Speaking Of Shots In The Dark: Welcome To the New Design!
-
Where Credit Is Due: Dr. James Blake
“Mitch, you’re not a Democrat. And I can prove it”. Dr. Blake looked across his desk at me. I was afraid he might be right. Jim Blake was the son of a New York cop, and still had the Queens accent to show for it. I didn’t know much more about his background, other than…
-
Anti-Democratic
Given that justices Kavanaugh and Coney Barrett were appointed and confirmed via the same process that has covered for over 200 years… … can someone tell me how our “junior senator” trying to popularize this kind of garbage isn’t a bigger threat to our system of government, the January 6 ever was
-
Soundtrack, Part 7
Throughout this series, I’ve focused on memories triggered by music that is cemented into my brain as sublime. But it wasn’t all good. There was plenty of music that ranged from awkward to awful. And the more I write about it, the more of it comes back to me.. This was the second or third…
-
Sincere, Sober Suggestion
(…since it sounds like “sobriety” is in short supply in government circles) Dave Hutchinson. Dan Wolgamott. John Thompson (not a DWI, but certainly over the legal limit of entitlement and rage). And now DFL legislator Briona Curran – who, it could be fairly said, was a little buzzed the other night: Perhaps Ken Martin and…
-
Where Credit Is Due: Bob Richardson
It was the long, hot summer after tenth grade when I was looking for a way to make more money than the buck a lawn I was getting from mowing and raking (In retrospect, I think my parents and grandma had quite the racket going). But I had no idea what I actually wanted to…
-
Soundtrack, Part 6: Notes From Underground
Long ago, I told the story of my first Sunday in the Twin Cities. It was a free day, without job hunting or much of anything to do. So I drove downtown. I visited First Avenue, had a burger, looked at Murray’s and vowed that someday, when I had a cool job and an awesome…
-
Open Letter To The Entire Twin Cities Media
To: Twin CIties MediaFrom: Mitch Berg, Obstreporous PeasantRe: Comforting The Confortable While Afflicting The Afflicted Minnesota Media, The Klink regime – in this case, politruk Flanagan – have been making this claim in various degrees ever since the election: Questions someone might think of asking the Administration: Given the administration’s, uh, innumeracy, it’d seem to…
-
Where Credit Is Due: Bill King And His Employees
Bill King wasn’t your typical Presbyterian minister. He spent, by his telling, a good chunk of his teenage years in one form of juvenile detention or another. He was a bit of a hoodlum until well into his teens. As he described it once, he didn’t get the right to vote until he was into…
-
Soundtrack, Part 5
Nothing about my first week in the Twin Cities ever smacked me upside the head quite as hard as my first rush hour. I drove Cedar to 494 to try to get to 35W, to drive from Burnsville to Vadnais Heights for an interview. And 494 during the morning rush hour is still a cardio…
-
Figures
I take some time off from job, blog and radio show, and suddenly the biggest story in the world isn’t our senile president and Trump’s legal woes. The fiftieth anniversary of the Yom Kippur invasion, no less. Couldn’t see that one coming. Quietly hoping that this time Israel ignores the international yapping about cease fires…
-
Where Credit Is Due: Don And Pat Hall
In couples terms, Don and Pat Hall were the American Dream. Don was a kid from a fairly unsuccessful farm in Starkweather, North Dakota, who nonetheless had athletic talent to burn. He got a scholarship to come to Jamestown College, in Jamestown, where he lettered in Football, Basketball, Track and Baseball for all four years,…
-
Soundtrack, Part 4
Yesterday’s (and Tuesday’s) entry was a bit of eighties apocrypha, meaningful maybe only to me. Today’s? Sublime, and a pretty universal pop culture reference. Do I even need to introduce it? The video isn’t just representative of the golden age of music video. The rotoscope noir-in-color is the golden age of music video. MTV would…
-
Where Credit Is Due: Grandma Bea
My Grandma Bea was not an effusive woman. If there’s a stereotype of rural Scandinavians in America, it’s that they are pretty emotionally reserved, in a way that comes across as cold to some, passive-aggressive to others, and often just funny for those who get it. Example: when I was born, Dad called his mother…
-
Soundtrack, Part 3
My first couple of days in the Cities, I was staying on a friend’s couch in Burnsville, working through my list of job leads (which was short) and going through the want ads to try to find some kind of income. Which left a little time for watching that new toy I’d found, MTV. And…
-
Where Credit Is Due: Oscar Berg
Nobody really knows where the name “Berg” came from. Oscar’s father, Andrew, was named Anders Olafson – “Andrew, son of Olaf” – in his home village in rural Sweden. He came to America in the late 1870s, and wound up in Lake Lida, Minnesota with the name Andrew Berg. Berg? I have no idea. I…
-
Soundtrack, Part 2
The two weeks before I moved to Minneapolis, I wrapped up on my roofing and siding job. I had a boom box to help while away the lonely hours of hammering and sawing. To save battery power (four D batteries ain’t cheap), I usually tuned it to KFYR in Bismark – the only non-country music…
-
Where Credit Is Due: Berndt Oleson Græsli
I sometimes wonder what it must have been like to be Berndt Oleson Græsli. He was born in 1863, named Berndt Oleson – “Berndt, son of Ole”, in a tiny farm hamlet named “Græsli”. a place small enough that being known as your father’s son was plenty specific enough. Græsli was in the hills of…
-
Soundtrack, Part 1
John Hughes wrote movies for eveyrone – but they focused through the lens of angsty upper-middle-class kids from the north burbs of Chicago. Risky Business, Sixteen Candles, Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink. even Home Alone (angsty tween!). And their soundtracks reflected those kids; Psychedelic Furs, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, Simple Minds – just sing…
-
Where Credit Is Due, Part I
I’m not a big “podcast” person. But since I got a car that reads my phone’s bluetooth without a lot of muss and fuss, I wind up listening to some of them anyway. It’s probably not a huge leap that I found my way to Mike Rowe’s The Way I Heard It podcast. It started…
-
Soundtrack
Growing up working in radio, I learned an interesting bit of applied psychology from my various program directors: people tend to become emotionally attached to music they hear from puberty until their brain stops growing, around age 25. It’s not so much that music attaches itself to important events in your life, as the music…
-
I Heard It On The NARN
Mike Casey is running for the GOP nomination in CD4. Jim Schulz, former MN Attorney General candidate, is with the Minnesota Private Business Council. And here’s today’s music list:
-
Instant Experts
As we noted the other day, Target is closing nine stores in four, blue, cities. The news brought out a flood of expert social media opinion from people who have never worked in the productive private sector. “Target is just using teh crime to cover up teh realz reazons they’re closing” was the big line…
-
Addiction?
Governor Klink apparently came to love the way he got to govern while he had “emergency powers” [1]: Of course, none of it is “done”. It’s mandated. It’s on paper. Businesses have scarcely started paying for “Paid Leave”, or absorbing the impact of the unfunded mandate. “Affordable Housing” is exquisitely unaffordable. Public transportation? They’re throwing…
-
Who Says…
,,,that Minnesota can’t win championships?
-
Just A Doggone Minute
Governor Klink, and Co-Governor Flanagan have been yapping nonstop about their “free lunch and breakfast for kids“ program. So I was amazed to see this: If kids are getting 10 of the weeks 21 meals at school, how are they going hungry? Or is the school feeding program financed by the feds through the back…
Got any book recommendations?