Road rage: The intersection between anger and acting out
from Girl Meets Geek by Kate Madonna Hindes
“It was instantaneous. One moment, I was bemused by the fact that Webkinz lined the front dash of a gigantic, black truck that had merged behind me and the other I was white-knuckled and terrified.”
Shelter report: Yes, there are Meth Moms, but...
from Across the Great Divide by Charlie Quimby
I've spent the better part of two days researching the various state drug-testing proposals, the arguments made for and against, the data on Colorado's welfare caseloads and what happens to federal dollars when they hit state and county welfare departments.
The deep meaning of random acts of wackiness
from Minnesota Brown by Aaron Brown
A world traveler, Jim Moore, selected a North Dakota couple at random and sent them handwritten postcards from all over the world. The joke was that he pretended that he knew them, giving just a little, but never much information about how or why.
If election integrity is the goal, how about voter suppression?
from mnPACT! Progressive Political Blog by Dave Mindeman
I am not even talking about the potential voter suppression that will occur with a new voting burden. No, I am talking about the number of other obstacles that Republicans have use to reduce turnout — which you should be aware is the main goal.
LMFAO: Scandalous and we know it
from Duets Blog by Catlan McCurdy
The band LMFAO is coming to Minneapolis this May. The band’s name, a mouthful of letters sadly capable of no shorter nickname, is derived from Internet slang that evolved from LOL to LMAO to LMFAO. If you don’t know the meaning behind each acronym, I’ll leave your capable fingers to the Internet searching.
Writing about place
from Landing on Cloudy Water by Emily Brisse
When I went off to college, I knew about Toni Morrison and Ernest Hemingway and Harper Lee. I loved literature, so much that I wanted to both teach it and write it for the rest of my life. But it wasn’t until I took a regionally focused Ethnic American lit course two years later that I realized I’d never heard of Robert Bly and Louise Erdrich, Patricia Hampl and Joyce Sutphen, Sinclair Lewis and Paul Gruchow and Bill Holm—writers, every one, some more established, all talented and passionate, who wrote about the place I came from: Minnesota.
We're going to ... Twins. We're going to ... sigh
from Minnesota Brown by Aaron Brown
I usually comment on the opening of the baseball season. It's a time for hope and good feelings. But I was busy with the radio show this weekend and the Twins are awful, just awful. They are going to lose 100 games. Their pitching is bad and they have no offense. Their most expensive players are damaged, probably forever.
Ozzie's Marge Schott moment
from Mr. Dilettante's Neighborhood by Mark Heuring
As a Twins fan, I always enjoyed it when Ozzie Guillen and the White Sox were on the schedule. The games were usually a lot of fun and Ozzie was liable to say and do anything. In a world with a lot of vanilla managers — quick, give me a memorable Trey Hillman quote — Ozzie was always a hoot. And since the Twins usually beat the Whities like a drum, it was all good.
In which we travel to Wisconsin and make paper
from Minnesota Prairie Roots by Audrey Kletscher Helbling
Making paper at The Paper Discovery Center in Appleton, Wisconsin, on Saturday proved so much fun for our family that I declared, “I could really get into this paper making.”
Barataria celebrates 5 years of blogging
from Barataria by Erik Hare
Barataria has been written 3X per week, MWF, without a single miss these five years. There are now 832 posts and 7,350 comments from the community that generates over 50k pageviews per month from 27k unique visits. It is a labor of love that has come to define me, for better or worse, to the greater community of people on the ‘net that includes 4,700 in my twitter feed.
Congratulations, Erik!