bearing blog

Police blotter item.

Actually from Apple Valley.  According to the Star Tribune, on August 10th:

Theft. A man called police to report his wallet was stolen by a cab driver who drove him home from a bar. As the taxi pulled up to his house he told the driver he would have to go inside to get the money to pay him. The taxi driver reportedly told him the only way he would allow that would be if he left his wallet with him and he would get the wallet back when he returned with the money. He said he then went into his house, used the bathroom, and got hungry and decided to make himself something to eat. After eating he went back outside and the taxi was gone.

Yes, I searched the police blotter to see if any cab drivers had reported being bilked of a fare they took home from a bar.  No luck; I guess my career as an investigator will have to wait.

"Maybe they will be less mean to me if I make them something delicious."

Fun interview with Anna Prasomphol Fieser of local restaurant True Thai.

Did your mom actively teach you to cook, or did you learn from being in that environment?

Well, we had no TV at all growing up. My dad owned a movie theater, but he didn’t allow me to go watch movies. The only time that I’d get to go see a movie — even though it was free — was after exams. Even then I had to have a note from my dad to show at the theater, “Let me in!”

So, all the time I had available, my mom said, “Either you come help me and learn how to cook or you go study French after school.” And, after being in school all day, I didn’t want to do anymore reading or studying, so I had no choice.

And she called that a bonding time – just me and her. Also, being a girl growing up with eight brothers in the household, you may think, oh, maybe they will be more nurturing with me, but no; they were very rough. So, in order to please them… maybe they will be less mean to me if I make them something delicious.

The myth of the Minnesota fear of spicy food, the $2,000 Kaffir lime prep-cook fiasco, and more at the link

Bad directions.

So when a chunk of local infrastructure is so poorly designed that it annoys thousands of people every year, but it's been that way for so long that many locals are used to it, is it a waste of taxpayer money to improve the design, or not?

It depends on whether the design improvement actually solves the problem. 

Based on the number of comments on the Star Tribune story, apparently the hottest topic in the Twin Cities isn't the Minnesota Senate race, but airport signage.  And apparently most of my fellow citizens are of the opinion that if you get lost on the way to the airport because of confusing signs, it's your own damn fault. 

A little background for the out-of-towners.

We have one major airport here in the Twin Cities, the Minneapolis-St.Paul International Airport, with one three-letter airport code, MSP.   That airport has two terminals.

1. What everyone calls the "Main Terminal," but which is really named the Charles A. Lindbergh Terminal, and which is served by all but a few airlines.
2. The "Humphrey Terminal," i.e., the Hubert H. Humphrey Terminal, which is served by AirTran, JetAmerica, IcelandAir, Southwest, Sun Country, and several charter lines including Aeroméxico.

So far this is not unusual for a mid-sized American city:  one airport, two terminals, check.  Here is the unusual part.  The two terminals are not accessed by the same exit on the highway.   You can take the train from one terminal to the other, but it isn't a trivial operation -- we're not talking about a little airport peoplemover, I mean you can take the light-rail line from one stop to the next.  Let's just say that if you arrived at the wrong terminal with not much time to spare, you might well miss your plane.   (Below:  Google Map taking you from Humphrey to Lindbergh in nine minutes, not counting time spent in parking garages or figuring out you're in the wrong terminal.)

View Larger Map

Okay, so, here's where the signage comes into play.  Most cities I've been to with multiple terminals work like this.  You take the (only) exit from the highway that goes to the airport.  Once you're on the airport grounds, airport signs direct you to the correct terminal, usually by the airline you're flying.  Northwest flies out of here, USAirways out of here, etc. etc. etc.  Most cities, the key piece of information you need as you drive to the airport is what airline.  You can just sort of assume that this will get you to the right building.

Not so here.  As you're driving to the airport you are greeted with signs that tell you to take this exit for the Humphrey Terminal and that exit for the Lindbergh terminal.  No mention of airlines, charter vs. scheduled flights, domestic vs. international, or any such useful information.  Leaving you, perhaps a hapless non-Minnesotan, to guess whom Minnesotans hold in high enough regard to honor with the MAIN terminal name, and whom Minnesotans hold in, oh,  a sort of small auxiliary regard.  The erstwhile politician, or the famous aviator?   And wait a minute, if you're on a kind of a small airline anyway, are you even sure you belong in the main terminal?

OK, so the airports commission just voted $2.2 million to improve the signs by referring to the terminals as "1" and "2" (maybe that's a little laughable, but I think this is an improvement, at least if Lindbergh "Main" becomes "1" since at least the ordinal numbers imply a primary and a secondary terminal) and, more importantly, signs that tell drivers where to go for which airline.

Let's leave aside the possibility that the sum is exorbitant.  I do not have enough information to know whether $2.2 million is a good deal for the signage.  I haven't the foggiest idea how much highway signs cost, and none of the news articles have offered any useful context (how much does MNDOT spend on signage per year statewide, for instance?) I'll just take them at their word here.

So... the hostility in the comments on the article towards the improved signage is mind-blowing to me.  "If you're too stupid to find your way to the airport, you're too stupid to fly."  (Hey, maybe we should just eliminate all road signage while we're at it.)  Or "They should just put up one sign for international, one fo""r domestic."  (Huh?  International and domestic flights take off and land from both terminals.)  Or "Everybody knows you should find out which terminal you're going to ahead of time." (Not necessary in most American cities.)  Or, my favorite, "We don't need signs --how hard is it to read what's written on your ticket?"  (What is this artifact, this ticket you speak of?)

Anyway, I for one am glad they're fixing it, if only because it annoys me every time I drive by the signs.  I do hope they don't spend more on the signs than they need to, but matching the exits to the airlines strikes me as the minimum adequate signage.  Look, it would have been nice if they had done it right in the first place and not had to spend the money this year, but when government screws up I think we should expect them to fix it.   I'm glad there are so many people annoyed by government money-wasting, but the money-wasting happened long ago when they made the spectacularly bad signage from the highway.

Fusion cuisine.

A dish I never had before moving to South Minneapolis is tacos al pastor  (Google image search results). It's a specialty of the place up on Lake Street where we always get our Mexican carryout when the tribe comes over:  Taqueria La Hacienda, 334 E Lake Street.  We send Chris to fetch it because he's the only one who speaks any Spanish, and he likes the practice.  

Tacos al pastor look a little bit like Greek gyros.  The meat is spiced, pressed, and stacked on a vertical spit, then slow roasted and shaved off onto corn tortillas.  It's usually served with cilantro, onions, and pineapple; the Taqueria also does a plattered version where they top it with bacon, onions, red and green peppers, and cheese and run it under a broiler or something.

So I find out today from the tcfoodies blog that tacos al pastor looks like gyros for a reason!  It's actually descended from Lebanese shawirma:

...at least according to Wikipedia, the al pastor taco is a Mexican adaptation of shawirma, introduced to Mexico by Lebanese immigrants.

Nice adaptation.  Very nice.

So often we think of fusion cuisine as a peculiarly American melting-pot sort of thing... it's good to be reminded that it happens other places too.  Well, if you ever see tacos al pastor on a menu, be sure to order it -- it's kind of rare to see it outside Mexico City, I'm told.  Lucky South Minneapolis!

"I do it for the children."

Anna Prasomphol Fieser explains the agony of the decision:  whether to have cream cheese wontons on the menu of her restaurant True Thai, easily the best Thai place in Minneapolis.

(Now open on Sundays!  Woo hoo!)

I've only just discovered Ms. Prasomphol Fieser's blog and am really enjoying reading through it, although it's making me hungry.  From her entry on "Starting the day right:"

Reading an old newspaper I saw that a very bright young man just graduated from the University of Minnesota at the ripe old age of 13! Congratulations to Caleb Kumar for becoming the UM's youngest graduate ever.

Wow, and I thought I was precocious for having graduated from high school at the age of 15!

I don't know about Caleb, but I was the victim of a very harsh upbringing. Instead of getting to eat donuts and junk food like all my friends, my mother made me start the day by eating her special salmon dish. On our menu it is known as My Mother's Salmon because it's exactly the same recipe as what I ate each morning as a schoolgirl in Thailand.

Did it work? Well, none of my donut-eating friends graduated until they were 18 and by then I was off to America to study business at Kentucky Business College.

Gorgeous photo of "My Mothers Salmon" at the link.  It makes my fried egg on steamed kale and spinach with olive oil, which I thought was so lovely, look like a bowl of corn flakes.

Semi turns across bike lane, kills commuter cyclist in Minneapolis.

Mark rides this route every day, so his co-workers kept sticking their head into his office all morning to make sure it wasn't him:

On Wednesday morning, just as Dumm took off from the bike lane at the intersection of Park Avenue and E. 14th Street, a semitrailer driver began to make a wide left turn, crossing in front of Dumm and hitting and killing the 31-year-old cyclist.

The driver of the truck will not be cited in connection with the accident, said Minneapolis police spokesman Sgt. Bill Palmer. 

At first I was infuriated that the driver wasn't even cited, because he wasn't following the law -- but then I wondered, how on earth could a semi driver who has to make wide left turns follow the relevant statute?

 (g) Whenever it is necessary for the driver of a motor vehicle to cross a bicycle lane adjacent to the driver's lane of travel to make a turn, the driver shall drive the motor vehicle into the bicycle lane prior to making the turn, and shall make the turn, yielding the right-of-way to any vehicles approaching so close thereto as to constitute an immediate hazard.

 

Okay, it makes sense that the drive is supposed to pull into the bicycle lane before turning, as it avoids the hazard of bicyclists getting sideswiped, but if a semi did that then it'd be up on the sidewalk.  Not sure what the semi driver was supposed to do differently that wouldn't be at least as hazardous.  Witnesses seem to think the cyclist didn't break any rules of the road either.  Sad to say, sometimes the rules don't prevent all possible accidents.

Different traffic markings might help though.  The city of Portland, for example, has special markings called "bike boxes"  that create a visual space for cyclists who would otherwise be crossing a turn lane.  Something like that might have prevented the problem.

Let's hope this tragedy increases awareness of the dangers of biking alongside big trucks.  

Local Hmong cooking.

One of the things that sets the Twin Cities apart is its large population of Hmong; there are many thousands living in Minnesota, and our metro area has one of the highest concentrations in the U. S. 

Not to reduce a culture entirely to its cuisine -- I don't know about you, but I don't feel that I understand people nearly as well if I don't know much about what they eat.  :-)  There are not, as far as I know, a plethora of Hmong restaurants around!  So I was glad to see this article in the local food blog Heavy Table about the Hmong home kitchen.  

In a building at the back [of the International Market Place in St. Paul], vendors sell produce such as greens, herbs, lemongrass, lychees, and longans, year-round. This time of year, the outdoor produce vendors sell seedlings for Hmong herbs. “Hmong people do a lot of gardening,” says Kasouaher. “It’s ingrained to grow your own stuff. Use what you can, then give the rest to family.”

 Sweeping her hand over orderly rows of potted seedlings, $2 each, Hang says, ‘These are all chicken herbs,” referring to a recipe that I’d inquired about, “Fresh Chicken with Hmong Herbs (Soup for New Mothers)” in Scripter and Yang’s “Cooking from the Heart.” According to the book, “Hmong custom dictates that, for one month after a baby is born, a mother’s diet consist of only this chicken soup, freshly cooked rice, and the warm water drained from the second soaking of rice (kua ntxhai) or clear, warm water.” Kasouaher says that in Laos it could be a big sacrifice for a family to feed a new mother the chicken soup for a month. “It’s a great sign of respect for her daughter-in-law, for a mother-in-law to make the chicken soup for her,” she says. “It is a time for a husband to show how he cares for his wife by making the chicken soup, often reserving for her the best parts of the chicken.”

Says Hang, “You don’t have to have a child to have the chicken.” You can eat the soup anytime. (We’ll include the “Fresh Chicken with Hmong Herbs (Soup for New Mothers)” recipe in Friday’s review of “Cooking from the Heart”).

In the cookbook, the authors describe how many chicken herbs, which can’t be found in the typical American grocery store, ”originated from seeds and starts carefully brought to the United States from Laos in the handbags and pockets of Hmong women striving to preserve their healthy cooking traditions.”

Some cool pictures at the link, including some gorgeous food photos.  Apparently there is a new cookbook out, to be reviewed at HT on Friday.

Where I live.

One of the more interesting (to me) bit of social research out of the Pew people lately:  Almost half of all people want to live somewhere else.

It's interesting to me because for such a long time I really marveled at the large number of people (even of people with the necessary means) who, growing up in one particular spot, don't leave the place they grow up in.  It's not that the place I grew up in was particularly constricting or backward -- I grew up in the suburbs around Dayton, Ohio, nothing particularly wrong with that -- but I can't remember ever having the expectation that I would stay there as an adult.  Where you choose to live, I thought, is an expression of your individuality.  City girl or country boy.  Northeast, Southwest, ocean or mountains or plains.  Leave the country even, live in another place if you want, but find the place that suits you if you can.  It's only chance that planted you where you are; why would anyone expect that this particular roll of the dice is where you'd thrive?

(People whose family moved around a lot as kids weren't in my calculation at all here.)

Anyway, I did wind up moving away, and as it turns out the place I picked to settle for the rest of my life does suit my taste extremely well.  I live in a city, and I remained in the Midwest (I guess, some people call this the plains).  As a child I dreamed of living in a big city, New York or San Francisco; I think now that I'm a Midwestern girl, so that Chicago might have worked well but (there being not much else big to speak of) that's about it.

But this has happened to me before:  When I decided where to live for the rest of my life, I didn't know I was doing it at the time.  I thought I was picking a grad school.  Since then my sweetheart's (unexpected to me) decision to quit his Cincinnati job and follow me, marriage, children, and good friends have gathered around me ("like so much cement!"  no wait, that is not the image I want, hm) and, well, here I am for good, here in Minneapolis, and I'm happy.

(Sometimes, at night, I wake up in a cold sweat, thinking of what might have been, and want to fall to my knees and thank the good Lord that I did not decide to go to Berkeley.  It was a close call.)

So:  I left, and I am in a good place.   At first I continued to be astonished at people who didn't leave.  Not, again, that suburban southwestern Ohio is a bad place to be, but just that so many people were happy in the place that chance had put them.  And even weirder, that some folks (relatives for instance) would ask, "When are you moving back home?"  

I'm not moving "home," at least not home to Ohio.  Home isn't in Ohio anymore, it's in Minneapolis!  Why would I leave...

...why would I leave my home?

Anyway, after a few years of saying that, the irony got through my own skull.  I have reasons to live here by now that are not at all about "expressing my individuality" or about "living in the kind of place that suits me."  Not even about where my job is, or where my husband's job is.  City vs. suburbs, there's some leeway there (or at least there will be when the housing market settles down), but it's been long enough that I can say, okay, I get it now.

Altercation, again.

Around 1:30 in the morning the sound of scuffling and yelling filtered through my consciousness.  I raised my head from the pillow in the darkness, confused -- was that the kids?  No -- the neighbors?  -- didn't sound like them -- ugh.  Again.

It's hard to get the muscles moving when you're wrenched out of sleep.  I wriggled out from between my sleeping husband and sleeping daughter and groped my way to the bedroom window that overlooks the street.  Peeping through the curtains, I couldn't see much, but the yelling was so loud -- obscenities, get your hands off me you %@#$, and thumping noises -- that at first I thought the fight was on our own front porch.  

I moved quickly to the bathroom to see through the other window, then back, and then finally as the last fog of sleepy confusion lifted, I saw the two people, a man and a woman, at each other's throats and screaming at each other, in the open door on the far side of an unfamiliar pickup truck parked directly across the street.  The woman's words were easy to make out, the man's just a low-register snarl.  A third person sat in the driver's seat with his door closed and his window open; all I saw of him was a tiny orange glow that went up and down, perhaps the tip of a lit cigarette, perhaps a cell phone display.

The screaming continued, first the man's voice, then the woman's, and they were hitting each other.

"What is it?" said Mark, already reaching for his phone.

"Pickup truck... three people... one's a woman I think... okay, assault is definitely happening now," I said, still moving back and forth between the bedroom and the bathroom as Mark dialed 911.

Again.  

Hmm, how many times have we called 911 since we moved onto our street in south Minneapolis?  More than I can accurately estimate.  Two dozen times?  More?  Maybe.  We've been here six years or so.   

We do not call for loud parties -- hey, I am always pleased when the sound of loud voices outside is made by people who are celebrating, not angry.  We do not call for car alarms; they stop on their own eventually.   We call when people are fighting, or unconscious, or rolling in the street wailing that they've been raped, or throwing up on our lawn.  Or yelling angry words and running down the street with a handgun drawn, which, despite my unreserved support for a liberal interpretation of the Second Amendment, I personally classify as "suspicious behavior."

Mark described the goings-on in a brief call to the 911 dispatcher as the fighting grew louder, the woman's voice higher-pitched, the sounds of impact against the truck more frequent.  Mark went into the bathroom, where it is darker and he would not be back-lit, to watch.  "Do you have to stand there?  The cops are coming, there's no reason to stand there," I told him.  

"If something happens, I'll be a witness.  Look, I know there's a risk."

I scooped sleeping Mary Jane from our bed and carried her away from the windows, away from the front wall, into the hallway, something I've done before.  Tyesha Edwards is never far from my mind at times like this.  She wrapped her arms around my neck, turned her face into my neck away from the light, and went back to sleep.  It seemed longer than usual before the bright blue lights moved slowly across the ceiling and the yelling stopped.

The woman's voice we could hear, friendly, instantly cheerful and calm where before it had been all obscenities and full-throated hoarse screaming.  It is absolutely amazing, the change in their tone of voice when the police show up.  We have seen this happen before.  "No, nothing's wrong officer.  No, I'm fine."  

If there had just been two of them, the one woman and the one man, I might guess we were looking at a so-called domestic dispute, even though it was taking place on my street in a vehicle I'd never seen before.  What's more likely, given the presence of a third man?  Drugs?  Some kind of prostitution thing gone awry?  (The police liaison told our block club that in our area, prostitution is more significant than drugs or other gang activity.  Used condoms show up from time to time by my garage door.  Our neighbor in the back told us he was offered "services" last year, from a woman walking down the alley as he crossed the yard from his house to his garage.)

The cop ran the license, I guess nothing serious came up, because they all drove away.  We went back to bed.

It takes me a long time to get to sleep after this kind of thing.  You'd think I'd be more used to it by now.

Circus.

Tuesday we went to the Children's Theatre Company to see Madeline and the Gypsies, minus Mark and plus Hannah's 6yo Silas, who thought he'd died and gone to heaven what with the free pizza and the Fruit By The Foot I bought the kids during intermission, 

I love theatre, and I don't think I've seen a single production of anything not expressly for children since, uh, we had children.  Such is life.  But luckily, here in the Twin Cities, the children's theatre is top-notch, and we've enjoyed being subscribers.  Madeline and the Gypsies was especially fun, I thought, because it featured performers from St. Paul's Circus Juventas, the circus arts school for ages 3-21.  I especially liked to watch a father-son balancing act team -- the little boy was maybe 6 or 7, doing flips off his daddy's hands -- and a young man who did a routine on a German wheel, which I'd never seen before.  And if I was impressed, imagine the three boys I was with -- I thought they were going to pitch off the balcony from bouncing on their seats and pointing and squealing.

What, doesn't your town have a circus arts school?   For kids whose parents don't think they climb the walls nearly enough?  Courses are available in acrobatics, aerial, balance -- yup, high wire and all that -- clowning, juggling, various types of dance.  After watching the play I was tempted to sign Milo up for one of their 3-6yo classes.   Kind of pricey, but cool.

The Children's Theatre Company does shows expressly for older kids and teens -- they've done Antigone and Romeo and Juliet in recent years.  I'm looking forward to going with my kids to some of these as they get older.