Minnesota has recently become an intellectually poorer place with the departure of Richard Cretan for Portland, Oregon. I’ve known Richard since the early 1990’s, when we were introduced by a mutual friend, Prof. Peter Firchow of the University of Minnesota English Department, where Richard and I were both undergraduate majors in the 1980’s. (Our paths did not cross back then at that big place.)

Richard’s wife was recently offered a new job in Portland, and the combination of a good opportunity and the promise of going to one of the most sane and progressive cities in the country overcame their ties to the Twin Cities. So they have said goodbye to many dear friends and many years of life here in Minnesota.

I’ve learned much from Richard over the years, most recently my tendency to put too much trust in the powers-that-be: the mainstream media, the government, the corporate world, the political parties, etc. That trust, for example, led me to mistakenly support the Iraq War at its outset, not heeding Richard’s warnings. More recently Richard has been warning about the weaknesses in our economic system, some of which have been evident in the financial problems related to falling real estate prices and rising foreclosure rates.

Richard recently wrote a masterful post, “St. Paul to Portland, the long way,” that touches on these subjects and more. It’s his farewell to the state. Richard, we will miss you, but we look forward to seeing you in “Cascadia” and back here in the Upper Midwest.

Here’s a quote from Richard’s farewell post: Read the rest of this entry »

Richard Cretan is a dear friend and one of the most talented writers I know. In his blog, Glebe Cow Drooled, he recently commented on my efforts to improve snacks at my daughter’s pre-school. Here is an excerpt, written in Richard’s inimitable style:

Against bureaucratic feet-dragging, I had earlier advised [Bill] to wage a campaign of surrealism and hijinks by staging an anti-junk food demo at the school: march the kids around holding giant self-portraits in which they’re transmogrified into the quivering jellied ovoids that are apt to rise from a diet of Pop-Tarts and doughnuts. Bill may have found this a bit much for Northfield, Minnesota.

Now comes news that shouldn’t be too surprising. Earlier this month, a new Florida State University study found Americans see being fat as normal. So maybe the pre-school has been onto something all along. Cheese puffs: gateway to cultural literacy!

Back in March and May, I wrote about the snacks at my daughter’s pre-school. I’m happy to say that the doughnut holes and Pop-Tarts are gone from the August snack menu, but the cheese puffs remain. Are they gone permanently? We shall see.

If gone permanently, is that a step in the right direction? Probably, since those seemed to be two of the three snack items that had the least amount of nutritional value. However, lots of processed food snacks remain on the menu that I wouldn’t feed to my child regularly, so we’ll continue to send a snack along with her.

And yes, lest you think we are too food-puritanical in our household, we do eat our own share of processed foods, and I often eat doughnut holes at our church when the nice ladies put them out after the service. I’ve not downed a Pop-Tart in a long time, however, and my waist line, already expanded, says thank you.

This blog is now featured in a blogger “spot” on the Northfield.org sidebar, under “N.org sponsors.” You’ll only see it occasionally there as it rotates through a number of different spots. Thanks to Adam Gurno for including me in this. See the Northfield.org blog and feed aggregator for a complete list of the Northfield blogosphere.

About the picture: yes, the bike helmet never comes off. You can never be too safe.

Another major Northfield web site, Locally Grown Northfield, run by Griff Wigley, alerted me to the Northfield.org update. Thanks, Griff.

This development has prompted me to add to my short list of blogs on the left sidebar. Thanks to those who have done the same for me!

In an opinion piece in today’s StarTribune, John Gunyou plays pin the blame on the donkey – or the elephant, perhaps – for the I-35W bridge collapse. Here’s an excerpt from his sharply-worded piece:

It’s increasingly evident the Pawlenty-Molnau administration ignored the advice of bridge experts to take remedial action. Worse yet, the administration still has no viable long-term plan to improve, much less maintain, our state’s critical transportation infrastructure.

After twice vetoing the Legislature’s attempts to put such a plan in place, Gov. Tim Pawlenty offered up a scheme to fund our needs at only 10 cents on the dollar — with 30-year bonds. Worse yet, he wanted to pay off that debt by cutting into already inadequate maintenance resources. That doesn’t build any more roads or bridges over the long run; it simply borrows against the future.

I recently “met” my namesake, Bill Ostrem, online a few weeks ago and was fortunate to be able to exchange some emails with him. I maintain a Google alert for my name and was notified of this nice profile of Bill in the San Diego Union-Tribune newspaper. Bill appears to be willing to go the extra mile and pay extra costs to create better communities.

Here’s a quote from the article, which was published back in January: Read the rest of this entry »

One of Minnesota’s most famous and gifted citizens, Garrison Keillor, has written about the I-35W bridge collapse in his newspaper column, The Old Scout. As usual, our reigning politicians are on the receiving end of his barbed wit.

Here’s a brief excerpt. Keillor’s tongue is firmly in his cheek as he writes about his choice to travel down to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, which requires crossing other “structurally deficient” bridges:

The day when we look to big government for solutions to our transportation problems is gone. Our governor has twice vetoed a 7.5-cent increase in the state gasoline tax to pay for road and bridge repair. He believes it is dumb. So it’s up to us to solve our own problems. Rochester is 88 miles away. Northwest Airlines offers seven flights daily for a round-trip fare of about 500 bucks, or slightly more than the fare to New York. You want to visit Rochester, pay your own freight. Don’t expect Minnesota to take care of you.

Having visited Gold Medal Park, I’d say it’s a nice addition to the Minneapolis cityscape. It offers a great view of the new and impressive Guthrie Theater, which I have not yet entered. The park isn’t a tour de force like Chicago’s Millennium Park, which I first visited a few months ago, but it’ll do.

The picture above was taken early in the morning, so it’s rather dark. Notice the impressive cantilevered deck on the right side of the theater.

I came across one critical appraisal of the park at a web site called Cafeapolis.

Viewing this part of Minneapolis, between Washington Avenue and the Mississippi River, I was struck by how much it has changed, with other recent additions being bike trails along the river, the Mill City Museum, and lots of condos. Formerly the area was undistinctive at best, and its transformation is a great success.

On Saturday, August 4, our family made an early-morning trip to the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport, then headed north for a glimpse of the collapsed I-35W bridge. Sensitive to calls to stay away from the immediate area, we went to Gold Medal Park, near the new Guthrie Theatre. I had read in Nick Coleman’s StarTribune column that people were gathering there to view what they could of the disaster from the newly made hill that sits at the center of the park.

The picture above shows the view toward the bridge, magnified only slightly by the 3x zoom on my small digital camera. It’s not a great picture of the disaster, but if you look closely in the center of the photo, you can see the collapsed southern part of the bridge angled downwards. In the background is the 10th Avenue bridge.

For the last several days we’ve been hearing about Governor Tim Pawlenty’s indications that he will reverse his “no new taxes” pledge and support an increase in the Minnesota gas tax. Shamefully, the tax has been held at 20 cents a gallon since 1988. Inflation has eaten away at the ability of the tax to provide funds, and it’s at or near an all-time low in terms of its real cost.

How sad that it takes a disaster that costs many lives and hundreds of millions of dollars to realize that we need to increase funding for transportation infrastructure. Democrats deserve some of the blame for recently failing to come up with a compromise that might have overriden a Pawlenty veto, but the onus of responsbility for the disgraceful drop in funding over time goes to the anti-tax crowd and, more recently, its darling, Gov. Pawlenty.

Pawlenty is trying to keep this disaster from being an albatross around his neck. Would that he had made prevention his goal and not political reaction.

See a StarTribune story for more about Pawlenty’s political situation regarding the tax. The story quotes a poll showing that 57 percent of Minnesotans oppose a gas tax increase. Voters need to wake up to this issue too. The truth is that driving a motor vehicle imposes costs not only to the environment in the form of pollution but also to the transportation infrastructure in the form of wear and tear. A gas tax only begins to allow government to remedy the damage caused by driving.

It has been nearly two days since the I-35 bridge over the Mississippi River in Minneapolis fell. According to the latest reports, five bodies have been recovered and eight people are still missing. Many more have been injured. And all of us have been amazed that something we took for granted, the support under us while traveling across a major bridge, could so rapidly vanish.

In the time since the catastrophe, a number of friends from other parts of the country have contacted me to check on our safety. Fortunately, my family and I were nowhere near the bridge when it fell. As yet I’m not aware of anyone I know having been involved in the accident.

I’ve been thinking about times that I crossed that bridge. I did so quite often when I was a student at the University of Minnesota in the 1980’s, since it’s near the university’s Minneapolis campus. When I imagine crossing that bridge in a car, it’s as a younger version of myself, driving south with downtown Minneapolis to my right.

I’ve also been thinking about how a bridge like this one – a “steel-arched deck-truss bridge,” according to a StarTribune graphic – is largely invisible to us as we travel over it. In the case of a suspension bridge, we can see the giant cables that support us.

There is another bridge just downriver from the fallen bridge. It’s the 10th Avenue bridge, visible in photos as an attractive, white-arched bridge. I used to walk across it to the university’s west bank campus when I lived on 10th Avenue as a student. I didn’t pay much attention to the bridge not far away to the west, the I-35 bridge.

In fact as news reports showed the photos and video of the bridge, for some reason I pictured different bridges further downriver, bridges I had lived near and used more recently and more often. Only as I learned and talked about it more did I envision the correct bridge in the correct location – that is, envision the former bridge and its former location.

The I-35 bridge – or, more accurately, its wreckage – is no longer invisible to me. Its catastrophic failure has made its former presence remembered and known. I wish that it would have remained only half-remembered and still standing, still ignored by people traveling happily over it.