Welcome back to The Flyover, your daily digest of important, overlooked, and/or interesting Minnesota news stories.
Watch Out, Grandma's Runners!
This Saturday around 9,000 runners will compete in Grandma's Marathon, with another 10,000+ participating in shorter runs along the North Shore as part of Minnesota's oldest and largest marathon. The official Grandma's Marathon poster that'll greet 'em? It's, well... it's a big, bombastic artistic swing:
Perhaps due to the current climate of international nuclear saber-rattling, the poster has inspired a combination of doomsday alarm and gallows laughter among viewers. Here's a sampling from the 95 KQDS Facebook community...
"I dunno, looks to me like everyone is running from a nuclear blast," writes Steve Branstrom. "I mean, it is well done."
"The nukes behind them will probably help runners hit their PR’s!" writes Ben Pelerin.
"That’s a nuclear bomb attack," writes Patrick Stephen. "We can’t pretend this isn’t funny."
Racket reached out to the artist, Hartley Bauer, to ask about her inspiration for the poster and reaction to its various responses. We didn't hear back. The young artist, whose portfolio rocks, graduated from Duluth's Denfeld High School. She's currently pursuing an illustration degree from the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York.
And, Pearl Harbor-like, Bauer's 2025 Grandma's Marathon poster is a hit. Prints of her design have sold out online.
We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Theater
As you may have heard, it’s the 50th anniversary of Jaws dunh-dunh, dunh-dunh, dunh-dunh-dunh-dunh-dunh-dunhing its way into theaters. Even for a five-year-old who had no chance in hell of seeing it, Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster was inescapable, spawning (fish term) novelty records that I, Racket film critic Keith Harris, swear to god got played on the radio and not one but two Saturday morning cartoons.
But the real question is: How did Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster affect Minnesotans? And at the Pioneer Press today, Nick Woltman looks back at how the hit film affected the two metro theaters that somehow scored exclusive rights to screen it: the Gopher (900 cap) and the Cine Capri in downtown White Bear Lake (with just 400 seats).
Both theaters set sales records—in its opening week, Jaws grossed $94,000 combined for the two small theaters, or about $580,000 adjusted for inflation—and they sold out every show for weeks. But Universal Pictures put the squeeze on the two movie houses, with book terms that allowed the studio to “put its own ‘jaws’ into the theaters playing the movie,” as PiPress entertainment writer Bill Diehl wrote at the time.
The terms were so burdensome that, as Diehl put it, “One theaterman earlier had wired the studio that he wouldn’t meet Universal’s terms ‘until Hell freezes over.’ After viewing the movie he shot off another wire: ‘Hell has just frozen over!’”
In addition to requiring a 12-week run, locking in the theaters for the full summer, Universal got a whopping 90 percent of the box office revenue. Woltman notes that Cine Capri closed in 1977 and the Gopher only survived till 1979 by shifting to X-rated films.
The Vibes Are off at the Strib’s AI Generated Culinary Compass
Yesterday, the Minnesota Star Tribune launched Culinary Compass, a new digital product that recommends restaurants based on little surveys you fill out—neato! The questionnaire asks about your budget, the time you plan to go out (brunch vs. late-night eats), vibes, and patio options, among other things. Next AI searches the paper’s restaurant archives and tells you to… try out The Howe.
Well, it might tell you to check out The Howe. We also got the Nicollet Diner and The Lowry a bunch of times when playing with categories. Those are all OK-ish places, but aren’t exactly the kind of results you want when clicking on things like “candlelight and romance” or “special experience.”
“AI is helping to process the restaurant ‘vibes’ and user inputs to match it with recommendations from the Food & Culture team’s history of restaurant news and reviews,” an email on the Culinary Compass launch states. Ah, there’s what’s going wrong; never trust a robot to process “vibes.”
Culinary Compass is apparently the first public-facing AI initivitive from the Strib. Last year, CEO (and former YouTube tech bro) Steve Grove announced the paper would be participating in the Lenfest Institute AI Collaborative and Fellowship Program, which grants papers up to $10 million for AI projects. That’s a lot of money for underwhelming recs. Imagine if the money could be earmarked for human reporters instead... alas! (Neither Star Tribune Media Co. or the Strib union would talk to us about the company's foray into AI journalism.)
Just another example of how AI is still lagging behind humanity: 20 years ago, places like City Pages and the Thrifty Hipster deployed people-made databases on their sites that could narrow suggestions by neighborhood, cuisine type, full bar—all in one go. Heck, AI or not this current one over at Mpls.St.Paul works pretty well.
Journey to the Cosmos... of MN
We're suckers for hokey/folksy local TV news segments, and WCCO's "Finding MN" series delivered a shining example of the genre earlier this week. Reporter John Lauritsen traveled to Meeker County to introduce viewers to Cosmos, Minnesota—a space-themed town of 500.
We learn from a town historian about how early plans for a major university never materialized. We learn the streets were successfully named after planets, galaxies, and constellations, and about the annual Space Festival Parade and monthly Galactic Gazette newsletter. We learn about the existence of Neptune Ned and "a random bird simply known as Local Chicken."
We learn... more about ourselves? Not really. But for those seeking to take one small step toward killing some time, you could do a lot worse.
