The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

Eventful barely begins to describe the year that was 2008. There was, of course, the ongoing fiction that Minnesota was ever a battleground state during the presidential election, and the RNC taking place in Minneapolis, er...Saint Paul. But even stripping away the millions of dollars and the monstrous steaming piles of carefully worded bullscheiss funneled into the state and strewn across the landscape like so many cow pies by the national politicos leaves us with a startling patchwork of transcendence and frustration on the local political scene.

Today marked the first day of what promises to be an interminable coda tacked upon an already unwieldy election.

Fresh from the flap over his new book Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, our favorite local boy Franken (he’s from St. Louis Park, you know) has never been better—even when he won five Emmys for his work on the original cast and writing staff of Saturday Night Live, or when he won a Grammy for best comedy album in the 1980s, or when he starred as ersatz new-age twelve-stepper Stuart Smalley in the nineties.