March 24, 1997 - Midday’s Gary Eichten talks with Minnesota Public Radio producer and film expert Stephanie Curtis, the "Movie Maven" about the Academy Award nominees for the 69th Academy Awards. Curtis details nominees and the process behind nominating process. Program also includes call-in questions and commentary from listeners.
January 23, 1997 - Imagine a museum with exhibits ranging from a human horn and a sculpture of Pope John Paul the Second carved from a SINGLE strand of hair....to a mouse pie that, when eaten, supresses stammering in children. It's not imaginary, It's real. The curator of the Museum of Jurrassic Technology in west Los Angeles, has created a collection of bizarre oddities, which is now spawned not only a following, but a book. The book, "Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder" is journalist Lawrence Weschler's examination of the museum and the human obsession with the extraordinary. Minnesota Public Radio's Stephen Smith spoke with Weschler who says the building is so unassuming, it might be ignored altogether by passersby. | D-CART ITEM: 0442
January 17, 1997 - Ordinary colorblindness is almost always partial. People who have it confuse colors, such as green and red, but don't see completely in black and white. Achromatopsia (AYE-CHROME-uh-TOHP-EE-AH) -- total genetic colorblindness -- is surpassingly rare. It occurs in only one person in thirty-thousand. The condition makes people painfully sensitive to light and and unable to see fine details; making it difficult for them to read. On a tiny island in the South Pacific called Pingelap (PING-guh-lap) one in TEN people are totally colorblind. Oliver Sacks, the neurologist and author of "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat", travelled to Pingelap to see how individuals and the community adapted to this genetic quirk. His new book, "The Island of the Colorblind", is part travel writing, part cultural anthropology. Sacks told Minnesota Public Radio's Stephen Smith that the islanders have invented myths to explain the prevalence of colorblindness. | D-CART ITEM: 1805 | TIME: 4:26 | OUTCUE: "...my island phase"
January 15, 1997 - As part of a series on poverty, MPR’s Stephen Smith reports on low-income housing.
January 13, 1997 - He drives through Twin Cities neighborhoods at midnight with a truck full of plastic animals. Nick Courteau (core-TOE) is a driver for "Flamingos by the Yard". You can pay him to pull a prank on one of your loved ones. In the dark hours, he plants fifty pink flamingos, or other plastic creatures, in front lawns to surprise folks in the morning. So no one wakes up, he has to be quiet, but that's not the toughest part of the task. In this week's Odd Jobs, Minnesota Public Radio's Stephanie Curtis finds out how hard it is to find a strange house at one o'clock in the morning as he delivers his strange cargoes. | D-CART ITEM: 8145 | TIME: 2:50 + 1.15 music fades
February 13, 1995 - On this pledge drive Midday program, a rebroadcast of MPR documentary "Song Catcher: Frances Densmore of Red Wing." Frances Densmore was a Red Wing woman who recorded the songs of Native Americans around the turn of the century.