The 612? That's the moniker Minneapolitans have adopted for the City of Lakes, according to today's Washington Post Style section. Huh. Postie Paul Farhi must have seen this Washington correspondent drive by in his made-in-St.-Paul Ford Ranger pickup truck with its "612" custom oval bumper sticker. Strib colleague Bill McAuliffe was disseminating these a while back, but I didn't know it had caught on to such a degree. Has it? When I first moved to the Twin Cities back in 1980, there was still some chatter about the Minneapple (was that Mary Tyler Moore's influence?), or the Mill City. Having moved back to D.C., maybe I missed the 612 area code thing. Farhi's piece, about the emerging but questionable fashion of referring to the Washington metropolitan area as "DMV" (District, Maryland, Virginia), shows a certain connect ion between D.C. and the Twin Cities: both strongly white collar areas in perpetual search of a regional identity. New York will always be the Big Apple, and Chicago is the Windy City. But, uhm, darn. What are we without an established nickname?
