Hours of Daylight – 10:20
Weather: Cold, overcast, occasional freezing rain or light snow

Tomorrow is my birthday. I turn 37. At that time I will, officially, be earning less than my age. The last time that happened, my foggy mind recalls, I was 24.

Driving home tonight I was so pissed at the commercials on the heavy metal station I listen to (it inspires me to drive aggressively), that I switched to NPR. Now, I am a HUGE NPR supporter. Both Annette and I gave, for us, large sums to WNYC back when they were forced to buy their license from The City.

However, NPR here is not the NPR I know and love; here it is MPR.

Turn on MPR at drive time and you will be treated to about five minutes of All Things Considered and then 25 minutes of Minnesota news. If I had more free time I would do hard comparisons and report the actual numbers. The NPR station here slices and dices ATC to ribbons then spews mountains of news that could only be of interest to the most ardent Minnesotans.

For example, tonight I learned that Minnesota, the state, has higher gonorrhea and clamydia infection rates than San Francisco, Chicago, or New York, the cities. This is serious news, but MPR devoted as much time as ATC would devote to a real story, i.e. one that would be important to, say, the entire country. The MPR commentator did an interview with the state health commish, and basically repeated the same three questions over and over to fill the enormous allotment of air time. MPR did not consult the University’s School of Public Health, they did not have any field clinicians speak as to the veracity of the Commish’s opinions and they did not have any minority group spokespeople refute the claim by the Commish that minorities are the source of the inflated numbers.