Meet the Meat Guys
“Psst! How about a case of meat? Good stuff. Great price. C’mere and have a look.” It happened to Joe’s wife one day as she pumped gas on her lunch break. She and a friend followed the peddler to a van...
View ArticleSt. Paul’s Lunch Lady
I don’t know whether I was having a nightmare, but I recently woke up wondering what it takes to produce 48,000 meals a day. So I invited myself to the St. Paul Public Schools’ nutrition services...
View ArticleDown Force
The now ubiquitous spoiler—that horizontal fin typically perched on the trunks of sports cars—goes way back, back before the elevated brake lights that now decorate them on every third Honda you get...
View ArticleThe Mortarboard, the Sheepskin, and the Dixie Cup
Nothing was normal on the morning of Wednesday, November 5, at Stratford High School in Goose Creek, South Carolina. For one thing, there were no drugs in the school. If there were, the fourteen police...
View ArticleFeeling the Knead
Is St. Paul Irish? Mostly not—there is an embarrassment of Lutherans and Germans—but that doesn’t stop the city from promoting a credible St. Paddy’s Day parade. Since the capitol city pulls off this...
View ArticleCruise Control
At approx. 1015 hours on 12/31/03 I saw a white male driving a white Ford Taurus. The male backed his car into a parking spot to my left. I was also backed in. The male began reading the paper in his...
View ArticleStick ’Em Up!
Phoenix Rising, a sculpture fashioned from roughly five thousand melted guns, now lies in two pieces in a storage facility. Hennepin County officials are reluctant to say exactly where, because its...
View ArticleStrange Flesh
Once you’ve paid forty bucks to sit down with a hundred complete strangers wearing party hats and paper bibs, the rest should be easy. It’s so easy, in fact, that some folks put away as much as two...
View ArticleYou Are What You Meat
The little tag on a tray of Smart Chicken brand breasts at the Byerly’s meat counter said, “One hundred percent vegetarian-fed chicken.” Does this mean the Bush administration has finally found a use...
View ArticleOn Ice
While hockey and competitive figure skating can be brutal, they are rarely fatal. Naturally, civilians don’t normally think of ice arenas as potential morgues. But the topic came up the other day,...
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