Welcome back to The Flyover, your daily digest of important, overlooked, and/or interesting Minnesota news stories.
Step Aside, Project 2025: We Gotta Talk About the 2035 Plan
Does the Minneapolis Downtown Council read Racket? We're asking, futilely and into the void, because the biz-friendly booster org just released its anticipated 2035 Plan to reimagine downtown and... a lot of the recommendations were floated earlier this year by yours truly?
Public restrooms, turning the gorgeous post office into a riverside attraction, beautifying with greenery, transforming Nicollet Mall into a pedestrian corridor, making parking easier—check, check, check, etc. The glossy, corporate-jargony, 131-page report even includes a pull quote from Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, recounting the time he almost shit himself due to downtown's abysmal bathroom situation! (We explored that saga in-depth here.)
The plan (paging Built to Spill...) calls for cool stuff we didn't consider, like ambitiously converting office space into residential properties and doing High Liney things with the skyway system, plus adding indoor parks, dog parks, and skating rinks. Then again, there's a sweaty fixation on attaining a Michelin star restaurant, and "expediting MPD staffing" doesn't sound like a formula for producing good cops. Over on Bluesky, ex-journo/current poster David Brauer seems generally skeptical of the Minneapolis Downtown Council.
"There’s a lot of energy around downtown, but luckily, we’re almost all heading in the same direction and working on the same thing," MDC CEO Adam Duininck tells Twin Cities Business. "It’s a question of prioritization and collaboration.”
And here are those renderings we promised:
Grape Salad, Revisited
Where were you when Grapegate happened? Believe it or not, we've lived a full decade since the New York Times aggravated the entire state of Minnesota by suggesting we cherish the strange holiday dish known as grape salad, which was supposedly conceived by an unnamed heiress.
In an article headlined “United States of Thanksgiving,” Times reporters claimed they "scoured the nation for recipes that evoke each of the 50 states,” but their WTF pick for Minnesota felt as if those coastal elites were spitting grapes, sour cream, and brown sugar into our misunderstood Midwestern faces. Last week Anna Haecherl of MPR News published a nifty retrospective of the ordeal, which culminated with the NYT—an outlet that has yet to fully hold itself accountable for cheerleading us into the Iraq War—issuing something of a mea culpa to Minnesotans. In any event, it's fun to revisit the white-hot rage we felt and, sure, still feel today over Grapegate.
“I could not be more outraged by the whole grape salad thing. That has nothing to do with Minnesota. We don’t grow those green table grapes. We definitely don’t grow them in November… and pecans are from the south,” veteran food writer Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl told MPR in '14. "I think it’s almost like a veiled insult. They want to be beating us over the head with Jell-O salad but they don’t actually have the guts to do it.”
HBD, MST3K
Has it really been 36 years since Mystery Science Theater 3000 debuted via Minneapolis TV station KTMA, aka Channel 23? According to this reliable-seeming tweet, yes! (Worth noting? I had debuted, via my mother, one year earlier.) The beloved movie-riffing program has been rebooted and crowdfunded back to life over the years, and its core crew—Michael J. Nelson, Kevin Murphy, and Bill Corbett—still yuks it up as RiffTrax; in fact, RiffTrax just inked a weekly streaming deal. This 2018 Rolling Stone feature, headlined "Mystery Science Theater 3000 at 30: How a Cult TV Show Changed Pop Culture," does a nice job of encapsulating the sneakily huge MST3K legacy...
This show’s original community of fans bonded through the Internet, right when bulletin boards and e-mail groups were becoming popular. And today’s social media sometimes resembles Mystery Science Theater 3000, in the way people turn photos into memes, or snarkily live-tweet through big events. But from 1988 to now, this series has never really been set up to go viral. Even in its ’90s heyday, MST3K was just a little show from Minnesota, aimed at the handful of people in every TV market who’d find jokes about Morrissey, Gamera and the NBC Mystery Movie equally funny. It’s always been artisan-crafted, with a dorky kind of love: a snarky little show made by a few, for a few. The fact that it turned into the eye-roll heard around the world may be the biggest goof of them all.
Shoutout to MNopedia
The Minnesota Historical Society maintains and regularly updates an online encyclopedia known as MNopedia. It'd be easy for these great entries to go unnoticed, but thankfully MinnPost regularly posts 'em for maximum visibility. In just the past month, we've gotten: two detailed explainers on the first people of Minnesota, the Dakota and the Ojibwe; a primer on St. Paul hardcore legends Hüsker Dü; and a piece about how more than 2,000 Native families benefited from the Civilian Conservation Corps, a rare instance of the federal government actually helping those demographics. Artificial limb history, hockey history, celebrity horse history—MNopedia contains multitudes.
