The Other Mike and I had a chance to check out the Princess Kay of the Milky Way pageant last night. After playing a video where each of the 12 contestants contributed a Midwest Dairy fact, the Princess Kay Orchestra kicked things off: The Master of Ceremony, Rod Johnson, was excellent as usual. Here he [...]
The Other Mike and I biked near and around Lake Pepin two weekend ago. Great riding. That’s me above somewhere in Sconie along the Eastern shore of Lake Pepin. If my memory serves me right, that’s somewhere after Maiden Rock. Here is what we covered over two days: Day 1: We drove to Lake City, [...]
Emily Badger has an article up on Miller-McCune that explains how NY state’s prison population skews congressional districts due to the census counting prison populations as residents of the prison’s district rather than as residents of the community the prisoner was from before being incarcerated. The counting quirk sounds like a quandary for demographers. But [...]
Minnesota’s Arizona-like anti-Hispanic immigration policing bill is backed by representatives from very white parts of the state. How white? Here’s one way to look at it based on 2000 census data. The big blue bars represent the percentage of white folks living in each of the bill’s supporter’s districts (all rural Republicans). The red sections [...]
Bob Ingrassia’s new Minnesota blog directory and ranking system, Newsbobber, has received some buzz on Twitter today. This seems like the start of something useful for people interested in finding local bloggers who’re passionate about various topics. One thing that’s cool about the directory is reading Newsbobber’s take on what they perceive each site to [...]
Aaron has a post over on MNPublius that outlines some of the ways Michelle Bachmann is using her government funded congressional website to endorse groups outside the scope of House rules. While this may not seem like a big deal to some, it’s worth considering the value of links from a .gov site as Aaron [...]
LinkedIn has a Key Statistics along the right column of their business profile pages where they show which schools a company’s employees attended. I suppose this information could be used to get a feel for what type of people work for a given company. Whether that really happens, I don’t know. Douchebags So, what does [...]
The Yellow Pages industry is pretending to be consumer friendly this week now that a bill is flowing through the Minnesota legislature that’s designed to give state residents more control over which yellow page books end up on their doorsteps. Let’s take a look at the reality of the situation. The Yellow Pages industry maintains [...]
This baffles me: Why does it cost $1.75 more for an online renewal than mailing in a check? Here’s my current theory: They’re Ignoring Labor Costs At some point in history, someone with the state probably noticed that accepting credit card charges involves absorbing merchant fees. I don’t know what the state’s merchant fees are, [...]
This is the first report I’ve seen from a newly smoke-free area of the state. Apparently, life has indeed gone on without smoking in bars and restaurants: New faces, atmosphere since ban on smoking “The first few weeks, there was an initial buzz where that’s all everyone was talking about,†Shol said. “But then things [...]
