Photo courtesy of O'Connor Casting Company.

The Alt for Norge Season 3 contestants in Norway.

This Saturday, Norway's hit Emmy-winning reality TV show Alt for Norge (or, in English, "The Great Norway Adventure") will host an open casting call at the Mall of America for its fourth season. 
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If you build it, they will come.

Instead of sitting around playing video games, brothers Isaiah and Samuel Ehlinger turned their sprawling Kimball, MN backyard into a wiffle ball "field of dreams."

The project began last summer when 15-year-old Isaiah found a YouTube video posted by people in Georgia who had built their own wiffle ball field. Isaiah says he has seen the movie Field of Dreams, but YouTube was his real inspiration.

"Everyone does baseball, but wiffle ball is different," says Isaiah. "I'd never seen a wiffle ball field in Minnesota, and we were looking for something to do. Summers can be low key around here and we didn't want to stay inside.

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Photo by skippyjon

Get on your bike and ride!

April showers normally bring May flowers, but this year the flowers have arrived early. It's especially good timing, as this month marks the 30 Days of Biking challenge, an event where folks take an online pledge to bike every day in April. There's also support, so if your endurance waivers you can check in with other participants as they share stories, jokes, and photos of their experiences via social media. Although the idea has spread internationally, it began with two dudes in Minneapolis.

We recently attended a workshop at Grease Rag and Wrench, a safe forum for women, trans, and femme cyclists to learn about maintenance and repair. In between adjusting derailleur gears, folks swapped stories and shared some great rides for how cyclists can fill up their 30 days.

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​The eyes of the sports world will be focused squarely on East Bethel this Saturday, as arm-sports enthusiasts of all ages, sizes, genders, and experience levels will come together for the Fatboys Arm Wrestling Challenge.

The action kicks off at 5 p.m., and will feature both the open-invite tournament as well as an all-star clash between Adam Kruger and John Whitaker, two of the top five arm wrestlers in the state. Event organizer Josh Handeland says he expects around 40 competitors to participate, and the competition will be divided into five different weight classes to level the playing field (according to the website, you're allowed to strip down to make weight if need be).

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Photo by polzovat

​Now that snow has finally arrived in the Twin Cities and the weather remains overcast, you may believe it's necessary to spend long evenings inside playing games of Scrabble and living off of crock-pot leftovers.
 
Au contraire, my friends.
 
Instead of shutting yourself up at home, why not use this weather as inspiration to explore parts of the Twin Cities that you might otherwise overlook? There are plenty of venues that are not only eager to distract you from your winter doldrums, but provide cultural experiences wildly different than the average beer-and-burger routine.
 
For this (potentially) snowy weekend, we'd like to suggest that you activate your inner Muscovite and imagine that the Twin Cities have been transformed into Moscow. (Duluth is a sister city of Petrozavodsk, one of the largest cities in northwestern Russia, after all). So, grab your sweetheart -- or a friend -- and head on out for an entertaining Russian-inspired adventure.

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