Month: February 2022
PDD Quiz: February 2022
Test your memory of February 2022 headlines with this week’s PDD quiz!
The next PDD quiz will mark Women’s History Month with a quiz about notable Duluth women; it will be published on March 13. Send question suggestions to Alison Moffat at [email protected] by March 10. (more…)
PDD Headshot Backstory
When joining Perfect Duluth Day’s “Saturday Essay” roster, I was asked for a headshot and I submitted this which accompanies my essays. It is a video still from an old GoPro on a stick. The camera has broken through the water, and my face is about to break the surface. Water depth @ 20-30 feet, off the sand beaches of Park Point. It was late summer and I wanted one more batch of diving photos in my Aquaman colors. (more…)
Duluth Harbor Circa 1870s
Although this old photograph is labeled “Duluth Harbor,” it’s not what we think of today as the harbor. Based on a similar photo posted to Perfect Duluth Day in 2020 and the resulting discussion surrounding it in the comments, it was determined that the tall building shown in our photo here is the Lake Superior & Mississippi Railroad Grain Elevator A and was located roughly where the Northland Vietnam Veterans Memorial is today. (more…)
Lake Superior Eats Lesser Bodies of Water for Breakfast
Lake Superior is the biggest lake on Earth. And it’s the best. Want to fight about it?
If you’re like me, sometimes you mention Lake Superior in conversation, and you find yourself saying, “Lake Superior is the biggest lake in the world — by surface area! But if you’re judging by volume, the biggest lake is Lake Baikal!” But screw that. It’s time to take a stand. Now I say, “Lake Superior is the biggest lake in the world and those other janky lakes can suck it.”
What is a Lake?
The issue is nuanced, which triggers me. The definitions we use for lakes are arbitrary. I looked it up on Wikipedia and it just made me angry: “Lakes lie on land and are not part of the ocean.” Is it not obvious that oceans also lie on land? What is an ocean on, if not land? The ocean is not bottomless. The bottom of the ocean is land — they checked. Another irritating part of the definition is that lakes are “surrounded by land.” Now, don’t tell me oceans are not surrounded by land. There is no difference between oceans and lakes. The definition of a lake as “laying on/surrounded by the land” means oceans are, in fact, lakes. (more…)
Low – “All Night”
The seventh music video release from Duluth band Low‘s 2021 album Hey What is directed by Azalia Snail.
Low’s album was nominated for a Grammy in the category “Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical” for the work by mastering engineer BJ Burton. The Recording Academy has announced the rescheduled date for the 2022 Grammy Awards show, which was postponed due to COVID-19. It will air on April 3 at 7 p.m. on the CBS network, KBJR channel 6.2 in Duluth.
Pączki!
Every year, for a week, Super One Foods sells pączki, pronounced poonch-key, a specialty Polish donut. But they never do my favorite flavor, prune.
What does a man have to do to get a prune donut in time for Mardi Gras?
“Shrinking Winter” — Great Lakes Now episode
Great Lakes Now is a production of Detroit Public Television. Footage of Duluth @11:44-12:00.
Postcards from the Duluth Arena-Auditorium
Included in this post are four postcards, all published by Gallagher’s Studio of Photography, showing the early days of what is now known as the Duluth Entertainment Convention Center. Numerous buildings have been added to the DECC campus over the years, but these postcards show only the original two, then known as the Duluth Arena and Duluth Auditorium. (more…)
Tiny Titanic
A Proctor family uncovered a surprising connection when buying a house — it had belonged to Anna Larsen, a survivor of the Titanic disaster. Jason and Kim Seguin’s son Jaxson was obsessed with the Titanic and so Jason, an experienced metalworker, decided to build his own scale model of the ship and put it in their front yard.
This feature was produced and edited by Silver Brook Township’s Mike Scholtz for the southwestern Minnesota Pioneer PBS series Postcards. It aired Feb. 17
Selective Focus: Presidents’ Day Blizzard of 2022
Somewhere in the range of 17 inches of snow fell on Duluth from Feb. 22 to 23, blowing into tall, fluffy snow dunes. Collected here are a few images from around the region, via Instagram. (more…)
Lake Superior Waves
Lake Superior photographer Christian Dalbec shot the scenes in this video on Jan. 5. The waves hitting the cliff are at Tettegouche State Park on Crystal Bay. The surfing shots are from Stoney Point. The surfers are Jake Boyce and Ben Gravy.
Duluth curler among stray Olympians in Beijing streets
John Landsteiner of Duluth, at right in the image, was among “hundreds of stray Olympians” who “had been left behind after the 2022 Winter Games,” according to the satirical news website the Onion. With Landsteiner in the photo is his curling teammate Matt Hamilton of McFarland, Wis.
Mater Dei Apostolate
Students at Mater Dei open house.
I recently attended the open house at Mater Dei Apostolate in the Lincoln Park neighborhood. (more…)
Plutonium Loves
I loved her and now that I’ve left I am full of cancer. My genome breaks further each day in a cascading cellular demolition. She’s a physicist so we used to see each other around the University. Once the accident made her radioactive, we saw each other through the leaded glass of her containment chamber in St. Luke’s. (more…)
Trapp family in Esko tallest in the world
Averaging 6 feet, 8.03 inches, the members of the Trapp family in Esko are the tallest in the world. Pine Knot News reports that Guinness World Records has declared it official. In the article the heights of each family member are broken down: “Adam Trapp 7-foot, 3.7 inches; Savanna 6-foot, 8.5 inches; dad Scott Trapp 6-foot, 8.2 inches; Molly (Trapp) Steede 6-foot, 5.8 inches and mom Krissy 6-foot, 3.5 inches.”
Video Archive: Superior’s Old Firehouse & Police Museum Tour
This video tour of Superior’s Old Firehouse & Police Museum was given by one of its founders, Leonard Rouse, in the early 1990s. The station closed Oct. 4, 1982 and later became a museum. The video was shot by Tad Matheson.
The Alworth Incident
Introduction: UMD’s Alworth Hall was built in 1974. It was rebuilt in 2011 in the wake of the Alworth Incident which claimed the life of Desiree Zontal, Dean of the Research Instrumentation Laboratory. Her graduate student Ward Hind, and her husband Horace Zontal, Associate Dean of the Physics Department, both survived. Mr. Hind, the jealous saboteur, is incarcerated in Oak Park Heights in a cell made of the anomalously-irradiated bricks of the lab. In these essays, we put a human face on the Incident, although in the case of Mr. Hind, this is, ironically, impossible.
A Duluth Area Cross-Country Skiing Decision Tree
What follows is an incredibly scientific and very carefully curated guide to Duluth area cross-country ski trails.
1. Do you want something unavoidably intense?
If yes, proceed to #2
If no, proceed to #5
2. Do you have a lot of time?
If yes, proceed to #3
If no, proceed to #4
3. Do you prefer constant climbing followed by constant descent, or insidious but varying slopes?
Up then down: Korkki
Beat me up: Mangey-Snively
Korkki
The Korkki trail, located off Homestead Road between Duluth and Two Harbors, is a single loop out and back with cutoffs at various kilometer points. Like Lester Park, it features a steady rise on the outward ski and a steady coast downward on the inbound trail, only it is more intense in this trajectory, and reaches its climax at the far end of the loop, where there are a bunch of aggressive hills. (map) (more…)
Duluth sailboat crash in ship fail video compilation
The sailboat that crashed into the Aerial Lift Bridge on May 16, 2018 has made it into this recent “Ship Crash Compilation” on the YouTube channel “Crashing Zone” (@ the 1-minute mark).
Lake Trout Fishing Gone Wrong
Seth Trobec gets taken for a ride in this ice-fishing video gone wrong. Trobec’s buddy, Cody Mjolsness, leaves the fish house and takes off on his snowmobile to pick up a friend … but the fish house is still attached to the snowmobile, with Trobec inside.
The video was shot Jan. 14 at Canisteo Pit Mine Lake, about 60 miles northwest of Duluth.
Postcard from the St. Louis County Courthouse at Night
This undated postcard features a nighttime image of the St. Louis County Courthouse, which opened in 1909.
R.I.P. Esmond Building
The Duluth News Tribune reports the former Seaway Hotel, also known as the Esmond Building, was demolished on Wednesday. The building had been gutted by a fire on Jan. 10. (more…)
Uncle Jim and Aunt Susie in Duluth
Episode 5 of Pam & Tommy, the biographical drama series about Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee, mentions Duluth. The same Duluth joke comes up twice, and it’s also used as the title of the episode: “Uncle Jim and Aunt Susie in Duluth.” The episode premiered today on the streaming service Hulu.
The two scenes with the Duluth mentions are strung together in the video above. The setting for both scenes is the writer’s room for The Tonight Show with Jay Leno in 1995.
Song Release: Sydney Hansen’s “Somebody’s Nobody”
Duluth’s Sydney Hansen has a new single on various streaming platforms. She cowrote the song with Nashville’s Bill DiLuigi.