2020 Cartoon Shout-outs!

Your friendly Saint Paul Crank here. It’s time for some late summer cartoon shout-outs.

This first one goes out to the organizers of the Minnesota State Fair Crop Art competition. If not for the pandemic, you would have been able to see this piece hanging in the horticulture building with all the other excellent seed-art works. I used onion seeds for the black, red lentils, broccoli, millet, quinoa, poppy seed and Cream of Wheat.

This photo goes out to the organizers of the State Fair itself. Even on weekdays, the bicycle parking corrals are often full to capacity, with bikes locked to random objects on Como Avenue, the UMN campus, and Snelling Avenue. Despite this, every year, Fair organizers put black tape over the bike lanes on Como Avenue and repurpose them for cars. This year, the city of Saint Paul is building an off-street bikeway in front of the Fairgrounds on Como. Will the Fair organizers try to repurpose this new bike path for car parking next year? I hope not but I wouldn’t put it past them.

This cartoon is for the “Bike To Work Day” we never had this year.

This cartoon goes out to the Saint Paul Public Works Department, who’ve done a pretty good job of filling potholes, considering they have a half billion dollars in deferred street maintenance.

This cartoon goes out to all the folks living next to college campuses. With COVID-19, it looks like the fall semester could be super short this year.

This cartoon goes out to all the laid-off or underpaid flight attendants dealing with mask-less, irate customers.

This cartoon goes out to the folks who still have car alarms, particularly the ones that make a piercing single chirping sound when your car locks or unlocks. Thankfully these devices seem to be declining. Maybe it’s the efforts of the “Silence of the Horns” project?

This cartoon goes out to the new Space Force. Hope you’re having fun up there.

This cartoon is for Mike Freeman, and all the judges, prosecutors, attorneys and elected officials entrusted with holding police officers accountable. If we fail to do this, a lot more stuff is gonna burn.

At Streetsmn, we focus on petroleum use in the transportation sector, but what about plastics and packaging? This cartoon goes out to all the plastic industry lobbyists who called me and every other resident of Saint Paul, trying to block the city’s ban on plastic take-out packaging (something we’ve apparently dispensed with during the COVID epidemic).