NewsCut

Why Joe Mauer won’t retire
The Twins front office made a huge mistake decades ago not keeping franchise icon Harmon Killebrew with the team. It's a mistake those running the 2018 Twins won't make when it comes to Joe Mauer.
Shoveling sand against the tide, and Hurricane Florence
We admit to being shameless hurricane voyeurs, repeatedly clicking webcam images from the Outer Banks of North Carolina . At this point, there's little human activity on any of them. Just the ocean trying to wipe out any evidence of an allegedly advanced civilization.
The reason we know what Hurricane Florence is doing, is because a small group of people got up this morning, as in previous mornings, and flew an airplane into it.
No Art Shanty this winter
The only real way to survive a Minnesota winter is to embrace it and face it head-on. That was the beauty of the Art Shanty project, in which artists create spaces on a frozen lake somewhere and people who aren't the type to get pushed around by the weather visit, each experience changing from one shanty to another. We're going to need a Plan B, however, because the organizers have announced they'll take the coming winter off.
The limits on free speech will soon be seen -- or not seen, as the case may be -- on Red Wing's Barn Bluff, the western face of which has served for decades as a giant billboard for people who had something to say even though there's a graffiti ordinance in the city.