This is the big one here. Minnesota will have (another!) automatic recount due to a close (within 0.5%) vote. Mark Dayton (DFL) appears to have narrowly won as our next Governor. The recount will not even start until all the counties have certified their results so it will be a couple weeks. Then the (re)counting... Gov. Pawlenty has said he' ( Read more... )

I've only been to county fairs, never to any state fairs. Thus I have not been to the Minnesota State Fair. I do know that food on a stick is common, and that Minnesota takes it quite a ways (hotdish on stick?). So when there is to be an anthology of murder mysteries set at the Minnesota State Fair, there could be only one name for it: Murder on ( Read more... )

My weight is higher than it ought to be. The price of motorfuel is already quite high and likely to keep rising. The gas tax in Minnesota is increasing as well. Also, it is no longer Winter and hasn't been for a while now. So I checked on the bicycle I bought a few years ago and didn't ride very much. Part of that was that I didn't have a way ( Read more... )

"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies." -- Groucho Marx

So far the facts of the I-35W bridge collapse are few. That it collapsed, the time of the collapse, and that it could have been worse are about all that is truly known with any certainty. Even for ( Read more... )

A short time ago sistaur called to let jmaynard and myself know that a bridge collapsed in the Twin Cities. This bridge was on I-35W.

A cougar that was captured Tuesday in Willmar will make its new home at a wildcat sanctuary in Tennessee by Saturday. There wasn't room at Wildcat Sanctuary in Minnesota, so the cougar is being moved south to Tiger Haven in Tennessee.

I saw a notice for a new faire (Warning: The site is hosted on Tripod so don't expect it to work right and do expect it to be spammy) in New Ulm. I'm a bit concerned that this is the "Martin Luther College Renaissance Faire" and they need to use a Tripod web site.

It's scheduled for May 6 which seems a bit early in the year for the latitude. ( Read more... )

From time to time I hear some newscaster in the Twin Cities refer to the rest of the state as "greater Minnesota." I have to wonder, does that make the Twin Cities "lesser Minnesota?"

Or at least I never heard it before moving to Minnesota. Take a hot sandwich, such as turkey or roast beef, put mashed potatoes on top, and then cover that in gravy and what do you have? I'd call it a mess, or maybe inedible, and certainly unnecessary. Yet that is what gets called a commercial here. Turkey Commercial, Beef Commercial, and I ( Read more... )

A year or two ago I wrote about the DFL doing nothing but waiting for Governor Pawlenty to come up with a budget so they could rip on it (and him) without bothering to come up with anything of their own. (I'd link to that post if I could quickly find it.)

This year is different. The DFLers in the Minnesota Senate came up with a budget, and even ( Read more... )