This is not OK

I am from Minneapolis.

I lived a few blocks away from where Alex Pretti was killed. For somewhere around 12 years. It was so long that I’m even a bit fuzzy around exact dates. Like, I think I moved there in 1994 and moved out in 2006? So let's say it was a dozen years.

I have stood right where Alex Pretti stood.

I have been to every business on the 2600 block of Nicollet Avenue many times.

Glam Doll Donuts, my favorite donut shop in the whole world, wasn’t there when I lived nearby. It opened later, in 2013. But even after I moved away, I made a point to stop there when I came back. Every time I was in Minneapolis, I tried to get coffee and a donut at Glam Doll at least once per visit. Every time, I thought to myself, geez, I wish this had been here when I lived in the neighborhood!

A perfect weekend morning for me on more than one trip was coffee + donut at Glam Doll, followed by record shopping at Cheapo Records. With friends, or by myself. The picture above was taken by me on a 2023 visit to Glam Doll.

That section of Nicollet Avenue is called “Eat Street” because it holds some of the best restaurants in the Twin Cities. I’ve been to many of them. Some have closed since my time there, but many remain: Quang, Pho 79/Caravelle, Black Forest Inn, Rainbow Restaurant, and others. Little Tijuana was a famously dive-y Mexican Restaurant right around the corner, on 26th Street.

I used to be nervous to walk around that neighborhood when I first moved there in the 1990s. It took me a while to get comfortable with it. I learned to love walking to the corner store, to the hardware store, to the restaurants, to the coffee shop that used to be on the corner of Nicollet and Franklin, and then southward down to all the great restaurants of Eat Street.

I used to stop at Caravelle to pick up Chinese food on the way home from my job in the suburbs.

I used to love a good Paulaner Weissbier at the Black Forest Inn.

That neighborhood was home. It still holds a special place in my heart.

I am sad and angry for what happened to Alex Pretti on 26th and Nicollet.

I am sad for the fine people behind Glam Doll Donuts. I want the world to know about them, but because their donuts are fantastic and everybody there is always friendly … not because of this. This is not why their storefront should be on the national news.

What the government is doing is damaging Minneapolis. Hurting my onetime home. Hurting my friends. Hurting good people.

It must stop.

One-pot Instant Pot beef and pasta

I love my electric pressure cooker. My off brand not quite an "Instant Pot" is my go-to device for cooking an easy and simple dinner. I've been writing these up as recipes lately, so I can easily find them later, and today, I'll share with you this one: How to make pasta and ground meat in the instant pot.

You'll need:

• One pound fresh ground beef, chicken or turkey. I often use ground chicken, because it's often on sale where I live, as low as $3.99 a pound. Sometimes even less.
• A jar of pasta sauce, typical size is 24 ounces.
• Dried noodles. Nothing special here, I just buy whatever medium-sized pasta is on sale, usually rotini or penne. I usually use about 8 ounces, or about half a typical box.
• 1.5 cups of broth or water. I mostly use water and tend to save broth for soups and stews.

First, sauté the meat in the instant pot. Brown the meat, it's easy. Chunk it up as you go. I have what I call the "meat asterisk," a meat masher or ground meat chopper. You should get one, they're cheap. I got mine at Aldi for $3, but Dollar Tree has even cheaper ones. It is perfect for breaking up the fresh ground meat block into little blobs.

(If you want to get fancy, you can add italian spices at this point, or even a bit of diced onion. I keep diced onion in the freezer so that I can grab a handful of it in a pinch and add it to whatever I'm making.)

Next, turn off sauté mode and pour in the water. Add the pasta noodles and gently push them so they're mostly in the water. Add the sauce over the top. Try to cover it all with sauce. Don't stir anything at all.

Set the pressure cooker to cook for five minutes on high. Which really means, it'll take 15-20 minutes to come up to pressure, then it will pressure cook for 5 minutes, then it will take 15-25 minutes to come back down from pressure and then you can eat dinner. So I try to set the cooker up an hour before I want to have dinner, and after it's done cooking, it goes into "keep warm" mode automatically, so dinner will be warm and ready whenever I happen to wander back into the kitchen after it's done.

That's all there is to it. Just the maybe 10 minutes of prep, if you're browning ground beef (chicken or turkey browns faster), and that's it. It's more than enough food for two people, with ample leftovers for tomorrow's lunch. Or you could portion it up into zip bags or containers to freeze some of it for later re-heating.

The pasta will be soft, but that's okay with me.

Enjoy!

Bag Storage at Denver Union Station

Denver's Union Station has no place to check bags, at least as of August, 2024. They used to. The station has a very nice hotel called the Crawford, which used to check bags for a fee. They no longer do. The station also services Amtrak, and Amtrak used to have lockers, but they no longer do. I have no idea why, but it's easy to guess.

I had checked out of my hotel in Boulder, taken the (very nice) Flatiron Flyer bus back to Denver, and now I had time to kill before my evening train back to Chicago. Where could I park my bags, so I could walk around and explore, unfettered? I asked at the front desk of the Crawford Hotel and the nice lady there gave me a card for LUGDEN. LUGDEN is....a van. A van parked on Wynkoop Street, by 17th, right across from Union Station. They'll let you check luggage for a fee (at the time of writing, $3/hour or $10/day). I was able to check both of my bags successfully, head to Meow Wolf, followed by lunch and wandering, then swing back and pick up my bags in time to grab a pre-train cocktail at the Terminal Bar.

So, I'm sharing this here for those who, like me, searched online and found information lacking. You'll find old message board posts that suggest that Amtrak and the Crawford will check bags for a fee, but then neither Amtrak or the Crawford's website say this any more, and when I asked at the hotel, they weren't storing bags for non-guests. So, anything you see online suggesting otherwise is probably out of date.

Need to store luggage at Denver's Union Station? You'll want to look for LUGDEN. Find their website here, get a card from the front desk of the Crawford Hotel, or look for them on Wynkoop Street.

While it may seem to be a bit of an odd setup, everything worked fine, the process was easy, the person manning the van was professional, and they do take credit cards. I had no issues at all and would recommend them to others.

The 1981 Lake Harriet / Har Mar tornadoes in Minneapolis

The other night here in Chicago we had a crazy walloping of 11+ confirmed tornadoes during very bad storms. After surviving that, coworkers were sharing their opinions with me about what's scarier, hurricanes or tornadoes? I've had to get out of town to avoid a hurricane before, and I guess I've been lucky that I've always been able to make use of fair warning -- we tend to see the hurricanes coming, though their path can change and their intensity, too.

But what of tornadoes? I definitely am not a fan of tornadoes, going all the way back to when I was a child, growing up in Minneapolis. In 1986 there was a storm in Fridley (a suburb of Minneapolis) that spawned a huge tornado that a TV station caught on video and was famously shared around the world.

But even prior to that, back in 1981, a tornado ripped across the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, and went right through the neighborhood of Linden Hills, where I was growing up. I was wondering about that tornado, asking myself how correct my recollection of it was, and it turns out that local television station KARE-TV recapped that June 14, 1981 tornado a few years ago, and so I share that with you below. Enjoy!

(They've also recapped the famous July 1986 tornado as well.)

Like Grandma's basement

Sometimes I order an old record from eBay, sight unseen. Or seen via photo. But not smelled. I have no idea how it's going to smell until it arrives. I guess that's how I ended up with this album, which smells like grandma's basement. I guess that this is proof that it really is an original pressing from 1963.

The album: Crash! Kenny Burrell with the Brother Jack McDuff Quartet.

Great album. I've already listened to it half a dozen times in less than a month.

Growing Spam Resource

My deliverability blog Spam Resource got about 398,000 visits in 2023. Is that good or bad? It feels good. It's been fun blogging about email, deliverability, mailbox providers, marketing best practices, and all that kind of stuff. Near the end of 2021, I slowly started to overhaul the blog with the hope of increasing visibility and traffic.

Quick and Incomplete Notes on Low Salt Food

I've had to change my diet recently after learning that I have a heart condition. It's not possible to completely eliminate salt (unless I want to only eat rocks), so I'm not going to be able to get to a zero sodium diet, but I have decided to eliminate sodium from my diet wherever I can. Here's a few of my notes on what I look for when buying food.

Hang in there. We need you.

It's a shitty time. Depression falls from the sky more easily than the rain lately.

Please remember that your family needs you, your friends need you, your pets need you. The world needs you (even if you don't realize it). Depression can and will grab at you. Try hard not to let it eat you up whole. Get up out of bed in the morning, walk your dog, shower, brush your teeth, no matter what. Survive and try to even thrive, so that you can help others through this time.

Please wear a mask

Please. Wear a mask when you are outdoors and around others.

Yes, wearing masks helps. Here's why. Maria Godoy, Minnesota Public Radio, June 21, 2020.

More.

Even more: 

• Face masks work. They need to be mandatory.
• Do cloth face masks really work? We tested them in the lab.
• Still Confused About Masks? Here’s the Science Behind How Face Masks Prevent Coronavirus. 
• Face masks don’t even have to work especially well to be effective. 

No, face masks don't lower oxygen intake or put you at risk of carbon dioxide poisoning.

Updated: July 20, 2020.

But what of antifa?

What IS antifa? I don't know much about them, and I suspect you don't either, so maybe start with Wikipeda. Jezebel's Harron Walker has a good and quick take for you as well. See "Area Fascist Still Doesn't Know What Antifa Is." (Jezebel, May 31, 2020.)

Beyond that, a greater understanding of "what is antifa" is too much for me to tackle. Instead, I'm just taking a few notes here based on my concern around the president labeling antifa a terrorist group. I decided to do a bit of googling and reading around the news to try to answer one question for myself: Is "antifa" actually behind all the rioting and looting going on in the US these past days? If so, maybe some level of outrage is warranted. If not, it's fair to question what's actually going on here.

Black Lives Matter

Other people can explain this better than I can, so I'm going to quote and link quite a bit here.

Black Lives Matter. Doesn't "All Lives Matter" mean the same thing / mean a good thing, too?

No. German Lopez from VOX explains  Why you should stop saying “all lives matter,” explained in 9 different ways . (July 11, 2016.)

It’s a common conversation these days: One person says, “Black lives matter.” Then another responds, “No, all lives matter.”

It’s also a complete misunderstanding of what the phrase “black lives matter” means. The person on the receiving end interprets the phrase as “black lives matter more than any other lives.”

But the point of Black Lives Matter isn't to suggest that black lives should be or are more important than all other lives. Instead, it’s simply pointing out that black people's lives are relatively undervalued in the US — and more likely to be ended by police — and the country needs to recognize that inequity to bring an end to it.

My Coronavirus Notes & FAQ

Here I'm pulling together a few different bits of information on dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic that I believe to be correct. I've linked to sources and included publication dates to help with identification and trust.

Starting with: Should you wear a mask when out and about?

Yes. See this post from Daring Fireball's John Gruber. "We’re waiting for peer-reviewed studies. In the meantime, early studies and anecdotal evidence from countries with established mask-wearing social norms suggest quite strongly that mask wearing is effective." (May 21, 2020.)
See also "HAMSTER RESEARCH SHOWS MASKS EFFECTIVE IN PREVENTING COVID-19 TRANSMISSION" linked to and summarized by John Gruber. (May 21, 2020.)

John's not some conspiracy theorist. He's a respected tech blogger linking to various respectable sources of information.

On the subject of voting

“It comes from a very ancient democracy, you see..."

"You mean, it comes from a world of lizards?"

Greetings from NOLA!

Greetings from New Orleans! My wife and I are down here for a bit, dog and house sitting for a friend. So far we've seen some great music (Snug Harbor might be my new favorite jazz club), and had fantastic food and drink at too many places to mention, both in the French Quarter and around the Bywater neighborhood we're we are staying.

SONOS on a budget? IKEA Symfonisk!

Looking to expand your SONOS home audio system? Or want to get into the wifi zoned audio game on a budget? Check out IKEA's new Symfonisk speakers! Created in collaboration with SONOS, they are fully compatible with other SONOS speakers. I've got three SONOS speakers already (two Play:3 and one Connect:Amp), and it was a breeze to add this new Symfonisk speaker so that we could listen to music while preparing dinner in the kitchen.

Love it or leave it? No. Improve it.

This "love it or leave it" garbage is not new. Fifty years ago people were pointing out how stupid it is. Here's proof.

From the July 21, 1969 Chicago Tribune: On the op-ed page, Sydney J. Harris wrote a piece headlined, “The ‘love it or leave it’ nonsense.”

“One of the most ignorant and hateful statements that a person can make to another is, ‘If you don’t like it here, why don’t you leave?’” Harris wrote. “Most people who want to change conditions do like it here: they love it here. They love it so much they cannot stand to see it suffer from its imperfections, and want it to live up to its ideals. It is the people who placidly accept the corruptions and perversions and inequities in our society who do not love America.”

From the Chicago Tribune.

Our new apartment!

I never planned to become a home owner -- it just sort of happened. But it's good to live indoors, and rents are going to keep going up.

Here's two walkthrough videos of our wonderful new space in Chicago. First, right after closing, and next, about a month later after we've gotten some furniture in place.

Goodbye, Croslene Kettle

Very sad to hear of our neighbor and friend Kettle's passing yesterday.

Here's what happened, courtesy of Block Club Chicago.

My wife wrote something up about him for her newsletter.

Our alderperson Maria Hadden shared this as well.

And finally, Jonathan Ballew of Block Club Chicago wrote this wonderful article that helps to explain what Kettle meant to us in Rogers Park (and vice versa).

Chicago: Rogers Park Viaduct Clearances Map

I just moved back to the Windy City, and I'm about to have some furniture delivered. Delivery of big items here can be tricky, with the "L" tracks overhead. Some movers even sort of try to B.S. you and say their trucks can't make it to a certain part of town. Which isn't true, if they check bridge clearances-- and this map helps you do that. This map used to be found on the prior alderman's website, which is now deleted. So I'm linking to it here. Hope people find it useful.

Impossible Sliders: Try 'em!

My wife and I are road tripping around the country with our dog. I am so tired of driving and ready to be back home, but that's another story for another time.