Minneapolis

MINNEAPOLIS -- The Minnesota Lynx have signed free agent shooting guard Erin Thorn, formerly of the Chicago Sky.

MINNEAPOLIS -- In the '80s, everyone was doing it.

From Jack Morris and Roger Clemens to practically every pitcher on Roger Craig's staff in San Francisco, the split-finger fastball was the ticket to success on the mound.

MINNEAPOLIS -- How to increase the number of people who hunt and fish?

A question often asked, and one with an obvious answer, say Lisa and Ed Retterath of Elko, Minn.

"Women."

That firmly held belief was on display Saturday morning in the northern Twin Cities suburbs, as the Retteraths joined the opener of the state's early goose season not by aiming guns -- but cameras.

Co-owners and producers of the cable TV show "Women of the Wild Outdoors," the Retteraths, along with two videographers, were on site during the first goose hunt of autumn as three women attempted to fell a honker or two.

MINNEAPOLIS -- Amid the evening's gloom, when most Minnesota anglers were winching their boats onto trailers, Patrick Kirschbaum and Carl Sassen were just launching theirs. A specially built, wartime-looking craft, their boat is constructed for nighttime stalking in shallow water, with a high deck in front and flood lamps to three sides.

Kirschbaum, 35, and Sassen, 29, are bowfishermen, the only sure-fire defense against carp Minnesota has. Or may ever have. On a good night, while most people are asleep, they will arrow as many as 100 common carp, some weighing 40 pounds and more.

"My biggest weighed 46 1/4 pounds," Kirschbaum said.

MINNEAPOLIS -- Purchased along a stretch of two-lane blacktop in northern Wisconsin a few years back, my vintage pickup camper bit the dust this winter beneath a ton or two of snow. This was the same camper in which I took practice showers for two weeks before learning the exacting contortions required of all who master RV hygiene. Also during time I conquered the camper's plumbing, heating and air conditioning, and could fall easily into the handyman RV banter so familiar to members of the recreational-vehicle "family."

Black water. Gray water. Broken water pumps. These were words over which some of my tightest campfire friendships were cemented

MINNEAPOLIS -- An ordained minister of the Presbyterian Church USA was acquitted Monday by a church panel of charges that he violated the church constitution when he legally married his gay partner in California in 2008.

MINNEAPOLIS -- It was an ordinary angiogram in the cardiac cath lab at the University of Minnesota Medical Center. But there was nothing ordinary about the tall technologist scrubbing in as part of the medical team.

"I've got this certain attachment to the hospital for some reason," joked Goffrey Duevel, 31, as he stood with -- or, more accurately at 6 feet 1, above -- several cardiologists, a nurse and lab technician readying the 79-year-old patient for transfer to a recovery room.

Duevel has been intimately familiar with this hospital for more than 25 years. At 5, he was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, a cancer of the immune system that should have been the worst health challenge of his life. It wasn't. He endured a form of polio at 8, relearned how to walk and then, at 24, was told he had an enlarged heart, due most likely to the chemicals used to save his life as a boy.

After two open-heart surgeries at UMMC in 2007 to insert heart pumps, Duevel received a new heart in 2008. In the fall of 2009, he began studying at St. Cloud Technical and Community College in St. Cloud, Minn., to become a cardiovascular technologist (CVT), a program that includes a 16-week internship.