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.
It was the Great Depression and your family needed you to go to work. So you dropped out of school. But you’ve always thought about going back to school or taking night classes to get the high school degree. Instead, you married, raised three children, divorced, then married again. When you were 93, a Council Read more →
For the first time, some unsuspecting people have had a ride in Google’s new driverless car. They liked it.
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Remember when it was Tornado Awareness Week and the weather experts said you should use to figure out where you would go in a tornado? Remember all the time growing up when authorities told you don’t use your vehicle for protection. Remember when they said don’t try to outrun a tornado? Read more →
For utter incomprehensibility, nothing beats this quote in the news today: “I killed my daughter as she had insulted all of our family by marrying a man without our consent, and I have no regret over it.” A pregnant woman, Farzana Parveen, 25, was stoned to death today as she headed to court for a Read more →
A medical marijuana prescription from a state where it’s legal will not prevent you from being busted in Minnesota, the Minnesota Court of Appeals affirmed today. Read more →
The only thing that would’ve made things more perfect Saturday night in Davenport, Iowa if it had been Father’s Day. Read more →
There’s something not right at all about this morning’s NPR story from Texas in which a Texas family dropped their Blue Cross Blue Shield health insurance because not a single one of the 28 obstetricians in their area ‘took Obamacare.’
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Elizabeth Cummings Browning died over the weekend. She was just 53, and suffered from dementia and ALS and died just two days after the musician was unable to play one of her favorite songs, according to her obituary in the Star Tribune, which presumably was written by her husband, Star Tribune reporter Dan Browning. Read more →
This incident in Eau Claire had all the makings of the typical springtime tragedy in these parts. A car stops, apparently for no particular reason, in the middle of the multi-lane road. Another car or two go blasting past them and into a duck and her ducklings who were trying to cross the road. Read more →
Mental health advocates will tell you that trying to get the country to pay attention to — and maybe even provide a little empathy for — the problem of mental illness in America has been a long slog. Imagine if the fervor for eliminating smoking could be harnessed to make significant inroads to help those Read more →
Arby’s is promoting a smokehouse brisket sandwich by running the longest TV commercial in history — 13 hours.
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From the “Can Your Winter Do This?” file: A couple of fishermen were out on Lake Michigan near Traverse City this week when this came along. “They crept up on our boat and then we could see that it was a cloud that was really close to the water. We thought about pulling in our Read more →
Farmers can breathe easier. The fertilizer shortage is over. The Associated Press reports that BNSF has now cleared all the backlog of delayed fertilizer shipments as commodities vie for railroad access. The Surface Transportation Board last month ordered BNSF and Canadian Pacific Railway to submit the plans to ensure fertilizer was available for spring planting. Read more →
Is this a whimsical and cute chalk drawing on a Stillwater sidewalk or a dastardly and illegal expansion of commercial signage?
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For all the appropriate chatter about intrusions into privacy, for all the legitimate scandals being derailed by school districts citing privacy and personnel law, a story today stands out: Why is it anyone’s business whether you voted? Read more →
Bob Collins