"Lake Calhoun? How Original!"

Obviously we can't all agree with the entire City Pages "Best of the Twin Cities" [on newsstands in your neighborhood today (mine anyway)]. For one, the reader's polls have become such a farce that one could argue that they be omitted entirely. Predictably, the poll winners are always the most recognizable local poster-kids (Josh Freaking Hartnett, Kevin Garnett), the chain restaurants (Caribou Coffee, Applebee's for crissakes), and those with the ridiculous annual grass-roots write-in campaigns (Skywynd for the second consecutive year, and the resulting equally tragic side effect - 93X's Remy Maxwell).
Overall, it's surely the most popular issue of CP each year, and the contentiousness of the picks is what makes it so interesting. You can't read it without feeling that at least one of the picks has committed an audacious act of injustice. To wit:

Why, oh why, did the writers pick the U Otter Stop Inn for Best Karaoke? Awful, awful, awful. Seriously. I can't say it's the worst I've seen/heard, as that would be an improbable feat, but even the Uptown VFW is a far superior karaoke experience to the U Otter, and no one, I mean no one, can top Grumpy's "Staraoke". That's just the way it is. I wonder, might the second consecutive "Best of The Twin Cities" loss for Grumpy's have anything to do with the continued absence of Dave? Something to consider.