We have a new catch phrase in town: "Bring Yo Ass." I gather someone said it during the Timberwolves playoffs and it struck some people as having a certain pith, a zing, a je ne sais quoi. So you see it on signs. Davanni's pizza, for example, has it on their marquee, making you think "Ass" when you think of their pizza. Okay. The newspaper printed up posters with the phrase, although they used asterisks for the double-S.

Why?

Well, because it's vulgar, to use an archaic term from the days when Cotton Mather was pulling out tongues with hot tongs, and people were sent to prison for saying "ankle" within 50 feet of a church. The asterisks indicate the presence of a Line, with a different form of civil discourse on one side, and the demotic on the other. I'm one of those tiresome people who doesn't care if people say it in their social settings, but think it's probably best to require a more elevated standard to public discourse.

Probably also a lost battle.

Our publisher celebrated the 157th anniversary of the paper with 57 reasons to read the paper. Sorry, the StarTribune.

If you were a columnist at the paper, you’d be keen to see where you were on the list, no? I mean, it’s petty and conceited, but writers can be like that.

Okay well I guess I’m not in the top 20 lol as the kids say

Okay not the top 40 either but that's okay

Nope, didn’t make the list. The other Variety columnist did, as well as a business columnist, and one metro columnist. Well, can’t fit everyone in.

Some helpful reader added me in the comments:

Thanks! Ah well, probably doesn’t mean anything; I’m sure I would’ve made the 157 things list.

Or not.

See, if I hadn’t known by now, I think I would’ve known from this.

After 44 years, or 46, if you go back to the first one, I will no longer have a newspaper column. My column will not appear in the relaunched paper in August, or even online.

I'm done. A few more columns through the summer, and then I do an Emmett Kelly and sweep up the spotlight, except without the makeup and flowerpot hat and the shoes and everything about clowns in general and specific, really. And you cannot gather photons with a broom.

It wasn't related to the previous clusterfarg, by the way. It's possible that some may think they're connected, and there's nothing I can do about that.

What next? We'll see. Probably more architecture pieces. From 120 pieces a year to 38.

I suppose I should be happy about that but you know, it's the damned thing. I'm not.

It’s 1915.

Right and tight! Accept no substitutions, like that Koh-I-Noor which is probably the genuine article but we’re banking on you not knowing that.

"Get the Genuine." Considering that the company was founded in the 1500s, they might have a point.

Wilhelm Prym became an independent goldsmith in Aachen, starting a chain of events that would lead to the Prym Group. Kerstgen Prym, presumably Wilhelm Prym’s son, was running a brass workshop in Aachen’s Kölnstrasse by 1559. Its proximity to the major zinc ore deposits in the region offered the Pryms ideal conditions for brass production.

It’s interesting to consider that simple safety pins were, at first, in competitive markets, before they became interchangeable commodities.

This site tracks down the history of Consolidated Safety Pin, and provides a picture of the old factory:

And the site today shows the building, in stripped down and humiliated form.

Ah, there she is.

Good bye, old Hook & Eye.

People were relieved, because no one wants a hook in their eye.

They were on pins and needles:

Can’t quite fix the address today, it was on this block, and . . .

I think you could say the neighborhood's changed.

Dress shields, so you don’t rot out the pits:

The factory has a ghost sign indicating its rubbery functions. It’s in a semi-residential neighborhood, too - houses just a block away.

Must have smelled wonderful.

“We would like to make arrangements with some first class firm to handle our entire output of these goods.” I’ll bet you would.

Seems a bit needy.

You need absolutely fresh Panama Girl webs, don’t you?

I’m not sure what their purpose might have been. Let us google . . .

By the 1920's, the company diversified and began producing brake linings and clutch facings. By the 1940's, it was also making aero safety belts, parachute shrouds, solid woven transmission belting, ladder tape for Venetian blinds, and suspender, garter and corset webs. The H.K. Porter Co. bought Russell in 1964 at which time it was making non-elastic webbings and tapes, automobile friction materials, clutch facings and brake linings, woven glass fabrics, straps and military webbing, aero products and transmission and conveyor belting; it then became the Russell Manufacturing Div. The division was sold in 1970 to J.H. Fenner Co. Ltd, which closed it in 1984.

Ol’ Sam Russell made his fortune in many trades, including opium. His house is now a local attraction.

He’s back, baby

The accompanying text, if you’re curious.

If you prefer it in larger type:

ONE HUNDRED MILLION people, better fed, better clothed, and better housed, and with more advantages for business, more resources for agricultural and industrial progress, more educational and religious opportunities, more freedom from entangling alliances, than any other people in this or any other age have known, live in the most wonderfully endowed country on earth.

They own 40 per cent. of all the railroad mileage of the world, though they number only one-sixteenth of the world's population.

BOSSES

They produce more than one-half of the world's coal, and have such vast resources upon which to call that it may be said that their coal is almost limitless in extent.

They produce more than 40 per cent. of the iron and steel of the world, more than half of its petroleum, 60 per cent. of its cotton, and 75 per cent. of its sulphur.

They live in the best located country, geographically considered, on earth, and they have no standing armies of millions at their border lines forever threatening war and ruin.

They can produce foodstuffs enough when the time demands it to support five times their present population, the cotton and the wool with which to clothe these people, and the raw materials for industries to employ them.

To the north of their country, these one hundred million people have a friendly Anglo-Saxon land of ten million people who must become ever-increasing consumers of many of their manufactured products.

To the south of them these one hundred million people have Cuba, with its immense wealth made this year out of sugar, Porto Rico and many other islands, and Mexico, which, with peace, will doubtless begin to rebuild on a large scale its industrial and commercial activities, and Central and South America, a mighty continent of mighty possibilities, whose buying and selling must now of necessity be largely forced to the United States.

The non-coal and iron and steel producing countries of the world must seek our coal and iron and steel, since they can no longer look to Europe. ton-goods-buying nations who have heretofore looked to the 100,000,000 spindles in Europe for their supplies must perforce now turn to the mills of the South and of New England. The hardware and machinery buyers of these southern lands who have helped to enrich Germany and France and Belgium and England, with trade running annually into many millions, can now fill their needs nowhere else on earth except in the United States.

We may mourn beyond words to express over Europe's pall of woe, and feel a deep sorrow at its loss of trade, but we will be doing civilization's work by stretching every nerve to expand our trade and commerce, for in so doing we shall be strengthening the whole fabric of all civilization.

Nothing worth having is easily won. We need not expect to conquer new trade without a strong and continuous effort, but the possibilities of an empire of business to be won are so vast as to mistily a long and determined work to win a prize of such might and power.

I know, that was a lot. But they had a lot to say.