Coming soon: Peppermint Hippo, a strip club inspired by South Park

Welcome back to The Flyover, your daily summary of important, overlooked and/or interesting Minnesota news.

Minneapolis gets More topless people

Soon there will be another place to see breasts in downtown Minneapolis: The Peppermint Hippo, a strip club named after South Park‘s own nudie bar. The Minneapolis City Council today approved applications for adult dining, late-night food and alcohol licenses, although Councilman Michael Rainville asked CEO Alan Chang to meet for coffee sometime soon to discuss the establishment’s 3 a.m. closing time because “nothing good ever happens after midnight.” Brianna Kelly of Downtown Voices snapped a few photos yesterday showing that there’s already a sign at 251 Third Ave. S.

But don’t expect any references to Cartman or Kenny; a quick look at the website suggests it’s a joke in name only. In fact, the Peppermint Hippo, opening in Vegas in 2022, is a joke within a joke (a goofception!). The South Park The strip club’s name is a pun on Spearmint Rhino, a successful chain of gentlemen’s clubs (there’s one at 725 Hennepin Ave.) where Chang worked for seven years. Sounds very litigious, right? It is! Spearmint Rhino is suing Peppermint Hippo for copyright infringement, and both companies are aiming for a jury trial sometime this year. In the meantime, PH is thriving and surviving in places like Neenah, Wisconsin; Akron, Ohio; Pineville, Missouri; Little Rock, Arkansas; and soon, downtown Minneapolis.

Did you know that you are missing a foot?

Health insurance companies are so hungry for money that they can never be satisfied. So it’s annoying—but not surprising—that the Wall Street Journal has crunched some numbers and uncovered some extraordinary nonsense: Insurers send doctors to their customers’ homes to examine them and discover new diseases they don’t have. Patients get a $50 gift card while insurance companies rake in billions from taxpayers. Conveniently, the diseases being added to health plans are the things that make insurers the most money: diabetic cataracts, HIV/AIDS, dementia, schizophrenia, and, in one incredible case, a missing foot. According to the WSJ, patients and their primary care doctors are often unaware of these diagnoses, which means they don’t get treatment. But the latter is probably OK, since the diagnosis is usually wrong (yes, even in the case of the missing foot).

Minnesota-based United Health is by far the biggest offender, when it’s not busy buying up the medical practices it’s bankrupting and wrongfully denying all sorts of medical claims. “Insurer-initiated diagnoses of UnitedHealth for illnesses no doctor treated resulted in $8.7 billion in payments to the company in 2021,” the WSJ reports. “UnitedHealth’s net income was about $17 billion that year.”

Niagara receives millions for selling Minnesota water

Would you pay to drink bottled water from Minnesota? If you’re a fan of bottled water from Kirkland Signature, Target’s Good & Gather or Walmart’s Great Value, you may soon be drinking the same thing you get from the tap down the street, because Elko New Market has signed a deal with Niagara Bottling to build a factory in town.

The suburb, about 40 miles south of the Twin Cities, offers the Kansas City-based company big incentives to sell its groundwater: $4.3 million in forgiven loans, tax rebates and cheaper zoning and connection fees. According to Madison McVan of the Minnesota Reformer, the plant “will require 13 million gallons of water a month — more than the entire city of Elko New Market uses — leading some opponents to question why state and local governments are offering incentives to extract a valuable resource given the uncertainties of climate change and future water quality and quantity.” Back in June, Elko New Market received permission from the DNR to increase its water use from 135 million gallons to 365 million.

Spanish company wants to end the garbage war in St. Paul

Spain gave us tapas, tempranillo and, starting in 2025, a new era of garbage disposal in St. Paul. FCC Environmental, a subsidiary of a Barcelona-based waste management company, will begin disposing of St. Paul’s solid waste in April. But as Bill Lindeke notes at MinnPost, it will mark the end of the city’s infamous garbage wars, a time when St. Paul operated under a garbage consortium that had about a dozen fleets contracted to handle various neighborhoods’ garbage disposals and half the contractors subcontracted their jobs to even more contractors. It was as confusing and inconsistent as it sounds. It was also the time when discarded couches and mattresses roamed the streets and turned up in yards and local parks because people didn’t want to pay garbage fees. Enjoy your new garbage age, St. Paul.