Tag Archives: Minnesota

Goofing, Music

New state anthem

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I suggested a new state anthem for Minnesota (lost to the internet now, alas) some years back. But that was in the quaint, distant, antebellum past. Today, as an embattled sovereign jurisdiction, we face circumstances calling for something a little more bellicose.

I posted about the popular southern song of the Civil War, “The Bonnie Blue Flag,” the other day.

I must have been off my game, because it didn’t occur to me at the time that our new, much-vaunted, progressive state flag (shown at the top) is indeed, a bonnie blue flag, bearing a single star.

It was for me the work of but a few hours to come up with the following new anthem for my beloved state, to which I vow eternal loyalty:

We are a band of siblings, we live on stolen soil, 
And when it starts to freeze outside, our blood begins to boil; 
So when our graft was threatened, we rallied to Omar, 
Hooray for the Bonnie Blue Flag, that bears a single star.
Hurrah! Hurrah!
For Gopher graft hurrah!
Hurrah for the Bonnie Blue Flag that bears a single star!
As long as good old Uncle Sam looked off the other way, 
Cheap labor and big money grants made public service pay. 
But now that pesky auditors have rushed in from afar 
We hoist on high the Bonnie Blue Flag that bears a single star!
Hurrah! Hurrah! 
For Gopher graft hurrah! 
Hurrah for the Bonnie Blue Flag that bears a single star!

Music

States’ rights and nullification!

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Apparently I now live in a state that no longer recognizes the priority of federal law. I post the song above out of a sense of prudence, so that I won’t be considered a traitor by my secessionist neighbors.

The lyrics to the song “The Bonnie Blue Flag” were written in 1861, by an entertainer named Harry McCarthy. The tune, like so many of our best tunes, was stolen from the Irish — the original song was called “The Irish Jaunting Car.”

The music in this clip comes from the 2003 movie, “Gods and Generals.” The visuals are a montage.

Goofing, Uncategorized

Annals of arctic shopping

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Fridtjof Nansen and crew members download Windows 1 from the Cloud, 1894.

A notable day this was. Finally got something done I’d been wanting to do all week. It cost me money, but if ‘twere done, then ‘twere best ‘twere done quickly, as the bald guy said.

I decided I needed a new laptop on Monday. The keys on the old one were stuttering, doubling random letters, which means your work load rises about 50% when you subsist by the keyboard as I do. But I got sick, as I’ve mentioned, and languished at home, doomed to work (work still came in) on my desktop computer, which really isn’t that bad. But I hate messing up my procedures, you know? It’s one of the perquisites of old age, being stuck in your ways.

Today I felt better, and decided this would be it. It was one of the coldest days of the year (the year being six days old), but I figured that would keep the other shoppers at home (I was mistaken, of course. This is Minnesota, where people jump in icy lakes for fun). My reading of Fridtjof Nansen seemed fitting, because just getting ready to leave the house on a day like this is a little like outfitting an Arctic expedition. (OK, just a little, but sometimes our temperatures are comparable to temps Nansen saw in the pack ice. In summer.)

The Norwegians have a saying – “Det finnes ingen dårlig vær, bare dårlig klær” (“There is no bad weather, just bad clothing”). This is one of the reasons I expected to find non-Scandinavian DNA when I joined an ancestry site. The fact that I found almost none indicates I must be a mutation – my father did visit Hiroshima while in the army in 1946, after all.

But at last I reached my favored computer store, eventually attracting a salesman’s attention. My plan was to spend a certain amount on a refurbished one, which has been my custom for a while. The salesman persuaded me I could get a new one for the same money that would be much more powerful and have a much longer life expectancy. It meant buying a brand I’d planned to avoid, but I saw reason at last. (Update: I’m working on it now, and I’m actually quite pleased. The keyboard action is good, and I haven’t had trouble with any apps [yet]). I notice, looking around, that I actually have a fairly tall stack of crashed laptops sitting around the house, so maybe the refurb strategy wasn’t as shrewd as I thought.

It did come with Windows 11. No doubt I’ll live to regret that, but what’s done is done, as the bald guy also said.

At least I didn’t have to retype half my words on this post.

Uncategorized

‘Lost Conquest” documentary

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Here is a link to a recent documentary (a little over an hour) about Viking enthusiasm in Minnesota, concentrating on the Kensington Rune Stone. I am not in it; I was in the throes of graduate school when it was made. But several friends and acquaintances of mine are featured. I missed the Midwest Viking Festival this past summer, but hope to make it again this year. See it here.

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Romper Room wonks

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Tonight I cooked one of my brother Baal’s purple potatoes for supper. Did you know there are such things as purple potatoes?
It tasted like a potato. No surprises there, thank goodness. But a purple potato is deeply disturbing on a fundamental level. It’s purple inside and out, with thin of sheath of white between the “meat” and the skin. It looks like some kind of unnatural hybrid of potato and beet, and you can’t help thinking that it’s going to taste like something approved by the Center for Science in the Public Interest. Visual cues mean a lot to most of us, and by that standard, I just don’t… (ready for this?) dig purple potatoes.
But it was interesting. Definitely interesting. Maybe three-year-olds will like them, if you tell them they’re dinosaur livers.
Rodham Devon, it was cold today. Cold out of a clear cerulean sky, so that if you kept your window shades open you got a nice solar rebate on your fuel oil bill. But the ambient temperatures more than adjusted for that. On a day like today, there’s nothing between us and the interstellar wastes except a little rind of planetary atmosphere. The sunlight drops in and bounces right back where it came from. Minnesota. A nice place to visit, but even sunlight doesn’t want to spend time here in the winter.
Lots of talk about the Iran Study Group report today. From what I hear and read on the web, it seems pretty much like what everybody expected.
I keep flashing back to my childhood. Elementary school. Green chalkboards and linoleum. A “cool” teacher telling the class, “Today we’re going to have a discussion on current events.”
And he would ask our opinions on how we thought various issues in the news ought to be handled.
The answers were always the same.
In domestic affairs, the answer always was, “The government should make a law…”
In international affairs, the answer always was, “We should sit down with other countries and talk about it.”
“That’s very good. Very thoughtful,” the teacher would say.
(Thomas the weird kid, of course, would say something like, “I think we ought to drop an atom bomb on ‘em.” But the teacher would tell him sternly that if he had nothing appropriate to offer, he should just be quiet.)
Fifty years later, it seems like most of us are still trying to impress that teacher.
Maybe it’s because our culture has bought into the myth of the Wisdom of Children (an opinion that seems to gain adherents as the birth rate decreases).
Or maybe it’s because we’re just culturally stuck in an infantile mode, dressing even in middle age like kids in an Our Gang feature, and bragging loudly about the toys we’ve accumulated (like Viking live steel gear, I know).
But I think a lot of us—even the old codgers of the Iraq Study Group—stopped refining our thinking about public affairs back in elementary school, and we haven’t noticed that the world is a little more complex than we knew in fifth grade.
What was your suggestion again, Thomas?