It’s been five years I’ve lived in Minneapolis, and about time I froze my ass off (or some other body part).

When I typed this last Wednesday night, it was 9 below zero outside. 9 below zero? Big deal, you say, if you are one of the one 12apostrophes reader/contributers who lives in Finland, or are someone’s grandparent, and have reached the age of scoffing hyperbole (“9 below? We used to walk to school when it was 9 below, on our hands. With paper bags for mittens. And we were grateful.”).

OK, 9 below zero, big deal — but with windchill, it felt like 25 below zero, if anyone’s exposed skin could have stay attached to their body long enough to feel it.

We had a week or so of this in the Twin Cities, and it’s starting all over again tomorrow. A week or so, give or take every winter in Minneapolis since the earth’s crust cooled. So when I went to shovel snow last week in the frigidness, I wasn’t stupid. I waited until the 3 p.m. tropical doldrums, when the mercury bubbled up to 7 above zero.

After a half hour of shoveling, my fingers hurt. I was wearing “Thinsulate” gloves, so I figured I was good. Frostbite is that shit in Jack London stories, it can’t happen to me, I thought. Another five minutes though, and I decided I preferred my fingers sans ice crystals.

I came inside and placed my fingertips directly on the radiator in my office. The ring finger on each hand was the worst off. Reddish-purple, swelled like a sausage, and throbbing like a bass drum.

Oh crap, they’ll have to amputate, I thought. But after a little harried research online, I found that my symptoms best match a condition called “chilblaines,” which is a kind of a bo-bo frostbite, from the latin, “really cold fingers, just get over it already.”

I learned my lesson — if God wanted us to remove snow from sidewalks, He would have given us shovels for hands. Knowing me and my proclivity for dumbassedness, it’s kind of hard to believe I haven’t had some sort of run-in with the cold sooner. The only thing protecting me until now has been my aversion to actually going outside.

I cried because I had chilblaines, until I saw this video of Dennis Wounded Shield, resident Minneapolis homeless guy, talking about how his cheeks turned black.

Pulao, Dingusx, and I were really cold the other night, walking the 14 drunken steps from the CC Club to the car in sub-zero temps, and we wondered: “What about the homeless folk in the Twin Cities? When it gets cold like this?”

Well, turns out, of course, that sometimes the homeless sleep outside, even when it’s really, really cold. Go figure.

(This from a story in the Star Tribune about an outreach program in downtown Minneapolis to help cut down on homeless arrests — cool article. Watch the full video, 3 minutes.)

When something’s on sale at the grocery store, it’s old. Expired. The opposite of fresh. That’s why it’s on sale. Check it out next time. Ribeye for 3.99 a pound? That’s last week’s ribeye. Look at it closely. A little grey, isn’t it? Best if sold by yesterday? Let me tell you, you gotta pay attention to this stuff.

Before Christmas break, Pulao and I bought some sale rice. The first time we had it, Pulao said it tasted bad. “It’s a little bitter,” she said. Ha! I scoffed. It tasted fine to me. We ate it again. “I don’t like this rice,” she said. The Princess and the pea, I thought. After the second time, Pulao bought some new rice, but I didn’t throw out the old. It’s fine!

Then we came back after ten days holiday vacation to find that our glass rice jar with the old rice, sealed tight, had six to seven buggy things in it. Kind of like little moths, or little cockroaches. Trapped in the jar, they seemed to be mostly dead. There was webby mossy stuff trailing from rice to bugs, and two bugs appeared to be joined at the butt. Went out with a bang, I guess. These bugs had time enough to be born, go through an awkward adolescence, hook up, and die – all while living inside our sale rice.

Pulao is classy, I’ve decided. With a true discerning taste. She is now also my official food taster, who I have asked to vet all my meals and drinks for twinges of buggy bitterness, so I will, in the future, not happily eat thousands and thousands of weevil larva.

Today, I got an e-mail from somebody needing technical help. It was like somebody changed my job description to IT Support and forgot to tell me, which is nothing out of the ordinary where I work.

Hi, I have a login with ‘Editor’ privileges but can’t import or view images in my groups folders. Please help. Cheers, X

I wasn’t the only one getting the wrong e-mail, proved by the next item in my inbox:

i’d like to know who setup this email address and told people to use this as a support contact.

Yeah, I thought. But what do we do when we find them? Then a third person, the polite opposite:

Please remove me from this thread. This is not meant for me. Thanks.

But soon this was all the e-mail I was getting:

A: Ditto … please
B: It’s not meant for me either. Thanks.
C: Me neither

It might be simpler if the person it was meant for could just speak up instead. But this is the kind of thing that cubicle types like me pounce on whenever we can, since anything is more interesting than our actual jobs. Next came the voice of reason:

It seems the point of all the emails on this are that it went to all the wrong people, myself included. Might I suggest that people assume it was a one-time error and not keep sending emails asking to be removed from the list? It’s only adding fuel to the fire…thanks.

That worker tried to raise the level of e-mail conversation to an afternoon tea in Buckingham Palace, but to no avail. Finally, the only thing that worked — the good old all-caps e-mail of loudness:

STOP REPLYING ALL PLEASE! THANK YOU!

I really wanted to reply-all, “I WILL STOP REPLYING ALL NOW,” but I was able to resist the urge.

In one of those motivational 37-way conference calls the other day, a big cheese told a story about two guys in a boat:

“A leak springs on a boat, and one guy thinks he’s OK, because he’s on the dry side — but they’re both going down. Just because we’re in good shape doesn’t mean we don’t have to circle the wagons.”

I have at least two things to say about this. First off, that guy on the dry side who thinks he’s OK is really stupid. I mean, how big is this boat? The story starts: “There are two guys on a boat.” This is more dinghy than ocean liner. This guy is staring at a leak springing up six inches to his left and thinks, “Whew!”

And the other thing. Is it just me, or does “Just because we’re in good shape doesn’t mean we don’t have to circle the wagons” remind you of that Nirvana lyric, “Just because you’re paranoid don’t mean they’re not after you”? Just more lame?

I think there was also something about “a mission-critical window of opportunity,” but I was too drunk off the mixed cocktail of metaphors to pay attention.

A few days ago, a friend of mine sent out an email with this year’s List of Banished Words, as deemed thus by the language lovers over at the Lake Superior State University. The premise, for those of you who haven’t come across it before, is simple: you know the word that gets used any which way and people throw them around like a gold coin in Scrooge McDuck’s vault and you go from noting that hey that’s not what that word actually means to wow that word sure does get thrown around to irritation at the tendency to overuse and incorrectly at that this word to feeling the vein in your head about to pop the next time you hear the word? Well, this is the list that actually tries to “ban” it. Once LSSU has decided which of those words are most pressing.

There are some words on that list whose placement there I agree with wholeheartedly. Like “organic”– I think my brother-in-law (who apprears on this blog as either Steven Koski or Steven Kiosk) first pointed out the silliness of identifying some foods as organic, since, c’mon, they’re always going to be carbon-based. Which is exactly what someone at LSSU points out. Plus, things happen organically, people belong to certain families more organically than others, intellectuals can be organic if they represent of the class they were born into, though do class-mobile intellectuals become inorganic?

Or the phrase “X is the new Y.” I heard a few years ago, for instance, that green was the new pink. I imagined that meant that baby girls were being wrapped in green blankets at the hospital– because where else does pink have any value?– but I’ve checked. Pink is still pink.

But then, I came across “sweet” on the list. That one, I’m not so sure about. Of course, people don’t mean that when a gadget is sweet that it tastes like sugar, but were we ever in danger of assuming that they did? We are, I think, capable of understanding that people are speaking figuratively since we’ve had plenty of practice. We know that not everything that is cool is icy to the touch, or not everything that rocks has a compelling back beat, or, for that matter, not everything that is awesome actually fills us with childlike wonder.

This ties in to an earlier post about words that mean little in themselves, but have a great deal of currency in the work place. Cliches. Personally, I would be happy if we all stopped using “counter-” everything. Counterintuitive, counterproductive, etc. though I really like counterpontal. Maybe we can keep counterpontal. what do you think?

I saw flamenco—steps and music—performed last night in a warehouse in NE Minneapolis. For free. Last night was a Wednesday, by the way.

The warehouse was cozier than a warehouse has any right to be—excepting the warehouse ceiling and cement construction, the room was closed in by a half-wall painted burnt orange, had tall mirrors on the walls, and was lit by tucked-away lamps and candles on the tables, scattered chairs, and stools.

The friend who had brought us—let’s call him “P”—plied us with Trader Joe’s three-buck chuck in Cabernet, Merlot, and Shiraz flavors. He had cases of the stuff in the back of the room. This was a rehearsal space for him and his band. He had actually got his three-buck chuck for a $1.50 a bottle, somehow, maybe by the same new math that gets you a free flamenco show on a Wednesday night.

At the height of the flamenco, there were five guitarists, two good dancers, one extraordinary singer, and a smattering of box-drummers and hand-clappers. In between, there was a bit of a flamenco class, that some of us were invited to join (not me—the flamenco people glanced at me and knew, accurately, that I had the rhythm of a woodpecker with a head cold).

P said: “This is better than a bar, don’t you think? Live music, laid back, none of the bar-hassles.”
I said: “Like paying for my drinks. I agree!”

Later, P said: “What are other people doing right now? In Minneapolis? Snoozing. Watching a little TV. They may see live music once a year, and hope none of the members of their band die.”

I agreed whole-heartedly. Then went home to snooze, but I kept the TV off.