Its going to be a quiet and a long day. We’ve done all the sight seeing we are going to do and we will fly out of Las Vegas at 11 PM. We will arrive in Duluth early tomorrow morning. I went to bed last night reading through some of the used books I bought last night.
The book about Jewish pirates looks to be the most captivating. The one on a war between England and Scotland seems a bit more restrained. I haven’t peeked into the book on the Roman citizen Cato but the book Fierce Patriot about William Tecumseh Sherman looks to fit into my immediate reading. For one thing my Grandfather George Robb was intensely interested in the Civil War. This book promises to be one more undoing the southern historical romanticism that glorified their lost cause and vilified Sherman as a monster. It also mentions something that was probably not a feature of the histories my Grandfather read – little salaciousness. Cump, it seems, was a ladies man. History books that strip important people of the basic features of their personality don’t do history justice.
I woke early and read the New York Times and some NPR stories then decided to see what my stats said about blog readership. In doing so I looked at what my readers were leafing through. One reader found Lets Make a Deal a 2008 post riffing off the Red Plan’s architect Keith Dixon’s claim that the building plan would only cost a laughable $125 million. He passed on this gross fraud in a Duluth Budgeteer article that can no long be found on the Internet. (I’m sure I have a copy of it in my clipping collection)
It was unresearched fake news hyped by the clueless but shrinking Duluth News Tribune Empire. Its one of the memories that makes their sniffing today about the school board looking to the future most annoying. The people of Duluth will find it difficult to fix their schools until the Red Plan is finally paid off after today’s Kindergartners graduate.
I didn’t find a single story in the DNT worthy to read on line this morning. It used to take me two days to read through a couple weeks of Tribs after I came back from a vacation. I should manage the last seven days worth in about as many minutes when I return tomorrow.
