The Aerie
Our neighbor's son was murdered yesterday.
He died a few miles away, in a quiet neighborhood wedged in between the freeway and a couple of colleges, while riding his moped home from giving a dance performance. Joe Sodd III was minding his own business when someone, for reasons unknown, decided to stab him to death.
I didn't know Joe Sodd III terribly well (grandson of the Minnesota PGA Hall of Fame player). When he worked as a waiter at a local restaurant, he had served my wife and I dinner. But as the Star Tribune points out, he was a gifted young man with lots to offer the world.
I cannot fathom his parent's grief, nor do I wish to try. Just thinking about it makes my head spin. The Star Tribune did a service by posting a video that shows some of this young man's accomplishments. There are any number of web tributes to Joe by his peers, which show how many people cared about him, and how much he will be missed.
The Sodd's have lived down the block from us for the seventeen years that we've lived in this house, and it is my deep regret that I did not get to know their son better. He was a student at Marcy Holmes school, and the photo above is eight years old now, with Joe in the center, from a production of 'Bye By e Birdie.'
There will be a memorial for Joe on Sunday at the Triple Rock Social Club which is very close to where he was killed.
Apparently I was too quick to post, yesterday. It took til this morning, but KSTP has posted the article along with the video of the crazy St. Francis councilman which caught my attention while flipping channels. So now you can watch and judge for yourself, although as I mentioned in a discussion with my friend Tim, you CAN count on the media to edit the interview in order to get 100% pure uncut China White craziness.
Still, it doesn't appear that it took a lot of editing.
Also, rebounding from my crushing defeat on a technicality in Bruce Schneier's Third Annual Movie Plot contest (Pfft! "150 words or less"... it's a guideline!) my caption for the Bruce Schneier motivational poster has received wide acclaim. So that motivational poster is available by clicking on the thumbnail at left...
And WHY am I focusing my life on entering various contests on the Bruce Schneier blog? Because it's about the only blog I can actually justify reading while I'm at work!
Well, that, and I have no life.
St. Francis is my alma mater, I graduated from St. Francis high school, back in 19-mumble-mumble. At the time, St. Francis was a desolate little farm town, which thought nothing of investing in extra athletic facilities, but skimped on the educational funds. Call me biased, but when I grew up there, I thought I was surrounded by thugs and hicks and knuckle-draggers.
I expressed this opinion in response to a story on the Star Tribune website, garnering a response from a friend of mine who has lived up there for the last couple of decades, assuring me that things have changed for the better.
But some things never change.
KSTP TV had two "crazy St. Francis" stories in a row tonight. I normally do not watch KSTP TV, as it is also populated by thugs and knuckle-draggers: specifically the Hubbard family which owns the station, and is trying to turn it into a little Fox News of their own. (To their credit, however, they are the station which broke the story about the missing explosives in Iraq back in 2004.)
Anyway I'm flipping channels and see the face of some lunatic shouting into the camera about how he won't be kept silent any more.
Turns out he's an insane St. Francis city council member, featured on camera ranting like a madman. I couldn't find the story on the KSTP website, but I did find this.
"When he finally had a chance to response, Schaffer yelled at the top of his lungs. There are no witnesses that he ever drank in his life, said Schaffer, who’s voice grew louder with every word. “I resent the aspersions on my character,” he said. “I resent it very much.”" |
KSTP went to some lengths to point out that Schaffer is a member of the Green Party, despite the fact that St. Francis city council positions are not partisan. I'm sure they would have been delighted were he a Democrat, and utterly silent were he Republican.
The second story was about the high school semester being ended early because of racist death threats against the school's (still) ridiculously small black population.
| St. Francis officials said 18 African American students attend their school of 1,800. |
Let me do the math. I graduated from St. Francis, so it may take a while. Let's see, 1800 students, 18 black, that would make... 1%! One measley percent of the school population is black, yet that's too darned frightening to some racist troll at the school. While small, that is approximately nine times more black people at the school than during the Sevent... er, the years I was there.
No, not much seems to have changed in St. Francis over the last thirty... er, several years since I graduated!
Hey y'all. I wanted to blog this yesterday, but I was too busy partying? Why?
Because yesterday was "Alberti Day"!
Yes, it's carved in stone somewhere, so it MUST be true.
Alberti Day was named on behalf of the first Italian settler on Long Island. To put things in perspective, when this guy stepped off the boat, Columbus' discovery of America was not as old as the Civil War is to us now.
Along those lines, my friend Giovanna has clued me into the fact that if you can trace your ancestry back to Italy, you can become an Italian citizen! And since my father's father was from Palermo, I have the opportunity to undertake the multi-year quest to gain Italian citizenship.
This is no small thing! WIth such citizenship, I could get work in the European Union, and also I could own property in Italy. Here comes my Tuscan retirement villa! Gio has offered to help me out with this quest, with the caveat that she's moving to England in the fall in order to become an archaelologist.
Other than that, the news is that I'm continuing my quest to NOT work more than 40 hours a week, in the hopes that this will improve my health. It helps that I was given the resources of another individual to assist me, so I can give him the extra 20 hours that I've been working every week. So I've been trying to get my more bicycle rides in, and to get to the gym a little bit more. Also my wife has been helping me with nutrition.
Speaking of my lovely spouse, we recently celebrated our 19th wedding anniversary, which strikes me as completely nuts. That means of course that we celebrated the 20th anniversary of our engagement. Here's the thing - nobody told me that life accelerates so fast as you age! It just doesn't feel like we've been married for twenty years. Heck, I don't feel like I've done ANY particular thing for Twenty Years, although I know that I have.
Anyway we had a lovely trip down in Red Wing, which photographs I'll post when I have a minute. Lots of shots of turkey vultures flying over bluffs. We stayed in the St. James Hotel, which has regrettably (or not depending on your dietary condition) canceled its Sunday Morning Gorge Fest, also known as the Sunday Breakfast Buffet.
The weather being fine, we ate an ordinary breakfast out on the patio. I enjoyed listening to the fifty-something woman behind me discuss politics with her husband, the highlight of which conversation was when she started a sentence with the phrase, "Well, the word on the street is..." I almost choked on my coffee. I wonder if she also spoke "Jive"?
So hopefully I'll be blogging and writing a little more than I've been able to over the past couple of months. I know, promises, promises...