It’s festival season and the PDD Calendar has it all sorted out — from the various outdoor concerts and art festivals to all the county fairs and neighborhood parady street-dancey things.
Each month we reach out with one beggarly blog post to remind everyone that human beings and not machines are at work editing and publishing calendar items. So if you appreciate it, drop a few bucks in the PayPal account.
Owners of Locally Laid — Lucie Amundsen and her husband, Jason Amundsen
Lucie Amundsen’s journey to poultry success was not an easy one. The co-owner and marketing mind behind Locally Laid Egg Company dealt with the usual struggles of launching a sustainable farm — competing with bigger brands, a severely challenging profit margin and an audience that might not understand the importance of buying local.
I attended Bay Days to table with Wilderness Health and the North Shore Mental Health Group. It is an active group of citizens committed to increasing awareness of and access to mental health resources up the shore.
For the past three decades, the Northeastern Minnesota Book Awards have recognized books that substantially represent the history, culture, heritage and lifestyle of northeastern Minnesota. In 2021, longtime award coordinators at the Kathryn A. Martin Library at the University of Minnesota Duluth announced that due to staffing changes, the university library would no longer organize the awards. In early 2022, Twin Ports-based nonprofit, the Lake Superior Writers, announced that it would be the new NEMBA coordinators.
The July 7 episode of the New York Times’ new podcast, First Person, was produced by Duluth’s Courtney Stein. Titled “To Fight for Ukraine’s Freedom, He Went Back Into the Closet,” the episode features Stein talking to a gay Ekrainian soldier during the first months of the Russian invasion.
“I got to know him through the voice memos he sent me in between shifts on guard duty,” Stein wrote in the Times’ Opinion Today newsletter. “He told me that it had been difficult to decide to enlist, not only because he feared fighting the Russians, but also because he was afraid that his fellow Ukrainian soldiers wouldn’t accept him.”
If you’re wondering where I’ve been, three years ago I survived an assassination attempt on the Blatnik Bridge. Locally called “the High Bridge,” it is in fact 120 feet high over the St. Louis Bay. It is co-owned by Minnesota and Wisconsin, and when you cross the state line, you have a bird’s eye view of the bay, Park Point, and Lake Superior. For a moment, I thought it would be my final view.
Earlier that morning, I swam through the ruins off of Washburn, the tiny Wisconsin town with big secrets. On the way back to Minnesota in my blue 1976 Lotus Esprit S1 — the Aquamobile — I stopped at the Anchor Bar in Superior. Time: 11 a.m. The streets were quiet, church was still in session. I parked across the avenue and went inside. Joining my confidential informant for a burger in a booth, he slipped me a list of every crooked cop in Wisconsin. I put it in my shark-themed backpack, returned to the Aquamobile, and put the backpack in the passenger seat next to the speargun. I got in and rolled my window down. Now for a little drive to the U.S. Marshals office in the Federal Building at the Duluth Civic Center.
In Herbster, Wis., near the southern shore of Lake Superior, sits a 40-acre farm that uses sustainable methods to help build a stronger local economy. The farm is home to American guinea hogs, Icelandic chickens and a lush variety of produce including (but not limited to) apples, strawberries, cherries, lettuce, tomatoes, elderberries, raspberries, gooseberries, garlic, potatoes, saskatoons, pears and even a greenhouse with a lime tree.
Elsewhere Farm is tended by Chicago-native Clare Hintz, who came north for college and fell in love. Hintz was interviewed for this article on a particularly snowy winter day, but even then she lit up when describing the Arrowhead region.
Perfect Duluth Day has been Duluth’s Duluthiest website for 19 years. Yes, it was June 29, 2003 when PDD’s first blog post was published … back when people didn’t know what a blog was.
[Editor’s note: For this week’s essay we’ve once again pulled out a relic from the archive of Slim Goodbuzz, who served as Duluth’s “booze connoisseur” from 1999 to 2009. The Sultan of Sot drove out to Rice Lake Township for this article, which appeared in the June 26, 2002 issue of the Ripsaw newspaper. Burn’s Bar, by the way, closed in 2013.]
Throughout my long history of drunken escapades, I’ve seen quite a bit. I’ve seen prostitutes working their trade right out in the open. I’ve seen barroom floors covered with blood. I’ve had white-trash women sic their mongoloid husbands on me. I’ve never seen a gunfight, but I have sipped suds right next to fresh bullet holes. One time, a guy seriously tried to sell me on the idea of pimping out young girls. “You don’t have any ambition,” he told me. “Where are you going to be in five years?”
But at no point during any of this have I seen anything like what I see when I pull into the parking lot at Burn’s Bar. Burn’s Bar is awesome.
If you need simple evidence, then judge the place by its patrons’ appreciation of great poetry, which is scribbled on the men’s room wall.
Ticket prices have been on the rise, but the cost to find out that events exist hasn’t gone up at all. The PDD Calendar remains free. However, each month we reach out with one beggarly blog post to remind everyone that human beings and not machines are at work editing and publishing calendar items. So if you appreciate it, drop a few bucks in the PayPal account.
Judge Azcarate agrees to a last-minute venue change and the Johnny Depp v. Amber Heard defamation trial moves to Ukraine. Johnny Depp and Amber Heard get in Russian T-90 tanks spray-painted with “Z”s to fight each other. One is in a Russian tank, and the other one is in a Russian tank appropriated by Ukraine. No one knows which is which. The celebrities pursue each other shooting high explosive rounds from the 125 mm smooth-bore tank guns. Their “cope cages” and reactive armor spectacularly fail. The roads clog with burned-out tanks as the battle takes longer than legal analysts expected.
Bogged down in the countryside by the infamous Ukrainian mud, the venue changes again. Johnny Depp and Amber Heard pursue each other through the bowels of the sprawling steel plant complex at Mariupol, on the north coast of the Sea of Azov. Miles of tunnels under the plant conceal what really happened in the fog of war. All we know is they are both actors on the destabilizing world stage, cogs in a grinding apocalypse.
Johnny Depp and Amber Heard level each other’s cities in a great humanitarian crisis. Threats of a Johnny Depp chemical weapons attack haunt Amber Heard who puts on an aging gas mask and thinks, “This might be it” as she rushes into the fight. But the threats were a bluff: Johnny Depp has snorted all the nerve gas.
Greetings, PDD quizzers!
The PDD quiz will be delayed by one week; the next installment of the Duluth parks quiz will be published on May 22.
See you then!
I got spooked by a coincidence while researching Great Lakes shipwrecks for a story. The coincidence involved a shipwreck so terrifying I decided not to write my story at all.
I had planned to write about each category of maritime disaster: shipwrecks, ghost ships, and disappearances. With a proper shipwreck, the fact of the sinking is undisputed, but the wreck itself may or may not ever be found. A ghost ship has been abandoned but doesn’t immediately sink, sometimes not for years, resulting in haunting sighting reports. I had written a story about a ghost ship already. Now I wanted to write about a ship disappearing. With such missing ships, a sinking is often assumed, but the ship is simply gone; it may as well have sailed into a black hole.
My disappearance tale remains unwritten. The story I was going to write was of a ship vanishing in plain sight as it sailed under the Aerial Lift Bridge. The mystery would be where did it go, and how — was it all an illusion/what is reality anyway, etc. The ship’s possible fates would include “what if the lift bridge acted like a teleporter.” The end would reveal a document recording an encounter with the ship in the distant past, describing the crew as phased half into the deck — a nod to the Philadelphia Experiment. The story would end with this horror image of the still-alive crew, instead of with an explanation. Dude this story was going to rock. All I needed was the name of this doomed hell ship and I could start writing.
Homegrown is over, but the music festivals keep coming. There’s the Festival of Nordic Music, Duluth Dylan Festival, Bayfront Country Jam, Bayfront Reggae & World Music Festival and on and on. The only reliable tool to help weigh the options is the PDD Calendar.
Each month we reach out with one beggarly blog post to remind everyone that human beings and not machines are at work editing and publishing calendar events. So if you appreciate it, drop a few bucks in the PayPal account.
From the book The First Time Germany Invaded Duluth, Minnesota by Peter S. Svenson:
“July 1, 1917: The Weltanshauung, a German hydrogen war-zeppelin, lost power over Bavaria. Captured by the wind, for the next two weeks it blew north across Europe and then the Arctic Circle. The furious crew tried fixing the engines but never succeeded. Technically, they set the World Record for the first arctic crossing by air, a feat later repeated by Shackleton.”
From “Zeppelins Over Duluth!” Duluth Herald, July 16, 1917:
“The Weltanshauung contained an internal airplane hangar with six black tri-planes that emerged from the nose of the craft like hornets. A Canadian fighter squadron looked for the zeppelin over Lake Erie and almost collided with it in the dark. It was a cliff face hanging in the sky, dwarfing them with the black-cross-on-white symbol of the German Air Force. But the Canadians lost it in confusion and fear. Soon a lake steamer spotted it drifting within sight of the North Shore of Lake Superior, toward Duluth. The authorities mobilized the American helium zeppelin, the Federalist, from its floating hangar in the Duluth harbor.
