I wish I liked hot peppers. They're so cool.
I went to the Saint Paul Farmers Market on Sunday morning, and there was so much bounty, and not enough people, it seemed, to buy almost any of it.
The chile peppers were what caught my attention, though:
Most of these peppers are dangerous to touch before touching your eyes.
I wish I could eat them.
I think I've mentioned murals here in the past (ha!). Lake Street in Minneapolis is another Twin Cities place to look for them, and the Lake Street Council, in collaboration with a number of funders, has just worked to support creation of 25 new murals this summer and fall.
I went to see some of them on Saturday. It was cold and had just been raining, so it wasn't the best weather for outside wandering, and the map they handed out was not too helpful in locating some of them, but it was worth the trip.
You can find a map of most of the existing and new murals on this page if you want to check them out yourself. It's better than the paper version they had on Saturday.
The very newest mural, which artist Daniela Bianchini told me she and Pablo Kalaka had just finished the day before, is on both sides under the giant Hiawatha Avenue overpass. It's not even on the map yet. I don't know if it has a title.
The south side looks like this in totality:
With these close ups in three sections from left to right:
Daniela makes mosaics, including mirror pieces, which are adhered to the mural. She designs the more realistic-looking painted parts, and Pablo designs the more graphic/illustrational parts.
For the north side, I only have close ups:
They painted on the site for six weeks, 12 hours a day, Daniela said, and started working on it in studio in February. (The mosaics are done ahead of time, as well as the designs and planning.)
West of Hiawatha, generally near or west of Bloomington, here are a few of the many murals:
Lupita, one of the new murals, by Argentinian artist Mariela Ajras.
Procesión by Pablo Kalaka, 2023. You can see the stylistic connection to his work in the new mural under the Hiawatha overpass, shown above. This the south side of the building; the mural continues on the east and west sides of the building (and for all I know, the north side, too — I didn't check!).
Frida, by Copla Murals, 2023.
This one — by the artist known as Biafra Inc. (2018) — is near Cedar Avenue.
These are just five of the 60+ murals on Lake Street. More to check out in the future!
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Past mural-related posts:
Denver's RiNo District – August 2023
Chicago Murals – August 2023
Murals 2022 – October 2022
Murals from Open Streets – October 2021
Murals! In Saint Paul! – September 2019
The Murals of Carytown, Richmond – December 2018
I'm an atheist, but still, that headline is still only mostly tongue-in-cheek.
The way the Trump regime lies and says things completely opposite reality on a constant basis, though, makes me think that if there were a god, it would possibly do something about the incessant lies and oppositism.
For instance, Kristi Noem was just in Minneapolis to puff up what her minions have been doing here. She said these things, according to today's story in the Star Tribune:
In this country, with this president in the White House, we don't pick winners and losers. We don't decide which law gets enforced and which one doesn't. There are laws. They are on the books. They were put in place, voted on and instituted, and therefore we enforce them all.
I waited for her head to fall off after that statement, since the Trump regime has violated so many bedrock laws — such as the Impoundment Control Act and the very foundation of Congress as the appropriator of funds, and now the Anti-Deficiency Act, which prohibits taking donated money to spend for public purposes.
But sure, they "don't decide which law gets enforced and which one doesn't."
Noem also said she doesn't know how Minnesota Governor Tim Walz sleeps at night, since he lets undocumented people walk our streets. She, of course, implies those people are uniformly dangerous, when all information shows that the undocumented are much less likely to commit crimes than U.S.-born residents.
Unlike the ICE and other DHS enforcers who slam people to the ground for having brown skin or looking like they might speak Spanish.
There's no question in Noem's head about how she manages to sleep at night, since she is without conscience.
[Here I am, yet again unable to deal with present reality.]
I appreciate the BlueSky account of Vince Mpls, who usually posts about local history, and sometimes about history more broadly, including today, when he posted this:
Oct 24, 1861: The world's 1st transcontinental telegraph line is completed between existing networks east of the Mississippi River to California via Omaha and Salt Lake City. The astonishing speed of new communication made the Pony Express obsolete, which officially ended two years later.
I always take notice of significant events that happened during the Civil War that were not part of the war itself. One such was the 1862 Dakota War (which included the largest mass hanging in U.S. history), and another was the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre.
Connecting the transcontinental telegraph was obviously more pro-social than those two parts of the subjugation of the continent's Indigenous people. Which is not to say it didn't have a large effect on society.
One of the first things I remember learning when I started mass communication grad school was that the telegraph was the first instance of disconnecting communication from transportation in human history. That's a bit of an exaggeration, since there had been smoke signals, warning drums, and signal fires before then: but in terms of fully detailed messages, it is correct.
I only read a few daily comics these days. One of them is "Crankshaft," about an elderly school bus driver and his family, living outside Toledo, Ohio.
One of crotchety Ed Crankshaft's endearing qualities is his use of malapropisms. However, the strip that ran yesterday included a usage error, spoken by a different character, which I don't think was intended to be funny.
It's just a mistake:
You can be "called out" or you can be "called on the carpet," but up until now, I've never heard of someone being "called out on the carpet."
This mash-up of idioms does not appear in my somewhat outdated volume of Garner's Modern American Usage. Searching it turns up just one person asking about it, and the response given refers only to "called on the carpet," without acknowledging the fact that the questioner had added the other words.
So it's not a thing... yet. I hope it doesn't become one.
I've just picked up my copy of Life After Cars, written by the "War on Cars" podcast hosts. They were also just guests on both the Volts and Why Is This Happening? podcasts, talking about the book.
One of the topics in the book and during the podcast discussions is about how kids who grow up being driven everywhere have no ability to map the place where they live. Sarah Goodyear, one of the "War on Cars" folks, wrote an article about this back in 2012 for Bloomberg News, based on the research of Bruce Appleyard. Among other things, he found that:
Children who had a “windshield perspective” from being driven everywhere weren’t able to accurately draw how the streets in their community connected, whereas children who walked or biked to get around produced detailed and highly accurate maps of their neighborhood street network.
I grew up in the countryside, five miles outside the very small village where I went to school, and two-plus miles from another, even smaller village that was in a different school district. I took the school bus to school, but otherwise was dependent on my mother for car trips to anywhere (or my oldest sister, for one year before she left for college).
I have fine-grained knowledge of the acres around our house because we lived and played outside without supervision. And I have strong roadside-scale memories of my bus route, and the roads I was driven on by car.
But it's true that I never understood the geography of the area I grew up in at all until I started driving myself, and that driving was supervised until I was almost 18 because I waited a long time to get my license.
And even after I was driving on my own there — mostly when home for the summer or breaks during college, or visits later — I still didn't have a sense of east and west, or how my town related to the county, and barely how that related to the larger area of New York state. Honestly, it's only in the last two decades that I realized where my little home village is in relation to the places around it.
My awareness of the space in my home area is completely different from the way I learned the places I moved as an adult (Washington, D.C., the Twin Cities — or even the two smaller cities I lived in as a college student). The way "home" feels in my head is fuzzy and shapeless to this day, even though I've studied maps of it since then and tried to overlay them on my awareness.
Daughter Number Three-Point-One was driven to school (mostly in carpools) until she was in 9th grade. After that point, she made the transition to riding our local bus system, Metro Transit, to school and it was a big win for her both in terms of knowing her city and becoming an independent person. She also walked or rode her bike in our immediate neighborhood in earlier childhood, though she didn't have the all-day, free-ranging outside play that I did, living in the country.
Though I wasn't aware of any of this when she was a child, I hope her experience made a difference in how her place-awareness developed.
So much insanity and inanity just in the past couple of days. I can't believe he's tearing down the east wing of the White House, and some Democrats in the Senate are still voting for his judge nominations.
Anyway, I just saw this, courtesy of political commentator John Fugelsang on BlueSky, and it stood out among all of the other stuff, maybe because it connects over the decades:
The average age of U.S. home buyers is now 56, up from 49 last year.
In 1981, the year trickle down economics began, it was 31.
Being an American, I didn't learn a lot about the Napoleonic Wars in school. It's strange to say, but most of what I know about it now, I gleaned from Naomi Novik's Temeraire books, a fantasy alternate history series, where dragons are real and are used as part of fighting battles in Europe and around the world. (It's really great.. check it out!)
Anyway, thanks to Novik, I had just a bit of awareness when I saw that today is the 220th anniversary of the day Lord Nelson spotted the French and Spanish fleets off Cape Trafalgar. According to the BlueSky post that described it,
At first light on 21st October, Nelson led his fleet into a pell-mell battle, rewriting the rules of engagement, and securing the greatest naval victory in history.
His uniform remains blood-splattered and shows the hole which was created when a musket ball from a sniper aboard the French ship Redoutable found its target and shattered his spine, leading to his death in glory several hours later. His final words, “God, and my country.”
My eyes glaze over when I try to read the details of the battle of 27 British ships vs. 33 French and Spanish ships (as on the battle's Wikipedia page), reminding me why I don't read about these types of things in general. But still, for an American, it's useful to have some understanding of why there's a Trafalgar Square in London, and a Lord Nelson's column.
Even if it's all a bit more interesting when dragons are involved.
A Facebook friend who attended No Kings yesterday posted about it there, with photos. A friend of hers — who I do not know — responded with this:
It bewilders me that any American would be against one of the best President’s of all time. World peace and our economy are up. Gas, drug prices, taxes and crime are down. It’s self-defeating to think what’s good is bad and what’s bad is good. What you’re seeing on the left-wing news is designed to get an emotional reaction but try to get an objective view of the incredible improvements in such a short amount of time.
This friend is a white man of about my age. He doesn't have much of an online presence, except I can see he's a retired banker who lives in what appears to be a white-flight suburb of Kansas City, Missouri.
World peace is up. Hmm. I guess he believes the "eight peace deals in eight days" line.
Taxes are down (for him, maybe). But tariffs — which are taxes, especially on people who have to spend all of their income — are way up, and literal taxes are also going up on lower income people.
Drug prices may or may not be up, that depends on formularies, but drug insurance prices are up. My 2026 plan, I was recently informed, would be double what it was for 2025. I was advised to drop it and go out of pocket: that would be cheaper. And my plan insurance is about 50% higher, but he didn't touch on that... of course.
Gas prices are not controlled by the president. When they go up —which they will, for whatever reason —will that be Trump's fault? I doubt this guy will lay claim to it then.
Crime is indeed down — nice to hear a Republican acknowledge that! — but it was going down before the Trump regime began.
"Our economy is up" — that should be an empirical question, but the Trump regime is doing everything it can to make sure we don't have the data to be able to tell. American consumers don't seem to think it is, though, according to polls. This latest poll has Trump 15 points underwater on his handling of the economy. (52% disapprove vs. 37% approve.)
He doesn't mention anything about abridgement of rights, people being snatched off the streets, blowing up boats in international waters, violation of Posse Comitatus, causing the deaths of untold thousands by cutting off international aid, the venality of the regime's open corruption, or the many other horrors that have happened since January 21.
But Mr.-Former-Banker, comfortable in his suburban house, doesn't care about any of those things. His taxes will be lower and he thinks things will be fairer to him. None of that DEI stuff. In one of his later comments he said, "We on the right don’t care about one’s level of melanin, only with one’s character."
I'm willing to bet he thought plenty about melanin when he considered a location for his home purchase.
Of course, I went to the biggest local No Kings event here in the Twin Cities: in downtown Minneapolis.
I have no personal perspective on how many people were there, because I stayed in one spot during the first hour as the crowd gathered, and then went on the march and stayed in one spot within the march column, so I didn't see the length of it.
Here's an overhead shot, taken about 20 minutes after the official start time, showing most of the gathering area:
The place where I was standing is not in this image, however, so I know this is not all the people. The group of people I was with is just outside the lower left corner, which is between the light rail station and the stadium where the Minnesota Vikings play. The event's speakers were somewhere in the upper right corner of the park area, I think. I couldn't hear them at all where I was. Sometimes, we could hear the crowd's applause.
The attendance estimate that's being put out is 100,000–150,000, but I don't know what that's based on. I will say, I think the energy at this event was more lively than the events held at the State Capitol in Saint Paul.
Some of that is because of the many Portland-inspired characters who showed up. It wasn't just frogs and unicorns:
That guy on the left is an alien holding a small human, who is an ICE agent. Sort of a meta-comment on abduction.
I didn't get too many photos because I was playing percussion with the Brass Solidarity band. But I did my best between songs and chants.
I missed a lot of great signs. The ones I did get are focused on wordings I haven't seen before, the sign's earnestness, or the effort put into it.
I really liked the use of stencils on that last one.
The laser-eyed loon has become a local favorite after it appeared on one of the failed entries for our state flag in 2023, so it was nice to see the bird being put to use on a No Kings shirt:
And props to the people who made these story-tall banners and hung them from one of Minneapolis's ugly parking garages along the march route:
It was a lot of hours of standing and walking on concrete, but it was a beautiful day full of connecting with other people who've had it with WTF is happening in our country.
I appreciate a holistic Halloween house:
The fact that the house is white with blue shutters undermines the spooky look, I admit. That probably makes it less intimidating to young kids, though — so maybe it's a win-win?
I'm a fan of this type of cost-efficient, large-scale Halloween decorating (not too different from my neighborhood's pumpkin house), as opposed to yards you see featuring many purchased blow-up figures or things like that.
I never manage to note the anniversary of John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry on one of its "round year" anniversaries. This year is its 166th. I last mentioned it in 2021, just after I had read The Good Lord Bird.
This year seems like a good time to remind people about having the courage of your convictions. And to not be afraid to be seen as crazy by some of the people around you, who are going along with what may seem to be the majority.
As a writer named Jessica Ritchey said this evening on BlueSky,
If I had to explain American history in one sentence, I could do worse than "John Brown was hung for treason, but Robert E. Lee was not."
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Another post that involves John Brown, from 2018.
