News Cut Category Archive: Surveys and trivia

The bear as state mammal

Posted at 12:39 PM on February 8, 2012 by Bob Collins (24 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

A bill has been filed at the Minnesota House of Representatives today to make the black bear the official state mammal.

As with many of these "official" designations, this one originates from a first-grade classroom, where a teacher recognized a teachable moment. The kids spent the first minutes of their class in Andover watching the "den cam" at the North American Bear Center.

Supporters claim the bill has bipartisan support and should become law. It's for the kids, after all.

In matters of official mammals in Minnesota, that's never worked so well.

According to the Minnesota Legislative Reference Library, the white-tailed deer is the leader in failed attempts to name an official state mammal. Eight times deer fans have tried to make the deer the official mammal, eight times they've come up empty at the Legislature.

The eastern timber wolf has gotten support -- only to be turned aside -- six times. The last was in 2000, when some school kids voted on whether the wolf, deer, or gopher should be so honored.

The library also reveals that an effort was made in 1973 to make the wood tick the official state mammal. Combined with the official state bird -- the loon -- such a move would have made Minnesota the "loon-and-tick state," according to the Pioneer Press.

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Twin Cities no longer America's gayest

Posted at 9:34 AM on January 10, 2012 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

The Advocate is out with its list of gayest cities, but let's cut right to the chase: Minneapolis, you've been dethroned. It's a shot in the collective heart. We love our surveys.

That's a big story, perhaps, but bigger still is what city dethroned you. It's Salt Lake City. Utah.

While those unfamiliar with the Beehive State are likely to conjure images of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, far-less-oppressive-than-it-used-to-be Salt Lake City has earned its queer cred. There are more than a half-dozen hot spots for men and women, including the eco-friendly nightclub Jam (JamSLC.com), though the sustainable bamboo flooring is perhaps less of a draw than the packed dance floor. The Coffee Garden (878 South 900 East) is a gathering spot for those looking for a caffeine fix, the Sundance Film Festival brings LGBT film buffs to screenings downtown, and lesbian-owned Meditrina (MeditrinaSLC.com) is a true wine bar -- yes, you can get a drink in this town.

Saint Paul and Minneapolis drop to #7, even though part of the judging criteria is the existence of a WNBA team. It wasn't Salt Lake that won the WNBA championship.

It's technically two cities, but oh, what fun there is to be had here. The region is a draw for upper Midwestern LGBTs, and Minneapolis (pictured) topped this list in 2011 for so many reasons. These two cities can't get enough of each other: There's the Twin Cities Gay Men's Chorus (TCGMC.org), Twin Cities Pride (the 40th annual is June 23-24), and even Quorum: The Twin Cities GLBT and Allied Business Community. Sheesh, just get domestic-partnered already!

Curiously, there was no mention of Minnesota's upcoming constitutional amendment vote on the definition of marriage as between one man and one woman.

Here's what they said about us last year:

Minneapolis has become the gay magnet city of the Midwest. It makes sense: People here are no-nonsense, practical, and don't deal well with hypocrites. This is where the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America took a historic leap forward and voted to accept gay and lesbian pastors, including the Reverend Mary Albing, the denomination's first openly lesbian pastor. And Minnesota senator Al Franken introduced the Student Non-Discrimination Act to protect LGBT youth from school bullies. But that's not all. Minneapolis also has the very hot Mayhem rugby team (MayhemRFC.com) and a thriving bear community with events like Bob's Bear Bash, every Wednesday night at the Saloon (SaloonMN.com).

Of course the list is baloney; Salt Lake City wasn't even on the top 15 list last year and it's unlikely a lot happened in a few months to warrant it rocketing past more deserving locales.

The Advocate also didn't mention a story it reported on just last September. The hate crime in Salt Lake City:

Dane Hall, 20, was attacked by four men as he was walking home from a gay night at Club Sound early in the morning of August 27. He was beaten and kicked; his jaw was broken, several of his teeth were knocked out, and a piece of bone lodged in his brain. He says the assailants called him "fag" and other antigay slurs.

And that's your #1 city?

There's another city that has a biggest beef, a city that dropped off the top-15 list entirely this year: San Francisco.

The list:

1. Salt Lake City
2. Orlando, Fla.
3. Cambridge, Mass.
4. Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
5. Seattle
6. Ann Arbor, Mich.
7. St. Paul and Minneapolis
8. Knoxville, Tenn.
9. Atlanta
10. Grand Rapids, Mich.
11. Little Rock, Ark.
12. Portland, Ore.
13. Austin
14. Long Beach, Calif.
15. Denver

Honorable Mentions

16. Washington, D.C.
17. New Orleans
18. San Francisco
19. Pittsburgh
20. Salem, Ore.
21. Madison, Wis.
22. Eugene, Ore.
23. Oakland, Calif.
24. Boston
25. Kansas City, Mo.

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Do people watch politics for the pretty people?

Posted at 11:41 AM on January 6, 2012 by Bob Collins (14 Comments)
Filed under: Politics, Surveys and trivia

In the category, "Questionable Studies From Professors," Israeli researchers have concluded that more physically attractive members of Congress get more coverage on network television.

The New York Times says:

Two Israeli professors concluded that members whom a student survey judged to be better looking appeared more frequently on television -- but not radio or in newspapers. The researchers argued that the networks were trying to attract larger audiences.

It gets even more unbelievable...

Not surprisingly, Professor Waismel-Manor and Professor Tsfati found that other factors, too, influenced coverage. Senators and representatives who hailed from larger states, were male, were black or espoused more extreme ideologies also tended to be featured more frequently. The effect of attractiveness on news coverage, the study found, was greater than the effect of tenure in office, or bill sponsorship. Frequency of news releases had no discernible effect on news media appearances. The study also examined coverage on NPR and in USA Today, and it found no correlation between the so-called attractiveness effect and coverage in those outlets.

Are we watching the same networks?

Here's who I see most of the time, these days:

Here's who the study says I saw most of the time:

That's Rep. Marsha Blackburn, who most people may not recognize because she's actually almost never on TV news shows.

Why the disconnect?

This explanation of the methodology provides a clue:

To avoid skewing the results, they eliminated, among others, members in top leadership posts and presidential candidates.

Top leadership posts? Here's a person who doesn't have a top leadership post, who nonetheless has had much more airtime than Rep. Blackburn.

Check the Sunday TV news shows sometime and see if it's not the same group of leadership members of Congress week after week after week. Why? Because most members of Congress are there for show, and a small number actually influence anything and those are the people news organizations want to talk to.

How does the rest of Congress get some crumbs of attention? Here's a little inside story:

Back in the early '80s, I worked for a network news operation in New York. It was radio, but the situation is roughly the same. My job was to get interviews with people for upcoming newscasts. Over the years I was there, listeners heard a disproportionate amount of Sen. David Durenberger of Minnesota (a state, by the way, with which I had no particular affinity or knowledge).

Why did he get on the radio so much? He answered his own phone, especially on nights and weekends..

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The art of parallel parking

Posted at 11:14 AM on December 9, 2011 by Bob Collins (9 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

The InterTubes are alive with chatter today over this video in New York (posted yesterday) showing someone who actually knows how to parallel park. Hey, they call them "bumpers" for a reason, people.

I've seen better:

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Black Friday comedy

Posted at 3:06 PM on December 5, 2011 by Bob Collins (9 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

Remember when everyone was concerned about the Target employees who had to work overnight on Thanksgiving?

Presumably none of those were the 1.2 million people who've watched this viral video of a couple of guys goofing on them that day. Nonetheless, it's pretty funny. Sorry, Target people.

(h/t: Boing Boing)

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How to speak Minnesotan

Posted at 10:16 AM on November 30, 2011 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

Posted today. Don't click if the printed "f" word bothers you.

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The funniest holiday of the year

Posted at 12:46 PM on November 23, 2011 by Bob Collins (9 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

Question: Is there a funnier holiday than Thanksgiving? What is it about the holiday that popular culture finds so appealing when it comes to dropping a punch line?

Continue reading "The funniest holiday of the year"

Pies in the face

Posted at 12:45 PM on November 18, 2011 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

The people over at Prairie Home Companion have now put up the video of last Saturday's tribute to the late Tom Keith.

You can find many videos there, although I'm isolating this one while musing on what it is about pies in the face we find so entertaining, time after time after time?

I do not know what the context was and it doesn't much matter.

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Scenes from the screening area

Posted at 4:38 PM on November 4, 2011 by Bob Collins (11 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

Jesse Ventura is (still) upset that he was patted down while going through airport security, but his lawsuit has been tossed out and now he says he'll never stand for the National Anthem again.

He's going to go back to Mexico, and seek dual citizenship. He's not about displays of patriotism anymore, apparently.

Who wants to be the one to tell him there's still an official portrait up at the Minnesota Capitol that is a bit of a flag-waver?

Which brings us to Friday, the day the Transportation Security Administration releases its list of lame attempts to smuggle stuff through security.

Here's this week's favorite:

A passenger at Santa Barbara (SBA) alarmed the walk through metal detector and an anomaly was detected in her groin area during a pat-down. The passenger eventually admitted she had a tube of toothpaste concealed in her groin area. While we're not looking for toothpaste, it was concealed in an area where explosives can be hidden and we had no idea what it was until we resolved the alarm. We should have known what it was though, right? Isn't that where all the cool kids are keeping their toothpaste nowadays?

That's just the kind of person who could be elected governor somewhere.

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The graying of the president

Posted at 2:45 PM on October 19, 2011 by Bob Collins (5 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

A picture of President Obama in the paper this morning piqued my curiosity and photos distributed from his appearance with Mrs. Obama at Joint Base Langley-Eustis, in Hampton, Va., confirmed it: In two and a half years, the guy has gone gray in a hurry.

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Life in the small town

Posted at 12:41 PM on September 29, 2011 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

In Abington, Massachusetts, the typical local school committee agenda reads: (I) Pledge of Allegiance (II) Magic trick and (III) New business.

Chairman Russell W. Fitzgerald usually starts the meetings with magic tricks like this one at last month's meeting:

But, alas, the tradition ended this week when Fitzgerald performed a trick, broadcast live on the local cable access channel, that appeared to remove the bra of another school committee member.

The handkerchief trick needed three participants. Fitzgerald picked Shannon and Killian, both of whom played along as Fitzgerald tied the two handkerchiefs into a knot and gave one end to Shannon. He then instructed Killian to hold the knot tightly against her chest.

Both men then pulled on their end of the handkerchief and out from under Killian's folded arms popped a bra tied to the handkerchiefs.

Fewer than 10 people sat in the audience. Four school committee members sat at the meeting table with the superintendent and the high school student representative. Two other school officials sat at another table.

No one in the meeting room at town hall laughed or made a comment about the trick.

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Is Detroit a better place to live/work than Minneapolis?

Posted at 12:07 PM on September 20, 2011 by Bob Collins (21 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

Minneapolis, are you too expensive?

A survey out today (there's a reason why the NewsCut category is called "surveys and trivia") lists Minneapolis as the 33rd best city for living and working. The "Simply Hired" survey lists Detroit 4th for the balance between an ability to find a job and afford to live there.

Click the image to see a larger version of the results:

The unemployment rate in Detroit -- the official rate -- is 14.1%, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. The Minneapolis-St. Paul unemployment rate is 7.1%.

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And now, someone's national anthem

Posted at 9:29 AM on September 10, 2011 by Bob Collins (3 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

(h/t: Neatorama)

Saturdays are for thinking about trivial things -- especially since the drought has eliminated the need to mow the lawn. Here's one: If national anthems consisted of pop music, what songs would be the national anthems of what country?

Go!

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Who slipped the moose a mickey?

Posted at 11:31 AM on September 8, 2011 by Bob Collins (6 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

If you get enough real journalists in a room, sooner or later the discussion will evolve to the stories they're most proud of -- that they worked days on -- overshadowed by an insignificant but memorable story.

Trust me, somewhere today a journalist is turning in his/her story about terrorism, the economy, or famine, and nobody will remember it because the newscast will have this:

I'll just let the headline do all the heavy lifting here:

Seemingly drunk Swedish moose found stuck in tree

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Timewasters: The hippo video

Posted at 11:08 AM on July 27, 2011 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

The latest viral online video is a baby hippo in California doing the "ballet thing" in the water.

Where would a hippo get such an idea? It's life imitating art.

It's either this or watch Congress in inaction, folks.

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St. Paul's train to nowhere

Posted at 4:03 PM on June 29, 2011 by Bob Collins (4 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

There's been a fair amount of chortling over plans for high-speed rail in the country, and in these parts there's been plenty of hand-wringing over a St. Paul-to-Chicago leg. Should it go through Red Wing or down through Rochester?

We didn't have these nagging problems when we dreamed bigger dreams.

The Infrastructurist notes today that there was once a plan for train service from St. Paul to London...

The most striking line from this system -- which is really saying something for a system that includes a track to the North Pole -- is a double-tracked bridge that extends across the Atlantic Ocean and runs, via an incredibly straight course, into London. Behold the St. Paul & London Intercontinental Doubletrack Railway:

(h/t: Boing Boing)

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Mystery solved: Trees make sounds when they fall

Posted at 11:22 AM on June 21, 2011 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

Now we know. If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there, it does make a sound. So reports Wisconsin stream ecologist Martin Melchior, whose research is published this month in the Annals of Improbable Research.

I used directional microphones, professional electronic audio recording equipment, personal observation, and some very inexpensive young assistants, to monitor the accumulation of large woody debris in old-growth forests of northern Wisconsin from June 1999 through July 2001.

I hired an impoverished undergraduate student to collect nearly 20,000 hours of audio/video tape in scenic areas in the Chequamegon and Nicolet National Forests. Video footage was collected with a Hitachi Z900 video camera and audio data was collected using a Shure SM58 microphone and three Shure DM 25 directional microphones with parabolic collector dishes. Recordings were made on a Tascam 850 8-track digital recorder and Yamaha 16-channel mixing board.

I made this impoverished undergraduate watch all of the tapes and make a record of every instance in which large woody debris fell to the forest floor.

He found that it does. Here's the entire issue. Good luck getting past the instructions on how to host a Roman orgy.

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Who needs fathers?

Posted at 1:09 PM on June 16, 2011 by Bob Collins (8 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

Pew Research is out with a survey about fathers, which includes this finding:

Among all adults, 57% say it is more difficult to be a father today than it was 20 or 30 years ago. Only 9% say being a father is easier today, and 32% say it's about the same. Among dads themselves, 63% say the job is harder now.

How do people know this? They weren't fathers 20 or 30 years ago, or if they were, they're not raising kids now. This question, which bloggers like to write about, doesn't make a lot of sense in the big scheme of things because we can't properly swap positions with our parents (or with our children) with any degree of reliability.

I think being a father is way harder than anything else in the world, but all I take away from that is a new appreciation for my father, who passed away some years ago, shortly after I wrote him a letter telling him so (I'm still waiting for my letter, kids).

The survey presented some interesting data, but shied away from the deeper questions about the role of fathers. If 1 in 10 fathers lived apart from the family in 1960, and now it's 1 in 4, is that a failure of fatherhood? Is that why fathers think it was easier to be a father way back when?

There's clearly a racial component to this, the survey says:

Black fathers are more than twice as likely as white fathers to live apart from their children (44% vs. 21%), while Hispanic fathers fall in the middle (35%). Among fathers who never completed high school, 40% live apart from their children. This compares with only 7% of fathers who graduated from college.

Among fathers who live with their children at least part of the time, nearly nine-in-ten say they are doing a very good (44%) or good (44%) job as fathers to those children. Fathers who do not live with their children rate themselves much more negatively. Only 19% say they are doing a very good job as fathers to the children they live apart from, and 30% say they are doing a good job. One-in-four say their parenting as not very good (13%) or bad (9%).

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The great Lionel Richie mystery

Posted at 1:07 PM on June 8, 2011 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

Slowly, a pop culture phenomenon has been making its way across America. Someone, somewhere came up with the idea of a "lost" poster with singer Lionel Richie. The tear-off sheets at the bottom, which normally might have a phone number, has lyrics of a song (The picture above is from Brooklyn, we believe. It appeared in March.).

Today, it was spotted in West Duluth.

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Another 'bike kid' parody

Posted at 10:44 AM on June 8, 2011 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

The parodies of the Minnesota kid giving an inspirational speech on learning to ride a bike keep coming.

Here's today's

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An Ill literacy survey

Posted at 12:40 PM on May 27, 2011 by Bob Collins (3 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

When it comes to those surveys about cities that are the smartest and/or best-read, Minneapolis has dominated. So it comes as a shock to our ego that the Twin Cities don't even make the top 20, in the "most well-read survey" from Amazon. Of course, by "well read," Amazon means, "cities that ordered a lot of stuff from Amazon..."

1. Cambridge, Mass.
2. Alexandria, Va.
3. Berkeley, Calif.
4. Ann Arbor, Mich.
5. Boulder, Colo.
6. Miami
7. Salt Lake City
8. Gainesville, Fla.
9. Seattle
10. Arlington, Va.
11. Knoxville, Tenn.
12. Orlando, Fla.
13. Pittsburgh
14. Washington, D.C.
15. Bellevue, Wash.
16. Columbia, S.C.
17. St. Louis, Mo.
18. Cincinnati
19. Portland, Ore.
20. Atlanta

We'll just remind Amazon that Minnesota not only has one, but two cities on the top 10 list of Most Literate Cities.

1 Washington, DC
2 Seattle, WA
3 Minneapolis, MN
4 Atlanta, GA
5 Pittsburgh, PA
6 San Francisco, CA
7 St. Paul, MN
8 Denver, CO
9 Portland, OR
10 St. Louis, MO

But only the Twin Cities, Denver, and San Francisco don't appear on Amazon's list.

The Culture Mob blog also points that Minneapolis is the top-5 in lists for most newspaper subscribers and most bookstores.

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Woman denied service at trot-through window

Posted at 12:03 PM on May 27, 2011 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

Debbie Murden from Derbyshire had driven her two-wheeled carriage to the drive-thru window at the Alfreton branch and ordered her burgers and milkshakes, the Web site Newslite reports.

But when she tried it again this week, it didn't work

Fortunately, they weren't hungry enough to eat a horse...

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The name game

Posted at 12:01 PM on May 10, 2011 by Bob Collins (6 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

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Video of the day: The seal

Posted at 10:35 AM on May 10, 2011 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

We're into college admission season and in a few months, many of your sons and daughters will be like this baby seal, which is getting a lot of attention via YouTube this week. It was found starving when a British Columbia rescue center found it. It was nurtured back to the point where it could live on its own and then released.

(h/t: Andrew Phelps

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Timewasters: The trailer

Posted at 11:59 AM on May 4, 2011 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

The White House Correspondents Dinner featured this spoof from the White House:

What was particularly neat about the production was the short "For Hub" note at the end. Hub Schlafly died April 20th. He made people seem more spontaneous and clever than they really were. He invented theTelePrompTer.

How does this video rank on the list of White House (intentional) spoofs? Second, to Bill Clinton's "Final Days" video. Oh, and there are are only two spoofs to choose from, as near as we can tell.

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The birth certificate

Posted at 8:20 AM on April 27, 2011 by Bob Collins (18 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

There it is. The birth certificate proving President Obama was born in the United States and is thus qualified -- at least under terms of the Constitution -- to be president of the United States.

According to the White House blog:

The President believed the distraction over his birth certificate wasn't good for the country. It may have been good politics and good TV, but it was bad for the American people and distracting from the many challenges we face as a country. Therefore, the President directed his counsel to review the legal authority for seeking access to the long form certificate and to request on that basis that the Hawaii State Department of Health make an exception to release a copy of his long form birth certificate. They granted that exception in part because of the tremendous volume of requests they had been getting.

He's speaking to the nation about the "issue," which should practically guarantee it'll lead the news for most of the day.

A large percentage of Americans don't believe Mr. Obama was born in the U.S. It's about the same percentage -- 26% -- who can't name the country the U.S. fought for its independence. Chances are: They're the same people.

We're going to need a new conspiracy theory to obsess over.

Update 11:05 a.m. - Here are the presidents remarks:

Hello, everybody. Now, let me just comment, first of all, on the fact that I can't get the networks to break in on all kinds of other discussions -- (laughter.) I was just back there listening to Chuck -- he was saying, it's amazing that he's not going to be
talking about national security. I would not have the networks breaking in if I was talking about that, Chuck, and you know it.

As many of you have been briefed, we provided additional information today about the site of my birth. Now, this issue has been going on for two, two and a half years now. I think it started during the campaign. And I have to say that over the last two and a half years I have watched with bemusement, I've been puzzled at the degree to which this thing just kept on going. We've had every official in Hawaii, Democrat and Republican, every news outlet that has investigated this, confirm that, yes, in fact, I was born in Hawaii, August 4, 1961, in Kapiolani Hospital.

We've posted the certification that is given by the state of Hawaii on the Internet for everybody to see. People have provided affidavits that they, in fact, have seen this birth certificate. And yet this thing just keeps on going.

Now, normally I would not comment on something like this, because obviously there's a lot of stuff swirling in the press on, at any given day and I've got other things to do. But two weeks ago, when the Republican House had put forward a budget that will have huge consequences potentially to the country, and when I gave a speech about my budget and how I felt that we needed to invest in education and infrastructure and making sure that we had a strong safety net for our seniors even as we were closing the deficit, during that entire week the dominant news story wasn't about these huge, monumental choices that we're going to have to make as a nation. It was about my birth certificate. And that was true on most of the news outlets that were represented here.

And so I just want to make a larger point here. We've got some enormous challenges out there. There are a lot of folks out there who are still looking for work. Everybody is still suffering under high gas prices. We're going to have to make a series of very difficult decisions about how we invest in our future but also get a hold of our deficit and our debt - how do we do that in a balanced way.

And this is going to generate huge and serious debates, important debates. And there are going to be some fierce disagreements - and that's good. That's how democracy is supposed to work. And I am confident that the American people and America's political leaders can come together in a bipartisan way and solve these problems. We always have.

But we're not going to be able to do it if we are distracted. We're not going to be able to do it if we spend time vilifying each other. We're not going to be able to do it if we just make stuff up and pretend that facts are not facts. We're not going to be able to solve our problems if we get distracted by sideshows and carnival barkers.

We live in a serious time right now and we have the potential to deal with the issues that we confront in a way that will make our kids and our grandkids and our great grandkids proud. And I have every confidence that America in the 21st century is going to be able to come out on top just like we always have. But we're going to have to get serious to do it.

I know that there's going to be a segment of people for which, no matter what we put out, this issue will not be put to rest. But I'm speaking to the vast majority of the American people, as well as to the press. We do not have time for this kind of silliness. We've got better stuff to do. I've got better stuff to do. We've got big problems to solve. And I'm confident we can solve them, but we're going to have to focus on them - not on this.

Thanks very much, everybody.

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Why would Minnesota want to be like Florida?

Posted at 12:02 PM on April 26, 2011 by Bob Collins (11 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

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When presidents dance

Posted at 10:50 AM on April 21, 2011 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

If this were the 1960s, the talk shows would be filled with worry that America is falling behind in the dance race. This video surface this week, showing Russian President Dmitry Medvedev dancing as if he intended to bury us with his moves.

Sure, funny stuff. But the fact remains: Our presidents don't dance...

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The 90-square foot apartment

Posted at 11:35 AM on April 5, 2011 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

Because the Twins are making their first and only visit to New York this week, we're required by the Blogging Code to point out at least one aspect of New York that clearly highlights Minnesota's superiority. Generally, our baseball squad doesn't qualify.

But this does:

She owns two plates, one knife, fork and spoon.

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Lottery losers

Posted at 10:01 AM on April 1, 2011 by Bob Collins (3 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

Is there anything that can kill a friendship quicker than a winning lottery ticket?

Seven co-workers pooled their money and won more than $300 million in the lottery. They each threw $2 into the pot. But "Mike," who usually buys in, passed this time.

Mike tells ABC News he's not upset. Mike is probably lying.

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What every cabin owner needs

Posted at 11:27 AM on January 27, 2011 by Bob Collins (4 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

For those of you lucky enough to get away to your quiet waterfront cabins in Minnesota, this should be a nice addition to the neighborhood, eh?

It's coming soon and it'll only cost $175,000, according to New Scientist.

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Miss Understood

Posted at 9:28 AM on January 16, 2011 by Bob Collins (5 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

Times change. The last time there was controversy in a Miss America pageant, it involved a contestant taking her clothes off.

That was then. In the wake of last night's Miss America pageant, controversy rages across the union over why a yodeling ventriloquist singing "I want to be a cowboy sweetheart" did not win:

America still isn't ready for the likes of Miss Arkansas, apparently.

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There's something about Sophia

Posted at 2:09 PM on January 3, 2011 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

Regions Hospital in St. Paul today released the list of top baby names for kids born there in 2010:

Top girls' names:
Isabella
Sophia
Ava
Emma
Ella
Amelia
Claire
Abigail
Neveah
Maya

Top boys' names:

Jaden
Owen
Ethan
Jackson
Elijah
Mohamed
Abdul
Carter
Gavin
Sam

Compare this to the national list of baby names (from BabyCenter.com). Isabella and Sophia are the top picks, although Sophia assumed the top spot. Alden is the top boy's name.

Sophia's rise to popularity began after 1996. I'm certain I've missed a popular culture reason (and I'm sure you're about to tell me):

Lost in all of this is the continuing crisis surrounding Robert, which is sadly in danger of dropping off the top 100.

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Public Radio rap

Posted at 10:58 AM on November 16, 2010 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

Ah, never mind. Do I really need to say anything?

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Avoiding the next Honus mistake

Posted at 12:01 PM on November 5, 2010 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

Several generations of junk have accumulated in the nation's attics because of Honus Wagner.

It's a nearly mythical tale. Mothers cleaning out the flotsam and jetsam of childhoods threw away baseball cards that were -- allegedly -- worth millions. A person could retire comfortably on one Honus Wagner card. Now, people hold onto everything -- how many Beanie Babies are in your closet? -- because nobody wants to throw out the next Honus Wagner-like object.

There are only about 60 Honus Wagner cards left in circulation (thanks, Mom!) and the Associated Press today reports that one of them has been sold at auction for $262,000. It was bequeathed to an order of Roman Catholic nuns.

What's in your attic?

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Paul was a fraud

Posted at 12:49 PM on October 28, 2010 by Bob Collins (4 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

The Guardian blows the lid off the soccer-predicting octopus story.

Paul the Octopus, who provided colourful if inane fodder for umpteen news and broadcast organisations during the World Cup, especially those with no rights to any live action in South Africa, was also credited with predicting correct match results for Euro 2008 games. It should be stressed that, contrary to some reports, that was actually a different octopus, and that the different octopus got other results wrong, but such facts shouldn't get in the way of a good story.

In other global news today, 350 people were killed in a tsunami in Indonesia.

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Timewasters: News in the social media age

Posted at 1:38 PM on October 22, 2010 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

What makes this spoof entertaining, is the degree to which elements of it ring true.

It's not going over big in Dallas, apparently. The news is serious business.

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Life and the little red wagon

Posted at 10:24 AM on October 7, 2010 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

Mention "Radio Flyer" to old people like me and they'll start spinning stories of their youth that can last for hours. I don't even know if Radio Flyer wagons -- metal, not the plastic ones -- are made anymore. but I know I want one.

This one:

(h/t: Brian Hanf)

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Is Lake Pepin a lake?

Posted at 12:14 PM on October 4, 2010 by Bob Collins (13 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

When we first moved to Minnesota many years ago, we were naturally aware that there are a lot of lakes here -- 10,000 of them, rumor has it. We also came to understand that many of those "lakes" are actually ponds.

Still, we we're shocked -- shocked -- to read today in the Rochester Post Bulletin that one of our favorite spots in all of Minnesota (which we visited this weekend) is not a lake at all:

Lake Pepin really isn't a lake, not in the Minnesota sense. Instead, it's a reservoir of the Mississippi River formed when sand pouring down the Chippewa River from the heart of Wisconsin blocked the river at what is now Reads Landing. It's the widest spot on the Mississippi River, except when it floods. Pepin was once much longer, stretching up to what is now the Twin Cities. But over the millenia, it has been slowly filling in. Such lakes are very rare worldwide.

"Not in the Minnesota sense?" What does that mean? Lake Pepin isn't good enough for you and your 10,000 close friends, Minnesota?

Check ye olde Encyclopedia Britannica:

It may be said, however, that rivers and streams are relatively fast moving; marshes and swamps contain relatively large quantities of grasses, trees, or shrubs; and ponds are relatively small in comparison with lakes. Geologically defined, lakes are temporary bodies of water.

Not being from Minnesota, I'm unqualified -- as is Encyclopedia Britannica -- to bring a Minnesota sensibility to this question. Over to you, native Minnesotans.

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Why do kids in rural areas drink more?

Posted at 3:17 PM on October 1, 2010 by Bob Collins (12 Comments)
Filed under: Health, Surveys and trivia

Rural teens, why do you drink so much? It's not because there's nothing else to do in flyover country. It's because they think their parents and their community don't care about them, a new study says.

Researchers at Calvin College in Michigan looked 1,425 sixth- to eighth-graders in Wisconsin, North Dakota, Wyoming, and South Dakota.

Live Science says the percentage of middle-schoolers who had imbibed in the past month ranged from 21 percent in some towns to 69 percent in others. It said that suggests high-drinking rates involve more than just boredom.

The findings also illustrated the complexity of the relationship between economic hardship and drinking, researchers said. The poorer the community, the more likely teens were to drink. But it was the relatively affluent kids in those towns who drank the most, perhaps because they're more able to afford the booze.

The kids' responses suggested that it's not boredom that drives them to the bottle. Rather, teenagers seem to have some of the same motivations for drinking as adults. The more stressed the teen, the more likely he or she was to drink.

Update 4:42 p.m. -- Based on the number of people who have told me their darkest small-town-upbringing secrets in the last hour, it would appear the study is in error and that boredom really is the reason. Did you grow up in a small town? C'mon. Spill.

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The myth of the texting-ban study

Posted at 11:56 AM on September 29, 2010 by Bob Collins (3 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

I was hoping someone would point out the obvious in the much-talked-about study released yesterday that purported to show that banning texting while driving increases the danger of driving. But, so far, no luck.

Cover me. I'm going in.

TechDirt jumps in with the latest theory:

My concern has always been that I don't believe the laws work. And, now, it appears that we have some more evidence to support that. A new study has shown that state laws banning driving while texting have not reduced accidents, and in some cases may have even resulted in more accidents. How could it have increased accidents? Because people who want to text anyway -- especially unskilled young drivers -- begin holding their phones lower to avoid detection, making it that much more difficult to control the car and be aware of their surroundings.

It's true that maybe the laws don't work. It's true that people may be holding their cellphones lower and that's why there are more accidents. But shouldn't news stories consist of more? Shouldn't someone ask, "what DO you know?" That's what any scientific endeavor should reveal. What someone thinks? Not so valuable.

Here's the Cars.com description of the study's methodology:

The HLDI study looked at the crash rates before and after text-ban laws took effect in four states -- California, Minnesota, Washington and Louisiana - and compared it to surrounding states that have no such laws. After adjusting for possible changes in collision claim rates unrelated to the bans, the study found that the bans did nothing to reduce crashes. And in three of the four states, crash rates increased after the ban.

There was no analysis of any data of the cause of the crashes; only the crash rates were used. So a person getting drunk and driving down the wrong side of a highway, is included in a statistic that is used to show that the cause of the accident was holding a cellphone lower.

Minnesota was was one of the four states included in the survey. Its accident rate went up 9 percent since the ban was enacted in August 2008 -- the biggest jump of any state, according to the study.

It compared Minnesota's crash data with two neighboring states without texting bans -- Iowa and Wisconsin. But look at the chart. Their crash rates went up too.

And check where the spike in numbers occurs: five months after the ban was enacted. In Minnesota, that's January. If there are bunch of crashes in Minnesota in January, there's usually another reason besides the prevalence of people holding their cellphones between their knees (It's also worth noting that the low points of the red line after the ban was enacted is slightly lower than the low points of the red line before the ban was enacted).

And that's the point the president of the Highway Loss Data Institute, which did the study, misses when he jumps to his conclusion.

"But this doesn't explain why crashes increased after texting bans," Adrian Lund points out. "If drivers were disregarding the bans, then the crash patterns should have remained steady. So clearly drivers did respond to the bans somehow, and what they might have been doing was moving their phones down and out of sight when they texted, in recognition that what they were doing was illegal. This could exacerbate the risk of texting by taking drivers' eyes further from the road and for a longer time."

There's no such thing in Minnesota as consistent conditions for driving as there may be in other non-winter states.

But there are other facts to consider, too, that should've led the news media to provide more contextual reporting on the story. In Minnesota, for example, the number of highway deaths dropped by 8 percent in 2009. And, according to the Department of Public Safety, the number of crashes in the state actually went down in 2009, not up. Does that have anything to do with a texting ban?

A little more skepticism by the media was warranted on this story. Any study with the word "may" sprinkled throughout requires it.

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Who dat stuck in traffic?

Posted at 10:36 AM on September 9, 2010 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

Sure, the New Orleans Saints beat the Vikings in last winter's NFC championship game. And, sure, the experts -- that's another word for sportswriters -- are picking the Saints to beat the Vikings in the season opener tonight. But Saints fans will spend more time stuck in traffic this year than Vikings fans, apparently. Crunch dat, Saints.

The survey, taken from data supplied by TomTom GPS units (people voluntarily allowed the company to mine their driving data) , found that fans in New Orleans and St. Louis experience the overall slowest speeds an hour before the game, as they drive at roughly 10 miles per hour.

The slowest traffic in most NFL cities is two hours before gametime, according to the survey. But in Cincinnati, Oakland, and Miami, the slowest traffic is four hours before the start of the game. That might indicate that more fans are heading for tailgate parties. But, c'mon, it's Cincinnati. And Oakland.

The 10 professional football stadiums with the greatest traffic delays were based in Washington D.C., New England, Buffalo, Dallas, Jacksonville, Carolina, Miami, Tennessee, Green Bay, and Atlanta, respectively, the survey said.

Minnesota? Solidly average. Typically.

Stadium Game Day Reduction in Speed
1 Washington DC 57%
2 New England 55%
3 Buffalo 55%
4 Dallas 41%
5 Jacksonville 39%
6 Carolina 37%
7 Miami 36%
8 Tennessee 35%
9 Green Bay 33%
10 Atlanta 31%
11 Philadelphia 29%
12 New Orleans 29%
13 Houston 27%
14 Minnesota 27%
15 St. Louis 27%
16 Cincinnati 26%
17 Detroit 24%
18 Indianapolis 24%
19 Pittsburgh 21%
20 New York 21%
21 Chicago 20%
22 Denver 20%
23 Baltimore 17%
24 Cleveland 14%
25 San Francisco 13%
26 Seattle 9%
27 New York 8%
28 San Diego 1%
29 Oakland -10%

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Will Facebook make you dumb?

Posted at 3:02 PM on September 7, 2010 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

When I was your age, I'd tell a young student today, the TV was the evil in the house. My parents would tell me not to study in front of the TV (eventually I complied by not studying at all, which explains why I became a blogger, perhaps). My dad constantly harped about sitting "too close" to the TV. When my sister helped carry me out of the house with what turned out to be appendicitis in my junior year in high school, I overheard my dad tell my mother, "I told him not to sit so close to the TV."

But you've got the designated evil in your house too, students of today. It's Facebook.

Take this study, for example, from professor Paul Kirschner in The Netherlands, as reported by The Daily Mail: "Using Facebook 'can lower exam results by up to 20%."

The study involves 219 students at an unnamed American university. Facebook users had a typical grade point average of 3.06. Non-users had an average GPA of 3.82.

But look closer and see if you can spot a similarity.

'The problem is that most people have Facebook or other social networking sites, their emails and maybe instant messaging constantly running in the background while they are carrying out other tasks.

'Our study, and other previous work, suggests that while people may think constant task-switching allows them to get more done in less time, the reality is it extends the amount of time needed to carry out tasks and leads to more mistakes.'

The study is actually not about whether Facebook users are as smart as non-Facebook users. It's whether using Facebook while studying is better than not using it. And who doesn't already know that any distraction -- TV, Facebook, phone calls, music, blogs -- makes processing information more difficult? You can't get a decent headline out of that.

What the study doesn't say is whether people who never use Facebook are smarter than people who do.

For the record, I use Facebook. I just take care not to sit too close to it.

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Timewasters: The answering machine message

Posted at 12:59 PM on August 27, 2010 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

Every around this time every year, this answering message begins appearing in inboxes and on Facebook, allegedly a real message placed on the answering machine of a school in Australia. Judging by my e-mail in the last two days, it's making its appointed rounds, again.

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Funny but not really true.

According to Snopes.com, it actually originated at the Pacific Palisades School District in California, where officials adopted a policy that 10 unexcused absentees in a semester would result in failing grades. This was a spoof that was created during the subsequent parental reaction.

That, of course, is not to say there are plenty of teachers and school officials going back to work soon that wouldn't like to add a few items to the list.

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Timewasters: Pee Wee Herman

Posted at 3:59 PM on August 24, 2010 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

In today's entertainment news: Pee Wee Herman is apparently about to become the next Betty White. He unveiled a video today of his trip to the motorcycle rally in Sturgis, South Dakota.

Apparently, he's the latest to start blogging on Huffington Post.

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St. Paul UFO mystery solved

Posted at 9:30 AM on August 21, 2010 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

One can imagine a prison conversation going like this sometime:

"What are you in for?"

"Flying a kite."

Ernest Sawka Jr., 34, is sitting the slammer after he was arrested. He admits to being the brains behind the unidentified flying object that caused a stir in St. Paul a week ago.

"I'm kind of flattered," Sawka told the St. Paul Pioneer Press. "It's hard to get people to bat an eye nowadays. I'm just trying to get people to think and look around and enjoy what is right now."

Truth is: Sawka's in jail on an outstanding warrant unrelated to providing entertainment in the third degree.

He says he tied LED lights to the kite string.

It's unclear whether he had anything to do with these previous sightings:

And this video also captured the horrible voices of our alien visitors:

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Favre's pack

Posted at 4:00 PM on August 17, 2010 by Bob Collins (3 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

You've probably heard by now. Brett Favre is back with the Vikings.

Still unclear: Who are the people who have the time to stand by the side of the road to welcome him?

(Photo: Video lift from KARE 11)

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Flugtag countdown

Posted at 10:42 PM on July 19, 2010 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

This weekend, one of the odder events in the history of Harriet Island takes place in St. Paul.

During Flugtag, teams attempt to fly themed human-powered flying machines. They are launched off a pier about 30 feet high. None of them fly. They all end up in the drink.

The "teams" applied for entry by submitting videos. I don't, actually, know what to make of any of them.

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For sale: Stuffed horse

Posted at 8:01 AM on July 10, 2010 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

If you're of my generation, then this headline today is transporting you back to the '50s and '60s.

ROY ROGERS STUFFED HORSE, TRIGGER, IS FOR SALE

It's an auction from the now-closed Roy Rogers Hall of Fame in Branson, Missouri.

Trigger is expected to fetch between $100,000 and $200,000, which confirms the view that perhaps the economy isn't so bad if someone can still shell out a couple of grand for a stuffed horse, even if it's not just any stuffed horse.

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Man loses horse race

Posted at 11:45 AM on July 1, 2010 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

British sprinter Jamie Baulch raced against a race horse last night and lost. Baulch says when he heard the hooves he thought, "there really is a race horse behind me." As if the lights, the crowd and the racetrack hadn't given him a clue already.

The horse -- Peopleton Brook -- went off at 1-to-9 odds, which suggests that perhaps someone bet on the human.

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Unicorns 1 Hogs 0

Posted at 12:34 PM on June 22, 2010 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

When it comes to battling the unicorn meat industry, the National Pork Board is all business.

Continue reading "Unicorns 1 Hogs 0"

Call for entries: What's the story?

Posted at 2:13 PM on June 21, 2010 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

These are the days when walking on a sidewalk beats walking in a skyway, past many things we've seen so often, we don't think twice about them.

So here's News Cut's summer project: Find images in your day that scream "What's the story here?"

Here's an example: From a bike rack across the street from the Minnesota Children's Museum in downtown St. Paul:

What's the story with this bike? How long has it been here? Did the person ever get back home? Who needed handlebars badly enough to steal them? Why was one pedal taken, and not two? Which will happen first? A new stadium for the Vikings or the removal of the bike's skeletal remains?

I imagine the person was to meet someone on a blind date at the Children's Museum. It was love; the kind of love that makes you forget where you put the key to your bike. But it didn't matter, because it was love, and she had a car.

Got a better story? Write it below. Got a candidate for "What's the story?" Send your image and comments via this form.

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Toy Stories

Posted at 7:48 AM on June 19, 2010 by Bob Collins (3 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

The opening of the latest Toy Story has people remembering their favorite toy as a child and, judging by this blog post from Bob Mondello with NPR personalities showing their favorite toy, many people have rescued theirs from the ash heap of history.

Try as I might, I can't recall a favorite "toy" as a kid. I'd kill, still, for a good Wiffle Ball game, but that's not something you save. I played a lot of "dice baseball" games and I still have some of those around, but that's only because I played it as an adult, too.

A few years ago, my mother sent this to me:

The problem is I can barely remember playing with it. I must have, though. Its eyes are gone, the music box attached to its belly as if it were a State Fair cow stomach exhibit doesn't work anymore, and it appears to have been squeezed regularly. But it has no particular emotional meaning, as evidence by the fact that it currently is guarding the detrius of the workbench in the garage.

I have a few toys -- besides the closet full of Beanie Babies -- that the kids had when they were small, but they probably have more meaning to me, than them.

Do kids still play with toys? Toys that you can hold, or throw, or shove in the closet at some point until their mother digs it out and sends it to them decades from now? Or will today's kids some day find an old -- probably cracked -- CD, and suppress a tear as they recall their moments snuggling with World of Warcraft?

Let's see Pixar make a movie out of that!

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Where are the tourists?

Posted at 12:16 PM on June 8, 2010 by Bob Collins (8 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

A project to map photos posted to Flickr has revealed an ugly truth for the Twin Cities: It's not much of a tourist destination.

Eric Fischer used geotagging to document pictures taken in cities around the world by locals vs. pictures taken by tourists. He's posted the result for Minneapolis. Blue is pictures taken by locals, red -- if you can find any -- indicates a picture of a location taken by a tourist (or at least a non-local).

The Walker, Mall of America, and Minnehaha Falls are the most-often-photographed areas of the cities.

Find Fischer's set of city images here.

(Photo: Eric Fischer)

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Gin and mayo

Posted at 12:30 PM on June 7, 2010 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

You're probably a die-hard Public Radio fan if you were tempted to try a gin and mayonnaise concoction, based on your weekend listening. You're probably also a fan of Wait! Wait! Don't Tell Me.

Over the weekend, author Tom Robbins was a guest on the show, playing "Not My Job," and described the time he and a friend tried mixing mayo with gin, because the only other thing in the house was maple syrup and, well, that's just a gross combination.

Leave it to the Wait! Wait! crew -- specifically Ian Chillag -- to consider that a challenge:

In other tasty news, a new ice cream flavor -- fish and chips -- has been introduced in the UK.

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Chuckles with NPR

Posted at 1:23 PM on June 3, 2010 by Bob Collins (3 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

Over the years, attempts by National Public Radio to be funny have usually ended up as train wrecks (Click and Clack were the rare exception but, face it, you either love 'em or hate 'em). It's never really been the forte of public broadcasters to make people chuckle. Over the years, it's mostly been run by men who wear their suit coats while sitting in their cubicles.

In the last few weeks, though, NPR has been giving it a pretty good go with funny videos.

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Marriage and the modern mutt

Posted at 3:42 PM on June 2, 2010 by Bob Collins (9 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

The pending divorce of Al and Tipper Gore has shaken the "marital community" to its foundation, but the New York Times reaches an intriguing level of marital advice today by suggesting we can enhance our marriages by taking a lesson from our pets.

She argues that we all have much to learn from the way we love our pets. People often describe pets as undemanding and giving unconditional love, when the reality is that pets require a lot of time and attention, special foods and care. They throw up on rugs, pee in the house and steal food from countertops. Yet we accept their flaws because we love them so much.

Dr. Phillips suggests we can all learn how to improve our human relationships by focusing on how we interact with our pets. Among her suggestions:

Greetings: Even on bad days, we greet our pets with a happy, animated hello, and usually a pat on the head or a hug. Do you greet your spouse that way?

Well, no, not exactly. But to be honest with you, a pat on the head has never worked well for Mrs. News Cut. Neither does putting her in a kennel at night or walking with a leash attached. Let's just say that a dog is a dog and a spouse is a spouse and even the New York Times can engage in a desperate search to fill online space.

It's true that the official dog of News Cut -- Luci the Blog Dog -- is an engaging personality and full of adoration for her masters, but the notion that dogs (and other pets) have a level of loyalty that mere mortals cannot duplicate is, well, nonsense.

The other day, for example, Luci was by my side, doing that loyalty thing, when a rabbit came by. No amount of calling, cajoling,bribing, or whining would deter the mutt from her desire to chase the rabbit.

Loyalty works only up to the point of temptation.

Many of the readers who bothered to comment on the article did a fine job of schooling the Times:

I think this idea is kind of ridiculous. The reason we easily forgive our pets is because we know that they lack the cognitive capabilities that humans posess. Pets don't think beforehand of , for example, well if I do x, y, and z my owner may feel this way or that way. They are trained for certain actions and know those actions illicit a response, for example, pee outside or I will get into trouble. But spouses aren't "trained" to be a certain way. They have their own thought processes and can reason and weigh the pros and cons of their actions, and the effect that those actions may have on their partner. That is why we more easily forgive our pets than our partners. In essence, our partners should know better, whereas our birds are mere birds.

Or put another way, not treating spouses like dogs is what the '60s and '70s were all about.

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Survey: Rochester is #6

Posted at 1:35 PM on May 26, 2010 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

Another post for our "They Like Us. They Really Like Us" file:

Kiplinger's July issue is naming Rochester, Minnesota is #6 on its list of the Best Cities of 2010:

The result is a community of great hosts and hostesses. Rochester's mayor, Ardell Brede, is proud of his community's welcoming way. "The other day a woman came up to me and said, 'You have a such a wonderful city, when I ask someone for directions, more often than not, they offer to walk me there themselves,' " he said. (That's a phenomenon I experienced during my own visit -- more than once.) To entertain its guests and residents, the city offers 60 miles of bike trails, more than 100 parks, and a civic center that attracts regional and national conferences and entertainment. And almost everything is accessible by skyway and underground walkways connecting many of the hospital, hotel, and retail buildings -- a near-necessity during Minnesota winters. There are public art projects scattered throughout the city, and a huge art-glass sculpture by Dale Chihuly is installed in the Mayo Clinic's Gonda Building. It all traces back to the Mayo brothers, the founders of the clinic, and their belief in the healing properties of art.

Who's better? Salt Lake City (#5), Boulder Colorado (#4), Washington DC (#3), Seattle (#2), and Austin, Texas (#1).

A lot must've happened in Rochester we don't know about in 2009, however, because only Washington and Austin were in last year's list of top cities. Austin, Seattle, and Des Moines were all on the 2008 list.

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Dispatches from Planet News

Posted at 2:38 PM on May 25, 2010 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

Any day in the news business brings its share of bizarre tales, but for reasons we cannot fathom, today has been particularly filled with head-scratchers in the absence of significant news that's not about oil.

In no particular order:

-- In Chicago, fire crews investigating a mysterious stench found an elderly couple buried alive under mounds of garbage in their Chicago home. Police had initially been called to the two-flat apartment building by neighbors who had not seen the couple in some time and wondered about their welfare. One neighbor said that she used to see the woman sitting on the front porch as she walked by but no longer could because the hedges had not been trimmed for years and had grown level with the second floor of the building, obscuring the view. (AP)

-- In Ohio, the Franklin County coroner has apologized for a mix-up that led to the wrong baby's body being cremated. Dr. Jan M. Gorniak said her office failed to follow procedure and erroneously released the boy's remains to a funeral home. Jaylen Talley's body was picked up from the coroner's office last Wednesday and taken to the wrong funeral home, where it was mistaken for another child's remains and cremated. "On top of all that, my son had a funeral with a whole bunch of people that he doesn't even know, he already had a funeral without me, in ashes," the father of one of the dead children said. (WBNS-TV)

-- In Philadelphia, a 21-year-old New Jersey man pleaded guilty today to vomiting on another spectator and his 11-year-old daughter in the stands during a Philadelphia Phillies game. Matthew Clemmens stuck his fingers down his throat and vomited on
Michael Vangelo, an off-duty Easton police captain, and one of Vangelo's daughters after Clemmens' companion was ejected from the park. (AP)

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Fit in Minneapolis

Posted at 10:27 AM on May 24, 2010 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)
Filed under: Health, Surveys and trivia

We love surveys that tell us how wonderful we are.

Today's action comes from Forbes where Minneapolis has been proclaimed the Minneapolis are to be the third-most-fit metropolitan area in the country, behind only DC and Boston.

"A penchant for exercise offsets slightly above-average obesity rates in the Twin Cities," Forbes says.

Now this from the grain-of-salt department: Just a few short years ago, Forbes named Kevin McHale as the best general manager in all of sports.

chew on that.

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What do high school students excel at? Cheating

Posted at 11:45 AM on May 12, 2010 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

A University of Nebraska study of a "Midwestern high school" reveals that most high school students cheat. The study was limited to a junior class at the unnamed school, but it supports previous studies on the extent of cheating in high school.

For example, 89 percent said glancing at someone else's answers during a test was cheating, but 87 percent said they'd done that at least once. Also, 94 percent said providing answers to someone during a test was cheating - but 74 percent admitted to doing it.

Other behaviours weren't as cut-and-dried in students' minds. Surprisingly, only 47 percent said that providing test questions to a fellow student who had yet to take a test was academically dishonest, and nearly seven out of 10 admitted to doing so.

Boys tend to cheat more than girls, the study said. There's no link between cheating and "moral development," according to the author.

They cheat on tests, homework assignments and when writing reports. In some cases, though, students simply don't grasp that some dishonest acts are cheating," the study's author said.

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The price of motherhood

Posted at 8:00 AM on May 8, 2010 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

How much is motherhood worth? Every year, salary.com jiggers up the numbers and calculates how much the functions of motherhood should fetch on the open market. This year? $117,856 for stay-at-homes.

The figure is down from last year. Times are tough all around.

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Workplace meltdowns

Posted at 1:48 PM on March 29, 2010 by Bob Collins (4 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia, The jobs we do

Perhaps you've had days at work like Jim Playfair, the coach of the Abbotsford (British Columbia) Heat of the American Hockey League. He lost it over the weekend:

Today, the league fined Playfair for his tirade.

But the video has us recalling the fond moments of great sports meltdowns.

Jim Schonfield, then coach of the New Jersey Devils, provides one...

The target of Schonfield's rath, ironically, is the father of the target of Playfair's.

Former Vikings coach Dennis Green's meltdown is legend:

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'Miss me' wars

Posted at 10:18 AM on March 25, 2010 by Bob Collins (8 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

Texas -- Ennis, Texas to be exact -- fires a new salvo in the "Miss Me Yet" billboard war.

I've taken the liberty of anticipating the next "shot." This is for you, Texas:

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The new penny

Posted at 2:50 PM on February 18, 2010 by Bob Collins (11 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

The U.S. Mint today unveiled a new design for the penny, leading to a nationwide shrug and water-cooler debate over why we still have them.

We've had the penny since 1793. Adjusted for inflation, a penny then would be worth 12 cents now.

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The lure of the trivial

Posted at 11:12 AM on February 13, 2010 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

The University of Pennsylvania has determined why some people e-mail certain stories they find on Web sites and not others. Researchers studied the "most emailed" lists from the New York Times in making the determination in its report "Social Transmission and Viral Culture."

It requires a certain keeping of a straight face while reading:

One emotion we focus on in particular is awe. Stimuli that open the mind to vast and often unconsidered possibilities can inspire awe, a unique human emotion that expands a reader's frame of reference (Keltner and Haidt 2003). Awe is the emotion of self-transcendence, a feeling of admiration and elevation in the face of something greater than the self (Haidt 2006). It occurs when two conditions are met (Keltner and Haidt 2003). First, people experience something vast: either physically vast such as the grand canyon, conceptually vast such as a grand theory or finding, or socially vast such as fame or power. Second, the vast experience cannot be accommodated by existing mental structures.

Intellectual epiphanies, natural wonders, and great works of art can all make people feel a sense of awe (Shiota, Keltner, and Mossman 2007). Similarly, news stories about a treatment that may cure AIDS or a hockey goalie who continues to play even with brain cancer may both inspire some level of awe.

The Discover blog noted that stories about science are predominant in these lists and finds no difficulty explaining why:

The thing about people online is, geeks still run the joint. Sure, lots of normal people are online, I assume to buy pet products and find out if Abe Vigoda is still alive. (Yes). But geeks use the web. We share information on the web. We read stuff and send it around, and we like science.

The analysis is silly from the start. First, anyone who's ever run a Web site knows that there's no real correlation to be made between what people are primarily interested in and the most-emailed lists that you find on Web sites (including this one).

What gets e-mailed are quirky, often trivial things that aren't found somewhere else. That's why at this moment, for example, the most e-mailed story on the MPR Web site is about the guy who made a Valentine's Day greeting out of manure for his wife.

Does this mean that more people are interested in manure-inspired love notes than, say, the death of an Olympian? No. It means that if a story is available on 10 million Web sites, it's probably already well-known to most of the world, and e-mailing it to someone else has no purpose, whereas there's a chance your friend hasn't heard about the manure Valentine's Day card.

Nobody needs a Master's Degree to figure that out.

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Sleeping in airports

Posted at 12:36 PM on February 10, 2010 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

Thousands of flights to cities on the East Coast have been canceled as the latest winter storm (the one that hit us earlier this week) takes a whack at the region. Thousands of travelers are stranded.

But it's all about us, of course, which is why we're duty bound to reveal that Minneapolis St. Paul has been selected as the 5th-best airport in the country to sleep in, according to the Boston Globe.

Some of the reviews provided to The Guide to Sleeping in Airports makes the C concourse sound like a vacation destination:

On my way back from Orlando I had a 6 hour layover in Minneapolis on my way to Calgary. I arrived at 3:15 in the afternoon & was resigned to the fact of my layover, wondering how I was gonna kill 6 hours! I found an open square near where the moving sidewalks start where there were big lounging Lazyboy-style chairs (which you normally put money in to make them vibrate but even if you just sit in them nobody cares. I managed to catch a good powernap as they were pretty comfy & you could also slide another armchair over to rest your feet on. Behind me was a big picture window & the tram ran outside & I kept thinking tram riders as they whizzed by could spy on me sleeping. I then noticed there was a power port behind the chairs where you can plug in a laptop (which was good cuz the battery on mine was dying). I spent the next 2 hours surfing the Internet & writing Facebook messages to my friends. WiFi is provided through Boingo so you have to pay for it. Anyway, after spending nearly half my layover time in my comfy spot I decided to get up & wander around, now feeling quite rested. Chance had it that I suddenly saw a friend from home walk right past me!!! What were the chances?? He was on his way to New York so we chatted for about 15 minutes. That was pretty cool. There are almost 2 miles of moving sidewalks to play on if you get bored & despite this being a midwest USA airport, a recorded voice in a British accent says constantly, "Attention, you are approaching the end of the moving walkway." Now, from my vantagepoint of soft chairs, this tended to get rather annoying as the chairs are situated right AT the end of the moving walkway! however, I found there was plenty to do at this airport & it wouldn't be a really bad place to spend a layover. I'd have no qualms about going through MSP again.

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Billboard mystery partly revealed

Posted at 11:41 AM on February 9, 2010 by Bob Collins (57 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

Update on the great billboard mystery.

Mary Teske, the general manager of Schubert & Hoey Outdoor Advertising reports, "The Bush Miss Me Yet? billboard was paid for by a group of small business owners who feel like Washington is against them. They wish to remain anonymous. They thought it was a fun way of getting out their message."

Various people have stepped forward around the country to claim credit -- the latest was a gentleman in upstate New York from what I can tell in his e-mail. But, it's all local, folks.

There's a post to be written someday about the viral nature of trivia and how it gets attention at the expense of more meaningful stories (this one, for example), but I guess I'll wait on that one.

FYI: Closing the comments at 6:30 p.m. CT. I can't stay at work to moderate them tonight. Sorry.

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The mystery billboard

Posted at 10:40 AM on February 8, 2010 by Bob Collins (107 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

It was late at night and I wasn't sure I'd seen the billboard correctly as I whizzed past it on I-35 in Wyoming last week on the way back from Wrenshall. But an e-mailer confirms I saw what I thought I saw.

It's beginning to sweep along the Internet, accompanied by various claims that it's a Photoshop fake. But it's not. It's real.

There's no billboard ownership plate on this particular billboard, making tracing the person who had the cash to post it difficult to find. It's time to crowdsource this puppy.

Update 11:44 a.m. - An e-mail to Wyoming Mayor Sheldon Anderson yields no further clue:

Wish I could take credit for it. Calls every day asking if it was me. If you find out let me know.

Update 11:46 a.m. - Luke Hellier at Minnesota Democrats Exposed thought he had a lead on the owner, but alas....

The person who I thought did not put up the billboard. He has been contacted about keeping it up if the current owner takes it down due to money.

We may have to offer a News Cut coffee mug to smoke the owner out. Sadly, we don't have News Cut coffee mugs.

Update 7:43 a.m. Tue 2/9 - FoxNews asked me to be on today to talk about the billboard. I declined, noting I don't know anything other than that there's this billboard. But it's interesting how the story has spiraled from the blog, to the NPR blog, to a couple of national blogs, to Drudge etc. True, I'm intrigued by the mystery of it all, but it's also a reminder of how the truly trivial can grab our attention. I write about deeper, more meaningful news, too. Maybe that's the bigger story here: Can blogs exist without the trivia?

By the way, for those of you visiting News Cut for the first time via the national blogs, stay for awhile. Look around.

7:52 a.m. - Colleague reports MSNBC just called looking for me. Dear MSNBC: "No." Now go find out who paid for this billboard, willya?

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Skiplanes on Lake Calhoun

Posted at 3:00 PM on January 11, 2010 by Bob Collins (19 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

A couple of pilots made the news today when they landed their skiplanes on Lake Calhoun (No, the video isn't from Lake Calhoun. Go here for an image from the lake). It also has gotten them in trouble, apparently. The Minnesota Parks Board prohibits landing an airplane on any lake within its jurisdiction.

Despite being the land of 10,000 lakes, very few in the Twin Cities are open to airplanes in any season.

In Hennepin County, for example, these are the only landing spots for ski/seaplanes:

Bryant Lake
Diamond Lake
Eagle Lake
Fish Lake
French Lake
Lake Independence
Lake Minnetonka
Lake Sarah
Medicine Lake
Mississippi River
Ox Yoke Lake
Schmidt Lake
Whaletail Lake

Here's the full list of lakes.

The pilots who landed their planes today, apparently to visit a nearby restaurant, have a good chance of having their flying licenses revoked or suspended.

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About that decade

Posted at 1:01 PM on December 21, 2009 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

The mind tends to block out trauma, so 20 or 30 years from now, maybe the 00's won't seem so bad. But it's 2009 and a survey from Pew says this has been the worst decade in 50 years.

That's pretty harsh treatment, considering that the '70s gave us inflation, Jimmy Carter, and disco.

But that's not the most surprising element. Only 53% of those surveyed rated 9/11 (a shoe-in for event of the decade) as the most important event of the decade, the survey said.

Cellphones were rated as the most important technological achievemernt of the decade, while many people social networking -- including blogs -- in a negative light, suggesting that the 20-teens might not be all that snappy for some of us.

Asked to sum up the 2000s in a word, "downhill" was the most common answer.

Here's the entire survey. Post your thoughts below.

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Now, we dance

Posted at 3:04 PM on December 15, 2009 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

Among the important questions facing mankind is this one: Do men become better dancers as they get older, or do they just think they do?

A British researcher has the answer, according to Discovery:

Men 16 and under don't take much pride in their dance moves, but as men grow older, their confidence steadily rises. In fact, men over the age of 65 think they are veritable Saturday Night Fever John Travolta's, with their confidence even surpassing that of 55 to 60-year-olds.

Interestingly, women are just the opposite. They display immense confidence in their dancing up to age 16. There's a drop in boogie boldness from 16 to age 20, then a small rise, before a steady drop in groove pride hits from ages 55 to 65.

(h/t: Nancy Lebens)

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Violence on TV

Posted at 1:45 PM on December 10, 2009 by Bob Collins (8 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

This must be the power of social networks we've heard so much about.

A New Orleans Saints fan posted on Facebook that if the New Orleans Saints beat the Washington Redskins last week, people could shoot his TV.

The Saints won:

For extra credit, count the number of stereotypes in the video.

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The Golden Snowball Competition

Posted at 2:13 PM on December 8, 2009 by Bob Collins (7 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia, Weather

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The Tiger remix

Posted at 1:50 PM on December 3, 2009 by Bob Collins (4 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

Yes, I know. Too much Tiger coverage. Now, however, it's inspiring art.

In other pro athlete news, Adrian Peterson has been dinged by Edina police for going 109 miles per hour.

State law calls for Peterson to lose his driver's license, but he apparently only got a ticket. (h/t: @iamdez)

There's probably a song in there somewhere, too.

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We're #24!

Posted at 2:44 PM on November 20, 2009 by Bob Collins (3 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

It's been a long time, it seems, since we've had a gratuitous survey that reminds us how great we are.

I'm talking about you, Woodbury. Everyone else, step back!

BusinessWeek says Woodbury is the 24th-best place to raise your kids in the U.S., and -- clearly -- the best in Minnesota, with Rochester and Eagan off in the distance.

Here's the bottom line:

Woodbury, a growing suburb just 10 miles southeast of St. Paul, is close to major employers, including the state government and 3M, which makes everything from post-it notes to safety equipment. It has 100 miles of multi-use trails and is surrounded by thousands of acres of park land. The city is served by three independent public school districts and is home to the Math & Science Academy charter school.

So, Woodbury's strong point is it's near another city where there's a major employer. Woodbury once had a major employer. But State Farm Insurance succumbed to the allure of Lincoln, Nebraska, and its huge campus has been vacant ever since, right across the street from the shopping center that looks like every other shopping center in America, and up the street from Woodbury Lakes, the now-in-foreclosure upscale shopping district.

It's interesting, however, that the article sees three school districts in the city as a plus, since most people consider it a headache. The districts were drawn when the city was nothing but pasture. As it was developed, one school district -- actually based in Oakdale -- got the benefit of the retail growth in Woodbury, while the primary school district got nothing. The three districts all split up neighborhoods in the city.

There's no questioning, however, that the magazine got it right on parks and trails. Both would've made better backdrop for the supporting photograph in the magazine than the one it used:

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Fresh Eye on the Radio: Tombstone texting

Posted at 5:08 PM on November 9, 2009 by Bob Collins (7 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

Embed | Help

Copy and paste the HTML below to embed this audio onto your web page.

Audio player code:
<iframe title="minnesota_news_features_2009_11_09_mary_bob_nov9_20091109_64s_player" type="text/html" width="319" height="83" src="http://minnesota.publicradio.org/www_publicradio/tools/media_player/syndicate.php?name=minnesota/news/features/2009/11/09/mary_bob_nov9_20091109_64" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" frameborder="0" allowFullScreen></iframe>

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The smashing pumpkins

Posted at 11:40 AM on October 30, 2009 by Bob Collins (3 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

Continue reading "The smashing pumpkins"

The balloon kid redux

Posted at 1:55 PM on October 21, 2009 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

I've been able, up to now, to avoid the balloon-boy story as the trivia it is. Today, however, a CNN video on YouTube makes it impossible to do so:

I'd be inclined to think the significance of the moment is to ask, "what kind of way is that for a six-year-old to talk?" CNN doesn't think much of that angle, however.

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Time to study

Posted at 1:15 PM on October 21, 2009 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

What do the students at Yale Law School know that the kids at Villanova don't? A Princeton Review of major law schools in the country -- except for you, University of St. Thomas Law School -- revealed that Villanova law students study an average of 7 1/2 hours a day while the kids at Yale put in a grueling hour and a half.

The only regional school that bothered to report the figures was North Dakota, good for a little over 3 hours of work a day.

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Michael Jackson 'healthy'?

Posted at 11:58 AM on October 1, 2009 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

The definition of health is in the eye of the beholder. The Associated Press, somehow, has obtained a copy of Michael Jackson's autopsy report:

Michael Jackson's arms were covered with punctures, his face and neck were scarred and he had tattooed eyebrows and lips, but he wasn't the sickly skeleton of a man portrayed by tabloids, according to his autopsy report obtained by The Associated Press.

In fact, the Los Angeles County coroner's report shows Jackson was a fairly healthy 50-year-old before he died of an overdose.

Punctured arms, scarred face, tattoos on the lips?

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One for the Situation Room

Posted at 12:29 PM on September 18, 2009 by Bob Collins (5 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

Wolf Blitzer reads the news for a living, so it's a slam dunk that he'd kill at Jeopardy.

He didn't.

For the record, that was a comedian who cleaned Blitzer's clock.

(h/t:Drew Geraets)

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Timewaster: Kanye West interrupts Obama

Posted at 12:17 PM on September 14, 2009 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

If we only could harness the creativity of people for good...

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We're #50!

Posted at 3:26 PM on September 2, 2009 by Bob Collins (3 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

The University of Minnesota has made Washington Monthly's annual ranking of top colleges/universities, coming it at #50 in the list of national universities. That's up from #51 in 2007.

It doesn't have the cachet of the famed US News ranking of institutions of higher learning, but insists its methodology is more meaningful:

We rate schools based on their contribution to the public good in three broad categories: Social Mobility (recruiting and graduating low-income students), Research (producing cutting-edge scholarship and PhDs), and Service (encouraging students to give something back to their country).

Only two other schools appear on the list: University of St. Thomas (#172) and St. Mary's University (#256)

Eight Minnesota schools are ranked in the list of liberal arts schools, topped by Carleton (#9), and followed by St. John's (#18), Macalester (#19), Gustavus Adolphus (#33), St. Olaf (#55), College of St. Benedict (#80), Concordia (#83), and the University of Minnesota Morris (#157).

No less an arbiter than The Atlantic's James Fallows confers his degree in lack of bogusness to the rankings:

The practical solution to ranking mania is not to try to eliminate them -- it's too late -- but instead to crowd the field so that no one "Best Colleges" list has disproportionate influence. Toward that end, the Washington Monthly's latest iteration of its college rankings is valuable simply for existing and adding diversity to the ranking field. It's more valuable than that, because of the way it carries through its analysis about the traits we really should value in universities, plus letting people tailor their own rankings based on the qualities that matter most to them.

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Sign of the times

Posted at 12:58 PM on August 23, 2009 by Bob Collins (5 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

MPR's Tom Weber spotted this at a church in Lake Elmo.

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Birth, marriage and death by the numbers

Posted at 12:55 PM on August 7, 2009 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

The National Vital Statistics Report has released birth, marriage, divorce, and death statistics for 2008 today.

The bottom line for Minnesota:

>> Fewer births than 2007, but not by many (5,719 vs. 5,887). Chalk it up to cold winters. Nationally, most births are in July. I'll do the math for you. October.

>> We're dyin' here. Deaths increased from 37,116 in 2007 to 38,529 in 2008. That's at least three straight months of increasing deaths.

>> The number of marriages have dropped for three years running. Minnesota did not provide divorce data, however. Marriage rates in Minnesota have been dropping since the '40s.

Here's the report.

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The pot question

Posted at 12:21 PM on July 13, 2009 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

A new poll today shows apparent support for legalization of marijuana. Poll: 41 percent support pot legalization (CBS). (Psst: 52 percent still oppose it)

Why the emphasis on the minority? Because the poll has shifted by 10 percent. Just a few months ago, another CBS poll showed only 31 percent favored legalizing marijuana.

But polls on the question tend to vary widely. In May, a Zogby poll claimed 52 percent of Americans favored legalization.

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Timewaster: Spot the hero

Posted at 12:19 PM on June 22, 2009 by Bob Collins (3 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

What's the first sign that America's love affair with its heroes has gone too far? When they do cameos in music videos.

Spot the hero... ripped from the headlines.

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Laughing all the way to the bank

Posted at 12:30 PM on June 17, 2009 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

Poor North Dakota. Wait, that's not the right adjective. North Dakota is sitting on a $700 million surplus, but it can't buy a break from the late-night comics.

For the record, North Dakota doesn't have a state budget manager.

(h/t: Than Tibbetts)

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Talking 'bee'

Posted at 2:46 PM on May 29, 2009 by Bob Collins (9 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

Like the end of the Olympics, I am having spelling bee withdrawl withdrawal today. I am not yet ready to let go of the two astounding -- if predictable -- facts surrounding the annual spelling extravaganza.

1) We have far too many useless words in our language. Perhaps there should be a sunset provision whenever someone makes a word. If it is not used for one year or if it's use is followed by the more common "huh?", it is banished from our language. Forever. We're not fooling.

The problem is -- as I learned on Twitter today (from @ecaron) -- we are fast approaching one million words. We're 12 days, 2 hours and change away, according to the Global Language Monitor.

Alcopops, chengguan, and chiconomics (the ability to maintain one's fashion sense in a bad economy) are dangerously close to entering the lexicon (n. Gk. lexikos, of words. Def. What you write when you've already used language too much in a blog post.)

2) We feel a little queasy about whether we put our kids through too much. National TV? Prime time? Academics have often wondered what would happen if the math quiz got the same attention as sports, but as far as I know, Grey's Anatomy has never been delayed to show a kid's sporting event.

There was a moment near the end of last night's spelling bee in which a young woman spelled the word wrong, then buried her sobbing head into her parents' embrace. On the other hand, the last remaining young man who spelled his word wrong, calmly sat down as if it was just another day in homeschooling hell.

The Daily Beast saw it coming:

If you've seen the documentary Spellbound, you know the lengths to which some kids--and, more to the point, some parents--go to prepare for the Bee. The finalists will have spent hundreds of hours--possibly thousands in the case of veteran spellers--memorizing arcane words. They will have been tested via printed word lists and interactive software. They will have been drilled ceaselessly by demanding moms, dads, teachers and coaches. For the top competitors, the pressure is profound. (As the Bee has evolved, it's grown more difficult. The winning word in 1981 was "sarcophagus." Not to brag, but my first-grade daughter can spell that.)

(Aside: Do these kids "text" on their cellphones? Do they spell out all of their words or abbreviate, thereby misspelling them?)

Most people seem to agree, however, that it's not an entirely bad concept to watch kids using their brains for a couple of days; even if they have no sense of chiconomics.

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A picture is worth a picture

Posted at 3:07 PM on May 19, 2009 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

You have to feel a little sorry for Rep. Dean Urdahl, R-Grove City, who picked a bad time to rub his eyes on Monday as the Legislature wrapped up its work.

The picture made the front page of both the Pioneer Press....

... and the Star Tribune.

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Perks of the presidency

Posted at 1:46 PM on May 5, 2009 by Bob Collins (13 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

President Obama and Vice President Biden hopped in the motorcade and hit up a small burger joint in Virginia for lunch today, the Washington Post reported. Cute stuff, of course, but there are so many unanswered questions here.

Let's look a little closer:

A couple of $20's? And each paid for his own meal. How much are they charging for burgers in Virginia, anyway? $6.95, according to NPR.

A closer look at the transaction:

Have you ever seen a politician hold onto money as tightly as the vice president?

A question I'd ask if I did a TV segment about good questions: Where does the president get cash? Is there an ATM in the White House?

Apparently, the place is worth getting elected for:

Though it appears to be a tough place for a couple of guys to strike up a conversation with average folks...

The people in line are obviously too shy to talk to the two celebrities. What would your opening line be?

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Fun with numbers: the Seven Deadly Sins

Posted at 11:34 AM on April 29, 2009 by Than Tibbetts (2 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia, Things that are puzzling

OK, I'll start this off with the disclaimer:..

This is a precision party trick -- rigorous mapping of ridiculous data.

...but it's interesting, nonetheless. A couple of geographers from Kansas State University wrangled up a host of national statistical databases, massaged the numbers and used them to quantify lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride on a county-by-county basis across the U.S.

The story in the Las Vegas Sun tilts heavily toward Nevada, but the graphs are there for each state.

Sure, the sins tend to be value judgments — i.e., "Greed was calculated by comparing average incomes with the total number of inhabitants living beneath the poverty line" — though it's not meant to be a serious scientific study.

Although I would like to know why the folks in Pine and Kanabec Counties are so envious.

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Better Know a District

Posted at 10:56 AM on April 14, 2009 by Bob Collins (6 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

Watching this replay last night of a Colbert Report episode that aired last week, it was hard to envision a Minnesota congressperson agreeing to be interviewed by Stephen Colbert or -- more important -- agreeing to finish the sentence, "I like the company of prostitutes because...."

For the record, no sitting member of the Minnesota delegation has been interviewed by Colbert for his "Better Know a District" series.

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The burden of fame

Posted at 4:43 PM on April 9, 2009 by Bob Collins (3 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

What is it about actors who become singers and then go on talk shows and act like jerks?

On the CBC's Q TV with Jian Ghomeshi yesterday, Billy Bob Thorton channeled Joaquin Phoenix.

Update 5:28 p.m. - The Current's Mary Lucia told me, "there are too many of them to count," when I asked her about actors turned band members who are difficult interviews. But on the question of interviews in which the host would like to grab the guest by the scruff of the neck, she mentioned this one.

(h/t: Luke Taylor)

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Scenes from the parking lot

Posted at 10:25 AM on March 20, 2009 by Bob Collins (3 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

I've always had a "thing" about what cars say about us. There are so many stories in this picture I took this morning. The nature of stereotypes. The declaration of old political bumper stickers. The half-removed Wellstone and Bell stickers. Who tried to take them off? The owner? A Republican?

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St. Patrick's Day was some kind of fun

Posted at 7:45 AM on March 18, 2009 by Bob Collins (5 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

MPR's Julia Schrenkler captures a bit of the raw awesomeness of St. Patrick's Day in St. Paul. Someone apparently lost track of the road and hit the MPR building. "They didn't leave a note, only car parts," she said.

Let's see LRT do that!

Update 3:21 p.m. The window industry stimulus plan is underway.

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What you talking about?

Posted at 12:24 PM on March 12, 2009 by Bob Collins (7 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

Quick! What is the name of this building?

Here's a hint:

... and here's the story.

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One small step for mathematics

Posted at 11:36 AM on March 3, 2009 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

It's March 3, 2009, which shares an important distinction with February 2, 2004, September 9, 1981, August 8, 1964, and April 4, 2016.

It's Square Root Day.

It, like an increase in your IRA and 401k, happens only nine times a century. It's when the day and the month are the same number, and when multiplied together make up the last two digits of the year.

Enjoy.

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Satiating the armadillo paparazzi

Posted at 11:17 AM on March 3, 2009 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

The Minnesota Zoo today announced the birth of an armadillo, the third one born in a U.S. zoo this year. It noted that for the health of the baby, no media photographers would be allowed to take a picture, which only makes us want one in the first place.

The zoo provided this photo along with the factoid that a baby armadillo is about the size of a golf ball.

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If not a cherry...

Posted at 5:43 PM on February 23, 2009 by Bob Collins (3 Comments)
Filed under: Arts, Surveys and trivia

The removal of the cherry from the spoon at the Walker's sculpture garden is the most covered story involving a fruit in the history of Minnesota, it would appear.

This picture is from MPR senior producer Jim Bickal. Though the spoon looks lost, it got me to thinking in my patented there-are-no-problems-only-opportunities way.

What might be a fitting food to put there instead? Cheerios to honor our unofficial state oat cereal? Porridge to accurately portray the budget situation?

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Timewasters: Radio hosts

Posted at 12:07 PM on February 20, 2009 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

Bloggers are almost like normal people. They occasionally get tired of all the bad news and are looking for diversions, too. This is pledge drive week at MPR, which causes us to talk about ourselves, so let's slip this little number in for a timewaster diversion.

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Lincoln's casket

Posted at 10:58 AM on February 11, 2009 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

Since I'm in the neighborhood today anyway, I might just swing over to the Hartquist Funeral Home's Engebretson Chapel in Luverne. They're displaying an "authentic replica" of President Lincoln's casket, according to today's Worthington Daily Globe.

The replica coffin is identical to the original coffin that holds Lincoln's remains, with two exceptions. The replica is not lead-lined, and it does not feature the formal silver nameplate on the top, which was inscribed with Lincoln's birth and death dates.

"It probably was an impressive casket at the time," says the funeral home director, well-skilled in the art of dampening expectations.

Batesville Casket Company asked for and received permission to create the replica in 1984. There are four of them touring the country and their "appearances" are booked through 2010. Apparently, they're quite popular for funeral home grand openings, which is whole 'nother story, I'm sure.

(Photo: Via Flickr/daveblog (Creative Commons license))

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What's not to like about Minneapolis?

Posted at 9:01 AM on January 30, 2009 by Bob Collins (14 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

Over the years, Minneapolitans have gotten accustomed to being at the top of various -- and usually, trivial -- surveys with questionable methodologies. Gird yourself! We're at the bottom of a survey of popular places to live.

First the bad methodology part: The Pew Center called people up and asked them whether they'd like to live in particular cities. If you've never been to Minneapolis and someone called you at the edge of winter and asked you if Minneapolis turns your crank, would it?

Now the results: Nearly half of the people surveyed said they'd rather live somewhere else. Denver, San Diego, and Seattle were top ranked.

Only Detroit, Cleveland, Kansas City, and Cincinnati were rated worse than Minneapolis. Only 16 percent of those surveyed said they'd like to live here. Most of those who want to live here are young people, make between $30,000 and $50,000, have some college or are college grads, are evenly split by political party, and are more liberal.

Here's the full report.

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The great escape

Posted at 9:05 AM on January 29, 2009 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

I have no real comment to make here. But I can watch this all day.

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Rock the Cradle

Posted at 12:08 PM on January 25, 2009 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

MPR's John Nicholson suggests that The Current's Mary Lucia is interviewing a replacement for the afternoon "news" guy at today's Rock the Cradle event that's underway.

Don't even think about it, kid.

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What if we sold the White House?

Posted at 11:17 AM on January 8, 2009 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

A firm which knows how to get attention for its press releases has calculated the market value of the White House:

Real estate Web site Zillow.com today announced it has calculated a Zestimate(R) value for the White House were it actually a home that could be bought and sold. That estimated value - $308,058,000 - would make this by far the most expensive residence in the United States, however still more than $23 million less than its value one year ago. Zillow(R) calculated this value using its proprietary Zestimate algorithm that determines a home's estimated worth today based on public data and recent sales.

It's also calculated that the monthly payment would be $1.48 million, not including the taxes and insurance escrow.

The firm has also calculated that the market value of the White House has declined by 7.2% this year which is a much smaller hit than many Americans have taken.

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Tick tock

Posted at 2:49 PM on December 29, 2008 by Bob Collins (6 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

A few weeks ago, Google announced it was putting thousands of Time-Life photos on its image search, and when I checked it out, this was one of the first ones I found. It was from the 1964 World's Fair and this population clock was a big deal to me (10 years old at the time) because it was in the Equitable Life pavilion and my dad worked for Equitable.

I was thinking of this today because the Census Bureau put out a press release this afternoon that said as of New Year's Day, the U.S. population will be 305,529,237.

It said In January 2009, one birth is expected to occur every eight seconds in the United States and one death every 12 seconds.

And, according to the census bureau, net international migration is expected to add one person every 36 seconds to the U.S. population in January 2009, resulting in an increase in the total U.S. population of one person every 14 seconds.

That's a factoid that, coupled with the photo, makes me whip out the official News Cut calculator.

Let's see:

Since 1964, the population has grown by 113,430,699. There are 31,556,926 seconds in a year. There have been 11 leap days since 1964, each containing 86,400 seconds or 950,400. So, since that picture was taken in 1964 (I'll guess and say Jule 1) to New Year's Day, 1,405,233,607 seconds have come and gone.

So the population has increased at the rate of 1 every 12 seconds, somewhat less more than the predicted 1 every 14 seconds for 1999.

One reason for that may be those people sitting at the top of the stops in the picture above. It's a couple and their 14 kids. There's something you don't hear a lot of anymore -- couples and their 14 kids.

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Next time, try some soft music, a bottle of wine and 'Psycho'

Posted at 3:11 PM on December 23, 2008 by Bob Collins (5 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

How can any guy compete with Tom Hanks in Sleepless in Seattle or You've Got Mail? They can't, and a study out of Scotland confirms it -- romantic comedies are bad for relationships because they create unrealistic expectations.

Researchers at Heriot Watt University's Family and Personal Relationships Laboratory in Edinburgh studied 40 romantic comedies released between 1995 and 2005, and found that problems reported by couples in relationship counseling reflect misconceptions about love and romance depicted in the movies.

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Baby, it's cold inside

Posted at 8:52 AM on December 7, 2008 by Bob Collins (4 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

I have been away from News Cut for the last five days and the way this "cold" has treated me so far, it may be a few days yet before I return. From what I understand, everyone in Minnesota is suffering from the same seasonal disorder, though the strongest in the majority are going to work, leaving the weakest in the herd behind to stretch out on the sofa, watching the stock market ticker on a minute-by-minute basis (we're too weak to turn the channel) and wondering which will kill us first: the economy or this misnamed affliction.

A "cold" sounds so puny, and it usually is until you hit your 50s and then you find it takes longer to recover from such things. We don't expect others to understand, and so we embellish our woes a bit. "I have the flu," one might say, and that worked great until Google ruined things by developing an application a few months ago that tracks the flu.

Google has determined that keywords that people enter in its search engine are indicative of a flu outbreak. For peace of mind alone, I've been entering "I have the freakin' flu" in the search box for the last two hours, but Google has determined that I don't.

By the way, if you actually type in "I have the freakin' flu" in Google, the number one item that is returned in the search is "get your freakin' flu shot."

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Why kids cheat

Posted at 6:06 PM on November 30, 2008 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

This one writes itself.

Says the Associated Press:

In the past year, 30 percent of U.S. high school students have stolen from a store and 64 percent have cheated on a test, according to a new, large-scale survey suggesting that Americans are too apathetic about ethical standards.

Educators reacting to the findings questioned any suggestion that today's young people are less honest than previous generations, but several agreed that intensified pressures are prompting many students to cut corners.

Sixty-four percent cheat? There are some standardized tests where the barely 64-percent passed!

ONe of the questions asked kids to respond to the assertion that "in sports, if you're not cheating, you're not trying hard enough." Thirteen percent of boys agreed. But the real question is how what percentage of that percentage is on the team?

Perhaps more disturbing than the numbers is the ease with which some education officials dismissed them. Perhaps it's not really about the "pressures society puts on them."

The survey was done by the Josephine Center at the Institute for Youth Ethics. They were smart enough to ask the kids if they were being honest in answering the questions. Almost 30 percent said "no."

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Is blue the new red?

Posted at 10:30 AM on November 9, 2008 by Bob Collins (4 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

Barack Obama's chief of staff, Rep. Rahm Emanuel, was on Face the Nation this morning and something didn't seem quite right. After nearly 30 years of a steady diet of red power ties on Sunday morning talk shows, there he was in a power blue tie.

Then I realized, it's not an accident. Check the lineup from Friday's Obama news conference:

And I can't quite tell from this picture of Friday's news conference by Mark Ritchie, Minnesota's Secretary of State, on Mary Lahammer's excellent blog, but from a distance, isn't that a bluish tie?

Ritchie popped up on KSTP today on Tom Hauser's show (which I believe is taped) and we have not one, but two power blues.

On Meet the Press, meanwhile, House Majority Whip Rep. James Clyburn was sending a bipartisan message.

Perhaps last week's election was the first part of the men's department stimulus package.

Update Mon. 11/10 4:35 p.m. - President-elect Obama met President Bush at the White House today, and injected new life into the blue-tie theory.

(Washington photos via Getty Images)

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Smudge - Part II

Posted at 7:08 AM on November 4, 2008 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

Last evening, I posted a picture of Mary Lucia's dog with the request for captions that will make us laugh. This is clearly the winner in the "Photoshop" division.

This is the outstanding work of News Cut reader Dan Gilchrist of Minneapolis. It's true, I didn't actually have a Photoshop category. Now I do.

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How much do you love your cellphone?

Posted at 12:41 PM on October 27, 2008 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

The BBC carries a story this afternoon about a 26 year old passenger on a train in France, who dropped his cellphone into the toilet. He tried to fish it out, only to become trapped.

"He came out on a stretcher, with his hand still jammed in the toilet bowl, which they had to saw clean off," said Benoit Gigou, a witness to the man's plight.

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Absence of trust

Posted at 4:57 PM on October 24, 2008 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

There are many ills in America's political system but one of the most disturbing ones is that important stories get lost in the nonsense of campaign trivia.

Here's one:

Half -- half! -- of the doctors in this country prescribe phony pills. Even worse, most of them don't feel bad about it.

Says the New York Times:

Several medical ethicists say they're troubled by the results, including study coauthor Franklin Miller: "This is the doctor-patient relationship, and our expectations about being truthful about what's going on and about getting informed consent should give us pause about deception

Some of the doctors embrace the "benevolent deception" theory-- that it's OK to deceive you if it's good for you in the long run.

And do patients really have that close of a relationship with doctors anymore, where the absence of trust is a big deal?

By the way, don't tell the New York Times, but I actually first brought this up in January.

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Crime wave

Posted at 3:49 PM on October 20, 2008 by Bob Collins (4 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

In days gone by, I joked with Mary Lucia of the Current that all the world's strange things happen in Oklahoma. These days, it's Ohio.

Dateline: Blue Ash, Ohio. (Begin sound of Dragnet theme here). The cops surrounded -- I might be embellishing this a bit -- the home of Edna Jester.

"Give the football back," a cop on a loudspeaker says as the simultaneous sound of rifles being cocked (are rifles cocked? I don't know, I don't own a gun.) pierces the calm Ohio air.

"You'll never take me alive, coppers" the old biddy shouts as she knocks the stained glass portrait of Boomer Esiason out to get a more tactical look at the situation.

In suburban Cincinnati, where they've had 8 property crimes all year, Edna -- did I mention she's 89 years old -- is Public Enemy #1.

Some kids kept kicking a football into her yard, she kept it, and the police arrested her.

"It's the only way to get through to these kids," she said.

Film at 11.

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Survey: American couples argue more

Posted at 1:01 PM on October 7, 2008 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

The Oxford Internet Institute is out today with a survey that shows a wide disparity in couples depending on where they live.

"Britons are the least likely to complain if modern life leaves their partners too tired for sex. Australians are less worried by their spouse being less affectionate and Americans argue more," says the BBC.

The survey was put together for the online dating site, eHarmony, and appears to be part of a massive year-long project to explore the Internet and dating. Serious stuff.

Couples in the U.S. experience a dip in "marital satisfaction" around the birth of their first child, something that may be surprising to anyone who hasn't had a kid yet.

But wait, there's more in the survey!

In the US, couples put more focus on the interpersonal facets of their relationships, reporting that they laugh together, exchange ideas, kiss, and confide in each other more often. However, they also have more arguments and are more likely to report that their partners annoy them.

There's something you can discuss with your spouse this evening. Let me know how that goes. And spare no details.

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Not everyone is wringing hands today

Posted at 1:12 PM on September 26, 2008 by Bob Collins (4 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

Let's step back from the ledge for a few minutes, just long enough to remember that it's still OK to have a little fun.

For sheer, gee-I-wish-I-could-do-that-if-I-weren't-so-chicken daydreaming, nothing fits the bill better than Yves Rossy, who jumped out of an airplane over France this morning, and landed about 13 minutes later in England.

He wore a jetpack-powered wing on his back:

Rossy's wing was made from carbon composite. It weighs about 121 pounds when loaded with fuel and carried four kerosene-burning jet turbines. The contraption has no steering devices. Rossy, a commercial airline pilot by training, wiggled his body back and forth to control the wing's movements.

He wore a heat-resistant suit similar to that worn by firefighters and racing drivers to protect him from the heat of the turbines. The cooling effect of the wind and high altitude also prevented him from getting too warm.

Why? What the heck! Why not? It beats sitting around watching the 401K free-fall.

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Minnesota: Get to know it

Posted at 12:11 AM on September 23, 2008 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

The Census Bureau released its American Community Survey this morning. Here's some insight into Minnesota:

Speaking English:17.9% in the 5th Congressional District (Minneapolis) speak a language other than English -- the highest percentage in the state. Only 3.4% of people in the 8th District -- northern Minnesota -- speak a language other than English.

Home-grown Minnesotans:Eighty percent of the people in the 6th District were born in Minnesota. Only 64% in the 5th District were born in Minnesota. 84.4% of the people in Stearns County are Minnesotans by birth. Twenty percent of Brooklyn Park was born in another country.

Need a lift? 77.8% of the people in the state drive to work alone. Scott and Anoka County residents drive to work alone most often. (84%). Almost 9% of the metropolitan region carpools to work. Washington County has the highest percentage (10.1%) of carpoolers.

Sherburne County residents have the longest mean commute -- 32 minutes. The median commuting time in Minneapolis and St. Paul is about 22 minutes.

I get around: Just over 17% of the people in Ramsey County and St. Louis County lived in another house one year ago.

Five brides for seven brothers: There are more unmarried men per 100 unmarried women in Minnesota in Northern Minnesota (123) than in any other part of the state. But Carver County has the highest single-man ratio (134).

Sixty something: The youngest median age in Minnesota is the 2nd Congressional District. The oldest is the 8th District. The 7th District has more people over 65 (17%) than any other part of the state. Of the major counties, St. Louis County has the highest percentage of residents over 65 (15.9%). 18% of Bloomington is over 65.

High school: Stearns County has the lowest percentage of people 25 or over who completed high school or received a GED. (89.9%)

The poor: 9.5% of the people live below the poverty level. The highest is St. Louis County (14.9%). Twenty-three percent of St. Cloud lives below the poverty level.

It's Carver! The median household income is $55,802. It's $78,975 in Carver County. The median family income is $69,172. It's $96,885 in Carver County. The median cost for housing per month is $1,500.

The highest median housing value of an owner-occupied home is in Washington County ($282,500).

34.6% of mortgage owners spend more than 30% of their income a month on housing. The highest percentage, however, is in Sherburne County (41.6%).

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The root of our political beliefs

Posted at 1:52 PM on September 18, 2008 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)
Filed under: Politics, Surveys and trivia, Surveys and trivia

Why is it so hard to change the mind of a voter? A Nebraska study out today theorizes that there's a physiological reason:

46 volunteers were first asked about their political views on issues ranging from foreign aid and the Iraq war to capital punishment and patriotism.

Those with strong opinions were invited to take part in the second part of the experiment, which involved recording their physiological responses to a series of images and sounds.

The images included pictures of a frightened man with a large spider on his face and an open wound with maggots in it. The subjects were also startled with loud noises on occasion.

The more easily startled, the study says, tended to have more right-wing political views.

The University of Nebraska's Dr. John Hibbing says there's no political value to his research other than to explain to both sides of the proverbial fence that the other is simply experiencing the world differently.

Rice University political scientist John Alford told Newsweek magazine that there are three influences on political opinion: biological predisposition, socialization, and adult experience.

"If you ask someone why they support the Iraq War, they would probably give you some answers out of those latter two categories. They would make an intellectual argument: we were faced with a threat and this was the right choice. If you pushed, they might also mention socialization: well, I'm an Army brat, my dad was a Colonel, my brother's in the Marines. One thing that they'd never say, in my experience is I'm simply biologically predisposed to be sensitive to threats. What's really important here is that we're not dismissing intellectual choice or experience. We're just asking for a place at the table for biology."

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The root of our political beliefs

Posted at 1:52 PM on September 18, 2008 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)
Filed under: Politics, Surveys and trivia, Surveys and trivia

Why is it so hard to change the mind of a voter? A Nebraska study out today theorizes that there's a physiological reason:

46 volunteers were first asked about their political views on issues ranging from foreign aid and the Iraq war to capital punishment and patriotism.

Those with strong opinions were invited to take part in the second part of the experiment, which involved recording their physiological responses to a series of images and sounds.

The images included pictures of a frightened man with a large spider on his face and an open wound with maggots in it. The subjects were also startled with loud noises on occasion.

The more easily startled, the study says, tended to have more right-wing political views.

The University of Nebraska's Dr. John Hibbing says there's no political value to his research other than to explain to both sides of the proverbial fence that the other is simply experiencing the world differently.

Rice University political scientist John Alford told Newsweek magazine that there are three influences on political opinion: biological predisposition, socialization, and adult experience.

"If you ask someone why they support the Iraq War, they would probably give you some answers out of those latter two categories. They would make an intellectual argument: we were faced with a threat and this was the right choice. If you pushed, they might also mention socialization: well, I'm an Army brat, my dad was a Colonel, my brother's in the Marines. One thing that they'd never say, in my experience is I'm simply biologically predisposed to be sensitive to threats. What's really important here is that we're not dismissing intellectual choice or experience. We're just asking for a place at the table for biology."

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Study: Video games do not turn people into misfits

Posted at 3:49 PM on September 16, 2008 by Bob Collins (5 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

Video games do not turn people into socially isolated creatures. So says a new study from Pew.

Here's the full report. It comes just a few weeks after an MIT professor debunked 8 myths about video games.

In other news, video games have been blamed for a fiery motorcycle crash, a sex attack, and a satanic sword killing.

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I (heart) my PDA

Posted at 1:36 PM on September 16, 2008 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

A new survey says 35 percent Of BlackBerry And PDA users would choose their device over their spouse, according to CBS.

Here's what else the survey from Sheraton Hotels found:

84% check their PDAs just before they go to bed and just after they wake up.
84 % feel that technology gives them more quality time and flexibility with family and friends.
77% say their PDA helps them enjoy life more.

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Taking back the streets

Posted at 2:09 PM on September 6, 2008 by Bob Collins (3 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

... one credential at a time.

(h/t: St. Paul writer Erik Hare)

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An ill wind blows no good

Posted at 7:47 AM on August 22, 2008 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

I admit to occasionally wishing ill will on weather people who stand outside in the middle of a hurricane (or tropical storm), dressed in their sponsor-logo raingear, desperately trying to stand still, and ready to take one for the team, all in the interest of telling us to take the hurricane seriously and stay indoors.

But I wouldn't wish this on anybody, no matter how ill advised the activity that led to it. Kevin Kearney was badly injured while kite surfing during Tropical Storm Fay in Ft. Lauderdale.

The obvious question: What was he thinking? A less obvious one: Why didn't he let go?

His mother told a TV talk show this morning that the man saw the video for the first time last night. "He thought they filmed the wrong guy," she said. Alicia Paradise-Garza says he doesn't remember the incident. "He knew there was some kind of danger, but he didn't calculate the tornado or windspout that picked him up."

Last night, his friends set up a Web site on the man's behalf, to help raise money for his medical bills.

A similar accident in Spain last year won a Darwin Award nomination.

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Campus sustainability

Posted at 2:49 PM on August 21, 2008 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

The "press release" folder in my INBOX reveals the "campus sustainability report card" today from the National Wildlife Federation.

This comprehensive study by National Wildlife Federation and Princeton Survey Research Associates International reviews trends and new developments in environmental performance and sustainability at 1,068 institutions. It recognizes colleges and universities for exemplary efforts and awards academic letter grades (A through D) for collective, national performance on environmental literacy, energy, water, transportation, landscaping, waste reduction and more. The report analyzes collective trends in the areas of management, operations, and academics.

But enough about them, what about us? We're Minnesotans, afterall, and we love surveys that show our superiority.

University of Minnesota Morris
Augsburg
Bemidji State
Carleton
College of St. Benedict
Dakota County Technical
Gustavus Adolphus
Northland Community and Technical
St. Cloud State
St. Olaf
Winona State

.. were all listed in the "exemplary" category.

Individual states didn't get rated but the Midwest got a "B" for setting goals (the Midwest was lowest rated), B- for staffing environmental programs (middle of the pack), C- in orienting students, C in integrating environmental topics into academics, B- in professional development (highest of all regions), A in water efficiency upgrades (everyone got an "A"), B+ in energy efficiency, D in use of solar, wind, and biomass, A in recycling, C in transportation management, and B in landscaping.

Find the full report here.

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The world by scooter

Posted at 12:32 PM on August 21, 2008 by Bob Collins (6 Comments)
Filed under: Energy, Surveys and trivia

It's not that I don't love my job; I do. But I always marvel at the folks who undertake great expeditions without a care, apparently, for having to make a living at it. The various journeys to Antarctica and the North Pole from Minnesota explorers are a couple of examples.

Now there's a third. Two guys are going to spend time riding a scooter from Minnesota to New York City-- and back again. Why? To demonstrate the power of the scooter in the era of high-priced gasoline.

Says the 'expedition's' Web site:

2007, Dustin Saunders moved to Minnesota to seek new opportunities. Once he settled in, the love for his scooter he left in Utah was too much to bear. Dustin then traveled with his friends to Utah to pick it up, and drive the scooter back to Minnesota.

Scooter Quest was originally meant for family and friends to check to see how progress was going as the crew made it back from Utah, to Minnesota. Now, in 2008, Sean, Dustin, and Michael will take their scooters and venture across parts of the United States on an epic adventure of traveling, exploration and fun. The adventure begins on August 23rd, 2008 from Minneapolis, MN ending in New York, NY with checkpoints in Chicago, Indianapolis, and Philadelphia along the way.

Check out their Web site and their plans to stay connected during their journey. They leave in a couple of days.

(h/t: Laura Yuen)

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The best place to work

Posted at 5:59 AM on August 15, 2008 by Bob Collins (3 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

The Minneapolis St. Paul Business Journal is out with its list of the best places to work.

According to a news release, here's the criteria:

To be eligible for consideration as a Business Journal Best Place to Work, companies had to have an office in the Twin Cities 11-county metro area with 10 or more employees, or be Minnesota-based companies with at least 1,000 employees in the state. They also had to have a certain number of employees, depending on company size, complete the online survey.

The online survey part of it is a little questionable. One can imagine the benevolent boss begging the employees to click the survey.

Here's the list:

Administaff Inc.
Arts Midwest
Azul 7
C.H. Robinson Worldwide Inc.
Capella Education Co.
Carmichael Lynch
Certes Financial Professionals Corp.
Clockwork Active Media Systems
CMGRP Inc.
Colliers Turley Martin Tucker
Comcast
Ecolab Inc.
Ecumen
First Financial USA Ltd.
Fortune Financial
Fredrikson & Byron
Goff & Howard Inc.
Gray, Plant, Mooty, Mooty & Bennett
Great River Energy
Harbinger Partners Inc.
HealthEast Care System
Horizontal Integration
Intertech Inc.
Into the Mystic Inc.
JRA Financial Advisors
Lakeview Health
Lancet Software Development Inc.
LarsonAllen
Lindquist & Vennum
Merrill Lynch, Pierce Fenner & Smith Inc.
Olson
Oppenheimer Wolff & Donnelly
Parsinen Kaplan Rosberg + Gotlieb
RBA Inc.
Reside
Riverbridge Partners
Salo
Securian Financial Group Inc.
Solution Design Group Inc.
SPS Commerce
Tobin Real Estate Co.
Vibrant Technologies Inc.
Wells Fargo
Wenck Associates Inc.
Winthrop & Weinstine

If you work at one of those places, what's so great about it. If you work at another place not listed, why do you think it shold -- or shouldn't -- be on the list.

(PS: I'll be on the road to St. Cloud this morning. Posting will be sporadic until the afternoon)

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We love surveys

Posted at 4:55 PM on August 13, 2008 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

I admit it: I love surveys that are about... us.

Minnesota leads the nation in ACT scores? Great. We eat it up. Good job, kids. Take that, Wisconsin! How do you like us now, Iowa?

Less fascinating are the ones -- the obviously inaccurate ones -- that paint us in a less flattering light.

Forbes, for example, says fans of the Minnesota Twins are among the fairest of the fair-weather fans in Major League Baseball. We console ourselves with this injustice by reminding people that the same outfit named Kevin McHale the best general manager in all of sports.

Late today, came another blow to our Gopher-sized ego. Minnesota ranks 44th -- 44th! -- in the nation in fast Internet connections. The Minnesota average is 1.57 megabits per second. The U.S. average is 2.35. Japan is 63.60 megabits per second. A year ago, Minnesota ranked 26th. Wisconsin has passed us. Iowa has not.

The report comes from the Communications Workers of America, the union that stands to benefit, of course, should panic ensue over the situation.

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The kid sings the blues

Posted at 12:50 PM on August 13, 2008 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

In Wisconsin, an underaged person can be served -- and drink -- alcohol, as long as it's OK with the parents who are with the kid. But don't try playing a guitar. Insert your own Wisconsin joke here.

But it's not a laughing matter for Tallan "The T-Man" Latz. He's 8 years old and apparently a heck of a blues player.

But the state of Wisconsin is threatening action if he keeps trying to play in the state's bars and taverns, the Associated Press reports.

An anonymous e-mail sent to state officials complained that Tallan was too young to perform in taverns and nightclubs because of state child labor laws. His booking agent even got an anonymous letter threatening her with death if she keeps booking him.

When Tallan's father read him the state's letter saying he couldn't play clubs anymore (he can still play festivals), the boy's response -- like his music -- seemed beyond his years.

"He goes, 'It's not how many times you get knocked down but it's how many times you get back up and go forward,' Carl Latz said his son told him. "And I told him that's exactly what this is all about and if nothing else this letter just taught you a life lesson."

Tallan was apparently turned in by another blues guitarist who was tired of losing gigs to a kid. Drink up, kid. The show's over.

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Plymouth rocks

Posted at 10:02 AM on July 14, 2008 by Bob Collins (11 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

Money Magazine, the magazine that's made surveys a cottage industry, has another Minnesota feel-good survey for us.

Plymouth, you're number one.

Lots of rich people, plenty of good jobs, and -- no doubt -- more than a few Money Magazine subscribers makes it the "best small city in America."

Eagan is at #17

More people come to work in Eagan than leave each day. Big companies like Thompson-Routers and Blue Cross Blue Shield are its largest employers.

Check with us on that a year from now, Money.

Apple Valley is #24

To combat urban sprawl, the city has a core downtown area where all commercial businesses lie, with the surrounding neighborhoods free from them.

No offense, Apple Valley -- and Money -- but unless I'm missing something, you look like just about any suburb in America.

Lakeville, which actually has a there there, is #26.

Lakeville is a southern suburb of the Twin Cities that has more than 100 years of history. The town treasures an historic downtown that gives it a unique feel compared to other burbs.

Eden Prairie is #40. Maple Grove is #41. Burnsville is #43. Rochester is #70 (not really sure why Rochester is on this list since it's apparent you have to be a cookie-cutter suburb to even be considered in Minnesota. How else do you explain the absence of so many -- you know -- small cities where people actually answer with the name of the city they actually live in when people ask them where they're from?). Blaine is #93.

Texas had the most number of cities on the list (13). Minnesota tied with New Jersey (9) for second.

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One is alone

Posted at 7:56 AM on July 13, 2008 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

Last week MPR's Cathy Wurzer interviewed Eric Thomas of Duluth, who aims to sail solo from San Francisco to Hawaii in the Singlehanded TransPacific Yacht Race. Yacht sounds like a big boat to us landlubbers.

Here's his yacht, courtesy of MPR listener Andrea Diamond, who took this picture a year ago at the conclusion of the Trans Superior race.

Andrea wrote on Saturday:

Hi, I sail w/ Eric on Polar Bear when he's not doing the solo thing. I just got a text message from his wife Sarah that he's off and was first across the starting line (that's a great way to start!). I am looking for some photos I took of Eric finishing the Trans-Superior last summer and will send those along.

Here's a page where you can follow along.

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How and when?

Posted at 5:25 PM on July 9, 2008 by Bob Collins (7 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

How do you want to "go?" Quickly or slowly?

Yes, it's creepy to talk about it but fascinating nonetheless as Jen Gross proves on the New York Times' blog The New Old Age. She writes this week about a recent presentation that asked people when they wanted to die. Most, as you might expect, chose when they are "old."

Then the presenter asked : When the room was not thrilled with cancer and then heart disease, they were told that they'd just chosen "dementia and frailty."

"How many of you expect to die?" she asked.

The audience fell silent, laughed nervously and only then, looking one to the other, slowly raised their hands.

"Would you prefer to be old when it happens?" she then asked.

This time the response was swift and sure, given the alternative.

Then Dr. Lynn, who describes herself as an "old person in training," offered three options to the room. Who would choose cancer as the way to go? Just a few. Chronic heart failure, or emphysema? A few more.

"So all the rest of you are up for frailty and dementia?" Dr. Lynn asked.

On the screen above the dais, she showed graphs describing the three most common ways that old people die and the trajectory and duration of each scenario. Cancer deaths, which peak at age 65, usually come after many years of good health followed by a few weeks or months of steep decline, according to Dr. Lynn's data. The 20 percent of Americans who die this way need excellent medical care during the long period of high functioning, she said, and then hospice support for both patient and family during the sprint to death.

Deaths from organ failure, generally heart or lung disease, peak among patients 10 years older, killing about one in four Americans around age 75 after a far bumpier course. These patients' lives are punctuated by bouts of severe illness alternating with periods of relative stability. At some point rescue attempts fail, and then death is sudden. What these patients and families need, Dr. Lynn said, is consistent disease management to head off crises, aggressive intervention at the first hint of trouble and advance planning for how to manage the final emergency.

The third option, death following extended frailty and dementia, is everyone's worst nightmare, an interminable and humiliating series of losses for the patient, and an exhausting and potentially bankrupting ordeal for the family. Approximately 40 percent of Americans, generally past age 85, follow this course, said Dr. Lynn, and the percentage will grow with improvements in prevention and treatment of cancer, heart disease and pulmonary disease.

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Because it's there

Posted at 8:00 AM on July 9, 2008 by Bob Collins (10 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

The News Cut editorial board (me and the dog) is split over whether it's a good idea to spend even one minute of your life doing relatively pointless things. Take Jim "Mouth" Purol, who is trying to set a world record (kept somewhere) by sitting in all 92,542 seats at the Pasadena Rose Bowl.

As of 3 p.m. Tuesday, MSNBC reported, the 56-year-old Anaheim resident had sat on at least 30,000 seats after starting his mission Monday morning.

"I've been wanting to sit in the Rose Bowl's seats for over 20 years, but I kept getting turned down by the city of Pasadena," Purol said. "They thought it was dumb."

It's not all dumb. Purol is raising money for Outward Bound.

He's got an assistant keeping him hydrated and "facilitating the continuous interviews with the media."

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The Congress we don't like

Posted at 4:11 PM on July 8, 2008 by Bob Collins (3 Comments)
Filed under: Politics, Surveys and trivia

Two factoids worthy of consideration:

Economic indicators

Posted at 4:01 PM on July 2, 2008 by Bob Collins (7 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

Just another day in the American economy. UnitedHealth is cutting 4,000 jobs, the Treasury Secretary makes a proposal that allows financial firms to fail without messing up the economy, 900 flight attendants at American Airlines will lose their jobs, and oil prices have hit a new record

News Cut is constantly testing the underpinnings of the American economy. Today is no exception.

Retail sales specialist -- and occasional MPR reporter -- Tom Weber remarked today that the size of sales receipts is growing at a frightening rate. Today, for example, he bought a pack of Mentos and a pack of Eclipse gum (he paid $3.79 for gum, but that's a topic for another day),

Here's his receipt.

9 1/4 inches.

Yesterday I bought lunch for my sons and a friend at a local restaurant. Here's the receipt:

11 inches.

Even the U.S. Postal Service is big-receipt happy. Sending a certified letter?

That'll cost you 9 1/2" of valuable wallet space.

By far, the worst offender is Home Depot. A one-item purchase will net you a sales receipt equivalent to about a full roll of toilet paper.

In most cases, the size is attributable to offers to tempt you into filling out an online survey about the store's performance. "Your receipts are too big," does not appear anywhere as a survey option, however.

Small receipts can usually be found from the gas station's pay-at-the-pump printer. Oil companies are making massive amounts of money. Home stores, restaurants, and street retail are struggling in the economy.

This leads us to the theory we need to test: The worse the business is doing in a tough economy, the bigger the receipt.

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A smokestack is just a smokestack?

Posted at 1:20 PM on June 27, 2008 by Bob Collins (9 Comments)
Filed under: Icons, Surveys and trivia

Isn't that a gorgeous picture? Teresa Boardman of the St. Paul Real Estate blog took it (used by permission). As I mentioned the other day, Teresa is a supporter of the notion of preserving the smokestack at Xcel's High Bridge plant in St. Paul, the one they're going to blow up on Saturday morning.

"It's just a smokestack," someone said in the comments section to the above post. True, enough. To appreciate the High Bridge smokestack, you have to think of it as representing something other than what it was -- the dumping ground for pollution from a coal-burning power plant.

Smokestacks, though, represent industrialization, which used to be considered a good thing.

Cleveland, when it built Jacob's Field (I refuse to call it Progressive Field), understood that by designing the light towers to portray smokestacks.

The smokestacks in Cleveland fouled the air in a city where they still joke about the time the river caught on fire, and yet they symbolized something greater.

That, I presume, is what Teresa sees in the smokestack, which is in its final hours as one of the dominating features of the St. Paul skyline.

Which brings us to.... the St. Paul skyline.

A skyline should make a statement about the city to all those who are about to enter it. Absent a symbol of the city's past (along with a demolished brewery from some years ago), what statement will the St. Paul skyline make now?

On the way in from the eastern front today, I noticed the Capitol is now partly obscured from sections of I-94, by the addition to Regions Hospital. We have a bank building with the big red "1" still dominating the skyline. St. Paul: A good place to get sick and cash a check.

There is the Cathedral of St. Paul, of course. It's a gorgeous building, to be sure. But it somehow stands apart from the downtown skyline, as if it's in this city, but not of this city.

Tomorrow, by the way, News Cut will be accepting your pictures of the demolition of the smokestack. We'll be providing video from this end. Use this form to send me your favorite shot. And if you want to provide some prose about the stack, I'll be happy to include that, too.

Update Reader Sean Garrick has sent a photo he took Wednesday evening.

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What Google says about us

Posted at 1:02 PM on June 24, 2008 by Bob Collins (8 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

A defense attorney in an obscenity case in Florida is trying to use Google search statistics to prove that the "community standards" are all about porn down there. If everyone is searching for it, the attorney is suggesting, it must be acceptable.

The chart measures the words people are entering in the Google search box in Florida. The defense attorney picked three: surfing, orgy, and apple pie.

The chart shows that the people of Florida search for "orgy" (the red line) more often than they search for a recipe for "apple pie." (the orange line) Surfing (the blue line)? Apparently it's more fun that I thought. (Disclaimer: This would also include searching "Internet surfing," which conjures up all sorts of questions on its own.)

Naturally, News Cut's first reaction (after "nice try, pal!") is to figure out what the same statistics say about us?

We're not that interested in surfing -- or orgies -- apparently, although when broken down by cities, St. Peter has some explaining to do.

Let's replace "surfing" with "fishing."

No contest. Take that, Florida perverts!

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The architecture poll

Posted at 10:53 AM on June 13, 2008 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

I was going to post the "Most boring architecture" poll (mentioned here and here) to coincide with the NBA Finals, and then other work got in the way. After last night's Celtics win over the Lakers, I realize I better hurry up. The NBA finals are about over. There'll be no Purple Reign this year.

Here are some of the nominees.

And here's the poll:

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The streets of Bovey

Posted at 8:10 AM on June 11, 2008 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

Among my favorite radio segments of the last 16 years I've been at Minnesota Public Radio is one a small group of talented individuals brought to listeners in the late '90s: The Streets of Bovey.

The police chief in the small town -- Terry Wilkey -- died in 1998. Said an MPR story at the time:

Every week or so, Wilkey would write a list of what he'd been up to; items like, "Found an unlocked door at a business. We locked it." Sometimes, Wilkey talked tough. In one column, he suggested a few nights in the Crowbar motel might straighten out a wrongdoer. Sometimes, details about Wilkey's life would appear. He wrote about the difficulty he had renting a tux for his daughter's wedding, because he was such a big man. He complained about what he paid for the wedding, listing the prices of flowers, food, and photographs. Each column began with a suggestion that know-it-alls should not read his words because they might overtax their minds. Each column ended with the advice, "Lock that door and get that license number."

Though it's been 10 years since The Streets of Bovey appeared in some fashion, I'm reminded of it today while reading a couple of police log entries in the morning paper.

Boring architecture (cont'd)

Posted at 12:28 PM on May 30, 2008 by Bob Collins (9 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

News Cut is still taking nominees for the most unimaginative and boring architecture in the Twin Cities (the original post explaining why we're doing this has scrolled off the page but can be found here).

I've set up a little slideshow to more quickly process the submissions.

If you have a nominee in the category, please send it by Monday. Perhaps we can have the playoffs in the category to coincide with the Celtics (one hopes)- Lakers NBA finals.

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Timewasters: TwitterVision

Posted at 4:04 PM on May 21, 2008 by Bob Collins (4 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

I'm not really qualified -- that is: cool enough -- to write an entire treatise (or even an abbreviated one) about Twitter, described elsewhere as a micro-blogging tool. It either is another form of communication that will revolutionize things, or it's another laughing matter. I leave these questions to the smart people, like MPR's American Public Media's Jon Gordon.

I do know this: TwitterVision, in which these random thoughts appear on a map, is one of the most intriguing -- if not particularly useful -- things I've ever encountered on the Web. Last week, I noticed, there was nothing on TV. So I "watched" TwitterVision.

As a young lad, I wondered what it must be like to be God at prayertime, and how he (she?) sorted everything out when it was coming at him (her?) at once.

Hold that thought! Somebody in Tulsa says he's getting a tatoo. Gotta Go,

http://twitter.com/bcollinsmn

Update 8:12 a 5/22 -- Here's a great example of how a company can use Twitter effectively.

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Power, lab-grown meat, and cellphones

Posted at 3:22 PM on May 21, 2008 by Bob Collins
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

It's been far too long since I pulled together one of these.

The day in science:

Junk food junkies

Posted at 7:08 AM on May 20, 2008 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

Unrelated -- perhaps -- stories today from Planet Junkfood.

A study of monkeys, the New York Times reports today -- finds that given the choice of junk food or something more nutritious, monkeys on the lower rung of the social ladder will not only choose junk food, but dive headfirst into the stuff.

For the monkeys the situation seems simple. They get some sort of comfort that is particularly appealing to the subordinate monkeys. One possibility is that the fatty foods help block the monkeys' stress responses. Studies with rodents have shown that high-calorie foods cause a metabolic change that tamps the release of stress hormones like cortisol.

Meanwhile, at the Metrodome, the Twins are trying an all-you-can-eat promotion. For an additional $12 per ticket, you can dive headfirst into the stuff. And that's what people did.

Insert monkey joke here.

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Sexy voices and fertile women

Posted at 12:22 PM on May 1, 2008 by Bob Collins (5 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

Veteran News Cutters recognize I have a penchant for offbeat studies.

Fortunately, every day brings another fix.

Fertile Women Have Sexier Voices, the headline on the BBC Web site screams today.

Scientists have suggested that very subtle changes caused by the rise and fall of different sex hormones can be detected by men, who then perhaps find a woman more attractive without necessarily even realising why.

The latest research, from the State University of New York at Albany and originally published in the journal Human Evolution and Behavior, involved taking recordings of women counting from one to 10 at four points during the menstrual cycle and then played them back to male and female students.

"The missing link here is finding out how this works in plain conversation - in a bar, for example," says Dr David Feinberg, from the McMaster University in Canada.

And why do we need to know that?

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Your happiness/health index

Posted at 7:25 AM on April 30, 2008 by Bob Collins (2 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

I'm on the road to Two Harbors today so posting will be light. Thus, it falls on your to pick up the slack. But, no pressure.

Fortunately, we've got The Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index. It's based on interviews of more than 100,000 people and it, shows that 47 percent of Americans
are struggling and 4 percent are suffering. Forty-nine percent of respondents are reported to be thriving based on a personal assessment of how they feel about their lives at the time of the survey, and where they think they'll be in five years.

The survey is done every day and Gallup says it will do it for the next 25 years.

Findings so far indicate that peoples' workplaces and any health problems are the two major contributors to whether people are happy.

You know what's coming, right? Sooner or later, Gallup is going to be in workplace. So tell me first. What are they going to find?

Oh, and what do you think your life is going to be like in five years.

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Are you addicted to your computer?

Posted at 10:40 AM on April 25, 2008 by Bob Collins (6 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

For the sake of the future of the little children on the News Cut staff (OK, there aren't any little children and there isn't any News Cut staff, but let's just pretend.), I certainly hope so.

Take this quiz.

This question, in particular, creeps me out:

How often do you prefer the excitement of the Internet to intimacy with your partner?

and so does this one:

How often do you block out disturbing thoughts about your life with soothing thoughts of the Internet?

Soothing thoughts of the Internet? Oh, bandwidth, you gorgeous bandwidth! Reveal to me the underlying source code of this page. Yes. Yes. Oh, yes.

Full disclosure: I scored a 30. Which means, "You are an average on-line user. You may surf the Web a bit too long at times, but you have control over your usage."

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Tightwad or spendthrift?

Posted at 4:30 PM on April 21, 2008 by Bob Collins (11 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

Are you a spendthrift or a tightwad?

On Tuesday's Midmorning on Minnesota Public Radio, we're going to examine some research that recently came out that found:

The freedom to water?

Posted at 12:11 PM on April 18, 2008 by Bob Collins (9 Comments)
Filed under: Surveys and trivia

Now that freedom is on the march and there's a movement afoot to allow us to burn incandescent light bulbs if that's what we want, perhaps the next battleground is water.

As the St. Paul Pioneer Press reports today, there's a coming "crackdown" on people who use too much water on their lawns.

"To crack down on such water wasters, Woodbury is pioneering a new water-conservation tool -- water audits."

because...

"Officials were outraged to learn that a single user -- a home in the ritzy Powers Lake Point area -- used 471,000 gallons last summer."

A "crackdown"? "Outrage?" You'd think the "targeted" homeowners were breaking the law. But, in fact, they aren't. While these homeowners may be gluttonous, earth-destroying, sloths, there's no law to stop them. Should there be?

As usual, the greatest show on earth, is the comments section of a newspaper's Web site, with opinion ranging from:

More liberals controlling our lives-Kids are starving in Haiti due to ethonal and we wnat to monitor water usage in Woodbury. Great!!!!!

...to...

The state legislature needs to get involved in this water debacle. We need to implement a state-wide tax of at least $1 per gallon of water used.

That last one came from someone from North Dakota. Three words, Fargo: You go first.

As any newspaper carrier can tell you, an early-morning drive around Woodbury, especially in the rain, will find lots of automatic sprinklers in action (usually in townhome developments where no single person appears to be in charge anyway).

There actually is a law in Minnesota that requires rain sensors to be installed on lawn-irrigation systems. It passed by wide margins in the Republican-controlled House, the DFL-controlled Senate and was signed by the Republican governor.

The real mystery here is what is it about green lawns that drives Minnesota into such irrational exuberance? I have friends -- yeah, in Woodbury -- who weren't sucked into the lawn-care marketing and when dandelions sprouted, their neighbor came in the dark of night and applied weed-killer to their lawn. What is it we think a green lawn says about us that we're so desperate to have it say?

Ted Steinberg, author of "American Green: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Lawn," says it's a Post World War II thing:

As American industry became more efficient in turning out innovations people needed--such as washing machines, stoves, cars and more--there still was plenty of capacity left over to turn out even more products that were less essential--such as those that could be used to create and maintain perfect lawns.

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