This undated postcard shows the 500-foot Steamer David Z. Norton loading 3,000 bushels of wheat in the Duluth Harbor. Note the postcard has “J” as the middle initial of David Norton. That is presumably a misprint. David Zadock Norton was a director of the American Ship Building Company and the namesake of the ship.
Instagram is aglow with northern lights photos from last night, thanks to a little solar storm activity. It was less than a month ago when Perfect Duluth Day previously featured auroras in “Selective Focus,” but the show last night brought out practically every sky photographer in the region.
A bobcat and her two kittens put on a little show for a Voyageurs Wolf Project trail camera recently. Although the University of Minnesota research project has caught bobcats on camera numerous times, this is the first clip that includes kittens.
How can you tell your Pepperkakebyen from your Mannheim Steamroller without the PDD Calendar? You can’t. You just can’t. That’s why we reach out each month 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.
Documenting all extant media coverage of my exploits since 2005. Sharing them here. Articles, interviews, TV, radio, all the things:
Los Angeles Review of Books has a brief mention of Duluth in the opening sentence of a review of three books focused on trees. The reviewer, Barbara Kiser, is a former Duluthian who has lived in London since the 1980s.
With all precincts reporting, the results are …
Duluth At-large City Councilor
Top two candidates are elected
Terese Tomanek | 7,959
Azrin Awal | 6,882
Joe Macor | 6,131
Timothy L. Meyer | 1,302
Write in | 108
Straight from the Iron Range comes this Halloween medley by Steve Solkela. The music was recorded at Kaleva Hall in Virginia. The medley includes: “Ranger Things Parody,” “Ghost of John,” “Play that Scary Music Bite Boy,” “Pass the Witch’s Broomstick” and “Zombie Taylor Swift.”
I haunt the resale shops looking for “records that look like books.” I’m referring to the folios of LPs that were common (a) when prepackaged by the label, as a way to sell extended plays and collections when records didn’t hold too many songs and (b) when sold blank, as a way for an individual collector to store and carry multiple, individually-purchased discs.
When I find a collection stored in the sleeves of such a folio, I snatch it, wondering who collected these masterpieces.
Happy Halloween, folks! Treat yourself to this current events quiz and see how many of this month’s headlines you remember.
The next PDD quiz will explore Superior Laws (a complement to the September quiz on Duluth laws); it will be published on Nov. 14. Submit question suggestions to Alison Moffat at [email protected] by Nov. 11.
West Duluth was the scene of windmill experiments a century ago, according to a story in the Oct. 31, 1921 Duluth Herald. Albert Herman Heyroth was hard at work at 55th Avenue West and Raleigh Street attempting to generate electricity for home energy use.
When my father died, I had a surrogate dad waiting in the wings: the work of Ray Bradbury. I was obsessed. I felt I would devote my life to him, a feeling common to loves which last no more than a couple years, as this one did. But they were timeless years. Between my 13th and 15th birthday, with my adult future on the horizon, I was still young enough for summers to last forever.
Now in my 50s, I retain the suite of Bradbury paperbacks I collected back then. I have no use for them, although no library contains merely useful books. I quit re-reading them decades ago. But there are many reasons for books to be collected. I moved on to obsessions with writers less old-fashioned and less overly lyrical, although not before his lyricism infected my own style. Yet even for me, Bradbury is too breathless and too wordy (although not chatty like Harlan Ellison). He wrote terrible poetry. He became a cranky old man. Film and TV adaptations of his work are, by and large, bad. I now consider him (along with his contemporaries Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein) to be a branch of Young Adult (i.e., children’s) literature. But I still give his books a treasured pride of place on my shelves, which overflow with his successors. Strangely, most of my adult favorites also begin with the letter “B”: Burroughs, Ballard, Borges, Bowles … but Bradbury got to me first.
The Bong Bridge spans the background in this view of Grassy Point wetlands.
A three-year habitat-restoration project on the St. Louis River in West Duluth was completed this month. Sediment contaminants at Kingsbury Bay and Grassy Point have been remediated and heavy equipment has been removed.
