Greg Benz Photography is a site for a local photographer Greg Benz, which has some really great shots on it. A lot of it is weddings and family portraits, which as a genre don’t do much for me, but these are pretty good, and I suppose that’s probably how most photographers actually make money. I’m more of a sucker for the great skyline shots, landscapes, random close ups, and admittedly the occasional pretty girl :) Below are links to a few of my favorites of each on the site. Note that some of these have more than one picture per page.
Downtown Minneapolis Cover Shot for MN CRE – the reflection on the Wells Fargo building (the one in the middle with the tiered gold looking top) lining up with the horizon behind and the street in front of it is really cool in this one, like it’s almost see through
Update: As Greg notes in the comments, he’s got a Facebook page as well. It has some great pictures on it, and they’re broken out by subject matter in the albums too (cityscapes, Twin Cities, portraits, etc), which is pretty handy.
Endless Migration is a really simple, but really addictive flash game, where you’re the lead goose in a V migrating around the world, until the planes and blimps get you and you’re bird strike.
The games are pretty quick (about 30 seconds to around 3 minutes), so it’s a good short time waster. The one part that’s not really intuitive at all is that when you finish one game and it says retry or back to menu, if you go back to the menu after each game, you can see that you earn points for achievements that you can use for upgrades (both their own screens with links from the main menu), which make it easier, gives a few more goals past staying alive, and makes the game longer.
I thought it was fitting for this time of year when the honkers are flying overhead and pooping on the paths around the lakes. I think Minnie would approve.
Is it just me, or do the red powerade coolers that you can see behind the benches at the NCAA Tournament / March Madness basketball games look like they have corset lacing on them?
I suppose you could say shoe laces too, but for some reason that wasn't the first thing to spring to my mind. Maybe because they're vertical instead of horizontal. Maybe because I've been single way too long.
I was out at the bar over the weekend with some of my geekier friends. In conversation it came up that one of them has a motorcycle, which he has named “Frogger”. (See, I told you they were on the geekier side.) One of my other friends recently got an air brush kit, and is planning to help paint said motorcycle with, as they put it, “bad ass frogs”. So, being geeks, we not only had our laptops with us, but were at a bar with wifi – so we busted out the internet and went to work finding bad ass frogs to use as models for said motorcycle air brush mural. Some of the highlights were:
But eventually, we came to thinking, why not use the actual Frogger frog? So, we found an image of the original cover, and realized how lame and entirely not bad ass the original Frogger frog was:
A tie? A watch? A vest? A freaking brief case?!? Maybe there was a reason all those cars had it in for him.
Pretty wimpy, but we have computers, and GIMP – we can fix this.
So, over the next hour or two, I drunkenly photoshoped (okay, so I don’t actually have the program, but “GIMP’ed” just sounds wrong) up our video game hero to toughen him up a bit, while carrying on a few other conversations. There were plenty of inputs from my other drunken, laptop toting, geek companions (“give him some tattoos”, ” put some blood on his mouth”, “make his butt less pointy”, “he should have a sword, no, an anime sword”, “give him angry eyelids, no, not like that, angle them, no, this way”) to help with the process. Until we eventually came up with:
Not bad for a few beers in (though looking at it sober, it does have some rough edges here and there).
And then, of course, we realized he must vanquish the lesser version of himself, who has apparently been sweating in fear for decades now (click for bigger):
This time of year, as the mounds, piles, and banks of snow start to melt, I’m always amazed by what they reveal. Not the grass and bushes and pavement and such, as much as all the various trash that’s gotten frozen into the snow banks and buried over the winter, all to be revealed in a few days as the snow melts away.
This is particularly interesting because I’ve found the one major weather difference between Iowa and Minnesota is how much the snow pack melts during the winter. In Iowa (at least the parts I lived in) it melts several times throughout the winter. Maybe not completely, but enough to get down to just a few inches of snow on the ground, and melt everything off the side walks. In Minneapolis, it’s just those 5 or 10 degrees colder that it takes to keep it almost completely frozen all winter. Snow we got at the start of December is just melting for the first time now. The side walks are visible for the first time since Christmas. The snow and ice here just piles, and piles, and piles up all winter, and then melts all at once over the course of a week or two.
In doing so, it reveals everything that’s been tossed along the side of the roads and side walks all winter too. So far this year, just in the past few days, I’ve seen the following melting their way out of the snow banks:
More beer cans and bottles than I could count
A baby stroller
A variety of clothes
A plastic banana
A complete toilet, intact
Several feet of rope
A complete car bumper
A couch
A diaper (used)
A large headboard
Rear view mirrors
A tire, with rim, still fully inflated- not a spare tire, but a normal full sized tire
Shoes, both men’s and women’s
Various parts of bikes
A large (carnival sized) stuffed dog
A broken cell phone
A dog collar
And much, much more generic garbage
Note that each and every one of these was not just something that was on top of a snow bank, or tossed on top lately, but every single one of them was buried in the snow to the point that you couldn’t see them at all a few days ago, and still had some snow of it covering part of it when I saw it. Yes, even the couch, car bumper, tire – all of it. I’ve walked past many of these over the past several weeks and months and had no idea they were there.
A lot of these are a little fascinating just for how they got there. Who tossed a used diaper in a snow bank? How has a whole couch been hiding under a snow bank all winter. Who lost a shoe when there was already snow on the ground, but apparently continued without it? Where did the clothes (underwear included, though never a whole outfit in one pile or in a trail, usually just one piece in a place) come from?
Each of these is interesting, and the randomness is sort of amazing, and I’m sure I’ll see more in the coming days are we get rid of the last of snow we have now (I’m sure we’ll still get more – I don’t trust we’re done with snow here until it hits 90 the first time).
So, my idea for this one is I think someone should gather up all of the stuff that has melted out of the snow along one street, or in more dense neighborhoods even a single block, and make sculptures out of it.
It would be interesting to see what you could structurally assemble out of all of it, and to see what different types of stuff you find in each neighborhood. It seems like there’s lots of modern art that is made out of found objects and discarded items, but I think this would have a sort of cool local flair to it. Especially if you played up the hidden vs seen, and clean and pure snow vs what it’s hiding aspects.
You could also just gather up everything from one block, and instead of making a structure or sculpture out of it, just lay it out in a compulsively neat grid of items, to contrast with the random, strewn about nature of where you found it.
Of course, you would definitely want to wear some thick gloves for this one. And you might pass up the diaper.
This morning I left for work a little early because I had a 9:00 meeting that I was supposed to go to, and I wanted to be sure to get in early enough that I could start up my computer and catch up on any new emails before the meeting. So, I left home around 8:20 or so, and headed over to 35W south to head to work. Kind of the standard stuff – potholes, idiots who don’t know how to merge, a few people driving way too fast, a few way too slow, and, right around when I got to the Diamond Lake Road exit, a giant mushroom cloud of flames that was about 200 feet tall. A little something like this (particularly towards the end of the video):
Except I was driving about two blocks away exactly at the moment of the initial blast, which was probably twice as high as the above.
My first thought was I should pull over and call 911, and as the though crossed my mind, 4 or five cars in front of me pulled over.
Okay, so really the first thought to cross my mind was something to the effect of HOLY F(*@ING S#!+ #%)Q ^&# $)^&!# ^)#@*$@ #)*^* ^&# !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!.
Then, oh, I should call 911. Followed by, oh, those people probably have it covered.
Followed by, why is it so hot all of the sudden. Because in my car with the windows up, 2 blocks away (though straight downwind), going 60mph, it suddenly got really, really hot in my car. Like in a short sleeve shirt, no jacket, and sweating hot.
Followed by little bits of burnt, melty gunk falling on my wind shield.
My next thought was, hmm, I should get the #$%^ out of here, because though the inital fireball had gotten smaller (and by smaller, I mean what you see in the video above), it kept burning. And there not being much black smoke would mean some kind of fuel burning rather than a house or car or something. And if there’s one tank of fuel to blow up, there could be a bigger one next to it.
So, I kept driving to work and could see the base of the flame from the highway as I drove past, just like at the end of the video above, except from the other side and a little higher up. In case you’re not familiar with the area, it looks something like this:
The explosion happened when I was where the blue line starts, straight east of the fire was where it got really hot and I could see the base of it burning. Note this is pretty much exactly the chunk of highway that got shut down as soon as police could get there to block it off.
By time I got to work, I still didn’t know what exactly it was. However, I work a couple of stories up above the trees line and could still see it clearly from my desk, about 4 or 5 miles away. Okay, not quite from my desk, I’m not that close to the window. But if you stood up and took a couple of steps to down the row, you could see it from there. About ten minutes later reports started popping up on local news sites that there was a fire of some sort, and about twenty minutes after that that it was a gas main that exploded.
It burned for a good hour more after that, visible from miles away the whole time.
There’s a fair amount of coverage, pictures, and videos on the local news sites:
Also alternate titles for this post that are okay to laugh at now because we know no one got hurt:
I was hoping for a spring warm up, but this is ridiculous!
Minneapolis fails in bid for winter Olympics, but is awarded temporary custody of the torch as consolation
Stay Puft Marshmallow Man Smores For Everyone!
The Vulcan Krewe is really getting out of hand, well, more than usual
Minneapolis starts new St Patrick’s tradition, falls to outshine Chicago’s green river (seriously, while standing by the window watching this thing burn from miles away, my coworkers started talking about how amazing the green river in Chicago is, and how bright of a green it is, you know, not dark like you’d expect, and how the boats go back and for to mix it up after the first boat FOR FUCK’S SAKE WHY ARE WE TALKING ABOUT THIS WHEN THERE’S A GIANT PLUME OF FLAME RIGHT FUCKING THERE!?!?!?)
So, hopefully the drive to and from work tomorrow will be a little less eventful. Might stop and get a Shamrock Shake on the way home though. So there’s that.
This is my 500th post on Stray Hawkeye. It kind of feels like it should be a big deal, so I keep meaning to come up with something impressive to do for it, but have been kind of busy lately, and haven’t come up with anything, thus, a month gap in posting. So, I’m giving up on this post being even remotely impressive or interesting, posting it, and moving on with more interesting usual posts. So, ummm, happy post anniversary type thingy to me, and stuff.
