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E.T. Phone Home? More Like E.T. Home Decor.
If you were a child of the early ‘80s, you were probably jump-scared by this thing at least once, whether you came across it unexpectedly at a friend’s place or under a pile of stuff at a garage sale. Made with molded plastic and standing over 3 feet tall, this E.T. laundry hamper looked like the real thing, his haunting eyes forever staring off in the distance.
In 2026, this kinda cool, but also odd piece of marketing is considered extremely rare and, as you can see via this eBay search, it can cost anywhere from $600–$3,000. But if you’re looking to buy one locally, look no further than Troy Troupe out in Andover. He’s selling his E.T. hamper, which looks to be in pretty good condition, for the reasonable price of $1,300.
“I have had it since the movie came out. We actually bought it at Children’s Palace,” Troupe tells Racket, name dropping the long-gone Pittsburgh-based toy store. “My focus has gone from toys to sports, so it was just time to part with it.”
Troupe notes that while it’s usually referred to as a hamper online, it was really intended to be more of a toy box. (There's a hollow space in the back.) And while he says he’s had lots of questions about his E.T. for sale, he’s yet to receive any serious offers.
Data Centers Drove Minnesotans to Polls, Spurred Minneapolis City Council Into Regulatory Action
Data centers, those unholy shrines to Big Tech's AI ambitions, are loathed by Minnesotans. But how is that bipartisan animosity translating politically? Glad you asked, because two recent news items shed light on that very subject.
Reporting for MinnPost, Brian Arola found that voter turnout spiked in communities starring the barrel of hyperscale data center construction. That means increased participation in City Council races in places like Farmington (+48%), Faribault (+61%), and Hermantown (+18%). “This was the issue that everyone wanted to talk about,” Farmington City Council candidate Ben Blomgren tells MinnPost. “When I went door to door, it was about the data center.
Will this new crop of elected officials who oppose data centers—like victorious Hermantown CC candidate Emma Richtman, who you might remember from this Racket story—be able to halt the interests of Silicon Valley oligarchs? Does democracy even work? Can we hear from Arola? "It's unclear," he writes.
Closer to home, Cait Kelley of MPR News has this story about the Minneapolis City Council voting 7-6 late Thursday to mandate council approval of all new data center projects. The package of compromise regulations also stipulates that new data center construction would be limited to two areas downtown. (The city's temporary data center moratorium expires next week.)
“This would allow us to have an up or down vote that evolves with the industry,” Council Member Aurin Chowdhury said Thursday, citing concerns like surveillance technology. “We cannot ask our residents to just trust an industry that has created a high concern over livability and well-being.”
As you've already intuited, Mayor Jacob Frey doesn't support case-by-case data center approvals. He says he might veto the new measure. Interesting to see the downtown-booster contingent pant like hungry dogs over the prospect of downtown becoming... a humanless server farm.
Middle-Class Problems
For the latest episode of the Strib's Essential Minnesota podcast (gift link), we hear from reporter Emma Nelson, who spoke with dozens of people who consider themselves middle class about why life feels so hard these days.
American confidence in the economy hit an all-time low in May, and in recent months, Nelson has been working on a series of stories that address why the middle class feels so specifically squeezed. She sent surveys to Minnesotans across the state and received more than 300 responses from folks who were willing to share the intimate financial details of their lives. "There's often a sense of 'why,' why is it so hard? I have the degrees, I have the job ... but it still feels really hard," Nelson says.
Perhaps the complaints we hear from Star Tribune sources over the course of the half-hour episode will feel familiar to you: There's no sense to the cost of anything anymore; six figures doesn't buy what it used to; health care costs just keep skyrocketing; the "brutal math" of raising two kids. You might have a middle-class income, but life doesn't feel as easy as it seems it should; did it always require two incomes to afford a house and a car? Not a lot of upside here—sorry!—but maybe hearing from her interview subjects will at least make you feel a little less alone.
RIP Palace Pub, We Hardly Knew Ye
The spot on West 7th Place in St. Paul, adjacent to the Palace Theatre, seems like it’d be an ideal site for offering pre-show eats. It certainly seemed so to the Palace’s owner, First Avenue, which first took over the space previously occupied by the Wild Tymes sports bar in 2017.
However, Brianna Kelly of Bring Me the News is reporting that First Ave has abruptly closed the Palace Pub, the restaurant that opened on that plaza just a year earlier. And the Palace was the second First Ave attempt to establish a restaurant at that spot. Wrecktangle Pizza opened there in 2023, in partnership with First Avenue. But all did not go well: Wrecktangle closed that spot in 2025 and First Avenue sued its former partner for $1.6 million last November.
