Here are some interesting links I have collected over the last week for you all to enjoy and hopefully discuss:
1. According to the MNSun, UMore Park is having their 9th annual open house on Thursday August 20th which will include many vegetables, fruits and nuts which possess cancer-preventing compounds. The event is free!
2. Valley Natural Foods is giving away a free bike courtesy of Honest Tea and Jamis bicycles. All you have to do is fill out an entry form and forever be spammed to death by fliers, circulars, and other mailbox annoyances.
3. According to the Star Tribune, a Burnsville man is accused of attempting to run over and harm a bicyclist with an axe because he felt the rider was “trailer trash”. Classy.
4. Lakeville blogger Steve Eck learns why South Metro transit options, especially later in the evening, suck. I have ridden the same route he has–but only once–and I concur.
5. According to the Pioneer Press, Eagan principal Doug Steele originally ousted from his job over forcing a kid to clean up his own toilet mess, has been suspended without pay for 15 days and will return to the district as a principal at large (more from the Pioneer Press, again, here and from the Star Tribune here). Better than being outright fired I suppose.
6. Jeremy, an Eagan blogger, is having his bathroom remodeled into a $20,000 palace for the the DIY Network’s BATHtastic! series. That is going to be one major fucking upgrade! Keep following along on his site for more updates to the project.
7. Serious Eats gives us a tasty looking Hot Habanero Salsa recipe that looks absolutely delicious. I cannot wait to try this one out for myself!
8. Nothing terribly funny in the Star Tribune’s South Metro Police Blotter this week but an important read as always.
9. The Star Triubune reports as a followup to the original discussion on the zero tolerance policy at ISD 191, the school district has given some room for minor mistakes and reduced the automatic expulsion to lesser charges on the first offense if the incident warrants it.
10. According to the MNSun, Burnsville has decided to end the senior lunch option (#6) and instead open a “learning” cafe inside the building for use by students. It will be staffed by a federally funded (we know how well that will work out) senior citizen position and will serve sandwiches, coffee, and soft-drinks.
I’m sorry but taking away a fun option and adding something absolutely fucking lame and following the same failed business models of so many other local restaurants is just not a good way to teach students about how to run a successful business.
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I’m mostly interested in what you think about the poor transit options available in the South Metro and if you believe that BRT will solve them. Also would love to hear your thoughts on Burnsville’s ending the senior lunch and instead bringing a “working cafe” into the high school to use as a learning lab. Will this option be well received and will it actually work when they’re serving sandwiches, coffee, and soda with federally funded positions? Whatever you feel about any of the links above, feel free to comment on and let us know what you think!
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August 14th, 2009 at 9:06 am
From the blotter
Wouldn’t that lead to an arrest? Does this maybe mean that a passenger ended up driving? Weird. Found the statutes… Apparently driving drunk is just a misdemeanor if the first time, or it’s been more than 10 years since the last. Of course it’s a Gross Misdemeanor if you’ve never been convicted of drunk driving before, but refuse to take a test.
We allow for zero tolerance where a kid can get suspended and expelled from high school because he left a box cutter on the floor of his car that he uses at work. And yet, you drive drunk once, that’s o.k. Go on home. I thought we didn’t want drunk drivers on the road?
That transit issue, working late, is exactly the reason why each time I’ve looked at it, I’ve had to say no to mass transit. Buses are not convenient south of the river.
20k on a bathroom remodel? I hope they bought the house when the price was low or the bathroom is the lone sore spot in a 400K home. Investing in your home is all well and good, but what kind of return can you expect if you spend so much on a bathroom?
August 14th, 2009 at 9:09 am
Mikeh, he didn’t have to spend the $20,000. From his other posts on the subject it would appear that he had to put in $3,000 and the rest came from donations and the show itself.
August 14th, 2009 at 9:23 am
The high school cafe idea sounds like it could be cool, but I’m saying that now as a 28 year old. I guarantee I wouldn’t have given a shit when I was in high school. So it sounds like they’ll hire a senior citizen at first, but then they expect it to be staffed by volunteer student labor? Is that right? or will the students be paid? If it’s volunteer… it might be a hard sell to convince students to work there for free when they could do the same thing at Subway and get paid for it.
I’ll bet that opting out of that first hour study hall will be a very popular option.
August 14th, 2009 at 9:51 am
While I like Jeremy’s blog, it is an acquired taste, so to speak. :) Afterglide might be a bit much for some of your readers (I had to word these sentences carefully so they didn’t look totally dirty on the comment preview). As far as a return, I think he mentioned once that he bought his place in 2000, but I could be imagining that.
I’ve been in Steve’s shoes before with needing to take transit in the evening. Aside from all of the other issues with it, BRT would have to run pretty frequently and throughout more of the day to take care of this problem.
August 14th, 2009 at 9:55 am
Tim, I figured that if you’re reading this site you could handle some “fucks”, “farts”, and “poop jokes”. If not, click the back button and return to a bunch of poop written by an old fart who is a fuck ;-)
August 14th, 2009 at 10:06 am
My high school had a separate lunch area for seniors only, and a hangout type room with a stereo, telephone, etc., which was for seniors. These were areas underclassmen looked forward to being able to get in to, as they could not even cross the doorways of these areas. We could not leave campus for lunch – the concern was that carloads of students would be racing back to campus if late for their next class, making poor driving decisions. Seniors could leave campus after their last class, but once they left campus and they could not return until next day. The process seemed to work and the cachet of the privileges led us to respect and protect them in terms of self-policing and making sure not one person/group ruined it for the rest of the class. Of course, that was the 80′s. Don’t know if the positive peer pressure would work now.
August 14th, 2009 at 12:58 pm
We didn’t have any real benefits to being a senior but by then I did figure out how to game the system a little bit–not that it was of any great benefit. Now my wife, she has stories to tell of her “bratitude” when she was in HS ;-)
August 14th, 2009 at 4:12 pm
My high school (in Indiana) was a huge six-building campus with parking lot gates that had police in little guardhouses. We even had our own planetarium. The cafeteria had groups coming and going every ten minutes to get everyone fed over a two-and-a-half-hour period. I don’t think there were any benefits to going to my school other than fantastic theatre and athletic facilities and winning basketball teams. They say that’s why the school was so big – in order to have a larger pool of basketball players to choose from.
Talk about priorities.
August 14th, 2009 at 8:23 pm
I never was aware of any real benefit of being a senior. But I had all but one credit done by the time I was a senior. I ended up in the mentor program at the school and spent the first 1/3 of the day in a class and study hall, and the rest was at the DCTC or at 3m or Honeywell working on programming assembly line robotics systems.
Didn’t help much that most of my friends were Seniors when I was a Junior, and as such, most of them were gone while I was in my final year.
August 15th, 2009 at 8:31 am
While the BRT would have helped the particular situation I was in the other night (being stuck at the MoA with no upcoming feeder buses) in the normal case it would significantly add to the travel time to get home from downtown.
The simple fact that I left on the light rail 10 minutes before the 477R that stops at the Megamall, but arrived after that bus had already gone through seems to demonstrate that the light rail->MoA->Apple Valley route is longer even if you ignore the time it takes to change from light rail to bus and any small amount of waiting around there.
BRT is inferior to direct express routes as far as downtown travel is concerned. They should be adding more express bus routes, not lengthening my commute by forcing me to transfer vehicles.
August 15th, 2009 at 6:14 pm
they missed the whole story!
Driver is accused of threatening cyclist with ax!! not quite true!
MSPD after screaming through the peloton during the last 2K, nipping the big russian ‘rotchakockoff at nicollet and the crosstown for the yellow, chased the pickup that sideswipe’d him at the 1/2k mark, and beat him about the head and shoulders with the long necks that were spilling from the back bed of the rusted 1976 unidentifiable make of pickemup!! the cyclist was last seen heading toward the PAC in his orange and day glow green spandex and lycra for a speaking engagement with the b-ville city council! the pickemup retreated to it’s trailer park at a undisclosed location:)
bb
November 20th, 2009 at 11:36 am
[...] 4. The Star Tribune reports on the cafe in Burnsville HS that we’ve discussed before (#10). [...]