Bob CollinsStick tap. Read more →
MPR News Reflections and observations on the news
By Bob Collins
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.
No matter how proud we are of facing down the threat of death by nature this week, we are not in the same league as this person waiting for a bus at Lake and Lyndale in Minneapolis Read more →
We don’t even begin to understand how cold weather pants became a ‘thing’, but this year’s polar vortex made frozen pants a thing.
Read more →
You know those big heroic sendoffs that communities give their sports stars when they go off to a state tournament?
The robotics teams in Austin, Minn., got one this morning.
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Maroon 5 took the money that many artists wouldn’t take in protest of the NFL blacklisting and treatment of Colin Kaepernick, the quarterback who took a knee during the National Anthem to protest racial inequality in America, and found himself out of work. Read more →
No more votes, please, the winner for best use of the cold wave goes to Patrick Sieve, who runs the Travelers Inn Restaurant in Alexandria. Read more →
Police in Fargo don’t think a woman whose body was found in a car in a shopping center died in the recent cold snap; she died several months ago. Read more →
If there’s a little bit of love left in the world, the internet should do that thing it does for Jay Mitchell, whose story on the front-page of the Star Tribune today will bring out the feels, including a fair amount of anger that he faced what he faced. Read more →
Here are the stories, topics, and guests you’ll hear on MPR News today. Read more →
Nine of the 10 states contending with the highest losses of county income voted for President Trump in 2016, including, in order, Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Alabama. Fifteen of the 16 highest-harm states were also red. States likely to benefit mostly voted for Hillary Clinton. Read more →
A food company tries to get away with porn references in its Super Bowl ad. It didn’t work. Read more →
Dejah Rondeau is a pretty good quarterback, and it’s driving a lot of the boys who aren’t crazy. Read more →
A newspaper in Japan is reporting that Foxconn is suspending work on its $10 billion plant in Wisconsin, a day after news broke the company isn’t going to provide manufacturing jobs, but will make the facility a research and engineering facility instead. Read more →
This is impressive. A Twitter account has posted this picture of an exploding toilet tank.
We are skeptical. We want to know more. Read more →
There may be only one place in the Northern Hemisphere where people aren’t talking about the cold: Carstairs, Alberta, north of Calgary.
They’ve got a mystery in the town of 4,000. Car FOB’s have stopped working near a grocery store. Read more →