Homegrown Music Festival starts next week with acts performing in venues across Duluth and Superior. You can read a detailed history of the festival on its website. And you can test your knowledge of this year’s festival by taking the PDD Quiz. And here you can test your knowledge of this year’s Homegrown venues by playing one of this week’s three Geoguessr challenges.
Växjö, Sweden. Photo based on an interpretation of aerial imagery by Microsoft Flight Simulator.
Växjö – pronounced Vequa according to the YouTube videos I watched — has been Duluth’s sister city since 1987. With a population of 80,000, it’s approximately the size of Duluth. Also like Duluth, it has a significant student population, with Linnaeus University just outside the city center. In 1991, Växjö became the first city in the world to set a goal of becoming fossil fuel-free. In 2007, it won the Sustainable Energy Europe Award for being the greenest community in the EU.
As a two-time former Duluth city councilor, one of my goals is to make city government more accessible, or at least help citizens become more informed. I figure there are many Duluthians who would like some simple answers to some simple questions. I learned in school that if there is something you don’t understand it’s likely there are many others who feel the same way. Hence the idea of the Duluth Mailbag column.
I won’t divulge who is asking the questions, but I’ll answer them in this format about once a month. Feel free to put a question in the comments for next month’s “Duluth Mailbag” or tweet me via @Hobbs_Duluth or email me at hobbsforduluth @ gmail.com.
Also, if you want to have a longer conversation, you can sign up for a 45-minute cup of coffee through my 100 Cups of Coffee project.
OK, here we go!
“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.
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.
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.
The bell given to Duluth by Ohara. Photo by Matthew James.
Duluth has five sister cities. The next five Geoguessr challenges will take a look at them one by one. The first one in this mini-series has what I consider to be the most interesting story: Ohara, Japan.
The first Caribou Coffee in Edina, Minnesota, now closed. (Photo by Bobak Ha’Eri, 2011 CC-By-SA-3.0)
The first Caribou Coffee opened in Edina, Minnesota, in 1992. Last December, it closed. But there are still plenty of other Caribou Coffee locations to visit. Geoguessr Challenge #12 examines some of these other locations in three separate games. The first draws from the 302 remaining Caribou Coffees in Minnesota, selecting five locations in northern Minnesota (defined as any place at or above Highway 2).
De Hef in Rotterdam carried trains until a tunnel opened in 1993. It is a now a national monument. Photo by the author.
As the principle symbol of Duluth, writing on the Aerial Lift Bridge often focuses on its uniqueness. Because it started as a transfer bridge, the top span makes it unusual for a lift bridge. But lift bridges themselves are not so unusual. Wikipedia lists 137 of them in the world.
Devil’s Kettle, a location featured in Atlas Obscura. Photo by the author.
This challenge provides the opportunity to go on a road trip without leaving the warmth of your house. Billing itself as “the definitive guide to the world’s hidden wonders,” the website Atlas Obscura lists user-supplied travel destinations that the standard guidebooks usually omit. The site focuses in particular on unusual museums, folk art, natural wonders and memorials to otherwise forgotten history.
References to Duluth in the media are a regular feature on Perfect Duluth Day. But for every reference that does not include the state name, many are left with a lingering doubt about whether the reference is really about Duluth, Minnesota, or Duluth, Georgia, a city outside of Atlanta with about one third of the Minnesota city’s population.
Former Duluthian Nancy Valentine teaches bamboo painting online (thanks to an arts grant).
Coloring pages related to this project are available via Google Drive.
Season eight of Perfect Duluth Day’s “Saturday Essay” series has drawn to close, and it’s time to look back with the usual popularity contest. For the second year in a row, Jim Richardson authored three out of five works deemed by Google Analytics to be your favorites. In 2021, he swept the whole top five. It makes sense, because he’s Lake Superior Aquaman. Superheroes get all the clicks.
Cropped photo of a Christmas Eve service by Patrick Sweeney CC BY-SA 2.0
As this Sunday Geoguessr challenge is appearing on Christmas Eve, a topical theme seemed appropriate. I thought finding five local churches with midnight services would be a rather simple map to put together. It was not.
They might be on hiatus or they might be done. Some lasted a handful of episodes, others lasted a decade. Some were never meant to keep going. There are no recent episodes of the audio productions listed below, but the archives are still available … or, at least they were the last time we checked.
Perfect Duluth Day’s look at archived podcasts no longer in production is a companion piece to the “Guide to Duluth-area Podcasts,” which features shows currently, or at least recently, in production.
