March is the big month for Downtown Saint Paul, Minnesota. It’s certainly not because of the dreary, drippy weather that gets everyone a bit down after a while. It’s our month because it’s Tournament Time, the giddy sidewalks packed with people in town to see, in turn, the Boys High School Wrestling Tournament, the Boys Hockey Tournament, the Western Collegiate Hockey Association (WCHA) Tournament, and sandwiched in there somewhere the bacchanal of Saint Patrick’s Day. It’s a good time to see what works for our city because, after all, the place is bubbling with life and energy and a lot of cash being spent.
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Category Archives: People & Culture
All about the standing-upright chimps that really love to talk about themselves.
Quotations
Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever.
– Napoleon Bonaparte
The use of quotations from famous people long gone is an easy way to dress up a blog or other writing. It can be done as an epigram that frames the piece, as I did here, or something that inspires a work and sneaks in gradually. More often than not it’s an appeal to authority, a claim on the mind of someone long gone who is revered one way or the other. When it’s done well it crystallizes the point being made into an image that is memorable and mythical. That’s what makes quotations useful.
Tempus Fugit
Next weekend, the USofA will adjust the clocks to Daylight Savings Time. When we come off of it in the Fall, we get no interest on the daylight that we were forced to save. Why do we have any interest in this scheme at all? Those of us who have worked with people in other nations gradually realize that monkeying with the clocks only proves how artificial the whole idea of time is, and that we’re better off with one time across the globe.
Ha Tien
On University Avenue, around Western, sit a cluster of stores with a very distinct purpose. They sit aside other things around them, despite being in the middle of Saint Paul, for one very important reason – they serve different customers than the big stores further down by the Snelling off-ramp. This is the part of the city that has yet to achieve a strong name or definition on its own despite its different nature, a part of the city more likely ignored than given a name like “Little Asia” or “New Vietnam”. Anyone who pledges to care about the future of University Avenue, or especially Saint Paul, should spend some time getting to know this world. A good place to start is the grocery store called Ha Tien.
The Living Lincoln
Heroes come and go in a nation as large and diverse as the USofA. The ones that stand out are the ones that keep coming back to us in times of trouble, re-evaluated and reclaimed for a new generation. None of our heroes has the ability to comfort us in difficult times like Abraham Lincoln, and his resurgence recently is a wonderful mirror through which we can see where we stand with a strong clarity and resolve. As great as he was, his presence as a myth is even more powerful than the man himself.
Barataria - The work of Erik Hare 