Bob Collins
Why do people pay a high toll price on MnPASS roads when there’s no real calculation how much time they’ll save? Read more →
MPR News Reflections and observations on the news
Archives for March 2014
If we can’t get excited about Minnesota’s kids — the ones that perhaps don’t have NHL careers ahead of them — playing for a state hockey title, can we really call ourselves the state of hockey? Read more →
For more than a year, Stefon Alexander, the Twin Cities rapper who performs as P.O.S., has been looking for a kidney. His musician pals, DoomTree, crowdfunded the cost, raising more than $47,000 for the procedure, well over the initial $25,000 goal. Finding a kidney turned out to be harder. Read more →
A couple having a medical emergency in Minneapolis finds a good person. Read more →
The only thing that made Carl Kasell’s retirement from NPR acceptable, was that he’d still be on Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me every week. Now, that’s ending too. Kasell announced today he’s retiring from the show. “My favorite time at NPR has been Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! It was loads of fun and gave Read more →
We still tinker with software, but hardware, the very infrastructure of our wired and unwired lives? Not so much. We’re generally content if something just works. Read more →
Evelyn lost her driver’s license because someone thought she was too old to drive. But she wasn’t too old to fight back for her neighbor. Read more →
They’re so cute when their small. Then they hit the teenage years, tell you how much they hate you and how they wish they’d never been born, they go into their room for a few years and come out and tell you what college they want you to pay for.
That’s the typical cycle of parenthood life. Everybody gets over it. Eventually. Read more →
“Has it ever before happened that people associated with Ukrainian, Russian, Belarusian, Armenian, Polish, and Jewish culture have died in a revolution that was started by a Muslim? Can we who pride ourselves in our diversity and tolerance think of anything remotely similar in our own histories?” Timothy Snyder asks in his marvelous recap of Read more →
The I-35W collapse was supposed to be a wake-up call. Instead, the nation has fallen back to a comfortable sleep, the New York Times reports today. Read more →
While we’re stuck in the unique hell of both winter and the spring pothole season season, perhaps we can work on our art appreciation, for potholes are art. Just ask Davide Luciano and Cladia Ficca, a husband and wife team who some years ago created mypotholes.com to show their obsession with streetscapes reimagined. You see Read more →
Sure, it was cold again overnight with a little bit of snow and there’s no indication spring is anywhere in sight. Trust me, we’re one morning closer than we were at this time yesterday. In the meantime, we present today’s “Can your summer do this?” entry. Related: Chisholm musher begins run in grueling Iditarod (Duluth Read more →
Wisconsin has reached back 34 years to promote its tourism industry. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Robert Hays — two stars of the movie, “Airplane” — reunited for a parody to promote Wisconsin: David Zucker, the director of the film, graduated from UW Madison. This isn’t his first crack at promoting Wisconsin. Two years ago, he produced Read more →
Nazi salute? Nope. Read more →
Nobody in their right mind would mistake the movie trailer for an actual emergency. Right? Read more →