Here is an important suggestion, if ever you should find yourself living in rural Minnesota.

Always roll up your car windows at night.

Wait, you say — that seems unnecessary. This is a trusting part of the world, where petty crime is rare, and people leave houses and cars unlocked all the time. Why not leave the windows down so that the interior is cooled by soft breezes in the summer months?

There are two reasons. Remember them.

1. You never know when a rainstorm might flare up, soaking your car seats. This is a fairly minor concern, however.

2. Open cars are giant insect traps. You have not experienced Minnesota until you’ve entered your car to discover it is full of enraged, starving, confused, and frantic mosquitos. This is particularly disastrous if it has rained and your cupholders are pools of water, because now they are also horny and want a blood meal so they can lay eggs in your car interior.

That is all.

You may have heard that the midwest, my little corner of the universe, has been hit hard by storms. My specific little area has avoided the worst, and we’ve been watching the major storms fly by on the television, just clipping us as they rip past, but we have been inundated — on Wednesday, in particular, it was one of those days where you huddle inside while the thunder rattles the windows and the water gushes out of the sky. There is a lot of construction work on the road in front of my house, and they had to stop while the roadbed turned into a sea of mud.

So where we are, it’s uncomfortable but nothing more, which means that our greatest affliction right now is the epidemic of dumbness on the news.

“We’re just kind of at God’s mercy right now, so hopefully people that never prayed before this, it might be a good time to start,” Linn County Sheriff Don Zeller said. “We’re going to need a lot of prayers and people are going to need a lot of patience and understanding.”

I guess god really hated those people who died or had serious property damage then, huh, Dumbass Don?

I really can’t stand public officials who think they are being helpful by telling people to waste their time.

Hey, how about this one?

“I believe that this is God’s way of doing things, and I’ve got insurance, so I’m not worried about it,” said Tim Grimm, who was forced to leave his home in the city’s Czech Village area.

And they call atheists unfeeling, arrogant, and amoral…

In case you too have an obsessive fascination with our home on the prairie, Morris, Minnesota, there is another blog based in my neighborhood, and the latest talk is about all the construction going on. College Avenue, the street running in front of my house, is being ripped up and reconstructed, a process that’s supposed to go on for a few months. Anyway, there’s a strange fabric fence that’s been put up between us and the university, which the precocious young man living near us has decided is a Physicist Fence, to protect us from wandering physicists, presumably drawn by the sound of heavy machinery.

If it really is a physicist fence, though, I’m tempted to go out and cut a couple of slits in it, just to see what would happen.

Greg Laden has posted a video that is wonderfully representative of life in rural Minnesota. If you can grok this short movie, you will have come a long way towards comprehending Minnesota.

We have some local scoundrels, who also tend to be entangled in the right-wing Christianist nonsense. One of the notorious kook/thieves in these parts was Robert Beale, a multi-millionaire tax evader who has just been convicted. The story features arcane, desperate legalisms this wacko used to avoid paying taxes — did you know that if you live outside the District of Columbia and U.S. Islands, you are a non-resident alien, according to the Constitution, according to Beale?

This dishonest, greedy sleaze deserves one thing from us: our prayers. On this National Day of Prayer, pray ferociously for Robert Beale.