If I Had A Penny For My Thoughts I'd Be A Millionaire

Good item in today's Star Trib. Apparently the U of M has developed a new kind of apple, called Zestar (a combination of zesty and star, or if you say "Ze star!" in a mock French accent), and the hope is that it will bring in tons of dough in royalties. Now the commercial creation of new kinds of fruit seems a little strange to me, but I'm really weirded out by the idea of a university making a bunch of money off of a new type of fruit developed there. I guess I've just generalized reasearch universities as being sort of "for the good of all mankind," but hey, particle accelerators don't pay for themselves.

Far more notable to me than the underlying morality of collecting royalties on crops were two paragraphs in the story. This "remember when?" gem designed to bring readers back to 1972, the year develpoment on the Zestar began:

It was 1972, the year of "Pong" and Nixon's trip to China, J. Edgar Hoover's funeral and the year Mark Spitz won seven Olympic gold medals.

Beautiful.

But even better is this glorious quote from a proud Minnesota biologist, Cecil Stushnoff:

"Horace Greeley used to write articles to encourage people to go west, but he wrote 'Go west, but don't go to Minnesota, because you can't grow apples there.'" Stushnhoff said. "There were a lot of proud Scandinavian folks who said, 'We'll see about that."

I did not know Horace Greeley wrote that. Fuckin' east coast mainstream media sell-out underestimating the gumption and stick-it-to-ive-ness of real Middle-Americans.

I greatly admire this man. And this man. Click them links, bitch!

P.S.: Great juxtaposition in the Wikipedia article for Nouveau riche:

Fictional examples of nouveau riche include Jay Gatsby from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby and Rodney Dangerfield’s character in Caddyshack