Paul Lundgren
PDD Calendar Launch on Monday, Sept. 12
Here’s the short version of things you need to know about the big changes at Perfect Duluth Day:
1) The PDD Calendar, which has been available in test mode for two months, will be launching full scale on Monday.
2) The editor of the calendar is Abigail Schoenecker, who can be reached at calendar @ perfectduluthday.com.
3) Effective immediately, PDD’s Blog Policies are changing a bit to discourage posting about events on the blog.
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Time to settle this once and for all
The bird in this photo is …
This poll is now closed. The results were:
A skyrat, one of the Devil’s flying rodents, which should be fed rocks from a slingshot. — 70.4 percent
A seagull, one of God’s lovely creatures, which should be fed popcorn gently tossed in its vicinity. — 29.6 percent
[poll id=”10″]
Cloud Cult – Unexplainable Stories
Animation by Jon Thompson of Minneapolis-based Bolster Creative
The Park Point Fox
Photos by Hattie Peterson. (Click any image to see it full size or to go through them all slide-show style.)
Minnesota Point: Protector or Guide?
From the 1950 book This is Duluth, by Dora May Macdonald:
According to rumour, George Sherwood, one of the old-time real estate men, stood on the barren hills one day with an Easterner, expounding on the charms of the village and the advantages to be gained by investing in Duluth real estate. Pointing to the sandy stretch of land curving out into the water, he said, “There lies Minnesota Point. It looks like God’s arm protecting the town of Duluth.”
The Easterner, unimpressed by the rocky hills, sand, or sentiment, replied, “It looks to me more like God’s finger pointing the way out of town.”
Iran continues to be Iran
Associated Press via the Washington Post: “Iran sentences two American men to eight years in jail in blow to hopes for freedom“
Perfect Duluth Day Spelling, Punctuation and Proper Usage Police
From time to time the geeks who comment on this website will get into arguments about grammar, spelling and so on. It doesn’t happen too often, but when it does it kind of excites certain people while it embarrasses and annoys others. Some people just love to show off their mad English skills, while others don’t care if their capable of getting there sentences from here to they’re properly.
With that in mind, this post has been created as a bitching ground for uptight word nerds.
Don’t let this post stop you from creating your own post to showcase public blunders in the future, it just seemed like this type of stuff needs a home base.
Here are some related posts from the past:
Really? And I had my hopes up …
Need Fun!
Great food. Bad punctuation.
Unnecessary quotation marks are sometimes disturbing
A Small Request
To help this discussion along, we’ve started the “Perfect Duluth Day Writer’s Guide,” as a handy reference to Duluth-related nouns that are frequently botched.
Let your ranting begin.
Sample Ballot for Duluth Primary Election on Tuesday, Sept. 13, 2011
Duluthians who live in the Fourth Council District, which includes parts of the West End, Piedmont Heights and Duluth Heights neighborhoods, will also vote on that council seat. The candidates are Jacqueline Halberg, Garry Krause, Ryan Miles, Wallace Newquist and Travis Silvers.
There will be more races in the General Election in November, but only one or two candidates filed for those offices, so they are not on the primary ballot. To see a complete list of candidates visit the “Duluth 2011 Election Candidate Filings” post.
Duluth Early History
A 1914 recap of Duluth history:
Proctor’s Yellowstone #225 circa 1963
The ol’ steam locomotive from the Duluth, Missabe & Iron Range Railroad that sits in downtown Proctor has been there a long time. This photo is from the Cliff’s Barber Shop Collection, dated 1963. Below is a 2009 photo from the Minnesota Railroading Photos on minnesotajones.com. (more…)
All roads lead to Duluth
The location of the city at the head of navigation, in the center of a continent, 1,400 miles from the sea, gives it unequaled facilities (through 8,000 miles of railways centering here) as a natural distributing point for a great and prosperous section.
We have cheap power, cheap coal, cheap gas, cheap iron, cheap raw material of woods, in vast quantities with unequaled transportation facilities in every direction.
—Duluth News Tribune, Sept. 30, 1914
Hey Tourists, Welcome to Our City
In the search for info on the song “Welcome to Our City,” for the list of “Songs with ‘Duluth’ in the lyrics or title,” PDD’s Fairy Research Spy found this 1910 Duluth News Tribune illustration (which has the same title as the song, but predates it by six years). Note that the Aerial Lift Bridge is not a lift bridge … it was the Aerial Ferry Bridge back then, with a gondola car carrying cars/wagons across.
Poll: Should the PDD Calendar display or hide event descriptions?
Two weeks ago we launched the new PDD Calendar (in test mode) and asked you for feedback. Although we received good feedback in general, there was one specific area we asked about as an afterthought in the comments and didn’t get much response on, so we’ll ask again in a more obvious and simple-to-respond-to way (though it still requires some degree of explanation):
How would you like the entries on any given day to look? (more…)
Missing Person: Walter Clock
The Duluth Police Department is seeking the public’s assistance in locating a missing 69-year-old male. Walter Clock was last seen on Saturday at noon, leaving his residence in the 2200 block of West Second Street.
UPDATE: He has been found.
Amusement seekers are well cared for by theatrical houses of the Zenith City
That was the headline above this photo collage from the Sept. 30, 1914 edition of the Duluth News Tribune. Of course, the Lyceum, Rex, Grand, Zelda and Empress are all gone now. Only the Orpheum remains — remodeled and renamed the NorShor Theatre in 1941.
The Duluth Economic Development Authority is working with Westlake Reed Leskosky and SJA Architects on restoration plans for the NorShor. Have patience; it’ll take some time.
Duluth Beer Tour 2011
How many different beers are produced in Duluth and commercially available in July 2011? Could you drink a pint of each in one day and not require a stomach pump? (more…)
We are opposed to the notion that you are the first to be unopposed, Mr. Ness
At least one news organization reported yesterday that Mayor Don Ness is the first Duluth mayor to be unopposed in an election. Well, it’s not true.
Mayor Ness is indeed the only mayor in the past 126 years to go unopposed, but Maryanne Norton at the Duluth Public Library has found three Duluth mayors in the 1800s who were unopposed.
Sidney Luce was elected unopposed in 1872 and served one term.
Dr. Vespasian Smith was elected twice with no opposition — in 1873 and 1874. (Mayors served one-year terms until 1913, when the current four-year system began.)
Horace B. Moore was elected unopposed in 1885 and served one term.
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Introducing PDD Calendar Beta Test +
Perfect Duluth Day is launching an events calendar, and for the next month or so you can preview it at it’s permanent URL:
We have created this calendar because a majority of posts to the PDD Blog are about events, but the format of a blog is not a practical way to organize that type of information. If you wanted to know what’s happening today based on PDD posts, you’d have to select the “events” category and skim through weeks of random items looking for today’s date. That is lame.
So today our calendar is born. It doesn’t have a ton of events in it yet, and it probably has some technical issues left to be fixed, but the general format is set and it has seemed to be working well during our initial testing phase.
Check it out and tell us what you think with a comment to this post or an e-mail to calendar @ perfectduluthday.com.
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Lynx on its way
Captain LeeAnne Gordon of the Tall Ship Lynx informed the folks at Visit Duluth today that she estimates her ship’s arrival in Duluth at 3:30 p.m. The Lynx is sailing into the harbor for the Duluth Music and Maritime Festival. This will be the first visit to Duluth for the 114-ton Lynx, an interpretation of a privateer or naval schooner from the War of 1812.
Duluth Schools Construction Tour
Duluth Public Schools just released a 53-page PDF (which takes a moment to load) titled “Duluth’s 21st Century Public Schools: Construction Tour, July 2011.” It includes updated construction photos of the district’s three new and six updated schools. Here’s a brief gallery for those too lazy to take on 53 pages.
Twin Ports Bridge Festival 2011 Photos
Michael Franti and Spearhead put on quite the jubilant performance during the Twin Ports Bridge Festival at Bayfront Park. Cheers to organizer Shane Bauer; this was a great event. (more…)
Photos from Clifford E. Johnson of Cliff’s Barber Shop
Cliff’s Barber Shop in West Duluth is for sale. The proprietor, Clifford E. Johnson, died two years ago. I took the photo above in April, when Cliff’s shop was being cleared out after an estate sale.
The sale included boxes upon boxes of old slides. Most of them were of vacations to Hawaii and so on, but I found two boxes that had some local images, so I plopped down $10 and brought them home for a slide show. The folks at Swim Creative have scanned a few of the more interesting slides so I can share them on Perfect Duluth Day. (more…)