Secrets of the City

Ok, likely not the correct headline to use, but it’s Max. Max! And he’s quoted in the Strib.

A “hugely intoxicated” man — according to Sparber — boarded a downtown bus yesterday afternoon, couldn’t quite get his fare together, became enraged, and struck the Metro Transit bus driver in the head. He was, of course, immediately thrown from the bus by three helpful passengers.

Good thing this didn’t happen on an airplane. That’s all I can say. Plenty of Twitter action on the matter, of course, but alas, no hashtag. Maybe Max will give us more.

Of course we do. While MNSpeak started out as a community-building forum, leading to interesting dialog and even new friendships (which hopefully it still does, from time to time at least), we are now criticized for our hostile, insular, liberal tendencies (and a host of other “failures”) on a somewhat regular basis.

Today, I came across this post on Small Laws: “I’m reluctant to trace the stats back from this blog, you know, see where people are coming from and how they’re finding me, since any spike of unique visitors inevitably comes from a conversation where I’m being insulted in the Secrets of the City community. I’m less anxious to crack the lid on that tin of derision and libel, as it inevitably leads to a bad trip. Sparber may have 50,000 fans or whatever, but he has carefully cultivated one enemy.”

‘Tis a shame we’ve managed to make an enemy (surely more than one) somehow. (Or is it?)  ‘Tis also a shame the writer has clearly not returned to MNSpeak or paid enough attention to know that we’ve lost our Sparber. Could this be the MNSpeak post that drove the writer away? Were we too harsh?

Our own Max Sparber crafted the words behind Ivan the Drunk and His Terrible Tale of Woe, a play with Off-Leash Area opening June 4th at Open Eye Figure Theater. 3 Minute Egg has a video interview and overview and TC Theater Connection covers it in their podcast.