The Superbowl is in Minneapolis this weekend, and I’m happy to say I’m staying 150 miles away from that mess. Various outlets are busy trying to inform the influx of visitors about Minnesota culture, and this is one absolutely essential point.

Be ready to experience first-class passive aggression. If someone says your old school Ron Jaworski Eagles jersey is “interesting,” they are not a fan. If someone says, “I’m not mad,” they are, in fact, mad. If you get to a 4-way stop at roughly the same time as another driver(s), your best bet is to just abandon the car, get out, and walk to your destination, as who gets to go first will never be resolved by conventional means.

The 4-way stop thing? Totally true, unless one of the people was born out of state, like me, and exasperatedly cuts the friendly waving short and accelerates right on through. What they don’t say about the passive-aggressive stuff is that everyone is going to be very polite to all these East Coast people, but deep down…they hate them. Especially the Philadelphians. No, wait, especially the Pats fans. We hate them with a white hot passion. They will be boorish and crude and impolite, and all the natives will be seething inside, regretting that they left their Viking axes at home, or there would be some churls waking up in Hel with their brains draping their shoulders, I tell you what.

Jon Del Arroz bubbled up in my news again — you may remember him as the self-aggrandizing fellow who bills himself as the “Leading Hispanic Voice in Science Fiction” and who last rose to my attention as yet another rabid puppy whimpering about SJWs with made-up statistics and bad analyses. He’s making noise again, not for the excellence of his writing, but because he had his membership to WorldCon revoked.Oops. It’s hard to lead from the rubbish bin.

But his complaining provoked Jim Hines to catalog all the reasons he was banned. That’s going to leave a mark. I can’t say that I’m sorry to see an anti-feminist, anti-social justice friend of Vox Day get a public spanking, but it’s kind of sad to see someone who works so dang hard at self-promotion accomplish the reverse of what he intended.

Here’s something really nice: an impromptu choir formed to join David Byrne in singing a David Bowie song. These are the kinds of communal heroes we should encourage.

Byrne comments:

What happens when one sings together with a lot of other people?

A couple of things I immediately noticed. There is a transcendent feeling in being subsumed and surrendering to a group. This applies to sports, military drills, dancing… and group singing. One becomes a part of something larger than oneself, and something in our makeup rewards us when that happens. We cling to our individuality, but we experience true ecstasy when we give it up.

The second thing that happens involves the physical act of singing. I suspect the regulated breathing involved in singing, the act of producing sound and opening one’s mouth wide calls many many neural areas into play. The physical act, I suspect, releases endorphins as well. In singing, we get rewarded by both mind and body.

No one has to think about any of the above-we “know” these things instinctively. Anyone who has attended a gospel church service, for example, does not need to be told what this feels like.

So, the reward experience is part of the show.

Kill them, take off all your clothes, snuggle up nakedly with their corpses, and have someone take your picture and post it to the internet (nsfw!). This is one of those public service campaigns to promote conservation that I just don’t get. Do these celebrities realize the props they are holding are dead animals? Is this more about flaunting your skin than doing good?

This might be one rare case where the useless phrase “virtue signaling” might actually be appropriate, because they sure as heck aren’t doing anything productive.

You can buy a flamethrower from Elon Musk for the low, low price of $500. Why? I don’t know.

Soon, orders of flamethrowers potentially capable of shooting a flame up to 10 feet will be shipped out to 20,000 people via a billionaire’s mining company, of which the greatest accomplishment leading up to the sale of flamethrowers has been the sale of hats and alleged workplace violations, in a claimed effort to battle an impending zombie apocalypse, which is almost certainly scientifically impossible. The NRA will likely respond by suggesting you purchase your own flamethrower for protection.

This is some kind of twisted promotion for his company, which wants to drill holes through cities to make it easier for cars to drive through them. I don’t get that either. I’m more used to bumper stickers and buttons being given away as promotions, this new-fangled business of selling your fans $500 weapons doesn’t thrill me.

So if I criticize the NRA, I get shot, but criticizing Elon Musk will just get you third-degree burns? None of this is appealing.

Minnesota is on a list of the 10 most educated states in the country. So is my home state of Washington.

10. New Jersey
9. Washington
8. Minnesota
7. New Hampshire
6. Virginia
5. Colorado
4. Vermont
3. Connecticut
2. Maryland
1. Massachusetts

I had to look up a few other states I’ve lived in. Utah ranks surprisingly high, at #11 — we’re going to have to credit Salt Lake City for bringing up their score, which is a really nice city to live in, despite the weird religion, and is home to a great university that the state actually takes considerable pride in. Pennsylvania is surprisingly low, at #30. It’s surprising because Philadelphia is in the heart of a region rich in universities, with a long academic tradition. I guess the benighted middle of the state is dragging their average down.

There is some bad news for Minnesota lurking in the details: we have one of the worst gaps in educational attainment by race. I suspect that’s a consequence of welcoming many immigrants — Hmong, Somali, and Central American — and then failing to do right by them.

I suspect it’s the human condition to be spinning like a top between the two. So here’s a bad song about one side of the problem.

You might think it’s great. It’s not.

OK, 2018 already sucks big time.

There was a guy wandering around the edges of the Iowa City women’s march, putting up white supremacist stickers, and looking like this:

He was pursued, non-violently, and people were taking photos of him to document his activities. He hid in a building and started making phone calls. None of this was illegal, nor were any of the marchers doing anything illegal — he was just being obnoxious, and his sweat shirt was provocative, obviously intentionally so.

What struck me, though, was this bit of the story.

“I was standing outside MERGE looking through the photos I’d taken, when a young woman in a blue hoodie came up to me,” Sarsfield said. “She asked if I’d taken photos of her boyfriend. I asked her if her boyfriend was the one putting up the white supremacist stickers.”

“She said, ‘Yes,’ and that he’d called her saying he was in MERGE. She said she wanted me to delete the photos, because this whole thing was traumatic for them,” Sarsfield recalled. “She said he’s not a racist, he just likes to do these things to get a rise out of people.”

Really? REALLY? I know the 4chan crowd likes to maintain a pretense of ironic mockery, but there are limits. Dress like a racist, act like a racist, spread racist slogans, you are a racist. I don’t care if you’re hiding behind your cloak of anonymity, you are still a bad person.

It’s kind of peak 4chan, though, when a trolling white guy claims he’s traumatized because people take photos that might identify him. He’s boo-hoo-hooing because his words and actions might just catch up with him. And that’s not all he has to worry about — he has been identified, and he was previously found guilty of possessing child porn. He’s deplorable. It just gets me how badly these people try to deny their actions.