Both bike riders and bus drivers in the Twin Cities are different than they are were I had previously lived, in the Boston area. In Boston, bike riders are well-armored but live in abject fear, are hardly found on the road within the cities, but have reasonable options for recreational biking. Bus drivers, cab drivers, truck drivers, and car drivers in Boston are all maniacs, and it is impossible to identify one group vs. another as dominant on the highways and byways.

In the Twin Cities, bike riders are numerous (this is one of the bike-ridingest cities in the country), radical, and fearless, and bus drivers drive as though there was no one else on the road. And that behavior by the bus drivers is matched by the behavior of the car drivers…buses always have the right of way, and you always let them go, move aside, and avoid them. Or they crush you. Since everyone does get out of the way, there are few problems.

Except for the bike riders, of course.

So one of the man news stories du jour in the Twin Cities was this battle between bus drivers and bike riders. The official news reports don’t tell the full truth. What was happening was this: The recently modified Nicollet Mall, a major downtown street closed to regular traffic…was open to buses, cabs, pedestrians, and bikes. But the bus drivers were annoyed at the bike riders, because the only people on the Mall exhibiting more hubris than the bus drivers were those bike riders. The bike riders would drive as though they were the only people on the road, and so would the bus drivers.

The bus drivers asked the city to exclude bikes from the Mall. Bike friendly, the city refused. So the bus drivers simply started running into bikes. Or so it would seem. Right after the bus drivers complained and help was refused, slam, a bike went down. More discussions, more negotiations, another refusal. Slam, another bike went down.

Now, it is possible that this was all a coincidence, but I did not get that sense at the time. The sense got was that buses kept slamming (gently) into bikes until the bus drivers got what they wanted and bike riding was restricted to specific times on the Mall.

Now this is all changing, with new rules.

…starting Monday, bicyclists will be able to ride along it on weekdays for the first time in 12 years.

In 1997, the city banned bicycles from the mall between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m. on weekdays, after Metro Transit drivers complained of close calls between their buses and bikes.

the story is here

There is also to be a free shuttle service up and down Nicollet. This is being touted as a “long asked for” service, but that is not true. Well, it is partly true. But what many people have actually been asking for all along is a service that would ALSO connect Nicollet Mall with Eat Street, the part of Nicollet to the south that is a self-organized neighborhood phenomenon that puts to shame the high-volume, hyper-consumeristic, downtowney development we see along the Mall. I mean, the Mall is nice and all, but Eat Street is Minneapolis. A shuttle that brought downtowners to Eat Street would help ensure long-term stability in that neighborhood. The down side, I suppose, is that it might bring brown poor people into more direct contact with the downtowners, who we all know live in the suburbs and commute to the city to make their living.

This seems to be a case of city tax money subsidizing the suburbs. And that’s okay, because suburban tax money subsidizes the city as well. But I think the lack of a shuttle to Eat Street is highly questionable.

I hope we can see an Eat Street shuttle some time in the near future.

In the email, she had asked for my time. She wanted to talk to me about a strategy for finishing her degree in anthropology, and she wanted to know whether there was some research that she could do with me. At the end of the email, she said, “Can we please meet at the Hard Times? I’d be more comfortable.”

To this day, even though Lizzie has been my student, then my colleague, and now is my friend as well (and still my colleague), and even though it has been many years since this particular email (how time flies!), I have never asked her exactly why she wanted to meet in the local anarchist coffee shop rather than in my office. But I don’t think I’ve needed to ask her that; I have a sense that I know why.

So I arrived at the coffee shop not entirely sure why I was there or what I was going to do or even exactly whom I was meeting. I had a vague idea of who Lizzie was, but it would be all too easy to get it wrong and mistake her for someone else or someone else for her. She was small, had red hair, and would be wearing black, as most of my students seemed to. Among the young women in the coffee shop, this ruled out…almost no one. So I went to the counter and ordered something, figuring that whatever needed to happen would happen. When my coffee was ready, I paid and picked it up and turned around and there she was. Maybe.

“Lizzie?”

“Yes. Hi.”

“Okay, then, let’s talk.”

And we walked over to one of the tables by the front window and sat down. Almost immediately a young man came over and sat down on a nearby chair and said “Oh, Professor Laden. Hey, I was in your class two years ago. Your human evolution class. I’m sure you don’t remember me, but I just wanted to tell you how great it was.”

I got the sense that Lizzie knew this young man.

“Well, I’m glad you liked it.”

I also got the impression that this young man was a regular in the Hard Times. He was probably one of the local anarchists.

“Yeah, it was great. I couldn’t’ believe the things you were saying. You totally changed the way I think about…everything…,” and as he said this, a young woman came over and sat down next to him, joining our little group.

I realized as this conversation developed that the reason these two kids had come by to talk was because Lizzie was there. Lizzie was with me, so they could come over too. I’d been in this very coffee shop countless times previously, and most of the young anarchist crowd were polite but avoided me unless they specifically knew me. No particular reason for that…other than that I was probably known to most of them as someone who taught at the U, and who may have been a bit intimidating (those of you who’ve met me know that I’m a big, scary guy with a mean face that most people avoid getting anywhere near). With Lizzie sitting with me, unharmed and clearly not intimidated, it was safe to explore, say hi, ask a few questions.

“Your lectures were totally awesome. They made me rethink everything. Everything. In fact, that is why I dropped out of college. Now, I mainly hang out here.”

Oh, great, I thought. I converted a perfectly normal young man into an anarchist. I wondered whether there was a particular lecture that did it…

“Me too!” Suddenly the girl was animated and involved in the conversation. “Some professor I had in some class three years ago. He was totally awesome. He made me realize that I did not belong in school and that I just needed to do my own thing.” Then she looked at me, rather closely. “But it wasn’t this one. It was some other professor.”

“Hmm, I wonder who?” I said, glad that I was not the only one who was busy ruining the entire system of education.

Now, the boy was looking at the girl with a quizzical look, and the girl was looking at me. “He had long hair and a mustache,” she said, remembering her wayback.

A moment of silence. Then the boy said to the girl, “Imagine him with long hair,” and his thumb pointed to me.

Lizzie chimed in, “And a mustache. A big mustache like a pirate.”

And the girl’s eyes widened and her mouth made a big “O”….

“It’s you!” she shouted. “You’re the one. You changed your hair, but it’s you!”

Oh, brother. Turns out I was ruining the entire system of education pretty much single-handedly.

Over the next few minutes, the two visitors wandered off and Lizzie and I were able to get down to business.

…Now, that scene you have in your mind, of Lizzie and me sitting across from each other at a tiny table in a dark and smoky coffee shop on the West Bank in Minneapolis …let it get all wavy and foggy and slowly fade away. Then it fades back in, but it is different. It’s still Lizzie and Greg, but now they are sitting next to each other at a bar, in a different but still darkish location, and the barkeep has just put a plate of Königsberger Klops in front of Greg and a plate of Wiener Schnitzel in front of Lizzie….

Greg had just been saying to Lizzie, “You know, the downside of knowing a blogger is that whatever happens…,” eyeing the Weiner Schnitzel, “…just might get blogged. Like this Wiener Schnitzel. I’ll probably have to blog that.” And verily, the Wiener Schnitzel was huge and impressive. Totally bloggable. “Plus, for some reason, I tend to write a blog post every time you and I have dinner together.”

“I did notice that,” replied Lizzie, with a measure of snark but not taking her eyes off of the Wiener Schnitzel–I assume calculating which parts to eat and which parts to load onto her bike for the ride home.

We were sitting in the Black Forest Inn in South Minneapolis, on Eat Street. The Black Forest is across the street from Azia and is also the location of a party PZ Myers and I threw a few months back for our readers, so some of you know this place. This establishment has been extant for a very long time and has a rich and interesting history.

To our right, as we sat at the old traditional bar, sipping the custom-made beer and munching on very authentic German food, was the famous Richard Avedon photograph. It seems that some years back, Avedon was a student at a nearby art college and came here regularly to hang out at the bar. At some point later on, he gave the owners of the Black Forest this photograph…a huge, almost life-size blow up of six or seven women, all Daughters of the American Revolution. They were sitting and standing around like they were about to get their portrait taken, or had just gotten their portrait taken, and they looked like a bunch of pretty tough broads. Most people who see this photograph, hanging behind huge sheets of Plexiglas off to one side of the rectangular, centrally placed bar, think it is a group of Germanic royalty. The women are wearing formal dresses with crown-like tiaras, and they all look very Germanic and stern. And their photograph is hanging in the Black Forest, which is otherwise adorned with myriad specimens of Germanic art and kitsch. But no, they are not Germanic royalty, just old-fashioned, upper-crust blue bloods from somewhere in the U.S.

Some time after the photograph was hung, a gentleman who at that time frequented the Black Forest and still frequents the neighborhood pulled a .357 magnum pistol out of his pistol-hiding place and put one bullet into the forehead of one of the ladies and another bullet into another lady’s chest. Bam. Bam. He double tapped the Avedon. The owners got really mad at that dude, and he is no longer allowed in the restaurant. I hear tell Avedon was not too happy about this either. The bullet holes are still quite visible, no repairs having been effected.

Anyway, Lizzie and I had gotten together for dinner very late on this Wednesday evening for a number of reasons. We needed to talk about some science and some personal stuff. We never got to all of the personal stuff because there was so much of it, with things happening in her family and my family and among mutual friends.

One of the things I wanted to touch on was this: We have a mutual friend who had gotten himself into trouble some years back and was now paying the price with an imminent stint in prison. I’ve given the details elsewhere. A few days before this dinner, I had gotten an email from him, and I didn’t think he’d mind if I shared it with Lizzie. For some reason I didn’t want to just forward it to her. That that didn’t seem right or respectful. So I had a printout which I let Lizzie read at the bar, before the dinner had been delivered by the barkeep.

What is relevant to the present discussion about this long letter with many things in it was this one part, which I shall paraphrase: “When I started to take your class, way back when, I was involved in these illegal things I was doing. But in your lectures, you showed me the value of science and scientific thinking. This totally changed my mind about everything, and I walked away from the life of an anarchist and decided that I needed to become a scientist.”

So. Anarchy 2; Science 1.

______________

There is another feature of that night’s dinner that I’ve decided to relate in a different forum. Here.