AP
More than 1,000 people gathered Saturday in a scenic Minneapolis neighborhood for an annual ritual — the sharpening of a gigantic No. 2 pencil.
The 20-foot-tall (6-meter-tall) pencil was sculpted out of a mammoth oak tree at the home of John and Amy Higgins. The beloved tree was damaged in a storm a few years ago when fierce winds twisted the crown off. Neighbors mourned. A couple even wept. But the Higginses saw it not so much as a loss, but as a chance to give the tree new life. More
LiveNOW the local Fox affiliate was there yesterday covering the action. Watch
For a second, at first glance, I thought that thing in the photo was a port-a-potty.
Hey, is that pencil a #1 or a #2?
I don’t understand. What’s the point?
🙂
That looks more like a No. 200 pencil.
It’s Minneapolis – they’re off their mosquito-infested rockers.
Someone needs to surreptitiously re-sculpt it for pride month.
Okay, I grew up in a foreign land, one known for doing strange off the wall sh*t. But even this is weird to me.
Having been born in the Twin Cities, and having family still there, I can say with authority that these people are nuts!
I agree with joe6pak!
I lived in a southern suburb of Minneapolis for 32 years and the longer I lived there, the more nuts people got. That’s why I moved back home to Michigan. The government here is nuts (Democrat), but the people in my RED county are great.
Were there any pencil necked geeks involved in this ritual?
Hi, Claudia! I’m glad you’re back home and happy in Michigan. In my case if I went back home it would be Minnesota. Except that’s not entirely true, I left Minnesota when I was 18, moved to Alaska. That’s where I grew up. Now I’m a reasonable adult.
Put a little lead in your pencil.
“…The 20-foot-tall (6-meter-tall) pencil…”
Thanks for the metric conversion, Mark & Steve. It added so much to your team effort. A solo journo would have never come up with that informative factoid. I can only imagine the literary masterpiece that a team of three or four journos would have spun this story into.
From the looks of it, “sharpening” should definitely be in quotes. It’s just two dorks turning a sharpener-shaped cap while a third dork tosses giant “shavings” off the scaffold.
If you’re looking for examples of meaningless action, you are sure to find plenty of them in Minnesota.
Sharp, like their governor.
And you thought living in Minneapolis was pointless