Bob CollinsThey appeared to be sober, so they didn’t get the experience exactly Minnesotan. Read more →
MPR News Reflections and observations on the news
Sports
Normally, that’s a runway at St. Paul’s Downtown Airport. Now, it’s a parking ramp for big money.
Two of the airports three runways have been closed so that there will be a place to put the corporate jets making their way to the Twin Cities. Read more →
A glance around the ‘news’ coverage of the Super Bowl shows the National Football League has done it again. It’s convinced the skeptical world of journalism to fall head over heels over the celebrities who latch onto the Super Bowl, and the theater surrounding the “big game.” It’s hard to tell where the public relations arm of the NFL ends and journalism begins when a Super Bowl comes to town. The league’s ability to tamp down a discouraging word is how the NFL has become a billion-dollar non-profit organization.
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The chances are pretty good that you’re going to skip work next Monday, the day after the Super Bowl in Minneapolis. The flu outbreak is good for something; it gives us a believable excuse.
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Chief Wahoo has been dying for a long time as the Cleveland Indians have walked a fine line between angering its mascot-embracing fans and slowly transitioning away from its use. In recent years, the team has adopted an uninspiring block ‘C’ as its official logo, but the wahoo still appeared on the team’s uniforms. Read more →
Today’s New York Times article that declares that Minneapolis St. Paul won’t see the big economic windfall from the Super Bowl that its hosts thought it would probably isn’t that big of a surprise to the hosts. That’s pretty much why details of deals between the NFL and host cities are kept fairly secret. Read more →
The Storm Lake Tornadoes went to Spencer, Iowa last Friday to play some basketball and were taunted with racist chants, a report says. It’s not the first time Storm Lake’s kids have heard them. They’re from one of Iowa’s few schools with a student body that’s mostly non-white.
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Kyndel McConchie, who lives in Columbia, S.C., says it’s unfair that the violence directed toward Vikings fans at last Sunday’s NFC championship game soils the ‘classy team’ of which she’s a die-hard fan. Read more →
Our hearts are always warmed when we see the boys of summer giving winter a good go. Read more →
Where football is concerned, it’s getting to be that charity begins on the road.
A week after Minnesota fans inundated a New Orleans Saints player’s charitable foundation with cash in admiration for his sportsmanship, Philadelphia fans — some of them, anyway — are pouring money into Minnesota Vikings coach Mike Zimmer’s charitable foundation, too. Read more →
It’s probably only a coincidence that it happened just after a big snowstorm in the host city, but the price of Super Bowl tickets at US Bank Stadium are sliding. Read more →
Jigar Desai said he wasn’t trying to catch the train when he ran into a concrete pole. He just saw a bunch of Eagles fans and wanted to get them pumped up.
Alcohol was involved.
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As long as his team was playing well — which it has since his trade from the Minnesota Timberwolves — Kevin Love wasn’t likely to be dogged by the type of locker room rumors as he was with the Timberwolves. Those days are over. Read more →
Those of us who don’t know the ins-and-outs of sled-dog racing take it for granted that the sport is just another idyllic Minnesota activity. Hook the dogs up… tell them to go… and the musher gets a free ride. We get lovely photographs.
Sometimes you get this photograph, which Blair Braverman, of Mountain, Wis., posted this afternoon to her Twitter feed. Read more →
It’s been a long time since we’ve all had the kind of fun together that we had in the last week, despite football’s best effort to make us hate it. Read more →