Gerald Herbert, the Associated Press photographer who took the ubiquitous McCain-Bush hug shot, has produced something nearly as frightening.
Let's see, beloved, though ancient, presidential candidate fore and cameras aft. Where to focus one's attention?
There may be a Star Tribune editor who is eternally grateful for having taken vacation last week. Or maybe they just called in sick.
Human entertainment has many dark basements. At the Roman Coliseum, crowds once howled their approval as human beings slaughtered one another. At strip clubs -- of more recent vintage -- patrons pay to stare as the most intimate and beautiful human acts are reduced to a public display of animal-like grinds and moans.
People who gawk at naked, gyrating women, like those who filled the Coliseum, are not evil, but ordinary human beings.
We all have a dark basement of the soul. We differ in the quality and condition of the locks we try to place on it.
My first reaction to this solemn attempt at poetic profundity — after the laughter, of course — was to consider writing a parody. But good parody is tough work and topping unintentional self-parody is much harder, as Brian Lambert shows with his effort.
Imitating clumsy writing is like purposely singing off-key. A professional will never be as convincing as the earnest and tone deaf amateur.
If you want to try, Lambert and MSP Magazine are sponsoring a contest to Out-Kersten Kersten. You may be able to recombine all her favorite obsessions in an amusing way, but after this, it's hard to imagine anyone beating her on style points.
Do the popularity of ultimate fighting and clubs like Sneaky Pete's signal the end of civilization in the Twin Cities?
No.
They're just more wear and tear on the lock to the dark basement -- and more encouragement for us one day to remove the lock altogether.
I think the record has been locked forever out of reach.
John McCain kicked up a dust storm in Colorado last week when he suggested that western states might renegotiate a water pact that allocates water from the Colorado basin. Even hard-right Republican Senate candidate Bob Schaffer fell all over himself to disagree with his party's presidential candidate.
One commenter on the story at DailyKos predicted McCain would soon be backtracking through his campaign staff, and sure enough, the same day it came in reports in newspapers around the West that picked up the original story with McCain's interview.
Tom Kise, the McCain campaign’s Colorado spokesman, said McCain was not proposing that the 2007 agreement be reopened or any immediate talks on the compact.
“He’s talking about ongoing conversations, conversations that happen this year, next year, 10, 20, 30 years down the road,” Kise said.
To readers far from the West and the politics of water, this whole flap may seem incomprehensible, and so it's unlikely to go much further as a campaign issue. Obama should not want to wade in there.
Reading McCain's original statements, I don't think he was as dumb about water rights as the reaction made out. But in trying to establish that his local knowledge was superior to Obama's, he was clearly impolitic and imprecise in talking about an extremely sensitive issue that has involved considerable ongoing efforts by the states.
If inflaming parties who are already working well together is how Mr. Straight Talk operates on his own turf and in his own language, heaven help us if he ventures into the affairs of other countries.
Although the Democratic National Convention is in Denver and McCain is nominally an Arizonan, any discussion of western issues has been absent from the national campaign. For a good overview of what Westerners would love to ask the candidates, read this column by Coloradoan Ed Quillen.
Seattle council members were optimistic in 2004 when they announced the city's new high-tech public toilets.
"The council and the last three mayors debated for years about how to pay for automated toilets. In the end, we didn't want to sacrifice the beauty of our downtown to the visual wasteland of advertising that some contractors required in their contracts," said Council President Jan Drago.
Last week, the city sold off the toilets on eBay for $12,549. The toilets cost Seattle $5 million to lease and maintain.
The city paid more than it planned to take care of the toilets. Workers had to clean the stalls after trash clogged the self-cleaning mechanism. Losing the toilets will save the city some $4.5 million on the remainder of its operating contract and in cleaning costs over the next several years.
Advertising didn't sully the beauty of downtown, but the johns who used the new public johns did. Prostitutes and drug dealers found the units were a good, private place to do business. After a few years, even the crack heads thought they were too nasty.
Early this year, New York opened its first pay loo, and it — along with Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Boston — plans to expand use of the automated toilets. Advertising revenue seems to be key to making the more expensive facilities affordable, but it's also a sticking point in some communities. Washington state law prohibits charging people to use public restrooms, so Seattle's were free to the public, and without the ad subsidy, sewage fees picked up the cost.
It's not clear whether there's any correlation between free toilets and criminal use. The Seattle potties were apparently placed where drugs and prostitution were already a problem, and 25 cents for 15 to 25 minutes is hardly prohibitive. It may simply be that the added security and privacy afforded by the automated units made them very well-suited for illicit uses.
Less American prudery might actually have resulted in better safety and less misuse.
Though it's easy to make light of this, public accommodations are an important feature of a livable city. Advertising is part of urban street life, and if public toilets, transit stops and bike racks with ads can help defray the cost of enhanced public services, then I'm for more of it.
Access to restrooms is one of the few areas where I'd grant the suburban mall provides a superior experience to most great downtowns.
Those mall restrooms also have less open drug use and prostitution, but that's likely because the suburban customers are shopping in the city where they're less likely to bump into someone they know.
They had me for a second there. I thought the radio reporter said the governor had announced the location of his 2008 Beer Opener.
What a great idea, even though I quickly realized it was the Governor's Deer Opener they were talking about. (Oh, it almost would've been worth having to endure Norm Coleman as governor, just to see how the city boy handled that political ritual.)
Deer hunting, the governor's office tells us, generates $260 million in retail sales and creates nearly 5,300 jobs in the state. Beer drinking, though, generates that much just in taxes, employs 37,170 Minnesotans and makes an estimated total economic contribution to the state of nearly $2.7 billion. No statistics on how much of that beer is sold during deer season.
A Minnesota Beer Opener sponsored by the governor could highlight the local brewing industry which, despite the state's early brewing heritage, has fallen far behind states such as Colorado (30 to 142).
Forget electing a governor we'd like to have a beer with. How about one who'd declare a Beer Opener?