Kiger's Notebook

Roch. pizza slinger one of best in state

A Rochester man's dough-manship recently earned him a spot as one of the pizza slingers in Minnesota.

"It was kind of exciting for us. We were all cheering for him. He was on the big screen and everything," says Shannon O'Neill of O'Neill's Pizza Pub in the Crossroads Shopping Center.

Cam Kvittem of O'Neill's soared to second place in a pizza tossing contest at the U.S. Foods industry show in the Twin Cities earlier this month.

"If he had been able to use to the dough for our cracker crust, I'm sure Cam would have gone all the way to first," says O'Neill.

He had to use the officially sanctioned "Throw Dough," which is used at all professional pizza competitions.

This is not your mother's pizza dough tossing. This is a true athletic competition.

To set the stage, the "Food Fanatics" convention featured a dough throwing demonstration by the official U.S. Pizza Team. Yes, there really is a U.S. Pizza Team, which travels around the circuit of official dough tossing competitions.

This culinary sport puts a new spin on pizza preparation with fancy moves, spins and elaborate routines.

Once the dough pros left the state, Minnesota's best pizza slingers stepped up to show what they could do. The big crowd of hopefuls quickly thinned out as the panel of judges trimmed out the less graceful of the pizza throwers.

Soon it came to down to the final three, the O'Neill's crowd cheering Kvittem.

"He can do it all…rolling it down his back and the fancy throws," she says. "That's what the free-style contest comes down to…who can do the most tricks."

His moves impressed the panel, which awarded Kvittem the silver pepperoni medal (OK. I made the pepperoni medal up).

No need to wait Forever - fashion retailer opening Sat.

 Forever starts in Rochester this Saturday.

That's the day of the grand opening of the new Forever 21 store in the Apache Mall.

Forever 21 is a fashion-forward clothing store for young women and men. Located in the Macy’s wing of the Apache Mall, the 12,686-square-foot store will encompass the former Disney Store space and more.

The new store will open the doors at 10 a.m. and the first 200 customers will get a free gift card. Four people will be win what Forever 21 describes as "One of the season's hottest outfits, valued up to $150."

Los Angeles-based Forever 21 is known for carrying "fast fashion" at prices that fit the budgets of people ranging from college students to young professionals in their late 20s and 30s.

Beside clothes and accessories, Forever 21 will also sell shoes, cosmetics and lingerie.

Kim Bradley, the mall's general manager, commented earlier this year that, “Adding Forever 21 to our existing unique selection of fashion retailers provides the Rochester community with yet another reason to shop at Apache Mall.” 

Since this was first announced in February, there has been a lot of interest in this store opening, according to the company.

Thanks for the pic, Anna. Get in line early.

“We are very pleased to have been given the opportunity to expand our business into Rochester…," says Larry Meyer, executive vice president of Forever 21.

This will be the company's fourth store in Minnesota. The others are in the Mall of America, Rosedale and Maplewood.

Olive Juice profiles 2nd Street Waver

This caught my attention Thursday when Rochester's Olive Juice Studios  emailed out their newsletter.

Olive Juice co-owner Scott Schoeberl and Jessica, who manages the photo studio, stopped on a whim to chat with Rochester's famous "2nd Street Waver."

Here's a little of what Kelly Schoeberl, who owns Olive Juice with her husband Scott, wrote about that visit plus, of course, some photos of the colorful Waver himself.

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Scott and I have lived in Rochester for nearly 10 years.  Rochester is best known as the home and birthplace of Mayo Clinic and, to the dismay of some, the corn cob water tower.

The Rochester Convention and Visitors Bureau publishes a magazine, Experience Rochester, to promote the many amenities that make Rochester a "Best Place to Live" (Money Magazine).  And, if you ask someone on the street, they are more than happy to tell you where the nearest park, bike trail or golf course is.  What no one knows, however, is the story behind the guy on 2nd Street.

He stands on the sidewalk, wears the most outrageous outfits and happily waves at cars as they pass by.  We drive down 2nd Street every day.  It takes us to our gallery and it's the same road patients use when they visit Mayo Clinic.  Sometimes we see the "2nd Street Waver" in the morning and sometimes we see him in the afternoon.  No matte r when, he always makes us happy.  So happy, we feel compelled to honk and wave back.

A few weeks ago, curiosity got the best of Scott and Jessica.  They had just finished a photo shoot and were driving back to the gallery when they saw him, the 2nd Street Waver.  Camera in hand, they stopped and introduced themselves (first name then last and middle, per his request).

Turns out, his name is Joey and he's 44 years old.

…

Joey has battled diabetes, high cholesterol and a depression that kept him locked in his apartment for years.  It wasn't until he "got a calling from God" that he went outside to wave. 

Joey wears a different outfit every day and gets limitless energy from the can of Pepsi he holds as he waves.  He taught Jessica to hold the can with 2 fingers outstretched to signify 2nd Street.  He also put his hats on her head and let her wave his flags.  He said she was the first person he ever let do so.

Joey hopes to start a movement.  Waving makes him feel better and he thinks people all over the country would feel better if they did it too.  It would be easy to dismiss Joey as "crazy" but we think he's pretty darn smart and can't help but wonder if the rest of us are the challenged ones.

Roch.-made computer to move heaven and earth

Here's some from a tidbit (or maybe tidbyte) about Rochester's Hardcore Computer going to school.

A unique Rochester-made machine that looks a little like a glowing fish tank is moving heaven and earth to launch the imaginations of local students to places they've never gone before.

To bring the stars to earth, the Mayo High School Planetarium is diving in with Hardcore Computer’s Detonator Professional Workstation. It uses Total Liquid Submersion technology to keep it cool and to boost its performance to hyperdrive-like speeds.

Planetarium director Lawrence Mascotti fired up the Detonator about a week ago and school staff soon learned that the computer's reputation for power is not an exaggeration.

They got a surprise while installing Uniview Theater, the complex simulation software that is used to teach astronomy, astrophysics and Earth-based science displayed inside the planetarium's dome.

They expected the huge program to take 22 hours to load onto the new computer. Hardcore's machine handled the task in 15 minutes. The Detonator's warp speed and stellar power is opening new worlds for the planetarium.

“Hardcore Computer helped us transform the current planetarium lab space into a new science center and visualization learning lab," says Mascotti. "As visual beings, the large display format that the Detonator supports has the potential to stir the imagination and communicate effectively and efficiently to students of all ages."

It's drive-in weather at Roscoe's Barbeque

A shout out of thanks to the PB's roving local news editor Mike "The D" Dougherty for snapping this pic yesterday as he snagged some lunch. Unfortunately, this pic is all he brought back.

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It may be mid-February, but it's drive-in weather in Rochester.

Roscoe's Barbeque, Root Beer and Ribs on Fourth Street Southeast is now open for the season, with customers eating outside in Wednesday's 40-degree temperatures.

This is the earliest Steve and Barbara Ross have ever re-opened the seasonal drive-in location after spending the winter shuttered up. Usually, they don't fire up the drive-in until March or even April.

Their other location, Roscoe’s Express, remains open all year in the Chateau Center at North Broadway and 37th Street in northeast Rochester.

"Why not open the drive-in?" Barbara Ross asks rhetorically. "It has been so warm, we could have been open all winter."

It opened last year on March 24 with a mega-drift of snow in the parking lot that they dubbed "Mount Roscoe."

This week customers are sipping root beer floats where the snow mountain once stood.

Medical journal critical of proton beam therapy

Here's an interesting take on proton beam therapy that originated in the Archives of Internal Medicine journal.

This was spotlighted on Valentine's Day by Gary Schwitzer on the Health News Review blog. Health News Review is a non-profit group focused on keeping an eye on how health  news is reported in the media.

 

While Mayo Clinic's massive proton beam projects in Rochester and in Arizona were not mentioned, this does seem to follow the same lines of thinking from the New York Times editorial. It is worth noting that the NYT editorial was written by doctors whose medical centers already offer proton beam therapy.

It seems this technology, which is surprisingly constroversial, is becoming a competitive issue among hospitals and other "medical destination communities."

Here's some from Schwitzer's post on this topic:

A "research letter" in the Archives of Internal Medicine this week concludes:

“To our knowledge, we show for the first time that the availability of a technology, in this instance a proton beam facility, in one’s HRR (hospital referral region*) is associated with a higher likelihood of receiving proton beam therapy compared with those living in an HRR where this technology is not available.”

* The Dartmouth Atlas defines HRR this way: “Hospital service areas make clear the patterns of use of local hospitals. A significant proportion of care, however, is provided by referral hospitals that serve a larger region. Hospital referral regions were defined in this Atlas by documenting where patients were referred for major cardiovascular surgical procedures and for neurosurgery.

The authors write:

“The number of treatment options for localized prostate cancer continues to expand, amidst growing concern regarding overdiagnosis and overtreatment of low-risk disease.  Treatment patterns, however, may be driven by availability of novel technologies rather than by clinical indications.

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No prostate cancer treatment has been proven superior to the others. There are, however, substantial differences in cost, which are becoming more important to society and are a focus of health care reform in the United States.While there are theoretical advantages to proton beam therapy from a radiation physics standpoint, no study yet has demonstrated its superiority to modern photon-based therapy in terms of either oncologic or quality of life outcomes…

Proton beam therapy has not been shown to be superior to other treatments for prostate cancer and is substantially more expensive.Caution should be taken when considering implementation of this technology in additional regions, which may lead to greater use of this technology.”

Crowing about Rochester's new 'slogan'

With all of the feathers flying about Rochester's mass murder of crows infestation, here's a whimisical take on how Rochester might change its city slogan.

Thanks to the technically adept and sardonic Emmett Salberg for creating this.

We'll check with Brad Jones to see if he is up for changing 'Rah Rah' to 'Caw Caw.'

Kiger's back and the blog is breathing again

I apologize to you all for abandoning this blog for so long.

I took a vacation and was pretty tied up even before I left. The result was that Kiger's Notebook was left barren for the longest stretch, since I launched it in March, 2005.

I couldn't stay away completely, so I did pop back in to do the CostCo piece and a few columns here and there.

Most of my time away was spent on the banks of The Wabash in Indiana. A place Verizon as well as the rest technological world evidently do not know exisits. While I did zip out a few Tweets and email responses when the moon was in the right place, I was mostly out of the loop.

I apologize to everyone who sent me emails, voice messages, Facebook notes and direct messages on Twitter. I'll try to catch up. More than a 1,000 unread emails have piled up.

Anyway, I'm back now and revved up for the new year.

Please keep letting me know what you are interested in and passing along any business tips you might hear.

Look for lots of action on here in as 2012 kicks into gear and thank you for reading.

Reeling in a legend — The return of The Hot Fish Shop

Here's some from today's column. Look for the full deal in the print edition.

For the record, this deal was reeled in by George Rownd of Braasch Commercial Real Estate. Thanks to Bucky Beeman for the pic.

Its batter and tartar sauce were legendary among its fans during its 68 years as a Winona landmark in the shadow of Sugar Loaf Bluff.

And now a father and son duo are bringing the Hot Fish Shop, which closed in 1999, back to life in northeast Rochester.

Joe and Rick Coshenet hope to open the new incarnation of the seafood restaurant by early November at 3456 East Circle Drive N.E., where the Dish It Up Diner operated until last week.

"I want our food to be great like it used to be," says Rick Coshenet, who worked with his father at the Winona restaurant. His great-grandfather Henry Kowalewski opened it in 1931.

Expect the new place to serve walleye, shrimp, scallops and cod all coated in The Hot Fish Shop's original batter.

Don't worry, Dish It Up fans. It hasn't gone away. Owner Heather Tlougan is returning her business to its roots. She is still offering her heat-and-serve meals and desserts for sale at the Rochester Produce grocery on Second Street Southwest.

Ex-Pannekoeken is flat as a ...

The way is now almost clear for Buffalo Wild Wings to swoop in and build a second Rochester location.

And the former Pannekoeken Huis  restaurant in front of the Crossroads Shopping Center is, in the words of my lightning quick colleague Jeff Pieters, "Flat as a pancake."

A Dutch pancake, of course.

Remember this demolition of the 27-year-old building is a step on Tom Graf's path to build a new 6,000-square-foot, stand-alone Buffalo Wild Wings as a southern sister to his first one in the Northwest Plaza.

Tasos Psomas closed that Pannekoeken in August, though the downtown location is still cooking.

Thanks to my ever-vigilant freelance (free) photog, Todd Schwarz, for these spot news pics.