26th February 09
The Retroactive Minnesotan project is over. Final score: Area High School 1, Everyone Else 0. A victory for the North Star State!
“Retroactive Minnesotan,” week 2.
26th January 09
An excellent weekend with Retroactive Minnesotan.
Mastered on Saturday:
- Some teenagers taught me how to bury beer in a snowdrift so that it doesn’t explode and your parents don’t find it.
- Jane (Edina!) and Louise (Minneapolis) took me out in a Volvo wagon to learn how to whip shitties on a frozen parking lot (Louise’s tweet above — as you can read, it wasn’t just any frozen parking lot, either).
- Greg from Powderhorn taught me what to do if I fall through ice into a lake.
- Brennan (Southwest Minneapolis) and Pete (Moorhead) gave me some starter tips on slapshots, cradling the puck and hockey fight etiquette.
- The captain of the Robbinsdale Armstrong High School Nordic Skiing team gave me some pointers in that field.
- Perhaps best of all, Robert from St. Louis Park gave me a seminar on hockey appreciation, specifically as it relates to hockey dad etiquette, and achieving the right mix of passive-aggressiveness, paternal pride, disappointment and barely-concealed rage in your yelling techniques (“Stay back, Hunter, stay back! Don’t get offsides! No, no, Hunter…! Yes, yes, Hunter, you’re open!”). Video from that, happily, is forthcoming.
I’m about halfway through the list of forty skills I need to master, with a full three weeks left. Still some tough ones to go, however: basic ice-skating, TV news anchors of the 1980s identification, blizzard history and treating hypothermia, among others.
21st January 09
21st January 09
Retroactive Minnesotan, lesson #7. This lesson was regarding the classic playground humiliation tactic of whitewashing (or “facewashing”), and how to both administer and survive them. Maley Neil, a native of Embarrass, Minnesota, ably demonstrated. All photos are courtesy of her.
19th January 09
Your correspondent, star forward. Go Area High School!
One of many photos from Retroactive Minnesotan, my interactive effort to master the native skillset, which I’ll be “performing” (cough, cough) out on frozen Medicine Lake every weekend until February 14. More photos to follow, plus a recap from this past weekend’s activities. Vita.mn had a short preview here.
