Secrets of the City

You can find out where to vote easily enough, but who to vote for? And will IRV be confusing, or will it give third-party candidates a new chance?

Mediation points out a useful resource: KFAI’s interviews with City Council candidates, along with a map of districts.

The You Are Dumb blog sets its sites on Strib commentors, and finds them, well, to be pretty dumb. Specifically, the blog’s author looks at responses to the recent tale of Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan, who was detained in Newark as a result of having his name on a watch list, which is approximately the equivalent of Julia Roberts being detained in China for being a possible terrorist. Strib commentors, however, don’t really seem to grasp the tale, so the blog clarifies: This is clearly, in the annals of airport security snafus, a minor incident. He wasn’t removed from a plane, he didn’t miss a flight, and he only lost a couple of hours. On the other hand, this is also clearly an issue of a broken system abusing an innocent traveler for no societal benefit, and only coming to light because the innocent traveler being abused has a certain amount of fame, power, and/or pull. And once we leave the land of Clearly, we enter the murky, confused world of the Strib commenters, who proceed to describe a whole other planet.

If the lack of new posts, as well as Lilek’s ominous last post is to be believed, yes it is. Will you miss it? Would you even have noticed its disappearance had I not just pointed it out?

Today is unallotment day, wherein Pawlenty will unilaterally slash the budget via unallotmen. Pawlenty won’t say just yet what he’ll be cutting, but he’s been bragging about it a little: “The state of Minnesota has never — since 1858 as far as we can find, in 151 years of history in the state of Minnesota, in a biennial budget — never has the budget gone down, until this year,” he said.

The PiPress looks back on his budget for clues to possible cuts, while PIM looks into whether such cuts are temporary or long-lasting. Are they even constitutional?

Brauer reports on a strike that could potentially cripple the ailing Star-Tribune: Star Tribune drivers have moved step closer to a walkout that could paralyze the bankrupt paper’s print operation. According to a memo from publisher Chris Harte, the drivers voted Tuesday night to authorize a strike if U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Robert Drain grants the company’s request to throw out their contract.

Could we be heading toward a Minneapolis without a daily newspaper? Would that be a bad thing? And what could take the place of the Star-Tribune?

City Pages points us to Ultralingua, Inc, a Minneapolis-based company responsible for an electronic guide to conversational Klingon. Minnesota has something of a long history with Klingon anyway; after all, we were the location for the very first Klingon Language Camp in Red Lake Falls. Could the time soon  be on us when more people speak Klingon than Navajo?

Bachmann has taken her shots at Congress before, as we remember, complaining about anti-Americanism, although she later recanted, or, more properly, claimed she had never said anything like that and it was an urban myth. Now she lets loose on “socialized” medicine: “I know one thing, the people in my district are not interested in paying for the health care for illegal aliens that are coming across our border to be yet one more magnet to bring people in that should come here legally.”

The magnet for illegal aliens she refers to? The State Childrens Health Insurance Program.

She has plenty more to say as well.

So tomorrow Secrets of the City is sponsoring a talk with author Neal Karlen and comedian (and German scholar) Ari Hoptman on the subject of Yiddish, about which Karlen has written a book. This has got me thinking about Yiddish in Minnesota, so I decided to do a little digging. There isn’t a lot, but what’s out there is interesting. Garrison Keillor once joked about a Yiddish-Minnesotan dictionary. KFAI, unsuprisingly, can be counted on to occasionally play Yiddish music. According to this book, there was a brief, but failed, attempt at publishing a Yiddish weekly in 1921. Local girls made good The Andrew Sisters had some luck with Yiddish novelty numbers, and also helped create Yiddish swing. The locally originated show Gershwin the Klezmer investigated Geirge Gershwin’s roots in Yiddish music. And, of course, St. Louis Park’s own Coen Brothers will be filming The Yiddish Policeman’s Union as their next movie.

So a five pound tub of peanut butter in Minnesota might be linked to a salmonella outbreak that has sickened 400 throughout the country. The distributor: The either awesomely or embarrassingly named King Nut (the have issued a recall). Lileks digs into the subject a little. The CDC tells us just what salmonella is anyway.