Paul Lundgren
Perfect Breakfast Restaurant: Duluth Grill
What’s not to like about Duluth Grill? It’s a truck-stop style diner in the friendly West End neighborhood that buys from local farmers and grows some of its vegetables around its parking lot in raised-bed gardens. Owner Tom Hanson and his family have plans to build an urban orchard on the lot as well, with plum trees, black-cap raspberries, lingonberries, choke cherries and other deliciousness. They even get their honey from hives on the roof of the building. Duluth Grill is much more than a simple breakfast joint, but readers of Perfect Duluth Day strongly agreed in a recent poll that it is indeed the best breakfast restaurant in the area.
Is it the Scotch eggs? The breakfast stir fry? The curried polenta skillet? The smoked salmon omelet? The caramel apple French toast? Yes, yes, yes, yes and yes. It’s all that and more.
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Catnip: Egress to Oblivion?
This short film was one of the highlights of last weekend’s Free Range Film Festival in Wrenshall. Call this an encore presentation.
Poll: Best Breakfast Restaurant
Through a recent poll about breakfast joints we have a disputable, yet official list of the five favorite places to seek ante-meridiem nourishment in the Duluth area. Now it’s time to determine which is number one, so again we ask the all-important question …
[poll id=”40″]
This poll is now closed. The results were …
Duluth Grill — 39.2 percent
Pizza Lucé — 21.6 percent
Uncle Loui’s — 17.5 percent
At Sara’s Table / Chester Creek Café — 15.4 percent
The Kitchen — 6.2 percent
Care Bears, Care Bears, Yeah – Live at Beaner’s
Someone tell us everything about this band, because we need to know right now.
What to do with extra garage door panels
If you really want to know why I have two extra garage door panels, go ahead and ask. For now, I’ll get to the point. What I find to be really annoying about having two perfectly good garage door panels is that it seems the best thing I can do is haul them to a junk yard and get them out of my way. Tell me if I’m wrong.
Is there anyone who warehouses stuff like this and sells them to contractors or the general public? A new panel costs $220 — that’s $440 for two — but the odds that someone who needs the exact size and color panels I have will search Craigslist and find out I have them for cheap are minimal. So these panels are likely to hit the dump by the time the snow falls, unless I get ambitious and recruit two friends to help me carefully feed them into the rafters so they can waste space up there for 20 years.
Superior Hiking Trail: Martin Road to Lismore Road
There hasn’t been a lot of hype surrounding it, but as of June 1 the Superior Hiking Trail is complete from Duluth to Two Harbors. The missing link is no longer missing. You can now hike the trail from Jay Cooke State Park to the Canadian border … you know, if you feel like a nice 296-mile trek.
Above is the starting point of the Duluth to Two Harbors section, from the trailhead at Martin Road on the Duluth / Rice Lake Township border. The start of this section is cut on the old North Shore State Trail, and a sign there pays tribute to C. J. Ramstad, “Mr. Snowmobiling.”
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Poll: Best Breakfast in the Duluth Area
A recent post on PDD asked about the “best breakfast in town.” Having gleaned the nominees from that post — and eliminated one for being too far outside Duluth — we might as well make it official and have a poll asking the all-important question …
[poll id=”39″]
This poll is now closed.
Because there were a dozen options in this poll, we considered it the first round of voting. So instead of posting the full results, we reveal the top-five breakfast restaurants, which advance to a new poll to determine the official champion.
The top-five breakfast restaurants, in alphabetical order, are:
At Sara’s Table / Chester Creek Café
Duluth Grill
The Kitchen
Pizza Lucé
Uncle Loui’s
50-cent soda pop machines in Duluth
“One soda … 12 ounces. Fifty sen! Sold. It’s been a pleasure frequenting your establishment.”
–Michael Douglas as William “D-Fens” Foster in the 1993 movie Falling Down
I noticed recently that Twin Ports Cyclery in the West End has a pop machine inside that charges 50 cents, which is the amount that should be forever recognized in the U.S. Constitution as the official price for a can of carbonated water, citric acid and corn syrup.
I’m wondering if there are any other 50-cent soft-drink machines around town. Please note them in the comments.
I know the Last Place on Earth probably still has its 40-cent (or was it 45?) machine, but even at that price it hardly seems worth it to go in there, and the place is shut down right now anyway … or has it reopened again? I can’t keep up. Please consider all questions in this paragraph to be rhetorical.
Oh, and I don’t want to hear about any 55-cent machines. Might as well be a dollar.
The F-94C Starfire of Memorial Park Fame
The relic in the photo above is a Lockheed F-94C Starfire. It was on display at Memorial Park in West Duluth from May 1960 until October 1996 (photo of its removal above). It is not the same airplane that is currently displayed in the parking lot of American Legion Post 71.
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Video Archive: Low video “Over the Ocean” premiere on MTV from 1996
MTV’s Matt Pinfield introduces the premiere of Low’s “Over the Ocean” video during the program 120 Minutes. The video was directed by Philip Harder; the song is from Low’s album The Curtain Hits the Cast.
Dispatches from the Low/Radiohead tour, Green Man, skinny dipping and other happenings from July 2003
July 2003 is the first complete month of archived posts on Perfect Duluth Day. It was a time when Facebook didn’t exist and the word “blog” was still a year away from being named Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year.
PDD was a pretty different thing back then, both in appearance and attitude. Founders Barrett Chase and Scott “Starfire” Lunt used the Blogger publishing platform initially (until August 2004). If you look at the archive, it’s getting sloppier all the time as many of the images that were hosted on other sites aren’t there anymore and most of the links are dead.
Blogger didn’t support commenting in those days, so Barrett and Scott found some other thing to use, but the company behind it went out of business years ago, so all the comments from the posts on Blogger are long lost.
Since it was pre-Facebook, and was started among a group of friends, PDD initially was used a bit like Facebook, with a lot of inane daily updates — many of which stand the test of time and are cool to revisit, while others … not so much.
So what were the major happenings ten years ago as far as PDD was concerned?
- Starfire was a rock-and-roll nanny in Europe, traveling with Low and Radiohead (photos above).
- The second annual Green Man Festival was held at Spirit Mountain, featuring a giant gob of bands — the Big Wu, Wookiefoot, Shannon Wright, Heiruspecs, the Black-eyed Snakes, Ol’ Yeller, Pleasure Pause, Mark Mallman, White Iron Band, Cry on Cue, Spider John Koerner, Sweet Potato, Charlie Parr, Haley Bonar and so on.
- PDD achieved the number-one ranking on Google for the search term “skinny dipping pics.” Quoth Starfire: “I can’t tell you how proud I am of all of you.”
Jack Campbell – Absentee
Video by Lakefront Films. Album release coming up July 27 with a show at Beaner’s.
2013 Duluth Primary Election Primer
The filing period to run for city and school board offices in Duluth has closed. There were a handful of familiar names tossed into the hat at the last minute today in the Duluth School Board At-large race.
The primary election will be held on Sept. 10 and include the following contests:
Duluth At-large City Councilor
Four candidates advance to general election; two will be elected
Zack Filipovich, 219 S. 21st Ave. E., Upper Apt.
Barb Russ, 322 N. 22nd Ave. E.
Ray (Skip) Sandman, 2602 W. Sixth St.
Ryan Stauber, 4723 Pitt St.
Ray Whitledge III, 202 N. 24th Ave. W.
Duluth District One School Board
Two candidates advance to general election; one will be elected
Rosie Loeffler-Kemp, 2902 Bald Eagle Trail
Joseph Matthes, 5319 Colorado St.
Marcia Stromgren, 6179 Lakewood Rd 55804
Duluth District Four School Board
Two candidates advance to general election; one will be elected
David Bolgrien, 1306 N. 57th Ave. W.
Art Johnston, 37 N. 93rd Ave. W.
Justin Perpich, 4211 W. Seventh St.
Duluth At-large School Board
Four candidates advance to general election; two will be elected
Henry Banks, P.O. Box 16811, 55816
Joshua Bixby, 2809 E. First St.
Annie Harala, 1129 N. Seventh Ave. E.
Loren Martell, 623 E. Seventh St.
Nancy Nilsen, 446 N. 85th Ave. W.
Harry Welty, 2101 E. Fourth St.
There will be two other races on the general election ballot Nov. 5. Patrick Boyle is unopposed in the race for Second District City Council. In the Fourth District, incumbent Garry Krause will face Howie Hanson. There will also be a School District operating levy on the ballot.
Wholesome Album Covers
Does Sexhawk’s release of the Nuts of a Warrior EP do anything to offset the old Ween album art controversy? Or is there not enough flesh?
Bob Dylan Duluth Concert Photos
Some things improve a bit with age. The out of focus shot above is the best I could do at the 2013 Bob Dylan concert in Duluth, but it’s better than I did in 1999, below.
So, who did better than me?
Sloppy Cloud Cult post-rainout acoustic set clips from the Twin Ports Bridge Festival
It started raining at the Twin Ports Bridge Festival pretty much the moment Cloud Cult hit the stage. About four songs into the set it started pouring. When the announcement came that the show couldn’t continue, the crowd slowly dispersed, then rushed back when the band started performing unplugged as the rain relented. When informed they needed to get off the wet stage, the band climbed into the pit area behind the guard rail to belt out another tune. Then they escaped under the stage and the downpour resumed.
Check out Nate Lindstrom’s photo gallery of the Bridge Fest at the N. Lindstrom Photo website.
Video Archive: Bad Company and Damn Yankees at the DECC Arena in 1991
Bad Company played Grand Casino Hinckley last night with Joan Jett & the Blackhearts. Twenty-two years ago, Bad Company toured with Damn Yankees and played the DECC Arena.
The memorable part of the show was that the news came out during the concert that the Gulf War had ended. Ted Nugent celebrated by shooting a cutout of Saddam Hussein with his crossbow. (This seemed spontaneous, but it was actually something he was doing throughout the tour, because he’s Ted Nugent and that’s what he does.)
Actual Wolf – “Kerosene and Spark”
[This post originally contained an embedded video that is no longer available at its source.]
Video by Nicholas Sunsdahl.
Video Archive: Homegrown 2003
Here’s a sloppy VHS version of KDLH-TV’s coverage of the 2003 Homegrown Music Festival, including clips from the only Homegrown Kickball Classic ever held at the Wade softball fields — and the only time a TV news personality was invited to participate in the game.
Starfire’s fabulous mohawk appears near the end, although the quality of the video doesn’t do it justice.