a midway bikelog

I spent a lovely, lazy Sunday afternoon yesterday biking and hanging out with a bunch of fellow idiots who think that biking around town in single-degree temps is a fun way to spend an afternoon. In other words, the Hiawatha Cyclery pub crawl.

We met up at noon at Bulldog’s Pub NE for a meetup, lunch and some fine beer. Lanny Hoff, who was the primary organizer, is also a local importer of a lineup of some very fine Belgian beers, so the route was planned to hit a few of the best beer joints in town. Not only did we get some good beer pointers, but he had also organized specials at some of the stops that were much appreciated. He also lined up some cool schwag from the crawl sponsors, and at each stop read off numbers from wristbands that each rider had. Prizes included t-shirts, glassware, hats and more; totally unexpected and fun.

I stuck mainly with friends Monte and Velocipete (who is looking for his digital camera, if anyone found one at the Blue Nile), and a few others whose names i don’t remember. Many friends from the regular Hiawatha shop ride were along, as were many from the Mpls Bikelove forums

From Bulldog’s, we headed downtown to MacKenzie’s for some scotch ale. Then on to Bulldog’s Uptown where we expended the Belgian palette to some beers that the earlier stops didn’t carry. This Bulldog’s is in the old MudPie space, and it makes for nice, cozy neighborhood bar, almost makes me wish i lived on that neighborhood again. From there, on to the Blue Nile over in the Seward neighborhood.

I hadn’t been to the Nile in many years, and it was very very quiet on a Sunday afternoon, but to be fair, i think we were there just as they opened. I wonder if they still have karaoke there on weekends. The beer was excellent, and the crowd a bit smaller but no less convivial, and the middle-eastern snacks hit the spot. I hit it big in this round of schwag number calling, on the last number of the stop, when i got this sweet Urthel brewery cycling jacket:

I skipped out on the last stop to the Town Hall brewery, thinking i might get a bit of work done before the end of the day. What i actually got was a nice, early bedtime that totally hit the spot.

Tons of fun, i hope we can do it again sometime. Big thanks to Lanny for instigating and organizing, Jim and Kevin for sponsoring and promoting the event, and Hohenstein Distributing for door prizes. There’s already talk of doing this again. I’m in.

I’ve been going through this incredibly complete and annotated list of someone’s ranking of the complete Beatles catalog over the last couple of days. I found the link sort of at random, but it coincides nicely with re-learning the guitar, as i’ve been practicing with a number of Beatles songs that i know well enough to play through, given the chord changes.

The thing about the Beatles is that they’ve somehow never seemed like just a band to me. I listened to my mom’s copy of Meet The Beatles that she had bought (it was released 2 years before she was married) when i was a kid, once i was old enough to work the turntable. This album and Bill Cosby’s Wonderfulness were a big part of my soundtrack as a kid, for about a year or two. Because they were already the Beatles though, this legend of massive musical achievement, even when i started playing music myself i never really appreciated them as a workaday band. Sure, i knew they’d spent years playing clubs and worked hard to hone their playing and songwriting, but it was hard to place them in time, having it all happen before i was forming lasting memories.

Going through this list really helped fix that. It’s not that i necessarily agree with the full ranking, it’s that author JBev wrote extensive notes on the project, with background info and some justification for the choices made in the list. As i went through the song notes (worst to best), even though the chronology was jumbled, the notes kept things straight, and for the first time i was really able to get a sense for the time and place when these songs came out, where the band was in their creative arc, and how the world must have reacted to it, like today watching an artist like Neko Case or Radiohead evolving in real time as new songs and albums are released.

I was certainly familiar with the vast majority of the Beatles catalog, but there were a lot of B-sides and less-familiar tracks in the list that i hadn’t listened to before. The bigger hits took on new meaning, because i could finally place some of them in the band’s timeline and understand them in context. To be honest, i wasn’t always aware of exactly which album some songs had come from, or who had written them, so it was helpful to have that framework in this list.

The other thing that shines through in this list and the notes is the appreciation for the talent in the band and the struggles that the band lived through. When you listen to the catalog like this, considering each song on its own, you can hear the little details that really pull the room together, so to speak. The 4 were not just talented songwriters, they obviously worked really hard (with George Martin) to polish the best of them to a spotless shine. As a bass player, there is much to admire in Paul’s playing; so fluid and even funky in spots, really driving the songs from behind. Ringo too gets a lot of props for being the anchor through songs like A Day in the Life where he’s holding the song together through multiple time and feel changes; an indispensably steady hand on the tiller. They were all students of music at large and explored how to filter those influences through their own work.

If you like the Beatles at all, or just want a different appreciation of them, i highly recommend this list as a good starting point. They truly explored musical territory that has lain fallow since

This project started the weekend after New Years, finally done now.

Before and in-progress shots:

After:

I’m no great carpenter, but it seems sturdy enough. The frame is screwed into the wall and chimney, all pine frame and beadboard doors. The whole thing was probably less than $50, and i think it matches the style of the house pretty well. I plan to add a coat or two of orange shellac to better match the existing woodwork, otherwise it’s ready to stock up.

It was a busy first day for the new boss:

Whirlwind hits Washington as President Obama starts work (the Guardian UK)

Obama Issues Directive to Shut Down Guantánamo (NY Times)

Oh, happy day.

Favorite line while listening to his speech at work: “We’ll restore science to its rightful place”. So many implications with that little bit.

From 1994, Frank Black in seamless set of the first three songs from his Teenager of the Year solo album. The rest of this album has some ups and downs, but these first 3 songs are killer. Watching it live also helped me figure out the chords to play them :-)

You know it’s a good/real winter in Minnesota when…

There’s frost on the inside of the back door.

When you’re washing dishes, and the dog barks to go out, so you wipe your hands and go to the back door, only to realize that your hand is sticking to the door knob.

You keep your car keys in your coat pocket, because they’re too cold to put in your pants.

You’re wearing at least three pieces of wool clothing at all times.

You celebrate 20° F with a nice long bike ride (tomorrow, hopefully).

Update: 15+ fun miles with Jess, Chris, Steve, Gene and Steve. Thanks for the ride!

This is what my house turns into, left to my own devices.

(not to be confused with the Mad Ripple effect, which apparently causes spontaneous hoonenannying)

From the Big Picture blog, a stunning series of photos of the earth from astronauts and satellites. I love this one (click for the proper large version):

In mid-December 2005, the diminutive Amsterdam Island made waves – not in the Indian Ocean where it resides, but in the clouds overhead. The MODIS instrument aboard NASA’s Terra satellite captured this image on December 19, 2005. The island itself is almost too small see in this image, but it serves as the starting point for the clouds that flow toward the northeast in a giant V shape. (NASA/Jeff Schmaltz, MODIS Land Rapid Response Team at NASA GSFC)

There’s a metaphor in there somewhere, if only it were painfully obvious…

Commenting on, and headline stolen from today’s Strib article.

The gist of the article is that people are noticing that Minneapolis and the west metro in general are getting the majority of cool new transit projects. This is not news to those of us who bike; it’s not entirely a coincidence that Mpls has over double the rate of bike commuters than St. Paul. Minneapolis has that lovely and well-used Minneapolis Greenway -vs- the indefinitely stalled St. Paul Greenway extension, not to mention the older well-designed paths for those heading west out of town. Minneapolis and the west metro in general has more businesses, more population density, but frankly they’ve also worked harder to get new and expanded transit projects implemented.

St. Paul is trying to play catch-up starting with the central corridor light rail project, which will run 4 blocks from my house. This is a good thing, and the numbers on the Minneapolis Hiawatha line are starting to bear out the predictions for growth along light rail lines, raising the stakes for getting something moving on the east side. The problems we’re running into in St. Paul though are emblematic of the difficulty of rebuilding a lost infrastruture: mainly that of routing around historic locations and public institutions. Hang-ups like these don’t do much to encourage other new projects, even if many of them are unique to building in a downtown area.

Further east, the problem is density – the lack of population density and the overload of density in the public representatives. Woodbury and other eastern ‘burbs have been built up with a sprawling lack of planning that practically precludes central transit service. Wisconsinites from Hudson are a better target ridership than most of the east side within the 694 loop.

It wouldn’t surprise anyone that my own response to the Stillwater commuter complaints is to ‘move closer to work, if your commute is a burden’. What’s more surprising to me is the overwhelming percentage of comments to the story that are saying the same thing. I guess given the usual pro-driving response that cycling stories usually get, i expected more sympathy and demands for more road lanes. Instead, the call is for more personal responsibility for the choices made, and encouragement to make the changes they seek. In short, if the east-siders want rail, they’d better clue in Michele Bachman, because so far she has fought against anything that doesn’t resemble a person traveling in their own vehicle.

The commuting discussion inevitably gets tied into gas prices, but to me this really misses the point. Sure, the monetary cost of the commute goes up and down with the price of gas, and woe to those who had planned their budget around low gas prices. (Hint: it won’t stay under $2 forever, it’ll go back up again, guaranteed.) No, the real question for me isn’t the money, it’s the time and angst. Is it really worth living where you live to spend so much of your life in the car every day? It would be really hard for me to wash away 5 days of rush hour in even a good weekend.

I liked living (and working) in the country when i did, and i’d love to live where i could bike off into the woods from my back door and not see a paved road for hours. But if the cost of that is spending 3 hours every day navigating through traffic, i can’t reconcile that against everything else i could do with that time. Increasingly, it seems others are reaching the same conclusion. Time is nigh for the east siders unhappy with their commutes to either get busy moving or get busy lobbying.