Bob Collins
Someone at McDonald’s is getting fired today.
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MPR News Reflections and observations on the news
By Bob Collins
Bob Collins retired from Minnesota Public Radio in 2019 after 12 years of writing NewsCut and pointing out to complainants that posts weren’t news stories. A son of Massachusetts, he was a news editor 1992-1998, created the MPR News regional website in 1999, invented the popular Select A Candidate, started several blogs, and every day lamented that his Minnesota Fantasy Legislature project never caught on.
The Rochester Post Bulletin today carries the story that easily fits in the ‘ain’t life interesting’ category, unless you’re not awestruck by the notion that a family escapes a gulag in Siberia and, because it did, a doctor becomes the ‘savior’ of the governor of Minnesota. Read more →
In the category of ‘you raised ’em right,’ we give you the kids of the Augsburg hockey team.
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Puckett owned this town once, but now he’s barely even a memory.
He would have turned 57 today. Read more →
The cyclist-driver gulf may never be bridged. Read more →
We will always drop whatever we’re doing on NewsCut when adorable comes along and though we provided an update yesterday on Robert Kelly and his family — the guy who was on the BBC when his daughter came into his home office — the adorb-o-meter was pinned again today when the family held its news conference to get the media off its back so they can get back to normalcy. Read more →
A Minneapolis woman has found that doing one’s civic duty can be pretty rough on nursing mothers. Read more →
The Oxford comma — also known as a serial comma — will soon be extinct and a lot of people would like to make a federal case out of it.
Someone has.
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Deep in the recesses of the World Headquarters of NewsCut, there is a picture on a wall of the original employees of Minnesota Public Radio. Young Garrison Keillor, Michael Barone, and Gary Eichten standing with three others.
All of them were men. That’s the way radio was back then. Men. It wasn’t a place for diversity. Read more →
This picture from Aleppo has the world paying attention again. Photography can do that. Read more →
Jerilynn Huber didn’t have a prayer of succeeding in her protest, but at least she stood for something, or climbed for something. Read more →
Robert Kelly wants you to know he loves his kids and he wasn’t mad at them for making him into an Internet sensation. Read more →
Bekah and Derrick Quirin intend to walk the entire 2,200-mile trail starting next week with their 1-year-old baby. They figure it might even be easier than staying home. Read more →
It’s unusual to read a story by NPR’s Nina Totenberg that doesn’t involve the U.S. Supreme Court; this one involves a violin.
But Totenberg has a personal connection to the violin, made by Antonio Stradivari in 1734. It was stolen from her father, virtuoso violinist Roman Totenberg, 38 years ago before it was recovered in 2015. Read more →
For 20 years, Shane Snowdon didn’t say much about what happened in 1997.
Snowdon, a Cambridge, Mass., resident, has broken the silence now after reading a headline. Read more →