All posts in the topic Dyna's Annual All Fools Day Tale (Short link)

From: Dyna Sluyter Date: Apr 02 01:26 UTC Short link

On Apr 1, 2008, at 11:18 AM, Madeline Douglass wrote:

> I'm missing Dyna Sluyter's annual entertaining tale
> of the foolishness of our fair City...

	Believe it or not, all my April 1st stories are pretty much true,
although like any good story they may have been embelished a fair
bit. For example, several years back I reported the tale of a late
night drag ball put on by the Minnesota House Republican Caucus in
their fortress on the upper floors of the State Office Building.
Today that story would be so ordinary that it wouldn't even make the
"A" section, never mind the front page. During the peak of the
Northside drug trade I reported on start-up "Sly Di's Deep Discount
Drugs". That budding enterprise was simoultaneously shut down by the
Crips, Bloods, a bunch of "13" gangs, MPD, and an alphabet soup of
state and federal law enforcement agencies. But Sly Di's concept of
mass marketing addictive drugs was ahead of it's time- recent studies
show that more addicts may be hooked on prescription drugs than the
ones sold on streetcorners. That may explain why the drug trade has
diminished on Northside street corners as addicts are shopping
doctors and pharmacies for their addictive drugs instead. Last year I
told a tale of a streetcar vs. LRT car race between some "urban
explorers" and the billionaire owner of a pro baseball team. Note how
the railroad track has been moved to make way for the new stadium,
and there's only room for one track now- that billionaire has
crippled future commuter rail development to the west to build his
dream stadium that we're paying for. There's another good April 1st
story there, as moving the track has made the stadium more rather
than less vulnerable to a tragic hazmat accident or terrorist attack.
The same fertile swampland of the Bassett Creek bottoms and Oak Lake
will eventually give rise to another tale- the State Historical
Society has a photo of a waterfall at the mouth of Bassett Creek,
suggesting that Oak Lake had a water level about 830 feet above sea
level. Dig out a topo map if you want to see how big Oak Lake was.
There's also literally tons of flammable and under the right
conditions explosive hazmat dumped in those environs, and so far
science doesn't know a whole lot of what happens to that witches brew
when it's compressed by tons of fill and built environment. But even
after the firestorm blows closed the Bassett Creek and 394 tunnels
we'd need a flood event to refill Oak Lake, and nature simply isn't
cooperating today. So I've another story to tell...

	Late last night I prematurely released Mill City Farms L.L.C.'s
announcement of the return of farming to North Minneapolis. Today my
evil twin Sly Di and I cruised the Northside in Mill City Farms'
first tractor, the biggest mean green machine John Deere makes. We
initially ventured forth with the full 60 bottom plow array, but due
to our carless but narrow northside streets we cut that back to just
one 20 bottom plow. We also mounted the 20 foot wide bucket on the
front in case we found any brush, etc. to clear. First item on the
agenda was filling our green giant with Diesel, but while we
impressed the trucker and tradesfolk at the Holiday station on
Washington Avenue with our machine's size, it wouldn't fit under the
canopy at the pumps. Fortunately the city has provided a diesel pump
nearby on Pacific with no overhead obstructions. There was no one
there to take our credit cards, so R.T., just send the bill to Mill
City Farms. Full of fuel and junk food from Holiday, we sought
plowing opportunities. We tilled several acres at Port of Minneapolis
as the security guard fled in terror. Moving up the river, we scoped
out a few thousand cords of firewood to be harvested off abandoned
parkland as soon as our feller-buncher attachment comes in. Heading
west to Shingle Creek Park, we plowed several acres of disused park
land, saving our underfunded park board the expense of mowing for the
season- we'll be back with the planters as soon as the ground is warm
enough.

	Heading south on Lyndale, we at no charge to the city trimmed the
overhead trees which have been overdue for pruning since the opening
of I-94 absorbed most of the truck traffic. Along the way we cleared
a few abandoned structures so we won't have to maneuver around them
at planting time. At Broadway we came across a drug deal going bad,
so we put that 20 foot wide bucket to good use scooping up the perps,
vehicle and all. With all the gunfire it sounded like there was a war
going on in there, but with an inch of steel between us and the
gangbangers we pretty much ignored them. By the time we dropped them
out of the bucket, beat up Escalade and all, into the fenced in lot
of the 4th precinct station they'd been quite for a while- we figured
we'd let MPD have them and let GMAC repo the remains of their vehicle.

	You'd think as we got closer to downtown we'd find less available
farmland, but the opposite was true. Just north and west of the
"projects" we found some abandoned manufacturing facilities that's be
ideal for "value added" processing of our farm products. We expected
the fertile marshes of the new projects, AKA "Heritage Park", would
be unavailable to us for at least a few more years until they sink
into the muck like the last "projects" did. But judging by the high
proportion of unshoveled and untracked sidewalks, we may be planting
there yet this summer. At the south end of the new projects we even
found a lovely new but pretty much empty apartment building fronted
by a pond. Unfortunately the pond is probably too polluted for
irrigation purposes, but I suppose if we used it as a manure lagoon
that'd clean it up a bit?

	Heading further up the Bassett Creek bottom lands, we found a few
hundred more acres of fertile and already fenced in marshland just
south of Glenwood Avenue. We started clearing out the cars there with
the 20 foot wide loader bucket and putting them in the street outside
so they'll be out of the way when we come back to plow. We noticed a
crowd cheering us on at the entrance to this fenced in area, and some
jumped in what was apparently their cars after we removed them and
raced off. Unfortunately, before we could finish clearing the field
MPD showed up en masse, and despite our earlier good deeds they were
not happy with us. Fortunately when you're driving a 12 wheeled
tractor you can pretty much make your own roads and ignore fences. We
beat a hasty retreat out the back, and cut a few corners to avoid
traffic- the Harrison Neighborhood will be happy to know that we took
care of that abandoned gas station for you. Finding a secluded
parking spot for our big green tractor in Theodore Wirth Park, we
grabbed a bus home. Chief Dolan, we'll offer you a deal- if you drop
the charges we'll pull out the squad cars your officers got stuck in
the creek while chasing us...

	layin' low in Hawthorne,

		Dyna Sluyter