Pop Culture

Wii Fit is sold out everywhere and selling for $300 on Ebay

Filed under: Pop Culture

Hoping to celebrate Memorial Day by staying inside and practicing Yoga by balancing on a hi-tech piece of white plastic? Good luck finding a copy of Wii Fit--it's sold out everywhere in the Twin Cities. At my local Best Buy, I saw a pyramid of boxes of the $90 apparatus, but was quickly informed they were pre-orders. The store's regular stock sold out within 45 minutes of being put on the shelves.

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Posted by Kevin Hoffman at May 21, 2008 1:20 PM | Comments (0)

 

Reporter's Notebook: Standup Sampler

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In this week’s feature, we profile Stand Up! Records, a Twin Cities-based indie label that’s put out some the sharpest, most envelope-pushing comedy of the past eight years. YouTube clips abound after the jump.

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Posted by Matt Snyders at May 20, 2008 3:11 PM | Comments (0)

 

Reporter's Notebook: The Greatest Guitar Hero Player of Them All

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By Kevin Hoffman

In this week's news story, I went to Rochester to pay a visit to Chris Chike, the 16-year-old Guitar Hero phenom that recently set a new Guinness record for highest score on the game's hardest song. Because of the constraints of the narrative, there was a lot of material that I didn't get a chance to use. Included among the cutting-room-floor scraps is an interview with RedOctane founder Charles Huang about the series, tips from Chike on how to master the trickiest parts of songs, and YouTube clips of Chike in action. All this and more you'll find after the jump.

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Posted by Kevin Hoffman at April 1, 2008 6:14 PM | Comments (6)

 

Watching the Oscars? See the Best Picture Posters

Filed under: Pop Culture

For your Academy Award-watching preparations: this site has all 79 posters for the movies that won Best Picture. You'll never get that artichoke dip made now. Might as well just crack open the beverage of your choice and scroll through, counting the films you've missed.

[Via Neatorama]

Posted by Jeff Shaw at February 23, 2008 1:10 PM | Comments (1)

 

In Bold Stand, President Condemns Nooses

Filed under: Pop Culture

You may recall our story a while back about a noose in a college newsroom. It was one of many recent noose-related incidents.

Now, in what analysts are calling his boldest stand on any issue since declaring that man would walk on the moon by 2020, President Bush has spoken out. His position: Nooses are bad.

Insiders say Katherine Kersten will have a pro-noose rebuttal ready for tomorrow's Strib.

Posted by Jonathan Kaminsky at February 12, 2008 4:01 PM | Comments (1)

 

The Real Brock Lesnar UPDATED W/FIGHT VIDEO

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Watching Brock Lesnar engage in no-contact sparring is like watching a polar bear perform an interpretive dance. At the Minnesota Mixed Martial Arts Academy in Brooklyn Center, his hulking, six-foot-three, 265-pound frame contorts and contracts as he lightly grapples with his sparring partner. Muscles ripple and flare through his gi, as if they’re calling out, demanding to be put to more visceral use. He barely breaks a sweat, save for a few beads clinging to his ample brow.

There’s no pummeling, tackling, or suplexes for Lesnar today. He’s training in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu—“the gentle art.” The fighting style, popularized in America by Royce Gracie, who used it to beat much larger opponents in the first UFC, eschews brute power in favor of technique and physical dexterity. The goal is not to knock out your opponent, but to submit him with arm bars, leg locks, and choke holds.

“I’m focusing on my submission game,” says Lesnar. “And learning how to defend against arm locks and leg locks.”

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Posted by Matt Snyders at February 1, 2008 7:23 PM | Comments (1)

 

Diablo Cody on David Letterman

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David Letterman plays an important role in the Diablo Cody mystique. Back when she was just a humble stripper/memoirist, Diablo made her now legendary first appearance on Letterman, where she was bequeathed with the first and only "Dave's Book Club" stamp of approval. For those who haven't seen it, here's the now-famous star turn:

So it was with much anticipation that I tuned into her triumphant return on Tuesday night. Details after the jump.

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Posted by Kevin Hoffman at January 23, 2008 12:10 AM | Comments (1)

 

Requiem for a Stadium

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This week's City Pages features the 10 best and 10 worst moments at the Metrodome. Use this comments thread to debate our choices and provide some of your own.

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Posted by Kevin Hoffman at September 26, 2007 12:56 PM | Comments (2)

 

The Dutchman is halfway to New York

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The last time we talked to the Dutchman, a local vets advocate rolling across America to Manhattan in his wheelchair, he was camped-out on the lawn outside a Wal-Mart in Madison, Wisconsin. Two months later, he's in Ontario, Canada, making his way down the side of Highway 3. "I'm on my third chair," says Robert William Van Vranken II, speaking over his cell phone as trucks roar by in the background. "I went from Minneapolis to Menomonie, Wisconsin, on a manual chair, then burnt out the electric motor on a power chair. But I have over 600 miles on this chair."

Rolling along non-interstate highways between Minnesota and New York with a bike trailer behind him, the Dutchman has made pretty good time (50 miles a day), while raising money for a new Spinal Cord Injury/Disorder Center at the Minneapolis VA Medical Center, via his website, www.myspace.com/dutchmanrolling. (Instead of kicking him off their lawn, Wal-Mart made a donation.) His secret is to not push the electric motor. "I go an hour, then I gotta stop for about 25 minutes and let it cool down," he says.

The Dutchman has faced worse dangers than a burnt-out motor: While changing wires on his batteries in a bike path between Madison and Milwaukee, a snake got its teeth in him. "He bit my stump," says Vranken, who lost his lower left leg in a bus accident last year (had had been drinking, and fell under the vehicle). The swelling on the stump has gone down, so he doesn't think the snake was poisonous.

"Life goes on," he says. "My new hairspray is insect repellent."

Posted by Peter S. Scholtes at August 31, 2007 3:52 PM | Comments (0)

 

Drinking and biking

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Believe it or not, you can legally drive drunk in Minnesota if you're riding a bicycle, as long as you don't do something stupid, like plow directly into a police car--as a friend of a friend did recently, and was charged with careless driving under MN Statute 169.13. If you're steering 16 people on one giant human-powered vehicle, however, no one will insure you if you're also drinking alcohol. Which is why the new local, Netherlands-style cafe-on-wheels PedalPub (www.pedalpub.com) provides a (sober) driver to groups of up to 16 riders, who then power the cycle with their feet while seated at an open-air bar. "Bar" might be a slight misnomer: Riders can drink on the vehicle, but only while on private property, and with the property owner's permission. But for $150 per hour, PedalPub provides pub-crawl tours of Nordeast, Lake Calhoun, and other neighborhoods. The whole thing is more expensive than renting individual bikes, but cheaper than a limo or party bus, and healthier, too. The main thing riders should worry about: making it over that last hill.

Posted by Peter S. Scholtes at August 29, 2007 8:16 PM | Comments (1)

 

Don't forget August 5 is National Friendship Day, followed by Hollow Indifference Week

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The first Sunday of August is fast approaching and that can only mean one thing: National Friendship Day will soon be upon us. Proclaimed by the U.S. Congress in 1935, National Friendship Day helped remind a depressed, broke-ass nation that a friend in need is likely standing in a bread line indeed. And that it might be worth sending a card. Or at least saying "hi."

The date of observance is still with us, now accompanied by Women's Friendship Day (held this year on September 16), Old Friends, New Friends Week (third week of May), and International Friendship Month (February).

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Posted by Matt Snyders at August 1, 2007 2:37 PM | Comments (0)

 

Guess whether the priest is "pro-heart" or "pro-head"

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Two friends from the Twin Cities are among the four finalists competing in the 2007 Great American Think-Off, which will name "America's Greatest Thinker." Episcopal priest Paul D. Allick and arts administrator Joe Kaiser were among the 535 contestants who submitted essays from far away as London and Guam answering the question: "Which should you trust more—your head or your heart?"

Hosted in New York Mills, Minnesota, the contest winds up Saturday with a live debate, in which the audience chooses the winner (7:00 p.m., James W. Mann Performing Arts Center, New York Mills High School, 218.385.3339). Allick and Kaiser say they entered together on opposing sides, and debated the question over dinners at the Leaning Tower of Pizza on Lyndale.

"If Joe wins he'll be walking home," says Allick. "Because he's getting a ride there from me. If I win, I get to gloat all the way home, and he rides in back." UPDATE: Kaiser wins Think-Off, heart beats head.

Posted by Peter S. Scholtes at June 6, 2007 10:17 AM | Comments (0)

 

D'oh!: Springfield, MN says "no" to the Simpsons

Filed under: Pop Culture

Sixteen U.S. cities named Springfield are vying for the honor of being the official hometown of The Simpsons in conjunction with the July release the of successful FOX cartoon's first movie. Springfield, Minnesota, however, is not one of them. According to an AP story, City Manager Malcolm Tilberg said the citizens of the Brown County village in the south-central part of the state found little interest in Homer, Bart, Mr. Burns, and their yellow-skinned ilk putting them on the map. "Everything the fictitious Springfield is, we're not. We're a clean, close-knit community. There's no pollution, no waste dumps, nobody misbehaving all the time. And we don't want to be made a parody of," Tilberg said. The recent events have, however, placed Springfield in the running for Most Humorless City in America.

Posted by Corey Anderson at June 1, 2007 9:21 AM | Comments (1)

 

Muddy field of dreams

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Stephen Dick is a young man with a simple dream: A sunny day in July, a mud pit the size of a football field, and 288 people romping around in it up to their knees.

Dick is the man behind the first-annual Muddy Sunday volleyball tournament, to be held at Corcoran Lions Park in Hamel. Preparing for the dirty event has more or less consumed his non-working life.

A business analyst for Target ("I work with sheets"), Dick spends his spare time begging his way onto volleyball league e-mail lists, maintaining a sleek Web page for the event, and, for exercise, sticking tournament flyers on windshields near volleyball courts around the Cities. So far, he has already signed up 12 of a hoped-for 48 teams.

Future plans?

Dick, 24, plans to put the Twin Cities on the mud volleyball map. "Forty-eight teams is not a bad start," he says, but it is just that: a start. "We're going to make it one of the biggest tournaments in America. We're thinking very big."

Posted by Jonathan Kaminsky at May 30, 2007 5:42 PM | Comments (1)

 

St. Paulite selling all her possessions on eBay has auction pulled on a technicality

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It was widely reported yesterday that St. Paul resident Lisa Perry, in the throes of a self-described "mid-life excitement," was selling all her possessions in a single eBay auction. Today, however, Perry's eBay listing abruptly vanished. Had Perry suddenly gotten cold feet? No, says eBay spokeswoman Catherine English, the 45-year-old free spirit just hadn't played by eBay's rules. Explains English: Perry made mention of proceeds from the sale going to charity, but company policy says you need to back up such a claim with proof. Perry didn't. And so her stuff was zapped. "She'll be welcome to re-list her items in a way that complies with company policies," English assured. So, that's the good news for the charities. The bad? The bidding, which according to the Strib had reached $2,325 early this morning, will start at zero.

Posted by Jonathan Kaminsky at April 10, 2007 5:24 PM | Comments (1)