April 8, 2013

"38 Things Minnesotans Are Too Nice To Brag About."

#1 is Bob Dylan and #38 is Prince.

That reminds me, for some reason, as we were driving home today, I remembered the line: "Name me someone that’s not a parasite and I’ll go out and say a prayer for him."

51 comments:

tim maguire said...

...someone who's not a parasite...

CWJ said...

A very nice list. But I had to laugh at #14 - theatre. We iin KC have our share of Twin City ex-pats. We also have more than our share of live theatre. If I hear "Yes, it's nice, but its not the Guthrie" one more time, I'll puke all over their "nice" shoes.

edutcher said...

They feel the need to brag about Prince?

Bob_R said...

Even if they don't like 80's pop, they can brag about Prince's guitar playing. A great Tele player.

Sorun said...

It's a nice list of things. As a native Minnesotan, I've always found the "Minnesota nice" thing annoying. Minnesotans are average at best, and much less nice than people down south. The nicest people I've ever met are in Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana.

(Minnesotans are above average in intelligence and looks, however).

Archilochus said...

Visions of Johanna made me fall in love with Dylan's music. I still believe it's his finest ballad.

Hagar said...

Brag?

Sorun said...

The ingredients for tater tot hotdish is on my shopping list. I haven't had that in decades.

Living in Wisconsin is ok, but brats at every meal gets tiresome.

Sam L. said...

First time I ever heard of Bob Dylan, he was doing a concert in Dallas. I'd never heard of him.

Patrick said...

That's bullshit. Minnesotans won't shut up about Bob Dylan OR Prince.

And MN Nice really just means they'll say hello and stuff, but won't ever be your friend. It's code.

rcocean said...

First apologize for Jesse Ventura, Al Franken, and Hubert Humphrey.

Then brag.

rcocean said...
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Sam L. said...

And Keillor! Used to was funny, but came down with a bad case of Republican Derangement Syndrome, and a dramatically worse/terminal case of Bush Derangement syndrome.

kjbe said...

The kid (who's now an official MN resident) posted on FB, today, that she's definitely bragging on the Zubaz. That put a smile on my face...

Jay Vogt said...

As a transplanted Minnesotan, the most obvious miss was that the #2 slot should read:

2. BUCK HILL - home of more Olympic skiers than Summit County, Colorado. Among them, Kristina Koznick and Lindsey Vonn.

Archilochus said...

And of course Scott Fitzgerald from St. Paul.

Joe Schmoe said...

rcocean, you forgot Fritz Mondale!

Hey, that's another thing MN can be proud of: keeping Reagan from sweeping every state in 1984.

Patrick said...

I've only lived in MN for 22 years, so I'm still an outsider. BUt I can tell you they brag about all of this stuff, except for Jessica Biel (it has somehow escaped me that she was born in MN) and the Amy Adams connection (that's a very tenuous connection, but MN will pretty much claim everyone who has at some point touched MN soil, including at the airport. But then, I think Amy Adams is pretty much the most beautiful woman in movies today, and she has the additional benefit of being talented.

Jay Vogt said...

Don't really miss much about Minnesota.

I do miss "Juicy Lucies" at Matt's on 35th and Cedar in Minneapolis, and I miss the Boy's State High School Hockey Tournament. It's possible to argue that it's the most exciting sporting event in the country.

Vermin McCann said...

Minnesotans are mostly passive-aggressive douches who drive in the left lane for the express purpose of restricting traffic and who don't understand that lend and borrow are different words. We should pay Canada to take the entire state off our hands.

Patrick said...

And let's face it, for Number 12, it is not one of the greatest story in Olympic History, it is THE greatest story in Olympic History (with the possible exception of the original Marathon - that was pretty cool, but didn't have as good an ending).

Patrick said...

Plus it had a lot of WI and, to a lesser extent, some east coast guys...

(Ducks)

Joe Schmoe said...

As a Celtics fan, I have to put in a plug for Kevin McHale, the best low-post scorer I ever saw, a U-Minn alum, and, to bring it back to Althouse, a guy who was born and raised in the same northern Minnesota town as Bob Dylan.

Patrick said...

2. BUCK HILL - home of more Olympic skiers than Summit County, Colorado. Among them, Kristina Koznick and Lindsey Vonn.

They went nuts here when it was announced she was dating Tiger.

kentuckyliz said...

Scandinavian socialists, the lot.

They aren't nice. They are colder than their weather.

They trash Iowa and we let them think they're better, just to keep them out.

I spend every Christmas there and am happy to leave.

OD on pretentiousness. *retch*

kentuckyliz said...

Of all ironies, my niece is a big Democrat ("Well, I grew up in the Twin Cities...so I have to be a Democrat." saith she), and she has decided to be a poli sci major and is interested in politics. She is just the kind of know-better tyrant bureaucrat of tomorrow, who will happily run your life because she knows better. And she'll get away with it too, because she's cute and blonde.

Ah well...it's just a counterweight to the brother in law who believes in the mandatory sterilization of welfare mothers.

(I always tease him that as a farmer he is a bigger welfare queen than they are, and he can't leave out neutering the Johnny Appleseeds who knock up scads of poor women. Their fertility rate is potentially much higher than the women they impregnate. LOL)

Greg G said...

What? No love for The Trashmen of Surfin' Bird fame?

tiger said...
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tiger said...

People from Minnesota - and especially Minneapolis - are just like people who went to Harvard: they always find a way to tell you where they're within five minutes of meeting you.

'Yeah we have great food here.'

Really? Well I'm from Minneapolis and you can get EXCELLENT pralines downtown.

Or

'Wow. Hawaii has great weather.'

'Really? Well I'm from Minnesota and you don't know great weather until you've experienced all four seasons.'

Passive/agressive jerks with dis-advantage of letting Franken steal an election.

AlanKH said...

"Name me someone that’s not a parasite and I’ll go out and say a prayer for him."

There's a Tea Party joke in there somewhere...

Aridog said...

Uh, No. 8 is misleading, with first line total BS...

Minnesota invented the shopping mall.

No, sorry, that would be J L Hudson Company, Detroit, [now Macy's] who built Northland Center mall in Southfield way back in the 50's.

Now Minnesota may have built the first enclosed shopping mall...whoopee, but they did not originate the idea of consolidated shopping area centered on one, two or more anchor stores.

Of course, I am just being pedantic...as we here don't really care what Minnesota claims....see "Macy's", that we have now, and their various shopping centers are mediocre crap compared to the old J. L. Hudson company.

Example: Back in the 60's Hudson's models also worked as "personal shoppers" if you wanted or needed help with gift selections. That was a very nice feature :-)

Crimso said...

Hiring Rick Pitino's son Richard to coach UofM men's basketball.

I Have Misplaced My Pants said...

The Mayo Clinic is the first and largest not-for-profit medical center in the world. And also one of the best.

Uh, what?

And regarding the Coen brothers: yes, Fargo ruled, but A Serious Man was a crime against humanity.

CWJ said...

Aridog and Erika,

Yeah, any list or claim of the first or the biggest is always in the eye of the claimant, not the beholder.

FWIW, the claim is sometimes made that KC's country club plaza is the first (1920's) shopping center. I'm sure there are other claimants.

urban_hermit said...

From an early Guthrie production of Julius Caesar -

Friends, Romans, Countrymen,

Borrow me your ears!

Aridog said...

CWJ ... I suppose to differentiate the KC Country Club Plaza from J L Hudson's Northland Center I'd need to define a "mall" such as Northland Center as self contained with only walkways between stores, while KC's plaza layout is stores with road ways between them...e.g., not a mall by any reasonable definition.

Note...as I said earlier, I no longer care...Macy's turned Hudson's in to a shit heap metro area wide. Haven't even been inside a Hudson's/Macy's in decades. No longer any there there.

Patrick said...

I peg Urban Hermit as someone who moved to MN. It never fails to amaze me how otherwise intelligent Minnesotans use "borrow" when "lend" is required.

Urban Hermit FTW.

TosaGuy said...

Native Minnesotan here. It is the state where the Midwest ends and the Great Plaines begins.

There are several Minnesotas and the one depicted is Twin Cities area and up north.

The farming areas on the western side of the state are more in tune with the Dakotas and the other Minnesota doesn't acknowledge their existence.

Minnesota has always had lots of social programs, but the native Scandinavians at the time, to their credit, were too stubborn to use it. That Minnesota is dead.

TosaGuy said...

"("Well, I grew up in the Twin Cities...so I have to be a Democrat."

As a result, more and more of the cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul are on their way to becoming shitholes and the old-school DFLers (MN name for the Dems) are dying off leaving Keith Ellison and Al Franken as the new face of the party.

CWJ said...

Aridog,

Yep, that was my point. It usually comes down to some specific part of the definition that allows the claimant to make their claim. When things evolve over time, like shopping, its arbitrary to say this or that is the first of its kind.

BTW, Macy's has done a good job of destroying our local department store as well.

Jay Vogt said...

. . . CWJ said... "But I had to laugh at #14 - theatre. . . If I hear "Yes, it's nice, but its not the Guthrie" one more time, I'll puke all over their "nice" shoes."

The Guthrie is the perfect example of what's wrong with Minnesota. It's just so self-conscious in its design and implementation. A lot like Twin Cityians in relation to world class cities like New York or Chicago. It simply tries too hard because of its insecurity. There is no grace in execution whatsoever. It's like a 14 year old boy trying to impress an 18 year old woman.

But, they say to themselves, "Well, without it we'd just be a cold Omaha".

Larry J said...

My wife is a retired nurse. For the last 6 years of her career, she was a case manager for worksman's compensation covering several states but primarily California and Minnesota. She had many good experiences working with her Minnesota clients. They wanted to get back to work as soon as possible. That's a stark contrast with most of her California clients. They'd lawyer up to stay on worksman's comp for as long as possible (sometimes over 10 years). Fraud was widespread because they saw it as free money.

TosaGuy said...

"But, they say to themselves, "Well, without it we'd just be a cold Omaha"."

Omaha is a great city whose residents prefer that it remain under the radar.

Mr. D said...

I've lived in Minnesota for 20 years. In re the Coen brothers, they also described Minnesota as "Siberia with family restaurants." And with maybe a foot of snow coming here in the next day or so, that seems right.

Patrick said...

I've only lived in MN for 22 years, so I'm still an outsider.


I hear you, brother.

TosaGuy said...

I grew up in SW MN, otherwise known as East Dakota. The only thing that connected us culturally to the rest of the state was our annual disappointment with the Minnesota Vikings.

LuAnn Zieman said...

I, too, grew up in Minnesota--far northwestern Minnesota. We had many Canadian transplants who wanted their children to get in-state tuition at our colleges, eh! And yes--it was understood that we were Democrat/Farm/Laborites. That was until we weren't. My remaining family members mostly live in the Twin Cities and are still DFLers. It's the other religion along with Lutheran. I've moved on to Wisconsin.

Original Mike said...

Too nice??? Are you kidding me?

When it comes to Minnesota hockey, the average Minnesotan (of course there are exceptions) is an unadultered asshole.

Try going to a college hockey tournament in Minnesota and you'll see how "nice" they are. A couple of years ago at the conference tournament I was berated for wearing a Wisconsin sweatshirt by an 8 year old gopher, while his father looked on approvingly. Chip off the old block. On two separate occasions at the WCHA tournament in St. Paul last month I had it explained to me by middle aged men in Minnesota garb that Wisconsin plays "bullshit hockey."

Yeah, they're nice alright. They're humble too.

Bruce Hayden said...

I thought of Buck Hill too. They do it with near infinite repetition. Run many more gates than anyone else. One friend traIned there one year in HS when his father was on sabatical at UM, and his kids are training with them at Mt. Hood in summer. Last summer they were getting 2-3 timeas as many gates as anyone else there.

My Buck Hill story though involves the time I was iving in SLC and the Olympics. Guy in my male bonding ski group was out staying with me to work as a volunteer physician for the games. For putting him up for a week, he gave me a Buck Hill Ski Patrol T-shirt, showing several valiant ski patrollers with an avalanch cannon, and declaiming something like 17,000 avanche free days at Buck Hill. The punch line, unstated, is that the hill is too flat to ever avalanch.

Bruce Hayden said...

Because of the skiing and hockey scholarships, I knew a bunch off kids who came west for college, and most of them went back there after graduation, which says something positive about the state. Never did understand the allure though myself. Was stuck there for a couple months almost 30 years ago for work, and my memory is good steaks, a lot of snow, cold outside, hot as a greenhouse indoors, and flat as board. Grew up around mountains, and Minnesota was the flattest place I have ever spent more than a couple days in my life. Of course, a lot of the mid west is that way, and those of you who grew up there probably think that is normal.

Crunchy Frog said...

Don't forget walleye pike, and mosquitos the size of your head.

Those are always a blast.

Aridog said...

Any mention of "Buck Hill" should elaborate on the extraordinary skier & coach Erich Sailer, from Austria. His connections with other famous ski racers made his ski camps famous for high productivity...and they ranged from Buck Hill, to the Beartooth Mountains, to Mt Hood and back to his homeland of Austria. Without Erich Sailer Buck Hill would be just another sub-urban ski lump in the landscape.