Do you have road rage? Are you currently driving down the street at 90 mph while reading this from your iPhone? It's time to stop flipping the bird at that school bus because calming street art is coming to St. Paul.
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This "no comment" extends to whether an internal investigation has been launched, whether Huss is still employed in the control room of the Kewaunee Power Station, and, if they could get away with it, we imagine, whether a person named Duwayne Huss actually exists.
Da Capo's annual Best Music Writing anthology collects great pieces from the previous year into one handy volume. Authors whose work has been collected for the tome are notified well in advance, but each season there are Honorable Mentions announced later.
Idolator has reported that Peter S. Scholtes and Kevin Cannon's work on the Twin Cities Rock Atlas earned them one of these awards. This puts Scholtes and Cannon in some exclusive company.
More >>
Before we go any further, let us back up for a moment. In 2005, a federal grand jury in Washington state indicted eight people on charges of running a diploma mill and issuing thousands of fake degrees from colleges and universities both real and make-believe. All eight were eventually convicted, and last month the ringleader of the operation was sentenced to three years in prison.
Which left one big question unanswered: Who were their customers?
More >>Earlier in the week, Hasbro's lawsuit against the creators of the not-quite-Scrabble application Scrabulous on Facebook successfully shut down the popular game. This was much to the chagrin of yours truly and tens of thousands of other users -- but, I conceded, it was good of Hasbro to at least ensure that the official Scrabble application was up and running at the time.
Jinx!
That's right, the corporation emerged victorious in its anti-fun campaign, ruining the experience of potential customers throughout the U.S. and Canada -- and then borked their own version of the application the next day. It'll be down for weeks.
In an, ahem, unrelated development, the Indian brothers who created Scrabulous for the social networking site have a new game. It's called Wordscraper, and it doesn't have any set rules you must follow. It's just a blank board.
And yet, you can create your own board replete with double-word scores, triple-letter scores and the like. If the board happens to mimic Scrabble's exactly, well, what a happy coincidence.
Besides, it's not like you can play the game anywhere else on Facebook.
More >>The main focus of this Wednesday's content centers around Beth Walton's feature article about the Collins family, living in exile in Amsterdam.
More >>Also see:
The feature article
Interview with Jennifer Collins
Photo slideshow with more artwork Jennifer and Zachary drew as children
When Zachary Collins was 8 years old,he would bang his head on the floor after getting off the phone with his father, mother Holly Collins says. Holly sought the help of outpatient family therapist Fred Emilianowicz in Salem, Massachusetts.
Zachary had told the therapist that he would run away before going back to Minnesota. He told of having recurring nightmares of his father chasing him and said he believed that if his father caught him, he would be killed. During therapy, the child drew an 8-page depiction of his life. On paper he penciled his father slamming his mother into a wall while he and Jennifer hid in a nearby closet. The story, "The Tale of Mark," ends when the children are rescued and taken to safety in New England and Mark is decapitated by a guillotine at a nearby castle. “If I could get rid of Mark this is where I would do it,” the child wrote at the bottom of the page.
Zachary wrote and drew two complete stories which were supplied to City Pages by Jennifer Collins. They are reproduced in full after the jump. Click on each image for a larger version.
THE TALE OF MARK
Also see:
The feature article
Complete stories about abuse written and drawn by then-8-year-old Zachary
Photo slideshow with artwork Jennifer and Zachary drew as children
Jennifer Collins says that her father beat her as a child. She says that she told court officials and therapists several times during a tragic and lengthy custody trial that she did not feel safe with him. Nonetheless, Hennepin County Family Court put her and her older brother Zachary in his custody when they were just 7 and 9. It was believed that their mother was unstable and coaching the two children. Despite findings of spousal abuse, her father, Mark Collins of Crystal, Minn., was seen as the more fit parent.
Today, at 23 years old, Jennifer feels cheated. As a kid everyone told her if she told the truth everything would be OK. "But it wasn’t, was it?" She says on the phone from her mother's house in Western Holland. "I know I am an adult and it shouldn't matter so much anymore, but I want justice for us kids and for other kids who are currently being abused," she later adds in an e-mail.
More >>Every morning before I write this post, I check my messages from assorted e-mail accounts and on the social networking site Facebook. A lifelong Scrabble junkie, I often take a few seconds to make a move on Facebook's knockoff application, Scrabulous.
But not today. Today, this message greets me.
Just this morning, Facebook has agreed to shut down Scrabulous for American and Canadian users. Apparently not making enough off of Transformer and G.I. Joe licensing, owner Hasbro has been suing the application's developers. Which translates into users like me being struck dumb before our first sips of hot caffeine.
More >>Say what you will about our neighbors to the south. In the months since relocating to the Twin Cities from Ioway, I’ve learned that few punching bags endure as much ribbing and ridicule as my home state and those who inhabit it. (Though after last month’s flood, the jokes suddenly dried up, presumably out of respect or pity or other such Minnesota Nice claptrap.)
