Bosca Dubh

No, it’s not actually a human sacrifice to Mammon in the form of the Wells Fargo Center; this is a statue that graces the entrance to the Fifth Street Towers at 2nd Avenue and … um… Fifth Street in downtown Minneapolis.

World Pinhole Day is today, Sunday, April 30. I’ve taken a screwdriver to one of my Hawkeyes–it doesn’t really need a lens anyway–and I encourage everyone else out there to similarly mangle a camera for Sunday’s festivities. Show the world that all you need to take pictures is a box with a hole in it!

A Minneapolis photoblog without a picture of the Spoonbridge at the Walker Art Center’s sculpture garden? For shame!

I used to visit the sculpture garden occasionally when I lived in Nordeast; it was a nice summer bike ride. But then I moved to the south side, bought a house, got married, and had kids.

The day before Easter I had an unencumbered few hours while Kelly was studying and the boys were at Auntie Kathleen’s house, so I took the train downtown and hiked through Loring Park. I hadn’t been to the Walker for five years or so, and I felt like a tourist. Well, not quite as much of a tourist as the people who were posing for pictures in front of the Spoonbridge, trying to make it look like they were taking a bite out of the cherry or holding it in their fingers. Such fun. I may have some shots of the shenanigans taken with the Spotmatic; we’ll see how they come out.

This was taken with the Nomad–it’s what the cherry might have looked like if it had been built in 1951 instead of 1991.

This is an American Cream draft horse, the only draft horse breed developed in the United States. Alas for the breed, it was developed in Iowa in 1911, at the tail end of the draft horse’s reign in the field; in a very short time tractors replaced them, and many of these heavy horses ended up at the glue factory.

In graduate school, I spent a lot of time playing with the 19th century census books–the Krannart Library at Purdue had a great shelf of them. My favorite statistical game was calculating religious diversity in midwestern cities–that was part of my thesis. But I also liked the ratio of mules to horses as an indicator of rural poverty. Because people would rather have a horse than a mule, but mules are cheaper, this number really shows which farmers were doing well–the ones in Iowa, for example–and which were doing poorly–the Deep South and New Hampshire pop out.

I’m a city kid, so I don’t know much about mules or horses. But standing close to one of these draft horses, you understand what power they hold–this is a machine for breaking up sod, dragging logs, and moving rocks, and you’d need a team of mules to equal it.

Another from March 13–Riverview Cafe.

The Million Writers Notable Stories have been announced by storySouth! My story Self Defense, published in Pindeldyboz, made the list, as did many fabulous stories from around the web. Set aside some time to sample the stories on the list; you won’t be disappointed.

The Top 10 will be posted on April 1.

These are some tools that used to belong to my great-grandfather, Forrie Wall, a carpenter, orchard-keeper, house-builder, surveyor, and general jack-of-all-trades from Tenants Harbor, Maine. He was the model of Andrew Wyeth’s “The Man from Maine”, and one of Wyeth’s guides to the coastal villages.

I actually met Wyeth, when I was about four; he was at Grampy’s house with one of his models, a town drunk with a bristly white beard, and I was certain that this strange man had brought Santa Claus to visit. At least that’s the story my mother told me, since all I really remember about the house in Tenants Harbor is the Franklin stove between the kitchen and the parlor and Grampy’s stocking feet propped up on it.

Don’t forget–the 2006 Million Writers Award starts taking nominations TODAY. Start thinking about the stories published on-line in 2005 that deserve the nod! (If you’ve got one you’d like to spotlight, let me know through a comment or e-mail).