Image and stickers available courtesy of your friends Bratwurst.

Cooking on the Car west coast road trip from Duluth to Seattle and beyond.

I was running the trail in Lower Chester this morning when I glimpsed something odd out of the corner of my eye . Looking down, I beheld this bewildering loose sprig laying right in the middle of the trail. Quite real, and I can’t even begin to explain it. But at this moment, in the latter half of April, as winter is pumping yet another shell into the chamber, I offer it that it might elicit the same emotion it stirred in me: hope.

If the spring weather has you frustrated, perhaps you’ll find this video cathartic.

This has been up on YouTube for a while, but I don’t think it ever made it to PDD. The Grammy speech referencing Duluth is included.

Duluth’s finest cooking show continues as Dan Dresser and Jason Wussow make beer cheese soup and black bean dip on the manifold of their car on the way to Washburn using techniques they’ve honed on their many road trips around the country.
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I was out snowshoeing off of the Foxfarm Road on Friday (March 15), and two helicopters and a fixed-wing aircraft passed overhead, flying in sort of a formation.  The lead helicopter was a huge twin-rotor thing, with some sort of device hanging from it which almost seemed to be emitting some sort of vapor trail. Strange. Did anyone else see this, or better yet, does anyone know what they were up to?

If you miss those summer days strolling the end of Minnesota Point while under the influence of psychedelic drugs, perhaps this video will help.

Duluth mixed-media artist and associate professor at UMD, David Bowen, has his “Underwater 2013″ exhibit currently on display at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. This is pretty awesome in my opinion.  What do you think?

“Underwater” is a large-scale suspended installation that is articulated using data from the surface of water. A Microsoft Kinect was used to collect three-dimensional data from wave action on the surface of Lake Superior. This data is used to articulate the mechanical installation consisting of 729 individual servomotors. The complex and subtle movements on the surface of the water are simulated within the installation by the servomotors moving according to the collected data. January through March of 2013, underwater was installed at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts recreating the dynamic water movement from hundreds of miles away.

I saw a commercial being made for the upcoming Smelt Festival while walking in Canal Park today.  The sea creature character was booming out a pretty funny pronouncement from the Smelt Queen promising puppetry, puppet making and smelt-y fun in exchange for funding.

I couldn’t find any info online, but I did find a piece about last year’s event.

It’s stuff like this that makes me love this town.

I thought these scams went away years ago but I guess not.

I answer the phone a lot for the small company I work for, and in the past couple of months we have gotten about three different phone calls asking about refilling our copier supplies. We like to do business locally, and I know our supplier personally so I knew these people weren’t legit. But I thought I’d share it with all of you so you don’t get taken by this scam.

When they called our office they tried to talk to me like they knew me, then said, “Can we get the model number of your printer we misplaced it?” I then asked, “May I ask who’s calling?” and one caller actually said, “I’m your worst nightmare, B!&$h” Then hung up. While entertaining, still somewhat scary.
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I was in a cathedral, standing in the nave. The pews were empty, the building dark. It must have been night. Without warning, a choir’s song sliced through the hushed darkness, their voices intertwining to illuminate the room — a bright, pure light. I could see their faces, one thousand beautiful children, dressed in white. I stood there motionless, enraptured by their song, their words washing over me. The tune was bracingly enigmatic, yet hauntingly familiar — they sung a single phrase over and over:

Vincent Gargiulo is horrible.

It might be hard to believe, but it all happened in the dream!

Even odder, I’d never even heard the name before! It just came to me, seemingly from the ether. When I woke up, I immediately looked it up online, and as things go, “Vincent Gargiulo” is an actual person. Who knew? I bet he has a life and personality and family and probably a personal history too! Of course, that’s just conjecture, as I didn’t dig any deeper than a Google image search.

And you know what the honest to gracious truth is? He doesn’t look all that horrible at all!

But those words — those being-piercing, life-altering words. They must have an important meaning for my life. How can I pass?

So, I’d like to announce my next project — Vincent Gargiulo is horrible. It’s not about Vincent Gargiulo’s horribleness, or anything like that. Really, the title just seems to be the perfect vessel for an auto-biographical venture — it really captures a feeling I’m looking for. Vincent Gargiulo is horrible may sound as if it were about Vincent Gargiulo, but it would be about me. Get it? He’s the backdrop for my story.

Admittedly, the name gives me a moment of pause. I’ve considered something less polemic like Vincent Gargiulo is probably pretty okay in all likelihood or Vincent Gargiulo might deserve the benefit of the doubt or Vincent Gargiulo chooses Duluth for a project that the city would be really psyched about except for its name. But come on — would a choir of cherubim illumine my soul and crowd-sourced fund raising campaign with dull words like that? Highly doubt it.

I’ll be rolling out a Kickstarter in the next couple of days — I’m thinking I’ll need around 10k to execute the project properly — so get your Amazon Payments Account ready.

Everything’s embarrassing,

Adam

We’ve been conducting a variety of cold weather experiments at Great Lakes Aquarium this week. The location is just about perfect for it; right on the waterfront in Duluth with a door connecting our classroom lab to the outside.

This video should serve as a reminder to make sure your hair and your clothes are completely dry before heading out.

I don’t want to see our area children suffer from a lack of knowledge today with no school and am hoping parents or day care workers send them outside for cold weather experiments and share them on PDD. But be careful.

Ever since I read a blog post on 3rd Ward I have had the idea of starting this type of center in the area I live in now. The Duluth News Tribune had an article the other day about the trials of selling the shutdown schools and I thought the shuttered Morgan Park school would be an awesome location. I thought that a music studio could be added to the music wing of the schools also. If all the wood-working equipment and the kiln were still there it would be an added bonus.

I think it would be a cool add to the Duluth community. Probably a pipe dream though!

Have we mentioned yet that there is a Duluth pennant in the 1979 film Meatballs? It’s on the wall inside Tripper’s cabin.

A group of journalism students at UMD have created their own online journalism projects. The assignment asked them to conceive of a website that focused on a specific media “niche” and to produce content that appealed to that group by drawing on as many online media tools as possible.

The projects range from a Duluth-area beer-review page to a site that links volunteers with community needs in the Twin Ports.

Tomorrow we will have a very informal awards ceremony in which the page that has the most “likes” on our Facebook page will receive the Giant Foam Finger of Greatness Award (it’s a long story).

So, visit the page, check out a few of the projects, vote for your favorite and give the student journalists some feedback. Who knows, perhaps the best of them will actually develop into permanent pieces of the Duluth media landscape.