Minnesota (ⁱ/mɪnɨˈsoʊtə/) is a U.S. state located in the Midwestern United States. Minnesota was carved out of the eastern half of the Minnesota Territory and admitted to the Union as the thirty-second state on May 11, 1858. Known as the "Land of 10,000 Lakes", the state's name comes from a Dakota word for "sky-tinted water". Those waters, together with forests, parks, and wilderness areas, offer residents and tourists a variety of outdoor recreational opportunities.

Minnesota is the 12th most extensive and the 21st most populous of the U.S. states. Nearly 60% of its residents live in the Minneapolis-Saint Paul metropolitan area (known as the "Twin Cities"), the center of transportation, business, industry and education and home to an internationally known arts community. The remainder of the state consists of western prairies now given over to intensive agriculture; deciduous forests in the southeast, now cleared, farmed and settled; and the less populated North Woods, used for mining, forestry, and recreation.

Al Lindner (born 1944 in Chicago, IL) is a sportsman, television and radio personality, and fishing industry innovator who has invented, along with his older brother Ron Lindner, many fishing lures and rigs including the Lindy Rig which has been used by tens of millions of anglers to catch walleye since it first hit the market in 1968. The Lindners estimate that more than 70 million Lindy Rigs - and, as he put it, "its many imitators" - have been sold. Lindner also co-owns the Baxter, MN based Lindner Media Productions, along with Ron and sons James, Daniel and Bill, which specializes in producing educational fishing programs (such as "Angling Edge" and "Fishing Edge"), DVDs, videos, national TV commercials, product sales videos, point of purchase videos as well as providing underwater photography to the sport fishing industry. Lindner Media Productions customers include such well known companies as Rapala, Berkley, Lund Boats, Shimano, Blue Fox^{[disambiguation needed ]}, Storm,^{[disambiguation needed ]}MinnKota, Mustad, Nature Vision, Lindy Tackle, Humminbird, Frabill, VMC^{[disambiguation needed ]}, HT Enterprises, Mercury Outboard Motors, and Gander Mountain. Lindner has been inducted into three fishing hall of fames and the Lindy Rig was featured in the Minnesota State Historical Society's 2008 list of "Minnesota’s 150 — The people, places, and things that shape our state". http://www.mnhs.org/exhibits/mn150/