Tag Archives: giraffes

Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak

R.T. Rybak is the current mayor of Minneapolis, MN, (serving since 2002) and a former writer for the Minneapolis Tribune who has also contributed to MPR. More importantly, he’s been known to crowd surf at First Avenue concerts. Yeah, that’s Minnesota for you.

So I will start by saying that I have nothing less than the utmost respect for Mayor R.T. Rybak. The guy is kind, smart, passionate and is often the best speaker in the room regardless of the venue. With that said, it is with a heavy heart that I must report the following: when I invited the mayor to participate in GDBWSNBDG at a recent local foods banquet in Montevideo, MN, the first reply I got was “What does a giraffe look like?”

Needless to say I was speechless. Though I do not know the mayor on a personal level, I have spoken to him at enough political functions to know that this question must have been in jest. Or, at the very least, a question of metaphysics. After all, I as an armchair philosopher I can sympathize: what does anything truly look like?

At least for both his sake and mine this is the story I’m sticking to.

“Well, they have long necks,” I said.

“Right!”

He then took the notebook from my hand and began to draw, clarifying that he would need to draw a rough draft. (One could say that he was drawing a rough gir-aft, but one should probably not say that because it would make them look like an asshole).

Figure 1: Mayor Rybak’s Rough Gir-aft.

Commenting on his work (“Hm, not bad!”) he then tore the draft from the notebook. Becoming serious, he took to his art like a bird to flight …

… If said bird was filled with helium, therefore making it a fowl-ish Hindenberg.

Normally the story would end here, but the moment he finished (taking the time to “touch up” the work with neck-arms and a pigtail) he then took the sketch and ran off. Not knowing what was going on (and hoping to get my notebook back), I followed only to see that he had sought out his wife with cries of “Honey, honey, look what I drew!”

The reply? “That’s very nice, Raymond.”

Yes, very nice indeed.

Novelist and Short Story Writer T.C. Boyle

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After flocking to the Richfield, MN, Borders like a vulture looking for cheap deals on books I would hesitate to pay full price for, I found myself wandering Minneapolis with a dear friend talking about whatever we could to fill the morning air. It just happened that we made our way to the Minneapolis Central Library where, to our surprise, one T. Coraghessan Boyle (website) was having a reading/signing for his latest book When the Killing’s Done (2011). Boyle is the winner of the 1988 PEN/Faulkner, has written for the New Yorker and all around interesting fellow when you consider the following scene:

Life, says TC Boyle, “is tragic and absurd and none of it has any purpose at all.” He is sitting contentedly with a glass of wine in the west room of his Frank Lloyd Wright house in Montecito, California. “Science has killed religion, there’s no hope for the future with seven billion of us on the planet, and the only thing you can do is to laugh in the face of it all” (The Gaurdian, February 28, 2009).

Never one to not exploit what I can only believe to be Fate for my own profit, I thought this to be a good opportunity to collect content for what by now is on the verge of becoming my generation’s Facebook. My friend and I were only able to catch the last few minutes of the event – in fact, only the question-and-answer period – in the standing-room only auditorium and were fortunate to find ourselves so far in the back that we happened to be one of the first few in line for the signing. Quickly finding ourselves at the front of the line I gave him the typical pitch, finding myself particularly nervous as I did so, able only to find relief when he said “it would be a privilege to draw a giraffe for your website” with the catch that he make it “special.” Where I am sure other websites would be thankful regardless, GDBWSNBDG is a respectable website with its standards so I added a counter-catch saying that it could be anything but a horse, which is something a certain University of Minnesota President misunderstood.

This is what I got:

As I squinted my eyes, confused, Boyle clarified that it was actually an alligator eating a giraffe.

Well, OK.

U.S. Congressman Tim Walz (Minnesota)

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I made my way to the 2011 DFL Business Conference in Cokato, MN, in February because I am the the associate chair of the Chippewa County DFL, and for those not familiar with the workings of a political party this is where activists from across the state elect the chairman, secretary, affirmative action officer, and so on, who will be leading the party for the next two years. While there, as I was doing some campaign work for newly-elected Secretary Vanessa Blomgren, I ran into U.S. Congressman Tim Walz (office page). Pulling him close, I watched his arms fold up to listen to the hardball question he was likely expecting me to throw his way, but instead I made the typical pitch:

MPR Photo/Derek Montgomery

“Hello Tim, I know you’re really busy, but there’s something I would like to ask you. I’m working on a website called (blah blah blah) and while I think you are an amazing gentleman, you seem like someone who should not be drawing giraffes. Could you do me the honor of drawing a giraffe?”

The congressman then burst into laughter, saying he would give it a try and that the idea was overall “pretty damn funny.” While I expected him to simply scribble a drawing out so he could move onto other business, he seemed legitimately interested in contributing it, being invested enough to say “I have no idea what the hell that is” when he made the awkward neck-bubble (goitre?) on the giraffe.

Of everyone the editorial board has talked to so far, Tim has been the most receptive and for that we thank him.

Atheist Blogger and Feminist Jennifer McCreight

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Jennifer McCreight is an atheist and feminist blogger who writes over at BlagHag.com and someone I had the pleasure of meeting when she visited the University of Minnesota-Morris on March 23, 2011. As part of a small lecture tour she was doing across the state during her spring spring she came to the campus to speak about “God’s Lady Problem: Breaking Up with Supernatural Beings,” which was both edgy and controversial. And how it could it not be – she equated one’s relationship to God with that of an abusive relationship according to the established and accepted signs of such a relationship? Though the turnout was about 30-40, I counted only about one walkout.

She is perhaps most known as the main organizer behind Boobquake (4/26/10), a “humorous exercise in scientific and skeptical thinking” seeking to disprove the claims of Iranian Islamic scholar Kazem Seddiqi‘s who believes that “women who do not dress modestly lead young men astray, corrupt their chastity and spread adultery in society, which increases earthquakes.” Needless to say the results were pretty straightforward: boobs do not cause earthquakes. Who would have thought?

Also, for someone with both activist/scientific success and a popular blog under her belt she is surprisingly apt at drawing giraffes.

Writer and Director Roger Nygard

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The University of Minnesota-Morris (UMM) had the pleasure of hosting Roger Nygard, director, writer and producer (perhaps best known for his 1997 documentary Trekkies) who screened his most recent film The Nature of Existence (2010) to an overflow crowd of students and faculty alike. In Nygard’s own words, Existence is a film where he “wrote the toughest 85 questions I could think of, about our purpose and the nature of existence, and then asked hundreds of people all over the globe, such as: Indian holy man Sri Sri Ravi Shankar (The Art of Living), evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion), 24th generation Chinese Taoist Master Zhang Chengda, Stanford physicist Leonard Susskind (co-discoverer of string theory), wrestler Rob Adonis (founder of Ultimate Christian Wrestling), confrontational evangelist Brother Jed Smock, novelist Orson Scott Card (Ender’s Game), director Irvin Kershner (Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back), Stonehenge Druids Rollo Maughfling & King Arthur Pendragon and many more…”

Overall the film was not too bad even if he refused to challenge or interrogate the logic of those he interviewed, a point he made clear in the Q-and-A following the film by pointing out that his film is meant only to make the viewer think and come to their own conclusion. PZ Myers, UMM professor and author of the science blog Pharyngula, was in attendance, voiced his opinion and did not seem impressed by Nygard’s hands off style. In fact, the only reflection of his own beliefs the director made clear was the fact that he is moral relativist, the notion that “because there is no universal moral standard by which to judge others, we ought to tolerate the behavior of others – even when it runs counter to our personal or cultural moral standards”, which at face value is not an entirely harmful idea. After all, what is wrong with there being more tolerance in the world? Although such a notion can be agreeable to certain degrees it grants no excuse for reticence and does not justify inaction when there is a clear, unethical wrong being committed.

Take for example a brief exchange that happened during the Q-and-A.

When asked whether or not it would be acceptable for a culture to torture babies, Nygard responded socratically: “From what frame of reference?” stressing in his answer (and the small debate that followed between he and students) the fact that given the subjectivity of morality no culture has a right to dictate what is moral for another. In fact, when asked by a student whether or not his experience working on the film proved to him that “the world would have been a better place if there was no such thing as religion since all of the awful things that have been justified by it would not have happened” such as the Inquisition, the crusades, and so on. To this Nygard replied by again asking the student to define “what frame of reference” he was using. Clarifying his philosophy, Nygard said that while those things that have been committed in the name of religion were bad, to know good is to know what is bad.

I can’t say I agree – I happen to believe we can know what is good without killing the Jews – but that’s just my own opinion.

I wish I could say here that as the tension in the room began to build a member of the GDBWSNBDG editorial board turned the subject to giraffes, but the truth is Nygard’s moral relativism was an issue in most of the venues in which he spoke. Earlier in the day he participated in a roundtable discussion and apparently slipped into a debate with one of the university’s philosophy professors who wrote his thesis, which will soon be published as a book, on ethics. It was actually during this debate when Lucas Felts interjected during a pause … and asked for a giraffe …