Monthly Grovel: June 2022

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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.

Postcard from the Duluth Depot

The message on the back of this Union Depot postcard is dated June 8, 1912 — 110 years ago today. The names are tricky to read, but the sender signs off from Detroit, Mich. and the recipient was in Beaver Dam, Wis.

Life after Desk: Catching up with Gaelynn Lea

Duluth’s Gaelynn Lea won National Public Radio’s Tiny Desk Contest in 2016. NPR recently circled back to interview her during her work writing music for the Broadway adaptation of Macbeth.

The Tiny Desk Contest is NPR’s annual search for a great unsigned artist.

Grandma’s Marathon 2021 Double: Ninth or Tenth Annual?

Eric Strand’s tradition of running a Grandma’s Marathon Double — starting at the finish line, running to the starting line, then running the official marathon — continued in 2021. The annual video package didn’t make it to YouTube until today — 11 days before the next Grandma’s Marathon — but hey, editing video is its own marathon, right?

Joining Strand on the 52.4-mile trek, which began at 2:30 a.m., are Andy, Andrew, John, Lance and another guy named Eric. All were impressed with the awe-inspiring sunrise over the porta potties at the half-marathon starting line.

View in the City of Duluth Circa 1872

This image from a stereograph circa 1872 shows a view of Superior Street in Downtown Duluth looking eastward from roughly First Avenue West. The odd-shaped building in the upper right corner of the image is the Lake Superior & Mississippi Railroad Grain Elevator A, which was on the shore of Lake Superior at about Fourth Avenue East.

Video Archive: The First Half-century of Goldfines in Business

This 50-year-old film is a sort of unproduced mini-documentary about Duluth’s Goldfine family, with particular emphasis on their roles as civic leaders. The family’s entrepreneurial story in Duluth goes back to 1922, so it can be viewed today as marking a full century of Goldfine family enterprises in the city.

Ingeborg von Agassiz – “Higher, Higher”

The latest from Duluth’s Ingeborg von Agassiz is “a song for basement-dwellers and night owls.”

Squirrel Fighting Scaffold Match: Furball McGraw vs. Crazy Carl

In the latest backyard battle in Duluth, Furball McGraw takes on the squirrel-weight champion of the world, Crazy Carl in a scaffold match. Video by Brian Luoma of Wild Cam North.

Selective Focus: Grey Days

Foggy, rainy, cloudy … but not necessarily gloomy. May was a lot like April. Collected here are select images from the past month, via Instagram.

Mack on the Mic at Anchor Bar and Grill

As part of her new “Mack on the Mic” series, Comedian Mary Mack performed a matinee show at Superior’s Anchor Bar and Grill.

Mack’s parents are Duluth natives. She was raised in Webster, Wis., about 50 miles south of Duluth.

Minnesota Historia: The Chief Buffalo Memorial Project

Artist Moira Villiard presents a tour of the Chief Buffalo mural and the origin story of Downtown Duluth.

Minnesota Historia is a six-part WDSE-TV web series dedicated to Minnesota’s quirky past. It is hosted by Hailey Eidenschink and produced/edited/written by Mike Scholtz.

Duluth 2022 Primary Election Primer

The filing period for Minnesota state and county offices closed on May 31. Below is a tally of candidates who filed for races pertinent to Duluth-area ballots. Names that appear in red are hyperlinked to the candidates’ websites.

Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness Act of 1978

This 10-minute documentary on the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness Act of 1978 was produced by Sam Fulton and Mark Rogalski for National History Day on the theme of “Debate & Diplomacy.” The process paper and bibliography is at mn.nhd.org.

PDD Quiz: May 2022

See how much of this month’s headlines you remember with this current events quiz for May 2022!

Baseball will be the theme of the next PDD quiz, which comes your way on June 12. Submit question suggestions to Alison Moffat at [email protected] by June 8.

Johnny Depp – Amber Heard Trial vs. Ukraine War: A Mashup

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.