There's a new man on top of the bull's-eye. After more than 40 years with Target, including 14 as chairman and CEO, Bob Ulrich is handing the reins of the nation's second-largest retailer to his longtime sidekick Gregg Steinhafel.
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The Marijuana Policy Project is airing two television ads imploring Governor Tim Pawlenty to back down from his vow to veto a bill legalizing medical marijuana.
The first spot began running earlier in the month on cable channels. The second one--featuring a Ely resident whose neck surgery and resulting nerve pain have rendered him nearly bedridden--began running yesterday.
"I'm a registered Republican and born-again Christian," he says. "This doesn't have anything to do with culture wars. It's all about people in pain... please don't veto the medical marijuana bill, Governor Pawlenty."
Critics of the bill have framed it as a Trojan horse, maintaining that if we stop fining and jailing sick people who inhale cannabis smoke, we might one day cease fining and jailing healthy people who do the same. This "sends the wrong message," to quote an oft-repeated talking point.
Regardless of the bill's fate, medical morphine will remain legal.
[Peep the ads after the jump.]
Yesterday, we reported that Thomas Mengler, dean of St. Thomas' law school, barred students from volunteering at Planned Parenthood for school credit. His actions prompted 80 St. Thomas law students to sign an open letter to him decrying the decision.
In response, a rival faction of students is circulating a pro-dean letter through the school's Christian Legal Society. Among other things, these students encourage their classmates to support the dean "in order to demonstrate that, even though we might respectfully disagree with his decisions from time to time, we support him nonetheless, since he knows, better than anyone else, what is in UST Law’s best interests."
Read the full letter after the jump.
When Nate Patrin heard Grand Theft Auto IV was coming out, he knew he'd spend every waking hour playing the hell out of it. Hence, the plan.
Nate would spend 24 hours getting every other game he'd wanted to play out of his system. He'd play 24 different games overnight, with no sleep at all. This would leave him free to play GTA free of regret. It would lead to bizarre experiences like playing Resident Evil at 2 a.m. and Professor Layton and the Curious Village at 3 a.m. All the while, he'd liveblog it.
Which he's in the process of right now at Joystick Division.
Part game review orgy, part psychedelic travelogue, the posts are jaw-droppingly entertaining. Nate's writing more words than anyone has a right to expect, and his reviews of each game are extensive -- though that might change as his brain melts into quivering Jell-o. The liveblog is broken down into three posts, one for each eight-hour period, and every post is updated constantly during the process. Don't miss the crazy videos for Audiosurf down at the bottom of part one. I watched the Stereolab one and feel like I stayed up all night. Trust me, read the first one all the way through.
Here's the preview, part one and part two, with part three to be posted soon.
I'm heading over to Nate's place with a video camera to document his crack at Rock Band in hour 20 or so. Hopefully, his fingers still work at that time. Whether they do or they don't, the video's ending up here.
(In between all the lunacy, Gary Hodges found time to post some GTA IV special edition photos.)
Ever since our story on the legal psychedelic Salvia divinorum went to print three weeks ago, my inbox has been inundated with emails asking where I bought the stuff, what situations to do it in, etc.
“I was wondering where I can get the Purple Sticky or maybe just buy what is left of yours,” reads the most recent one. “Roger Waters is in Dallas next week and I am flying home for the show, might just be the thing for the show… With gas the price it is I cannot afford to drive to every head shop around and some are not even on the net."
It was a dark day.
I was broke. Desperate to make bills so my roommates wouldn't kick me out of our shared house, I turned to my regular capital-generating strategy -- donating plasma. But Alpha Plasma Services turned me away because I'd already hit up the vampires earlier that week, and you're only allowed to donate once every seven days.
The day before I'd been kicked out of a newly-formed punk band because my pal Gabe had found Pink Floyd records in my collection. And that's not punk rock, now, is it?
No band? No money? Only one item of value in my possession? There was only one choice: I had to sell my Epiphone Jack Casady model bass. So this sad panda accepted a ride from his roomie Jackie (being too busted to own a car, but not too proud for charity) and headed downtown to the pawn shop.
Our biggest Best Of the Twin Cities issue yet is live online, and will be making its way around town in perfect-bound format all day.
But why wait to see where the hottest spots in Minneapolis and St. Paul are, when you can check out an interactive map?
In 2006, anti-abortion group Vote Yes For Life attempted to essentially ban abortion in South Dakota. They put the ban to the voters, who rejected the measure 55 percent to 44 percent. Vote Yes remained undeterred and has accrued enough signatures to return the issue to the voting booth again this year. And in a strange political and ideological marriage, Vote Yes and Planned Parenthood agree on one thing for this year's showdown: Activists should leave their dead baby pictures at home.
It's not that every day is Halloween for the Twin Cities Costumers' Guild. It's that every day might be a stroll through Victorian England, or a jaunt through futuristic spacescapes, or -- you name it.
The nascent group (they've been around about six months) includes 15-20 avid costumers from around the Twin Cities, and this weekend they held their first big event, a costumed dance, at the Oddfellows Hall in St. Paul.
See the slideshow with more photos by James Tran.
Tons more, including pictorial remembrance of Paul Demko, after the jump.
Today's Friday, and though it's early in the morning, I can already tell that I'm gonna need a drink later on. Thus, we launch a new "Drink of the Week" feature on the food blog. Every Friday we'll alert you to a new off-beat drink, a beverage deal that can't be beat, or whatever strikes our libation fancy.
I do a lot of housing market posts. Some have called me an alarmist because I think this economy has yet to hit bottom.
If I'm the pessimist, though, Credit Suisse is the doom-and-gloom prophet. Not only does the company thing that it'll take another two years for the market to rebound, they think that before it's over, roughly 13 percent of borrowers will face foreclosure.
Think about that. One out of every eight. Depending on how big the blocks are where you live, that's about a home per block.
A report on a connection between smoking bans and an increase in DUI deaths should give pause to Minnesotans.
The paper, "Drunk driving after the passage of smoking bans in bars," was written by Scott Adams and Chad Cotti of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and published in the Journal of Public Economics. The authors estimate that smoking bands increase the number of DUI deaths by about 13 percent. Summary (emphasis added):
Using geographic variation in local and state smoke-free bar laws in the US, we observe an increase in fatal accidents involving alcohol following bans on smoking in bars that is not observed in places without bans. Although an increased accident risk might seem surprising at first, two strands of literature on consumer behavior suggest potential explanations — smokers driving longer distances to a bordering jurisdiction that allows smoking in bars and smokers driving longer distances within their jurisdiction to bars that still allow smoking, perhaps through non-compliance or outdoor seating. We find evidence consistent with both explanations. The increased miles driven by drivers wishing to smoke and drink offsets any reduction in driving from smokers choosing to stay home following a ban, resulting in increased alcohol-related accidents. This result proves durable, as we subject it to an extensive battery of robustness checks.
Sexpert Alexis McKinnis, author of “Alexis on the Sexes," seemed to be making that point exactly in her personal blog when she complained to her readers that her most recent column was "canned and replaced" by editors at Vita.mn due to her "apparent over-descriptiveness on how to give proper head to the man in your life."
As you may notice, our annual Best Of issue isn't up yet. We're having some server problems that are delaying the upload -- a Rev. Horton Heat slideshow I made Monday morning is just now appearing -- and it's affecting the issue as well.
This is a purely technical difficulty. The issue content's ready to go, and I'm assured it'll be online by this morning.
You can choose to believe me. Or you can choose to believe one of these alternate explanations, which make me want to laugh instead of punch a kitten in the face.
THE TOP 10 REASONS OUR "BEST OF THE TWIN CITIES" CONTENT IS NOT ONLINE RIGHT NOW
10. A Salvia-bedazzled Matt Snyders tripped over the server, unplugging it; proceeded to dismantle the server so it could become "one with its Buddha nature"
9. The Internet has become bourgeois and outmoded. We choose to go old-school, using only wax and rollers to paste up the issue. Somehow this means it is not accessible from the World Wide Web
8. Turns out Hoffman is Amish
7. Pawlenty budget cuts affecting even the mighty Village Voice Media
6. Douglas Feith seemed down on his luck, in need of work; we asked him to install a web server. Turns out he's not any better at that
5. Demko on his way out decided to take up a new hobby -- walking into random offices, pulling wires at random. Hey, a red one!
4. Our tech people ate something that didn't agree with them, and now the tubes are clogged
3. It was a sophisticated denial-of-service attack from Ron Paul supporters
2. Tom Bartel forgot to pay our credit card bill
1. It's actually online RIGHT NOW, but only the pure of heart can see it.
I can see it. What the hell is wrong with you people?
In our last installment, we took note of claims that John McCain had settled on T-Paw as his VP more than a year ago. A report on the website of conservative mouthpiece Fox News over the weekend only adds fuel to that claim.
Perspective is everything. A little seasonal shift alters moods, sways perceptions, gently nudges the very reality around us.
This includes our friend the pothole. Because two images of a particular road crater just hours apart afford the viewer entirely divergent experiences -- and because there ought to be more poems about potholes -- I am moved to create verse.
In the first image, spring precipitation collects in this masterpiece of decay from 44th and Wentworth. The resultant reflection fuses nature (the water, the overlooking pine) with that most urban of creations, broken asphalt.
Tons of effort by scads of people comes to fruition in the next 36 as our annual Best Of issue comes online and then makes its way in perfect-bound format throughout the cities. Don't miss it -- how could you -- and know that a few Web-only surprises will be popping up during the day.
Apropos of nothing: I may be the only person who saw this comic by Dan Piraro and thought: "wait, Rorschach never knew his father. I don't get it." But I will admit that this was my first reaction.
My second reaction: what's up with the stick of dynamite behind Mr. Rorschach the elder?
In 2006, in the midst of his successful run for a seat on the Minneapolis Board of Education, a concerned delegate pointed Chris Stewart to a little known provision in the No Child Left Behind Act that makes some federal funding to school districts contingent on access to military recruiters.
"I didn't know then what a reasonable response would be," Stewart says. "But I just knew there had to be something that addressed or challenged it in one way or another."
In recent weeks letters have been landing in the mailboxes of every principal in the Minneapolis School District notifying them of new restrictions on military recruiters--the result of a Stewart drafted resolution that passed unanimously in March.
Tim Pawlenty today appointed Tom Sorel to head the Minnesota Department of Transportation. Sorel leaves his post as administrator of the Minnesota division of the Federal Highway Administration.
Pawlenty chose Sorel over Bob McFarlin, the acting commissioner, who'd been in the job since the state senate fired Lt. Governor Carol Molnau from the post in February. The appointment requires senate approval, but the vote doesn't have to be held until next year's legislative session.
Spring is here. I know, because I saw a couple making out in the park for about an hour yesterday evening. Blanket-free. Indeed, free of many articles of clothing. I surreptitiously snapped this bit of evidence: yep, those are sweatpants bottoms.
At least the lack of a blanket isn't necessarily going to mean grass stains. Ah, young love.
Speaking of clothing and love, Ra'mon Lawrence Coleman's Eluded Love show went off Saturday, and we have a slideshow full of images. For great justice, here's a one-minute video of the show's finale. A model leaves wearing less than she entered with (and no, it's not what you think, at least I hope not):
Much more from a busy weekend after the jump.
WCCO's Caroline Lowe breaks the news today that Minneapolis police Lt. Lee Edwards has been relieved of duty pending a federal investigation. Veteran fellow officer Mike Roberts has also been removed from his post while the probe is conducted.
Edwards is a former homicide investigator and 4th precinct inspector. More significantly he is one of five black police officers currently suing the MPD and chief Tim Dolan in federal court on charges of racial discrimination. Edwards was demoted from his 4th precinct post last summer. In February he was cleared by an internal probe of allegations that he drove his squad car while drunk. Edwards is currently a finalist for the police chief post in Northfield.
It was twelve days
before we realized
before each one could hear
the same story from Arthur
and Bertie and William
Three days for the storm to stop blowing
Another two to dig one’s way
to the hog pen and the barn
to throw hay to the starving mare
Another week before
the wagons could make their way to town ...
So begins "Hearing the News," a poem by Jana Bouma. Bouma's poem, about an 1873 snowstorm, contains vivid imagery and raises historical details you might find interesting.
It's this week's winner in the What Light: This Week's Poem series sponsored by mnartists.org. The program celebrates Minnesota writers, but it's also an admirable initiative to help get poetry back into our daily lives.
Poetry's like breakfast. It's better when you have it every day.
The submission deadline for the weekly poem series is tomorrow, so ship 'em some poems if you're registered on mnartists.org. It's still National Poetry Month out there, after all. Onward ...
DAILY DISH: WHAT'S NEW AROUND THE SITE
Music editor Andrea Myers makes her debut with two posts, including breaking the news that the B-Girl Be summit for women in hip-hop is taking a year off. Also see her review of the Voltage fashion show and the bands that played there, supported with an extensive photo slideshow.
The City Council voted today to approve rules governing instant runoff voting, the ballot-counting system that city voters overwhelmingly passed in 2006. The Council also asked city elections staff to put out a request for proposals from voting equipment vendors.
Don't miss Jeff Severns Guntzel's post from yesterday about the first ever Minneapolis Film Festival, which we covered when we were still called "Sweet Potato."
The latest in a series of posts we're calling Unearthed, Guntzel goes through the City Pages archive and finds out what coverage of that 1981 event looked like, in words and pictures. He's got video from some of the films, too, but what I think will most whet your appetite is this cover image:
More contemporary images are coming later this morning, when we'll have multiple slideshows from last night's Voltage fashion show and music event.
Rep. Jim Oberstar, who chairs the House Transportation Committee, is threatening to "run out the clock" on the NWA-Delta merger until a new president is in office.
From Politico:
“We have no legal authority to block the merger, but we can continue to raise issues about it and ask the [Transportation Department] and [Justice Department] to address them,” said Oberstar spokesman John Schadl. “Simply put: Jim may be able to run out the clock on this.”
Here's a video clip of MediaNews Group CEO William Dean Singleton's unfortunate verbal gaffe referenced in yesterday's post:
(Cribbed from ASNE Reporter)
Spoiler alert: the onomatopoeia in the headline to this post ends Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s novel Slaughterhouse-Five. It's the transliteration of a bird sound heard by Billy Pilgrim, the title character.
If you didn't know, the book covers the firebombing of Dresden during World War II. The bird sound is meant to symbolize the absence of anything intelligent to say about war. Instead of human pontifications about strategy, the final sound you hear is an animal's. And the sound "poo-tee-weet" is offered as a bird's way of saying, is it over yet? Is it safe to come out?
Not that I'm comparing winter to the firebombing of Dresden, but that's what this week's weather has me thinking. The literal birds are out twittering, and the figurative ones inside me are saying, "hey, is it over yet?"
This week our sister paper, the Village Voice, published a hilarious guide to rightwing bloggers, and the list includes several notable Minnesotans.
First up is James Lileks, the Strib's wunderkind-turned-scaremonger:
JAMES LILEKS (The Bleat; lileks.com)ORIENTATION: Suburbative
TONE: Nostalgic
FUN FACT: Briefly lived in Washington, D.C. (“where I heard every voice on the globe,” and also “the world’s crossroads of disease”), in a “blaring trash-strewn enclave” where he “lived in a constant state of nervous dread.” Currently resides in a house he calls “Jasperwood,” complete with “water feature” (i.e., fountain), in a Minneapolis neighborhood that he describes as “urban.”
CANDIDATE: Undeclared, leaning toward George Wallace
STUPID/EVIL RATIO: 60/40
HISTORY: Writer for various papers, including The Washington Post; longtime employee of the Minneapolis Star Tribune, for whom he blogs and supplies columns. Books include humorous, affectionate tweakings of ads, recipes, and photographs from the mid-20th century, which also comprised the centerpiece of The Bleat when it started in 1997, along with scrupulous coverage of Lileks’s daily routine (dog-walking, conversations with daughter, unsatisfying encounters with store clerks). Conservative themes emerged tentatively at first, with grumpy-old-man swipes at graffiti (“When I see that thicket of cryptic squibbles plastered on a sign, I want to bring back the chain gang”) and Monica Lewinsky (“I no more care how she feels about Ken Starr than I care how Al Capone felt about Eliot Ness”). September 11 exacerbated these tendencies to an hallucinogenic degree. Predicted New York would be “nuked,” compared a Chock Full O’Nuts Coffee can to “an urn from Atlantis,” and imagined his daughter attacked by Osama bin Laden (“Give me a gun; show me the cave”) and feminists (“I cannot possibly think of any good reason to ever strike a woman, unless it’s the one in the uniform who wants to pry my daughter’s arms from my neck because the state has decided all men must leave the household for the good of the People”).
MODUS OPERANDI: The Bleat remained thick with such fist-shakings until the 2006 elections, which seem to have thrown Lileks for a loop. Now, he mainly weaves weird culture-war demurrers into his ripely worded chronicles of shopping and child-rearing. So far he’s been quiet about McCain and even Hillary, but he refers to Obama as “Cool Brother,” which, given his longstanding antipathy to The Boondocks, is dispositive. Also: “Hillary and Obama; put them together, and what do you have? White. Male.”WHAT TO EXPECT: Long, maudlin reminiscences of Ye Olden Tymes (croquets lawns, village greens) contrasted with fantasies of the Brave New Worlds affected by Hillary (forced repatriations of girlchilds and slut-servicings of Bill) or Obama (forced integration of Target, Wal-Mart).
BLOTTER BLOGROLL
