Saturday night update.

Mounts on front fender -slash- brake mount bolt for universal adaptability. Horizontal arms should be a little wider to meet the vertical arms where they meet the top rack, and going to make that mount-plate as small as possible and round it's edges. Sweet.

Prototype rack - Easy as pie.

Strong as hell.

Lutsen 2001 - Good shots Sean

Got my shock back from the Shockspital, and on the bike, but summer is gone now for sure, It's gonna be snow any day.

Erik Quackenbush Dot Blogspot Dot Com

I've been wanting to get Erik's art onto a website for years. He brought five recent paintings to Thanksgiving dinner to show and so finally, off we go. I called him tonight to make sure he saw my email with his new site location, he said: "ya, I saw it, it's blue with yellow dots or something, I'm eating dinner right now..." ok, I said, I'll talk to you later this weekend. - I guess I was more excited than he was at this point ;).

It won't be updated much until Christmas, but we are planning a mass photo-session for then.

The pictures don't do justice to seeing the, rather large-scale paintings in person. I've found which ones I like better and worse tend to change around the more I look at them.

Como Zoo

Fort Snelling State Park, Minneapolis.

Blog Confession

Sometimes I edit older posts. For grammar, sometimes for clarity. Lately sometimes to add a short enhancing sentence. I've added new pictures. I never delete anything (past next morning) but, Where will it end?

Open letter to Jared Andersson

Jared - You did some wood carving as I recall - the "couch block" - remember? Idea! You should carve a roughly bottle shaped object, that has an actual bottle cap attached to the top. - as a bottle opener - to do the opening one beer with another technique. It would always be sitting there on the bench. Ding! Do it! - Make me one too!

Make it the perfect "finger brace height", to pop it effortlessly. -or make it exactly like another beer...

That sound good... another beer.

Capricorn Handmade Steel Bicycles

That comment I left on Heath's blog about my neighbor with the cool custom bike and rack?... Looks like he made it himself, I stumbled across his blog tonight - It's definitely him. He lives on the next block - no wonder he didn't seem very impressed with my tall bike antics.

Coincidentally, I went to Discount Steel this morning and bought 40 feet of hollow, 16 and 18 gauge tubing (for $12!) - going to see about building my own racks.



Late nite update. I really need a drill press to do this right. Both gauges are too heavy, but the 18 will do for prototype. I've got the bender too, so the (90 degree) options are open really - send me pictures of your drawings. My new Harbor freight portable bandsaw ($60) blows-doors on my abrasive-wheel chop saw, hello Craigslist?

Golden Lake Michigan - 1984-ish

I bought my first AC/DC album at Target - Dirty Deeds, not long after we moved to Duluth, first Target I had ever seen. Must have been 79, 80. Over the next years I bought every AC/DC album that had ever been released, and nothing else. In '82 I heard Number of the Beast and switched to Iron Maiden. From there I started discovering all of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal albums, pretty much entirely on my own - with Sean and Randy - but for all practical purposes... this was long before the Intrenets. We seemed to have a knack for choosing new artists from the pictures and social clues available on the outside of their plastic-sealed album covers. As the dust settles twenty-five years later, we found many hidden gems , and didn't really get hung up on crazy crap.

The Metal world is a place that I always figured out for myself, in the combinations that made sense to me, and it still is. I pay as little attention as possible to style, and genre, and personality, I like guitar-riffs, I like music. (now- I mean, back in the day style was of course, extremely important ;))

There were however, two people who greatly helped open my eyes in my transition from Metal to everything. The first was my 1985 Augsburg college dorm-mate Doug Moen, a twitchy, thinning blond hair, bean-pole from White Bear Lake who had a nervous habit of loudly snapping the fingers of one hand when excited or nervous. I came with my enlightened set of NWOBHM discs. He came with a mix of Hendrix and obscure classic rock, and a full load of the cutting-edgiest alternative rock available in 1985. Some bands I can completely acknowledge my introduction to from him include: Husker Du - Zen Arcade (which had come out the year before - local boys even), Jesus and Mary Chain - Psychocandy and The Cult - Love - both of which had come out just that year. We didn't listen to my albums much. Somehow, he had the inside knowledge. We walked downtown a couple times, connected some, but were both lost in our own deals at that point. Never talked to him since. The music has lasted forever though.

He had half their back-catalogs too. He loved Hendrix, who I didn't love at the time, and one of his few other "classic rock" albums was Robin Trower (known as an exceptionally huge Hendrix fan) - Bridge of Sighs album. That title track was covered as a bonus song on the 2008 album by a band that you know that I know: Opeth. Full circle.

The other influence... I met soon after returning to dull-hut, after that first year away - through Randy in fact, happened to live in an apartment on the next block...

another time.

Summer is gone.

Mayday 2008

Dowling Elementary Minneapolis

There are things that I'd like to say
But I'm never talking to you again
There's things I'd like to phrase some way
But I'm never talking to you again

I'm never talking to you again
I'm never talking to you
I'm tired of wasting all my time
Trying to talk to you

I'd put you down where you belong
But I'm never talking to you again
I'd show you everywhere you're wrong
But I'm never talking to you again

Shall We... Saturday?

Hologeek Speaks!

Coffin Daggers at the Hex

You guys missed something good tonight - The Coffin Daggers from NY - they were original. "Surf mixed with punk"- according to the guitarist (who looked much older in person), in his thick New York accent. What I heard was pulsing instrumental surf mixed with Psychocandy feedback, Unforgettable Fire delay and White Stripes attitude. They were great. Steve and I were convinced that the guitarist and keyboardist were on heroin - literally, I'm not kidding they looked like they were falling asleep during the show but they seemed normal after. The guy had a theremin and he could play it - viva Jimmy Page! -and also a vintage tape echo - you could see him reach back and hit the button and everything would start to swirl.

In over four years of frequently going to surf night it was the best band I've seen play with them yet.