Here’s the weekly roundup of interesting links from around the South Metro for your reading enjoyment this Friday:
1. Reader Alissa who writes over at Chaos to Clarity, who currently resides in Savage, recently covered raw candy making classes at the Traditional Foods Warehouse in Minneapolis (if you’re a foodie, I suggest reading her article on that one as well. I must admit I’m intrigued).
2. The Star Tribune reports that Rosemount now allows you to report public works maintenance requests online.
Now, I just don’t get why it has taken cities so very long to do this. I mean, Google Docs makes it cake to make an online form (it takes all of 30 seconds) and anyone could do it. This is a no-brainer. It saves staff time, it makes it easy for citizens to report issues, and it’s easy and free to do. If any other city is out there and not doing something similar, time to get on it.
3. The Savage Pacer reports Savage was named one of the most affordable suburb in Minnesota and joined 9 other cities which no one has ever heard of nationwide which ended up on the same list. My favorite part of the article? The fact that they used all the deprecated state abbreviations:
The results range from established high-income neighborhoods to growing middle-income communities. The Top 10 Best Affordable Suburbs in America, by rank, included: Fishers, Ind., Papillon, Neb., Mililani Town, Hawaii, Huntersville, N.C., Montgomeryville, Pa., Hales Corners, Wis., Roxborough Park, Colo., Brandon, S.D., Savage, Minn., and Clark, N.J.
The 1979 USPS called, they love your use of Minn. and Colo.
4. Valley Natural Foods posts about community gardens in Dakota County. The information provided is great but the best link they offer is currently not working. Hopefully that will be rectified soon. In the mean time if you’re interested in community gardening this is a great place to start.
5. The Star Tribune reports that Lakeville is now going to spend money, which it does not have, on a study to find out if replacing the police station which the school district decided it did not want (#4) with a senior center would be a good idea.
How about you not worry about non-essential services like the historical society and the senior center and instead worry about keeping people in your city offices. Oh sorry, that would make entirely too much sense. Forget I mentioned it.
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Well that’s it for this week’s roundup. I’m mostly interested in your thoughts on the use of outdated state abbreviations (and even punctuation!) in the Savage Pacer fluff and Lakeville’s decision to study moving a senior center and historical society into a larger building when they had to cut staff in the past to balance their budget. But whatever you have to say about any of these, I’d love to hear what you have to say.
Related posts:
Dakota Complaints Map
Dakota Inmate Dashboard
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Lazy Lightning Gear
BPAC Financials Archive
March 5th, 2010 at 8:19 am
Those state abbreviations are written in AP Style, which is used by many (most?) newspapers/magazines.
March 5th, 2010 at 8:26 am
Further proof that newspapers are dead? ;-) Oh and it should have been 1963, not 1979 above.
March 5th, 2010 at 8:32 am
The AP has some stupid rules. I get the desire for consistency, but they should at least make sense. Besides, you can’t even use the argument that the shorter abbreviations might confuse people. While “AL” can be confused for either Alabama (correct) or Alaska (incorrect), the AP abbreviation of “Ala.” for Alabama doesn’t really clear things up. (Alaska isn’t even abbreviated…)
March 5th, 2010 at 9:03 am
Yes, I agree. I’m an editor at heart, so rules generally make sense to me, but the state abbreviations are pretty silly. My favorite is “Calif.” — how awkward. Plus, the AP generally wants to make things shorter to save space (leaving out the serial comma, for example), so this rule is particularly strange.
March 5th, 2010 at 10:20 am
If we don’t have a historical society how will remember all the stupid miskakes Lakeville is makaing and not repeat them in future generations?
Newspapers dead.. there you freak’n go again… One day society will cumble and this internets thing will go away. You’ll be pining for paper then young young man..
March 6th, 2010 at 12:41 pm
How does Brandon even qualify as a suburb? I doubt it has 10,000 people. Sioux Falls is just a really big town to begin with; it only qualifies as a city because it’s hours from anywhere. :)
And Mililani Town might be affordable by Hawaii standards, but that’s not saying much.