Garbage In, Garbage Out
Never mind that the literature box (below) was located in front of a Chicago coffee shop, not in the Twin Cities (I visited relatives 
there the other weekend).
The crumpled-up newspapers stuffed into it suggest that those “secrets” may not have exactly been gems.
“The Tailgate Test”
If you want to see how aggressive the locals are — or at least, local drivers — here’s an easy test:
Follow the car ahead of you on a busy freeway, and see how much space you can leave before another car tries to shoehorn in.
Tail(gate?)ing my brother-in-law to downtown Chicago, every time I allowed scarcely a 4′ gap — less than half a car-length — another driver attempted to cut in.
In the Twin Cities, I’m quite confident that you’d be safe tripling that before another car tried to muscle in.
“WHICH Ticket Goes in First??”
Once at our destination, I encountered another 
Chicago custom foreign to Minnesotans (or at least this one): the “chaser” parking ticket.
Essentially, a chaser ticket is a voucher that you insert after the regular ticket (see, Instruction #2, at right) to get a discounted rate.
Based on those explicit instructions, you’d guess that I wasn’t the only one getting the order confused.
Unfortunately, the chaser ticket reduced an outrageous $40 tab to a merely eye-popping $28 — for all of 3 hours, after 6 p.m. on a weekday.
On the plus side: the play we saw, “Jungle Book” at the adjacent Goodman Theatre, was the equal of anything I’ve seen on Broadway (or off).
