Geek Girl in Training

Video reblogged from Stuff about Minneapolis

My Little Old Shack In Minneapolis, MN by Yogi Yorgesson on 1950 Capitol 78. by irh1966

I am crying tears of joy. This song is my new favorite thing.

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Posted 1 year ago

HOW TO: STRETCH YOUR VOWELS LIKE A SWEDE
The so-called “Minnesota accent” is difficult to imitate because it involves three vowel sounds borrowed from the Swedish alphabet (å, ä, ö). These are separate characters that have nothing to do with the letters “a” or “o” and, when used in words, communicate something completely different. For example, in Swedish, the word bar means “bare,” the word bår means “stretcher,” and the word bär means “berry.” In Minnesota, the word “bar” means an establishment where alcoholic beverages are served—which, after three or four beers, is also the best place to practice flattening and elongating those vowels like a native.

July 2009 issue of Mpls/St Paul Magazine, “Mastering Minnesota: A field guide to the skills and secrets every Minnesotan needs to know in order to thrive in the land of 10,000 quirks”.

(Fun party trick with your non-Minnesotan friends: put on your thickest Minnesota accent and talk about the time you “drove the boat down the road to the ocean.” You will suddenly become the most amusing person in the room.)

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Video reblogged from

fauxreal:

“Why We’re Here: Twin Cities.

With all the possibilities around the world, what is the “it” that keeps people here in the Twin Cities? We suspected the answer to the question “Why We’re Here” was both simple and incredibly nuanced — worthy of art. We took our camera to the streets of Minneapolis and St. Paul to find people willing to talk, unscripted, on film. The result is our collective love poem to the Twin Cities.”

I will ALWAYS reblog this video. It gives me kitty-like happy warm fuzzies.

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Posted 1 year ago

Cloud Cult: “Everybody Here is a Cloud”

I love that one of my favorite bands also happens to be local, because you get a video like this that has a familiarity to it and makes you think of home.

This makes me excited for winter. If you’ve never stood out in the middle of a frozen, snow-covered lake before—looking out at the expanse of flatness around you and being the tallest thing on it, thinking about the water still moving under your feet and the fish still swimming when everything you can see is dormant—you don’t know what you’re missing.

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Posted 1 year ago

The difficult thing is to convince them of the beauty of flatness… because that’s the really magnificent thing in Minnesota… It’s really the prairie you have to interest them in… Get on a bicycle and ride a bike at sunset across the prairie. And that’s pretty amazing. And the Northern Lights in winter.

Garrison Keillor, answering my question today on MPR about how to get people to come visit me in Minnesota.

(Also, I have more of a Minnesotan accent than I thought. Not that it’s a bad thing—I’m proud of where I’m from—but wow, my R’s are something special…)

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Geek Girl in Training

Not sure I'm geeky enough just yet, but I'm working on it.