March 2024 Posts

PDD Quiz: March 2024

Close out the month of March and see how many newsworthy events you remember with this week’s current events quiz!

The next PDD quiz will preview the 2024 Homegrown Music Festival; it will be published on April 14. Submit question ideas to Alison Moffat [email protected] by April 10.

Is the Postal Service OK?

It recently snowed about thirteen inches here on the hill in the very middle of Duluth. Right here, in the urban middle.

That thirteen inches took three days to fall. It stopped snowing three days ago. The roads in my neighborhood have been entirely passable the whole time. Slick, perhaps, at times, but entirely passable.

Neighbors have been coming and going. School buses. Fed X, UPS.

But no Postal Service. No mail. Not a single truck since last Saturday.

Are they OK? Should we check on them?

Attention Billionaires: Get Bent

“And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.”

― William Gibson, Count Zero

Attention billionaires: get bent. As the recent “Cheerios” kerfuffle illustrates, Minnesota billionaire Karen Kathy Cargill is acting like a terrible neighbor in Duluth. Google her name to see the universally bad press she has unleashed upon herself. Basically, Mayor Roger Reinert had the temerity to point out that Cargill was not actually being helpful, and she ran crying to the Wall Street Journal, like ya do. It was there Cargill laid bare her toxic billionaire’s view of the world: “The good plans that I have down there […] forget it […] I think an expression that we all know — don’t pee in your Cheerios — well, [Reinert] kind of peed in his Cheerios right there, and definitely I’m not going to do anything to benefit that community.” Imperious much? Get bent.

Hermantown Fleet Farm property sold to North Dakota investors

The Fleet Farm property in Hermantown has been sold to a North Dakota investment firm for $30 million. (Photo by Mark Nicklawske)

The Fleet Farm big-box retail store property in Hermantown has been sold to a real estate investment firm based in Fargo, North Dakota for $30 million.

The Slice: KEBS Records

Tim “Edwards” Verthein and his daughter Stacia Rom operate what is believed to be the smallest record store in the world. KEBS Radio and Records is located at 311 Second St. in Bovey, about 80 miles northwest of Duluth. It opened in 2017.

In its series The Slice, PBS North 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.

Big League Manager Baseball Game from West Duluth

To mark the start of the 2024 baseball season we take a look back at the Big League Manager Baseball Game, which was made in Duluth beginning, as near as can be determined, 70 years ago in 1954.

Duluth Art Institute exhibitions moving to U.S. Bank building

The Duluth Art Institute has announced the location of its new gallery space. After 50 years at the St. Louis County Depot, the region’s foremost public art venue will move its galleries to the fourth floor of the U.S. Bank Building at 130 W. Superior St.

Duluth Van and Storage Company

The Looney Tunes animated short Design for Leaving was released on March 27, 1954 — 70 years ago today. One-minute into it, door-to-door salesman Daffy Duck shoves Elmer Fudd onto a nonstop bus headed to Duluth. Fudd returns moments later on a Duluth Van and Storage Company truck after Daffy has updated his home with futuristic appliances.

Park Point Land Grab

This Duluth News Tribune article talks about Kathy Cargill’s comments about Duluthians in the Wall St Journal.

Said a billionaire Heiress named Kathy
“The locals are yokels
Their houses are crappy”

No accounting for taste
She bulldozed in haste
And wonders why the neighbors aren’t happy

Selective Focus: When the winter that wasn’t, suddenly was

Select images from Instagram showing scenes of what might normally be considered a very typical late-season snowstorm … if there had been a winter in winter.

Indecent Proposal – “Behind Her Eyes”

The music video for Duluth band Indecent Proposal‘s romantic tragedy “Behind Her Eyes” was shot in the historic auditorium at Denfeld High School. It was released in November and has since amassed more then 195,000 views.

PDD Geoguessr Challenge #14: Duluth’s Sister Cities – Rania, Iraqi-Kurdistan

Rania, Iraqi-Kurdistan. Photo based on an interpretation of aerial imagery by Microsoft Flight Simulator.

The next of Duluth’s sister cities in this challenge series is its most recent. Rania officially became Duluth’s fifth sister in November 2015. According to the webpage on Duluth’s sister cities, Rania is located in a partially autonomous Kurdish region in Northern Iraq near Lake Dukan. With a population of 95,000, it is about the same size as Duluth. Exchange activities have included a visiting professor from Rania at the University of Minnesota Duluth and a visit to Rania by a Duluth choir group.

Live from Studio A: Charlie Parr

Charlie Parr‘s 18th album, Little Sun, is out today on the Smithsonian Folkways record label. The Minnesota native and longtime Duluthian stopped into Studio A at WDSE FM 103.3 “The North” on Feb. 28 to talk with Katelyn Brinza about the new record and play a few songs.

R.I.P. Viking Lounge & Liquor

Fox 21 reports crews were demolishing the Viking Lounge & Liquor building in Superior yesterday. The bar at 1501 N. Fifth St., and its upstairs apartments, were condemned after a Thanksgiving Day fire.

Postcards from the Fish Fry Lodge

The undated postcard above, published by W. A. Fisher Company, shows the Fish Fry Lodge on Highway 61 near Duluth.

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