It pooping while sitting bad for you?

Call it a weakness but I, for whatever reason, am somewhat drawn to well-written stories about poop. It's not a fetish or anything it's just the simple fact that the technology surrounding how we do the deed has gone unchanged for centuries. When everything else has evolved so much in the past centuries, why is it that we are still sitting down on an elongated bowl (most times) and dropping the kids off? I'm assuming that our distant ancestors began this trend many millennia ago by doing their business over some sort of earthen hole, all we've done in semi-modern times is add some pipes below the hole, sit on some porcelain as opposed to wood and filled to thing with some water.

When it's broken down like that, it's pretty damn primitive. That's why the Slate story (linked in the title) caught my attention. Simply squatting was apparently their answer. And why not? It's how primitive hunter/gatherers took care of their pooping. They didn't have time to dig a hole when they were out chasing Wooly Mammoths. Hell no. They literally popped a squat and did the deed. Then they moved on. Of course with the exploding population today, doing that would cause all sort of disease-related problems and would be plain unsightly. So back to some invention.

The geniuses (who apparently put a lot of time in to thinking about poop) at Slate theorize that the human body is designed to squat while pooping so why not design the toilet to function like that? It's really quite genius but what about the over 50% of the population who pee sitting down? What sort of miracle toilet works for both purposes while allowing you to poop while squatting (as the writer suggest with your knees close to your chest)?

So, without proper facilities we'll just have to improvise for the time being. Will you hover, perch or do some sort of modified squat to test out the comfort level of this new stance? Maybe I'll actually follow up on this one because I can see the health benefits to it. Do yourself a favor and at least try it.

And do me a favor and check out MinnPics. All Minnesota photos all the time.

What's at the Minnesota State Fair for me?

I normally love going to the fair. When I lived back in SPAMTown USA I'd hit up the good old Mower County Fair 4-5 times in its six day run -- not even counting the times I'd work my employer's booth at the fair. I'd always partake in at least one food item and wander down the midway or check out an exhibit building before heading back to the office. My other excursions centered around the midway or the far too popular beer garden. The prices weren't half bad and it broke up the monotony of the week.

But now I live in the general Twin Cities area and in the seven years I've lived here I think I've gone to the Minnesota State Fair four times. For one, it requires taking a day off work and driving to the opposite side of the Cities because I want no part of pushing my way through a bunch of slow walking folks who wreak of fried food and sweat as they wrangle their double-wide strollers through crowds and stand indecisively in front of each and every food booth whether they plan on making a purchase or not.

For some that is part of the charm of the fair -- the people and watching them. I'll admit that last year I caught some shade with the toddler as I fed her and watched the throngs of people who only seem to emerge in to public view during the ten day-long fair and it shows. There's always too much skin being shown and usually not by those who I wouldn't mind seeing some extra skin on.

For some reason, and I know it will make me out to be a total rube, I like to see the few media personalities who actually show up to the Minnesota State Fair. It makes the few who do show up seem a bit more human and relatable. As far as the food goes, after I had my first fried Snickers on a stick I officially swore off the new fangled fair food on a stick. It's gone too far. How long until some vendor actually sells deep fried t-shirts? It would be one hell of a novelty but not very practical or edible.

So I limit my Minnesota State Fair excursions to every other year. I take the day off from work and strike out for St. Paul. And I do the same with the Minnesota Renaissance Festival which I'll be going to this year. Again, it's a sweaty mass of people moving too slow for my own liking but the people watching alone makes for an interesting time. Who knows, maybe I'll end up being part of one of the audience participation shows again. But I'll still be stewing inside about the price of the food, people not covering themselves adequately and crowds moving far too slowly.

But it all makes for good photos. See what pops up in the coming weeks at MinnPics.

My hobbies and how to share them

Even though I've been extremely busy at the office and, as I mentioned earlier this week, I have plenty of other projects looming, my mind has been wandering. I've thought about creating a bunch of logos and other materials for the random things which wander in and out of my rather strange imagination. I've thought about all of the strange (to other people) hobbies and interests I have which have been cast aside in recent years for whatever reason and how I could resurrect them in an economical and interesting way which I could share with this small but apparently loyal online audience I've built in the past half-decade or so.

See if any of these items catch your interest. I have a vast collection of 1/64 scale farm machinery replicas. Most of these were amassed during the mass production era of the late-80s and early-90s but they've been relegated to an upstairs closet along with a huge stockpile of accessories for them. The Ertl brand is the go-to name for collectors and farm kids (and grown-ups) all across America and that's the dominant brand in my collection. Before they outsourced production to Mexico and eventually China, I visited the small Iowa town of Dyersville (west of Dubuque) where the Ertl brand was born after World War II. Sure, the brand has moved on but the city still has farm collectible (or toys as my old lady calls them) in their blood. I can already feel a photo project coming on for this one.

I've also got an immense sports card collection. It's something that came about in my pre-teen years (it seems to have begun in about 1988 and waned around 1994). I know that this is where hundreds if not thousands of my hard earned dollars went and I EARNED those dollars. They're not just baseball cards, though. The collection, for whatever reason, spans all four major pro sports and I'm fairly confident that I have more than a few Brett Favre cards lying around in those dusty stacks of boxes in my childhood bedroom's closet back on the farm. A few years ago I considered posting the whole lot of them on Craigslist but have since reconsidered. I'm definitely not a hoarder but without knowing what gems are lurking in those boxes, I just can't let them go. With some research and some cold weekends in the coming winter months, I could easily create a website chronicling akward photos of has-beens and never-weres staged by the photographers who roamed the major league circuits working for a pittance.

It's a beginning and I'll admit that the concept I'm thinking of if basically a ripoff of what's been going on for years at lileks.com and while I like that James Lileks (whose site I've read since my days in Austin at the beginning of this century -- that sounds very impressive) has in the way of everything under one rather massive roof, I also like the corporate philosophy I work under at the office of having a vast network of websites slowly expanding to cover niches as we all see fit. Each one has positives and negatives but if I'm going to take this seriously I need to choose one format and stick with it. I already have MinnPics, this always evolving blog and Minnesota River Valley Photos which is a tiny infant of just a few weeks old. So what's a guy to do? Do I stay the course or begin to move things to a more centralized umbrella site. Hit me up with your suggestions in the comments here or tweet them -- I'm at @sornie79.

What a surprise - Brett Favre has returned

I guess that my earlier thinking about Brett Favre hang gliding in to Airlake airport in Lakeville was about as far off as a guy can get when it comes to guessing games involving NFL athletes. I had pictured Favre dressed in his typical ensemble of Wranglers and a Hanes t-shirt gliding in to the metro area to save the Vikings from a 3-13 season. Instead he landed at the posh and tony Flying Cloud Airport in Eden Prairie mere minutes from the Vikes' practice facility alongside Interstate 494 in the aforementioned suburb.

The media circus surrounding the return of a 40 year-old quarterback who was already under contract for this season is mind-boggling. The Vikings seem to be a desperate team. Why else would they send a contingency of three players to a nothing town in Mississippi (Hattiesburg) to woo the graying QB to the frozen tundra of the Northstar State? And what's with the team's near obsession with quarterbacks who are old enough to be the father of half of the team's players? Warren Moon, Randall Cunningham and now Brett Favre. Have the Vikes ever groomed a QB from a college-aged draft pick to a successful superstar or are they too damn lazy to invest in someone for the long haul?

No, let's go out and woo a fucking redneck diva from Mississippi and put up with his shenanigans of being too good to attend training camp while using an injury as an excuse. And if that fails, make a play for more money because we all know that's exactly what transpired. He's the Michael Jordan of the NFL – the guy will never entirely fade away from the game because he needs the attention. When he does eventually retire, he'll probably buy an NFL team or maybe start his own league so he can own that and play as quarterback because that's just how much he needs attention. And here I was thinking that my almost-two year-old daughter was the neediest person alive when it came to attention.

Now that I have the latest Favre drama off my chest, you can visit MinnPics. Click to find out just how cool it is because I, like a certain quarterback who wears the number 4, yearn for your attention.

What does a three-minute break yield?

I'm taking a brief break from my recent deluge of design work. To give you some detail on the deluge I have eight two-sided poster-type projects to complete in the next two weeks, I'm waiting on revisions for the quarterly magazine which I am the Art Director and designer for, I have 140-plus pages for two annual publications to complete, a website which needs ads created for mock-up purposes so it's saleable, I am in the process of teaching myself Drupal (Google it) and I'm hungry for some freelance projects whether they be general graphic design work, logo design or photography. Because I never have enough to do, I also am in the 4-6 month long process of contributing to the redesign of eight moderately-viewed websites.

Those reasons are why I'm treating myself to a break.

It's all part of my daily life which also includes MinnPics. Curious? Check it out and prepare to be amazed.

How a labor strike changed everything

Immigration has always been a part of our country. It's how our country was built and it's how we became known as the world's melting pot. But now immigration is viewed by many as being a negative. It's viewed as bringing crime and it's assumed by many that everyone who doesn't look like you or I is here illegally. Sure, that's the case sometimes but it isn't always. That's the subject of a Minnesota Public Radio package airing today about my old hometown -- Austin, MN -- being at a crossroads a full quarter century after the Hormel strike which gained national attention changed the landscape of the city forever.

The subject is of particular interest because I grew up in Austin. Well, more specifically a farm outside of Austin but I attended school there and lived in the city until moving in 2003. Throughout that time, those changes were taking place. I remember our very own neighbors being embroiled in the politics of teh Hormel strike. Some crossed the picket line and some stood firm. Those wounds of union men and women and the "scabs" who crossed the picket line are still a sore subject for some but the real changes in the city weren't totally visible until a few years after the strike.

The dad of a friend of mine was at least partially responsible for finding new workers willing to take the lower wages of the newly formed Quality Pork Processors (QPP). I recall advertisements touting a starting wage of a whopping $7.75/hour. These were the same jobs that, under union scale, sometimes paid double that a few years ago. That was the beginning of the immigration influx. It was (and still is) an extremely low wage for an already established but recently unemployed head of household to earn a living with so the logical recruitment target were immigrants and the logical area was south -- particularly Mexico.

There have been rumors for the past twenty years of QPP advertising on billboards in border towns in Texas and even in cities south of the border in Mexico about the high paying jobs in Austin. Supposedly a bus arrives on a weekly basis -- if not more frequently -- in Austin carrying eager, new employees for the cut and kill lines at QPP.

The new racial make-up of Austin has created a cultural divide. While the once high-paying jobs that vanished overnight left many downtown storefronts, the influx of hispanics in the city created a rebirth of sorts in the business community. Suddenly Mexican markets and restaurants sprung up. When I left in 2003 there was one authentic Mexican restaurant in town. Not so any more. The MPR story lists the number of hispanic businesses in the downtown area as nearly a dozen. They pay sales taxes and property taxes and wages, too. It's good to have businesses.

"You know, we sound like a bunch of racists down here," said Vincent Maloney, who worked at Hormel for 38 years. "But we're not."

But some view the immigrants as taking over their once whites-only community.

"We've got eight parks in town. Small ones. Big ones," Maloney said. "The white man don't dare go out there. The Mexicans have got them all cornered. And what a mess. They get these piñatas. Beat the hell out of them."

In my last couple years living in Austin, I noticed the fondness that the new immigrants had for the community's parks. They were mostly families grilling on the weekends. Sure the crowds were large and to "old timers" the different culture is intimidating. There are plenty who view them all as bad because of the violence their culture has brought to the city. There have been stabbings and rapes and even murders. It's not a pretty fact but I think of it as a growing pain. If it weren't for the city's latest demographic make-up of 25% hispanic, the city would be a virtual ghost town. The police do their jobs in cracking down on crime but they don't racially profile because that is simply wrong.

The big sticking point is that the influx of hispanic immigrants are very adamant about clinging to their heritage, their language and their culture. That doesn't sit well with established residents.

"Everything is labeled here, making it easier for them to keep their language," she said. "At HyVee, the grocery store, they have the Spanish names for the restrooms and they have the magazines that are printed in Spanish. They just enable them to keep their language. ... I think everyone would feel more accepting if they tried to blend in."

That quoted point is something I actually agree with. My grandpa immigrated here from Denmark. He worked hard to learn the language and earn a living. He farmed for decades and provided for his large family. I don't recall my dad ever saying that his dad spoke Danish -- even inside the house or with relatives who immigrated here as well. Sure, he hung on to the language because he as well as his relatives corresponded with family members back in Denmark but that was the extent of him keeping his language. May dad can't speak one single word of Danish. My grandpa blended in.

Is it different now? Was it different a century ago? Was it shameful to be proud of your immigrant heritage in 1917? I don't have the answers but I do know that my old hometown has permanently changed and those residents need to confront the change head on, embrace the positives and work with their immigrant neighbors together to make the city better before the few bad apples effectively take over.

Anarchy and beat downs

Last week I mentioned my seemingly semi-annual processes of reinvention. Music has always played a big part in that reinvention and this go-round with it is no different. The last mention of music was my almost accidental discovery of "The Pretty Reckless" who are currently on this summer's Warped Tour.

Today's musical inspiration comes to me courtesy of "Against Me!". I first heard a track by them about five years ago on their MySpace page then about two years ago they struck gold with the single "Thrash Unreal" off the disc entitled "New Wave". That CD brought them some mainstream success -- even if it was fleeting. Then this year they released a new disc, "White Crosses".

That's where this single comes from. "I Was a Teenage Anarchist" is a fairly decent song but the video -- shot entirely in slow motion -- tells a fantastic story. What its meaning is is open to interpretation but I take it to mean that the lead singer has no desire to conform (anarchy) and suffers the consequences to his non-conformist attitude. A beating at the hand of a single police officer ensues while throngs of people simply watch.



The video's conclusion shows the beatee smiling as he sits in the back of a police car. Inside he knows that whatever he was punished for was worth it. Bruises heal while injustice takes action to correct.

But that's just my interpretation. What's yours? Drop a note in the comments or just move along to the pretty pictures of Minnesota at MinnPics.

The Jackass 3D trailer is amazing

I'm probably not in the demographic which the Jackass franchise is geared at but I was when the show first aired on MTV and it actually stands the test of time.

I literally laughed so hard that I had tears in my eyes, not to mention those streaming down my face. It's that good.

JACKASS 3D


If this appears too classless for your refined tastes, check out the classy photos of Minnesota at MinnPics.

Reinvention through discovery

A couple weekends ago I sat idly discussing the Warped Tour with my wife's cousin's daughter. She was pretty excited and told her dad that she'd work extra hard during the upcoming week so she'd be able to go to the 2010 edition held in Shakopee, MN. In her mildly depressed, goth way, she rattled off a dozen or so bands that she was excited to see. I sat there and listened as not a single fucking band registered with me. I bluntly told her that all of the good bands (Bad Religion, Less Than Jake, etc.) were skipping Minnesota this year (because that's the exact comment I saw a day before on the Warped Tour website).

I went on, like any old-timer would, to regale her with the tale of the last Warped Tour I attended. I told her as she feigned interest that it was in Somerset, Wisconsin and it was supposedly the only time that Blink 182 and the Warped Tour would cross paths so this one was big. Ten years ago that place was my own personal mecca. How could you go wrong spending less than forty bucks to see ten bands you at least had interest in and discover a handful of others?

Sure, the Warped Tour is much closer to the Twin Cities now by actually being IN the Twin Cities but the bands she named all were foreign to me. I sat and drank my beer like a good old-timer and slowly realized that I'm not really that old but I was becoming out of touch. I had settled in to a safe rut and again, like I seem to every six months or so, felt the need to reinvent myself in some way to stave off certain insanity.

It all sort of fell in to place one night last week as I stumbled across a supposedly controversial YouTube video featuring the band of a teen star of the TV series "Gossip Girl" (it's on the CW). The seventeen year-old was dressed up in her trashy best as she belted out the lyrics. I had my doubts about her band -- The Pretty Reckless -- but the video for "Miss Nothing" was not only not bad it was actually damn good. Sure, most every concept for music videos has been done a million times but the music that this band had put together was fresh. At least fresh enough to jump-start me.



The Pretty Reckless was actually a good band and whether or not others will judge lead singer Taylor Momsen's vocal skills to be worthy of their oh-so sensitive ears, I thoroughly enjoyed it. It's upbeat and loud while still having subtle tonal qualities such as appropriately placed bells and it's just what I needed to begin my current reinvention. Then it clicked, this band was one of those unknown-to-me bands that had been mentioned to me less than a week earlier. Shit, I just learned about an actually listenable band from a 15 year-old. Maybe, subconsciously, that's why I featured Taylor Momsen as one of Monday's photos on MinnPics but the decision to put a couple tracks from The Pretty Reckless on my iPod was definitely a conscious decision.

Brett Favre isn't retiring

How's that for taking a stance on a subject? When I first saw the retweet of Judd Zulgad (Star-Tribue sports writer) informing the online universe that Brett Favre was retiring, I called bullcrap. It seemed too abrupt. Favre was quarterback for the Minnesota Vikings for one season. Not to get all preachy and optimistic but Favre has something to prove. Sure, he took the Vikings to the NFC Championship Game last season but that isn't the pinnacle of success in the NFL.

Sure, Brett Favre is slowly becoming the Bionic Man with his shoulder surgery last year and his ankle surgery this year but the man's athleticism is nothing to laugh at. He's 41 years old and has taken more beatings than a slave but he still has something to prove. If he can't do it this year, I'm almost certain that it will be his swan song but mark my words -- Brett Favre will be in a Vikings uniform for the 2010 NFL regular season. He may use his ankle as an excuse to not only miss traning camp but dodge the preseason games this year as well but he'll play in the regular season.

We already know that his wife, Deanna, renewed her Lifetime Fitness gym membership so if rumors like that mean anything, Favre will be riding in to Minneapolis on a white horse to rescue the Minnesota Vikings and save them from being a 3-13 team.

If you want to escape both my madness and sports madness, check out the spectacular photos of Minnesota at MinnPics.