NPR's Robert Krulwich circled this bright spot on a night-time satellite image of the United States. As Krulwich points out, this cluster of lights is new — it wasn't there in 2005. And it's not a city.

Instead, that bright spot is a shining reminder of the natural gas boom. What you're seeing are the lights from drilling rigs and flares burning gas.

In 1936, Ludwig Bemelmans painted scenes of the Twin Cities to illustrate an article in Fortune magazine. If the style looks at all familiar, it's probably because you're remembering Bemelmans' most famous creation — a Parisian schoolgirl named Madeline.

In this painting, you can see the Cathedral of St. Paul and what I am pretty certain is the James J. Hill House — a massive, red sandstone mansion that is actually across the street and down a half block from the Cathedral. Bonus fact: The Hill House was built by the railroad magnate behind what is now Amtrak's Empire Builder route from Seattle to Minneapolis. In fact, that was his nickname. James "The Empire Builder" Hill. I'm not kidding. The house is open for tours and it's pretty fantastic. Plus, you get to watch a nice video which assures you that while James J. Hill was, technically, a union-busting robber baron, he also really liked kittens. Again, not kidding.

Check out the Nokohaha blog for more of these paintings

At one point — I think it was about halfway through climbing the twisting warren of dark staircases and pipe organ parts that leads to the top of the 10-story slide — I turned to my husband and asked, incredulous, "Why the hell wasn't this place in American Gods?"

Opened in an abandoned shoe factory and warehouse in downtown St. Louis in 1997, The City Museum is not so much a museum as it is a massive, rambling fantasy playground. From the rooftop to the strange subterranean tunnels built beneath the lobby floor, sculptor Bob Cassilly and a team of 20 artisans have, bit by bit, created something truly wonderful. Imagine what might happen if somebody turned Maker Faire into a full-scale amusement park. That's The City Museum.

There's a 1940s ferris wheel creaking and groaning its way through a glorious, rooftop view of the city. There's a human gerbil trail that winds around the first floor ceiling, providing great spots to check out the intricate tile mosaic fish that swim across the floor. There are columns covered in gears, and columns covered in old printing press plates. There's a giant ball pit; two gutted airplanes suspended in midair; and so many chutes, and slides, and tunnels that, by the time you walk back to your car you will find yourself thoroughly conditioned into reflexively contorting yourself into every dark hole you happen to see. Also, there are bars. Also, there is almost entirely zero supervision.

And sure, okay, that alone is not really enough to justify including The City Museum on an imaginary map of important places of power. But here's the thing about the The City Museum: It is actually built out of the city. It is the city. And the city is ancient.

I'm not just talking about "ancient" in American terms. When European explorers showed up on the banks of the Mississippi in 1673, there was already a city at the site of St. Louis — a huge network of mounds and earthworks dating back to the 10th century. Much later, in the late 19th century, this was the location of the fourth largest city in the United States. People are drawn to St. Louis and they have always been drawn to St. Louis.

The last 100 years or so are an aberration in that pattern. But what's 100 years to a 1000-year-old city? Meanwhile, in that blip, The City Museum rises, literally built from the cast-off parts that other people left to rot. The welded metal and the glass mosaic; the ferris wheel and the airplanes; cement and rebar; an entire collection of beautiful, carved cornices and architectural details left over from the heyday of Euro-American St. Louis — it's all been salvaged from the dying city and pieced back together like a prayer.

Even the building itself is an altar to human development in this place. There were once Mississippian mounds scattered throughout the city of St. Louis. On the first floor of The City Museum, half inside the main building and half out, you can see what initially replaced them — a log cabin, a real one, dating to the early 1800s. It's a bar now. You can drink there. And on top of it all sits the symbol of the city's industrialization, power, and success in the form of the International Shoe Company factory and warehouse.

What's more, this temple seems to be accomplishing something, in the metaphorical cosmic sense. I know there are a lot of you who won't believe me, but St. Louis is no longer the wreck I, and many other Midwesterners, grew up thinking it was. Or, at least, it's not all a wreck. There is life here, and getting livelier. To get from the parking lot to The City Museum, we wandered through a part of downtown lit up with fancy lofts, unique stores, and people heading to parties, restaurants, and bars. In the South Grand and Tower Grove neighborhoods we found real, thriving city — brick homes rehabilitated, street parties underway, diverse crowds hanging out in a restaurant courtyard for an outdoor concert. There was block after block of cool stores, good food, and people who seem to really want to live in this place. Again. Because people come to St. Louis.

Bob Cassilly, the sculptor responsible for The City Museum, was a part of that revitalization. He started his career renovating and building townhouses in the city's decimated neighborhoods. The City Museum itself has been used as an anchor to develop the vibrant area we saw around it, and Cassilly apparently had a hand in or outright owned several residential and commercial projects nearby. When he died last year, he was in the process of turning an abandoned cement factory and construction dump on the city's still-impoverished north side into another whimsical attraction called Cementland.

The point to all of this: You need to go to The City Museum. Make it a Happy Mutant pilgrimage. It's one of the only tourist attractions I've ever been to that managed to live up to all the hype I'd heard before I got there. But, while you're at it, visit St. Louis, because the two things are one in the same, and even now she rises. (And, also, Neil Gaiman should really consider adding The City Museum into any planned American Gods sequels. I think I've made a pretty good case here.)

Some Tips for The City Museum:
• Go at night. Not just because there are fewer school groups to contend with and the bars are open. There's something about being in the dark here that makes the place even more awesome. It's open to 11 p.m. for a reason. Plus, they shut off the lights inside and give you a flashlight.
• Bring kneepads. You will look dumb. But I cannot stress enough how much of the experience you will spend on your hands and knees. And, while it may not seem this way most of the time, your 31-year-old knees are old. Really old. Really, really, really old. And prone to bruising.
• Leave anything you do not want to lose in the car. Do you have one of those little zippered bags on a lanyard that you're supposed to keep your passport in, under your clothes, when traveling in a foreign country? Bring that. Use it to hold some cash, your ID, and maaaaybe a cell phone. Maybe. You want your arms and hips unencumbered by purses, you want your butt free of oversized wallets, and you want anything that could fall out of your pockets already out of your pockets.
• Make a plan. You will end up separated from the people you came in with. You think you won't. But it's so easy. You go down the same hole, but you take a right turn and they think you took a left and the next thing you know you're both on different floors of the building. Or, say, your child crawls into something that you are pretty sure is too small for you to fit in and you have no idea where it leads, so you stand there freaking out while several childless adults nearby vacillate between wishing you would calm down and vicariously freaking out right along with you. I suggest synchronized watches and planned meeting points/times to regroup.
• Pay extra for the roof. Seriously, it's worth it. I can't speak to the aquarium, but it's supposed to have a walk-through shark tank and a stingray petting zoo. It's probably safe to assume that any upgrade is an upgrade worth paying extra for here.
• Don't learn too much about the place ahead of time. I am going to give you a link to the website, but you have to promise to use it wisely. And, by that, I mean, don't go to the "Attractions" tab and spoil the whole thing for yourself. Part of what makes this so awesome is the feeling of discovering something insanely wonderful and unexpected around every corner. Bonus: The sense that, even in three hours, you didn't see more than 1/3 of the place. If you go in with a plan of what you will find on which floor, where, I don't think it would be nearly as fun.
• Make friends with one of the people who live in the loft apartments on the 5th floor. And, when you have accomplished that, report back to me. I want to be friends with them, too.

That is a high claim, I know. But over Labor Day weekend, a combination of dedicated curation and popular vote resulted in Henri 2, Paw de Deux being named the best Internet cat video.

The Internet Cat Film Festival, sponsored by Minneapolis' Walker Museum of Art, drew a live audience of more than 10,000 people last Thursday night. Videos were curated from a massive collection submitted online, and were grouped into thematic categories— foreign films, for instance, or comedies. Henri 2 took home the Golden Kitty, a People's Choice award.

Bonus: If arguing about the merits of Henri 2 weren't enough of a gift to your procrastination tendencies, you can also check out a full list of all the films screened at the festival, including links.

I'm excited to be back on my old home turf next week, with two speaking events in Kansas City, Missouri, and Lawrence, Kansas.

Both events are centered on Before the Lights Go Out, my book about electricity, infrastructure, and the future of energy.

Thursday, August 30, 7:00 pm — The Raven bookstore in Lawrence
I'll be back in my college town to talk about the weird, messy history of electricity, and the ways that writing online can help build a better book. Join me at 6 East 7th Street, Lawrence, Kansas.

Friday, August 31, 7:00 pm — Prospero's Books in Kansas City
My event at Prospero's will cover a lot of the same ground as The Raven event, but will get more in-depth on the engineering of how our electric grid works and why this flawed system affects what we can and can't do to solve our energy problems. RSVP for the Prospero's event (and get address info) on Facebook.

If these photos of NASA's Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project look suspiciously like they might actually have been taken inside an abandoned McDonalds ... well, that's very observant of you.

All of those film canisters you see in the first image are actually spools of 70mm magnetic tape containing the analog originals of images taken by the Lunar Orbiter spacecraft in 1966 and 1967. Very few of these images have been seen by the public—at least, in their full glory. Some of the images were released early on, but only as grainy photos of photos. The originals are a lot more sharp and detailed.

After sitting in storage for decades—most notably in a barn in California—the tapes were brought to the NASA Ames Research Center in 2007. Since then, some of the originals have been digitized and preserved. (There's a good chance you saw a few in 2008, when the first preserved images were released.) Others are still in process. There's not much funding for this type of work, and it can get expensive, as it involves maintaining extremely rare FR-900 tape drives.

These photos of the LOIRP facility were taken in 2008 by venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson, who has been on a couple of tours there. He says:

Some of the applications of this project, beyond accessing the best images of the moon ever taken, are to look for new landing sites for the new Google Lunar X-Prize robo-landers, and to compare the new craters on the moon today to 40 years ago, a measure of micrometeorite flux and risk to future lunar operations.

Check out NASA's page on LOIRP

Visit the official LOIRP team website

Check out Steve Jurvetson's photos on Flickr. If you scroll down in the comments, you'll find a photo of the outside of the LOIRP facility, taken this week.

Well, it's been a quiet week in Minneapolis, Minnesota, my hometown. The heatwave broke. There was a giant tomato fight downtown. And the Gonzo Group Theater is performing Aristophanes in the middle of the lightrail construction zone. But out on the Internet, everybody is talking about the fact that Minneapolis will, on August 30, play host an Internet cat video film festival.

Yes, a film festival of Internet cat videos. Curator Katie Czarniecki Hill is accepting nominations through July 30, so you should totally submit your favorite.

But I also wanted to talk briefly about the context of this, because it's awesome, and you should know about it. Czarniecki's Cat Video Film Festival is part of a summer-long program at the Walker Art Center (our fabulous modern art museum) called Open Field. If you're not familiar with Minneapolis, the Walker sits at the base of a big hill. Part of the lot is covered with art museum, and part of it is given over to a broad, grassy slope*.

That's where Open Field happens. What's Open Field? Partly it's just a reminder that this big public greenspace exists behind the Walker and, hey, maybe you should come hang out there. But it's also sort of an ad-hoc, crowd-sourced, summer-long festival space, where both Walker artists-in-residence and average folks can stage unique community events, skill-shares, workshops, and projects. Today, for instance, you could go down to Open Field and team up with a group of knitters and fiber artists who are building an interactive fabric installation; join the band Dear Data for a low-key acoustic campfire sing-a-long; watch your own (and other people's) old, film-based home movies and learn about film preservation; and participate in an interactive workshop about the history and future of print-letter writing and the post office.

Basically, you should know this—Walker Open Field: It's like a Happy Mutant smorgasbord.

See the Open Field Schedule, including the Cat Video Film Festival

I'm amused and charmed by this theoretical public art project proposed by Minneapolis' Carmichael Lynch Creative. Urban Plant Tags explain the care, placement, and proper feeding of inanimate objects like benches, streetlights, and fire hydrants.

You can go to the website to read those plant tags more clearly. But I love the care instructions for this bench: "Apply Real Estate Ads Annually — Occasionally Wipe Clean — Keep Warm With Butt."

Side note: Perhaps you are confused by the fact that this fire hydrant appears to be on a stilt. That's because it snows so much up here in Minnesota that they have to build the fire hydrants tall enough to clear the winter snow cover. An amusing regionalism.

See the whole set of urban plant tags

It didn't go over very well, according to a story in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune:

"The first three-quarters of the presentation were really good," said Bliss. "They talked about what is marriage and how marriage helps us as a society. Then it started going downhill when they started talking about single parents and adopted kids. They didn't directly say it, but they implied that kids who are adopted or live with single parents are less than kids with two parents of the opposite sex. They implied that a 'normal' family is the best family."

"When they finally got to gay marriage, [students] were really upset," said Bliss. "You could look around the room and feel the anger. My friend who is a lesbian started crying, and people were crying in the bathroom."

Bliss was one of several students who stood up to argue with the representatives from the archdiocese. One girl held up a sign that said, "I love my moms."

It's not a coincidence that this assembly was mandatory for seniors only. Minnesota will be voting on a marriage amendment this year. In fact, the presenters from the archdiocese tried to bring that issue up, but didn't get much of a chance to talk about it because of students—politely and respectively—challenging the rhetoric and asking pointed questions about evidence.

Also not random chance: The fact that high school students would challenge the Bishops on these issues to begin with. There is broad support for gay marriage among people under 30. In fact, multiple polls have shown that somewhere between 55% and 65% of all people under 30 support gay marriage. Like the seniors at DeLaSalle, a majority of young Americans get that this isn't a political football, it's a civil rights issue.

Read the Minneapolis Star-Tribune story about what happened at DeLaSalle High School.

See two polls on gay marriage from 2010 and 2011.

We grow a lot of corn in the United States, much of which never sees the inside of a human stomach. In fact, in 2010, something like a quarter of all the corn grown in this country went to ethanol production. That's a massive amount of corn grown for gas tanks. And it's a problem.

The process of growing corn is tremendously energy intensive, and it has some far-reaching drawbacks that threaten the future of vital farmlands in the Midwest. Corn crops provide steady, reliable income for farmers. But the risks likely outweigh those benefits, at least at the quantities in which we now grow corn.

In the spring of 2009, I experienced some of those risks first hand. At Smithsonian.com, you can read a excerpt from Before the Lights Go Out, my book about the future of energy. The excerpt is about Madelia, Minnesota, a small town where local farming advocates are trying to promote a more sustainable cropping system, and a better way to grow biofuels—one that provides incentives for farmers to grow less corn, not more.

In the course of reporting that story, I ran into a dust storm—a phenomenon that is related to the way corn grows and what we have to do to the soil to keep producing massive corn crops year after year.

The wind had started the day full of bluster, and it was positively furious by the afternoon, while the open, empty fields that flanked the highway offered nothing to slow the wind down. This alone wouldn’t have been a big problem. I grew up in Kansas, and I know how to steer a car through a windstorm. The issue was what I could see ahead of me—or, rather, what I couldn’t see. Out of nowhere, a gray cloud rose up to hover over the highway, swallowing semi-trucks and digesting them into sets of disembodied tail lights. I had barely enough time to realize I wasn’t looking at fog before I plunged into the thick of it.

The sun disappeared. Gravel pinged against the car windows. I couldn’t see anything that wasn’t artificially lit. In a panic, I turned on my headlamps just as I drove out the other side of the gritty haze, back into a normal, windy spring day. The “cloud” was made of dirt, and a mile or so up the road, another gray ribbon of it stretched across the horizon. I went through three or four of these dust clouds before I reached the exit for Madelia.

Even in town, the dust was not easily vanquished. I parked my car downtown, beneath the prow of a movie theater awning, and stepped out into air so texturized you could almost gnaw on it. Flecks of dust stuck in my sun block. When I opened my mouth, grit came in.

I had traveled to Madelia to meet with Linda Meschke, the woman who had become the driving force behind the Madelia Model, and I’d left my house dressed for the occasion, wearing the tidy business-casual wear of a young reporter. Those dust clouds knocked me down a peg. By the time I’d walked two blocks through downtown Madelia, my skin was turning pink, and my hair was a winded red whirl glued into place under a layer of grime. Meschke didn’t seem to mind my sorry state. Instead, she just nodded slowly and said, “It’s a little windy out here today.”

At that point, I still didn’t quite understand what I had seen. Dust clouds such as this, I knew, were related to soil erosion, but it wasn’t until I talked to Meschke that I was able to connect the dots between the dust in my hair and the goals of the Madelia Model.

Read the full excerpt at Smithsonian.com.

Read my book, Before the Lights Go Out, to learn more about efforts to localize energy generation.

This customized 1957 Pontiac was used by the Erie Mining Company to transport supervisors up and down the company's 74-mile-long Mainline railroad, which shipped taconite from mines in northern Minnesota to coastal ports and processing facilities on Lake Superior.

Every day, seven 96-car trains full of taconite travel down this rail line. The Pontiac was tricked out to allow it to drive on both roads or on the Mainline rails, themselves, with rail wheels that could be raised or lowered. You can see the rail wheels in the photo below.

Both photos come from my visit to the Lake Superior Railroad Museum in Duluth last month.

Here are two myths you need to let go of:

The solution to high gas prices is more oil.

Climate change is something that happens to polar bears and people from Kiribati.

The truth is that fossil fuels are extremely useful and valuable. And, by their very nature, the supplies are limited. Likewise, climate change isn't just something that's going happen—it's already taking place, and you can see the effects in your own backyard.

Too often, I think, we talk about the risks of fossil fuel dependence and climate change in ways that make them seem abstract to the very people who use the most fossil fuels and create the most greenhouse gases. That's a problem. There are lots of reasons to care about energy. But I think that fossil fuel limits and climate change are the most pressing reasons. And I think it's incredibly important to discuss those very real risks in a way that actually feels very real.

This isn't about morality, or lifestyle choices, or maintaining populations of cute, fuzzy animals. (Or, rather, it's not just about those things.) Instead, we have to consider what will happen to us and how much money we will have to spend if we choose to do nothing to change the way we make and use energy.

Over at Scientific American, you can read an excerpt from my upcoming book, Before the Lights Go Out. In it, you'll read about the energy risks hanging over the Kansas City metro area—a place that, in many ways, resembles the places and lifestyles shared by a majority of Americans. You've probably never been to Merriam, Kansas. But you can look at Merriam and see what could happen in your hometown.

Merriam isn't a small town. There's nothing really recognizable as a small town central business district. Instead, Merriam's stores and offices are mostly concentrated along two major thoroughfares—Shawnee Mission Parkway and Johnson Drive. These wide, multilane roads are dotted with clusters of shopping centers and big box stores, like necklaces strung with fat pearls. The municipal building and the police station are a couple of nondescript offices that sit off the frontage of Shawnee Mission Parkway, on a ridge overlooking the Interstate. Nothing about that says, "Classic Americana."

Yet Merriam isn't a suburb, either—or an urban city. It's too dense to be the first and not dense enough to be the latter. Merriam has a mixture of house styles. Drive down one street, and you'll see a 1930s bungalow standing shoulder to shoulder with a spare little 1950s Cape Cod. Next to that, there's a 1980s split-level with windows on the front and the back but none on the sides. More than three generations of the American Dream are living here.

It's ironic that Merriam doesn't really fit any of the classic American paradigms, because, quite frankly, most of us have already left those paradigms behind. We talk about this country as if it's full of neatly defined small towns, big cities, and tidy suburbs. In reality, the places where we live are lot mushier than that. Merriam isn't the exception. Merriam is the rule.

Read the rest of this excerpt from Before the Lights Go Out at Scientific American.

Here's a sentence I never expected to type: You should really read the Grand Forks Herald's review of The Olive Garden.

This is in North Dakota, for those not familiar. With almost 100,000 people in the metro area, it's the third-largest city in the state. It recently got its first Olive Garden and critic Marilyn Hagerty got in ahead of the lunch rush.

The place is impressive. It’s fashioned in Tuscan farmhouse style with a welcoming entryway. There is seating for those who are waiting ...

At length, I asked my server what she would recommend. She suggested chicken Alfredo, and I went with that. Instead of the raspberry lemonade she suggested, I drank water.

She first brought me the familiar Olive Garden salad bowl with crisp greens, peppers, onion rings and yes — several black olives. Along with it came a plate with two long, warm breadsticks.

There are several things to love about this review. For me, it's about the nostalgia. If you grew up in places where Olive Garden and Red Lobster really were the best restaurants in town, you can't help but feel a warm twinge of homesickness reading this. It's not judgement. I can't judge. I chose to go to Applebee's for my fancy high school graduation dinner.

But the best part about this review comes from some background information dug up by intrepid Duluth News reporter Brandon Stahl. In the course of verifying that this was, in fact, a real review, he uncovered something wonderfully upper-Midwestern. First, read the full review. Done that? Great. Now, get this—that was not a positive review of The Olive Garden.

Stahl talked to a former Grand Forks Herald editor who says, "By the way, [Marilyn Hagerty's] regular readers will recognize that as a fairly negative review since she spent a lot more time on the ambience than the food."

Cultural context: It's the difference between a glowing review, and a passive-aggressively negative one.

Before the Lights Go Out is Maggie's new book about how our current energy systems work, and how we'll have to change them in the future. It comes out April 10th and is available for pre-order (in print or e-book) now. Over the next couple of months, Maggie will be posting some energy-related stories based on things she learned while researching the book. This is one of them.

One of the things I loved about researching my book on the future of energy was getting the opportunity to delve a little into the history of electricity. Although I'd heard plenty about the Tesla vs. Edison wars—the "great men doing important things" side of the story—I was pretty unfamiliar with the impact their inventions had on average people, and how those people responded and adapted to changing technology.

What I found in my research was fascinating. I spent a lot of time in the archives at the Wisconsin Historical Society, turning up letters and documents that introduced me to a perspective on history I'd not previously known. I learned about the skepticism and fear that surrounded electricity in the 19th and early 20th century. I found out that many, many of the early electric utilities went bankrupt—unable to make enough money selling electricity to cover the costs of building the expensive systems to produce and distribute it. I learned that, outside the hands of a privileged few geniuses, electric infrastructure and generation was a slapdash affair, focused more on quick, cheap construction than reliable operation—a reality that still affects the way our grid works today.

Last week, I spoke about some of this history, and its impact on our future, at the University of Minnesota. (You can watch a recording of that speech online.) Afterwards, Christopher Mayr, director of development at the U's Institute on the Environment, told me about the video I've posted here. In it, Doris Duborg Hughes, a lifelong Wisconsinite, talks about her father, farmer Rudolph Duborg, and the hydroelectric power plant he and his brother built on Wisconsin's Crawfish River in 1922.

This is a great story about Makers tinkering with "crazy" ideas at a time when very few people knew anything about electricity, and when getting electricity on a farm was a near impossibility. By the 1920s, some electric utilities were beginning to turn a profit ... but only in cities, where population density meant you could spread the cost of infrastructure over a lot of customers. Having electricity on the farm meant building the infrastructure yourself, something few people had the drive (and money) to manage.

Doris Hughes' earliest memories involve her family putting up the men who came to wire the farmhouse. She was a child when the system went in, and that's part of what I like about this story. It's very clearly coming through the filter of childhood. Because of that, we get details like Hughes remembering that she wasn't supposed to turn lights off in the house, during the day or at night, because she was told that doing so might break the system.

Also fascinating: Henry Ford sent men to inspect the Duborg hydroelectric plant, apparently as part of research into a manufacturing scheme very different from the factory system Ford is known for today. In the late 'teens and early '20s, Ford was convinced that he could harness water power to bring electricity to farms, then split the elements of automobile construction among a number of electrified farms in a geographic region. The result (he hoped): More employment in rural communities and an increase in living standards. You can learn a little more about this at the end of the video.

Video Link

Earlier this week, Mark told you about a couple of the cool art projects happening on a frozen lake in Minnesota. The Art Shanty Projects are a semi-annual wintertime tradition up here. And it's a sort-of send up of a much older tradition.

Every winter, there's a lot of ice fishing that happens in Minnesota. On the smaller lakes in Minneapolis, people set up temporary tents to shield themselves from the wind while they drill through the ice and wait and drink. But out on the larger lakes, the shelters become a lot more elaborate. Ice fishing "shanties" might come with bunk beds, carpeting, satellite TV, and kegarators. They're left on the lakes—which turn into temporary neighborhoods—all season long. From the outside, some of these fishing shanties just look like a trailer camper, or a plywood box. But it's not unusual to see fishermen get creative—decorating their shanties with tropical paint jobs, designing them to be fish-shaped. There's even a fish shanty parade in a small town in northern Minnesota.

This is where the Art Shanty Projects come in. Basically, they build on things Minnesotans have been doing for years, but with the priorities flipped. At the Art Shanty Projects—which run through this weekend on Minnesota's Medicine Lake—the emphasis is on art and creativity, rather than fishing. It gives artists, makers, and groups of friends with a good idea the chance to build something wild and whimsical and wonderfully interactive.

This year, I got to follow one group of shanty builders as they built their "Monsters Under the Bed" shanty at the Minneapolis Hack Factory, and then took it out on the ice.

This is Cali Mastny. I met her, and several other members of the "Monsters Under the Bed" crew in early January, when they were rushing to get their art shanty finished and ready to go out on the ice.

Cali and her friends aren't professional artists. Instead, they're people who like to build things and turn crazy ideas to real-life objects. They do projects for Convergence and Burning Man. And they've built an Art Shanty before, too. A couple of years ago, they created "Tiny Shanty", where everything—from the chairs, to the windows, to the front door—was sized to fit a toddler. This new shanty was built on the bones of the old one. Instead of constructing it from scratch, the team had to take apart Tiny Shanty and repurpose the parts for the new theme.

The crew—about seven core planners, plus five helpers—split up the labor. This list was tapped to the shanty when I visited, reminding people about all the tasks left to be done. The funds for building come from the Art Shanty Project organizers, who raise money and distribute it to the teams whose ideas are selected for the event. One of the reasons the Art Shanty Projects happen every other year, Cali told me, is so the organizers can give groups bigger grants. This year, the grant to build Monsters Under the Bed was $1200. It was enough to cover all the costs of construction. Two years ago, they only got about $450 to build Tiny Shanty and had to raise a few hundred more themselves.

Once you've got an idea for a shanty theme, there are two things that make the process of executing it a little difficult. First, Cali says, there's the safety issue. At Burning Man, the team doesn't have to worry too much about whether someone could get hurt on the contraptions they build. But the Art Shanty Projects draw a lot of families. They're also, naturally, set on slick ice. so safety has to be a priority. Here, Cali's teammate Scott Raleigh is constructing some of the lofts that people will be able to climb on inside the shanty. You can also see a tongue-shaped object in the center of the photo. That's the ramp to the shanty's front door. It's also a great example of how safety and fun can be combined. The team knew they'd need some kind of traction built into the ramp. Then it occurred to them: Real tongues have taste buds. The traction taste-buds make sure people don't slip off the ramp, and fit into the theme of walking into a giant monster mouth.

The other issue that makes building an Art Shanty tough: Planning events. Every shanty has to have some kind of interactive element. And it needs to be something that can appeal to a wide variety of visitors. It would be easy, Cali told me, to make a shanty that was very kid-centric. But her team didn't want to do that. They wanted something whimsical and silly (and certainly kid-friendly), but that wouldn't marginalize adults. That's why, when they built monster arms into the side of the shanty, they put some at kid height, and others at grown-up height. The goal is to make something fun for everyone.

This is what the Art Shanties looked like on opening day. I got there early, before the crowds showed up. It doesn't usually look this desolate.

It's also usually not this close to shore. The Art Shanty Project works with the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources to make sure the ice they set up on is thick enough to support shanties that can weigh up to a couple thousand pounds. This year, it hasn't been very cold in Minnesota, and there's not much thick ice far from shore. So the shanties had to butt up next to the beach.

I'm pleased to report that The Monsters Under the Bed Shanty came together in time. In fact, they were ahead of several other groups. When I visited on opening day, you could hear electric drills buzzing inside several shanties, as people scrambled to finish construction before the first batch of guests arrived. But the Monsters Under the Bed were already set to go, and dressed in their monstery finest.

There were a couple of small hiccups. The bed part of the shanty, up on the roof, was supposed to have a head and a foot board. But the foot board had fallen off during the assembly process. It was made of metal and, in the cold, the fall caused it to snap. So no footboard. The other issue: When I visited, the group's wood stove—built for them by a friend—wasn't quite yet getting the shanty warm. Luckily, the monsters were dressed in layers.

Next door, looking for all the world like a little gingerbread cottage just waiting to be attacked by monsters, was the "Sashay Shantay"—a grandma's attic of taxidermied birds, books, and boxes full of dress-up clothes and masks.

Another awesome shanty: "The Sit-and-Spin Shanty". From the exterior, it's a giant wicker egg ...

... Inside, it's a self-propelled carnival ride of awesome. Sit on the bench, turn the big wheel and spin like a top. Here's my friend Grady looking dizzy.

There are 24 different shanties out on the ice this year. Some of my other favorites included: "The Naughty Shanty", a shack that looks like a gypsy-wagon and is filled candy cigarettes, cookie jars to steal from, and slingshot-making lessons; "Robot Reprise", a giant robot that can actually move across the ice under the power of humans hidden in it's appendages; "Camera Head", where visitors can construct and play with head-mounted camera obscuras; and the "Letterpress Shanty", home to a delicious collection of old-fashioned metal and wood type blocks, used to print a Shanty newspaper and make prints of Shanty-related tweets.

Special thanks to Cali Mastny, Rachel Bendtsen, Matt Mackall, Caly McMorrow, Aaron Prust, Scott Raleigh, Cole Sarar and the rest of the Monsters Under the Bed team for letting me get a look at their process!

Last week, I asked BoingBoing readers to send me images and stories about your favorite museum exhibits—beloved displays and collections squirreled away in museums that might not have a big profile outside your state or region. The challenge was triggered by an awesome photo of a mummified Ice Age bison on display in Fairbanks, Alaska.

But this series also has roots in my own love of the museum exhibits that defined my childhood. Over the coming week, I'll be posting more "My Favorite Museum Exhibit" entries. I'll update the list here, and this post will be the one-stop place to check if you want to read them all. But I also wanted to use this space to share one of my favorite museum exhibits—the Panorama of North American Plants and Animals at the University of Kansas' Dyche Museum of Natural History.

Taxidermy is not normally my thing. I love dinosaur bones, but dioramas always make me feel like I'd rather just be at a zoo, or watching a nature special on TV. This is especially true of the "local flora and fauna" sort of museum dioramas. I have seen squirrels, thanks. But the Panorama is something else, a work that transcends its genre to become true art and a temple to Maker creativity.

The Panorama is the work of Lewis Lindsay Dyche, a 19-century KU professor. Dyche originally constructed the exhibit for the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago. It featured 121 animals and took two years to complete. Scientific American called the Panorama one of the most remarkable exhibits at the Fair. By all accounts, Dyche was a very good taxidermist. But his taxidermy work is only part of what makes the Panorama so impressive.

Instead of presenting a single scene, the Panorama flows, capturing every North American biome from the Arctic to the jungle. It wraps around the room, almost a full 360 degrees. As you follow the circle, polar bears and seals fade seamlessly into bunnies on the tundra, then aspen forests full of bobcats, and on into craggy cliffs dotted with mountain goats. As a child, it was my first brush with the realization that where I lived was only one part of something bigger—if I walked far enough north, I'd find icy wastes, far enough south and there'd be vine-covered trees filled with monkeys. What the Panorama offered was perspective. Before you're old enough to really comprehend "spaceship Earth" you can comprehend this.

The video at the top of this post only shows about 2/3 of the Panorama. You're missing the desert and jungle areas. Below, you can see a close up that shows off the prairie and Rocky Mountain areas in a little more detail.

According to Jennifer Humphrey, the KU Natural History Museum's communications director, the Panorama is one of only three dioramas like it in the whole world. It's not the only thing I love at that Museum. But it's definitely a big part of what makes the Museum unique.

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Other entries in the "My Favorite Museum Exhibit" series:

Twin Cities Boingers will be meeting up this Saturday afternoon. The meetup is ostensibly scheduled around the Art Sled Rally in Powderhorn Park, but will still happen even if there isn't enough snow on the ground for the sleds to, you know, sled.

Emily Lloyd has graciously volunteered her house, across from Powderhorn Park, as the location of the meetup. We'll meet at 3216 10th Ave South at 1:00 — BYOB and a snack to share. Then, at 2:00 (King Boreas willing) we'll cross the street to watch some awesome sledding action!

See you there!

We all probably had at least one friend who attempted to reinvent themselves after high-school in a way that was so not them that it just made you feel pity. You know what I'm talking about. Like the goody-goody who tried so hard to change their squeaky clean reputation, but would clearly never be a badass cool kid, no matter how many times they told you that they got "sooooo drunk" last weekend.

That's what this ad reminds me of.

Somehow, North Dakota has managed to create a tourism ad that is simultaneously offensively sleazy and desperately uncool. It's trying to make a wink-wink, "women are objects" lad mag joke. But it looks like your really dorky, incredibly square uncle's idea of a wink-wink, "women are objects" lad mag joke.

It's sleaze as designed by people who have no idea what sleaze is supposed to look like. They've just heard about it third-hand from someone who went to Vegas once.

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!