School finishes a lot earlier around here. End of the year is already next week somehow.
61 thoughts on “May 19, 2023: Play The Alice Cooper”
School starts way too late in Minnesota. I've lived here for 26 years and I'm standing by that.
We always started school the week after Labor Day and ended the last week of May. As it was, sometimes the first week of school some of us might have half days to help finish harvest. No way with football two-a-days and farming could we adequately start in August.
There is farming and football in Iowa and they manage to start before Labor Day.
You're talking about a whole different growing season down there.
Those folks say "y'all" down there. Different culture.
In Iowa?!
I've definitely seen more Confederate flags in Minnesota. (As confusing as that is.)
That makes at least one good thing about Jesse the Gov.
I went down the rabbit hole and found this: Polk County leads all other MN counties in acres of Spring Wheat, in acres of Soybeans, and also in Sugar Beets (over twice as many tons as 2nd highest Wilkin County). Thanks again, Lake Agissiz.
It really depends where you are in the state. We're done next week down here too, and I know of another town not too far away that finished up yesterday.
How?! We go to June 8.
Back in ye olde days, IIRC, we would start day after Labor Day and end week of Memorial Day, if memory serves. I do not remember having a week-long spring break, or winter break in February. I think for Christmas, we took the week off between Christmas and New Year’s, but not two weeks like I see a lot of places now.
Same. I’m fortunate to have the support network to manage a two week break in late December, but I suspect that puts a big strain other families and makes kids’ transition back to the classroom that much more difficult.
That said, I would have little personal problem with schools extending the year through late June and taking a short break after each quarter. Compressing the opportunity for academic backsliding seems like a worthy goal, and school that extends into summer could afford opportunities for out-of-classroom learning for kids in areas that are cold much of the traditional school year.
Finding summer programs for kids who aren’t old enough to be on their own is fraught, expensive, and often a patchwork affair for even comfortably middle-class folks in this area. (Pre-pandemic childcare was more expensive here than in Seattle.) If I wasn’t remote most days it would cost me a ton of money just to cover working & commuting hours. Our school systems haven’t adjusted to massive changes in society that are now five-plus decades underway and are still predicated on the idea that there is a parent at home.
Yeah, I think it would be good to really look at what we’re trying to accomplish and the best way to get there, but it’s generally hard to defeat the kind of momentum the overall system has.
Minimal other breaks (though we did have a spring break for the first time in a very long time this year - but we also started before Labor Day this year for the first time in a while). Snow days minimized by becoming distance learning days. Not sure how other places manage to go so long.
We start the day after Labor Day (except some grades start the Friday or Thursday before(??)). The end date varies based on the number of cancelled days, but this year it's June 16.
I always like the Wednesday before Labor Day. 3, 4, 5 day weeks to start the year.
Our school district always starts with three days (Mon-Wed, this year Aug 15-17) before the county fair weekend, then a break for the fair. Dumb. Annoying. But FFA.
Jobu - you been reading the MN Reformer? Best writeup I’ve seen on the matter was published online yesterday.
In my communities, school is scheduled to start next "fall" on August 22. The first football game is August 25.
Looking at planning a family road trip (10 year old and 5 year old) where the farthest destination is not more than nine hours away. That leaves us primary options of going west to the badlands, east to Mackinac Island, or south to St Louis/Kansas City. Not looking at Chicago.
Ya'll welcome to chime in with thoughts of any of those family destinations as well as pit stops along the way. We'd stay at least one day/night halfway in between twice, which would be like Minnesota west border, Green Bay, and Des Moines/Iowa City.
St Louis - Magic House, Arch, City Museum, Zoo, Busch Gardens, Grant's Farm, Cahokia Mounds.
It's about 8 hours from StL to the Twin Cities, with Iowa City at the midway point (or catch a Kernels game!)
Good choices. They might be young for City Museum but Magic House certainly. I've never been to Cahokia Mounds. Kinda cool driving the car onto the Grafton Ferry and crossing the Mississippi. The Confluence Park is pretty neat as well.
I agree on Magic House over City Museum for that age.
I also liked their museum over the highway. Science, I think.
KC - WW1 Museum, Negro League Museum, American Jazz Museum. I haven't been there with young kids so I'm not sure what kids that she would think of these spots.
The WWI Museum is excellent, but I had a pretty good idea of what I might encounter and still felt deeply uncomfortable in parts of it. I wouldn’t take the Poissonnière there until she was in middle school.
You can't go wrong with either Badlands/Mt. Rushmore or St. Louis.
I've not done Badlands with my kids (yet - we were going to this summer but other conflicts arose), but I've been out there as both an adult and as a kid (multiple times with my family). Badlands are amazing, Custer State Park is great, and Mt. Rushmore is a checklist landmark. Throw in The Corn Palace and Reptile Gardens, and you've got a full trip with lots of fun family stuff. The only thing is that natural pit stops aren't as convienent along this trip (but you could always pop by down here!).
We did St. Louis with the kids last fall for my brother-in-law's wedding, and it was fantastic. I was blown away by the quality of the zoo and gardens, Union station was beautiful at night, and the Arch is a checklist landmark. We didn't do City Museum, but I think that might be right in the kids' wheelhouse, from what I remember.
I did KC as an adult, and that seemed like a less kid-friendly trip, though I'm guessing you could find kid-friendly things there too. But the other two much more naturally fit up with kids in my mind.
Mitchell/Corn Palace breaks the drive up pretty well.
Oh man, the Corn Palace. I've never been, but the first teacher I had for German was all about that place and put a picture of it in a slideshow of places in Germany we were asked to identify. Good times.
Definitely worth a stop if you are going to Rushmore/Yellowstone anyway from Minnesota. Or if you are driving through Yellowstone to get to Minnesota.
Come to Omerha, we have The #1 zoo in the country, AAA baseball, and a plethora of museums, restaurants & brewpubs. Also, you can step back into the 1950's, politically speaking.
Okay, I'll say it -- it's a great place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there 😉
I would fully support going to the badlands. And depending on which way you go, you can make a trip to Gettysburg and see me!
That would be wild. You’d expect it would both cost a major-league arm and empty the farm system (and make signing Ohtani to an extension essential), but man would it be incredible.
Sign me up for emptying the farm
If the Twins have to empty out the farm to get Ohtani, I'd come down and help slop out the barn to help make that happen.
I'll even bring my own shovel.
I'll bring a basket so you guys can put all of your eggs into it, but nobody can vouch for the continual health of the basket. And we all know it's a fantasy basket anyway.
I'm apparently in the minority, but I would not support that. But I see a very, very small chance of it happening anyway.
I'm with you Padre, seems like everybody wants to Herschel Walker the Twins.
Get Maeda on the case.
Yeah, irresponsible journalism right there. Yes, we may be very active at the deadline. No... we will not be in the Ohtani sweepstakes. What's going to suck is it will create this groundswell of expectation of being "in" on Ohtani. Once someone else over pays for him, we will deal with the typical deadline Minnesota angst. "Why don't we ever mortgage the farm on an ace? These owners suck!"
Would it be incredible and sensational if they did? Yeah. Chance of happening? 1 in a million.
I've been thinking for some time about getting a vehicle to replace the 2003 Chrysler Town and Country that's got enough miles on it t reach the moon. I just found a pretty good deal on a 2010 Hyundai Tucson Limited with only 125,000 miles, so I filled out the form with all my info and now I have a test drive at 5:00 p.m.
Hope it passes your inspection! The car market is absolutely nuts. Cash for Clunkers was a terrible program made even worse in retrospect by the disruptions of the past several years.
Cash for Clunkers was a great program poorly executed -- it got a slew of gas hogs off the road and spurred new car sales, but in some cases the marginal "clunkers" could have gotten themselves even worse guzzlers off the road instead of automatically being trashed. The biggest disruption is due to the parts market migrating overseas (especially electronics).
Also Cash for Clunkers was 14 years ago! I doubt very much that program is a reason for the used car shortage in 2022-23. As Runner said, parts market disruptions is the main cause for current woes.
Brookings published a study which essentially concluded that the environmental effects of the program were modest at best and the program itself was not cost-effective. Program participants had a higher income than non-participants, and the used vehicle market was subjected to artificial scarcity by the destruction of otherwise roadworthy clunkers, which further hurt low-income folks who rely on cheap wheels (and who may have replaced even worse-polluting vehicles with some of those used cars that were destroyed).
The program did succeed in raising safety standards across the board, which is noteworthy. But it seems like it was a poorly-conceived jobs program for automakers and a subsidy for folks who already could afford a new vehicle at the expense of hollowing out a market frequented by folks who couldn’t.
It should have been a lot more limited, IMO. Not sure its impact on the used market today, but it definitely dried up used supply back when it was implemented.
I’d be interested to see the numbers, but my intuition is that the new cars on the road as a group are not that much more fuel efficient than 10-20 years ago — most new cars today are huge. Their fuel economy is decent for their size, but they’d get even better fuel economy if they were smaller.
We "took advantage" of California's program a few years ago, when our Saturn couldn't pass smog.
It was still getting nearly 30 mpg. But I foolishly replaced the catalytic converter, thinking it would help it pass. Nope. leaky manifold. Rather than pay for further repairs on a 20-year old vehicle, I took the $1k to junk it.
Moot, they just texted me that the Tucson is sold. That's okay, I like the shopping part, too.
RIP. Reminds me of what I consider one of the greatest lines in the history of the Washington Post, from the great Shirley Povich:
“Jim Brown, born ineligible to play for the Redskins, integrated their end zone three times yesterday.” https://t.co/OsB7ggHfqa
I grew up in Ohio as a Browns fan, and Jim Brown was my first sports hero. I was seven years old when he retired and it broke my heart, I still blame Art Modell (just one of his many egregious transgressions). When I was a news producer years ago he was in town for some event and we arranged a talkback interview from his hotel for the morning news. It was just a photographer onsite, I was in the control room but once he had his earpiece in I got to talk with him for a few minutes before the anchor did the interview. It was pretty early in the morning and I don't think he was in a real outgoing mood, but when I rattled off a few of his career stats you could tell he almost smiled.
Gordon to IL, Garlick up.
Edouard Julien came out of the Saints game in the fourth inning tonight. The Saints announcer said he did not appear to be injured, and is speculating that he may have been called up. That is, however, just speculation on his part.
Seems weird to make the decision tonight rather than this morning. He would be unlikely to make it for tonight's game in Anaheim regardless, but waiting until tonight means he has to take a late flight to make tomorrow's game.
I wonder if Joey Gallo's injury is not getting better. Gallo is not in tonight's lineup (although facing a lefty and Garlick is back up)
School starts way too late in Minnesota. I've lived here for 26 years and I'm standing by that.
We always started school the week after Labor Day and ended the last week of May. As it was, sometimes the first week of school some of us might have half days to help finish harvest. No way with football two-a-days and farming could we adequately start in August.
There is farming and football in Iowa and they manage to start before Labor Day.
You're talking about a whole different growing season down there.
Those folks say "y'all" down there. Different culture.
In Iowa?!
I've definitely seen more Confederate flags in Minnesota. (As confusing as that is.)
There's only one Confederate flag that belongs in Minnesota.
Agreed
okay, that was a fun read
That makes at least one good thing about Jesse the Gov.
I went down the rabbit hole and found this: Polk County leads all other MN counties in acres of Spring Wheat, in acres of Soybeans, and also in Sugar Beets (over twice as many tons as 2nd highest Wilkin County). Thanks again, Lake Agissiz.
It really depends where you are in the state. We're done next week down here too, and I know of another town not too far away that finished up yesterday.
How?! We go to June 8.
Back in ye olde days, IIRC, we would start day after Labor Day and end week of Memorial Day, if memory serves. I do not remember having a week-long spring break, or winter break in February. I think for Christmas, we took the week off between Christmas and New Year’s, but not two weeks like I see a lot of places now.
Same. I’m fortunate to have the support network to manage a two week break in late December, but I suspect that puts a big strain other families and makes kids’ transition back to the classroom that much more difficult.
That said, I would have little personal problem with schools extending the year through late June and taking a short break after each quarter. Compressing the opportunity for academic backsliding seems like a worthy goal, and school that extends into summer could afford opportunities for out-of-classroom learning for kids in areas that are cold much of the traditional school year.
Finding summer programs for kids who aren’t old enough to be on their own is fraught, expensive, and often a patchwork affair for even comfortably middle-class folks in this area. (Pre-pandemic childcare was more expensive here than in Seattle.) If I wasn’t remote most days it would cost me a ton of money just to cover working & commuting hours. Our school systems haven’t adjusted to massive changes in society that are now five-plus decades underway and are still predicated on the idea that there is a parent at home.
Yeah, I think it would be good to really look at what we’re trying to accomplish and the best way to get there, but it’s generally hard to defeat the kind of momentum the overall system has.
Minimal other breaks (though we did have a spring break for the first time in a very long time this year - but we also started before Labor Day this year for the first time in a while). Snow days minimized by becoming distance learning days. Not sure how other places manage to go so long.
We start the day after Labor Day (except some grades start the Friday or Thursday before(??)). The end date varies based on the number of cancelled days, but this year it's June 16.
I always like the Wednesday before Labor Day. 3, 4, 5 day weeks to start the year.
Our school district always starts with three days (Mon-Wed, this year Aug 15-17) before the county fair weekend, then a break for the fair. Dumb. Annoying. But FFA.
Jobu - you been reading the MN Reformer? Best writeup I’ve seen on the matter was published online yesterday.
In my communities, school is scheduled to start next "fall" on August 22. The first football game is August 25.
Looking at planning a family road trip (10 year old and 5 year old) where the farthest destination is not more than nine hours away. That leaves us primary options of going west to the badlands, east to Mackinac Island, or south to St Louis/Kansas City. Not looking at Chicago.
Ya'll welcome to chime in with thoughts of any of those family destinations as well as pit stops along the way. We'd stay at least one day/night halfway in between twice, which would be like Minnesota west border, Green Bay, and Des Moines/Iowa City.
St Louis - Magic House, Arch, City Museum, Zoo, Busch Gardens, Grant's Farm, Cahokia Mounds.
It's about 8 hours from StL to the Twin Cities, with Iowa City at the midway point (or catch a Kernels game!)
Good choices. They might be young for City Museum but Magic House certainly. I've never been to Cahokia Mounds. Kinda cool driving the car onto the Grafton Ferry and crossing the Mississippi. The Confluence Park is pretty neat as well.
I agree on Magic House over City Museum for that age.
I also liked their museum over the highway. Science, I think.
KC - WW1 Museum, Negro League Museum, American Jazz Museum. I haven't been there with young kids so I'm not sure what kids that she would think of these spots.
The WWI Museum is excellent, but I had a pretty good idea of what I might encounter and still felt deeply uncomfortable in parts of it. I wouldn’t take the Poissonnière there until she was in middle school.
You can't go wrong with either Badlands/Mt. Rushmore or St. Louis.
I've not done Badlands with my kids (yet - we were going to this summer but other conflicts arose), but I've been out there as both an adult and as a kid (multiple times with my family). Badlands are amazing, Custer State Park is great, and Mt. Rushmore is a checklist landmark. Throw in The Corn Palace and Reptile Gardens, and you've got a full trip with lots of fun family stuff. The only thing is that natural pit stops aren't as convienent along this trip (but you could always pop by down here!).
We did St. Louis with the kids last fall for my brother-in-law's wedding, and it was fantastic. I was blown away by the quality of the zoo and gardens, Union station was beautiful at night, and the Arch is a checklist landmark. We didn't do City Museum, but I think that might be right in the kids' wheelhouse, from what I remember.
I did KC as an adult, and that seemed like a less kid-friendly trip, though I'm guessing you could find kid-friendly things there too. But the other two much more naturally fit up with kids in my mind.
Mitchell/Corn Palace breaks the drive up pretty well.
Oh man, the Corn Palace. I've never been, but the first teacher I had for German was all about that place and put a picture of it in a slideshow of places in Germany we were asked to identify. Good times.
Definitely worth a stop if you are going to Rushmore/Yellowstone anyway from Minnesota. Or if you are driving through Yellowstone to get to Minnesota.
Come to Omerha, we have The #1 zoo in the country, AAA baseball, and a plethora of museums, restaurants & brewpubs. Also, you can step back into the 1950's, politically speaking.
Okay, I'll say it -- it's a great place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there 😉
I would fully support going to the badlands. And depending on which way you go, you can make a trip to Gettysburg and see me!
Well, this pitch clock gamesmanship was entertaining
That would be wild. You’d expect it would both cost a major-league arm and empty the farm system (and make signing Ohtani to an extension essential), but man would it be incredible.
Sign me up for emptying the farm
If the Twins have to empty out the farm to get Ohtani, I'd come down and help slop out the barn to help make that happen.
I'll even bring my own shovel.
I'll bring a basket so you guys can put all of your eggs into it, but nobody can vouch for the continual health of the basket. And we all know it's a fantasy basket anyway.
I'm apparently in the minority, but I would not support that. But I see a very, very small chance of it happening anyway.
I'm with you Padre, seems like everybody wants to Herschel Walker the Twins.
Get Maeda on the case.
Yeah, irresponsible journalism right there. Yes, we may be very active at the deadline. No... we will not be in the Ohtani sweepstakes. What's going to suck is it will create this groundswell of expectation of being "in" on Ohtani. Once someone else over pays for him, we will deal with the typical deadline Minnesota angst. "Why don't we ever mortgage the farm on an ace? These owners suck!"
Would it be incredible and sensational if they did? Yeah. Chance of happening? 1 in a million.
I've been thinking for some time about getting a vehicle to replace the 2003 Chrysler Town and Country that's got enough miles on it t reach the moon. I just found a pretty good deal on a 2010 Hyundai Tucson Limited with only 125,000 miles, so I filled out the form with all my info and now I have a test drive at 5:00 p.m.
Hope it passes your inspection! The car market is absolutely nuts. Cash for Clunkers was a terrible program made even worse in retrospect by the disruptions of the past several years.
Cash for Clunkers was a great program poorly executed -- it got a slew of gas hogs off the road and spurred new car sales, but in some cases the marginal "clunkers" could have gotten themselves even worse guzzlers off the road instead of automatically being trashed. The biggest disruption is due to the parts market migrating overseas (especially electronics).
Also Cash for Clunkers was 14 years ago! I doubt very much that program is a reason for the used car shortage in 2022-23. As Runner said, parts market disruptions is the main cause for current woes.
Brookings published a study which essentially concluded that the environmental effects of the program were modest at best and the program itself was not cost-effective. Program participants had a higher income than non-participants, and the used vehicle market was subjected to artificial scarcity by the destruction of otherwise roadworthy clunkers, which further hurt low-income folks who rely on cheap wheels (and who may have replaced even worse-polluting vehicles with some of those used cars that were destroyed).
The program did succeed in raising safety standards across the board, which is noteworthy. But it seems like it was a poorly-conceived jobs program for automakers and a subsidy for folks who already could afford a new vehicle at the expense of hollowing out a market frequented by folks who couldn’t.
It should have been a lot more limited, IMO. Not sure its impact on the used market today, but it definitely dried up used supply back when it was implemented.
I’d be interested to see the numbers, but my intuition is that the new cars on the road as a group are not that much more fuel efficient than 10-20 years ago — most new cars today are huge. Their fuel economy is decent for their size, but they’d get even better fuel economy if they were smaller.
We "took advantage" of California's program a few years ago, when our Saturn couldn't pass smog.
It was still getting nearly 30 mpg. But I foolishly replaced the catalytic converter, thinking it would help it pass. Nope. leaky manifold. Rather than pay for further repairs on a 20-year old vehicle, I took the $1k to junk it.
Moot, they just texted me that the Tucson is sold. That's okay, I like the shopping part, too.
I grew up in Ohio as a Browns fan, and Jim Brown was my first sports hero. I was seven years old when he retired and it broke my heart, I still blame Art Modell (just one of his many egregious transgressions). When I was a news producer years ago he was in town for some event and we arranged a talkback interview from his hotel for the morning news. It was just a photographer onsite, I was in the control room but once he had his earpiece in I got to talk with him for a few minutes before the anchor did the interview. It was pretty early in the morning and I don't think he was in a real outgoing mood, but when I rattled off a few of his career stats you could tell he almost smiled.
Gordon to IL, Garlick up.
Edouard Julien came out of the Saints game in the fourth inning tonight. The Saints announcer said he did not appear to be injured, and is speculating that he may have been called up. That is, however, just speculation on his part.
Seems weird to make the decision tonight rather than this morning. He would be unlikely to make it for tonight's game in Anaheim regardless, but waiting until tonight means he has to take a late flight to make tomorrow's game.
I wonder if Joey Gallo's injury is not getting better. Gallo is not in tonight's lineup (although facing a lefty and Garlick is back up)