Let’s Hear from the Dude Who Tricked the Vikings Into Putting a Porn Star On the Jumbotron

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

We Salute You, Pornography Hero Johnny Sins

Esteemed outlets like the NY Post, Barstool Sports, and Fox News? They're all over it. Ditto for the Military Times.

Yet here in Minneapolis, where on Sunday Twitter user @kylerulz4h duped the Vikings into featuring porn star Johnny Sins during the Jumbotron #SkolSalute to military members? Silence from the mainstream media, likely the result of access journalism standing in the way of readers who deserve to know this sort of silly, tawdry shit. In your interest, we reached out to Kyle for some background on his U.S. Bank Stadium stunt and the subsequent reactions to it:

"Basically when I saw the tweet asking for submissions it reminded me of the old trolls @BarryOnHere used to make. Using that as inspiration I sent the tweet thinking surely the media team would catch it, maybe make a few people that saw it laugh. When someone tagged me in the pic of it on the Jumbotron I was stunned. The reactions have been hilarious, many of the comments being as funny as the original joke itself. I'm mostly happy that many of the people that commented were actual veterans and found it to be hilarious and weren't offended by it."

Even Sins is a fan of Kyle's work, tweeting, "Ha, that's awesome!" Incredible stuff.

New Statue Celebrates Nellie Stone Johnson, a Labor, Education, and Civil Rights Trailblazer

Suck it, Christopher Columbus! Our Capitol has a new sculpture, and it’s actually celebrating someone who deserves remembrance. Nellie Stone Johnson was an amazing woman. She had a hand in the formation of the Minnesota DFL Party in 1944, was a leader in creating the first Fair Employment Practices department in the U.S., and, during the Civil Rights movement, she met with Hubert Humphrey and Walter Mondale to advise and talk policy. After winning a seat on the city’s library board, she became the first Black person elected to a citywide office in Minneapolis. Johnson died in 2002 at the age of 96.

“She was a doer,” former Minnesota Attorney General Skip Humphrey tells MPR. “And if you look at the record that she has, that she accumulated, it was about getting the job done. And she helped drag this state and frankly, this nation forward.” The life-sized piece, created by sculptor Tim Cleary, features Stone Johnson holding a few Farmer Labor publications. She’s the first woman and first Black Minnesotan to be memorialized in the building. Incredibly, frustratingly, and sadly, MPR notes that this may be “the first statue depicting a Black woman in any state capitol building.”

The Problem of Auction House Artifacts

For MinnPost today, Sheila Regan looks at what happens when Indigenous objects end up for sale via auction houses. Consider, for example, the artifacts "owned" by Medicine’s Hall of Fame & Museum. The private collection of over 5,000 medical items from throughout history opened to the public in 2013 and closed in 2020; earlier this month, the whole collection went to auction. That's when Jaime Arsenault, the tribal historical preservation officer for the White Earth Nation, found out about the sale, which includes Native robes, drums, shields, ceremonial masks, and rattles. To whom, precisely, should these medical objects—including a Chippewa wood and rawhide medicine drum—belong? “It’s a very painful Catch-22 situation that tribes find themselves in, I would say, on a weekly basis,” Arsenault says, “because there are auctions happening every week in some community somewhere desperately trying to get something that left in uncertain circumstances.”

Pour One Out for Provision

A local cafe with a truly angelic mission statement is headed to Restaurant Heaven. Provision, Minneapolis’s pay-what-you-can food experiment/experience at Lyn-Lake, will close for good after its doors shut Sunday. “A lot of us assume that someone can afford to meet for coffee,” the nonprofit restaurant's executive director, Anna Wienke, told us in March. "The pay-as-you-can element is really about access.” The folks behind Provision, which opened in 2019, will continue its fight against insecurity at local shelters, they wrote in a statement last Friday.