Stray Hawkeye

• Chasing the ISS
• Ocean Dream
• Sailfish (series)

A potential multiple choice question for becoming a Minneapolis Police Officer:

It’s 3 degrees out and snowing.  It has been brutally cold for several days.  While driving along a narrow residential side street in your squad car, you come across a small SUV double parked in the street.  It has signs on it that say “Auto Rescue: Tires Changed, Jump Starts, Lock Services”.  It is parked next to a small legally parked car with it’s hood open.  There are two people standing in front of the car, one holding jumper cables.  You should:

A) Park in the open spot 3 car lengths back, get out, and see if you can help jump start the car.

B) Pull up behind the SUV and put your lights on so no one hits them.  Help to direct traffic around the SUV while the one lane is blocked to keep traffic flowing.

C) Park your squad car in the middle of the street, so it will block traffic coming from both directions instead of just one.  Stay in the warm car.  Announce over your car’s speakers that the SUV driver needs to move their vehicle because they are blocking traffic.  If the stranded motorist yells back that the SUV driver is giving her a jump start, repeat over the speaker that they need to move their vehicle because they are blocking traffic.  Note that no cars have pulled up behind you, in the lane that was already blocked by the SUV, though there are 3 cars now backed up in the oncoming lane, which only you are blocking.

D) A and B.

30 seconds.  Think it over.  As I saw tonight, the answer is apparently C.  Yes, that’s right C.  And they’re lucky you didn’t give them a ticket for being double parked.  Actually, he may have, I had walked further on by that point.

While we’re ripping on the Minneapolis police, on a more serious note, we’ve had a string of at least 10 violent, armed robberies on a main bicycle/running/walking thoroughfare recently.  And the police didn’t make any statement about this until there were 10 of them.  No warnings, no reaction at all.  People I know who work at a local running store, and bike on the route in question all the time hadn’t even heard about it.  (The following bit largely echos the sentiment of this post on The Deets.)  Then the police did finally issue a warning.  And it’s every bit as absurd as one might expect.  Do they give a description of the attackers?  Not really.  Three young males, that’s about it.  What is their first bit of advice?  Tell people to avoid going out after dark.  This trail is a main route for bicycle commuters.  Dark in Minnesota in the winter comes at about 4:30pm.  The work day ends at 5:00pm.  Anyone else see an issue here?

Another bit of advice from the police: “Pay attention to your surroundings. If you see people ahead of you, that make you nervous or uncomfortable, exit the Greenway at the nearest ramp.”  Apparently the police have never been on the Greenway (which would explain a lot).  There are very, very few entry/exit points.  It’s down in a hole that used to be a rail line, with bridges over it every block.  The sides are pretty much shear brick walls at several points.  There are several places where there’s no entry/exit for a least a quarter mile, and one I can think of off the top of my head that’s closer to a half mile.  (I hate running on the Greenway for just this reason, and avoid it even when there isn’t crime for this reason.  There’s also no water stops, but that’s another rant.)

Well, at least they tell the exact location of the attacks so people know where to watch out, right?  Nope.  “…on the Midtown Greenway. They’ve occurred in both the 3rd and 5th Precincts at different locations along the trail.”  All of the Midtown Greenway that is in the city of Minneapolis is in the 3rd and 5th Precincts.  It’s 5 miles long and spans the entire city, from one side to the other:

(base map from, that’s right, the police department)

And what do people do when the police aren’t protecting them?  They organize themselves:

(video via MN Stories)

Not that a big group of bikers all biking together one time really does much.  I would think something like a “riding buddy” program would do more, so people don’t have to ride alone.

Or have a regular police patrol or something.  There’s a good 10-15 cops standing in the intersections down town “directing traffic” every night during rush hour.  And by “directing traffic”, I mean standing in the middle of busy intersections waving their arms and blowing their whistles, telling drivers to do exactly what the traffic signals are already telling them.  Absolutely, 100%, exactly what the stop lights are already doing.  Except making people more nervous because there’s a cop waving his arms and blowing a whistle that you have to drive around in addition to the usual traffic and pedestrians.  Why not put a couple of them on bikes and run them up and down the Greenway in a loop.  They might not stop anything in progress, but being there, and on bikes, would at least show a good faith effort, and allow them to respond faster so there would be a better chance of catching the people doing this.

Generally when people lose faith in the police and try to police themselves, it doesn’t end well.

Dear Batman, are you there?  It’s me.  Kearn.

As you may have heard, there are a variety of legal suits at the moment trying to block Obama from being sworn in as President on the claim that he isn’t a natural born citizen.  They claim anything from “he was born in Kenya, secretly snuck back in to the US, and then given a birth certificate, without anyone noticing until now”, to, “his dad wasn’t American, so he’s not”, because apparently nationality is carried on the Y chromosome.

Though I like to indulge a good conspiracy theory from time to time, if nothing else as the “what if” type thought experiment (ie, if Obama wasn’t legally able to become President, who gets it then?  Biden? McCain? Re-Vote?  Supreme Court decides because they seem to like deciding elections?), but this one’s a little ridiculous to me.  Before the Democrats let Obama become a visible candidate, I’m pretty sure they verified his “natural-born citizen” status about eight thousand ways to Tuesday, or (to throw the conspiracy theorists a bone) forged it all so well you would need a nuclear powered Delorean to have any chance of getting evidence to the contrary.  Either way there’s too much riding on any party’s Presidential nominee to not check these things out excessively well before the media even hears the candidate’s name, much less gets elected.

But, when I close a door I open a window.  Or at least a mail slot.  Yep, this witch hunt is as good as dead (not that it really ever had much life).  But, what about a real witch hunt?  I’m pretty sure this one will have as much appeal to the GOP base as the current one, if not more.  Because after all, who does the GOP hate more than foreigners?

Non-believers.  That’s who.  (And really, they probably mostly hate foreigners for being non-believers.)  So why not take all the lipstick off the current witch hunt and cut right to the guts of it?  I propose the GOP finally launch a real, honest to goodness witch hunt.  And better yet, this time I have a simple way to find verifiable proof that the target is a witch.

Here is the logic I propose.  (Tongue in cheek so far I can nearly lick my own ear.)

As we all know, Obama’s whole campaign was based around one central theme, which he embraced.  Hope.

I would say that in many ways, it would be fair to say that in his campaign, Obama embodied hope.

And, as we all know from the 1998 movie of the same name, Hope Floats.

I’ll leave it to the GOP base to provide you with the rest of the logic:

So, logically, if Obama weighs the same as a duck, he’s A WITCH! The GOP could finally be absolutely justified in one of their witch hunts, if only we could find some larger scales.

As a side note, I’d also like to point out the length of the silence between, “She turned me in to a newt. – A Newt?” and, “I got better.”  Almost everyone who quotes this makes that pause significantly too short.  It bugs me.

• Siena Perspective
• Eternity
• Jordan.01

Usually when I post a musician on here, it’s one I’ve been listening to a lot lately and really like.  Someone I heard of a while ago, and their music hasn’t faded, gotten old, gotten annoying, or been massively overplayed since then.  Pretty often they’re also local musicians.  However, I’ll make an exception for this one, this is the first time I’ve ever seen this girl, and just saw it a couple days ago, but I’m impressed.

If you can open a song, on a live broadcast by singing a capella three part harmonies with yourself, and go from there, there’s a place on my blog for you:

I’d love to be able to compose/perform like that.  Just think of managing all those tracks in your head, while singing another one over it.  Most musicians take months in the studio to come up with something like that.  Wow.

On third or fourth listening, also really cool for the layering the past over the present, especially with the overall lyrics of the song about getting out of a trapping surroundings, and getting by just for the moment.

Via: Ovablastic

Have you ever thought to yourself, “I’d love to go to a free Christmas concert, but I just wish I could find one with more low brass”?  Well look no further.  Tuba Christmas is here!

“What is Tuba Christmas?” you may ask.  It’s an extremely loosely organized tradition of groups of tuba (and baritone) players gathering all over the country around Christmas time and playing Christmas carols.  No trumpets, woodwinds, or strings allowed.  The players usually practice together once, for about an hour, right before the concert.  And the skill level goes from junior high band students on up to professional orchestra musicians, and everything in between.  And yes, it is every bit as comical and entertaining as it sounds.  Usually there’s someone dressed as Santa, and people decorate their horns.  Here’s a little sample:

(I have no idea why Jingle Bells turns in to the National Emblem March in the middle there, but it always does, and I laugh every time.)

The Tuba Christmas in the Twin Cities is in St Paul at Central Presbyterian Church this Sunday, December 14th at 4:00pm, and yes, I will be playing there.  Free Parking.  Maps to church and parking: www.cpcstpaul.org/directions.html.  It free to attend (though they pass around a hat, usually literally, for donations), and it’s kid friendly.

If you’re not in the Twin Cities, there are Tuba Christmases all over the place.  There’s a big list of all of them here.  Basically, wherever there are tuba players with strange senses of humor (read: where ever there are tuba players), there’s Tuba Christmas.

If you want to play, bring a horn, registration is at 2:00pm, practice at 2:30pm.  It’s $5 to play, and if you haven’t played at one before, bring $15 for a music book (you can reuse it every year).

Merry Tuba Christmas!

I must look helpful lately.  From Friday night to Monday evening, the following total strangers have asked me for help/directions:

• A rather wealthy looking woman asked me for direction while I was out for a run.  She was in a mustang and pulled over and stopped in the middle of the road to ask me.
• A lady on the bus asked me for directions to the convention center, for a homeless convention.  No idea how that works
• Another girl on the bus asked me how to get somewhere.
• An extremely inebriated girl stumbling in front of our building asked me to call a cab for her.  That one was rather unpleasant.
• A guy asked me for directions to Hooters and the Target Center, and if I knew of any other “good” restaurants around here.  Because apparently Hooters is a good restaurant.
• A guy with two thick gauge lip rings, and a thick gauge nose ring (like a bull), plus a couple of tattoos on his face asked me for directions.  He was the nicest and most cordial of all of them.

In addition:

• A fellow Iowa fan struck up a moderately long conversation with me on the street while waiting for a stoplight to change.
• A security guard struck up a conversation with me, also for quite a while.  He’s also from Iowa originally.  Waterloo originally.  He moved up here about… well, I could go on.

And all of this in just a little over one weekend.  It’s not like I stand around outside trolling for people to be a Boy Scout to.  I basically go to and from work, and go running about every other day.  I didn’t even really go out at all this weekend.  It just struck me as odd that this many random strangers would ask me for directions in such a short period of time.

Due to my not wanting to deal with copyright stuff, and the exact copyright terms not being listed on the photographer’s website, I’m not actually making this into a lolcat-type picture, but feel free to look at this picture, and mentally place the following over it in all caps, white, san-serif type:

Actually…

dat might be nuf cowbell.

So lately we’ve been told over and over who can’t fail.  The banks can’t fail, or it would destroy the world economy and we’d all go back to living in caves or something.  The auto makers can’t fail, because, well, the auto execs said so.  But you know who has been ignored in all of this?  Rudie.  That’s who.  Rudie can’t fail.

If only The Clash were still around today to present their case to Congress,  they’d make a couple billion off of that song, no problem.

Via: My own random sense of humor.

“If you steal from one author, it’s plagiarism; if you steal from many, it’s research.” – Wilson Mizner

I always really liked that quote while working on research papers in college.  Nothing you come up with is entirely original, it’s all at least influenced by all the things you’ve absorbed over the years.  Though basically every great work of science of literature is attributed to one person, when you start to look at them, you start seeing the roots and the groundwork everywhere around them.  The fact that we even have some sort of language to communicate these ideas, some physical medium to record them on, is standing on the shoulders of giants.  Or more accurately, the shoulders of billions of gnats and a few mice.

At any rate, I’m going to be trying to do a better job of not just linking to where the things I find are, but how I found them too.  Some things I’ve bookmarked and forgotten where I found them, and some of what I put up is completely original content (with the caveats of above), so I won’t be able to link everything.  However, I’ve added a full list of the blogs that I read in the side bar here, and when I link to articles that I’ve found by way of another blog, I’ll be trying to add a “via” line to the end of those posts.

Also, I’m updating the tag line for the site.  I’m going from the surprisingly accurate, but excessively verbose “Web curation, political rants, philosophic ramblings, and vignettes of real life”, to the more concise, “Two parts show and tell, one part soapbox.”