Skip to main content

Downer Avenue comes to an end at the Lake. You think you can see Michigan in the distance, but you really can’t. It’s that big. Makes Lake Harriet look like a puddle. But it smells like dead fish on the beach, which is why I took this photo from on top of the bluff.

Continuing along the bike trail along the lake, we hit downtown. For you arts people, this building is the art museum. Which building, you ask? The ugly one or the pretty one? Both, actually. They stuck a graceful, award-winning building onto the side of that brown monstrosity. Like transplanting a swan’s head onto a trout. I guess the front view’s not so bad, but the view from the lake is just a wall of brown.

Now downtown, we find ourselves at one of the city’s hottest after-work happy hours- Flannery’s, named after my cousin. If my uncle hadn’t admitted his drug habit and gone into rehab, he’d still own it. Of course, he probably would have spent all the profits on drugs and overdose, so I guess it’s better this way. Flannery still eats for free there.

Our last stop downtown is the Pabst Theatre, where Mason Jennings played the other day. This is also where we put on my high school musicals. Yeah, you heard that right. This is where I got to do my high school musicals. I guess there was an upside to not having an auditorium.

I looked in vain for a Tyme machine, but apparently, they’ve all been replaced by regular ATMs. I also did not take photos of Anodyne, Caribou Coffee, Nomad World Pub, or beer, because this is a tour of what makes Milwaukee different from Minneapolis. Last, but not least, this is the page from the Summerfest schedule showing Andrew Bird, Wilco, Flogging Molly, and Mike Doughty all playing on the same night, practically for free.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

This post was a whole long longer and more emotional an hour ago...

First off: It's sad that I get better wireless reception in my backyard than in my apartment, right? Sigh. I normally try to stay out of the quagmire that is the abortion debate, but as usually, elyzabethe wrote something insightful about feminist issues that I had to comment on. Actually, I had to comment on the framing war that was going on in the comments section between elyzabethe and another friend. Then I ended up emailing back and forth with her for awhile. Then someone at work mentioned how the "choice" frame is starting to lose ground, even though advocates don't want to admit it. I started scribbling notes, sighed, and thought, "well, I'm gonna have to blog about this." Elyzabeth rants often against anti-choice organizations and legislation, as is her wont as a libertarian feminist. She’s particularly good at teasing out how anti-choice (A, if you’re reading this, bear with me, I’m referring to ‘anti-choice’ as more than just the abortion issu...

Obligatory OWS Post

I'll try and expand on this later, but a few links looking at the protest from marketing and demographic standpoints: OWS Demographics  or, "Duh, it's not just unemployed college dropouts" Protest, Music and #OWS Opportunism  or, "Hey, this thing ain't going away. Can we market it?" OWS Billboard?  or, "Really, you think Clear Channel will put this up?" and the Frameworks Institute analyzes the "We are the 99%" meme.
First off, this isn't a post about abortion. It's about how the personhood movement is dangerous even if you take abortion out of the debate. According to my friend Liz, More than 55% of voters in Mississippi yesterday   rejected the state’s  ‘personhood’ initiative —a development that certainly bodes well for reproductive rights in this country, and gives me a little more hope about our collective sanity, as well. What interested me about this issue (aside from the fact that I possess a uterus), was the way some of the groups fighting the Mississippi amendment were approaching the issue. The group  Parents against MS 26  pointed out that the personhood movement , "has far-reaching effects on infertility treatment, contraception, and women's physical health." Jessica Valenti cites several examples in her column in the Washington Post , including this one: In 1996, when Laura Pemberton in Florida refused a recommended C-section because she did not want su...