Test your memory of February 2021 headlines with this week’s current events quiz!
In honor of St. Patrick’s Day, the next PDD quiz will look at Irish (and Irish-adjacent) things in the Twin Ports; it will be published on March 14. Submit question suggestions to Alison Moffat at [email protected] by March 11.
Last week I had a series of interconnected dreams over three nights. I was first introduced to the idea of interconnected dreams by the book A Little Course in Dreams: A Basic Handbook of Jungian Dreamwork by Robert Bosnak. The book is pocket-sized which makes the title a self-referential joke. But the book has had an outsized influence on me. I don’t always agree with its interpretations — dream interpretation is a subjective crapshoot — but it helped.
I am blessed with the ability to easily remember and interpret many of my dreams. The revelatory insight from the book was the idea that dreams can come in clusters over many nights. I began noticing themes and symbols evolving over time. I frequently see this across spans of three or four nights. And some symbols have recurred over my entire life and continue working themselves out. As Bosnak writes, “Dreams often group themselves around specific themes that begin to unfold over time. Images go through a continual process of change, and such a process can sometimes be followed in a series of images that have presented themselves to someone as dreams. The insight that emerges when we study a series of dreams is that dream figures are in a constant state of development. Like any living organism, they come into being and decay.”
Duluth’s Cory Coffman has released the third music video promoting his 2020 album Canvas and Color.
Videography by Alyssa Johnson of Blind Spot Creatives. Editing by Mason Lehto.
Former government teacher Sharon McMahon appeared on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah on Monday, sharing why she started her fact-based Instagram account @sharonsaysso and explaining how she separates fact from conspiracy, breaking down the difference between a lie and bias.
The Duluth News Tribune reports McMahon was president of the political science association at the University of Minnesota Duluth. She taught in St. Paul, the San Francisco Bay area and a Maryland suburb of D.C. before returning to Duluth.
Duluth News Tribune: “Duluthian appears on ‘The Daily Show,’ CNN for her viral Instagram account that slays conspiracies, promotes facts”
Photographer Nik Nerburn (previously on PDD) has just published a book of photos and stories following the last few years of transformation in Duluth’s West End, more recently and commonly known as Lincoln Park. We get a sneek peek at a few of the images in the book.
As documented on this old postcard, Duluthian John Rudd is credited as having performed the first somersault on skies. It happened at Chester Bowl, then known as Chester Creek Hill.
About 200 miles northwest of Duluth, the Warroad River connects two ice rinks with a 2.5-mile skating path cleared by local dads.
Also in wild skating news, the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness is mentioned in the National Geographic online story, “‘It really is like flying.’ Explore wild skating on nature’s ice.” The article “glides across icy geographies, including Minnesota, Colorado, Alaska, and Vermont, where a 4.3-mile skate trail on Lake Morey ranks as the longest in the U.S.,” according to a blurb on the publication’s Travel newsletter.
Watch reconstruction of the Duluth Lakewalk unfold over the past year in this time-lapse video, compiled from footage via Veit & Company.
Four members of the Cranberry Bay Pack of wolves cross the camera in this video from the Voyageurs Wolf Project. The wolf that stands in front of the camera is a pup that was born last spring.
Cranberry Bay is on Rainy Lake, about 125 miles north of Duluth in Voyageurs National Park. The Voyageurs Wolf Project is focused on understanding the summer ecology of wolves in the park.
Fish of increasing size frozen at various depths in 8 inches of ice or so. Pic #1: 3-inch fish. Pic #2: 6-inch fish. Pic # 3: 12-inch fish.
This undated postcard, from Gallagher’s Studio of Photography, shows an aerial view from Lake Superior of Twin Points Resort in the Silver Creek Township northeast of Two Harbors. The area is now known as Iona’s Beach Scientific and Natural Area.
Teenage Prayers photo by Orianna Riley from PopMatters.
Teenage Prayers is a band from my days in college radio in Milwaukee. KUMD and KUWS approach the college radio vibe, but in the 1990s, college radio was a thing, and Teenage Prayers was a part of the thing.
One listen to the opening of The Duluth Local Show on the Current and a person gets a sense of the folksy, wholesome veneer the city imparts to its people and out of towners alike when it comes to its cultural musical identity. It’s the birth place of Bob Dylan, in case you didn’t know. But, just beneath the woodsy surface and what hides in so many of the homes in the Hillside above Bob Dylan Way, gulp, are an impressive number of artists plugging in synthesizers, drum machines, samplers … oh my!
Early morning winter cold floods in through the gaps between the sheet and mattress. The cold is so powerful, so penetrating, I imagine it to be as fluid as a rushing river with the ability to seep into minute cracks and crevices. In the chaos of adjusting the comforter and pulling the pillow into my impromptu cocoon, my sleep-hat has gone AWOL. An instinctual desire to escape the cold and fortify the barrier makes me abandon any pursuit of the lost headpiece.
A new form of low temperature has erupted in Minnesota, a reverse volcano maybe. Not a temperature so high it melts rock, but one so powerfully low it could probably fracture silk. This kind of cold, the kind that cracks house rafters, and spiderwebs the smallest chip in a windshield, has blown in from the north. Weather enthusiasts call it a Polar Vortex — something about the North Pole, and cold, and pressure. But at five o’clock in the morning in northern Minnesota, those technical, and normally interesting, scientific truths can crawl into a snowbank as far as I am concerned. Whether it’s a vortex, or cyclone, or Voldemort’s Dementors unleashed, the only truth that encapsulates this moment is something I learned years ago: “cold is the absence of heat.”
