The Deets

As you may have read, the Roseville 4 movie theater on Larpenteur Ave is potentially closing down. Rainbow plans to expand into that space.

This has gotten a lot of people worked up on Facebook, where there is a “don’t close the roseville 4!!!” group with 500+ members and a petition you can sign at iPetition.

The petition will be presented to the Roseville City Council on Monday, March 17th, so get your name on the list if you want to keep 2nd run movies on the big screen.

Thanks to Angela for passing along the tip.

I had to look up how to spell “Ponch” as in Ponch & John yesterday for a comment I wrote on Afterglide.com. Google is my spell checker of choice, so I typed in my best guess:

Unfortunately, I was nowhere close, so Google had no idea what I was talking about. Luckily, I was able to refine my typo into another typo that Google was able to convert into the correct spelling of Ponch. Problem solved.

Something about the term “Energy Coffee” seems a bit redundant to me. Personally, I’ll just turn my Krups Grind & Brew to 11 if I want more kick from my beans, for others may prefer to pour a cup or this stuff after topping off their tanks.

I haven’t tried the stuff, but ENERGYGURU from TaurineRules.blogspot.com (aka Energy Drink Reviews) gave it at try at a Speedway location in Chicago . . . in the future. His post is time stamped March 11, 2008. So it’s quite possible that this produce has time traveling properties and is kept warm on a flux capacitor.

Energy Drink Reviews: Speedway Shockwave Energy Coffee

About 45 minutes after finishing the cup I started to get real jittery, definitely more than with a normal coffee. I swear I couldn’t stop my foot from tapping. One thing Shockwave Energy Coffee definitely did though was perk me up. I was up big time with my eyes so wide open and my head screamingly clear. This is like power coffee. I kept my caffeine rush on for a few hours before a screaming caffeine crash that left me nearly delirious. It’s like drinking a normal coffee first thing in the morning and then coming down from the caffeine, but magnified three times. I still didn’t know what was in Shockwave Coffee so I emailed the marketing department at Speedway SuperAmerica. They were really friendly and got back to me within 3 hours. They claim that Shockwave Coffee has the same ingredients as their other coffee blends, but with a higher caffeine content.

And an anonymous commenter explained that this is strong stuff:

Energy Drink Reviews: Speedway Shockwave Energy Coffee

I have been trying to figure that out myself. My caffeine rush from this coffee lasted 12 HOURS!! I was able to do 11 hours of overtime off of it. I had never felt so awake. I love the coffee, but I wish it would not cause me to talk fast, histerically tap my feet and make me feel like running around the entire office twice!

Here’s a tip: don’t drink this stuff before golfing. I have a feeling that it would destroy your short game.

WCCO TV’s Jason DeRusha is sitting in for Don Shelby on his afternoon radio show today. I’m live blogging the 4-5pm segment.

History in the making. Has someone live blogged WCCO radio before? I don’t think so.

4:00 My stereo doesn’t get AM, so I had to grab my GE FM/AM Clock radio with TWO WAKE TIMES and dial in ‘CCO:

4:01: National news: flu shots for kids, a murderer gets sentenced, Obama picks up a HRC superdelegate, William Buckley Dead “Before Buckley, there was nothing” according to William Kristol

4:02: 25 degrees. WCCO’s bumper sounds the same as it did when I was growing up.

4:03: Local news: Bodybuilder dies from pain drug overdose, RNC demonstration parade route planning (get your permits now), Rick Larkin wants people to stay safe - new emergency management director, Mankato is having a high risk drinking summit as a response to Amanda Jax’s drinking death, Robert Bly is new poet laureate (Minneapolis resident).

Ad: Surdyk’s Ad - Boy, business sure has changed since grandpa ran this place. Spring wine sale is going on.

4:07: DeRusha’s on! Don for a day. U of MN president Bruininks is JD’s guest. JD’s changing the lights to CF for “E” day.

4:08 Traffic: Heavy easybound 494 near E Bush Lake Road? Do you really need a helicopter to tell you that?

4:09 Little snow tomorrow morning according to Paul Douglas. 28F tomorrow. You’ll be shoveling up north. Wow, Douglas went 7 days out!

Ad: Parade of Homes ad.

Ad: Get your guide book at Holiday Station Stores.

Ad: Maplewood Toyota: “It’s a special time” Cash back, low lease rates on Camry’s. “Minnesota’s #1: Maplewood Toyota” #1 what?

Ad: Issues ad from “Congress in Motion” applauding the veto override transportation bill. They “Just want to say, ‘Thanks’”

Ad: CSX train ad explaining that trains are an efficient way to drive cars.

Ad: Cheesy Quickbooks ad with hair dresser theme.

4:15: DeRusha’s back. Talking about the environment on “E” Wednesday. Bruininks’ in the house.

4:16 Bruininks explains that the U of MN hits up the state for Capital investments this time of year. Also looking for biomedical sciences investments. “One of our great strengths” “Vibrant cluster” of biomedical businesses in MN. Leading research happens at the U. Economic & job growth investment.

4:18: DeRusha pulls MNSpeak thread for Ethanol issue about pulled research funding. Bruininks says the money isn’t gone and is working on keeping it at the U.

4:20 Bruininks: Recently met with DOE to discuss biofuels. Thinks it’s a big issue for MN and the U of MN.

Ad: Advantage car rental. They’ll rent to kids.

Ad: Visa business can help you with secure payment options.

Ad: Progress in Motion.

4:22 Traffic. Southbound 35W is slow. Surprised?

Ad: Centerpoint Energy ad for energy audits. Feel good stuff. Rebates on furnaces and water heaters.

Ad: Nextel / Sprint Ad. Lots of fast talking fine print.

Ad: Another ad for Visa Business. They’ll track your expenses and stuff.

4:25: and we’re back. Don health update. Don will be on TV, but not radio today. TCF Stadium talk: “Sustainable Operation?” Shooting for LEED Certification. Drains stormwater in eco-friendly ways. You want to be efficient in your use of energy. 1/2 the stadium will be used in winter month while the other 1/2 will be shut down for the winter.

4:27 JD: what about trash? Bruininks: Recycle to the maximum possible degree. We’ve saved $5 million in energy this year through energy choices. Burning oat hulls keeps the U warm.

Ad: FreeCreditReport.com jingle.

Ad: Verizon wireless ad about a phone for old people. Big buttons and screen. Good Housekeeping approved phone?

Ad: CarFax

Traffic: Accident on 494 N. Slow on 35E north out of downtown St. Paul. Surprised?

Ad: WCCO TV.

4:30 News: new: shooting in Arkansas shoot. Should the Illinois school replace the building where the shooting happened? Did Clemens lie to Congress?

Ad: Obscure issues ad about wireless bill in St Paul. Sounds like a fake grassroots organization.

Ad: ACE Hardware with Madden

Ad: Acura certified preowned vehicles.

4:34: And we’re back. Solar decathlon talk. U of MN will be part of the competition in 2009. Bruininks: build a solar operated home here and compete at Washington, DC Mall. 150 students will work on the project. Colleges of Design & Technology are taking the lead on this competition. Shelby’s daughter was involved in this but Shelby was ticked that the U wasn’t previously participating.

4:38 “we need to be designing the technologies of the future that reduce our energy footprint” We can change the way people se energy.

This conversation sounds very scripted.

Ad: Patio furniture from By the Yard

Ad: Big 10 Network on Dish Network. You have to have it to “See it all” Lots of fine print fast reading.

Ad: Tom Tom GPS. 494 accident cleared up but still slow.

North HWY 100 is slow. No duh.

Delays out of downtown st paul. During rush hour? Wow.

Paul Douglas: 13F overnight. That dang Alberta is sending us some cold weather. Clipper trivia. 30 MPH storms. Not much precip, but blowing snow. Gives an update on how much snow is on the ground in various parts of the state. Maybe an inch tomorrow. Nuisance snow. Princeton, MN to Balsam Lake, WI: maybe a couple inches. 28F for a high tomorrow. 15-25mph wind tomorrow. 35F “as we greet March” He only gave a 5-day this time. 16F windchill.

4:44 Douglas / DeRusha banter. Douglas is impressed with Derusha’s Good Question segments. DeRusha gets Douglas’ vote. DeRusha forwards weather questions to Douglas. Douglas asks about how to deal with the onslaught of emails “we all receive every day.”

4:45 Twitter question to DeRusha about wind power at the U of MN. (Has Shelby ever taken a question over Twitter?) The U is moving toward energy independence. Wind turbines is one of the ways this is being done. Trying to figure out how to make wind energy more scalable. (Bruininks and DeRusha know a thing or two about wind.)

4:49 JD: Light rail question about U. Bruininks: 1600 buses and 25,000 cars go through the U on Washington Ave now. Tunnel is very costly and appears to be dead. Cost benefit “just isn’t there.” Looking at an above grade option that takes traffic off the campus and moves it to University Ave and 4th St. Thinks U would be better served by routing near Dinkytown. That’s where the most density is. People are concerned about delays. U of MN is the heaviest user of metro transit. 20,000 users. Passes subsidized by the U. We must improve the transportation system for the $1 billion spent. Central corridor won’t work without the U of MN.

Ad: Advantage Car Rental. Molly the college student couldn’t rent a car until she found Advantage.

4:53 Super 8 continental breakfast.

Traffic: 169 accident in North metro. Accident on Cedar Ave near Old Shakopee Rd. Slow traffic from Midway in St. Paul to White Bear Ave on 94.

Ad: Ordway

Ad. Ron Shara for Pet Cremation Services

4:56 DeRusha Twitters answer to previous Twitter submitted question while people are supposed to be listening to ads.

Ad: ANOTHER ad for Advantage rental cars. A Denny Hecker owned company.

4:58 DeRusha tells us what’s coming up in the 5 O’Clock hour. Thanks people for calling in about Good Questions.

Ad: Car body repair service.

Ad: Home & Garden Show.

Ad: Sargento Cheese

And that’s a wrap.

Thoughts: I counted 29 ads during the hour. Wow, they really cram them in. Jason’s during the first house was pretty entertaining. I learned that Jason has sat on a cactus in front of a live audience, about his dog’s fondness for poopsickles, and about Miley Cyrus’ real name.

These are the people who call in to local radio shows and make the shows more valuable. The telephone version of blog commenting.

1. Dan from Woodbury on Dan Barreiro’s KFAN show
2. Undertaker Fred on T.D. Mischke’s AM 1500 show
3. Carl Gerbschmidt on Barreiro
4. “Allan” on just about every political talk show in town
5. Walter “The Secretary of Insight” on Common Man’s KFAN show

Are not found here.

Apparently, there are a lot of celebrity sex photo obsessed people on the Internet today googling for pictures on Juno screenwriter and Oscar winner naked.

Who would do something like that?

Does it really come as a surprise that someone with a blog called Pussy Ranch, who’s worked as a stripper, would have had a lens pointed as an exposed nipple?

And why are people so obsessed with celebrity photos?

Also how big a celebrity do you need to be before your nude photos are worth discovering? Just look at the lack of traction Gene Simmons’ sex tape has received. I this a gender issue or hotness factor?

I blame Tonya Harding for all of this.

via Rex

Paul Graham has an interesting post on forum & blog trolls where he explains the factors he thinks contributes to rude behavior by members. Anonymity plays a role, but so does the forum’s acceptable culture:

The final contributing factor is the culture of the forum. Trolls are like children (many are children) in that they’re capable of a wide range of behavior depending on what they think will be tolerated. In a place where rudeness isn’t tolerated, most can be polite. But vice versa as well.

I don’t know if children is the best term for trolls since that would imply that moderators are like parents. I think moderators are more like bouncers who keep things under control and kick out people who are behaving badly.

There’s a sort of Gresham’s Law of trolls: trolls are willing to use a forum with a lot of thoughtful people in it, but thoughtful people aren’t willing to use a forum with a lot of trolls in it. Which means that once trolling takes hold, it tends to become the dominant culture.

That’s dead on. Why would anyone leave a thoughtful comment on a YouTube video or Digg post if it’s just going to be buried alongside all the rudeness? We see a bit of this locally on the occasional degraded MNSpeak thread (although it’s not consistently crappy like YouTube or Digg comments).

I’ve often wondered who uses the Pay By Touch systems at Cub Foods stores. It turns out the answer is, “not nearly enough people”:

Beleaguered Pay By Touch Looks To Sell Itself in Two Auctions

Pay By Touch’s biometrics business proved to be a huge money loser despite installations in more than 700 U.S. retail locations, most notably SuperValu Inc.’s Jewel/Osco grocery stores in the Chicago area. The biometrics and so-called personalized marketing businesses lost $137 million last year on only $600,000 in revenue, according to documents filed in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Los Angeles, which is overseeing the case.

It seemed like a solution in need of a problem to me. I tend to have plenty of time to dig out my wallet and whip out a card during the time it takes the cashier to scan my stack of Jack’s Pizzas.

Plus, it only worked with checking accounts so you’ll miss out on your credit card incentives. I suppose Cub chose to do that so they wouldn’t have to may a Pay by Touch fee on top of a credit card merchant fee in their relatively low margin business.

Here’s a story^1. from 2005 when Pay by Touch launched at its first MN location.

1. It’s cool that Blaine newspaper has a linkable archive from 2005.

The Rake’s farewell print issue (March 2008) includes a sidebar survey listing where local people say they get their news. Here’s how they ranked things:

StarTribune
Pioneer Press
The Rake
Minnesota Monitor
Daily Planet
City Pages
MinnPost
Cursor
MNSpeak
The Daily Mole
Politics in Minnesota
Talking Points Memo
Gizmodo
Informed Comment
Blogumentary
Eyeteeth
Walker Blogs
Mediation
Downtown Journal
WCCO
Southwest Journal
Minnesota Lawyer
MN Blue
The Sky Blue Waters Report

However, if you run that list through the Technorati search engine and sort by how often each site is mentioned in blogs, you’ll get a different ranking.

But before getting into that, it’s worth mentioning that a few of the sites on the list are nationally focused sites rather than local, such as the popular tech blog, Gizmodo, or the national political news site, Talking Points Memo. Strangely, the locally produced, nationally focused right-wing blog, Powerline, is missing from the list, which may say something about who was informally polled.

I took the above list (along with a couple sites I’ve involved with: The Deets and Technology Evangelist), ran each site through Technorati (just type the site’s URL into the search box) and made note of the blog reaction count. Here is how the above sites break down using that measure:

News Sites Mentions

315462	Gizmodo
144322	StarTribune
61249	WCCO
43608	Talking Points Memo
16098	Pioneer Press
13641	Informed Comment
5850	The Rake
4303	City Pages
3427	Minnesota Monitor
2569	Technology Evangelist
1642	Cursor
1594	MNSpeak
1307	MinnPost
1023	Walker Blogs
946	Daily Planet
673	Eyeteeth
571	Blogumentary
379	The Deets
365	MN Blue
310	The Sky Blue Waters Report
287	The Daily Mole
268	Mediation
181	Downtown Journal
179	Minnesota Lawyer
164	Politics in Minnesota
7	Southwest Journal

It’s interesting to see how things sort out. First, I’d drop Gizmodo, Informed Comment, Talking Points Memo, and Technology Evangelist from the list since they’re not local sites.

Looking at what’s left: It’s amazing that a TV station beats a major daily newspaper site (WCCO over the Pioneer Press). I’m not sure if that’s a statement about how little news the PP creates, how inaccessible their website is, both, or something else.

MNspeak’s page views to employee ratio has to be among the highest in Minnesota.

Eyeteeth, Blogumentary, and The Deets, receive between 1/2 to 1/4 as many mentions as Minnpost with 1/50th as many writers. Another 300+ blog mention local site run by one person is SkinnySki.com.

I’m trying to understand why Southwest Journal came out so low. My best guess is because they truncate their feeds, causing a lot of local influential bloggers to avoid reading that site.

I’m sure plenty of other local sites are missing from this list. The rest of our local mainstream media sites, Metblogs, and The Bridge come to mind. Let us know where other sites stand in the comments.

Next time you get cut off downtown, think twice before honking or flipping the guy the bird. He may have just spilled his drink while reaching for his handgun:

7th/Park Av S: Officers observed vehicle driving wrong way on one-way street, stopped vehicle; there were open bottles of alcohol in plain view; further investigation revealed loaded handgun under front seat: 2 Arrested/
WEAPON/OPEN CONTAINER
CID investigating

One more reason to avoid 18+ nights:

100 blk 4th St N; 2nd/7th Av; 7th/Hennepin Av: Sunday evening from at approx 9:15-10:30, officers responded to several large fights, SHOTS FIRED calls; crowds of teens attending club event became involved in altercations with one another, gun violence erupted; 1 victim sustained non-life- threatening gunshot injury located; 2 handguns recovered: several Arrested/ RECOVERED WEAPON/ASSAULT
CID investigating

Kids these days:

Lake/Hiawatha: Group assaulted, robbery victim who went to HCMC, arrested youth have ties to MTS school, frequent this location
5 Arrested: ROBBERY

38th & Chicago holds onto its title as my least favorite intersection in South Minneapolis:

38th/Chicago: Victim taken behind convenience store, robbed, checking video for suspect information
Investigating: ROBBERY