Wannaskan Almanac

  The Palmville Globe Volume 2 Number 11 Man Abandons Hotel Search Joe McDonnell, 79, and a resident of Palmville Twp, Minnesota, recently gave up trying to find a hotel and returned home instead.    "We recently travelled to a different city to take care of some business," McDonnell tells reporters, "After we took care of our business which was near the airport, we wanted to spend some time    sightseeing in the city. We started looking for a hotel in the city center closer to the sights. After a couple of hours of reading reviews, we we're getting frustrated. A hotel might have eight stars out of ten but according to the reviews every had ten star parts, but also two star parts. At this point we got a call saying we needed to take care of some business back home. Not an emergency, but it was a good excuse to quit looking for a motel and book a flight home." McDonnell thinks they'll get back to this city another time.    "If we don't," he says...

Hello and welcome to a pre-tax Saturday here at the Wannaskan Almanac. Today is April 11th. This is your friendly reminder that tax day is next week on Woe's Wednesday, April 15th.  I woke up this morning to a text from my loving husband. It read, "Here is a statistical estimate based on the last two days of scouting for tomorrow's remaining matches," followed by several charts. Ahhh, the romance... It's robotics season, and he's in St. Cloud with Team 2883: FRED at the Granite City Regional . Even though we don't currently have kids in robotics, he continues to volunteer and mentor students who do scouting and data collection. I love his love for robotics. It's a thrill to see him enthusiastic and passionate, and apply all his engineery, researchy skills just for fun. In times like this, I'm inspired to wax poetic. However, I'm not a great poet. So I tapped into the power of AI. Thoughts, artistic direction, and editing are mine, while AI gets...

     The U.S. is often compared to the Roman Empire, usually by people who are saying the U.S. is going downhill. That may be true about the U.S. but, as a historian said, empires take a long time to fall. The Roman Empire lasted about a thousand years if you count the Republic that preceded the Empire, so we have a ways to go to equal Rome's longevity.    Any empire, even at its peak, has many problems. There's never enough money. The poor are neglected. The old are sometimes mugged in the street. But at least there's stability. When an empire starts having multiple rulers in a single year, you can foresee the end, but even then it's hard to predict the final fall.    For perspective, the Empire is said to have ended in 475 A.D. when the last Roman emperor was deposed. The year when there were four emperors took place in 69 A.D. It was a hint of things to come, but the Empire still had a good run ahead of it.  After Nero committed suicide in 69, ...

    I’ve looked through, what appears to be, all my Wannaskawriter and Wannaskan Almanac posts of the past eight years 2018-2026 looking for a story I thought I wrote about my white German Shepherd, Jake. I must have written it in THE RAVEN:   Northwest Minnesota’s Original Art, History, & Humor Journal 1994-2018,   but I’ll not go looking for it there. No point, because although this is a true story about my dog, the reason I’m publishing it in this form is purely for its penmanship; a craft I once did in profusion, that I can no longer do due to the atheosis of my right hand. Some days I can write as well as I ever did, but other days it’s barely-readable script.    I went to an inner-city trades/technical high school in Des Moines, Iowa, back in the sixties thinkin' I was going to become a veterinarian. Instead, I let mathematics intimidate me; (if you saw my math scores, you'd understand.) Mid-stream, I decided I might as well do something that...

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac with Word-Wednesday for April 8, 2026, the fourteenth Wednesday of the year, the third Wednesday of spring, the second Wednesday of April, and the ninety-eighth day of the year, with two-hundred sixty-seven days remaining. Wannaska Phenology Update for April 8, 2026 Cowbird Molothrus armenti — asiginaak, in Anishinaabe — returns to Wannaska, one of our stranger migrants. The genus name combines the Ancient Greek mōlos , meaning "struggle" or "battle", with thrōskō , meaning "to sire" or "to impregnate"; the English name "cowbird", first recorded in 1839, refers to this species often being seen near cattle. Both monikers relate to different features of cowbird strangeness. First, cowbirds reproduce by laying their eggs in other birds' nests. Female cowbirds observe a potential host bird laying its eggs, and when the nest is left momentarily unattended, the cowbird lays its own egg in it. The female ...

If you haven’t heard of The Rusty Neon Philharmonic, buckle up—your playlists are about to get a whole lot more interesting. This genre‑bending powerhouse has been quietly building a cult following in basements, barns, rooftops, and the occasional abandoned shopping mall. Their sound is the kind of thing you try to describe to a friend and end up waving your hands around like you’re conducting an orchestra made of cowboys, DJs, and classical violinists who all met at a truck stop. What makes The Rusty Neon Philharmonic so mesmerizing is their fearless fusion of styles. They don’t just blend urban beats with country twang—they braid them together like a musical rope strong enough to tow a semi. One minute you’re nodding along to a gritty hip‑hop rhythm, the next you’re floating on a cloud of violins, and before you can catch your breath, a steel guitar slides in like it owns the place. It shouldn’t work, but somehow it does. Their lead vocalist, known only as “Cricket McCoy,” has a voic...