These are the mad political rantings of one Matthew McNeil, Liberal/Democratic radio host in Minneapolis-St. Paul, MN. The postings are mine, the thoughts are mine. Mostly about politics, but I will occasionally get into raising kids, cooking, gardening, the arts and my favorite sports. Bon Appetite!
This week we start with one of those police body-cam videos, but I promise this is gold! If you are not familiar with Marisa Simonetti, she was a Minnesota candidate for Hennepin County Commissioner in 2024. Although the race was a non-partisan race, she was definitely running from the right side of the aisle. Her campaign came a bit unhinged when she was accused of throwing a tarantula at a woman renting the basement unit of the house she was living in, appearing to try to drive her off the property.
You read that right.
A few weeks ago, the Edina police released the body cam footage of what happened, and to say it's even crazier than you think is an understatement. Watch this whole thing and be stunned when you realize this woman still got 31% of the vote.
Marisa is currently serving a 90-day work-release sentence for the crimes associated with this incident, and apparently she is currently running for the US Senate in Minnesota. That's plucky spirit!
Next up this week is more delusion! I've made comments about how Green Bay Packers fans are over the top with their fandom. I think the only fandom that is more crazed than theirs is Caitlin Clark fans, but that fan base is sprinkled with MAGA racism, which makes them a class unto themselves.
Apparently, there are numerous live streams of Green Bay Packers games from Packers fans who just sit and comment on the game. It's great if you want to have some guy screaming positively when your team is winning, but it is a masterpiece of tragedy when the Packers fans are losing. And this year, the Packers are not a good team.
Various YouTube channels collect all of these negative reactions and put them together for you to enjoy. Take a few minutes and watch Packers fans' Greek tragedy: they take the first three steps in the 6 stages of grief (denial, anger, and bargaining), loop back to anger, and then skip to the 4th step (depression) and just stop.
Finally, tonight, Lewis Black, the comedian and Daily Show Contributor, had some very nice things to say about Minnesota when he came through on tour earlier this year. It took the form of a letter he read about Minnesota Winters.
That's it for this week. Have a wonderful weekend.
On Wednesday, I got both my COVID and my Flu shots. Only fools think that vaccines are dangerous to the average person. Get vaccinated. Stay alive, stay healthy!
This week we had a very nice reminder of what we lost. Stephen Colbert won the Emmys for his now-cancelled show, The Late Show. It was great to see him win, and it was great to see him so happy. Retirement from the late-night talk show game seems to be doing him well.
He talked about it with another great late-night host, Jimmy Kimmel, who had Colbert on to talk about his wins, retirement, the shield, and whether he'll shave off his beard (spoiler alert!).
Also tonight, let me introduce you to one of the best accounts I've ever seen on YouTube, Farming While Beige. These videos feature Chris Newman and are about various things, including his farming group, Blackbird Farms/Co-op (a really interesting story).
He is also hilarious! "What is it now?"
Here is a cooking video going wrong.
Here is one where the cooking goes right.
Not only does he cover cooking, but he is also interacting with a lot of people about farming, educating people who come to believe industry lies and misinformation.
I particularly thought this video was great, especially when he breaks down all the help most farmers get, and how some of them don't even need the help.
That's it for this week. Have a great weekend.
Please make sure to stay up to date on all of your vaccinations.
Today marks the 25th Anniversary of 9/11. I was home that morning. We had just purchased our house 3 months earlier and were getting it ready for our first child, born in October. I heard the radio morning show talking about how a plane had hit the World Trade Center, but not in an urgent news tone, but rather in a "weird, wacky news to start your day" capacity. It all changed when the second tower was hit.
I ran downstairs to watch the news and will never forget a visibly shaken NBC News reporter at the Pentagon telling people the entire Pentagon just shook, and he had to evacuate. I remember asking myself if anywhere was safe at that moment.
2,977 people died that morning.
The next night my wife and I were sitting on our porch, noticing how quiet the skies were as all the country's flights were grounded. Living in a major city, you get used to the sound of planes flying over. That evening, the silence was deafening.
We did change as a country that day, in a lot of ways, and a lot of them weren't positive changes.
I'm going to post the full Naudet Brothers documentary on 9/11. These were the two French filmmakers following around a rookie firefighter, and what ended up happening to them that day will be the film that encapsulates what that day was like, not only the gut punch of being attacked in such a vicious way, but also focusing on the bravery and heroics of the people on the ground in New York City that morning.
Never forget.
Please make sure you stay up to date on all of your vaccinations.
Hi all! I hope you have a great Labor Day Weekend!
As good as the latest Spider-Man movie is (and it was pretty good), and as much as I am looking forward to the next Avengers movie, Doomsday (which looks AMAZING), the best comic book adaptation in TV or in movies today is Lanterns on HBO.
For those who are not familiar with the DC comic, Green Lantern is a superhero who is part of an intergalactic police force corps (quite literally the Green Lantern Corps) whose job is to keep the universe safe. Their green power rings, powered by a Green Lantern (1950s comic book logic!), allow the wearer to create powerful green light manifestations.
What makes the comic book good is not the power, but the people who wield it. Hal Jordan is the main Green Lantern, the one which is most familiar to us older comic book fans, but there have been more modern embraced versions of the characters; Guy Gardener (a hyper aggressive, short tempered Green Lantern featured in the latest Superman movie), and John Stewart (the first African American Green Lantern) who is the Green Lantern in most of the modern cartoon versions of the Justice League.
James Gunn, who has done great work with comic book adaptations, understands the basic rule of making a great comic book movie: Stay true to the comic books! His Guardians of the Galaxy movies and the latest Superman movie show he gets that.
He has absolutely outdone himself with Lanterns. The show features an aging Hal Jordan (a perfectly cast Kyle Chandler) training a new Green Lantern in John Stewart (an equally perfectly cast Aaron Pierre), as they stumble upon a mystery in rural Nebraska, the location Hal got his ring way back when. Also, Nathan Fillion shows up as the Guy Gardner Lantern featured in the Superman movie.
This is really good, not the nightmare that was the Ryan Reynolds Green Lantern movie from a few years ago. If you like a good story, good acting, and comic book fun, I highly recommend it. Considering it is incredibly popular, I'm not alone.
Let's start with Hal Jordan Lantern, interrogating a suspect he thinks is an alien.
Here is a great bit of acting as a clearly annoyed Hal Jordan (annoyed because of the mystery on his hands, but also annoyed to have to be babysitting John Stewart) who finds out what exactly Stewart (annoyed that he seems to be getting jerked around by Jordan) went through to retrieve the recharging lantern, and mentions an alien species that concerns Hal.
And why not a little of Guy Gardner too, from the Superman Movie last year, stopping a military invasion of another country (with help from Hawkgirl and Metamorpho).
Finally tonight, something completely different.
Minneapolis is home to the only waterfall on the Mississippi River, St. Anthony Falls. The waterfall is stabilized. It had to be because the waterfall itself, through natural erosion, was slowly killing itself, and humans tried to harvest the power of the waterfall. Their greed nearly caused the complete collapse of the Falls in 1869.
The Army Corps of Engineers eventually built a wall underneath the falls to save it in 1876...and that's the last thing we know about the wall. We know it's still there, but we are not too sure about the condition of the wall, and no one seems to want to take ownership of the wall - not the Feds, state, county, or city.
This is a bit of a concern. If the wall fails, eventually the waterfall itself will fail, turning into rapids and placing the water intake for the drinking water of Minneapolis above the water line.
Noles Explores and Explains has the details about the history and the problem underneath the river in Minneapolis.
That does it for this week.
Once again, enjoy your Labor Day weekend. All hail the worker! I hope you can afford to grill something and have the beverage of your choice.
Please make sure you stay up to date on all your vaccinations.
