• “Top Travel Destination.” Frommer’s has included Minneapolis in its list of “the most unique and enticing destinations” for 2007 travel. Thanks to our “cutting-edge design boom,” which includes the Walker expansion and Jean Nouvel’s Guthrie Theater, we made the global list along with Ethiopia, British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley, Krakow, Tokyo and a handful of others.
• MNdirt. Anyone taking Frommer’s advice might want to check out one of these unauthorized and cheesily designed keepsakes (top right)–a plastic-encased pinch of genuine Minnesota dirt, by the looks of it dug from Minneapolis Sculpture Garden turf.
• Vlogging mnartists: NYC videoblog Rocketboom has picked up the next installment of Chuck Olsen’s mnartists.org series on area artists. Featured this time around, animatronic toymaker and sculptor Anastasia Ward.
• Ikearchitecture? Ikea recently announced plans to construct 500 identical modernist homes in the UK each year. The exterior colors? Lingonberry, I presume.
• On NEED: Stephanie Kinnunen went from doing a catering gig with Wolfgang Puck for the Walker grand opening to being the co-founder and editor-in-chief of the beautifully designed Minneapolis-based magazine NEED, a LIFE-meets-COLORS quarterly focused on humanitarian success stories. Read my interview with Kinnunen here or today’s City Pages story here.