The grass is always greener

The field of the Twins’ new stadium in Mpls. is now being covered with Colorado-grown Kentucky blue grass. Although they expect this imported grass to grow in Minnesota, Minnesota grass wouldn’t work there. Local grass growers are up in arms.

While it would make good PR sense for the team to look for local or regional products to fill its needs, nobody has ever suggested that only Minnesota-grown players should be on the team. And they do use Hormel hot dogs even though many, if not most, people in the state who remember 1986 would prefer not to do business with those folks.

Mary Jo who? We don’t want to remember.

A sexual harasser who managed any jail or prison time after killing a woman in the course of his harassment has just died. [Don’t tell us that connections and/or wealth don’t help.] His passing probably won’t get the attention that the recent death of a child molester has received, but he is receiving a lot.

I remember when he spoke at the Civic Center in 1971 to raise money for the DFL Party and people who we would now call “abortion rights supporters” and/or “feminists” demonstrated against him, showing caricatures of the senior senator from Massachusetts pregnant captioned “if he were pregnant” and attacking him for his position on abortion. [In later years he almost looked the caricature, but I am confident that pregnancy was not the reason.]

Of course, this senator whose name I am withholding changed sides and the feminists made peace with him.

In 1980 the same senator whose name I am withholding challenged President Carter and helped bring on the Reagan era.

Yet Democrats continued to lionize him. And last year Senator Obama made an extra effort to enlist his support.

And I hear today that this guy who never saw combat is to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

To quote Yakov Smirnoff: “What a country!”

Notes on newspapers

I bought both the local paper and the Mpls. paper today. Only the local paper had any coverage of the death of Senator Kennedy. Considering the timing, that seems understandable.

But further examination of the rags leads me to wonder two things:

1. It was certainly nice of the [Dispatch] Pioneer-Press to tell us all where to go to look for drag races on weekends. Those maps certainly were nice.

2. Neither paper gives a lot of thought or space to its opinion pages any more, yet they both have access to much material. Wouldn’t you think that they might want to avoid duplication unless there was something really good in what was being duplicated? Yet today’s Star[-Journal and] Tribune ran a Kagan piece that the wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq are not “wars of choice” that the DPP had run Tuesday. Don’t the folks at the Mpls. paper read the DPP? There did not seem to be that much compelling and distinctive content to the piece.

Just a suggestion

Mayor Coleman the Second has announced in his budget address that he intends to keep at least some of the libraries open every day. This will undoubtedly aggravate what is already a confusing schedule for the general public to adjust to since various libraries have schedules which vary from day to day, generally Wednesday and Thursday varying from Tuesday and Friday.

Every library has a sign that tells its hours but you have to be up close to see most or all of them. The signs are pretty useless to people approaching the library by motor vehicle. Why don’t we have signs visible from the street?

Held captive at Rochester

Nobody should feel good about what happened last weekend in Rochester when a few dozen people were kept prisoner in a plane on the tarmac at Rochester International Airport.


There are laws against kidnapping. Are they waived just because an airplane is involved. Why not prosecution in criminal court in addition to whatever civil action might arise from Continental's kidnapping at the Rochester airport.

This idea of using corporations to excuse the evils those involved conspire to do has to come to a stop.

Post offices not big enough not to fail

Per KARE Television

Two Saint Paul post offices are scheduled by USPS for closing. One is the Como Station in St. Anthony Park. The other is Seeger Square on Arcade Street.

A post office is more than a place to send and pick up mail and to purchase postage, necessary as those things are. It is kind of a third place, a community gathering place and a neighborhood amenity. I doubt if there really is another post office which can serve St. Anthony Park like the present one does and I am darned sure that there is no post office which can serve the people of the East Side like the one at Seeger Square does.

This is the only post office in either the Payne/Phalen or Dayton’s Bluff areas. [Yes there is one called the “Dayton’s Bluff Station” but it is not on Dayton’s Bluff, but instead well on the other side of Johnson Parkway. Truth has never been a treasured quality at USPS.]

Closing this station will mean that more than 50,000 people will no longer have a post office in their neighborhood.

Is that responsible efficiency? Maybe, but as I noted above a post office performs necessary services. And a government which can bail out big banks and insurance companies ought to be able to keep necessary community functions being filled.

But neighborhoods just aren’t “too big” to fail.

I can also suggest this earlier article by Mary Thoemke in the Daily Reader.