Welcome back to The Flyover, your daily digest of important, overlooked, and/or interesting Minnesota news stories.
Has the LOTI Pencil Jumped the Shark?
This past Saturday, the owners of the Lake of the Isles Pencil hosted its fifth-annual celebration in their front yard. There was much fanfare, including pun-loaded speeches, DJ tunes, a marching band performance, and an ice cream cart. Thousands showed up to gleefully watch the 20-foot-tall, Curtis Ingvoldstad-designed wooden pencil sculpture get “sharpened.”
Racket contributor Abraham Teuber, however, did not have a good time at what he calls an “excruciating circlequirk.” He’s formulated why in a thoughtful (and thorough!) Substack takedown.
“I wouldn’t go to all this trouble if they just carved their mutilated tree into a pencil and called it a day,” he writes. “What I can’t stand is the brash insistence on some profound meaning to their whimsical burning of cash. I think this spectacle is emblematic of our city’s particularly white and liberal cultural shortcomings, our inauthentic affect, our obsession with our own relevance.”…