Twin Cities BoingBoing Winter Meetup: January 28

Mark your calendars, Twin Citians. The Powderhorn Park Art Sled Rally is January 28. If you've never been, you're missing out. It's a Happy Mutant-filled fun fest of creatively themed homemade sleds careening down a steep hill, ridden by costumed characters. It's also the perfect way to cure some depth-of-winter blues. Check out the video to see, among other things, a sled shaped like a 20-sided die.

I'll be joining BoingBoing readers for a meetup before this year's rally. Hopefully, you can come! We'll meet at 1:00. Reader Emily Lloyd has graciously volunteered her home, across the street from Powderhorn Park, for the meetup location. Bring what you'd like to drink. Bring a snack to share. At 2:00 or so, we'll walk to the park to watch the sledding. More details are on the BoingBoing Meetup page. See you there!

Maggie Koerth-Baker is the science editor at BoingBoing.net. She writes a monthly column for The New York Times Magazine and is the author of Before the Lights Go Out, a book about electricity, infrastructure, and the future of energy. You can find Maggie on Twitter and Facebook.

Maggie goes places and talks to people. Find out where she'll be speaking next.

MORE: art sleds • events • Everything Happens in the Midwest • happy mutants • minneapolis • St. Paul • Twin Cities

More at Boing Boing

Eurovision 2013: An American in London

The technology that links taxonomy and Star Trek

techblog

I think I will come, great opportunity!
IronEdithKidd

Out-o-towners (not from the Northlands) make sure you bring your absolute warmest clothing and boots. The last week of January/first week of February are notoriously cold in the Cities.

Never got to partake in any of the Winter Carnival fun growing up because it was always too damned cold for my mom to let me go. Especially to the parade. Why, oh why, is it always at least -20 that night?
http://twitter.com/kcmpls Kassie

Think I’ll have to check this out this year. I live less than a mile away and have never made it. Usually because it is super cold. This will be the year. (And let’s hope we have snow.)
- IronEdithKidd
  
  That could be tricky this year. I was up visiting family for Thanksgiving. It was a scant 5 degrees colder than it was in Detroit. That’s 55 degrees! On Thanksgiving in Minneapolis! WTF?
  
  Back in the day, we’d get 18″ storms immediately followed by 10″ storms the day before Thanksgiving (or maybe that was just 1983, I dunno). Bah. Get off my lawn, la nina!
  - Antinous / Moderator
    
    It was a scant 5 degrees colder than it was in Detroit.
    
    We’ve had a few nights in the last month or so when it was colder in Palm Springs than in Boston, New York and Toronto. And we’re not having particularly cold nights this year.
folkclarinet

Dang…I won’t be able to make it this time. The band has a gig in Madison that night. :(
GuyInMilwaukee

Sounds like a blast. I bet we could put together something pretty fun with all the leftover stuff from past projects. Milwaukee will represent!
quickbrownfox

Not to be a dick, but I think you really mean “*careering* down a steep hill.” But I’m just jealous because I don’t live in Minneapolis anymore.
- http://pulse.yahoo.com/_LJKDK6WWEZM2TXNUWI334YO5NY Seraph
  
  http://lmgtfy.com/?q=+careening
  - quickbrownfox
    
    Common usage != correct usage. Also, the first result of that search supports my point. From Bryan Garner’s Modern American Usage:
    
    careen; career, vb. Careen = (1) v.i., to tip or tilt [the sailboat careened and then sank]; or (2) v.t., to cause to tip or tilt [they careened the ship on the beach to scrape the barnacles and caulk the seams]. Career = to move wildly at high speed. E.g.: “His car overturned yesterday after careering out of control across three lanes of the motorway.”
    …
    It’s understandable why most people aren’t comfortable with this verbal usage of career. The word derived from a Latin term for road or path, and later denoted a racetrack, but today people think of it only as a noun: the path of a life’s work.
    
    The point is not that the sleds will be tilted down a steep hill, it’s that they will be moving quickly.
Pirate Jenny

That looks like the cold-weather equivalent of the Adult Soapbox Derby. It’s a shame we don’t reliably get a lot of snow in Portland (Oregon), or we’d probably steal this idea in a hot minute. Looks fun!