Stray Hawkeye

Tuba Christmas is coming up again.  If you don’t know what Tuba Christmas is, or why it’s awesome, or want to find one in your own region, see my previous post here.  More details on this year’s Twin Cities event below:

TUBACHRISTMAS 2011
The 24rd Annual MINNESOTA TUBACHRISTMAS Concert will be Sunday,
December 11, 4:00 p.m. at Central Presbyterian Church, 500 Cedar St., St. Paul.

Audience Admission Free.

Free parking (see directions)
For directions and parking info see:
www.cpcstpaul.org/directions.html

To Play the Concert:
If you play Tuba, Sousaphone, Euphonium or Baritone you are invited to play. (NO other instruments)
All ages welcome. There will be over 100 players. (Players age range from 10 to 80+)

Registration: 2:00
Rehearsal: 2:30
Concert: 4:00

Registration fee $5
Music book $18
Hats & Scarves available $15 each.
Head bands $10 each

Decorate your instruments.
Bring a music stand if needed.

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…

As a reminder, it’s Art Fair weekend in Minneapolis, with art fairs in Uptown, Powderhorn, and Loring Park happening all weekend.

I wrote up a review / guide of each two years ago, and from my experience last year, it holds up pretty well.  The one change I’ve heard for this year is that they’ve done away with the Art Hop, which I think is kind of a bummer.  They’re instead replacing it with free passes on the normal city bus routes (details here).  I’m guessing this is going to confuse the bejebus out of most people, and most people won’t think/know to print the passes ahead of time.  Plus, there doesn’t seem to be a straight route from Powderhorn to Loring Park or vice versa without going through Uptown.  So I’m predicting more traffic and more of a pain parking this year.  But aside from that, it should be a nice weekend for it, and it’s always fun to go wander through all the art.

Over the weekend I participated in the 48 Hour Film Project.  Basically, it’s a competition where teams get a genre, a character name / occupation, a line of dialogue, and a prop, and 48 hours later have to come back with a 4 to 7 minute film (plus 60 seconds for credits).  A couple of my friends have a production company, so I auditioned to be on their team and ended up with a part with a couple of lines (which in a 7 minute film I’m claiming is major role :) ).  Plus I made a website as a prop that also gets some screen time.  So, what I’m really saying here is you should come to the premier screening, because I’m going to be totally famous and on the big screen and stuff.  Also there’s about a 5 second shot of me and two other guys just shaking our butts in a musical number. Did I it’s a musical? And a Western? Because for genre we got “Musical or Western”, and decided that “and” is far better than “or”, so we did both. Confused yet? Good, more reason to come see the finished product.

Due to the number of teams, they break up the screening into groups.  We’re in Group D, which shows Wednesday, June 15th, 9:00 – 11:00pm at the Riverview Theater. Admission is $10, and you get to see about 10-15 movies made as part of this chaos.  If you have a large amount of faith in us, there’s a best of show a week later on the 23rd. I’ve seen our film and I think it’s pretty good, but having not seen others from this year, I have no idea where we’ll fall in the pack, or, for that matter, what categories / criteria they use to pick the best of, so, you may want to come to the premier screening just in case. Besides, the best of is $15, and you’ll have no idea what people are talking about for the week in between when everyone is saying how awesome ours is.

I went to see the new movie Thor today.  Pretty good.  When I went into the theater, it was nice out – sunny with a light breeze.

When I came out of the theater after watching a movie featuring, as the title character, the Germanic pagan god of thunder, lightening, and storms, it was overcast with a strong wind.  When I checked the radar, it looked like this:

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.

Skyline and building shots:

• Downtown Minneapolis Skyline – probably my favorite overall
• TPN IDS WF
• Fireworks on the Mississippi
• 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
• Minneapolis Tilt
• The Cathedral of St Paul
• Aquitennial Fireworks in Downtown Minneapolis
• Minnesota State Capitol in St Paul

Random:

• Slumhog Millionaire – this one makes me laugh a lot, and want a pet pig
• Purple Tulips – second shot here is gorgeous

Pretty Girls:

• Sherrell | Minneapolis Portrait Photographer
• Winter Returns to Minneapolis – the last one is adorable.

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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.

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:

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:

• Strib
• Fox 9
• WCCO

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.

Seen while out for a walk in my neighborhood:

Where are we going?

And why am I in this hand basket?

With the snow on Monday, I would say our winter total is already getting pretty close to:

Via Make

From what I can tell, the sculpture was made by G. Augustine Lynas, who has a bunch of other really cool sculptures, though unfortunately most of the pictures of them are really small and you can’t click them for bigger versions.

Maybe when the feet above grow up, they can warm up in a giant Red Wing Boots – though Red Wing will have to start working on making one for the other foot too.