Welcome back to The Flyover, your daily digest of important, overlooked, and/or interesting Minnesota news stories.
Stribby Is Basically Poochie
Due to a decades-long series of poor life choices, I've become Minnesota's de facto mascot reporter. I've ranked 'em; I've introduced readers to the odd civic outliers, like Elmer and Skip; and now I must appraise Stribby—the *ahem* Minnesota Star Tribune's recently unveiled brand mascot.
Self-congratulating was on overdrive at Strib HQ over the weekend, as the upper Midwest's largest media organization relaunched as the Minnesota Star Tribune, an expensive-seeming corporate refresh that came courtesy of local ad firm Colle McVoy... whose CEO, Christine Fruechte, happens to be board chair of Star Tribune Media Co. Among the highlights of Sunday's NYT puff piece that only features quotes from Strib executives: The splashy new typefaces, the shoehorning of "Minnesota" into the brand name, the first-ever cash infusion from Republican billionaire owner Glen Taylor, and the statewide coverage expansion efforts, none of which necessarily means additional investment in newsroom jobs. (We've reached out to the Strib union for its general thoughts.) But the Gray Lady omitted any mention of Stribby, the anthropomorphized gray duck (get it?) who you can apply to embody.
Conceptually, Stribby is an amalgamation of low-hanging Minnesota regionalisms, and for the love of god, I can't stop thinking about his name—it's unintentionally ripped from a 27-year-old Simpsons joke about writers not trying! Readers learned more about Stribby from this tortured bio featured in the Sunday paper. The duck listens to Bob Dylan and Prince. He's "frenemies" with geese. His unsolicited personal philosophy, almost certainly the product of staggering per-hour charges from Colle McVoy, is "be calm on the surface, but paddle like heck underneath." Artistically, it must be noted, the cartoon Stribby looks delightful thanks to his creator, talented Twin Cities cartoonist Kevin Cannon. Also it, well, certainly can be noted that Racket's Keith Harris is an unabashed and enthusiastic Stribby fan.
At this point, you might be thinking: "Hey assholes, it's fun and easy to talk trash about poor ol' Stribby, who I'll admit has unspeakably weird kneecaps in towering IRL form, but where's your ironic attempt at creating a half-baked animalistic brand mascot?" And to that we say: a) watch your tone!; and b) stay tuned...
In the meantime, good luck out there, Stribby.
Neighborhood to City: Do Something About the Third Precinct!
Remember when the 3rd Minneapolis Police Precinct became a flashpoint for the protests and riots that continue to be weaponized politically in this, the election year of our lord 2024? So do the folks who live next to its burnt-out shell, and they're losing patience with the city's failure to do something about the ugly reminder next door. Among the neighbor-sourced descriptions of the city-owned building collected by Sahan Journal's Katrina Pross: “eyesore," "blight," "distressing,” and “a constant reminder.”
At a tense meeting earlier this month between area business owners and city officials, the proprietors pleaded for concrete barriers around the building to come down ASAP, Pross reports. “It’s a source of utter disappointment,” says Chris Mozena, executive director of the Hook and Ladder Theater & Lounge. Adds Jamie Schwesnedl, owner of Moon Palace Books, “We just want the city to work with us and not just be like, ‘Here’s what we’re doing.'"
A proposed three-story "democracy center"—which would house voter services and outreach, plus an 8,000-square-foot community space—could emerge by 2026, but its cost hasn't been established and there's no deadline for $1.5 million in budgeted cleanup efforts. “The reality is that the city has done a lack of engagement to actually hear what people need in that corner,” City Council Member Jason Chavez tells Sahan Journal.
It's Not Easy Being Green for Downtown Minneapolis
No parts of downtown Minneapolis will ever be mistaken for Central Park. As any lunching desk jockey will tell you, finding green space amid the skyscrapers and parking lots is no easy task. In fact, as readers learned last week in Racket's exploration of how increasing extreme heat will impact Minnesota, “land-hungry” development has turned much of the city into baking rivers of asphalt. But! As Streets.MN blogger Bryan Formhals recently discovered, there are sneakily leafy pockets of downtown to enjoy—from the kinda obvious (Minneapolis Sculpture Garden) to the more obscure (patches around the Convention Center).
"The greenery is all around downtown, and I’m particularly interested in what I call 'idiosyncratic green spaces'—a term that may seem ambiguous," he writes. "For me, these are the green spaces we might overlook or find in less-than-idyllic locations." In his research, Formhals stumbled onto the University of Minnesota's "Minneapolis Tree Canopy Map," a super-neat data map that allows users to scan for neighborhood-specific leaf density ratings. It may or may not shock you to learn that, generally, things get greener the farther south you venture.
Hero Dog Captures, Stick-Like, Historically Dog-Occupied Mayorship
We'd like to extend a congratulatory "arf, arf" to Khaleesi Sherbrooke, a three-year-old, 140-pound Great Pyrenees who was elected mayor of Cormorant, Minnesota.
Khaleesi, who, yes, was named after the Game of Thrones character, won in a landslide 76.5% victory, having collected 103,000 votes in an election fight between two other dogs and a 29-year-old YouTuber. (Cormorant, population 1,407, conducted the voting through social media, hence the eyebrow-raising vote tally.) USA Today reports that Khaleesi is popular and friendly, and her mayoral duties will mostly include representing the town at events like Saturday's 13th Annual Cormorant Daze Festival, at which she'll be officially sworn in.
If the words "dog mayor" and "Cormorant" are jogging your memory, that's likely because you remember the town's first-ever mayor, Duke, a beloved Great Pyrenees/politician. Duke won office in 2015, served with great honor until his 2018 retirement, and sadly died the following year, leaving the mayor's office vacant ever since. "In 2015 we decided, hey, let's get a mayor," Tammy Odegaard, chairperson of Cormorant Daze, tells USA Today. "But then out of the blue, they all elected a dog, a neighborhood dog that everybody loved so much."
Khaleesi has big paws to fill, but she sure looks up to the task.
