Author: Molly Priesmeyer

  • A Spy Camera

    Last year, the Minneapolis Police Department received a “generous gift” from Target Corporation: enough money to purchase thirty surveillance cameras, which were strategically placed within a ten-block radius downtown. We Minnesotans like to keep to ourselves, so when the ACLU tried to stand up to Big Brother, many of us quietly cheered. Compared to other…

  • Getting Baked

    “My issues with tanorexia go way back to high school, when tanning beds first hit the scene,” said Julie Dey, a pretty twenty-eight-year-old from Apple Valley. “Girls would make tanning appointments and get out of school to go tanning. I have pictures of girls at my prom who look like they were painted in blackface!”…

  • Walking the Talk

    Mayor R.T. Rybak was scheduled to deliver the opening remarks at the 2004 Walkable Communities Workshop a few weeks ago, but he must’ve run up against a few obstacles on his way to the Coyle Community Center, tucked into the northernmost corner of Cedar Riverside, near the I-35/Washington Avenue interchange. According to the workshop, such…

  • Don't Cut the Cheese

    If you were lucky enough to find a job during this jobless recovery, your orientation probably consisted of a short tour of the copy room and a long trip through the employee handbook. But if you’re Jessi Peine, your new boss sent you on a six-week trek across Europe, where you toured several cheese-producing farms,…

  • The Next Big Little Thing

    A yellow electric scooter lies on its side in the middle of 38th Street and Park Avenue. It’s just past 2 a.m. (hooray, new bar time!), and I swerve my Mazda into construction to keep from running it over. The scooter lies among flashing orange-and-white traffic horses and chunks of broken pavement, like a glowing…

  • Load and Lock

    It’s well past the 10 p.m. curfew Minnetonka imposes for minors, and 40 teenage boys are in lockdown. They’re spending the next 10 hours at Game Tech, at an all-night LAN-o-thon, where they will battle each other in video-game tournaments until 8 a.m. LAN parties are erupting all over the country, and serious gamers are…