"Goggled-Eyed" at Høstfest

News from Høstfest in the Minot Daily News: “On Friday, a quartet of ‘shield maidens,’ better known as models for a Fargo modeling agency, appeared at Høstfest during a live steel combat demonstration by The Viking Age Club…” probably drawn by Lars and his colleagues.

Andrea Johnson writes, “The [elementary school] boys were goggle-eyed as [Gary] Anderson and Lars Walker gave a thoroughly realistic demonstration of live combat, involving the clashing of swords, the splintering of a wooden shield, and men falling to the ground so hard they lost their helmets. The weapons they were using were real, but the men are well-trained in combat.”

Aren’t those maidens cute? No doubt Lars will tell us about this year’s festival next week, but you can see him and Gary now in this video from three years back. Not a glorious moment for Lars, but every teaching moment can’t be glorious, I guess.

Life Without Garfield

Have you seen Garfield Minus Garfield? The book has been out since October 2008, collected from the comics posted on Dan Walsh’s website. The gist is to remove the cat from the strip and discover a remarkably funny, albeit dark and usually depressing, comic strip.

Publishers Weekly says, “If Samuel Beckett had been a strip cartoonist, he might’ve produced something like this.” Here are a couple.

Miserable Life

Respect

For a slightly different angle on this joke:

String or Noodle

Otherworld, by Jared C. Wilson

A UFO craze has hit Trumbull, TX, a little town outside Houston, in Jared C. Wilson’s Otherworld. It starts when Pops Dickey, a transplanted farmer from Wisconsin, discovers one of his cows dead one morning. He calls the local police, who call a local vet because the cow has been slaughtered with little or no blood spilled on the ground. Not the norm for vandalism. The vet labels the killing the work of aliens, and that’s the cue Pops needs to step into the media limelight.

Otherworld by Jared C WilsonAliens had visited Trumbull. They took some cow parts as souvenirs. Pops Dickey will tell you all about it and make up more along the way. Police Captain Graham Lattimer won’t have any of it, and when another cow dies, he wants to resolve the two incidents in entirely human terms.

In Houston, Mike Walsh is a magazine writer, who has been assigned a background story on UFOs with a few details from the Trumbull encounter to make it relevant. As he does his research, he is fed up with the hype and tumble of alien books and TV shows until he meets a philosophy and culture professor, Samuel Bering, who seems to know more than anyone else about alien phenomena. But for all of his knowledge, Bering has neglected wisdom, and now he hopes to gain a secret knowledge that will lift him above everyone in the world.

Alien with beerIn another part of Houston, a troubled young man gives in to the voices in his head and starts killing people, because this isn’t actually a book about visitors from outer space. It’s a book about an ancient evil.

And it’s fun. At one point, Mike Walsh says the events are getting too much like Peretti, which is a great comparison for Otherworld. The pace and plot read like This Present Darkness with an important difference. Jared has chopped up his narrative with short news reports, journal entries, and brief scenes of other characters. It has a TV feel to it, maybe a bit of artificiality, but I wasn’t annoyed by it. It helped the story move quickly.

While the characters aren’t depicted very deeply because of the fast-paced story they are in, they are all well-rounded. For example, the pastor, Steve Woodbridge, isn’t the Bible-quoting pillar of strength nor is he a villain. He’s a burned out, materially successful preacher, who wants to follow the Lord and may not be very good at leading his church. His character arc is beautiful.

Otherworld is a good story without Amish people falling in love or frowning on those who do (as Jared notes on his blog). If you have been a Thinklings.org fan for a few years, you may notice some familiar names for background characters. I don’t doubt that his next novel will be twice as good as this one and the following one twice as good as that.

Bill O'Reilly on Jesus of Nazereth

Bill O’Reilly’s new book, Killing Jesus, is surging in sales now. He talked to 60 Minutes last Sunday, saying he felt God inspired him to write a book describing Jesus as “a regular guy, very afraid, scared to die.”

“Jesus of Nazareth was the most famous human being who ever lived on this planet and he had no infrastructure and it’s never been done,” O’Reilly said. “He had no government, no PR guy, no money, no structure. He had nothing, yet he became the most famous human being ever.”

Fox Business has a brief interview with O’Reilly, in which he explains that he trusted other sources of history and his own reasoning more than the gospels on every detail of Jesus’ life. For example, he believes it was impossible for Mary and Joseph to flee Herod all the way into Egypt, which is what Matthew’s gospel says. I suppose he found no other sources saying it happened, so that was enough to rule it out. And though he has no evidence of Jesus’ resurrection, he takes it on faith as a good Catholic.

Apparently, the Bible’s historicity is no obstacle or support to his faith, and I wonder if most contemporary church-goers believe as he does. How many of us hold the line because we have been told which line to hold, not because we believe it actually happened? If we do, we fail to understand how much God has given us in His Word which can be verified, details intended to show us that the stories aren’t mere imaginary morality tales. They are accurate depictions of what happened.

So did Jesus rise from the dead? Paul tells us if He did not, our faith is useless (1 Corinthians 15:14). I guess that makes Paul is pretty poor Catholic.

Wilson Weighs Wodehouse

Pastor and author Douglas Wilson recommends P.G. Wodehouse for two reasons:

“Wodehouse was merciless to pretentiousness, and aspiring writers are the most pretentious fellows on the planet. So there’s that spiritual benefit.”

The second reason? “Simply put, Wodehouse is a black belt metaphor ninja. Evelyn Waugh, himself a great writer, once said that Wodehouse was capable of two or three striking metaphors per page.

  • He looked like a sheep with a secret sorrow.
  • One young man was a great dancer, one who never let his left hip know what his right hip was doing.
  • She had just enough brains to make a jaybird fly crooked.
  • Her face was shining like the seat of a bus driver’s trousers.
  • He had the look of one who had drunk the cup of life and found a dead beetle at the bottom.”

On the eve of embarkation

By way of a friend of our friend Aitchmark, here’s a blog post from VA Viper, with an embedded recording of a linguist reading what – he guesses – the old Indo-European language, from which are descended (you guessed it!) European languages and Hindi – sounded like. It’s a guess, but an educated one.

As I’ve done for some years now at this season, I’m leaving this weekend for Minot, North Dakota and the Norsk Høstfest. This is not what you’d call a relaxing vacation. I’ll be helping to set up and tear down the Viking camp, doing three combat shows a day, and this year I’ll be helping one of our guys do lectures at local elementary schools. He injured himself with a Viking axe (I’m not kidding) and needs me to do the heavy work, including the axe demonstration. Also, of course, I’ll have to check in online frequently to keep up with my graduate school class work. I should schedule a second week of vacation to rest up when I’m done.

[By the way, for the first time that anyone can remember, they’re advertising hotel rooms available in Minot during the festival. Just in case you were thinking about going.]

I won’t be driving this year again, but will be bumming rides with friends. This prevents me visiting commenters Roy and Dale as was once my wont, but Mrs. Hermanson, my car, just isn’t up to the exertion anymore.

Not sure I am either, come to think of it.

Oh yes, some people from the History Channel Vikings series (which I’ve panned here and elsewhere) will also be hanging around. Must remind myself to be nice to them.

Chances are I’ll fawn all over them like the hypocritical sycophant I am.

Horrible Report from Former British Lad Mag Editor

Martin Daubney, former editor of Loaded, talks about how bad pornography has gotten among children in Britain. Kids us Facebook and cell phones to pass around disgusting video links. Boys are being perverted, girls enraged and scared.

“Pornography is sexually traumatising an entire generation of boys.”

The children say their parents would be shocked to learn what they’ve seen, but trust them to use the Internet responsibly. No filters. Just evil.

Ironically, this article appears in The Daily Mail, which has sidebars “loaded” with soft-porn gossip links. I link to the print version above, so you can skip that part. I got this link via Facebook, BTW.

Blessed Nonsense

Today, just a snippet from an article in the current issue of Intercollegiate Review – “The Subhumanities: The Reductive Violence of Race, Class, and Gender Theory,” by Anthony Esolen:

So much of human life, says [Marilynne] Robinson in her new book of essays, When I Was a Child I Read Books, is blessed “nonsense,” not overmuch concerned with survival or whatever else preoccupies the reductivists of our time. It is like the folly of God, as Erasmus reminds us, thinking of the mighty words of Saint Paul, who declares that all the wisdom of the world cannot overcome the foolishness of the Cross, which is of course the foolishness of love.

Our friend Anthony Sacramone is Managing Editor of IC.