Did the Zodiac Killer Curse the Vikings?

Welcome back to The Flyover, your daily noontime(ish) digest of what local media outlets and Twitter-ers are gabbing about.

Killer Conspiracy

Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer: We’re dealing purely in the realm of speculation here, since the Gary Poste from northern California on Facebook has not been conclusively linked to Gary Poste, the deceased northern California man who was outed Wednesday as the infamous Zodiac Killer. That said, holy shit, the Gary Poste on Facebook is wearing a Vikings hat. Twitter speculators are having a field day:

As noted by another Twitter user, the Vikes suffered their first-ever playoff loss on December 22, 1968. Two days earlier, Poste had committed his first two murders just outside of San Francisco. The serial killer would go on to boast of 35 additional murders, though just five more would be confirmed. The Minnesota football team, now potentially cursed, would go on to decades of heartbreaking futility, including four Super Bowl losses.

Get It Together, Maple River High School

A microcosm of racist bullshit has formed in Mapleton’s Maple River High School near Mankato. It started on Friday afternoon, when at least one student allegedly chanted "Blacks to the back" during a homecoming event. Upon hearing this story from her biracial son (also a Maple River football player), Laura Nusser attended Friday night's game with a Black Lives Matter sign. There, she says a man approached her, shoved her, and ripped the sign from her hands. She was then escorted from the game by police. Her assailant was not.

On Monday, Nusser and students showed up to protest at the school, where media cameras caught a student with a Confederate flag and Blue Lives Matter sign on his truck as he drove by, flipping them the bird. “The Confederate flag is not about racism, if anyone actually does their history," the mother of the student, a woman who obviously hasn’t “done history,” told Mankato Free Press of the incident. While an investigation has been ongoing, at least one student has been suspended and one cafeteria worker has been put on leave. Nusser says her son has since endured a scary incident where a man threatened him at a gas station. Nusser has also received online threats. One woman allegedly messaged her via Facebook, asking if she could visit her "so we can talk about how you brought racism to our homecoming football game… I’m willing to come meet you face to face right now but [it] seems like you’re ducking out.” Don’t let that person anywhere near you, Laura.

Tom Emmer, Cryptocurrency Congressman

Did you know there's a Congressional Blockchain Caucus? Well... there is. And Tom Emmer is its co-chair. The Congressman for Minnesota's 6th District tells MinnPost it all started when he read The Age of Cryptocurrency back in 2015. He's since introduced several bills on crypto and blockchain technology, to little avail: Emmer says he's been frustrated by the many "crypto-ignorant" lawmakers in Congress that have been blocking that legislation. The first step towards crypto-progress? Defining what it actually is. Is it a commodity? A security? A currency? Turns out nobody knows!

Pipe Down

Two Minnesota men who shot at a fuel pipeline, causing a 3,900-gallon leak, have been ordered to pay $1.1 million in damages. Back in 2019, absolute geniuses Eric J. Weckworth-Pineda, 25, and Tanner J. Sik, 22, grabbed their guns and hopped in a pickup truck to go shoot at stuff along a creek that leads to the Yellow Medicine River. Nothin' wrong with that—except the target of their AR-15 was a fuel pipeline. Weckwerth-Pineda told an investigator they got bored shooting at the creek and thought to "try and hit that pipe," according to the Star Tribune. He does at least seem to feel bad about it now: "I was in the wrong place with the wrong person who decided to make one bad call," he told the Strib. "And well, if you play stupid games, you win stupid prizes." A fiscally and environmentally costly lesson to learn!

I Mean...

Are we not? (If you missed it, read our MplsPhotoBot story here—even if we did fail to address that there are "a ton of ghost babes" on the account.)