Welcome back to The Flyover, your daily digest of important, overlooked, and/or interesting Minnesota news stories.
Thin Nice
As we never tire of mentioning here at Racket, we are hardly branding, marketing, or advertising whizzes. (We would all have more money if we were.) Simple folk that we are, we can only look on in stupefaction as clients shovel cash over to the professionals who dream up “WeDo,” or “the Minneapolis Star Tribune,” or… “Bring the Nice?”
Yes, as Steve Marsh reports at Minneapolis St. Paul Magazine, that final slogan is being adopted by the Minnesota Timberwolves this year. Marsh spoke with Chris Raih of Zambezi, the agency responsible for the slogan, who said the riff off of "Minnesota nice" was “authentic to the market” but not “overly promissory.” “We are redefining nice into something more athletic and aggressive,” he argued. (The word is pronounced “niiiiice,” just as it is on playgrounds, as you can hear in the video below.) To my ears, it sounds like a weak PG edit of the organically winning slogan “Bring Ya Ass.” Maybe they should've had Ant in those branding meetings.
Kids ‘n’ Crime
What do you do with kids who commit crimes? A vexed question, to be sure, far more complicated than the people who shout “where are the parents???” on NextDoor will admit. And as Jessie Van Berkel and Liz Sawyer reported over at the Strib this weekend, the situation is even more complicated when the kids have mental health issues. These kids (a small percentage of the minors arrested) aren’t supposed to wind up in Juvenile Detention Centers, but with a third fewer beds in mental health facilities available than there were 20 years ago, that’s where they often go, untreated, if not back out of the street, where they’re shortly picked up again for another offense. The piece is certainly worth reading in full.
“This Shit Was Stolen From Us”
So said Lynx Coach Cheryl Reeve last night after her team lost the championship to the New York Liberty, suggesting that the outcome was due to officiating that was not just poor but biased. “All the headlines will be, ‘Reeve cries foul,’” she continued. “Bring it on, right?” Well, she was certainly right about that—her comments, rather than either team’s on-court performance, became the subject of today’s sports coverage.
Joe Nelson agrees with Reeve at Bring Me the News, saying that “Did Breanna Stewart travel before she was bailed out by a phantom foul?” is as easy a question to answer in the affirmative as “Is the sky blue?” At the Strib, they’re more circumspect about the matter. Jim Souhan presents a sort of Cubist portrait of Reeve’s remarks, looking at the ways in which they were honest, rude, calculating, out of control, on point, dangerous, off point, and revealing. (Why have one opinion when you can have eight?) Calling referees “the perfect enemy for our time,” Michael Rand discusses how in both the Lynx loss and this weekend’s Vikings loss it’s easy to overlook the times that bad calls went in favor of the Minnesota teams.
Ugly Pumpkins Are In
Or so KARE 11 tells us. The station headed to Ferguson's Minnesota Harvest in Jordan, where, according to co-owner Andy Ferguson, people just love ugly pumpkins. "Every year it's getting more and more popular,” he says. Why is that? As an aging shut-in, I just assume everything I don’t know or care about is “a TikTok thing,” but Ferguson credits the children’s character Spookley the Square Pumpkin, who I gather is the gourd world’s answer to Rudolph. Ferguson also points out that the ug—I mean, unconventionally attractive pumpkins are supposed to look that way. "If every pumpkin looked the same, that wouldn't be very exciting," Ferguson says. Spoken like a guy who’s got a lot of fucked-up-looking pumpkins to sell.
