Bob CollinsThanks to the Duluth News Tribune, we learned today how fast a police car can go when it has big intentions: 135. We also learned how fast a Camaro can go when it unwinds on Highway 61 on the way to Two Harbors: 171. Read more →
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.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but I got a good look at Cottage Grove’s newest addition when I was testing out an external mount on a GoPro a couple of weeks ago: an island in the Mississippi River.
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There’s reserved seating in Baseball Heaven for Bill Dugan, a Detroit Tigers fan who was raised right.
He caught five foul balls in yesterday’s Detroit-Pittsburgh game. Read more →
Here’s today’s daily dose of sweetness, which continues our unofficial theme of the day: Baseball. Read more →
It’s a charming story out of Winona where a police officer helped out a girl whose bike was stolen, but it’s also got an element to it similar to the story last week in Indiana where a police officer turned a traffic stop into a proselytizing session of sorts when he asked the scofflaw whether she’d been saved. Read more →
It seems the general consensus of the Colonies is that the American experiment, at least with regard to the country’s politics, has failed somewhat miserably.
When a member of Parliament took to the floor today to face British Prime Minister David Cameron on the revelations in the release of data from a Panamanian law firm that he was hiding cash offshore, it reminded us that perhaps it’s not to late to rejoin the empire. Read more →
Toward the end of a three-month stay at a drug treatment facility, Zach Spieker wrote a letter to the opiates that bedeviled him, Fargo Forum reports.
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Slate’s Leon Neyfakh is the latest media watcher to predict doom for Public Radio, specifically the organization formerly known as National Public Radio.
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Some kids in Minneapolis needed a “dad” for a father-daughter dance recently, so some cops at the local station house stepped forward and stepped up. Read more →
The Boston Globe’s editorial board made its point in an interesting — if somewhat inflammatory way — today. Read more →
The tribute last night to the inductees of the Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Fame revealed a continuing split between the artists it honors and the institution. Read more →
For those of us of a certain age who grew up watching the likes of Jules Bergman and Frank McGee and Walter Cronkite covering space missions with plastic models to describe what was happening, today’s SpaceX launch was a reconfirmation that we live in interesting times. Read more →
The girl’s hockey coach at Stillwater High School has resigned for mysterious reasons but as is usually the case, particular with schools, the privacy cone of silence has dropped over the situation. Read more →
What does it look like when someone opens fire on you because you tooted your horn at them at a green light at a major Minneapolis intersection? It looks like this. Read more →
Bruce Springsteen announced on his website that Sunday’s concert in North Carolina is canceled because of a new law that fails to include sexual orientation and gender identity as protected categories in an anti-discrimination law. Read more →