Welcome back to The Flyover, your daily digest of important, overlooked, and/or interesting Minnesota news stories.
Wild Turkey's Killer Potentially ID'd
Last week mourning extended from Minneapolis's Kenny neighborhood and beyond as news spread about the death of Kennethy, a reportedly beloved wild turkey whose favorite activity ("direct[ing] traffic") ultimately led to his getting smushed by a vehicle. Earlier today, Southwest Voices published additional speculation about what happened to the bird who also went by Gregory Peck, Gregg, Rupert, Herbert, Tom, James, and Mr. Turkey: Rumor has it a U.S. Postal Service worker hit Kennethy with a truck on February 24 at the intersection of 56th Street & James Avenue.
Adding to the drama, a postal worker was allegedly observed attacking a turkey in the neighborhood a week earlier. “He was just walking down the stairs, picked [the shovel] up, and then just jammed [the turkey] in the chest as hard as he could,” an anonymous eyewitness tells Southwest Voices. (USPS didn't provide an immediate response.)
Residents are "uneasy" about the way Kennethy died, Melody Hoffmann reports, and some have contacted the Diamond Lake post office and Minneapolis Animal Care and Control about it. “We would see him kind of sauntering down the street and then just standing in the middle of the road and demanding that people go around him,” one neighbor remembers of Kennethy. “I think he was teaching us something about ourselves.” Adds another: “The animal never darted... I think that's what some people got impatient with."
$750K for 1 Week of Ice Rink Operations
Our freaky-warm winter created a costly window for ice rink recreation at Minneapolis parks. For nearly two months park workers hosed down 45 rinks, the Strib's Susan Du reports, only to watch 'em melt away for good by mid-January. The total cost for those eight viable days of icy fun? Exactly $750,187. The experience has park officials planning ahead for increasingly warm winters, which may or may not present cause to freak out. "I think it's a wake up call," Park Commissioner Becky Alper tells Du. "If you look at the long-range forecasts, I think we can expect more variability in temperatures... Let's plan for that so we're better serving the public with the resources that we have." Through a combo punch of climate change and El Niño, this has been the warmest winter on record for most of Minnesota, MPR News reports, with Twin Cities temperatures soaring 10.3 degrees above average; since 1970, our average wintertime temp has crept up by 5.3 degrees. Sounds dread-inducing to us!
Study: Minnesota Feet Under-Monetized
That's the kinky collusion drawn from a spammy press release our newsroom received from a fetish marketplace app called FeetFinder. According to a study (term used very loosely) conducted by FeedFinder's crack research team, Minnesota ranks 45th in terms of search volume related to the buying and selling of feet pix. Data sets were reportedly geo-combed for 27 keywords, including: “how to sell feet pics,” “feet pics for sale,” “sell feet pics,” “sexy feet,” “pretty feet,” “good feet,” “hot feet,” “feet videos,” “sucking toes,” “bare feet."
The horniest states for feet include Nevada at No. 1, followed by Arizona, Florida, Colorado, and Georgia. The five states even less interested in feet than Minnesota? Alaska, Mississippi, Vermont, Montana, and South Dakota.
"Our data reveals Americans are searching for foot fetish-related search terms nearly 1.5 million times per month on average," concludes an unnamed spokesperson for FeetFinder. "Foot fetishes are common across America and seem to be growing in popularity year on year. Even so, celebrities including Britney Spears, Quentin Tarantino, and Elvis Presley have openly spoken about having a foot fetish." (You'll notice none of those celeb foot-freaks hail from Minnesota, more or less adding legitimacy to FeetFinder's landmark study.)
Did You Know the St. Paul Saints Were Reality TV Pioneers?
St. Paul Saints owner Mike Veeck followed in his dad's footsteps as a promotions guru with surplus creativity and an endless appetite for spectacle. But do you remember the time his team, then members of the independent Northern League, had their season cataloged in something of a precursor to HBO's hit football doc Hard Knocks? It really happened! Here's the New York Times previewing FX series Baseball, Minnesota in 1996.
That Baseball, Minnesota chronicles the minor league Saints, not the major league Twins, should not be a turnoff. This real-life soap opera is about men striving for maybe their last chance at pro ball. ''You may say they're losers with lame dreams, but they're getting paid to play baseball, which is more than you and I were,'' said Gary Cohen, the executive producer.
At this point you might be saying: "Racket that's infinitely interesting, and thank god there's a news outlet in town that cares, but tell me whether or not the entire damn thing is documented for my perusal on YouTube!" In the vernacular of the '96 Saints, who featured down-on-his-luck major leaguer Darryl Strawberry? Play ball!
