he sees as the core issues: poverty and social justice.

An hour later I read this story about an 83-year-old adjunct professor at Duquesne University, a Catholic institution. After 25 years as an adjunct, paid the equivalent of $12 an hour for full-time work with no health care coverage or retirement funds, French professor Margaret Mary Vojtko died of a heart attack while in the midst of cancer treatments.

The writer, a lawyer who was trying to get Vojtko's job reinstated, wrote:

Duquesne knew all about Margaret Mary's plight, for I apprised them of it in two letters. I never received a reply, and Margaret Mary was forced to die saddened, penniless and on the verge of being turned over to Orphan's Court.

He also wrote:

While adjuncts at Duquesne overwhelmingly voted to join the United Steelworkers union a year ago, Duquesne has fought unionization, claiming that it should have a religious exemption. Duquesne has claimed that the unionization of adjuncts like Margaret Mary would somehow interfere with its mission to inculcate Catholic values among its students.

This would be news to Georgetown University -- one of only two Catholic universities to make U.S. News & World Report's list of top 25 universities -- which just recognized its adjunct professors' union, citing the Catholic Church's social justice teachings, which favor labor unions.

This sounds like the clash between Paul Ryan and his audience at Georgetown, or Ryan's encounter at a Congressional hearing with Sister Simone Campbell of Nuns on the Bus.

Pope Francis is making it clear which side he's on. I wonder how long it will take Catholic institutions like Duquesne to get with the new (old) program?
____

Thanks to Michael Leddy at Orange Crate Art for the link to Margaret Mary Vojtko's incredibly sad and disturbing story.

A New Mystery Object

After surviving the promised apocalypse of a previous useless mystery object, I assume we will all still be here next week despite this beauty:


Some details on its nature:

• It's plastic.
• The dark gray circle at the base is kind of rubbery, but it's not a suction cup.
• The arms are flexible enough to bend toward each other and just about touch, but it doesn't seem to function as a set of tongs.

Here's a close up of the folded things at the top:


Any and all guesses or creative purposes are welcome in the comments. If anyone gets close (or if no one gets close!) I'll share an additional photo of this baby in action.

______

Commenter David Steinlicht got it right away: It's made to hold open a Ziploc bag while you pour liquids into it. (I still can't believe there is such a thing.) The clips don't hold the bag firmly, so it's very easy for it to pull out of them when weight is added to the bag.

God's Wheels

Now there can be no doubt: Not only does God not take public transit, he does, in fact, drive a somewhat-aging Jaguar:


Seen in Roseville, Minn.

Where the Diaper-Changing Tables Are

A few years back, I posted about a coffee shop that had its diaper-changing table in the men's restroom.

On a recent revisit, I saw that both of their restrooms are now unisex, so the location of the diaper-changer thingamabob is no longer restricted to males:


Love that hand-drawn skirt/no skirt icon, too!

Artify and the Big Model City

Today is Open Streets Saint Paul, held on University Avenue between Hamline Avenue and Marion Street. From 11:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., they're closing an almost-three-mile stretch of the street to illustrate what life could be like without cars.

University Avenue is where the Green Line light rail trains will begin running next June. The tracks and stations are already in place, and the line is currently being tested. I heard there may be some trains on hand at the festival today, as well as four stages with music, lots of food, and arts activities.

The Hamline (west) end of the Open Streets area is home to a group called Artify.



(Nice logo, by the way!)

They're a place-making organization, located in a former car dealership building. While I was there last week, they were preparing to paint the parking lot with a mural. It's a temporary location for the group, through April 2014, where they invite artists (broadly defined) to use their skills to express their sense of the place where they live.

In 2014, PPL (Project for Pride in Living, a great local community development corporation) will develop approximately 108 rental units on this site, with retail space at street level.

I don't know if Artify is a temporary organization, or if it's just their current space that's temporary, but either way, I'm glad they're at work.

Inside the Artify space is one of the coolest things I've seen recently.


As a person who loves models and pretty much anything that's miniaturized, I couldn't get enough of looking at the model they've created of the Saint Paul portion of the Green Line area, from the Minneapolis line to the State Capitol. They took a large satellite photo print and overlaid it with scale models of the buildings, cut from rigid foam insulation.


This is the area around the intersection of Lexington and University. I'm not sure, but I think the pink buildings represent future development, while blue, yellow, and white represent something else.


This is is the Raymond and University area. The white rectangle near the lower center is the Seal High Rise, a public housing building. None of those pink buildings currently exist.


Thanks to Artify for all its work.