Why can’t they make shit this cool anymore? Can you imagine someone building something this amazing today? Wouldn’t happen, especially not a government building!

I don’t want to hear how i drive a big truck when i park next to a full size pick-up truck and mine looks like a Honda Civic. That’s ridiculous. Do you think that dude ever uses all that space? I know he uses all that gas!

Victor’s might look like a tool shed on the outside and not much better on the inside, but they have done a nice job of adding cool Cuban posters and lots cool colors like these funky plastic table cloths...almost Cuba-like!

A cool old lady at The Turtle Bread Company. I bet she thought the service sucked too. The food is great, but the service sucks.

The Birchwood is maybe the best restaurant in town, or damn near one of the best. The food is always different and super homemade-like, and even gives off the illusion of healthiness. I had a meatless reuben that was pretty kickass (go ahead, laugh) and they make the best desserts and scones around. Alot of hippy types hang out at this place which used to bug me, but i dig those people now because i know they didn’t vote for Bush and have beliefs pretty close to mine.

Any discussion about the best resturant in Minneapolis wouldn’t be complete without Tao Foods in the mix. Tao is a total 1970’s hippy hangover that is mostly a health food store, but they have a few tables and a lunch counter at the front of the place where they serve fresh squeezed juices and soups and kickass sandwiches (the avocado sandwich is my favorite) and veggie rice dishes that are the best thing around...and no “illusion” of health here, this shit really is good for you. I feel like a rabbit every time we eat there (especially when we wash it all down with a couple shots of wheat grass juice), but i love the shit and could eat there every day.

An old lady walking down Lake Street in Minneapolis.

Josh set us up for a tour of the Marvy barber pole factory...although “factory” implies a bit more than what i think Marvy uses as production techniques. Basiclly it’s a small little room with about 20 barber poles hanging on the wall all at the same stage of assembly. No high tech computer robots or dudes in white lab coats here, which i guess is exactly how it should be given what they make (and they’re the only ones left doing it) is so cool and old school and real that it’s perfect that the “factory” looks today exactly as it looked 50 or 60 years ago.

Somewhere in Northeast Minneapolis. This is what i imagine Cleveland looking like. I’ve never been there but i would like to go someday. Seems like an old working class town with cool diners and stuff tucked away in neighborhoods like this one.