This writer had a strange encounter Sunday night. Walking downtown, a stranger approached him. The stranger said, "Those squirrels are weird little guys," and then added, "They better watch their place." This writer was bewildered by this, but, flipping through his RSS reader this morning, wonders if this fellow wasn"t from Hibbing, where, as Aaron J. Brown points out in a blog post republished on MinnPost, squirrels are now Public Enemy No. 1. The issue? The little idiots keep electrocuting themselves on power lines, causing outages.

Brown's post is one of a good number of fascinating, Minnesota-related blog posts from this past weekend. For instance, the Let It Unwind blog offers up a fascinating look at the temple-like ING building in downtown Minneapolis, along with several gorgeous photos. The 58th Year blog likewise takes a look at a Minnesota landmark — specifically, Heidi's restaurant, which was damaged in a fire and recently torn down.

Photographer Sopheava de Lumiare happened to be in the Dowling Studio in the Guthrie this weekend when it began to storm, and photographed this imposing image of the skyline through the theater's yellow-tinted glass. Photographer Michael Mingo, in the meanwhile, photographed Minneapolis with his iPhone's HDR application, which maps multiple shots of the same image taken at different stops to create a photograph with a higher dynamic range (thus "HDR"). This all sounds a bit technical, so, if you're wondering what it looks like, well, here.

And now, the news. Lino Lakes is still considering an English-only ordinance proposed by Council Member Dave Roeser, despite the fact that, as blogger John Van Hecke of the Hindsight 20/20 blog points out, Lino Lakes apparently already doesn't print anything in any language other than English. Wait, that can't be true. Maybe the Associated Press can clarify. Ah, yes: "City Council member Dave Roeser acknowledges that his English-only proposal would have no immediate impact. Lino Lakes has never translated official documents into other languages, and no one has asked the city to do so." Perhaps this is what inspired the Star Tribune to offer up a story by Maria Elena Baca that asks in its headline if this is "economics or politics." A local offers up his opinion: "The other is a philosophical reason: If you're coming to this country, English is our language. All our relatives, when they immigrated, they learned to speak English. So should everyone else."

This is not addressed in the story, so we at Glean will address it. English is not the official language of the United States. This country has no official language. There is no legal requirement that you learn English to move to this country, or to live here. It's useful to do so, since 96 percent of the people here speak it, and also it's much harder to read the Daily Glean if you don't speak English. But it's not required, and we at the Glean suspect that most of us had relatives who came here speaking Yiddish or Swedish or Hungarian or some other foreign language and never really mastered English, using their children as translators and mostly interacting with an extended community of fellow expatriates. But that was then and this is now, and, apparently, while it's not actually an issue in Lino Lakes, it must be addressed before it becomes one.

"Economics or politics" is the question in another immigrant story — that of illegal immigrants in Scott County. As a story by David Peterson of the Star Tribune points out, the number of incarcerated illegal immigrants has gone up from 17 to 90 since 2006, costing somewhere in the vicinity of $843,570 "and one cent," although some of this is lowered by reimbursement from the feds; about $61,000. "It really, really bugs me," the story quotes former Sheriff Dave Menden as saying; the story also shows that Menden is bugged at an especially opportune time, as he's running against the incumbent Shakopee-based Commissioner Jerry Hennen.

And, once again, we have an economics or politics story. Democratic gubernatorial candidate Margaret Anderson Kelliher isn't precisely broke, as campaigns go. No, according to Rupa Shenoy of Minnesota Public Radio, she's raised nearly a million bones, or clams, or what-have-you, for her campaign. And she's not what you'd call the working poor either — between her and her husband, they made between $100,000 and $250,000 this year. How do we know this? Because Kelliher voluntarily disclosed it. Why did she do that? Because she's making a case for tightening of the state's financial disclosure law, as Tom Scheck explains in Polinaut.

"This is an obvious shot at one of Kelliher's DFL opponents, Matt Entenza," Sheck declares. Entenza's wife, Lois Quam, apparently did quite well after cashing out stock options at UnitedHealth Group; Entenza has not released their combined earnings. But, as Jason Hoppin of the Pioneer Press points out, Kelliher's other opponent, Mark Dayton, isn't exactly begging for coins in a barrel suit. Is this a gambit, designed to make Kelliher look like the underdog in a race between millionaires? Perhaps, although Dayton did release his earnings from last year: $172,475. We wish he had added "and one cent" on to the end of that. It just sounds so good.

There's no question of economics in Rep. Michele Bachmann's most recent controversial public statement. She has an agenda for the end of the next election cycle, and it is as blunt as it is simple: According to the AP, if the GOP takes control of Congress this election, Bachmann thinks "all we should do is issue subpoenas and have one hearing after another and expose all the nonsense that has gone on." Of course, this isn't a new strategy at all — it's precisely what the GOP did to Bill Clinton, such as the so-called Whitewater Scandal, which resulted in six years of investigation at a cost to taxpayers of $50 million and produced no scandal at all. Eventually, all the subpoenas produced one illicit sexual encounter, which, as everybody no doubt remembers, resulted in Clinton's impeachment. Who doesn't remember, and long for, those halcyon days, that more innocent time?

In arts, MPR's Jessica Mador tells the tale of the Girls Rock 'N Roll Retreat camp, which sounds, well, awesome. The story quotes camp founder Jenny Case: "We are not allowed to apologize for making mistakes or not being good enough, which girls often do. Instead, they have to say, 'I rock!' " Case tells Mador. "So if you hear someone else apologizing for playing the wrong chord, or they are not picking something up quickly and they say sorry, you have to say, 'No — you rock!' "

In sports, well, it's not a good idea to say, "You're on dope." According to the AP, the Timberwolves' president has been fined for describing Michael Beasley as "a very young and immature kid who smoked too much marijuana" when he played for the Miami Heat.  The fine? $50,000. And one cent? We can only hope.