Another honor! Minnesota declared ‘least miserable state’

Editor’s note: Former Glean writer Max Sparber is filling in for Brian Lambert for a few days.

You know what Minnesotans love? They love being on lists. They especially love being at the top of lists. Declare Minnesota one of the top five places to hire a hit man and Minnesotans will smile all week. Show numbers that Minnesotans watch more online videos of kittens than everybody else and we’ll declare it ERMAHGERD Day.

So there’s a complicated Heisenberg Principle at work in that a Bloomberg analysis declared Minnesota to be the “least miserable state.” Are we really less unhappy that anybody else, or did the impending fact of being on a list — at the top of one, no less! — push us a little further out of our misery? City Pages has the story.

We also love our minor-league baseball team, the Saints. We love that they are co-owned by Bill Murray. We love that the mascot is two trained pigs named The Notorious P.I.G. and Piggy Smalls. We love that a train passes the stadium often, and that the announcers will simply pause in whatever they are doing to say “train.” Although that final part might not last, as Rochelle Olson of the Strib reports. There is a new stadium planned, as you probably know, and today the plan got $25 million in development grants — just $2 million short of what St. Paul was looking for, and a healthy chunk of the stadium’s $54 million budget. $2 million is nothing. Murray can probably just make another Garfield movie and pay that off with his per diem. And we’ll all go see it. We love cat videos.

Following up an earlier story, Frederick Melo of the PiPress reports that the St. Paul McDonald’s that printed a billboard in Hmong that was so badly translated it wasn’t even in Hmoob has redressed its error with a properly translated billboard. That’s all very nice, but an apology is always so much sweeter with a free Shamrock Shake, and I don’t care if it is a few months too early, or that I am not Hmong. I want a Shamrock Shake.

The combined powers of evangelists Brother Jed and Sister Cindy, who claims once to have been a disco queen, have been regular visitors to the University of Minnesota campus for so long that when they started, former disco queen sounded somewhat contemporary. Nowadays, it’s a bit like referring to oneself as a Charleston Champion. Nonetheless, the duo were generally politely ignored, with occasional outflarings of hot tempers, as the pair are decidedly provocative. I mean, here’s the opening sentence from a story by Cody Nelson in the Minnesota Daily: “A woman thrusting a condom into the air yelling ‘behold your God!’ shocked students walking along Northrop Mall on Wednesday afternoon.”

Man, that’s just good theater, and, as a result, the evangelists got a rousingly theatrical response, including a theater arts junior pictured in what appears to be a leftover costume from “Pirates of Penzance.” I’m not mocking the student, by the way. I was a theater student at the University of Minnesota, and dressed like a character from Pippin. I also used to be a disco dance instructor. That’s a true statement, by the way, and I take no shame in it, although the Pippin costume is sort of a sore point.

FOX9, in the meanwhile, noticed something on the Weather Channel they felt we should be alerted to. Apparently, we have a heck of an allergy season to look forward to — “worse and longer” than almost any in recent history. This could be a bit of a bummer, but all we have to do is make a list and put ourselves on it and we’ll cheer right up. Minnesota: We have among the worst and longest allergy season!

Ermahgerd.