Someone in Minneapolis wrote a radio musical about us.

Above: Minneapolis, where actors are playing my assistant Marisha right now.

Marisha just came across some press clippings that seem to indicate that someone in Minneapolis (of all places!) has written a musical radio show about the Christmas Island case.

You can read about it here.

They've taken some real liberties, it looks like, changing Christmas Island to "Moon Island" and giving former councilman Sherman Larson a bigger part than he actually played. It looks like they changed the ending, too -- as we all know, our Christmas Island broke up before the trial ended and are presently working in and around town to pay off their legal fees. I feel bad for the kids, but so it goes. They probably won't be able to afford to fly out to Minneapolis to see the show that's about them. What a shame.

Marisha says she may fly out to see the show herself in October. We'll update you.

I've heard Minneapolis is a nice place. It's about the same size, roughly, as here, so maybe the people writing it will have a sense of what it's like being here. Of course, Minneapolis doesn't have a Zeppelin District or Delawaretown, does it?

If you're visiting for the first time from Minneapolis, feel free to look at this introduction to what's been happening on this blog since 2006.

Our one year anniversary!

One year ago today, I sat down at my computer in my office at City Hall downtown and typed out the very first entry of this blog, the Armitage Heights Clarion. As I said then, my goal was to post "information about things happening around the neighborhood, news for residents and business owners, updates from city council meetings, and maybe even a few tips about life around the city!"

And so I have! What a year! Who could have imagined then what a wild -- and productive -- year the neighborhood would have?

Looking back, it's hard to believe so much happened in the space of a year, both positive and non-positive. There were the Winter Parade disturbances last year, the troubling emergence of the Kaos Krew as a major force on the international art scene, the unfortunate dysenteric death of handgun activist Marla Manda Johanssen (and brouhaha over her proposed memorial), the demisesquecentennial of the Zeppelin District, my assault and subsequent hospitalization at the hands of a fellow councilperson, my abbreviated U2-themed vacation to Ireland, kidnapping and brief career in the illegal underground 1984 Boston Celtics Dubai hostage basketball league , my assistant Marisha's housesitting woes with Mitt Romney's freeloading kids followed by his outrageous denunciation of Marisha, the meteoric rise of indie-rock superstars the October Revolutionists, my court-mandated re-election over Ms. Johnanssen's son Barry and a host of challengers, and of course, the tragic and still-shocking death of unlicensed non-Muslim cleric the Ayatollah Martin Wisniewski. And too many other neighorhood events and news tidbits to count!

Needless to say, it's been a wonderful year writing this blog for everyone. I hope to be around to serve the people the 3rd Ward for many years to come, and I hope you will continue to find the Clarion a useful, reliable and fun source of inform about this great neighborhood. It's definitely "in ur computer, conveyin ur nayborhood pride," as those great internet cats might say.

A "shout out" for my fellow survivors of the illegal underground Boston Celtics Dubai hostage basketball league!

Dazed fellow hostage Mark Imbretson (as Larry Bird), moments after our rescue.

The twenty-two days I spent in Irish billionaire Tynan Tiarchnach's illegal underground Boston Celtics Dubai hostage basketball league were some of the most challenging of my life -- and some of the most rewarding. We were forced to play three games a day, refer to each other using only our illegal underground Boston Celtics Dubai hostage basketball league names, and wear Celtic uniforms whose shorts left nothing to the imagination -- and, where relevant, blonde wigs and mustaches. But despite that, the camaraderie I formed with my fellow hostages, and the great times we shared in winning the forced simulation of the 1984 NBA championship made it feel less like a simulation whose outcome was mapped out, but more like the result of real teamwork in action, a commitment to persevere, and a will to be winners! There were some times when I almost forgot we were hostages.

So here is a tribute to the men and woman that comprised our championship illegal underground Boston Celtics Dubai hostage basketball league team. They are all fine, healthy and on their way back home -- and they are some of the best men and woman I've ever had the pleasure of encountering.

1984 Celtic Dubai hostage Larry Bird equivalent:
Mark Imbertson, 19, student
New Brighton, MN
This kid was unbelievable! He had the biggest shoes to fill as "the hick from French Lick," but he was amazing out there on the boards. He definitely earned his extra rations! I hope the Golden Gophers management are paying attention, because this kid is on fire!

1984 Celtic Dubai hostage Robert Parish equivalent:
Hanson Lenk, 39, optometrist
Schaumberg, IL
Hanson was a real trouper. What else can I say?

1984 Celtic Dubai hostage Kevin McHale equivalent:
Bruce Hagen, 43, software engineer
Philadelphia, PA
Poor Bruce had been a hostage longer than all of us -- he was kidnapped by Tiarchnach's operatives on a vacation to Venice six months ago. He was in great shape, though, and was actually the one that managed to sneak out and alert the authorities. Good lay-up, too.

1984 Celtic Dubai hostage Dennis Johnson equivalent:
Patrick Cotrell, Ph.D., 35, professor of art history
Springfield, MO
Dr. Cotrell had the hardest time of all of us -- he didn't have any idea who Dennis Johnson was, and had only barely heard of Larry Bird, which infuriated our captors. Luckily, we were able to "clue him in" after lights-out without the guards knowing. Being a professor, he was a quick study!

1984 Celtic Dubai hostage Cedric Maxwell equivalent:
Chuck Lurati, 53, city council member
Pittsfield, MA
Chuck is also a public servant! A representative of Pittsfield's Ward Seven, we bonded right away. In fact, we became a great two-person civic juggernaut on the boards. I'm looking forward to seeing him at the annual city government convention in Palm Springs this year.

1984 Celtic Dubai hostage Gerald Henderson equivalent:
Don Douglas, 30, pastry chef
Brampton, Ontario
Great hustle!

1984 Celtic Dubai hostage Scott Wedman equivalent:
Senthilkumar Venkattasetty, 24, programmer
Palo Alto, CA
Also a vegetarian, just like the real Soctt Wedman!

1984 Celtic Dubai hostage Quinn Buckner equivalent:
Adam Elliott, 20, student
Lansing, MI
Another "kid" that made us oldsters look bad out there! He always shared his rations with us.

1984 Celtic Dubai hostage M.L. Carr equivalent:
Dae-Hyun Park, 22, graduate student
Seoul, South Korea
No slouch on free throws! The only non-English speaker among us, but he did a really passable M.L. impersonation.

1984 Celtic Dubai hostage Greg Kite equivalent:
Jessica Swallen, 22, barista
Austin, TX
Jessica was a great sport (she was forced to wear a mustache at all times to resemble Greg Kite), and not bad on free throws. It turns out that she was a big fan of the indie-rock band the October Revolutionists, who she was excited to learn are from Armitage Heights! I hope that my assistant Marisha and her can become friends on Facebook, because they have a lot of interests in common.

1984 Celtic Dubai hostage Carlos Clark equivalent:
Carlos Clark, 47, high school basketball coach
Naples, FL
Astonishingly, this is the same Carlos Clark that actually played for the Celtics in 1984 -- they managed to kidnap the real one! Carlos kept us sane with his tales of the 1984 Celtics. He should write a book about it!

I am back! And what a tale I have to tell!

Hello again, everyone!

I am writing you this message from the American consulate in Dubai, UAE, in a nice, cool, air-conditioned office overlooking the Persian Gulf. What a wild few weeks!

My apologies for causing anyone distress over my disappearance. I am safe now, but it was looking bad for a little while.

The truth about where I was is too strange to make up, but the gist of it is this: it turns out the U2-themed tour group that I used is very, very unscrupulous. I probably should have looked a little closer at their licensing. But basically, I was taken into a house I was told belonged to U2 bassist Larry Mullen, Jr. (it did not), administered powerful drugs, and shipped without my consent from Ireland all the way to Dubai. There, in an underground pleasure prison owned by a wealthy Dublin expatriate on an artificially-constructed Ireland-themed island, I was forced to impersonate Danny Ainge (left) in an all-hostage on-court re-enactment of the 1984 season of the Boston Celtics (that's the year they beat the Lakers in the NBA championship).

It's hard to believe, but it's true.

I couldn't believe my jump shot was still fairly decent, too -- I haven't played much ball since high school (you locals will remember that I was a backbencher for Wihinapa High's 1986 team, the one that lost in the southern regional playoffs to Mesquakie).

This went on for about two weeks -- the Celtics' 1984 season meticulously recreated at gunpoint by a gang of Irish-American roughnecks in the employ of a Dublin billionaire in an underground dungeon decorated to resemble the interior of Boston Garden, right down to the parquet floor. Finally, the man they had playing Kevin Hale, a software engineer from Philadelphia, escaped and alerted the authorities just a few days ago. In the middle of our forced re-enactment of Game 3 against the hostage faux-Lakers, the Dubai Police Force, in collaboration with the Irish Garda Síochána, private investigators hired by local venture capitalist and amateur zeppelin enthusiast Rockwell Katz, and Interpol agents, burst in through the skylights and had the entire operation shut down in minutes. Once they did, they joined us on the court for a little pick-up game -- hostage faux-Celtics, Gardas and private investigators vs. hostage faux-Lakers, Interpol agents and Dubai policemen!

Our captor was an Irish businessman and billionaire named Tynan Tiarchnach who owned a mansion on the Ireland island of the so-called "World" project in Dubai (right). It turns out he was wanted in Ireland for tax evasion. He will now be tried in Dubai for human trafficking, and then extradited to Ireland.

Despite all of the dangers -- I endured some serious sleep deprivation, minor abrasions and a torn hamstring from a shot I took up against hostage faux-James Worthy -- I had a truly wonderful time! Dubai is beautiful! The American consulate has been amazing, and there are many exciting business opportunities here that our community may want to explore in the future. Ireland, too, was marvelous, or at least up until the kidnapping. I would encourage everyone to be sure that if they take a U2-themed tour of Ireland or any other country, please use a travel group registered with either a legitimate travel agency or through U2 themselves.

I understand things were quite busy in my absence. with the whole spectacle of the Romney family debacle -- Mitt Romney is calling for my resignation for allowing myself to be kidnapped, which is ridiculous. My assistant Marisha also seems to be enduring some venom from certain quarters of the conservative blogosphere, which is unfortunate. I'll answer these charges when the time comes.

On a side note, Interpol also took the trouble to recover my all time career stats in the illegal underground Boston Celtics Dubai hostage basketball league, so please enjoy them below! I return to Armitage Heights on Saturday, and I will be so glad to be back, serving this fine community as your city councilman!

Ted Norlander: "It's a lot like that episode of Thundercats."

An excerpt from a piece that award-winning memoirist and journalist Ted Norlander wrote for the Free Press this week. Of everything that's been written on Sherman's disappearance, I find it one of the most affecting. It shows yet again why Norlander is one of the most gifted writers of his generation, and even more, that this neighborhood has some of the most talented people in the world living in it. Sherman will be proud when he returns. - Marisha

Yo Sherm, where you at?

It is it not to my liking to have you missing in action for so long. It is not not to my not-liking, at the very least. Not-liking is a powerful and weird impulse. "Dig"? That's what the hippies would say. But these ain't friendly free-love 1967 hippies, no sir; the ones I'm talking about are the furious, the be-ruffled biker denim-pantsed motherfuckers from Altamont and Charlie "Ask Me About The Swastika On My Forehead" Manson. They want blood, and they want it now. When I ask if you "dig", that's the "dig" I'm talking about. Hippie fury, broseph, and that's no metaphor.

Do you remember that episode of Thundercats when Panthro gets lost in the Ro-Bear Berbil Village, and Lion-o and Jagra and Tygra can't find him anywhere, and they fear he has been kidnapped by Mumra and the Jackalmen? But really he just tripped over a rock or a something and he is merely unconscious and being tended to by the Ro-Bears? And there's a tearful reunion at the end when Jagra finds him, and all is right on New Earth again? It reminds me a lot of that. I hope this ending is similar to that ending, because that is what I want -- roll credits, created by Tobin Wolf, copyright 1987, a Lorimar-Telepictures Production, stay tuned for M.A.S.K. And then it's Zappetites for dinner. That is the ending I want.

I used to listen to a lot of Tesla, who were if not a seminal influence on me, than at least seminal-ish. The song lyric I had written all over my Lee jean jacket walking down the ochre-hued hallways of Kendall Park Junior High School was from the excellent "Heaven's Trail (There's No Way Out)," from their equally excellent and criminally underrated Mechanical Resonance, and they went a little something like this: "You know there's nothin' like the real world / To get me down. / Nothin' like the world outside / That turns me upside down / Makes me feel like I'm headin' down a one-way, dead-end street." Ha ha, right? Wrong, bucko. Aside from being an incredibly powerful Marxist critique (or like, whatever) worthy of Roland Barthes, that spring to mind to in this situation, and it might for those who don't even know who the hell Frank Hannon is. What the hell is wrong with me that an important person is missing, and all I can think of is to quote Tesla? All I can think about is Tesla? But Tesla is what is important. Sherman is wearing a Lee jacket covered with song lyrics, too. And he's on his way to find his way out. "Dig"?





This piece has also been excerpted in the New York Times Magazine, Esquire, and Spin. Ted Norlander is also the author of The Shah of Iran Keeps His Cool Side Cool: Essays On the Bloated-Out Carcass of Trans-American Culture In A Period I Do Not Actually Remember Much Of, 1979-1987; They Said Simon Le Bon Was Right and I Have the Stopwatch to Prove It: Seven-and-Three-Fifths Months in the Life of the American Post-Indie Underground; Sorry About the Disco Upstairs: New Critical Essays and Restaurant Placemat Puzzles For the Youth of America, and the recently re-issued Kill Them Again: The Awesome, Screaming Death of Discourse in the U.S.A. and Twelve or Thirteen Other New Half-Truths. His first novel, Hommina Hommina Hommina, will be published by Harper-Collins in early 2008.

Kimball F. Burin: "Sherman is probably looking for a teat to suckle on."

Legendary local novelist Kimball F. Burin in an interview with Walter Kirn in this week's New York Times Review of Books:

Kirn: The city councilman in your district, who you've written about ["Councilboy Moonface," in the December 2005 issue of Esquire], has been in the news recently, having disappeared in Ireland for a week while on vacation.

Burin: I don't see what the big deal is about this thing. I used to go missing for weeks all the time when I was a young man. Hell, I disappeared for five weeks in the god-damned deserts of Arizona or New Mexico or somewhere in 1956, and when I was finished, I just wandered back into my home in Kendall Park, and [third wife] Sarah was waiting for me, and that was that. Not only that, I managed to find time to write four novels about the whole god-damned experience [Tender Mercies, Christ In Tahoe, Here Comes the Evening, Never to Return].

Kirn: Yes, the Desert Quadrology. Those aren't necessarily...

Burin: Hell, I disappeared for a month in the Tarawa Atoll for three months -- I was living in a rusted-out Japanese water tower and killing god-damned howler monkeys with my bare hands so I could eat their brains. You know, the islanders thought that the brains had a special power, a sort of primitive atavistic magic, so I would rub the gray matter all over my face and go tearing through the jungle in my skivvies and scaring the hell out of the god-damned Krauts or lemurs or whoever. So my point is I don't know what the bally-hoo is about. Sherman is just another infantilized boy-man tied to his mother's apron strings, and probably wandering around Ireland looking for a teat to suckle. Maybe this will finally coerce him to grow a pair, if he isn't holed up with a commune of Irish hookers with a mothering festish, which he probably is. By the time I was his age, I'd already had three wives and killed nineteen men. What's he done, besides stain the marble floors in City Hall bright yellow with his boy-scented terror-piss?

Ireland searches for Sherman.

The Dublin apartment and childhood home of U2 bassist Larry Mullen Jr., where Sherman Larson was last seen.

From the BBC's website:

A search has been launched for US politician Sherman Larson, who went missing in Dublin following a tour on Thursday.

Mr Larson was reportedly last seen with his tour group at the childhood home of U2 bassist Larry Mullen, Jr.

Both the police and Mr Larson's tour company say they still have no leads about the missing politician.

Mr Larson, a city council member from the American city of Mishipeshu, was visiting Ireland on a three-week tour themed around the Irish rock band U2.

His assistant, Marisha Ferguson, filed a missing persons' report with the American embassy in Dublin on Sunday, saying no-one had heard from Mr Larson since Thursday evening.

Mr Larson represents the Armitage Heights neighborhood of Mishipeshu, perhaps best known for its zeppelinarium and large Esperanto-speaking community.

Ms Ferguson herself has come under scrutiny in the US media recently for expelling former Massachusetts governor and US presidential candidate Mitt Romney's children from Mr Larson's home. Mr Romney issued a statement today wishing for "a speedy return for Councilman Larson," but also hinted that Ms Ferguson has fabricated the story to "distract from her awful behavior regarding my boys."

In a press conference today, Commissioner Noel Conroy of Garda Síochána, the Irish national police force, expressed confidence that Mr Larson was "alive and well and would be located very soon."

Mr Mullen expressed his hope on behalf of U2 that Mr Larson would "turn up soon," and stressed the tour group was "in no way affiliated with or endorsed by U2 or its members."

Ms Ferguson had no comments for the media.

Vacation: Greetings from Dublin!

Hello, and greetings from DUBLIN, IRELAND! I can't write much, as I am using an internet pub on Grafton Street (and enjoying a delicious Guinness).

I arrived yesterday, and have been having a marvelous time. The tour guides are great, and it's very exciting to be meeting so many other Americans interested in U2. Our first stop today was at the National Museum Of U2 Art nearby on Grafton Street, which was remarkable. To the left is an outstanding painting I saw (I purchased a print for the office which I have shipped back -- at my own expense, of course -- to Marisha. Marisha, do you think we could put it over your desk in the reception area? It's about 3'x4'.). There was much more like it, including a full-size marble statue of Adam Clayton, and an impressive collection of The Edge's hats and bandanas over the years. He never seems to be without one!

We have a very full itinerary today, so I'd better get a move. We're taking a bus to see Bono's house in Killiney, and then the graveyard where Larry Mullen, Jr.'s grandmother is buried.

In the meantime, I representing our hometown well. I brought about thirty copies of the new October Revolutionists' album, which I hope to give to the Mr. Seamus Brennan, TD, the Irish Minister of Arts, Sports and Tourism. We'll be meeting him later in the week, and he'll give a short talk on the significance of Achtung Baby on Irish culture. I hope to schedule a few minutes with him afterwards to talk about some possible cross-cultural exchange program in the future. Perhaps we can appoint our own secretary of culture for our neighborhood.

I've enjoyed the posts from Reeves, as well! Be sure to email him and tell him what a great job he's doing in my absence!