Fifty-nine degrees

After lunch and before the sun went down on one of the nicest November days that I can remember, Unky Herb and I took a drive over to the big water water falls in Minneapolis. Minnehaha Creek is suffering an epic drought and the amount of water cascading over the falls is pretty pathetic. It's not much of a tourist attraction at the moment, but while I was there several groups were taking photos posing with the anemic waterfall as backdrop. They may have been native Twin Cities residents.

This is looking down at the creek just below the falls. There is a decided lack of water down there, especially when compared with the usual spring flush.

We walked down the creek for a ways to the second bridge below the falls, then up the hill to the picnic area by the Veteran's Home. There were people playing frisbee golf on the course there, several of whom seemed to have pretty good skill at the sport. Minnehaha Park is a really nice city park.

In 1863, on this date, November 19, Abraham Lincoln delivered his Gettysburg Address to dedicate the Soldier's National Cemetery in Pennsylvania. The speech was only two minutes long. When I was in junior high school, or maybe elementary school, one of our assignments was to memorize that speech as it was known to have been spoken. You know, the one that starts, "Four score and seven years ago ..." and is reputed to be one of the best speeches ever uttered. I still remember a lot of that speech from memory, more than 50 years later.  Now reading a Wikipedia article about the speech, I find that there is some disagreement about the actual text of the speech as he gave it. There were no tape recorders in those days so whatever the orator published in the paper on subsequent days about his words was accepted as the actual text. The newspapers of the day differ in several respects from the five known "manuscripts" of the speech.  So I maybe memorized the wrong version of the speech. I feel slightly hoodwinked.