Open Your Golden Gates

To everything, turn, turn, turn.

Now, I'm in San Francisco, CA, which is not someplace I ever dreamed I’d live. OK, that’s not true because doesn’t everyone with half a brain dream of living in San Francisco? But given my history of under-employment, the Bay Area never seemed like a practical choice.

But here I am and I can’t believe it. I get to live in this incredible house.

Actually I get to share the incredible house that the cars live here. There are more of them than there are people at this point. The house really isn’t IN San Francisco proper as you can tell by the amount of yard and stuff. It’s in Walnut Creek, far from the wagging fingers of the public transit vigilantes. This is still California after all and it’s nice to be able to feel cozy with your vehicles under one roof. Or six roofs, as the case may be.

So, sure there’s plenty of cars in California, just like they told me there would be. I just got here so stereotypes are a nice shorthand way of getting a grip on the place. There’s the California beaches and the ocean, another icon. Though it’s cold and gray now that daylight savings time has begun, it’s still beautiful out there on the edge of the wild Pacific.





Other icons of San Francisco: Victorian houses and gays and cable cars and cults. Eventually I will encounter them all.

Let me give you a for-instance. I was over on 22nd street and went inside this building:


I thought it was another gothic-esque church but it’s been repurposed by the Hua Zang Si Buddhists. Here’s their main Buddha which resides on the second floor:

There are offerings to the various Buddhas all over the place. This one has one thousand golden cups of water in front of him along with fruit and incense and sound, which are all part of the Buddha gift bag.

In the middle of the room is this glass case. It’s kind of hard to tell what it is from the picture and it’s also hard to tell when you are standing right in front of it.



This is a sculpture of Mt. Sumera, which is an important place in Buddhist cosmology and is basically due north of the known world, where we are now. So, to me here in San Francisco, it’s like Marin. Inside that sculpture are two sacred relics, actual pieces of Satyamuni, the medicine Buddha.

It got me thinking about starting my own spiritual movement, the Nanny Orthodox Temple.



I have a captive audience of ready-made followers at the park. We will meet in our small cabals in plain view at Gymborees and fast food coffee shops like Dunkin' Donuts where there will be colorful distraction for our tiny bundles of responsibility, necessary while we plot a spiritual path for ourselves from the comfort of our tracks suits.
I think these ladies are an underutilized source of strength and I want to harness the power of nannies for enlightenment. Lately, just about anything has a ring of possibility to it, doesn’t it?

This is Moe saying goodbye while continuing my search for Nirvana in the Bay Area.

Minneapolis: Staying Power

Not to get all socialist here, since that is right next to communist, which is right next to terrorist from what I can gather from the current presidential race, but let me just say that flour milling is not the only bygone industry that made the Twin Cities great. I am humbled by the incredible manufacturing power of the workforce of this city and region. Or what it was in the generations before me. There’s still the Ford plant for now but I fear the economic downturn is not going to be good news for light truck production. Sigh.

South of town however, an oasis of manufacturing success holds strong in the town of Austin, which is very close to the Iowa border. Austin is proud home to the Hormel main processing plant and the birthplace of Spam. I am talking about Spam, the luncheon meat, not spam the digital litterbug from your in-box.

The people at Hormel have really gone all out with their Spamarium. It is an impressive modern museum that will teach you all you need to know about Spam and its universe of influence. There are state of the art, attention-grabbing exhibits that are now the modern museum-going standard, which miraculously transform meat in a can into an entertainment experience. When I say museum, I mean something closer to Epcot Center, offering a low-impact educational environment that leaves virtually nothing open to interpretation. So, not like a museum where you look at things and get to decide what you like or do not like about them. At the Spam Museum, there is little room for anything but fun.



These two gents are Misters Hormel, junior and senior, apparently sculpted out of museum-quality lard that has been frozen in place by an undisclosed Hormel lard secret. Not all of the pig goes into the can of Spam, so lard is a “value-added” by-product of the process.



Hormel made other things along the way too and they own and operate the Dinty Moore line of canned stews etc. Dinty Moore stew was a huge treat in my childhood and we only had it for the special occasions when mom didn’t feel like cooking and actually listened to that feeling. I loved its comforting canned goodness, enhanced by mom’s own relationship to Hormel products during the war. When I say war, I mean one of the older ones where the moral compass points were clear.

There was a little info at the museum about what it is like to work at Hormel, but they kind of just show the fun parts on that too. Let’s face it, it’s a slaughterhouse which I imagine is not a pleasant situation for all creatures concerned. I did get to try on the cool shark-proof glove that the workers in the plant wear so that no fingers end up contaminating the food stream.

I have to say that personally, the gift shop was really the best part and I am proud to say that I contributed to the GDP during these troubled economic times by spending 65 bucks there. I bought two cans of Spam, Hickory Smoked and Garlic flavored, even though I will never eat them. The Garlic type is sort of a special-edition collector’s item because it cannot be purchased domestically and is produced entirely for the export market. Spam is crazy good, as the commercials tell us and is crazy popular in asia.

But my favorite splurge purchase was this piece of headgear:

which is going to make a nice Halloween appearance first and then will go into my daywear wardrobe. I am Spam, Spam I am.

It's hard to tell from this picture but my Spam hat was attracted to the colossus of spatulas that was displayed near the exit. The bigger picture wouldn't load right, sorry Dear Reader.

Until next time so long from Moe, your favorite canned ham on the internet.

Hands-Free

Today I went down by the riverside to lay down my sword and shield. No baptism took place but I did get a glimpse of Minneapolis’ former life as the flour capital of the universe.

The Mill City Museum is really well done and I can say that I now have basic understanding of how the river was used to power all those giant mills along its banks. The water goes in and pushes a big thing around that turns a lot of other big things. Those big turning things transform little things like grains of wheat into even littler things like flour. Or the turning things make blankets, socks, electricity. The river was crazy useful.

And the old buildings of the former mills are crazy handsome. Majestic in their size, they give perspective to our place as specs in the universe. Like the pyramids or the Corn Palace in South Dakota, they are humbling.

Hard to believe that every single one of those mills has now been converted to luxury urban housing. Or so explained the docent at the museum. The museum itself is a new building that was somehow slipped into decrepit ruins of the old Washburn Mill A. And the condos got slipped in too. The Residences at the Ruins. Strange, but the buildings are beautiful, even ruined and if putting condos in them is going to be how they get saved from the wrecking ball, I’m all for it.

Then I was over in the Somali neighborhood, Cedar Riverside where there are again, bustling shops and modest cafes and restaurants that cater to this community of very recent immigrants. I chatted with a merchant, Farah who got my attention when I picked up a package of biscuits named Glucose and he remarked that these were his favorite and I bought them to give Glucose a try. Farah said he has been here for ten years and that he has been “treated like a king” since he arrived and has been able to open his own shop and prosper. He said that after 7 wars in his country it was time for him to find another life.

Farah’s store is in the shadow of a soviet-style housing complex that is an architectural ode to poured concrete:





There were plenty of people walking around to do their marketing and small clusters of men chatting on the sidewalks. The women were dressed in hijabs, some of them very very beautiful in their flowing miles of fabric. I know it’s not considered very feminist of me probably but their dress was beautiful, especially compared to the guys who sport wester style clothes.

One woman I saw driving a minivan was talking on her phone and had ingeniously jerry-rigged a hands-free situation by simply tucking her cell underneath her head scarf so that it clung to her head while she drove. And I thought, wow that lady is really clever and then two minutes later I saw this woman waiting at a bus stop:

Sorry this is sideways too but I am having issues with the upload. Technology has its own ideas...

The Mini-Apple

"Minneapolis-St.Paul: going your way"

According to the sign in the airport, that is the motto of the city. Or was it the motto of the airport? That would make more sense.

Just arrived here and spent the day scooting around the Twin Cities with my new best friend Allison and her one hundred per cent ADORABLE daughter, Anna, 18 months old. At 18 months, I’d say from observation that the human animal peaks in terms of irresistible cuteness, and little Anna is a prime specimen. I know it is wrong to intervene in the growth of anything, but if Anna were my kid I would consider longer than I’d care to admit the possibility of giving her those growth-stunting hormones, to kind of freeze her in place at her apex of perfection. I know there are serious ethical implications in that kind of thinking but hey, I’m a serious person.

But first things first. When in Saint Paul, go visit the saint himself. Allison drove me over to the holy side of town, which is a city unto itself. Found the impressive cathedral on the hill named for Mister Saint Paul.

I really wanted to see St. Paul, or maybe a tiny sliver of his holy shinny bone or something, and I was very disappointed to find out that he does not in fact reside here in Minnesota. That is always such a bummer for me when I go to a big church named for a saint, and in the case of Paul, a really important one, only to discover that there is no real saint there. In Italy, this is not a problem. Mexico either. I have seen some saintly bodies or little parts of them in my day and I can’t say why but I do find it comforting, like an open-casket funeral. It’s important to see the body. Habeus Corpus, and all that.

So, no Saint Paul, though they put up this incredibly impressive cathedral named after him and here is a granite likeness of him from the outside of the church. And it turns out, this is his jubilee year to mark the “bi-millenium” of his birth, which is estimated between 7 and 10 AD. Paul had quite a potboiler of a life story, from the road to Damascus where he was converted to Christianity, right straight through to his martyrdom in Rome. Dude got put in jail seven times and nearly killed in many other incidents of preaching and whatnot by angry mobs. Don’t forget about his shipwreck on Malta! He traveled all over the Greco-Roman empire and is considered the “apostle to the gentiles”.

No Saint Paul, however there are loads of Latter Day Saints around Minneapolis-St. Paul, as the Google taught me. Though they are prolific producers, the Mormons are not really giving the Lutherans a run for their money around here. So many varieties of Lutherans, who knew? Latvian, Evangelical, Norwegian. And one called Faith Free Lutheran, which makes me wonder where the clarifying hyphen should go in that name. Faith or not, you choose. Personally, I would be torn between Creamy Ranch and Nacho Cheese Lutherans.

I know, it’s easy to make Lutheran jokes or hot dish jokes or you-betcha-doncha-know jokes. I’ll try and refrain in the spirit ot trying to say something new.

Went over to one of the latino neighborhoods and to a swell market called mercato central which was full of bustling stalls of sellers, hawking everything from tamale platters to baptism dresses that look like wearable wedding cakes. Sorry the picture is sideways but I am just not that adept in the technology department.


I bought a bottle of water from a pupuseria which had this touching sign on its counter.



Strange to see the word “corpse” used, so without the usual gentle coating I associate with the language of death. It was downright medieval, especially against the backdrop of the cheerful food court area.

At Mercato Central, it all is in the mix. Life, death, tamales, devotion. There's a lovely little shrine to protect the shoppers right by one of the entrances.
So much more comforting than passing through metal detectors!