David Cazares is an editor for MPR News. He also writes about jazz and Latin music.
Bob Collins is asking questions today at SugaRush coffee shop, 712 University Avenue in St. Paul, until around noon. Stop in to say hello. In the meantime, and in honor of his Monday Morning Rouser, we present a Friday morning downer: Bill Callahan singing “Too Many Birds” at Waterloo Records in Austin, Texas. I find Read more →
By 2025, a whopping one in five licensed drivers will be 65 years of age or older, according to the National Transportation Safety Board. Advancing technology will probably help make older Americans better drivers, but at some point many of us will lose the ability to drive safely. On Today’s Question we asked this: “Should Read more →
Here’s one way to generate an idea for a blog post: Enter the first word that pops into your mind into Google News. For reasons I care not to examine deeply, the word today was “raccoon.” So, let’s look at raccoons-in-the-news, shall we? In Alameda, California this week, raccoons descended upon a woman walking her Read more →
This is the kind of fun we could be having if the Twins had a staff ace and could somehow get by the Yankees: Giants fans sing Journey during World Series Game 2 @ Yahoo! Video And if a Journey sing-a-long at a World Series game doesn’t look like enough of a hoot, check out Read more →
I’d never heard of local used LP shop Hymie’s Vintage Records until Rolling Stone declared that it’s one of the 25 best record stores in the country. Forgive me for being unhip to the Minneapolis establishment, as I recently returned to the Twin Cities after spending that last dozen years in the San Francisco Bay Read more →
On a sweltering day like today, a healing drink of cold water on a public golf course can be rather hard to come by. Turns out it’s sort of a tough decision for Minnesota golf course operators whether to provide a few coolers for customers, many of whom develop a mighty thirst during a typical four to five hour round.
A world without mosquitoes? Nature posits that wiping out the Minnesota state bird might not have horrible consequences for our fragile ecosystem as most biologists would maintain. …in many cases, scientists acknowledge that the ecological scar left by a missing mosquito would heal quickly as the niche was filled by other organisms. Life would continue Read more →
Mark Dayton shelled out $28,000 to social media consultant Nicole Harrison this year, according to MPR’s Tom Scheck. What does $28,000 buy a candidate for governor? Is he listening to the expensive advice? Well, let’s see. Dayton hasn’t sent a message on Twitter since March (and it was a banal tweet at that): Dayton appears Read more →
Big news in the tech world today: The U.S. Copyright Office declared it legal to “jailbreak” iPhones and other smartphones. Jailbreaking is the act of hacking a device’s operating system so it can run programs not approved by the device maker. It was previously considered a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, but the Read more →
On NPR’s Monkey See blog, Linda Holmes posits that after the cupcake and bacon crazes have played out, libraries will fill the void. Call it a hunch, but it seems to me that the thing is in the air that happens right before something — families with a million kids, cupcakes, wedding coordinators — suddenly Read more →
David Cazares