If you’ve followed Perfect Duluth Day for long, you know how to play “Where in Duluth?” A photo from an undisclosed spot is posted, people guess the location in the comments, someone eventually gets it right and everyone else admires that person’s brilliance. But now, as part of PDD’s 15th anniversary celebration, there are prizes on the line.
A pre-dawn thunderstorm. What a treat. Don’t get them much in Duluth. There’s a cat fight going on outside. When I arrived home late last night, the lightning bugs were dancing. The air was thick and I could smell my childhood.
Which is all very bemusing because I hold little nostalgia these days. I used to sit on bushels of it when I was younger. An example is — and I think I may have relayed this to you in passing or maybe in some strange post-apocalyptic note — the events of June 17. It passed this year and I once again failed to think of you.
We had a date for that night in 1983. June 17 is also the anniversary of the break-in at Watergate, which never registered with me until recently. I was so obsessed with my own Waterloo.
You had gone to Florida and promised we would see each other upon your return and before the early pea pack. Our farm country hometown, like Paris, is such a romantic place.
With all the breweries popping up in Duluth and surrounding communities, it’s hard to keep the names straight. In casual conversation, no one really cares if you say “Earth Rider Brewery” or “Earth Rider Brewing,” but if you are one of the last copy editors in town who still has a job, for example, you might consider it important to distinguish which brew-suffix goes with each entity.
When I was a kid I had a blue Schwinn Sting-Ray Fastback 5-speed banana-seat bicycle with ape-hanger handlebars. It was classic and beautiful. I hated it.
That bike was a relic handed down from my significantly older brother, Scott, who bought it in the late 1960s with his paper route money and used it to expedite his collections process. I took it over just as the 1970s turned into the 1980s, and by then banana bikes weren’t cool. Freestyle bikes were the new rage.
In West Duluth at the time we called freestyle bikes “dirt bikes,” a term that would get them confused with motorized dirt bikes in other neighborhoods or other periods in history, but there was no confusion among us. The Huffy BMX is a popular dirt bike I remember, along with Diamondbacks. I wasn’t really tuned into what all the hot brands were, nor was I much of an enthusiast for stunt biking, I just knew I wanted one of those bikes so I could blend in and not look ridiculous when it was time to jump over stuff and race through mud or whatever. But I didn’t want it bad enough to get a paper route and pay for it, I just wanted fate to hand me one. Because if fate hands you anything in this life, it immediately entitles you to think it will hand you things over and over again.
Do you enjoy paddle boarding, kayaking, canoeing, or some other form of water recreation? If so this is a good opportunity for you! We are currently working on a research project to determine the effect of goose herbivory on northern wild rice and how water recreation such as kayaking or canoeing can effect how much the geese eat the wild rice. In this study I need to get people to scare geese for 1-2 hours at each site, if you are interested in volunteering to go out to some select bays to deter geese, get some exercise, and explore a bit please respond to this post!
Thank you,
Sam
A three-person majority of the Federal Communications Commission voted to give control of the internet to four corporations. All but rich corporations will become second-class internet “citizens,” and voices of dissent will be further marginalized. Please sign this petition and call your representative and tell him/her this is not acceptable.
In honor of Perfect Duluth Day’s 15th anniversary, this quiz looks back at some famous (and infamous) PDD posts, memes, events and features. Hat tip to Paul Lundgren for supplying question ideas.
The next PDD quiz, a recap of current events from June 2018, will be published on June 24. Email question suggestions to Alison Moffat at [email protected] by June 21.
I knew a guy named Aman who had been a commander in the Mujahideen, the predecessors of the Taliban in Afghanistan, back in the ‘80s when Islamist militants were on our side in the Cold War effort to kick the Soviets out of their country. One of the things Aman did back home was defuse Soviet bombs and rewire them for later use — thus his Coke bottle glasses and missing digits. I met him when he was washing dishes in a Minneapolis restaurant with a couple of his cohorts, one of whom, being an example of the crossroads which is Afghanistan, looked like any Irishman you’ve ever met. In those innocent, pre-9/11 days, Aman came into the kitchen one morning, and a young jewish cook said, “Hey, Aman, how’s the jihad going? Have you killed the Great Satan yet?” Aman merely waved his hand, and groaned, “Ah, Jewish,” and from there, as usual, we all got along quite swimmingly. A controversy at the time began when the president, George H. W. Bush, for some reason told the press he didn’t like broccoli, and the local TV station came to the restaurant for some counterpoint. Aman was enlisted for some filming which, alas, didn’t make the final cut, but there he was, our Mujahideen commander, eyes bulging behind thick glasses, ascending the stairs from the cooler with a case of broccoli on his shoulder. Coming to get you, George! God is great! And broccoli.
“Ooohh, Poppy’s going to do it!”
Poppy is our seven year old’s Mini Rex doe rabbit. Poppy has a date with a buck named Frodo with velvet black fur and a dwarf gene. I hadn’t seen him in-person, but his owner up the hill texted me his photo. Electronic match-making extends to other species, too.
“Wait, Nibbit,” the ten-year-old asked her little sister, “Do you even know what ‘do it’ means?”
“Uh, well. Not exactly.”
I thought we had already gone over this, or I assumed the eldest would have filled her in. So much slides with a second child. It was time for dinner, so over tacos I described ovulation, intercourse, fertilization, implantation, etc. I couldn’t tell if the seven-year-old’s eyes were glazing over with boredom or embarrassment.
Her father Jeremy knows that if you want to get a kid’s attention you light up a screen. He found a video of rabbits mating. It is actually worth watching. Forgive me for the spoiler, but when the buck comes he actually goes into a momentary trance and falls over.
The Duluth-Superior Film Festival is upon us, and that means it’s time for another premiere from Duluth’s budding film community. Gleahan and the Knaves of Industry, by first-time writer/director Samuel T. Weston, makes its debut Thursday night at 9 p.m. at Teatro Zuccone. As with all of the DSFF screenings, tickets are free.
[Editor’s note: This week we’ve pulled out another relic from the archive of Slim Goodbuzz, who served as Duluth’s connoisseur of drinking establishments from 1999 to 2009. In this essay we travel back ten years to a time before Duluth’s Black Water Lounge existed. A restaurant called the Chinese Garden occupied that part of the Greysolon Plaza, and our inebriated anti-hero paid a visit. This article was originally published in the June 30, 2008 issue of the Transistor.]
If there’s one thing I hate about being sober it’s how polite I become. Here I am, standing next to the cash register at the Chinese Garden, waiting for a fucken waitress to come over and choose a table for me. This wouldn’t happen if I were drunk.
Obviously, if had any spirits in me at all, my choice would be to flop into the closest available booth, even if someone else is sitting there. Tonight, that would mean interrupting what appears to be a magic night of romance for a pair of chubby 60-year-olds who are silently finishing their dinner.
The man, whose grey hair is pulled back into a ponytail, breaks their conversational lull by asking the woman, “So, are we going to stay here and drink all night?”
Her answer is, “I think so.” And so the stage is set.
Last Thursday, shortly after 6 p.m., I was out for a walk with my dog on the west side of Chester Creek between Skyline and Eighth Street. We were heading up the trail and passed a gentleman out for a jog with his two dogs, heading down the trail.
As we approached each other I said, “Hello, my dog’s friendly.”
He replied with, “Hi. My dogs are not,” and kept running.
From the Wildwoods Rehabilitation Facebook page:
In our lives as rehabbers, we witness many happy moments, but also many tragedies and moments of heartbreak. This story is one of the sad ones.
When friends of Wildwoods saw these very young, very tiny grey fox kits wandering around outside their den without their mom, they knew something was amiss. Something had happened to Mom; she was gone.
I moved to Duluth in March of 1998. It was during the El Nino winter, in which every single human with whom I interacted informed me that this winter was NOT NORMAL FOR MINNESOTA. It came up in every conversation, which, over the course of the six months that normally would comprise one Duluth winter, provided a more vigorous facsimile of the suspended, punishing experience; only instead of shivering from the cold, I was shivering from collective dread, carefully cultivated by the city’s entire populace. In the wake of such calamitous portent, simple freezing fucking winter was actually a relief. Thus it was that I spent an entire terrifically warm winter in Duluth scared shitless, forming alliances and hoarding dry goods, waiting for real winter to come, like Duluth was some kind of folksy, sitcom version of Game of Thrones.
In fairness, Duluth is a really strange place. It was going to be strange, whether or not the winter was briefly co-opted by an exotic air current. I have a hundred examples of Duluth’s magnificent wackiness, but that’s too many for today. So here are three.
