Is it just me or do you notice that a lot of people refer to this blog as “Perfect Day Duluth?”
1) What’s up with that? Why do people make that mistake?
2) When they do, do you correct them? How do you correct them without sounding like a pretentious know-it-all? I am a pretentious know-it-all, so that’s why I ask.
We threw all the résumés up in the air and one of them landed on top. Tony Bennett is the new editor of the PDD Calendar. His credentials include writing for nearly every publication in town, fronting the band Cars & Trucks, working a camera for TV shows such as Almanac North and The PlayList and for dissecting the work of “positive bros” as the Duluth News Tribune‘s music critic.
Tony can be reached via e-mail at tony @ perfectduluthday.com or calendar @ perfectduluthday.com.
Mr. Lawrence Lee, superhero editor of the PDD Calendar since April 2012, has announced his desire for fewer responsibilities. He is resigning his position, and will step down in October, when a qualified intrepid soul will be anointed to continue the mission. We promise not to turn the job interview process into a reality TV show, but we can’t say it won’t be competitive.
Follow this link to the PDD Employment page to read the job description.
During what will end up being a two-and-a-half-year stint, Lawrence will have presided over the publishing of more than 20,000 events in the calendar — and he didn’t even start getting bug eyed until a couple months ago. He plans to stay on as a contributor to the calendar, so the next person to join the ranks of PDD’s sterling staff will benefit from his wisdom and his ongoing efforts. That said, we will not accept a mere mortal taking over the reins. The bar has been set too high.
It’s been over five years since we’ve freshened things up around here. Welcome to the new look of PDD. At the moment we’re still fixing all the things that are breaking left and right as a result of messing with the layout of the PDD Blog, but soon things will be functioning better than ever.
Here are some fancy bullet points to get you up to speed:
Perfect Duluth Day is eleven years old today – Sunday, June 29, 2014. The official celebration is at Carmody Irish Pub tonight at 8 p.m. Fabulous prizes will be awarded to the top finishers of this week’s Pub Quiz, the questions for which will all be related to PDD. It’s a super tough quiz, so study intensively.
We’re looking for new Homegrown photo banners to run across the top of PDD during the festival. Photos shot at last year’s festival are the best candidates, but if there are compelling images of preparations for this year, I suppose that’s fair game too. For full details on banner submissions, click here. The basic info is the image must be 960 pixels wide by 167 pixels high. The Perfect Duluth Day logo will be added by PDD’s art department. Send them to banners @ perfectduluthday.com.
The Homegrown banners will replace the regular banner photos at the top of the page starting Sunday.
I don’t recognize any of the PDD community in this trailer. Were we all out of town when this guy rolled his Airstream through Duluth?
In 2004, Scott “Starfire” Lunt amassed a collection of tapes from answering machines that ended up in thrift stores.
“These are spectacular glimpses into people’s lives and I can’t believe they get so casually discarded,” Starfire wrote at the time.
Today we resurrect the audio files from the answering machine of the old Twice But Nice store.
A minor anniversary for Perfect Duluth Day: Five years ago today we stayed up late on a Friday night and switched to the WordPress publishing platform. From September 2005 to January 2009 PDD used Moveable Type and looked like this:
Perhaps it’s strange to pick a day when most events are cancelled to make this announcement, but … well, we do things when we get around to them so here it goes: The PDD Calendar now has a mobile version. We actually launched it on Sunday, so maybe you’ve already noticed.
If you view the calendar on a phone, you should automatically see the mobile version.
A search through the PDD Archives for October 2003 reveals a wild month. Rick Boo closed the NorShor Theatre (causing much reminiscing on PDD), Bone Appetit was supposed to open for Ratt at the Third Rock Bar until Ratt cancelled at the last minute, people on PDD started posting short introductions about themselves and telling ghost stories, Starfire got his jaw jacked, Jamie Ness was voted Hottest Ness Brother, a cake/fist fight broke out at Slim Goodbuzz’s book-release party, Elliot Smith died and Shaky Ray Records hosted some kind of party.
There were problems this week with the WordPress plugin that allows PDD users to log in via Facebook. In geek speak: “Facebook changed its API login procedures, which broke the plugin.”
We have a new plugin running now, so, if you are the sort to log in via Facebook instead of creating a PDD account the old fashioned way, please give it a try and let us know if you have problems. The new plugin also allows logins through Twitter. (If you are not logged in you can click either social icon below to launch. If you are logged in, you won’t see icons below.)
A few polls opened this week that those of you who log in with Facebook had been excluded from until now. They are still open, so there’s still time for that.
Note: Logging in will not allow you to purchase health insurance from Perfect Duluth Day.
The Perfect Duluth Day Archives for September 2003 feature a number of posts about the Nonchalant Jaunt, an event in which seven hearty PDDers walked the length of Duluth, from the Wabegon Supper Club in the Superior Township to the Lakeview Castle in the Duluth Township.
If you’ve wanted to create a post, add a comment or participate in a poll on PDD, but felt that creating an account would be a nuisance, well, now you can log in through your Facebook account with a simple click.
July 2003 is the first complete month of archived posts on Perfect Duluth Day. It was a time when Facebook didn’t exist and the word “blog” was still a year away from being named Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year.
PDD was a pretty different thing back then, both in appearance and attitude. Founders Barrett Chase and Scott “Starfire” Lunt used the Blogger publishing platform initially (until August 2004). If you look at the archive, it’s getting sloppier all the time as many of the images that were hosted on other sites aren’t there anymore and most of the links are dead.
Blogger didn’t support commenting in those days, so Barrett and Scott found some other thing to use, but the company behind it went out of business years ago, so all the comments from the posts on Blogger are long lost.
Since it was pre-Facebook, and was started among a group of friends, PDD initially was used a bit like Facebook, with a lot of inane daily updates — many of which stand the test of time and are cool to revisit, while others … not so much.
So what were the major happenings ten years ago as far as PDD was concerned?
