Jim Richardson (aka Lake Superior Aquaman)
Bury Me in Hot Sauce
There is a Medieval legend of the honey mummy: holy men consuming nothing but honey until their excreta and fluids turn to honey, whereupon they die and are sealed in honey-filled stone caskets for a hundred years. Bites of their candied flesh are said to have curative powers, mystically evading definitions of cannibalism.
When I am 75, I will stop eating and drinking anything except hot sauce. After a month, my bodily fluids will become hot sauce. I will poop fiery chili paste like a sambal. The endorphins released with every bowel movement will keep me high as a kite. I will pee siracha sauce squirting like a squeeze bottle. My seminal fluid will be an organic salsa verde. My salivary glands will secrete tabasco. Weeping serrano tears from cayenne eyes, everything I see will have an apocalyptic tint. The interstitial fluid between my cells will run with fermented habanero. Since an all-out hot sauce diet is unsustainable, I will die. Fill a stone coffin with artisan ghost peppers, pureed scotch bonnets, Trinidad scorpions, jalapenos aged in wooden casks, vinegar, salt, lime, onions, and garlic. Place my body inside. Then seal it for 100 years. (more…)
The colors of water
Red: Whiteface Reservoir. Orange: French River. Yellow: French River. Green: Lake Superior. Blue: Lake Superior
Surf and Slide – Great Lakes Now
Detroit Public TV produces Great Lakes Now. The show speaks to me of what we share with other Great Lakes residents and how we should quit fighting about whether or not Lake Superior is the Greatest Lake. This episode focuses on ice sailing, and lake surfing (specifically the Surfistas): “It’s about stoke.”
Stock Lake Superior with Seals and Orca Whales: A Modest Proposal
To the Mayor of Duluth and the City Council: I propose that the city stock Lake Superior with seals, and a community of orcas to keep the seals in check. This plan increases annual tourist revenue by $300,000,000. I outline my proposal below with expenditures.
Seals can live in freshwater. The only population of exclusively-freshwater seals is native to the ratchet Lake Baikal in Russia, the Baikal seals. But geopolitical issues preclude obtaining breeding pairs. Therefore we need to look closer to home: Quebec has harbor seals in a couple lakes, a subspecies of the common seal called the Ungava seal. But, the Ungava is endangered so if we import them, we should establish a breeding program, increasing expenses.
Fortunately, Iliamna Lake in Alaska has a population of common seals trapped there. I suggest we capture and import specimens from that population to get ours started. Technically saltwater seals, the common seals’ adaptability to freshwater has been proven which will give them a head start in Lake Superior. I’ll throw in a couple Ungavas on the house to increase genetic diversity. Estimated cost of capturing and importing 100 breeding pairs of seals from Lake Iliamna: $3,500,000. (more…)
This Tugboat Just Sank at the Slip
Picture from last winter skating at the Slip by the tugboat Lake Superior. Paul Scinocca broke the story with a photo of the wreck on his social media. The boat had been out of service for some time, and will be so yet, I reckon.
Winter of Discontent: Lake Superior Wild Ice Report 2021-22
The Wildest Wild Ice
This winter I operated as a lake observer from my hillside fortress of solitude. I dug my binoculars out and pegged them by the window to study the lake’s changes. Obsessed with the wildest wild ice — skating the big lake — I track everything to do with Lake Superior freezing. I track wind speed, wind direction, temperature, and preciptiation daily. In summer this helps me predict local water temps and clarity related to underwater video. In winter this relates to skateable ice on the biggest lake in the world.
The Institute for the Study of Light and Water
The Institute
I am the founder and only member of the Institute for the Study of Light and Water. In truth its membership includes all who live. Data-gathering continues from my top-floor hillside apartment, the observatory. Generous windows on every side provide views of the lake and the sky. I must complete the Institute’s studies.
PDD Headshot Backstory
When joining Perfect Duluth Day’s “Saturday Essay” roster, I was asked for a headshot and I submitted this which accompanies my essays. It is a video still from an old GoPro on a stick. The camera has broken through the water, and my face is about to break the surface. Water depth @ 20-30 feet, off the sand beaches of Park Point. It was late summer and I wanted one more batch of diving photos in my Aquaman colors. (more…)
Lake Superior Eats Lesser Bodies of Water for Breakfast
Lake Superior is the biggest lake on Earth. And it’s the best. Want to fight about it?
If you’re like me, sometimes you mention Lake Superior in conversation, and you find yourself saying, “Lake Superior is the biggest lake in the world — by surface area! But if you’re judging by volume, the biggest lake is Lake Baikal!” But screw that. It’s time to take a stand. Now I say, “Lake Superior is the biggest lake in the world and those other janky lakes can suck it.”
What is a Lake?
The issue is nuanced, which triggers me. The definitions we use for lakes are arbitrary. I looked it up on Wikipedia and it just made me angry: “Lakes lie on land and are not part of the ocean.” Is it not obvious that oceans also lie on land? What is an ocean on, if not land? The ocean is not bottomless. The bottom of the ocean is land — they checked. Another irritating part of the definition is that lakes are “surrounded by land.” Now, don’t tell me oceans are not surrounded by land. There is no difference between oceans and lakes. The definition of a lake as “laying on/surrounded by the land” means oceans are, in fact, lakes. (more…)
“Shrinking Winter” — Great Lakes Now episode
Great Lakes Now is a production of Detroit Public Television. Footage of Duluth @11:44-12:00.
Plutonium Loves
I loved her and now that I’ve left I am full of cancer. My genome breaks further each day in a cascading cellular demolition. She’s a physicist so we used to see each other around the University. Once the accident made her radioactive, we saw each other through the leaded glass of her containment chamber in St. Luke’s. (more…)
The Alworth Incident
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.
Duluth sailboat crash in ship fail video compilation
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).
Nat Harvie – “Dog”
Duluth native Nat Harvie has a new EP, Married in Song, set for release Jan. 28.
My message to FedEx about their Duluth branch
Messaged this to FedEx’s Facebook page even though I was off the clock (I am not speaking for my unnamed place of business in any capacity but only as a private concerned citizen): “Hello – I work for a Duluth MN business that is having consistent problems with your drivers being unmasked in violation of our store policy, FedEx policy, and a citywide masking ordinance.
The SuperiorLab-Marquette Disaster
Deep-sea explorer Ecclesia Hummingbird, August 23, 2001 on PBS: “I live and work here in SuperiorLab, a hyperbaric underwater habitat 950 feet deep, by a drowned petrified forest. Welcome to science’s first permanent presence at the bottom of Lake Superior, with our partners: the University of Minnesota, NASA, and our corporate sponsors. We are offshore between Two Harbors and Silver Bay, in a quarter-mile-wide underwater canyon whose sides slope hundreds of feet down. This scar cuts for thirty miles getting deeper and deeper. The lake’s canyons divide the bedrock like cracking skin, and this crack is one of its deepest, Bible black like space.
“SuperiorLab is manned by a rotating crew of divers and astronauts-in-training who live here for months at a time. Because of budget cuts, that is currently a crew of two. There’s myself, and there’s my half-sister Persephone Marrow, a geologist developing protocols for future Mars missions. We are the so-called ‘genius daughters’ of the university’s Professor Joseph Marrow. (more…)
Two new Nat Harvie songs: “Longbody” and “Every Woman”
Lyric video for “Every Woman” below. (more…)
Great Lakes Now: Resilient Duluth
“Great Lakes Now checks in with Duluth mayor Emily Larson in an update on the improvements being made to the Lake Superior city’s waterfront, which resiliency efforts were featured in a ‘Resilient Duluth’ segment in June. “
Project SULTAN: A 13-Year-Old’s Plan to Take Over the World
At age thirteen in 1981, I made plans to take over the world. I would form a military organization with a network of secret bases, to destabilize the nations of the globe so I could seize power. The Reagan administration had me scared of nuclear annihilation — a civilization gone mad. The only moral response was to end war by taking over the world. So I wrote a manifesto, detailed my plans, and designed superweapons. I kept these in folders in a three-ring binder in my top dresser drawer. Today, four decades later, one of those folders survives. It is titled “SULTAN: Bases, Robots, Missiles.” It contains my megalomaniacal manifesto, my plan’s diabolical steps, and some blueprints. The other folders are missing. I have a good idea what happened to them, or should I say, who happened to them.
The opening page reads: “This is a highly-classified, top secret notebook, full of my plans for world conquest, and absolute domination of the planet. Anyone (without whom I have first given specific directions) reading this book shall be dealt with accordingly. – Jim Richardson, Future Earth Emperor.” (more…)
Lake Superior Aquaman Fashion Week
(On the ‘gram @lakesuperioraquaman)