Walz's Turn

[some hot possessive dish for you]

1. Going forward, we will be sure to speak of Tim Walz’s vice presidential candidacy.

2. Tim, Gwen, and the kids are the Walzes.¹

3. The Walzes’ home is in St. Paul,² Minn.³

4. The campaign of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz is Harris and Walz’s campaign, because they share it. We might otherwise speak of Harris’s and Walz’s (respective) families.

What could be simpler?⁴

Meanwhile, the unofficial Minnesota state dish is referred to as hot dish or hotdish.⁵

One is pleased to note that “hotdish” is steadily gaining ground.

Also meanwhile, though Tater Tot is a registered trademark of the Ore-Ida⁶ company, it is unlikely that the potato police will be called on you if you refer to those tasty little bastards lowercasedly as tater tots.

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Dept. of The Usual Boilerplate

Thank you for being here, thank you for following, thank you for subscribing. All of this substackery of mine is free and will remain that way. Which means that if you have chosen to contribute to its and my upkeep,⁷ in larger or smaller ways, you are doing something you don’t have to do, which makes your generosity that much more resonant, and I am profoundly grateful. If you’re not yet part of that contributing crew and there’s a part of you that’s thinking “You know what? I like this guy” and you choose to join the crew, I will be eternally (or at least monthly or annually) in your debt.

Happy campaigning to you!

Benjamin

1. Post-publication addendum #1: And anything belonging to Gus Walz, including my undying championship, is Gus’s.

2. Post-publication addendum #2: The capital of Minnesota, I have been advised, is officially Saint Paul, though it is, to be sure, often abbreviated as St. Paul.

the flag and seal, respectively, of Saint Paul, Minn.

The city of St. Louis, Mo., OTOH, is only ever St. Louis, never Saint Louis.

3. All those two-letter state abbreviations—NY, NH, CA, and MA, to say nothing of MN, etc.—are fine on envelopes or packages you’re posting via the USPS, but in all other cases, let’s please pursue a more humanistic approach and stick to the traditional formats: N.Y., N.H., Cal. or the jaunty Calif., Mass., Minn., etc. And if you’re Ohio or Maine, to say nothing of Utah, you don’t even need an abbreviation, because your name is already so wee!

4. In prose, there are almost always multiple ways to do things, but my job, I think, isn’t necessarily to present you with multiple ways to do things and say: Fine, now you decide. My job, I think, is, when I can, to present you with the one way I think works best and say: I think this works best. It’s time-saving for all of us.

5. Post-publication addendum #3: I’ve encountered repeated assertions, re this essay’s illustration, along the lines of “That’s not [a] hotdish.* That’s a tater-tot casserole.” To which I can only say: “Hey, I googled an image of ‘hotdish,’ and I got twenty versions of this tater-tot-covered delicacy, so 🤷🏻‍♂️.” Not wanting to get too far into arguments over what [a] hotdish is or isn’t, I’m content with the assertion that [a] hotdish is “a casserole dish that typically contains a starch, a meat, and a canned or frozen vegetable mixed with canned soup.” YM, as always, MV. And thus I’d, reductively and bluntly, add: All varieties of hotdish are casseroles, but not all casseroles are hotdish. There, how’s that.

* There’s zero Upper Midwest consensus that I can detect re whether one refers to “a hotdish” or simply to “hotdish,” and lots of people have stated absolutely that it’s one way or the other way or both ways, so much for absolute statements.

6. Ore-Ida, to be sure, stands for Oregon-Idaho. The company’s primary production facility, I read, is located in Ontario, Oregon, near the Idaho border. And as we well know: “When it says Ore-Ida, it’s All Righta!”

7. And Sallie’s!