The Slice: Grand Portage Trail

Karl Koster, park ranger at Grand Portage National Monument, explains how the Grand Portage Trail connected people and commerce during the fur trading era.

In its series The Slice, WDSE-TV presents short “slices of life” that capture the events and experiences that bring people together and speak to what it means to live up north.

Duluth 2019 General Election Results

Emily Larson will serve a second term as Duluth Mayor. There will be three new city councilors: Derek Medved, Roz Randorf and Janet Kennedy. Paul Sandholm is new to the school board.

Duluth Mayor
Emily Larson – 13,340 | 63.65%
David Nolle – 7,509 | 35.83%
Write in – 110 | 0.52%

Duluth Trivia Deck Sampler #27: Gas and Water Edition

Another trivia card from a board game purchased at Savers.

Darling Drive – “At a Loss”

Darling Drive, the solo acoustic music project of Enrique Aguilar, released the song “At a Loss” on the 2014 album Shipwrecked. The song mentions Duluth, and depending on how one interprets it there might also be a reference to the city of Superior or Lake Superior.

Wild, a spoken-word musical tribute to weasels, inspired by an encounter in Chester Park

A celebration of the weasel family (mustelids) inspired by an encounter I had with a least weasel in the deep woods portions of Chester Park Ravine, which led to a re-reading of Annie Dillard’s essay, “Living Like Weasels.”

The Richardson Brothers Podcast: New Episode

This week: “SuperDuluth, the Living City,” a hallucinatory vision of the city awakening in a dream of light and water.

Breaking the Law

All names in this story have been changed. You know, just in case.

In my hometown of Petersburg, Alaska, there is one road that stretches from one end of town to the other, traversing but not circumnavigating the island on which my hometown is located. I think generally people tend to think of islands as little round circles of land in the ocean, which one might conceivably drive around and around forever, like a brass ball in a roulette wheel. But that’s not how things are, and islands are often shaped inconveniently, or pockmarked with gigantic mountains or bodies of water or even volcanoes, which can make logical traffic accommodations wacky. Anyway. In Petersburg, the road goes from one end of the long, arrow-shaped island to the other. This straight-line trajectory has even led locals to refer to driving toward the rural end of the island as “going out the road.” Interestingly, the city limits do not extend to the end of the road, but rather, end some several miles earlier. This means that the city police cannot legally enforce the law beyond those city limits, creating a kind of rogue, lawless wilderness on one end of the island.

This is, as you can likely imagine, terrific news for teenagers.

R.I.P. Merritt Park Recreation Center Building

This week the field house at Merritt Park joined the growing list of historic West Duluth buildings demolished in recent years. The 2,016-square foot building was constructed in 1939.

Selective Focus: Lance T. Karasti

Lance Karasti has been making independent films for several years, experimenting with techniques for shooting, writing and different ways of approaching the entire filmmaking process. He’s an active enthusiast in the arts in town, and he’s preparing for another variation in style and process for his current project. This week he tells us about his films, and his fundraising campaign.

LTK: I am an independent feature filmmaker. I am currently developing a style of filmmaking called “hypernaturalism.”

I started developing this style halfway through shooting my 2016 project Artificial. Artificial was being shot with a traditional process but I found myself rewriting the scenes every morning before shooting. By the halfway point I just told the actors to stop worrying about the scripts and be prepared to come up with stuff on the spot. While a part of this was due to realizing a lot of my written dialogue was amateur, it was mostly because it had become necessary for the authenticity of the narrative. As written, the film was about stuff I didn’t know and hadn’t experienced. The process of shooting it was like adapting it into something honest and reflective. Rewriting the scenes everyday had caused me to change the course of the film so much that completely improvising was the only way to adapt to the thematic shifts.

Video Archive: WDIO-TV Halloween Weather Report

From the haunted film vault comes this 1970s clip featuring WDIO-TV weatherman Jack McKenna, two mice and Dracula. Also featured at the end are anchorman Dennis Anderson and sportscaster Bill Stefl.

Happy Halloween!

Zombie self defense at UMD

What better place to find big juicy brains to feast on than an institute of higher learning. UMD Chief Information Officer, Jason Davis, explains how to defend against a zombie attack using principles of Jujutsu.

The Slice: Haunted Ridge

The Haunted Shack has been bringing the scare to northern Minnesota for 26 years. The year’s spookenings are at Ru-Ridge Corn Maze in Carlton, about 10 miles southwestish of Duluth.

In its series The Slice, WDSE-TV presents short “slices of life” that capture the events and experiences that bring people together and speak to what it means to live up north.

Countdown to Halloween: Duluth Paranormal Society

The Duluth Paranormal Society has been featured in the Duluth News Tribune. Most interesting is its research into Sir Benedict’s Tavern on the Lake.

The DNT article includes links to other resources:

Minnesota Paranormal Study Group

Iron Range Paranormal Research

Happy Halloween. 🙂

Halloween Banners

ZombieBanner-Call

Got a great costume this year, or been to a good Halloween party already? We want to see your creepy, comical, kooky Halloween photos. And we’d love to add them to the banner rotation — the long skinny photos at the top of the page when you view Perfect Duluth Day on a desktop computer. (There are no photo banners if you are on a smartphone.)

Keep in mind, the proportions are extremely horizontal, so not every photo works when cropped. Click here for complete submission guidelines, but the basics are: 1135 pixels wide by 197 pixels high, e-mail them to [email protected].

If you’re not able to crop and size them, send the full image and we’ll do our best to crop it into a banner.

Postcards from the Buena Vista Motel

This postcard of the Buena Vista Motel was published by Gallagher’s Studio of Photography and appears to be circa the early 1970s.

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