Burnsville’s Nicollet Park Sculpture

Last week I posted a comment about suburbs trying to create an identity for themselves under my post about the completely unnecessary and overpriced Apple Valley Liquor Store #3 which will be located in the complex adjacent to the pointless Apple Valley Target South and it got some interesting discussion going.

Well, a follow-up to that discussion is this story about how Anderson Builders of St Louis Park have decided to pull out of “downtown” Burnsville’s revitalization attempt known as Heart of the City. This “downtown” includes such businesses as Cub Foods, Milio’s Sandwiches and the Grande Marketplace as well as others such as Jensen’s Cafe located on the corner of Nicollet and Burnsville Parkway.

This entire development seems a whole lot like Apple Valley’s lame attempt at creating a “downtown” with the whole Apple Valley Central Village bullshit. It’s obviously going so very well for the suburbs to try and give themselves identities that everyone knows are nothing but attempts at creating more retail space for chain businesses.

Personally I think that this is great news. I can only hope that stories like this will deter the suburbs from their continued quest to become “Little Woodbury” and create these false “downtowns” in the hopes that people will be fooled into believing that they live in a real quaint town and not some dumpy chain-infested hellhole.

Tonight we got a knock on the door at 7:15pm from a teenager dressed in a bright yellow raincoat. I answered the door, why I’m not sure, and was immediately handed a copy of the Star Tribune. The kid jumped right into his sales pitch about selling Sunday edition subscriptions for $13 for 26 weeks and how I would be helping him pay for college because he could earn a $500 savings bond to help him get there.

Well, I have never and will never subscribe to a paper newspaper as they’re pretty much only useful for training puppies and making papier-mache projects. I felt bad for the kid and was also a little surprised that he was out there going door to door, in the rain, and said to him, “sorry man, I read all my news online.”

Well, hoping that this would be it, he continued on about how he really wanted to get this savings bond for $500 so that he could afford college. I hate to break it to him but $500 ain’t shit when you’re going to pay around $150/credit tomorrow and it’s not going to get any better by the time he makes it wherever he wants to go. Anyway, undaunted, I again refused his offer for the Star Trib.

This is when it got really nasty. The young kid said to me, “why don’t you want me to go to college?” He wasn’t looking pathetic mind you, he was just standing his ground and staring at me like I was completely fucking crazy. I stood my ground and repeated that I get all of my news online and he then said, “well you’re only getting the headlines!” Damn, he’s right, I’m not getting a bunch of nearly worthless articles I don’t want to read anyway. Doh, he owned me — errr, no.

Anyway, I didn’t really know what to say to him and was about to close the door when he said, “well, let me have that copy back so I can sell it to someone else.” I handed him the paper, wished him good luck and then sat down to write this post.

What a little shit but good for him, he might actually become a great salesman someday when he learns to become more of a liar and less of a jerk ;)

BTW, those of you at the Star Trib that read my site frequently, I suggest that you do what you can to rein in those that are going door to door to sell your litter box liner. They aren’t going to get you any sales when they’re treating potential customers as I was treated tonight.

Tonight we decided to take “Brad” up on his offer from Linwood Pizza’s Apple Valley location and ordered one of their large pizzas and we received an order of cheese bread with marinara sauce, a fresh garden salad and a two liter bottle of Pepsi at no charge.

We ordered it just after 5pm and just about an hour later the delivery guy arrived at our door with three boxes and a bottle for us to divvy up between the two of us. I set the boxes down on the table and took some photos and then proceeded to dive into the pizza.

We ordered the pizza half pepperoni and half mushroom. I was immediately displeased that the pizza was cut into squares but thankfully, for reasons I will explain later, the main reason why I despise pizza cut this way was irrelevant. The cheese bread was smallish and looked fairly boring while the marinara sauce in the plastic cup in the middle looked like leftover Sysco tomato sauce slightly dehydrated — like what’s on the inside lid of a bottle of Ragu when you first open the jar. The fresh garden salad was nothing more than bagged prepared salad, which I’m more than fine with as I eat it twice a day every day, with two nearly unripened tomatoes and a metric fuckload and a half of black and green olives thrown all over the top. If there is anything I despise, it’s black olives — blech! The salad came with a tiny bag (airplane peanuts sized) of croutons and a bag of ranch dressing.

Before even bothering with the salad I dug into the pizza. I hadn’t eaten anything substantial since 11 AM and this was exactly what I thought I was looking for. Now, before we go any further, I have eaten two slices of “real” pizza since August and the rest of it has been made with fat free cheese so pretty much anything should be excellent, right? This pizza was almost cold. I would have had to stick this in the oven for at least 10 minutes to warm it up enough to be edible at any other time but I was too hungry to care today. As I said above, I hate when pizzas are cut into squares. While I have had plenty of arguments with others about this, there is absolutely no reason to cut a round pizza into squares. When it’s hot, the squares in the middle have nothing to hold on to and the cheese burns your fingers (no, you’re not supposed to eat pizza with a fork) but thankfully this pizza was cold and that didn’t matter in this instance. The pizza itself was fucking awful. Let me be clear here, this was worse than any other pizza I have ever had including whatever they used to serve in the middle school cafeteria growing up. I have had better pizza from gas stations than what was delivered to me home tonight! After I ate two pieces straight up, I doused the rest in hot sauce to try and cover the horrendous flavor of what we were served tonight. Even with all the hot sauce it was still terrible. If I hadn’t been starving I would have thrown it all out.

I asked Kim what she thought… She told me that while it wasn’t the worst she ever had it wasn’t anything great. I should ask her if it was as bad as Two Guys from Italy. She was extremely disappointed that they “hid” the pepperoni under the cheese so that she couldn’t tell how much was actually on the pie. I didn’t try the pepperoni side myself (meat does not belong on pizza!) so I can’t say anything about that.

The cheese bread was also luke-warm and was pretty bland. Your typical toasted thick bread covered in melted cheese and crappy marinara. The pieces were pretty small and while I ate it, I didn’t enjoy it at all. Another one in the yuck column for me.

While the deal we received looked great on paper it wasn’t worth it once it arrived at the door. With all the other choices for pizza in town (all chain, yay!) I won’t ever be calling Linwood Pizza again and I don’t suggest any of you do either. You’re far better off getting a frozen pizza, undercooking it yourself and eating that for $7 or less.

See all the pictures from our terrible Linwood Pizza delivery experience here (camera).