Magic Smelt Puppet Troupe brought back its smelt-themed second-line parade and fish fry in 2022 after a two-year absence due to COVID-19. The WDSE-TV clip above is from The Slice, a series that presents short “slices of life” that capture the events and experiences that bring people together and speak to what it means to live up north.
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.
This postcard was mailed 80 years ago today — May 12, 1942. The recipient was Constance Jarvis of Riverside, Calif. Ray Boyer sent it from Duluth.
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.
The Voyageurs Wolf Project has yet another trail-camera video montage showing the array of wildlife that inhabits Voyageurs National Park. The footage is from fall 2020 to fall 2021.
Katie Switzer, from the central Minnesota city of Staples, won the North of Nashville songwriting contest in Duluth in February. Production of her new music video was part of the grand prize package. It was shot in Symphony Hall at the Duluth Entertainment Convention Center and Sacred Heart Music Center by Bo Allen of Bo Allen Productions.
The song was recorded as Sacred Heart and features Shane Nelson on acoustic guitar and bass, Matt Groom on percussion, and Bo Allen on acoustic guitar and background vocals.
Everybody knows the story of the Edmund Fitzgerald, the most famous shipwreck on Lake Superior. But what are the next five most fascinating shipwreck stories on the big lake called Gitchi Gumee? And is the #2 shipwreck story the scariest thing you’ll ever hear?
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.
Rock and roll is complicated. But the Homegrown Music Festival made it back after two years of online events during the pandemic. I took a bunch of photos and tossed the best of them into a slideshow. I made it to 58 acts, but that means I missed 131.
The song featured here is by Cars & Trucks from the 2013 album Theatre Stardusk. The band returned from a lengthy hiatus to perform a surprise popup at this year’s festival.
Duluth’s Nat Harvie sat down with Karl Neurauter of Chicago Music Exchange to talk sonic-vibes and writing processes and played four tracks from the new EP Married in Song.
Select Instagram images from day eight of the Homegrown Music Festival and the annual Run, Smelt, Run! Parade and Party.
Select Instagram images from day seven of the Homegrown Music Festival.
In an Instagram and TikTok world, it’s hard to ask anyone to edit and crop their photos during the hubbub of Homegrown. But now that things are winding down, if you’ve got any great shots that would fit that weird horizontal space at the top of PDD, send ’em our way, we’ll add them to the collection for next year.
The chant is heard sporadically throughout the annual Homegrown Music Festival Kickball Classic. “MVP. MVP. MVP.”
