Welcome back to The Flyover, your daily digest of important, overlooked, and/or interesting Minnesota news stories.
So Here's the Plan...
Downtown Minneapolis is going through it, man. Building owners are struggling to fill spaces, and earlier this week the Star Tribune reported that property values in the area continue to drop.
So what’s next? Meet Minneapolis CEO Melvin Tennant has some ideas. And while he won’t release his full-blown "2035" manifesto until early 2025, folks at a recent "what's to be done about downtown?" event hosted by finance group FEI Twin Cities report that MM has indeed cooked up a plan. The Biz Journal’s Keith Schubert obtained a rough outline of it...
- Honoring George Floyd and incorporating the city's place in the modern-day civil rights movement into its marketing
- Developing an iconic event showcasing Minneapolis' commitment to social justice
- Modernizing the convention center
- Improving connection to the central riverfront
- Establishing a "night mayor," which would be someone tasked with managing downtown's nightlife and post-5 p.m. activity
- Making Minneapolis a top destination for women's sports
There’s some stuff to like here and some stuff to… be very, very wary of. Idea No. 6 is pretty rad (go Lynx!), and having the city engage with its riverfront more is an obvious good. But No. 2, developing an "iconic" social justice event, sure seems like an example of putting the cart before the horse, and using the murder of George Floyd in promo materials meant to attract tourists to our city seems pretty gross. If we get a night mayor it better not be L.A. Nik, who, of course, has long laid claim to that title.
Meanwhile, the Minneapolis Downtown Council could be doubling down on fancy dining, aiming to add the Michelin Guide to Minneapolis by '35.
“While the specifics of how it will carry out the plan have not yet been disclosed, it would likely involve money,” Schubert writes. “Local and state tourism boards often pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to help fund visits from Michelin reviewers.”
Better yet, just check out Racket's ironclad plan to save downtown:
Bloomington Students Learn to Use New (Earth-Killing, Lie-Propagating) Tool
MPR News has a feature today on how students in Bloomington are being taught to use the AI chatbot ChatGPT. “It’s a tool that can either help your learning—or kind of hinder you from learning new things, depending on how you use it,” Kennedy High teacher Rowen Elsmore tells MPR’s Elizabeth Shockman. But while computer literacy is vital, the story never exactly makes clear why using this particular tool is valuable to students. Not all tools are useful or good, after all, or even designed for all users, and ChatGPT often feels like a service in search of a use.
Nor does the story address the environmental impact of ChatGPT—it uses the daily power of 180,000 households every day, and each query uses 10 times the amount of energy as a regular Google search. Or the simple fact that ChatGPT is often wrong. Just a fun anecdote, I saw today on Bluesky—ChatGPT had told someone the difference between sauces and dressings is that “sauces add flavor and texture to dishes, while dressings are used to protect wounds.” And though the story has an obligatory “plagiarism is bad” moment, it doesn’t recognize the fact that ChatGPT is a plagiarism machine that teachers and professors say is undermining their efforts in the classroom. Sure, call us alarmist if you want. But at least acknowledge the roots of our alarmism.
Say Hello to Fisher the Cat
Some really excellent work by the cat distribution system here: Erik Koffski was fishing in southern Minnesota's Madison Lake last month when he heard the sound of a feline "yelling."
“We were kind of making jokes because it was nonstop, it made those noises for like a half an hour,” he tells MPR's Sam Stroozas. “It slowly worked its way around the bay we were in, started at one end and it worked its way almost to the landing where we were at and then it stopped.”
Next thing Koffski knew, a small, light orange kitten was swimming out to his paddleboard—where it remained, all morning long, as he fished in a tournament. When he got back to shore to head to a different lake, the tiny kitten followed to his trailer and hopped right up in his Jeep. They spent the whole day fishing together, and of course, even though he's not really a cat person, Koffski brought the li'l guy home to his wife and son.
They named him Fisher. (This is where I started tearing up; stray animal stories GET ME.) Folks, please do yourself a favor, click this link, and take a look at the photos of Fisher and Koffski out on the water.
Scotch Tape Is for Losers (And Other Observations)
Scotch Magic Tape isn’t cool. The Minnesota Chamber of Commerce ain’t cool. BMO Bank? Certainly sounds uncool. Why are we bringing these easy truths up? Because the chamber and BMO apparently staged a bracket-style tourney over the past month to determine the “Coolest Thing Made In Minnesota,” and that goddamn tape from the company that poisoned the east metro won. “The 116-year-old chamber launched the competition to highlight the innovative products that fuel Minnesota’s economy,” reads a press release that claims 100,000 votes were cast in this agonizingly boring exercise in corporate boosterism.
Of the 64 products featured, only the following can be deemed “cool”: Lotzza Motzza pizzas, Faribault Mill blankets, Red Wing boots, the Kuuma BluFlame Sauna Stove (just learned about it), and, sure, SPAM, though we'll tsk tsk Hormel's complicity in factory farming and labor abuses. This is all very negative for a Friday, so let’s focus on bona fide cool Minnesota-produced items, many of which were cribbed from this MinnPost list: Zubaz pants, waterskiing, pop-up toasters, Steve Zahn, open-heart surgery, microwave popcorn, Winona Ryder, rollerblades, pizza rolls, snowmobiles, retractable seat belts, Honeycrisp apples, and Bob Dylan. That’s it!
