The Grinch Who Stole Minnesota

This year there are some mighty fine Grinch candidates from our fair state.

Who gets your vote?

McHale? Childress?

Petters? Paulose? McGuire?   

Someone else?

I just stumbled across this video showing history through photos from 1906 through Obama’s election. The I-35W Bridge Collapse comes in at 8:20.


Some graphic stuff here, so be forewarned.

• The Daily Planet has the scoop on what Minneapolitans need to know about education issues. School board candidates, a referendum on changing how school board members are elected (Councilmember Cam Gordon says vote yes), and a referendum on a property tax increase for school funding. I promise, you can stop all the cramming on candidates and issues in four days. Hang in there.
• CM Gordon also had the deets on reorganization in the city government that will better engage residents on the neighborhood level. “Last month, the Council voted to establish a new Department of Neighborhood and Community Relations and a new Neighborhood and Community Engagement Commission. These lay the foundation for what will likely be a similar, but significantly different, neighborhood revitalization program and a potentially much more effective City community engagement system in the future.” Sounds like the exact future of the Neighborhood Revitalization Program is still unclear.
• Amy Rea recently visited the James J. Hill House for a social studies assignment. I don’t know what her kid’s homework looked like, but Amy’s looks pretty good.
• Buy the Change (building community through commerce) wants you to truly put your money where your mouth is. They have the following goals: “To help people connect with their neighbors and people who share their values while supporting the organizations and businesses they care about.” AND “To raise awareness of the power of individual purchasing decisions and to provide tools that harness this power as a force for social change.” This video explains how it works. This better video explains how it works. They have larger goals, geographically speaking, but right now they’re heavily focused on Twin Cities neighborhoods. [Buy the Change blog] (via @MNWINwebmaster)
• Ban the Ban Minnesota is “a nonpartisan, non-profit organization dedicated to helping the people and independent small businesses in the state by providing advocacy, education and data, and information dissemination regarding smoking bans so that the real heart of the matter can be addressed; namely the issues of rights, essential liberty, and our ability to live our lives and run our businesses as we so choose. We demand that we be treated like the responsible adults that we are and be free of busybodies who think that we need to be forcibly protected from ourselves.” Those crazy Libertarians! [facebook group]
• This MnIndy item is ancient news now, but I still think it’s hilarious. “This [I Will Vote] sticker was observed Oct. 21 stuck to the parking lot surface at the K-Mart in Minneapolis — clear evidence that ACORN has been illegally registering inner-city blacktop to vote.” Why’s it gotta be blacktop?
• Leif reports that the downtown Target is now has groceries and a deli, meaning they have beaten the Lunds and Whole Foods projects to the punch (somewhat) and have probably made a whole lot of downtown residents pretty happy.
• Are you planning to take Election Day off? You work that out with your employer (they’re required by law to at least let you out to go vote). If you feel a need to declare more formally your intention to sit on the couch with CNN all day, RSVP on facebook to TAKE ELECTION DAY OFF, hosted by The Campaign for Change (Ellison, Obama, and Franken). And should you get hungry or thirsty at some point in the day, The Herkimer will be having 2 for 1s all day and all night and will also have election-type stuff up on the big screens.
• Minneapolis has a fire fighter museum? (via @g_rote)
• Growing Communities of Science is a blog chronicling one local teacher’s use of computers in his science classroom. (via Conner McCall)

• The next Twin Cities Media Alliance brown bag lunch is Wednesday, 10/22, at the East Lake Library in Minneapolis, at noon, with Paul Schmelzer. TCMA’s blurb on Paul is pretty nice, so I’ll just give it to you: “Please join me for a brown bag lunch Wednesday, October 22 with Paul Schmelzer, managing editor of the Minnesota Independent, and a winner of the prestigious Premack and SPJ Page One awards for journalistic excellence. Paul coordinated the Independent’s outstanding coverage of the RNC protests – a subject you can ask him about at lunch. Paul also writes the blog Eyeteeth: A journal of incisive ideas, which appears regularly in the Twin Cities Daily Planet, and has written for Adbusters, Cabinet, Ode, Raw Vision, Utne and other publications.”
• Hennepin County has more rain barrels for sale. 18 left as of October 13. $62 each. This is your last chance. There are no more incoming shipments and no more will be sold after 2008.
• Urban Wanderlust has a list of all the goodies they’ve canned and/or frozen this year out of their garden, CSA share, or locally grown fruit. So cool. How many people even know what grows in Minnesota? I don’t.
• In case you wanted to know you can buy pepper spray at General J’s Army Surplus.
• Thinkery stops by the St Louis Park treehouse. I used to live kitty corner from that thing, but I never actually walked across the street to take a closer look at it.
• The Daily Planet’s Arts Orbit blog has an update on the behind-the-scenes situation at the Southern Theater. Drama!
• Also at the Daily Planet is an article from the MN Daily saying that, as bike commuting has doubled over the last year, so have fatalities to bicyclists. Injuries have increased as well. There have been nine recorded bike fatalities in Minnesota so far this year, vs four in 2007. (Note that that’s across the whole state.) I’d like to see a death-per-thousand-cyclist statistic similar to how they report driving fatalities. The (three, so far) commenters disagree vehemently, saying it’s been shown that injuries to bicyclists decrease as the number of cyclists decreases because everyone’s more accustomed to sharing the road. Insert “drivers and cyclists alike should follow the rules of the road” argument in which everyone blames everyone else [here].

If you’re not at the bloginar or observing Yom Kippur, try this on Thursday.

Beyond the Pure: Readings by Writers of Color, is returning to The Carol Connolly Reading Series at Intermedia Arts (”Minnesota’s first and only ongoing series of public literary readings whose mission it is to provide a platform for writers historically excluded from traditional literary settings.”).

Beyond the Pure: Readings by Writers of Color
Thursday, October 9, 2008
7:00 PM at Intermedia Arts
2822 Lyndale Ave S, Minneapolis
Admission by donation; wine & beer reception to follow

Curated by Julie Bates & Carolyn Holbrook; hosted by Carolyn Holbrook

Featuring:
IBé was born in Guinea, and grew up between Sierra Leone, Chicago, St. Cloud, and the Twin Cities. Quite naturally, he lives in the Middle of the Atlantic…with a mailing address in Minneapolis, MN. Among others, he writes about the African Experience, both in Africa and in America. Bridge Across Atlantic, his first collection of poems, is a small dose of these stories.

BAO PHI has been a performance poet since 1991. A two-time Minnesota Grand Slam champion and a National Poetry Slam finalist, Bao Phi has appeared on HBO Presents Russell Simmons Def Poetry, and a poem of his appeared in the 2006 Best American Poetry anthology. He has performed in venues and schools across the country, from the Nuyorican Poets Café to the University of California, Berkeley. Currently he continues to perform across the country, remains active as an Asian American community organizer, and works at the Loft, where he creates and operates programs for artists and audiences of color.

SUN YUNG SHIN is a 2007 Bush Artist Fellow for Literature and author of the collection of poems Skirt Full of Black (Coffee House Press 2007); co-editor of Outsiders Within: Writings on Transracial Adoption; (South End Press 2006) and author of Cooper’s Lesson (Children’s Book Press 2004), a bilingual Korean/English illustrated book for children. She’s currently working on her second book of poems with the working title The Invisible Choir and a memoir of her immigration and naturalization. Her website is www.sunyungshin.com.

Funds for this activity are provided by the COMPAS Community Art Program through a grant from the McKnight Foundation. The Carol Connolly Reading Series is sponsored in part by The Banfill-Locke Center for the Arts, DreamHaven Books, Patrick’s Cabaret, SF Minnesota, and the University Club of Saint Paul.

Intermedia Arts on: [web] [facebook]

• MinneAfrica.com is (aiming to be) your one stop shop for all things African in Minnesota. (Aside: The connection to the now-defunct Metropolitan Cafe is merely coincidental.)
• Is Second Harvest Heartland your charity of choice? Follow them on Twitter: @2harvest
• You know any guide to the Twin Cities written by Max “Bunny” Sparber is gonna be… different. If anyone knows “hidden treasures, little-known locations, and strange history,” it’s Max.
• LiveJournal discusses the best apple orchards and pumpkin patches in the TC. (via @alexisthegirl)
• Inside Northside is a North Minneapolis Encylopedia in wiki format. Remember, a wiki means anybody and errbody can contribute to it. Who, what, and why.
• The Lynx’s Candice Wiggins handily won the WNBA’s Sixth Woman of the Year Award for the 2008 season. She set a league record for bench players in averaging 15.7 points per game. Gettin’ Wiggy wit’ it! The team has audio and Ice’s highlight reel.

The Minnesota Secretary of State’s website has complete results from yesterday’s primary. Warning: data porn. I thanked my polling place volunteers. Did you? Mary Lahammer on the primary’s biggest winners and losers.

If you follow the Minnesota Historical Society on Twitter, you will receive a “this day in Minnesota history” tweet and alerts about other MHS events.

While Northeast Beat the Website has been assimilated by the TC Daily Planet, Northeast Beat lives on in a Ning group! (FYI, Ning is a service providing DYI social networks.) It has 138 members at the moment.

Tom Elko at MnIndy: “McCain connected 35W bridge collapse to Palin’s pork.” Money quote from McCain: “‘Maybe if we had done it right, maybe some of that money would have gone to inspect those bridges and other bridges around the country,’ McCain said at a campaign stop in Ankeny, Iowa on Aug. 4, 2007. ‘Maybe the 200,000 people who cross that bridge every day would have been safer than spending $233 million of your tax dollars on a bridge in Alaska to an island with 50 people on it.’” Zing!

If you enjoy playing the hockey, check out pickuphockeyfinder.com. You can find games and sign up yourself/your friends/a team to play. Ice hockey (indoor), pond hockey, roller hockey, adult, youth, etc.

Opposite of hockey: Are you a surfer? Or at least interested in protecting our beaches and lakefront? Graeme Thickins is helping startup the Minnesota chapter of the Surfrider Foundation.

Webdigs is yet another local real estate brokerage. They’re pimping their use of technology/teh internets and some sort of rebate program. It’s pretty to look at. I haven’t done enough house shopping to know how their user interface compares. Also, having not done much by way of homebuying I appreciate their “How Buying Works” and “How Selling Works” info. And they have a pretty good blog going (which I’m not just saying because they linked us once).

I’m completely RNCed out, but the fallout continues. Y’all know where to go (The Uptake and MnIndy). If you need some handholding, Thinkery’s early-September archive has some most excellent aggregation of independent and MSM coverage. (Yeah, I’m rounding up a roundup. Meta!)

People fret about gas prices, wish they could get away with driving less, but not everyone is hearty, hale, and brave enough to bike. So naturally scooters are the next best thing. We are totally planning on buying a scooter next summer.

Did you know there’s a Holy Land Exhibit in Stevens Square? And that it’s 50 years old? Me neither. It’s not affiliated with the restaurant/deli/imported grocery biz.

Rhubarbarism describes for you the archetypes of Twin Cities cyclists. (Yeah, this one is ancient in internet years, but it’s still funny.)

“The unassuming gazillionaire”: The Strib’s Patent Pending blog talks to Saint Paul native Jawed Karim (PayPal and YouTube co-founder) about his latest project, Youniversity Ventures, which helps fund internet software startups founded by college students.

“If I had 4 days in St Paul…” Where Jen would eat, drink, and shop.

I’m not familiar with Big Quarters, but I want one of their “From the Home of Brown Babies and White Mothers” t-shirts (even though my dad’s the white one). Lake City Browns! w00t! Here, watch one of their music videos. (via MPLSSTPL)

National Geographic Traveler’s 48-Hour Guide to Minneapolis (July/August 2008 edition) lists local blogs and podcasts to check out, followed by newspapers and magazines, maps, and books and movies. We’re a design mecca on the prairie. (I didn’t know Building Minnesota had a podcast.)

TC Daily Planet: Copper Thieves at Coldwater. Exploring the effects of neglect of the Coldwater/Bureau of Mines land.

I knew there was the Minnesota Thunder, our professional men’s soccer team in the United Soccer Leagues. I didn’t know there was a women’s team, the Minnesota Lightning. They’re clearly affiliated, judging by the look of the websites. And by the extremely confusing navigation of the Lightning website, in which all of the links and even the site name up at the top of the browser point to the Thunder, but with a light blue color scheme instead of a dark blue one and a picture of women playing at the top instead of men. Boo! [twitter: @mnthunder]

Vote Yes MN implores you to protect the Minnesota you love. Everything you need to know about the Clean Water, Land and Legacy Amendment, a proposed amendment to the Minnesota state constitution appearing on the ballot this fall. If passed it will dedicate funding to protecting the environment “by increasing the sales and use tax rate beginning July 1, 2009, by three-eighths of one percent on taxable sales until the year 2034.” [web: yesformn.org] [twitter: @yesformn] [facebook: group]

While the Lynx’s Seimone Augustus is off playing in the Olympics, the team and staff will spend the WNBA league break out in the community, putting on the 33 Days of Augustus.

Common Roots is celebrating its 1st year of operation with a Summer Celebration on Saturday August 9th from 2-9pm. “Featuring grilling on the patio, an heirloom tomato tasting, local beer and wine samples, family activities and live music.” [facebook: profile] [facebook: event] [twitter: @commonroots]

Are y’all checking the late night movie schedule at the Riverview Theater?

FringeFamous is a blog covering the Minneapolis/St.Paul independent theatre scene, written by a group of quasi-anonymous “Twin Cities theater professionals.” They do year-round coverage (as of March of this year, anyway), but you can imagine how frothy they are over the impending Fringe Festival. [twitter: @fringefamous]

Community Design Group is “an urban planning and policy consulting group” touting “a people-centered, asset-based approach to urban planning, policy and design.” (via mediation)

Edina Realty now offers foreclosure searching.

See the Declaration of Indepence in Saint Paul. An original printing will be on display for public viewing at Saint Paul City Hall/Ramsey County Courthouse, September 2-4. (via Saint Paul-itics)

MPR: Ramsey County creates gas siphoning report line. To which I say, “Isn’t that what the non-emergency police line is for?” Enh, just program it into your phone, I guess. That phone number is not actually included in the MPR story and I could not find it on Ramsey County’s website, so I’m assuming it’s not actually set up yet and suggest you just call the county in the mean time (651-266-8500). There is, however a nice Gather video demonstration of gas siphoning.

Twin Cities Streets for People has the scoop on the Streetcar Feasibility Study that was presented to Minneapolis City Council in January. In case you need it laid out for you in plain English, or in case you missed it the first time around (or both). I’m sloooowly coming around to the idea that, much as I like shiny trains and still firmly believe that the metro needs a comprehensive LRT system, there is a lot of opportunity in adequately funding and fleshing out our bus system and bringing back streetcars.

TC Biz Journal: I still can’t wrap my brain around this Denny Hecker/electric car thing. Just like my brain shorts when I see a bus drive by with Denny Hecker’s mug on it. (Y’all know I’ve been scarred by Denny.)

Northstar News and Updates: “Northstar Commuter Rail achieved another milestone recently when the first locomotive rolled off the production line.”

MPLS Mirror goes to the Lake Street Festival and Art Car Parade. Photos and video!

Someone who didn’t like the Red Bull Illume exhibit felt compelled to make a statement.

Photo courtesy of Corporate Babysitter.

Dialing that phone number — (612) 230-6400 — gets you to the Minneapolis Park & Recreation Board.