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| Desiradi |
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Went to the lighting of the Stone Arch Bridge last night. In spite of it supposedly starting at 6pm, when I got there a couple minutes to six, the lead singer from Desiradi said something like Woohoo! Now we’ve got an audience!
When they started playing, there were a few of us milling around down by the band, and no sign of anyone else. Turns out, all the bigwigs were in the Mill City Museum.
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| Holidazzle Gone Wrong |
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About seven, after Desiradi had finished, the important ones trooped out as Savage Aural Hotbed were setting up. Sometime around 7:20 various of the bigwigs came onto the stage and told us about how swell this all was, with RT finishing off with a campaign speech, telling us how important the bridge and the riverfront were to Minneapolis (completely forgetting the early 80s, apparently) and talking about hos Washington Boulevard is going to be the next big project. Whatever. Then the lights, with a two minute song as RT encouraged people to close their eyes and only open them when the song was done so they didn’t see the lights gradually coming up.
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| The Unlit Bridge |
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By the time I got home, I was dead. My ankle and knees had strong opinions about all the walking around I’d done, and were expressing them quite forcefully to my brain. I’d also forgotten to eat dinner before heading out, so there was another body-part complaining, too. I ate, and basically collapsed, which is why I don’t get a chance to edit the pictures more carefully. Sorry about that. Given that all of the local TV stations were there, and most ran stories in the evening news, I’m kind of surprised I couldn’t find links to any of the stories online this morning, either. Maybe someone who has more patience than I do can dig them out of the poorly organized sites. You know where to send the links, right?
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| RT flips the switch |
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But hey, Aaron was there, and I got to talk to him for a while. He came up with the words that make the caption on the picture of Savage Aural Hotbed, and it made me laugh. While I wasn’t happy that most of the bigwigs didn’t step outside to listen to the bands, and felt especially bad for Desiradi, both because I couldn’t remember their name and they played most of their set to a little more than a dozen people, it was a pretty good evening. The weather was beautiful, and the full moon rising over the steam plant made it pretty damned picturesque. And while my lower extremities are hurting today, I think it was worth it.
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| The Lit Bridge |
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One final note on the pictures. I had my camera cranked up to 1600 ASA for most of them, so you’ll see a fair amount of sensor noise in the full-size versions. Maybe I could have done better with a tripod and long exposures, but I was comforted by the fact that I finally have a digital camera that behaves like film cameras I learned on did. It’s comforting when things behave as I expect them to, and previous cameras I’ve had never quite did. I took over fifty photos, playing with a bunch of features of my camera, and trying not to shake too much. I’ll probably get around to posting more of them later, and probably a better picture of the lit bridge when I head down there with a tripod some night, but I figure that I hit ten percent that I liked well enough to post today, which isn’t a bad average at all, considering that I was bracketing from “dead-on” to four full stops underexposed in many cases.
- Jim’s found other pictures of the Zombie Pub Crawl, but didn’t find any of him. Well, Jim and Tom got featured in the Daily’s Metro Section saying UNGHHHHHH on Saturday’s Zombie Pub Crawl. Thanks to the guy (one of the organizers, I think) who sent in the link. [jim]
- This year, UW boos Halloween visits, and this year the school is not allowing guests in the residence halls. They’ve allowed it in the past, but will be cracking down on out-of-town guests, hoping to keep the damage in Madison down to a minimum this year. [daily]
- The old gasworks on the West Bank are Vacant land full of local contention. Sounds as though the park board is planning to sell it off once elections are past so they won’t have to worry about losing their jobs. [daily]
- A plan to burn alternative biomass fuels at the U of M’s steam plant is coming under heat. As well it ought. I think it’s probably a good idea, but between the U of M and Foster-Wheeler, there were a ton of problems with the plant in the past decade that never seemed to be addressed. And when a facility like this is looking for a new permit (as they are in this case), you’ve got an excellent chance to hold their feet to the fire and actually get a response. [daily]