(SCENE: An anonymous Chipotle restaurant in the Twin Cities. The staff busies themselves with the same tasks that they’re always doing at Chipotle – grilling four thousand pounds of meat, preparing enormous vats full of rice, and that sort of thing. Up to the counter step Minnesota House of Representatives Speaker Rep. Kurt Zellers, R-Maple Grove, and House Majority Leader Rep. Matt Dean, R-Dellwood.)

CHIPOTLE EMPLOYEE: What can I get for you?

KURT ZELLERS: Well, I’ll tell you, I’m just not a fan of burritos.

EMPLOYEE: Uh, I’m sorry? Perhaps you would like tacos, or one of our bowls?

ZELLERS: No, you’re not getting this. I want a burrito, but I am not a fan of burritos.

EMPLOYEE: What?

ZELLERS: I don’t know how I can make this clearer: I do not want you to make me a chicken burrito. Black beans. Thank you.

EMPLOYEE: Uh… so you want a chicken burrito?

ZELLERS: NO! Jeez, do I have to spell everything out for you? I want you to make me exactly what I don’t want. Is that clear?

EMPLOYEE: Frankly, no.

MATT DEAN: Ma’am, let me explain. The Speaker wants a burrito for lunch, but the Governor also likes burritos. And so we can’t have it getting around that the Speaker wants a burrito too.

EMPLOYEE: Why not? That makes no sense. Can’t you both like burritos?

DEAN (agitated): Listen, we didn’t come to St. Paul to eat the same lunch the Governor eats!

ZELLERS: Actually, Matt, you used to run a restaurant, right? What do you think I should have for lunch?

DEAN: I think you should get a cheeseburger. Nothing better than a cheeseburger for lunch.

EMPLOYEE: We don’t sell cheeseburgers. We sell burritos.

ZELLERS: HOW DARE YOU. MATT DEAN USED TO DO THIS FOR A LIVING. I DEMAND THAT YOU BEGIN SELLING CHEESEBURGERS IMMEDIATELY. I AM INTRODUCING A BILL TO REQUIRE ALL BURRITO RESTAURANTS TO SELL CHEESEBURGERS.

EMPLOYEE: You want a cheeseburger from a burrito restaurant?

ZELLERS: Matt Dead used to be a restauranteur, madam. That means that he’s an expert in all foodstuff production of any kind, and MATT DEAN SAYS YOU NEED TO SELL ME A CHEESEBURGER.

DEAN: Unless the Governor likes cheeseburgers. Then you can’t sell them ever.

EMPLOYEE: I’m going to have to ask you guys to leave.

ZELLERS: Yeah, we hear that a lot nowadays.

*To be totally clear, I’m not criticizing people who are anti-stadium; just Kurt Zellers, for waffling and saying things like “I can’t support the bill” but “I hope it passes,” and then trying to claim later that he didn’t mean the things he said. Also, I should note that I first published this in the FanPosts section of the Daily Norseman.
*

Everyone likes to have an original opinion – to see something that others don’t see, or be able to explain it in ways they can’t. With this in mind, I’ve come up with a few Twins opinions – for your own personal use, if you wish – that absolutely nobody, I mean nobody, is going to be using.

Also, if you want to know what the week has in store for the Twins, I’ve got that covered too.

This week, I tell the story of my trip to Vegas, which I think bored people. They’re just lucky I didn’t put in a more complete explanation of how I came to win a bet on NASCAR, a sport I know virtually nothing about. As always, these links appeared first at RandBall, your home for Minnesota’s abysmally depressing major sports.

When I stepped off the plane in Las Vegas, I heard other people saying, “Vegas, Baby, Vegas!” They had been programmed to say this by movies and television, where Las Vegas is portrayed as the world center of excitement and debauchery of all stripes, as a place where people come to ride dinosaurs while discharging rifles and drinking from open chalices of molten lava. Or whatever. I can’t say that I had a clear picture in my head of what Vegas would be like, a confusion that was doubled by the fact that the Las Vegas airport is completely anonymous, like the Denver airport with a few rows of slot machines.

There are things that are allowed in Las Vegas that are not allowed anywhere else, like smoking lavishly indoors, or carrying a drink wherever you go. (In this way, it’s a little like being at a convention of alcoholics in about 1989.) Vegas also has sports betting, something that is banned across the United States, and is the worldwide leader in “enormous hotels that look like other places, as long as you have a very bad imagination about what other places look like.” But other than those slight differences, it looks surpassingly like Tucson – same desert climate, same acres of abandoned lots and disused asphalt, same general gripping fear of being stabbed no matter where you go.

The truth is that Vegas – like everywhere else – is defined by how you act while you’re there, not by the place itself. And it’s true that more than most cities, it’s designed for you to act like an idiot; it may be the best place in the world to get drunk and lose a lot of money, with the possible exception of western Minnesota farm auctions in the summertime, and then you at least usually have an inoperable decades-old combine or two to show for your big day out. It’s exciting because people are conditioned to do exciting things while they’re there, not because the town demands that you re-enact things from “The Hangover.”

So let me tell you about my first-ever trip to Vegas. I won three dollars fifty-five cents from a Star Wars slot machine that I couldn’t begin to understand; I saw one of my friends win over two thousand dollars at blackjack; I won thirty-five dollars betting on a NASCAR race; and I got a big cut on my shin from diving into a moving limousine at an In-N-Out Burger. Some of these things I could have done in Minneapolis, and some of them I couldn’t. But I probably wouldn’t have done any of them here, and I suppose that this is the magic that Las Vegas provides.

On with the links:

*I really enjoyed Matt Kallman’s story of his grandfather’s career in the early days of pro basketball, which is a great look into how things were back in the old days.

*Spencer Hall may be the only writer in the world that could imagine Ryan Leaf and Peyton Manning in the year 2028 and come up with this: the latter fighting with an A/V system and the former living in the woods and named The Pancake Man.

*Military terms are used far too often in football, but SB Nation’s Matt Ufford – a former Marine – knows that in Junior Seau’s case, at least one comparison may be an apt one.

*I really enjoyed Amy K. Nelson’s featurette on former Royals star, current Royals coach, and convicted drug abuser Willie Mays Aikens. It’s over ten minutes long – that’s 37 hours, translated into internet terms – but I recommend it anyway.

*And finally: Bulls fans have have figured out exactly how to feel.

Thanks to some scheduling issues (i.e. I was in Vegas all weekend), Thursday was my day at Twinkie Town this week. With the Twins getting no-hit on Wednesday night, I decided to make a few short lists about how bad the Twins are.

Also, we did a poll and found that 90% of Twins fans think the team will lose at least 90 games this year, and well over half are predicting at least 100 losses. (Only 9% agreed with me in saying that the Twins will lose 120 games this year. I think it’s happening.)

The Twins wanted to “cheer up” Francisco Liriano, according to manager Ron Gardenhire. Over at Twinkie Town, I imagined what that might look like.

The same day, the Twins announced that – following another disappointing start – Liriano would be skipped his next time up in the rotation. No wonder he needed cheering up.

*Every time I write something that even touches on a political matter, it becomes clear to me that I should not do this ever. Anyway, this appeared first at RandBall, your home for new athletic directors. *

In times of great conflict, it’s nice to have legislators that we can all be proud of. We are blessed with great leaders and statesmen, folks who, when contentious decisions like the Vikings’ Minneapolis stadium proposal come up for debate, will do the right thing and bog that thing down in committee. It’s what our legislators promised us on the stump – that they alone were ready, willing, and able to go to St. Paul and to tie things up in procedural nonsense.

I get that this is a difficult decision. Minnesota would be a poorer place if the Vikings were to leave town, which they will do without a new stadium. At the same time, the team’s asking for a lot of public revenues to be spent on a building that for some reason costs more than Target Field and TCF Bank Stadium put together. Like every group of people, the state of Minnesota is hamstrung by the need to make finite resources cover infinite wants, and there’s a legitimate discussion to be had about where an NFL team fits in our list of priorities and expenditures.

Surely, the least our legislators can do is to actually have that discussion – to stop sinking into the cameral morass and to simply make a decision. Government exists as a centralized way for us to provide ourselves services. It’s time to quit arguing about the process and to decide whether an NFL team will be one of those services. This is elected leaders’ only job, and I couldn’t be more frustrated in their continuing inability to do so.

On with the links:

*Via Phil Mackey, SI.com’s Tom Verducci thinks that the spate of recent injuries to closers means that it’s time to rethink how the baseball bullpen is used. Maybe “throw hard enough for your arm to explode, for one inning, every other day” really isn’t the best way of taking care of pitchers’ arms. (This also seems like a good time to link to Deadspin checking in with former Twins reliever Dr. Mike Marshall, who could pitch pretty much every day if anybody needed him.)

*Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey, writing at economist.com, makes a compelling case that nobody could have predicted the rise of Jeremy Lin – not even the guy that purportedly did.

*I enjoyed local writer Bryan Reynolds writing about his day trying to play lacrosse with the Minnesota Swarm. Key quote: “The consensus from the game was that none of us have the ability to run from one end of a hockey rink to the other.”

*Jesse Lund at Twinkie Town goes inside the pitch breakdowns to study how Carl Pavano beat the Yankees despite throwing only four breaking pitches all night.

*And finally – the goofs at Down Goes Brown have the latest (made-up) Brendan Shanahan disciplinary video explanation. We all used to make fun of former disciplinary czar Colin Campbell for his inconsistent, inscrutable decisions, but Shanahan is as bad, if not worse.

Ben Revere was sent down to Triple-A, which from a baseball perspective is a good thing  – he needs to play more than he is currently playing in the majors, so that he may continue to develop. From a promotional standpoint, though, it’s a bad thing, since the team was holding Ben Revere Bat Day in a couple of weeks.

Over at Twinkie Town, then, we look at some other (made-up) Twins promotions that the team might want to cancel.

Forgot to post these until the Thursday after. Timely! As always, these appeared first at RandBall, your home for bashing Bo Ryan.

Last Sunday, America watched the Masters and found its new golf hero, Bubba Watson. His left-handed swing looks like he’s right-handed but nobody’s had the heart to tell him. He possesses a body so strangely proportioned he appears to be a caricature of himself. He swings a pink driver and when he wins a major he goes out for ice cream with his buddies and he talks like a Dukes of Hazzard character and he seems to be genetically incapable of playing safely.

Christopher Mann writes that his everyman appeal allows us to project ourselves upon him, and that’s what makes him popular – that “the light of exceptional ordinariness” shines in him. But I’m not sure that’s right; not one of us would have tried to put fifty yards of hook into a wedge shot on a playoff hole in the Masters. We are, after all, not crazy. I was pleading through the television for Bubba to do the sensible thing and wedge out into the fairway and try to make an up-and-down par, the play that I think 98% of pro golfers would have made.

It’s hard not to compare Watson to the tour’s current scrambling lefty maestro, Phil Mickelson. Phil has long seemed like the id of the golf world, all flop shots and inappropriate club choices. But if Phil is the tour’s id, then Watson is Phil’s id – the shaggy-haired, long-hitting fearless banana nut fudge that Phil manages to keep locked up inside. Every so often, the demon flares inside Mickelson, and he ends up trying to play a shot right-handed out of a lake with one foot on a pontoon. But Bubba is all demon – swing hard and hope, and forget about what might go wrong.

I hope someday, we get a back-nine duel with Bubba and Phil in the same group. I hope Phil comes down to the last hole with a two-shot lead. I hope Phil’s caddy is there, telling him to just play safe down the middle and win the tournament. And I hope we see Phil glance at Bubba. I hope Phil sees the glint of a luridly pink driver, and faces personification of the crazy voice in his head, all wild hair and absurdly long arms and southern accent, the manifestation of the voice that’s telling him, forget playing safe, let’s swing hard and see if we can’t drive this green.

Forget projecting myself onto Bubba. I just like the crazy golf he plays. On with the links:

*I loved Spencer Hall’s embedded report from inside the Mississippi State football program. It’s a reminder that being a college football coach is exactly like your job, except a coach works twice as many hours and have no hobbies or life, and really is only interested in being a coach 24 hours per day and is not interested in anything else whatsoever.

*The Classical is following along as a few folks in Baltimore start their own minor league soccer team. It’s a nice look at sports in the minors, where it’s less about money and more about running your own team so you have someone to cheer for.

*The Toronto Maple Leafs missed the playoffs again this year, thus extending their streak of futility. There are many reasons the Leafs are terrible, but The Economist has a novel explanation: global warming is ruining winter in Ontario.

*I enjoyed Eric Nusbaum’s negative look at the MLB Fan Cave. Key quote: ” The… myth is that individual fandom is measurable in the volume of cheers, the number of caps owned, the amount of trivia spouted off, or the total hours spent at the ballpark.”

*I don’t remember a lot about the mid-90s Twins – it’s all a blur of Scott Stahoviak and Pat Mahomes and Rich Becker – but I do remember the night they introduced their hideous red alternate jerseys.

And finally: Man, look at what playing for the Orioles does to a guy.

I’m back at Canis Hoopus today with another edition of Timberwolves Point/Counterpoint, the goofy post in which I imagine an argument for two different Timberwolves players. Today, it’s Ricky Rubio arguing with Anthony Randolph about whether optimism or pessimism is best.

Like last time: stupendously dumb. This is fun.

The Twins lost their first three games of the season. This week, they play two American League powerhouses, the Angels and the Rangers. Minnesota’s pitching is terrible, their defense weak, their hitting anemic. In all seriousness, it’s very possible that the Twins could get swept twice more.

I suppose this is a serious problem, if you consider the Twins’ travails to be a serious subject. Nevertheless, I’m determined not to take it seriously, and so at Twinkie Town, I look at some potential scenarios – some plausible, some implausible, some ridiculous – in which the Twins could lose another six in a row.