Original anecdotes, commentary, rumination, and occasional pontification.
MAY 26, 2026 – I don’t know what I did to wind up in a family full of grammarians, but that’s what happened to me. One of my most searing memories as a teenager away at school was receiving from a certain family member, a Xeroxed (back when such was a word) version of one …
MAY 25, 2026 – This morning after breakfast and Java, I sat at the log dining table at the Red Cabin, pecking away at correspondence on my laptop. Facing the lake exactly 75 feet from the windows, I periodically looked up to check on the scenery. A splendid breeze frolicked across the two-mile fetch from …
MAY 24, 2026 – My parents, bless their souls, were philhellenes and to a lesser extent, Romanophiles—lesser because as I remember my dad explaining when I was quite young, for the most part, the Ancient Romans were “copycats,” the Ancient Greeks having been the source of so much that later evolved in the hands and …
MAY 23, 2026 – I remember asking my mother one evening when I was young, “Would you rather be great or famous?” Without answering it, Mother turned the question around. “What would you rather be?” “Great,” I said. Of course mother had to ask why. “Because . . . Anything can make a person famous if …
MAY 22, 2026 – Yesterday, I attended a quarterly board meeting of a non-profit organization, with which I’ve been involved for some years, the World Press Institute. Its 65-year (thus far) mission is to promote free and open journalism around the world. The founding concept was an annual fellowship program anchored here in the U.S. …
MAY 21, 2026 – To those of us who’ve been on the anti-Trump train since he’s been in the public eye, his multiple disorders have never been a mystery or a surprise. As we’ve seen for 11 years, with Trump, what you see is exactly what you get, which is appalling. For me personally, this …
MAY 20, 2026 – I didn’t forget. Early this morning when I first saw today’s date, I immediately thought of Dad. If he hadn’t died 16 years ago earlier this month, he would’ve turned 104 today. My three sisters, independently of one another and of me, were also thinking about Dad today. Later this morning …
MAY 19, 2026 – Today at high noon I joined two other lawyers with whom I’d teamed up in a contested real estate matter for the past two years. What had started out as the prospective sale of farmland turned into a full-blown lawsuit, including a protracted appeal, followed ultimately, by a closing on a …
MAY 18, 2026 – . . . North Korea! Or more precisely, Kim Jung-un. Or more accurately, the loser is . . . the United States and nuclear non-proliferation. Now that the Republicans have settled on a ratio existendi ex post facto for the war against Iran—namely, keeping nuclear weapons out of the hands of …
MAY 17, 2026 – “Seventeenth of May.” Though I’m of Swedish heritage, I have no problem celebrating Syttende Mai—”Seventeenth of May”—in honor of the Norwegians’ Constitution Day (1814), which marked the country’s independence from Denmark. After all, though my wife’s paternal grandmother was Swedish, as was mine, her paternal grandfather was Norwegian, just as my …
MAY 16, 2026 – A year ago, I worked myself to exhaustion planting Norway pine and white spruce seedlings, mostly in the tree garden of Björnholm. As is the case this spring, the ground then was so dry, a walk through the woods mimicked the Kellogg’s Rice Krispies jingle—snap, crackle, pop. After planting the seedlings, …
MAY 15, 2026 – Departing the big city at 9:30 this morning, I enjoyed a beautiful spring drive to the Red Cabin. Once there, After unloading the car and wolfing down lunch, I spent a good chunk of the afternoon hosing off the screens, letting them dry in the zephyr off the lake, then hauling …
MAY 14, 2026 – The other night I stayed up way past my usual bedtime to watch to completion the Netflix movie, Nuremberg, based on Jack El-Hai’s book, The Nazi and the Psychiatrist: Hermann Görning, Dr. Douglas M. Kelley, and a Fatal Meeting of Minds at the End of WW II. The movie stars Russell …
MAY 13, 2026 – Yesterday evening my wife and I joined a third of the population of the Twin Cities, it seemed, inside a middle school gymnasium for . . . an orchestra concert. The performers were fourth-through-sixth grade string players from each of the district’s half-dozen elementary schools. Included among the fourth-grade violinists was …
MAY 12, 2026 – Today I inadvertently observed the Dear Leader’s press conference, so-called, before his departure for “Chi-EENa.” One more blather session such as that one and the country will need therapy along with remediation. In my jaundiced view, what was readily apparent in Trump’s interactions with reporters was how remarkably out of touch …
MAY 11, 2026 – If Elon and his Tech Bros have their Apple wallets set on cruising to arid, dusty, rocky, lifeless Mars and pitching their tents there, I say, “Go right ahead . . . make my day” . . . er, “nine months there, nine months back, plus the time it takes to …
MAY 10, 2026 – Rarely do we find pleasure in facing our abject failures—let alone in talking out loud about them. I think this aspect of the human condition is a survival instinct. If we were to dwell on our defeats, we’d sink further into a quagmire of hopelessness, endangering our very continuation as a …
MAY 9, 2026 – Yesterday I heard a story from the horse’s mouth, as it were—that is, testimony that was non-hearsay. Though the story wasn’t told under oath, the witness was eminently trustworthy and credible. The cautionary tale was a chilling firsthand account of authoritarianism. Moreover, the example wasn’t an abstraction or something that “happens …
MAY 8, 2026 – In continuation of the pursuit of continuing legal education (“CLE”) credits, I’m in the middle of a six-hour webinar symposium on “Universal and Quality Health Care,” sponsored by the University of St. Thomas School of Law (St. Paul, MN). Again, along with a host of UST-sponsored CLE courses on constitutional law …
MAY 7, 2026 – For anyone who’s attended an actual concert, this evening’s occasion at our granddaughter’s school was more of a pep rally. In any case, concert or pep rally, the event was staged in the gymnasium of Central Park Elementary School. Covering the high wall behind the risers where the students would face …
MAY 6, 2026 – Today’s edition of The Times carried a guest essay entitled, “Give us the Aliens” by my favorite scientist, Neil deGrasse Tyson. In his usual jocular style, he poked fun at our enduring perception of aliens as very human-like in appearance—a torso to which are attached, two arms (each with a hand), …
MAY 5, 2026 – Sooner or later it was bound to happen: the Teflon would suffer a big scratch. Heretofore . . . The “Access Hollywood tape”? Ancient history. The “perfect phone call”? No one remembers—or cares. January 6? A Democratic plot. DOGE butchery without accounting? Old news, forgotten pain. ICE? Same. Assaults on the …
MAY 4, 2026 – My work-week routine is to consult briefly my sundry information sources as they stand at the top of the day, then head out on my well-traveled hour-long path to, throughout and back from “Little Switzerland.” I often use hiking time to mull over potential material for the day’s blog post. Today …
MAY 3, 2026 – This morning we—the two “work camp badge winners” from yesterday, and I as work camp director—wrestled with a first world problem while the rest of the world wrangled with real world problems. Our “first world problem” was the broken but still attached tree trunk dangling like the sword of Damocles or, …
MAY 2, 2026 – This morning I put all concerns about the larger world aside—along with most of my personal worries—and drove straight to the Red Cabin. Well, not exactly straight there. In Cumberland, Wisconsin I encountered a detour, which took me straight east, not north, all the way to Rice Lake, halfway across Wisconsin, …