The Alworth Incident

Jim Richardson (aka Lake Superior Aquaman) Feb 19, 2022 No Comments

Introduction: UMD’s Alworth Hall was built in 1974. It was rebuilt in 2011 in the wake of the Alworth Incident which claimed the life of Desiree Zontal, Dean of the Research Instrumentation Laboratory. Her graduate student Ward Hind, and her husband Horace Zontal, Associate Dean of the Physics Department, both survived. Mr. Hind, the jealous saboteur, is incarcerated in Oak Park Heights in a cell made of the anomalously-irradiated bricks of the lab. In these essays, we put a human face on the Incident, although in the case of Mr. Hind, this is, ironically, impossible.

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A Duluth Area Cross-Country Skiing Decision Tree

Karl Schuettler Feb 19, 2022 1 Comment

What follows is an incredibly scientific and very carefully curated guide to Duluth area cross-country ski trails.

1. Do you want something unavoidably intense?

If yes, proceed to #2

If no, proceed to #5

2. Do you have a lot of time?

If yes, proceed to #3

If no, proceed to #4

3. Do you prefer constant climbing followed by constant descent, or insidious but varying slopes?

Up then down: Korkki

Beat me up: Mangey-Snively
 

Korkki

The Korkki trail, located off Homestead Road between Duluth and Two Harbors, is a single loop out and back with cutoffs at various kilometer points. Like Lester Park, it features a steady rise on the outward ski and a steady coast downward on the inbound trail, only it is more intense in this trajectory, and reaches its climax at the far end of the loop, where there are a bunch of aggressive hills. (map)

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Outdoors ,

Duluth sailboat crash in ship fail video compilation

Jim Richardson (aka Lake Superior Aquaman) Feb 18, 2022 No Comments

The sailboat that crashed into the Aerial Lift Bridge on May 16, 2018 has made it into this recent “Ship Crash Compilation” on the YouTube channel “Crashing Zone” (@ the 1-minute mark).


Videos , ,

Lake Trout Fishing Gone Wrong

PDDTV Feb 18, 2022 No Comments

Seth Trobec gets taken for a ride in this ice-fishing video gone wrong. Trobec’s buddy, Cody Mjolsness, leaves the fish house and takes off on his snowmobile to pick up a friend … but the fish house is still attached to the snowmobile, with Trobec inside.

The video was shot Jan. 14 at Canisteo Pit Mine Lake, about 60 miles northwest of Duluth.


Outdoors, Videos ,

Postcard from the St. Louis County Courthouse at Night

Paul Lundgren Feb 17, 2022 No Comments

This undated postcard features a nighttime image of the St. Louis County Courthouse, which opened in 1909.


History ,

R.I.P. Esmond Building

PDD News Sieve Feb 17, 2022 1 Comment

The Duluth News Tribune reports the former Seaway Hotel, also known as the Esmond Building, was demolished on Wednesday. The building had been gutted by a fire on Jan. 10.

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Uncle Jim and Aunt Susie in Duluth

PDDTV Feb 16, 2022 No Comments

Episode 5 of Pam & Tommy, the biographical drama series about Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee, mentions Duluth. The same Duluth joke comes up twice, and it’s also used as the title of the episode: “Uncle Jim and Aunt Susie in Duluth.” The episode premiered today on the streaming service Hulu.

The two scenes with the Duluth mentions are strung together in the video above. The setting for both scenes is the writer’s room for The Tonight Show with Jay Leno in 1995.


News and Current Affairs ,

Song Release: Sydney Hansen’s “Somebody’s Nobody”

PDDTV Feb 16, 2022 No Comments

Duluth’s Sydney Hansen has a new single on various streaming platforms. She cowrote the song with Nashville’s Bill DiLuigi.


Music

Final Jeopardy Duluth clue a real stumper

PDD News Sieve Feb 15, 2022 No Comments

The episode of Jeopardy! that aired on Valentine’s Day ended with this clue: “At about 90,000 it’s the most populous U.S. city on North America’s biggest lake.” All three contestants failed to answer Duluth. Two answered Green Bay and one answered Minneapolis.

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News and Current Affairs ,

Mystery Photo: Alice

Paul Lundgren Feb 14, 2022 No Comments

This special Valentine’s Day Mystery Photo comes from the Duluth Public Library, where it was found in an office after one of the librarians retired. The photo is dated Oct. 28, 1918 and comes with a message of love on the back.

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History

The Slice: Winter Biking

PDDTV Feb 14, 2022 1 Comment

Jeremiah Peck and Shawna Mullen talk about the simple things needed to get into winter biking.

In its series The Slice, WDSE-TV 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.


Videos , ,

Latest photos from Jupiter’s moon Io, or maybe Duluth’s beaches

Jim Richardson (aka Lake Superior Aquaman) Feb 13, 2022 No Comments

Outdoors, Photos , ,

PDD Quiz: Duluth at the Olympics

Alison Moffat Feb 13, 2022 No Comments

Go for the gold with this quiz about Olympians with Duluth ties!

The next PDD quiz will review this month’s headlines; it will be published on Feb. 27. Submit question suggestions to Alison Moffat at [email protected] by Feb. 24.

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Sports

W.T.F. E.T.

PDDTV Feb 12, 2022 No Comments

For those who remember when little Thomas Demming from Duluth found his own real-life E.T. in 2009, well, now we have a 2022 sighting.

(The video is below the Read More button to keep it from slow-loading on the home page, because it’s a TikTok clip and those are a little clunky.)

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Videos

The Public Complicity Trick

David Syring Feb 12, 2022 3 Comments

One of the means of control my father used in his abuse (of my mother, my sisters, and me) was what I have come to think of as the “Public Complicity Trick.”

I’m going to describe this trick from my childhood, though I am a man now and it happened decades ago, because I need to speak about how I’ve seen what seems to be a similar effort recently from a man who I once thought of as a friend. This person chose to call into the podcast of a prominent national celebrity to enter the public sphere of discussion about cancel culture. I won’t repeat the details of his call; Allison Morse has outlined that story.

When I was young, my family would sometimes be out somewhere in the community, and my father would launch into one of his Big Lies. He would tell a friend about some great thing he had accomplished in his younger days—being a champion boxer in the military; or he would tell the head of the small-town Nebraska volunteer fire department that he had saved three people from a fire while serving as a volunteer during one of our cyclic moves between Texas (where he was from) and Nebraska (where my mother was from); or he would tell some new acquaintance from the evangelical church about a vision he claimed had helped him kick drugs and booze. (That brings back my memory of finding his jar of black capsules of some drug—not a prescription—in the kitchen cabinet when I was about 10. I carefully opened each capsule, dumped the powder down the drain, and closed the empty capsules to return them to the jar.)

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