
Other than bots I’m not sure this old blog of mine is viewed by much of anybody. The place to be if you are young and tech savvy is elsewhere on the Internet. But this is my shire so I’ll keep posting here in case Tic Toc or Reddit or Blue stream or Sub stack catches on.
I spent seven days in a resort on Sand Lake near Moose Lake. The pan fish is the only one I caught on my sojourn. Because we had three boys with us who had part time jobs home in Duluth we spent an inordinate part of our stay traveling back and forth between home and rest. I pretty much abandoned French studies but I kept up with my reading of Hamilton. As of today I have about 150 pages left of 735. Its been the best book I’ve read on that era. This is partly testament to the author who dazzled Lin Manuel what’s his name into writing Hamilton the rappish musical and my slow accumulation of history book reading on the subject mostly after college.
Over the week that I spent avoiding journaling or campaigning I spent considerable time thinking about my thoughts on challenging Stauber as a Republican for a fifth time as a protest Republican candidate. Why not as a Democrat or as a fusion candidate with the Forward party or the American party the idiot billionaire Musk wants to create to punish all his devils?
This week I have to answer a questionnaire from the Duluth Teachers Federation and be interviewed in a Zoom interview by the Editorial Board of the Duluth News Tribune. I’m still thinking about lawnsigns and going door to door to put them up. And I’m still reading the news……which will be my next post.
But first…my next likely books

I should finish Hamilton by week’s end. Its not my first book on perhaps our most important founder of America but when I read my first it was before I became fully dedicated to keeping track of the precise books and authors in my reading journey. I made a couple checks of books on Alexander published between 1950 – 1979 and all of them were at least 400 pages long but I’m not sure which author I read. A few years later I read a slim biography of Aaron Burr too which I still have and the paperback is filled with yellow marker. Ron Chernow has filled out my competing psychologies of Washington, Jefferson, John Adams and Burr quite well. Its been a great compliment to all my previous reading. Of the four only a serious John Adams bio has eluded me although the Pulitzer winning history “John Adams” by David McCoullough is on my shelves. Several Pulitzer and National Book Award winners about our founders fit between McCoullugh’s 1776 and John “Marshall the man who made the court supreme.” Among them are books by Joseph Ellis who specialized on Jefferson and a great read on John Adams voluble but secretive cousin Sam Adams who was the subject of my Grandfather’s master’s thesis at Columbia University that Trump is busy punishing for teaching history. The Sam Adams bio is by Stacy Schiff.
Ron Chernow has both elevated Hamilton in my estimation and verified my long standing suspicion of Jefferson’s over rating. All the Founding fathers are worthy of serious psychological analysis. Repeatedly as I’ve read how they designed American in the Chernow book I’ve been forced to think on how the ignorant Donald Trump is trying to turn their brilliance on its head. Its damnable good exercise for those of us who want to follow our predecessors who rose to the founders defense when ignorance, greed and hysteria was running rampant.
The second book is one a former school board member gave me after he found it in a book sale. It comes from a time when America was graced with brave journalists who would live on to get us through Vietnam with their professional competence and honesty. My next post about several stories from today’s NPR will deal with the America we now have absent that unifying journalism. The last book is one of particular interest to me. A cousin of mine who has expanded on my Mother’s interest in her Robb relatives found it. The cousin of my great great grandfather made his fortune in British Columbia as my great great John Robb was moving late in life to Pennsylvania. I hope to learn more about my branch of the Robbs by digging into a book that only a few thousand Robb descendants are likely to find of interest. As a kid I was given dozens of letters of these ancient Robbs writing across the Atlantic to each other so that I could peal off penny red stamps of Queen Victoria from their envelopes.

