Bob Collins
When you invite the Internet to ‘do that thing you do,’ the Internet generally does it.
So, do that thing you do, Internet, and find people who were born on January 23, 1945.
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MPR News Reflections and observations on the news
This or That
Michael Trimble doesn’t have any arms, thanks, he says, to the nuclear meltdown in Chernobyl.
But he rides a bike and, thanks to some modifications a friend made, he can carry the bike a short distance.
But now the bike has cost him his job. Read more →
If you fly small airplanes in Florida, there’s a pretty fair chance you own a big paperweight, at least in the area where President Donald Trump has set up his winter White House from time to time. Read more →
It’s still not a lot of fun flying from Point A to Point B in the United States, but the airlines’ performance is the best in 22 years, a report from the Department of Transportation says today. U.S. airlines canceled just 1.17 percent of scheduled flights for the year 2016, the lowest in decades. Read more →
Back when I first wrote about their dilemma two years ago, things looked bleak for Kevin and Lori Johnson, of Madison Lake, Minn., who have cared for Kirk Williams, a disabled veteran, for more than 25 years. Read more →
Cy Kubista, of Pine Island, built the hot rod back in the day when it’s what people did. He scavenged for parts in Minnesota and Wisconsin. When it came time to put an engine in it, he rigged up the kids swing set as an engine hoist.
Then he got cancer. Read more →
Wells Fargo is getting rid of the lobby coin-counter machines. Read more →
It wasn’t injured; it was curious. You know how owls are. Read more →
Surely there can be little doubt by now that using a cellphone while driving isn’t safe no matter how much we try to convince ourselves we’re different.
The brain has a hard time doing two things at once and this was true even when cellphones were just phones. Read more →
The main trouble with bad stories with happy endings is they quite often become happy stories with bad endings. Such is the story today of Jeff Bauman, whom you may remember from the Boston Marathon bombing.
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This guy, who retired at 55 and is letting us know he’s doing great while we’re hunkered down in our cubicle farms. Read more →
Newspapers face a big challenge when the big game goes late. Wait too long to get the paper out, and the people complain when the paper doesn’t show up on time. The Boston Globe scurried to get their Florida edition out in the Naples area — where Boston money spends the winter. It documented the Read more →
Luke Burbank, the public radio guy, found ‘sport stacking’, and finally there’s a sport for your kid that won’t break the bank. Read more →
Dad is a partner in a law firm. Mom is a pastor. Both have college degrees. They’re raising three sons in a “safe” Dallas neighborhood. They’re living the dream and doing, as Frances Cudjoe Waters — the mother — everything America says they should do.
And yet, they suffer from racism in the country that refuses to acknowledge a basic truth: No matter their credentials or accomplishments, they’re still black. Read more →
We are living in a new age of discourse in the United States. Disruption is in; dialogue is out.
This is presenting an increasing challenge to blogs and websites that still allow comments in the belief that individual perspectives add value. Many sites, as has been documented here many times, have simply given up in the recognition that in the age of disruption, it is a lost cause. Read more →