Welcome back to The Flyover, your daily digest of important, overlooked, and/or interesting Minnesota news stories.
Annie’s Is Back! Or Soon Will Be.
Remember in early 2020, when everything shut down? Remember later in 2020, when everything opened back up? Well, not everything opened back up. Some joints shut down permanently, and some, like Dinkytown burger institution Annie’s Parlour, wound up in restaurant limbo. But now, reports Ella Anderson at Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, Annie’s is slowly coming back to life, with takeout malts and milkshakes becoming available about a month ago, and the whole place soon to swing back into action. What was the holdup? Well, renovations begun during the shutdown took longer than usual, and then the owner, legendary Minneapolis restaurateur John Rimarcik, died in December. His sons Tony and Tom have taken over the business. “It is really satisfying to reopen the place that dad opened when we were just kids,” said Tony.
Coon Rapids Rep: Parents Should Pay Social Media-Featured Kids
Apologies to Ronald Reagan (jk, not really, rot in hell), but the actual most terrifying words in the English language are “legislation aims to protect children.” Whenever a lawmaker wants to justify something particularly dastardly, it’s in the name of protecting kids. Take the “Kids Online Safety Act,” a bipartisan bill working its way through Congress that would actually silence many of the minors it purports to protect. (Our senior senator, Amy Klobuchar, is a co-sponsor of that legislative mess, by the way.) So it was surprising to see a story by Peter Callaghan in MinnPost today that used those four frightening words to describe… legislation that might actually protect children.
Rep. Zack Stephenson (DFL-Coon Rapids) has introduced a bill that would give children featured in so-called “mommy run accounts” the same protections as child actors. Under the proposed legislation, parents would have to place 30% of the earnings they make from social media accounts that feature their children into a trust account. The child would be able to claim those funds at 18. The bill would also give children the right, at the age of 13, to demand the removal of content they appear in.
*Lana Del Rey Voice* Did You Know There Was an Ancient Glacial Lake in St. Paul?
Greg Brick is interested in prehistoric St. Paul—and we ain’t talking about Joe Soucheray here, folks. In a Q&A today with the Strib’s James Walsh, the former Department of Natural Resources geologist discusses the evidence he’s found of glacial lake from 10,000 years ago that shaped the Highland Park area in St. Paul, similar to the one that carved out the Minnesota River Valley. “For Brick, the finding ranks right up there with the discovery of the skeleton of a giant beaver in Hidden Falls Park in 1938,” Walsh tells us. “We can start putting together a picture of prehistoric St. Paul,” Brick says of his findings. “You had roaring waterfalls, giant beavers. You had this catastrophic lake drainage. At that time, there would have been no one living here.”
Uh Oh, Did Racket Make Downtown Pickleball Happen?
A few weeks ago, inspired by our strong mayor’s very funny joke about how working from home makes you a loser, Racket’s own Jay Boller whipped up “10 ambitious ideas” to revitalize downtown Minneapolis that didn’t involve making everyone commute to an office everyday. A proposal to replace parking lots with pickleball courts wasn’t the least popular idea that he offered (that would be the free downtown parking suggestion), but some readers did disagree with Jay’s assertion that “pickleball rules.”
The city did not exactly jump at the opportunity to put our proposals into action, but today Caitlin Anderson at the Business Journal reports that someone appears to be acting on Racket's suggestion. Planned renovations at LaSalle Plaza include the construction of “an indoor pickleball court in the former Rock Bottom Brewery space (with room for potentially more courts),” says Anderson. Are the folks behind this project reading Racket and following our suggestions? It’s hard to come up with any other explanation.
