Welcome back to The Flyover, your daily digest of important, overlooked, and/or interesting Minnesota news stories.
Love Is Blind—And So Is the Freakin' Umpire!
The new, Minnesota-shot season of hit Netflix dating show Love Is Blind has already exhausted our critic on the basis of it being punishingly boring. But could there be unexplored local angles, ones that might lend even an Eddie Gaedel-level of excitement to the show? Well, Michael Baumann found one.
Writing for FanGraphs, the hybrid baseball/LIB nut revealed that two current contestants—33-year-old David Bettenburg and 28-year-old Ben Mezzenga—played college ball for the University of Minnesota. (Bettenburg, a medical device salesman in the plastic surgery field, is being portrayed as the messy villain; Mezzenga, a churchy/apolitical developer, is taking heat over allegations he's a dirtball.)
In what has to be first-of-its-kind reporting, Baumann dug deep into the stats of those two love-seeking ex-hardballers, placing special emphasis on how they performed against future pros. Here's our favorite line...
In what was a real low point for my sense of professional worth, I reached out to the University of Minnesota’s athletic communications department to see if they had the 2011 box scores kicking around somewhere. They didn’t. Undeterred, I spent more time than I would’ve liked copying seven seasons of box scores into a format that would allow me to draw conclusions about Bettenburg’s and Mezzenga’s careers.
What inspired Baumann to undertake this exhaustive exploration of collegiate sports and reality TV? We asked, and he answered...
I might be the only Love Is Blind fan who is also a college baseball sicko. Like I said in the article, whenever one of these guys brags about a college athletic career, I immediately go look up how much of it is legit and how much is exaggerated. So when I found out Ben had actually been a really good player for a really good team, I started looking up how he did against future big leaguers like Tommy Henry and Tylor Megill, and things snowballed from there. I'm glad the readers seem to be just as amused by the premise as I was. I just hope that anyone out in the dating world remembers that if a potential partner tries to brag about their athletic career, you can and should go online and fact check their stats.
ICE Now Shipping Immigrants Around the U.S.
At least 11 immigrant detainees in Minnesota county jails have recently been relocated to a facility near Houston, Texas, Maya Rao reports for the Star Tribune. At least one of these immigrants, a Bloomington resident from El Salvador, had no apparent criminal record.
“It’s a big country, so it’s effectively like a mini-deport—you’re taking [detainees] and putting them a thousand miles away from their family,” immigration attorney Cameron Giebink tells Rao. As the story points out this also makes it more difficult for lawyers to represent, and more likely that an immigrant would slip between the cracks.
"The way a state treats its aliens is the way it would treat its own subjects if it dared," the Scottish journalist Neal Ascherson once wrote. Something to keep in mind as we watch ICE bend the rules as far as it can under the Trump Administration.
The Breakfast Burritos of Longfellow
Just because it's Sandwich Week doesn't mean we can't mix things up a little... let's talk about breakfast burritos!
Specifically, let's talk about 10 breakfast burritos located throughout Minneapolis's greater Longfellow area, as highlighted in this piece co-authored by Longfellow Whatever's Trevor Born and James Norton of the local food newsletter Heavy Table. (Norton is also a Longfellow resident.) The pair used an "unrigorous scoring system" to rank the 'ritos, with Habanero Grill coming in last (2.5 / 5.0, "meaty, gritty, and wet") and Longfellow Grill topping the list in a surprise upset (4.5 / 5.0, "a master class in how to let creamy, slightly browned hashbrowns serve as the base layer for your burrito").
The scarfin' duo also stopped everywhere from Tacos El Primo to Turtle Bread to the Loncheria Los Amigos food truck, with Born providing background on the restaurants and Norton writing about the burritos themselves. A fun concept that made me excited to go out for breakfast this weekend.
Your Mom Is Learning How To Grow Weed at Bachman’s
Minnesota garden shop Bachman’s has always been green friendly. But with the addition of a new “home cannabis cultivation” class it’s becoming green friendly. And wow, are folks interested in signing up for these $5 workshops, which are hosted by Emily Kowalski of Waxwing Horticulture. According to J.D. Duggan at the Twin Cities Business Journal, Saturday’s event at the Lyndale Avenue location quickly sold out, and a March 8 session soon followed. “With the legalization of home-grown cannabis in Minnesota, Bachman’s is dedicated to continuing to be an educational leader in the gardening community,” says a a Bachman’s spokesperson says in a release.
But fear not, home bakers! Bachman’s isn’t the only place you can learn about seeds, set-ups, the law, and more. Minnesota Cannabis College, for example, has a few five-week online courses starting up in May. CannaJoyMN hosts a ton of weekly homegrower meetups featuring guest experts, and the seeds and supplies to get you started are right there (Bachman’s has the growing supplies, but not the seeds). CannaConnectMN also has a calendar page listing events for weed novices and entrepreneurs alike.
