Twin Cities Parade of Coops

The afternoon I headed out on the Parade of Coops, a gentle mist was falling which I assumed would keep the crowds away this obscure Twin Cities event. I was wrong.

The blurb in the Star Tribune, which my mother-in-law had spotted and thoughtfully e-mailed to me, had said that chicken enthusiasts should meet at an address in Seward where we could get the addresses for the rest of the tour. Like the organizers, I imagined a manageable group of a dozen or so. During the course of my visit to the first yard, no less than 60 to 70 people ventured into the backyard to gawk at the chickens, to ask the owners how they keep the water from freezing in the winter, and enjoy warm tomato soup and zucchini bread.

The organizer, a young man in a jaunty plaid cap, quickly ran out of address lists and had to run off several more batches on the family's home computer. It was a long wait but it was free and a means to see other people's backyards without being creepy.

I only had time to visit two more homes. Each had four or five chickens, although some had permits for many more than that. All of them had children, as if raising chickens was a way to teach caregiving to their own offspring. All collected their eggs and ate them and all had charming coops. One of them had a dog, which, being a herding and not hunting dog, got along fine with the chickens and did not appear tempted to bite and shake them. They ate the eggs, but their children had grown too attached to the feathery critters to kill and eat them. Indeed, one of their daughters pet and held her chicken, perching it on her shoulder for visitors to admire.

At the third and final house I visited, the owner explained that he and his wife's reasons for having chickens had evolved over time. Initially they named them and kept them as pseudo-pets. Now they ate their eggs (they get about one or two a day) and when the chickens egg-laying months are behind them, they slaughter and eat them. In the corner of their yard, they were canning tomatoes over their turkey fryer. They had me sold. This is the attitude with which I would one day keep animals.


One of the things that struck me and that I keep trying to tell my husband is that none of the coops took up much space. One of the families had a very small backyard and the coop definitely dominated it, but they still had room for tomatoes and piles of firewood. The other two yards were large -- they both had extensive vegetable gardens, but also enough room for the kids to run around.

I also try to remind my husband that his pop-overs get extra pop with farm fresh eggs. How much fresher can you get than your own backyard?

I really need to quit the pig licking.

The old man wanted me to post this picture with the caption "The ultimate in local eating." So here goes.

The ultimate in local eating.

This was from the miracle of birth center at the State Fair. Those piglets were something like nine days old. All the mothers were just laying on their sides, half asleep while the piglets furiously rooted and sucked, sucked and rooted.

It made me crave pork chops and bacon.

Fortunately, I was at the State Fair where pork products are abundant. After visiting (warning: gratiutous use of the best beauty contest name ever) Princess Kay of the Milky Way, we headed to the porkchop on a stick stand. Porkchop on a stick was one of the first things I had had at the State Fair many years ago when I visited with my sister, her husband, and our friend, Jess. It was delicious and gave me the impression that every food item at the State Fair is solid, simple, delicious street food. I was mistaken.

Last year I made the mistake of trying something new. The week before I went to the State Fair I had read about the Ufda Brat -- a brat wrapped in lefse (Norwegian potato flat bread) with mashed potatoes and sauerkrat. I love brats. I love mashed potatoes. I love sauerkraut. I love lefse. Why wouldn't I love an Ufda Brat? I wouldn't love the Ufda Brat because it was a bland, flavorless goo. It was as if they thought that because they were packing so much stuff into each Ufda Brat, they needn't use any salt. Big mistake. You always need to use salt.

This year, I vowed to stick with the tried and true. I was not disappointed. Porkchop on a stick is an incredibly simple, spicy, salty porkchop grilled with a jerk-like rub and stuck on a stick for easy, portable enjoyment. Here I am enjoying it in front of the snake zoo.

Eric got a corn dog, like he always does and I had a bite, like I always do. So far the vow to only eat the tried and true was working out.

At the day wore on, I started to feel my defenses weaken.

Perhaps it was my Al Franken sighting.

Perhaps it was the seed art depicting Barack Obama in a quaint Sambo-like way. (Maybe it's just one of the constraints of the art form?)


Perhaps at was registering to vote. (We moved which means we had to re-register.)
Perhaps it was the totally random Loreal tent that was plopped down right next to the eco-building and the church coffee stand and was pumping techno over its totally State Fair inappropriate red carpet.


The sights and sounds of the State Fair must have gotten to me because suddenly I had the urge to break my vow and try something new. We made a beeline for Famous Dave's.

Pig Lickers had been the talk of the State Fair. Bacon dipped in chocolate. Need I say more? Yes I do.

A few years ago, I celebrated New Year's Eve with my friends Yas and Dean in DC. Yas is a pastry chef. A great pastry chef. For dinner they had cooked up a lovely honey baked ham. For dessert, Yas had melted a giant bowl of chocolate and laid out a tray of cut fruit and her amazing olive oil pound cake. We dunked and ate -- lucious chocolate dripping off of sweets -- and enjoyed our 1970s fondue flashback. We ate more and drank more and the menfolk got to talking about how much they love ham and other pork products. Someone pulled the ham back out.

More chaos ensued and in a "your chocolate's in my peanut butter" moment, bits of ham ended up getting dipped and eventually drenched in the chocolate. Most of the rest of the evening consisted of Dean sitting on the floor next to the coffeetable moaning with pleasure over the bowl of the now grease-stained chocolate.

A few years later, I was at another gathering at Yas and Dean's house. I'm not sure if the inspiration was that New Year's Eve, but Yas had refined the bacchanal experience into a neat little truffle. Peanut butter, chocolate, and bacon. In a word? Yum. She'd been making the truffles for the cafe where she worked and they flew off the shelves -- and with good reason. A perfect combo of salty and sweet.

I was hoping too recreate the whole experience at the State Fair with these little guys.
No such luck.

The problem with the ham dipped chocolate of New Year's Eve was that the warm ham grease ended up in the warm chocolate. But on New Year's Eve with a few drinks, no one seems to mind.

The problem with the pig lickers is the opposite: in order to keep the chocolate solid, the whole thing has to be stored and served cold. The result is that the bacon is congealed. It is possible, apparently, to ruin mother nature's candy.

The congealed ham completely threw me off my game because then I went and tried something else new (to me). Smores on a stick are gooey marshmallow and chocolate neatly contained in a graham cracker dough shell. Good in theory. Gross in reality. Nothing redeeming about this. The dough was sour (but not in a good way) and undercooked. I took a bite. And then another just to make sure it was really as bad as I thought it was. And then I threw it away. I should have done what Eric did and just gotten a butter sugar lefse.

He's so much happier with his sweet treat than I was with mine. Even the guy behind him covets the lefse. At least it looks like he's coveting something.

Next year I'm sticking to: porkchop on a stick, walleye on a stick, corndogs, lefse, and honey ice cream and maybe mini donuts. I promise.

The MN State Fair: Butter Sculptures For All

The State Fair (aka "The Great Minnesota Get Together) left town last week and, sitting in 64 degree weather, I fear summer went with it.

Really I meant to blog about the fair last week, but the old man and I have been busily renovating the home (demo, installing a glass block window, organizing the basement and various storage areas).

And so begins the State Fair blogging... a little late.

The thing that Eric and I always make a point of visiting is The Princess Kay of the Milky Way area of the dairy building. Yes, I did just write "Princess Kay of the Milky Way." Say it outloud. You will feel like you're in a Japanese cartoon.

Every year a handful of women are selected from various counties to be the faces of the Minnesota dairy industry. Minnesota produces more cheese than Wisconsin. We just don't wear those silly hats. (In the interest of full disclosure, I lived in Wisconsin for five years -- longer than I've lived in Minnesota. I have never worn a cheesehead.)

Here is this year's Princess Kay of the Milky Way, Kristy Mussman, in a parade with a chipmunk and some of her milkmaids.


Eric enjoys the ice cream in the dairy building next to the Princess Kay exhibit. I enjoy the exhibit itself, which features Linda Christensen making busts of each of the Princess's heads out of 90 pound block of butter. Yes. Butter. Yes. Ninety pounds. Nine. Oh.

Here's the artists working her magic in a chilled rotating glass display case.


I feel personally connected to the whole affair because last year when I got married I had a brief interaction with the illustrious Ms Christensen.

My sister, Laura, was the one who set me and my husband up. Needless to say, this was, in my sister's mind, the best aspect of my relationship with Eric. She spread the story of her yenta ways amongst friends and family alike with a large slice of pride and a dash of humility. Of course, we were happy that my sister had had such insight and wanted to pay homage to my her abilities. Around this time one of our friends, Jess, made a comment about the significance of my sister in our relationship. "They should have a butter sculpture of you at their wedding!" We thought it was a brilliant idea.

I called around trying to find someone who was adept at butter sculpture. turns out there aren't too many people who can do it. There was a woman down in Iowa who had sculpted a last supper scene and cows out of butter, but she was mostly out of the dairy art game.

I tracked down Linda Christensen in California. (The women at the State Fair had a big laugh when I told them why I needed to get in touch with her. I'm not sure if they were laughing with me or at me.) In order to accomplish such a feat during her annual trip to Minnesota (which was about two months before our wedding), the artist would need a freezer space to work in, pictures of my sister, and a 90 pound block of butter.

Could we just go into the co-op week after week, collecting pounds of butter to melt and reshape into a giant block? Can we just call land-o-lakes and order that sort of thing? Did we know any restaurateurs with walk-in freezers? Where would we store it for the months leading up to the wedding? What would we do with this giant block of butter afterwards? Could Eric bake that many pies even in a lifetime? In the end, as much as we wanted to pay homage to my sister's yenta-ing, it just proved beyond our capabilities.

We had a great wedding. It was amazing to see all the friends and family who came from near and far to celebrate with us. The band rocked. We danced all night. But still, part of me thinks about that 90 pound block of butter that could have been.

I might be an anarchist...

Over this past weekend during the lead up to the RNC, several homes around Minneapolis were raided by the Ramsey County Sheriff. The occupants of the homes, which included one in my sister's neighborhood, were suspected of preparing to violently confront the police during the anti-war protests in downtown St Paul during the RNC.

My sister's neighbors have a house that is, well, seemingly overflowing with stuff and ... dare I say... crap. According to twincities.com, the police found and confiscated a number of items during their search. The implication being that these items somehow showed that they intended to attack the police and destroy public property. I made a quick search of my own house to see which of these items I might have on hand. Here's the evidence that I might be an anarchist and that I might, at some point, riot in downtown St Paul.

Materials to create "sleeping dragons" (PVC pipe, chicken wire, duct tape), which is when protesters lock themselves together

A machete, hatchet and several throwing knives

a gas mask and filter

Empty glass bottles

Rags

Flammable liquids

Homemade caltrops (devises used to disable buses in roads)

Sledge hammers

Kryptonite locks

Empty plastic buckets cut and made into shields

So I'm not a perfect anarchist. My caltrops can't be turned over in any direction and still work. I don't technically have gas masks -- they're just dust masks. I haven't, technically, cut those buckets into shields. And, of course, I'm missing a few of the items that the police confiscated:

Rappelling equipment

Metal pipes

Axes

Bolt cutter

Material for protective padding

An Army helmet.

Wrist rockets (high-powered slingshots)

I'm missing the key item:

Large amounts of urine, including three to five gallon buckets of urine.

But the "anarchists" whose house got raided weren't perfect anarchists either. Turns out that the buckets contained rain water that the occupants had been collecting to flush their toilets and, indeed, some urine from a man who lives in a nearby garage that doesn't have a toilet. It's sort of sad that it was assumed that the urine was there for something nefarious when it was there because someone is poor.

There's still a chance that I'm not an anarchist. From the state of things on my second floor, there's still a chance that I'm just a homeowner doing some demolition (or supervising while her in-laws and husband do all the actual heavy lifting).

In fact, that switchblade pictured above was underneath some built-in cabinets -- likely tucked there decades ago by a kid whose parents didn't want him owning a switchblade or auditioning for Westside Story or perhaps an anarchist.
I took the picture of the knife next to the dusty remains of a bat that we found in one of the walls that we knocked down. Or I maybe I'm a witch...

Either way my house should definitely be raided.

Gale Woods Farm Rules!

Minnetrista seems really far away when you don't know where you're going. Last night, I went out to Gale Woods Farm for a canning class. The Farm is part of the Three Rivers Park District, a 27,000 acre park district full of reserves, water, trails, facilities, and, evidently, activities that I only recently discovered and plan to spend lots of time exploring.


Gale Woods Farm is a fully functioning educational farm with sheep, chickens, turkeys, cattle, and gardens set on 410 beautiful acres. The class started at 6:30, which was just about the perfect time to see the farm in the cool of the evening by the orange glow of the setting sun. We got a quick tour of the facilities including the sheep with their trusty sheep dogs, the turkeys which are unwittingly being fattened up for Thanksgiving dinners, the new, still fluffy chicks, and a demonstration bee hive that shows all the hard work the buzzing critters put into the newly harvested honey.

The class itself was really informative. It was a demonstration rather than an interactive class, but as a city girl who'd never even seen the process before, I wanted to see how it actually works before I plunge into doing it myself. I have enough confidence now to give it a go without too much fear of killing anyone. Primary goal of initial canning sessions: keep self, family, and friends alive. Keep checking back for more canning updates.

I'll also be returning to Gale Woods on Saturday when I have my sister's kids for their annual "Breakfast on the Farm," which features locally grown foods. Sweet.

Seriously, what's with the shopping carts? Seriously.

Why are there so many shopping carts in backyards in my neighborhood?

I went for a walk the other day and, due to the Minneapolis alleyway system, probably passed about seven or eight backyards. Of those, no less than three had shopping carts in their backyards.

About a year ago I went to the Target near us and, overloaded with probably totally unnecessary household items, took the shopping cart out to the car, or at least tried to. I pushed the cart into the parking lot and right when I reached the first lane of cars, the cart stopped rolling. It was a hot day and at first it felt like I had dragged the wheels through some hot sticky tar or something. I checked the wheels. No tar. I kept trying to move the cart and eventually ended up dragging it to my car. I couldn't possibly be bothered to haul it back to the cart corral, so I just left it in the parking lot, sort of out of the way.

As I pulled out, I realized that there were a lot of abandoned shopping carts strewn in the lanes between the cars. The carts didn't help this particular Target's image as a Targhetto.

This particular Target, it turns out, puts some sort of sensor in the wheels of their carts so that when it gets a certain distance from the store, the wheels get locked up. Unfortunately, that distance is approximately ten feet in front of the store.

I have been to many, many Targets in this area and none of the ones in the suburbs seem to have the same feature. In fact, I have seen some in the suburbs with abandoned shopping carts so far from the front door that they can't possible have any sort of sensor, unless the person who abandoned the cart was Hulk Hogan and he carried it. (Or perhaps Jessie "The Body/ The Mind" Ventura.)

Initially, I thought it was totally ridiculous discrimination that Target would put a sensor on their shopping carts in this particular neighborhood, which happens to be a little less than affluent. Having lived in this neighborhood for a few months now, I can sort of see why they do it here, I guess that maybe Target has a reason to fear cart thieves. None of the backyard carts are the bright red ones from Target.

Locavore Experiment: Day 4 (ish)

Yesterday my nephew (4) and neice's (1) day care was closed -- or "shut down" as my nephew said-- so my sister foisted her kids off on me for most of the day.

We made a last minute decision to go to the Minnesota Zoo. We packed up some snacks and water and juice and drove the 30 minutes to the suburban locale. It was a really nice day - beautiful weather, kids mostly under control and excited to see the sharks and bison.

The kids had their snack mid-morning and then lunchtime rolled around. I knew that walking all the way to the eatery would put us dangerously close to low sugar level meltdowns and so we ended up stopping at a little stand that had hot dogs and sandwiches and pizza. I sorted out what Gus (the four year old wanted) and what I could order that Addie (the one year old) would be able to eat. They were out of chocolate milk so I got Gus regular milk and hoped he wouldn't notice. They were out of fruit cups, so I placed "potato chips" into the "vegetable" category. I didn't think the food pyramid would mind.

It wasn't until I was a good bite or two into my sandwich that I remembered this locavore experiment that had been occupying my every thought for the past three days (and truth be told many thoughts in the months leading up). The moment I stepped into kidland, however temporary it might be, all thoughts of where the food came from and the economic and environmental and social implications of food consumption flew right out the window. I had one thought "Get food in their bellies and hope that they're getting some basic nutrients."

Therefore, it is my belief that having children (and perhaps more so having them suddenly and unwittingly thrust upon you) exempts you from ever having to follow any of these silly food movements. More power to you if you can manage it, but I will not judge you if you can't.

We now have three exemptions: "Marco Polo exemptions," "I have kids exemptions," and "my husband makes killer chocolate chip cookies exemptions."

Locavore Experiment: Day 3

Yesterday I went to the Midtown Farmer's Market. I bought some corn, lettuce, carrots, potatoes, and raspberries. The raspberries were from Peter's Pumpkin and are shown below.


There are some questions as to whether or not buying from your local farmer's market is more eco-friendly in terms of the energy required to transport the goods, but more on that in another blog entry.

I also picked up some almonds. They were flavored with a tangy bbq spice by a local family. The almonds themselves come from California, but I bought some raw ones before I asked where they were from. I feel like such a sinner.

The almond guy said that he had found some almond trees that supposedly grow in zone 4. We're in zone 5 -- although we used to be zone 6. Thanks, Global Warming! He said that he would soon be trying to grow some here in Minnesota in which case they will be the first almond farmers here.

Is it cheating to buy almonds when they come from California? What if they are roasted locally? They are really good for you. Does that make a difference?

A similar conflict arose when my husband wanted to bake some cookies. He's started to just starting lumping various items that he doesn't want to give up under the "Marco Polo Rule." He makes really good cookies and they require a lot of ingredients that can easily be obtained locally (eggs, butter, flour) and some that cannot be (white sugar, brown sugar, vanilla, chocolate chips). I have to admit that I am reluctant to try his cookies with maple sugar or molasses or any other sweetener that we can get locally. Would you be able to give these up?



The other question that came up was the flour issue. Minneapolis was originally a milling town. In fact, Gold Medal flour was one of the products that was originally milled on the banks of the Mississippi here.
The mills are all shut down now, but General Mills is still headquartered here. I haven't been able to find out where Gold Medal Flour is milled now or where they get their wheat from. But let's say that the wheat isn't from here and that the flour isn't produced here, does it still count as local because the company is based here? Aren't I still supported some sector of the local economy by buying the flour? Or does buying local mean necessarily supporting local farmers and small business and NOT supporting larger companies like General Mills that distribute goods all over the world and get their raw materials from all over the place?

I'm hoping to track down more information about Gold Medal Flour, but in the meantime, I'm wondering if even if it is from local farmers and produced locally, using their flour might not be in the spirit of the localist movement.

Locavore Experiment: Day 1

Inspired by an Adam Gopnik piece in the New Yorker last year, I've decided to venture into a little bit of social experimentation. For the next month, I'm going to try out the locavore lifestyle. Doing this is based on three reasons/assumptions: eating local is better for the environment, eating local tastes better, and eating local supports the local economy. Hopefully over the next month, I'll see whether any of that is true and whether any of that really matters.

Initially, I was going to try to get my daily grocery bill to be 100% local (the co-op we used to go to regularly before we moved had receipts that noted what percent of your purchases were local items), but after seeing that the bloggers over at "Splendid Table" are only shooting for 80%, I decided to loosen it up a bit. I don't have a specific number in mind, but I'm shooting for at least 80% local (not including salt and spices as per the "Marco Polo" allowances). Since I'm terrible with remembering how far away different towns are, I've decided to define "local" as coming from Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, or either of the Dakotas. (I know, I know, why don't I just include Jamaica and Belize while I'm at it?)

Even though I live in Minnesota, a place where the black earth offers up abundant local nutrition, I decided to stack the deck even further in my favor by doing this little experiment in August, the month that gives us the greatest cross section of late summer and early fall harvests. Perhaps one day I will try this experiment in the dead of winter in Minnesota, but not, perhaps, before we have a large deep freeze that I can spend the summer months stocking or before I figure out a way to turn potatoes into blueberries.

I also knew that this month I would be just returning from a trip to the east coast where I would have enjoyed loads of seafood and various other cuisines (like sushi and dim sum), the consumption of which this experiment would severely limit.

I just got back into town, so today was my first day. This morning I ventured to the local coop for my first entirely local purchases for breakfast and lunch. Last week, I had tried the Birchwood's Granola that my sister had brought along on our trip back east. It was delicious and local, so I knew that that would be an agreeable way to start my morning. It's also berry season here and raspberries and blueberries make the perfect topping to this treat.


Getting local milk in the upper midwest is pretty easy, but I'm lactose intolerant. I typically eat my cereal in and my cookies with soy milk. Right away, I was having a hard time finding a local non dairy alternative. I made a new rule for myself -- anything already in the fridge or pantry is fair game. If eating local is, in part, motivated by the desire to limit one's ecological impact, wasting perfectly good food already in one's home seemed to be utterly counterproductive.

As luck would have it, I had some soy milk in my fridge -- enough to tide me over until I can find another local option.

At the coop, I also bought a nice loaf of hearty, grainy bread made in St Paul and some Wisconsin cheese and sprouts. I had my breakfast and lunch lined up.

I was feeling pretty good about my purchases (in spite of the fact that the granola was $7), but when I went to double check the ingredients, I remembered that one of the things that makes the granola so delicious is the coconut. I was somewhat sure that the grains had all come from Minnesota or at least nearby (the packaging includes a thank you to Whole Grains of Welcome, MN), but I was also pretty sure that the coconut could not possibly come from, well, pretty much anywhere in the continental United States.

It made me wonder about the bread. How many of the ingredients had come from the five state region I had restricted myself to? Even if the food I buy is made locally, how I can be sure that the ingredients came from local farms? Does it even matter if they do or don't? If part of the reason behind this is to support the local economy, aren't I doing that by supporting the local restaurant that's making the granola or the local bakery that's making the bread?

For dinner, I was largely able to put those questions aside. We had enough patty pan squash from the most local place I could get it -- our backyard garden. I stuffed it with some pantry bread crumbs, the cheese I'd bought, and some bacon from Kerkhoven, MN that I bought that the Farm in the Market at the Midtown Global Market and had some tomatoes from the garden on the side.

Admittedly, some of the greater challenges came from the back and forth with my husband. The Global Market had a great deal on rainier cherries, one of my husband's favorite summer-time indulgences. Picturing them being driven half-way across the country, I passed them up. My husband was not pleased. I'm finding it's easier to convince myself to go without than to force this experiment on others.

Feature Friday: Maybe You Should Die

WARNING: This post has some content that is probably not mom and mother-in-law appropriate. You have both been warned.

So every so often I stumble across something really cool on etsy that I end up buying. In the spirit of mutual promotion and appreciation and encouraging the spending of money and the stimulating of the economy, I'm going to periodically feature a handmade seller.

The first one is Maybe You Should Die. I actually came across their wares at the No Coast Craft Fair here in Minneapolis last year where I took this picture.

They have great cards...
but also great "mean bags" -- bean bags (or actually rice bags) with bitter, funny, mean sayings on them that you can chuck at your friends... or enemies.

Since they're based here in Minneapolis, I doubly had to order something from them. I took a phrase from Tobias in Arrested Development. You can check out the episode here.

It matches our dining room and living room (you can order it in a variety of colors). It's well-made, handy, smells like Jasmine rice, and is fun to throw at your husband when he's being a "douchechill." Check out Maybe You Should Die here.

Farmer's Market Last Weekend

We've got a tiny little farmer's market a few blocks away from us that runs on Saturdays and Tuesday afternoons. Here are some pics.

Is it really possible for two such awesome things to happen in one day?

First, I was driving home yesterday afternoon and I had to stop to get some cash. I pulled over at a little bodega that I have never been to near our house. Standing at the cash machine, I glanced over at the malt liquor area and noticed this sitting on the shelf.


I thought they had discontinued this stuff! The date on the can does say 2006. Apparently either some places have been hoarding it or it doesn't fly off the shelves the way the real stuff does.

The Daily Show did a little piece on this energy drink when it first came out. They got two kids to drink some of it and they ran around going crazy for a while. At the end of the clip, one of the kids gets right up close to the camera, his hair all wild, and screams, "I'm high on cocaine!" I can't find the clip, but it's awesome.

Now there is a trio of cable guys at my house installing our cable and it is taking every fiber of my being to keep myself from getting up and asking them, "Would you like some water or some Cocaine or anything?"

Finding Cocaine was enough to make my day... no, my week, and then this happened.

My buddy Jeff (web editor over at City Pages) won a silent auction item that gave him the honor of leading the crowd in "Take Me Out to the Ballpark" during the seventh inning stretch of a St. Paul Saints game. (The local AA league team.) A bunch of his friends gathered at the field in St. Paul to cheer him on and enjoy the kitsch of these events (which are an illustration in what I wrote about in my last entry about the greatness of local community and culture along the lines of the "St. Paul Sieve" -- a guys who dresses as a hockey goalie and tries to defend his goal during a between inning fan involvement game -- and the verging-on-racist-or-at least-very-awkward-between-inning karaoke performance by a Japanese guy in a Dunn Brother Coffee emblazoned white tuxedo jacket with tails) .

Before the game, Eric and I were sitting out by the field enjoying a beer next to a concession stand. The Saints' mascot is a pig so the name of the concession stand was "Pigtop" and it was emblazoned in big letters across the top of the stand, which also happened to be the wall next to the bleachers above the stand. In between sips of beer, I looked up and saw this.

Yes. That is actually a cop. And yes, he is actually standing above a sign that says Pigtop. Plus, it was Irony Awareness Night at the game. You cannot make this stuff up. I only wish I'd had my real camera and not just the one on my phone. It was an amazing day.