Stray Hawkeye

Last we saw our dino heroes, Parker was wrapping up an Orange Bowl victory in Miami, while Sinclair was still trying to figure out where Minne the Lake Creature had gone to.  Since then, I’ve found out that for dinosaurs to live to 65 million years old, they have to hibernate for a while every now and then.  It’s a rather sporadic schedule, but if that’s what it takes to live to 65 million years old and still keep your youthful vigor, I guess you can’t complain.

Parker has woken up from his hibernation with a lot of energy and ready to go, while Sinclair has still been a bit groggy lately.  Parker has also decided to have the tattoos on his back removed, so people don’t keep confusing him with his beloved brother, who he got them in honor of.  If that none of that makes any sense, you can catch up by reading the existing posts in the Dino Saga series.

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“Good morning Parker, what are you up to?”

“Sure Parker. Are you planning to buy some art while we’re there?”

“Maybe, what does it take to buy art?”

“Just some money.”

“Oh, let me go grab mine!  I’ve been saving up!”

“Um, I don’t think so Parker.  Most places don’t take bits of string as a form of payment.  But we can still go look.”

“Okay.  Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!”

And out the door we went.

“You know Parker, we’re going to be doing a lot of walking today.  I know you have the energy for it, but do you think you feet will be able to hold up?”

“Hmm, you’re right, they might get sore.”

Luckily, the first place in the Uptown Art Fair is the Uptown Running Room.

“Okay, we could always order something in your size, but for today maybe Kearn can just carry you when your feet get tired.”

“Yeah, I could do that.  Thanks for trying Running Room people!”

Parker was getting anxious, “Okay, now let’s go see some art!”  So, our first stop was Daryl Harwood and Kevin Murphy‘s booth.

They make Ikebana flower bases, which have little spiked clusters in them you can put the flowers on so they’ll stand up straight, and have water.

Next, we stopped by the music stage Old Chicago had set up, which seemed strangely empty.

After Parker’s set, and three encores, we continued on, and found a Volvo dealership had set up shop at the art fair.

“Hey Parker, how do you think the ladies would like you in this old car?”

“Hmm, but Parker, can you reach the pedals?”

“Well, let’s see what else they have.”

“Parker, could you come over here and jump up real high?  I want to get your picture with the Uptown Theatre sign!”

“Kearn, all this jumping is making me hungry.  Can we go back and eat those flower stands we saw earlier?”

“No Parker, I don’t think the artists would like that very much.  But, we can see if we can find you some real food.”

“Here, let’s ask this guy if he know where we could find some food around here.”

To be continued…

Living in Uptown, and being surrounded by hipsters, this made me laugh a lot:

Ahhhh, panda hat guy.

Favorite comment on the video:

How many Hipsters can you pack in a Jazz?
A totally obscure number you never heard of.

Via Swiss Miss

You may have heard we had a bit of snow here in Minneapolis.  Enough, in fact, to collapse the Metrodome (pretty cool video there).  So, what does any sane person do when there’s 16 or 17 inches of snow on the ground, 20-30 mile an hour winds, and bitter cold?  Go for a walk and take some pictures of course!

And if you happened to be watching the Weather Channel at about 6pm Saturday, while they were talking to their correspondent in Minneapolis, you can see me walking in the background.  That settles it, I’m famous.

Also, while I was walking home, I was helping push a car that had gotten stuck in an intersection, the third one in five blocks.  As it got some traction and started moving my feet went out from under me and I slammed down on my knee.  I got up, brushed myself off, and kept going.  Then I heard someone from behind me yelling in a very Nelson from the Simpsons manner, “Haha, wipeout!  Hey Wipeout!  Hey WIPEOUT!! hahaha”.  Ah, Minnesota, always someone there to kick you while you’re down.

So, once I got back to my place and finally warmed up, my knee started hurting, a lot.  And it had one big spot where I had hit it on the pavement that was starting to bruise and swell a lot.  So, as a final indignity, I had to pack it in ice for a while.

While I was laying there, I heard a plow going through the alley to make a first pass at clearing it out.  When I looked out, it was actually one of those giant end loaders – the kind where the cab is about five or six feet in the air and has three foot tall tires and you sort of wonder how it fits under the phone and power lines.  In the course of trying to plow through our alley, or the part of it I could see, it got stuck and had to back up and make a running start to keep going.  Six times.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go limp out into the sub-zero wind chills and start digging my car out of the piles of snow the end loader and the wind left, so I can hope to actually have it out by time I have to go to work on Monday.  My car, unfortunately, does not have three foot tall tires.

Could someone remind me why I live here?

Anyone?

Anyone at all?

Kind of cool old-school snowmobile / tractor thingy:

Via Make

If you get bored, since it is a little slow paced, at least skip ahead to abut 7:25 to see the corkscrew things mounted under a car.  Somehow I imagine modern cars are a little less hacker friendly.  Also, at 9:20 or so, it shows it can run on dirt as well.

After watching that, I started to wonder why I’ve never seen anything like before.  It seems like it would be perfect for military use.  So, I looked around a bit and, low and behold, the Russians tried it out:

And, at least one modern company, Tyco, has picked up the technology (their version also goes on water):

Three pretty distinct takes on the same technology.

I eventually found a wikipedia article on the concept, and it sounds like the concept has been toyed with for a long time, but it’s not very good/fast on plain old dry land, so it doesn’t get used a lot.

For the Penn State game, the Iowa athletic department has apparently decided to counter Penn State’s usual clan rally white out look with a creation of their own:

I’ll be the first to admit that when we started doing the whole “all the fans wear the same color” thing, I loved it. I thought black outs at Iowa were the greatest thing ever. Until I saw one from field level… and noticed that you can’t really see shirts so much as everyone’s faces from that angle… and realized just how white our fan base is, and that is was more of a grey out than anything.

The gold out at night against Ohio State looked awesome, though it was pretty well tainted by the game.

In fact, it seems like on the whole, we tend to lose themed games more than not. So, I’ve pretty well soured on them.

But this one, even assuming it works, how long do you think it will be before someone photoshops it up to look like, well, hell, it’s going to happen anyway, so it might as well be done by one of our own…

At least we thought of it before Georgia Tech. Unfortunately no one told us we’re not the Yellow Jackets / Ramblin Really Nice Old Car.  Though, it wouldn’t be so bad to have the pretty sweet Nice New Camaro Bumblebee from the dog shit terrible Transformers movie as a mascot (I’m not sure exactly how that’s related, but in my mind it is).

On the way home from work, I saw a car with vanity license plates that just said:

WHEE

Awesome.  How could you not smile getting into a car with license plates that say WHEE?

On another note entirely, I checked the Minnesota DOT website to see how much customized plates are, because there still has to be some combination like WHEEE or WHEEEE or WEEEEE still left out there that I could get.  And I was quickly reminded of yet another way Iowa is better than Minnesota (beyond the selling alcohol on Sundays, selling alcohol in gas station and grocery stores, lower taxes, actually thawing / ice melting during the winter, and, of course, being the Hawkeye State).

In Iowa, personalized plates run you an extra $25, it’s an easy one page form, you can get them for a huge variety of causes, you can get them in your school colors, and you can see what they actually look like before ordering them.

In Minnesota, it’s ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHT DOLLARS AND FIFTY CENTS for personalized plates.  And you can use their four page long government form to try to figure out how to apply for them (god help you).  Now granted, if you look long enough, you can get custom plates in Minnesota for your school, though not in your school colors.  They’re right in there with where you get the plates for your Concrete Pumper or your Street Sweeper.

Here’s how we do it.  We need to convince the oil companies that there is oil on Mars.  Stay with me here. The oil companies will then fund manned space flight to Mars so they can drill for the oil. If they eventually find it, it will prove there was once life there, which will cause the religious fundamentalists’ heads to all explode in unison (side benefit there).  Then, because using the oil on Mars would be way cheaper than shipping it to Earth (not to mention supply and demand), we could then send all of the SUVs and sports cars (and their drivers, another side benefit) to Mars.  This would also have the side benefit of decreasing congestion here. Then, all the green house gases from the SUVs and sports cars will cause global warming on Mars (Marsal warming?), which will then teraform Mars to be habitable. We can then grow food on Mars and solve world hunger, on two planets no less. The end.

Granted, the religious fundies would just deny that we had ever been to Mars, or claim the oil was put there by god 5,000 years ago to test their faith. And there would have to be oil on Mars in the first place. And we’d have to figure out how to make SUVs run at several hundred degrees below zero with double the gravity. And I have no clue how fertile Martian soil is. But I can dream, right?

Or maybe we could just reproduce less.

Continuing the driving theme I seem to have established over the past couple of days, the free idea this week is a Pothole Spotter website.

As bits of pavement are thawing here on the frozen tundra, the potholes seem notably worse than in past years.  Now, I’m no stranger to potholes, having lived in the upper Midwest my whole life, but some of the ones this year seem pretty exceptional.  Perhaps it’s the particular combination of weather this winter, or maybe it’s the result of reduced preventive maintenance on roads with budget cut back, I don’t know.  And mind you, I’m not talking about a little bit of pockmarked road acne here, I’m talking about the tire swallowing, axle breaking caverns.

I’ve got a few on my way to work that are so substantial that I’ve modified my usual route by a few blocks to get around them, because I’m worried I’ll end up with a flat tire one of these days if I don’t (again, these are no “just swerve around them” sized pot holes).

From what I’ve seen in past years here in Minneapolis, the city’s way of patching these is to methodically drive up and down every single street on the warm days, starting when it gets up to the 40′s or 50′s, and patch every single divot on a given street, from fist sized hiccup to black hole of death, all at once.  Which sort of makes sense in a “it’s the government” kind of way.  After all, how would they know where the really bad ones are?  Or the ones that the most people drive over in a given day?  And really, what are you going to do about it anyway?

Make a Pothole Spotter website.  That’s what.

The people who are going to know best where the really bad potholes are are the people who drive through them (or swerve around them) every day.  The commuters.  So, this week’s idea is to make website where users can submit their favorite / most hated potholes.  Ideally, you would set it up so they can send in picture messages of the potholes from their phones, so you can actually see how big / bad they are.  The users should also include a description of the location (for example, 31st Street E, about 10 feet west of Stevens Ave, all of the right lane), or maybe a Google Street View link (http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=Minneapolis,+Hennepin,+Minnesota&ll=44.946643,-93.275565&spn=0,359.997299&t=h&z=19&layer=c&cbll=44.946644,-93.2757&panoid=dtMqU1RZFncbKp_RddLBew&cbp=12,30.94,,0,1.07 – those two close parallel cracks at the end of the white stripe have each opened into tire sized gaps in the pavement).

The commuters would have incentives to use the site, because it could potentially help them get the worst of the potholes they have to deal with fixed quickly.  Additionally, you could offer a weekly prize for worst pothole, and let users vote on it.  The worst pothole each week would be displayed at the top of the home page. It would strike me that you could get a tire company or an auto shop (especially one that does alignments and tire balancing) or a tow truck company to sponsor the thing, and give related / amusing prizes each week.

Additionally, it would basically publicly shame the cities / street maintenance crews that are in charge of the areas where the potholes reside into fixing them.  Or, more positively, help the cities and crews to identify where they can have the greatest effect improving drivers’ experience with the least amount of manpower and resources.

You could also pit cities against each other to introduce a bit of competition to it for both the government officials and the users, and maybe get a bit of press for it in the mean time.  “Will Minneapolis or New York have the worst pothole this week?”  “Hey, did you see Miami beat us this week?!?  They don’t even have winter!  We gotta get out and find some big ones!”

Additionally, this would also give the cities a good resource for concrete data (pardon the pun) about which streets have the most issues, which could drive the choices  on which ones get priority in replacement, as well as better analysis of layouts / materials that lead to the most / worst potholes.  It could also give the ability to track which spots have potholes that reoccur each year, which could lead to analyzing the effectiveness of patches done at different temperatures, at different times, or by different crews.  In that way, you even potentially charge the cities a small fee to mine the data, or sell some consulting to analyze the data for them.

People would have smoother commutes, the city would have a greater affect of peoples daily lives with fewer resources, we gather more data to prevent future problems and promote accountability, and have some potential to make some cash on the side.  Make it so.

In driving through the Crosstown Common (where 35W and 62 overlap for about a mile) I had a thought.  If you’re not familiar with the area, as 35W approaches the Commons it narrows to two lanes, and 62 narrows to one lane, and they combine to be 3 lanes for the length of the Commons.  62 merges on to 35W from the left, and then exits off the right.

So, most people on 35W who want to stay on 35W bunch up in the left lane of 35W as they approach the Commons, as that’s the only lane that remains 35W through the Commons.  In doing so, they form a bit of a wall, which is all well and good, except that anyone who is on 62 and would like to remain on 62 has to move from the furthest left lane to the furthest right lane in order to stay on 62.  As you can imagine, fun is had by all and traffic tends to back up in all directions around it.  (They’re currently doing some massive construction to try to fix this, but at the moment, it’s still very much intact this way.)

Now, on most days this is the low light of the commute, by far, especially given the merging skills of the average Minnesotan.  But today it occurred to me while driving through this mess that, really, the highways are just playing a large scale game of Red Rover.  It made me smile the rest of the way home.

On the drive home from work, I saw a Honda Civic with the following on a bumper sticker:

Think about honking

if you [heart] conceptual art

I think in terms of flair which defines my neighborhood (Uptown), that may well take the top spot.  It knocks off the previous favorite, which I saw briefly after moving here, which was on an old VW bus and said something to the effect of:

Zero to sixty

in about twelve and a half minutes