Text size: 
Here's a news release from the DNR that caught my eye:
Free workshop to focus on living with snakes
The Department of Natural Resources Nongame Wildlife Program is hosting six snake workshop around southeastern Minnesota aimed at taking the mystery out of our native snakes.
If you paid attention to press coverage of the artist Robert Rauschenberg's passing this week, you're 1) unusual, and 2) probably of the same mind as Jack Schafer, the outstanding media writer for Slate.
Here's the lead on his post regarding Rauschenburg's demise -- with the unfortunate headline, "Puffing Rauschenberg: The dailies slobber all over the corpse of Robert Rauschenberg":
The solemn tributes to Robert Rauschenberg in today's newspapers prove that you're more likely to encounter an independent mind operating in the sports pages than the arts section. Hoisting his reputation high and escorting it into paradise, critics from the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the Wall Street Journal write as if toeing the correct line handed down by some cultural commissar.
Schafer's right on. You'd think Leonardo himself (and I don't mean DiCaprio) had died in his prime. The uniformity of hyperbole in the writing about this celebrity artist was breathtaking, which says more about how pitifully limited media coverage is of fine arts -- and how the opinions of a few critics and collectors from the New York art world tend to color what little news is reported.
Rauschenberg was a major figure in American art, but Schafer correctly notes how the art world is so incestuously self-dealing at times like these:
I don't hold the press gang's reverential treatment of Rauschenberg against the artist. He was only selling. They're the ones who bought, bought again, and continue to toss coins into his grave.
Some errors are more bearable than others...I find this one hard to take. We had this headline online:
Trial for grizzly Waseca County farmhouse killings switched to Rochester
Which led to this reader e-mail:
Whoa! Watch out for those bears. They're tricky. Or did you mean gristly, as in he ate the victims?
Yours,
Grisly Adams
Two choice comments expressed last night at the P-B Dialogues event, which was one of our best community conversations yet:
"Life is a research project," said Steve Schwen, of Earthen Path Organic Farm near Lake City..."don't wait" for others or for society to come up with solutions to problems such as energy conservation and sustainable lifestyles -- "just start experimenting."
And Joe Mayer said, due to all the economic and environmental factors out there, "We're going to have to be fast learners" to stay ahead of the curve.
Yesterday when the paper came up from the press room about 11:10 a.m., an editorial page savant (whose name is Eric Atherton) noted that the top headline could be confusing. It said, "Building his 55-ton dreamboat."
Thanks to Eric, we made it "dream boat" for later in the press run.
Fifty-five tons is a big dream boat, too, of course...
Nope, not according to a beautiful graphic in today's USA Today, which color codes every county in the U.S. (I couldn't find a link to the graphic online...if you find it, let me know and I'll hook it up.)
If I had a gallon of gas for every time a reader has asked me why Rochester area gas is more expensive than elsewhere in the state, nation or world, I'd be sitting on the third-largest gasoline reserve in the world. According to the map on page 6A of USA Today, it costs up to $3.50 in select southeastern Minnesota counties and some others in Minnesota, but the vast majority of the U.S. is paying more.
Fill 'er up!
I
got a cryptic note from a Rochester reader this morning, on notepaper imprinted with a few cute chickadees fluttering around a birdhouse, one with a heart in its beak, and a border around the notepaper that's candy cane striped:
Too bad that people who know how to run this country are driving cabs or cutting hair!
Could be.
Next week's Post-Bulletin Dialogues event will look at how the organic and natural food movement is reshaping farming and lifestyles in the Rochester area. Featured along with yours truly will be new P-B columnist D. A. Loeser Small, who writes the GreenSpace column every Tuesday.
Other guests will include Joe Deden, executive director of Eagle Bluff Environmental Learning Center in Lanesboro; Steve Schwen, of Earthen Path Organic Farm, near Lake City; and Eva Barr, co-owner and founder of Dreamacres, an organic farm with a Community Supported Agriculture program.
The Dialogues community meeting will be from 6:30 p.m. to 8 p.m. Tuesday in the Rochester Public Library. It’s free, informal, offers people a chance to ask a lot of questions, and the coffee and cookies are always good.
Hope to see you there.
This came as a forward from my son...not as a burst of spam:
The date should be circled in black on your computer's calendar: the scourge of internet spam is 30-years-old today.
On May 3 1978, Gary Thuerk, a marketing man for DEC, a now defunct American computer company, sent what is thought to be the world's first junk e-mail. The unsolicited message was delivered to a mere 393 users of Arpanet, the US government network that would become the internet, but paved the way for trillions of future missives hawking counterfeit Viagra and dubious get-rich-quick schemes.
Today an estimated nine out of ten e-mails are unsolicited junk – accounting for about 100 billion messages every day and spam has become hugely lucrative, both for the racketeers that send messages and the firms that defend against them.
Another press release:
Dear Jay,
Enclosed is a recent press release regarding upholstered headboards. The popularity of this bedroom product has been steadily increasing over the past several years.
Another trend I was completely unaware of.
