I’m enjoying the enlightening discussion of Flannery O’Connor’s stories on Jonathan Rogers’ blog. You may remember that I wrote about being disturbed by “The River” last summer. That’s the story for this week, and the group has open my eyes to this terrific work. It’s still disturbing, but it’s disturbing like a Reformed pastor’s smack-down now. This will likely be one of favorite stories from now on.
What’s That Coming Around Again?
Has Google effectively taken telecommunications full circle with it’s new Google Tap? With three buttons, space, dot, and dash, Google’s app offers you the ability to send morse code to your friends.
Waitaminute… this is an April Fool’s Joke? I feel used.
A sojourn among the Swedes
I’m suffering from a sort of delayed drive lag today. Considering that my trip to Stromsburg, Nebraska was eight road hours either way, nearly 1,000 miles all told, I came home feeling surprisingly vigorous. I gauge my depletion by how hard it is to unload Mrs. Hermanson, my Chevy Tracker, when I get home, and it wasn’t too bad. Today I’m kind of dragging my feet and taking extra time to make simple decisions, like “Shall I zip up my trousers or not?” but all in all I came away with a good feeling.
Stromsburg, Nebraska calls itself “the Swede capital of Nebraska.” In spite of this, I saw no actual acts of violence committed against Norwegians during my time there. This was their annual Swedish Festival, and in my opinion it was a very impressive one, especially for a community of that size. They generally have a Viking encampment as part of the festivities, and I gather this year they tried to make it an extra large and impressive one. Unfortunately Viking attendance was down. On the upside, they had me.
“See our espalier pear trees bowing out of shape”
Matthea Harvey writes in defenses of her overgrown garden.
Last night the apple trees shook and gave each lettuce a heart
Six hard red apples broke through the greenhouse glass and
Landed in the middle of those ever-so-slightly green leaves…
Angry Birds Matter
Kevin Schut argues that games are good. They are similar to books in that they create new worlds for us. “But creative play, mental challenge, narration, and imagination in today’s games are similar to what we experience when we learn to paint, ride a bike, or bake a non-virtual cake. That’s not to say games should take over all the time we spend on those things! It’s not an either/or equation.”
Everything matters, but watch your time.
Reviewing the Reviewers of Morrison’s Home
This is curious. John Cotter holds the magnifying glass over the reviews of Toni Morrison’s new book, Home. Is it a rich, emotional book or is it not quite what reviewers hoped to read? Perhaps some of these reviewers are suffering from their own expectations? Sometimes when you expect to see the really, really, really awesome and see merely awesome, you’re disappointed. Santa has set me up like that many times.
Friday Fight: Boarspear
It occurs to me a bit late that today is Friday, and we used to feature a live steel combat video on Friday, and you know Lars is out today, on a Friday of all days, so maybe the vikings have recorded some new fights. Oh, look. They have.
“Endowed by their DNA with certain inalienable rights”
First, a personal notice. I’m leaving tomorrow morning for a Scandinavian festival in Stromsburg, Nebraska, so I won’t be posting anything. Be strong.
Over at The American Culture, where I cross-post now and then, Mike D’Virgilio has some thoughtful comments on the historical revisionism—distressingly popular among young evangelicals—that blames the “culture wars” in America on conservatives. I suppose if you weren’t around at the time, you can be excused for believing that kind of nonsense.
Below, a short history of religion in America as I suppose it’s taught in schools nowadays. (In case you’re new to this blog, the material below is satire. If you don’t know what satire is, look it up.)
In the beginning, an earnest group of Deists founded the United States. In order to protect the country from the fearful ravages of religion, they included in the first amendment of the Constitution a guarantee that the right to religion, and “the free exercise thereof,” might not be infringed upon by the government. Why they expressed it quite that way, when their clear purpose was to protect the people from all public expression of religion, remains a mystery.
Throughout the course of our nation’s history, religion has always been taboo in public life. No public figure ever prayed, or called for prayer, or defended his policies on the basis of the Bible. That was not done. The average citizen, in fact, never entered a church, and had no idea what the Bible has to say.
Throughout the greatest crises of our nation, the idea of calling on God was never even considered. The movement to abolish slavery, led by such stalwart secularists as Sojourner Truth, John Brown, and Rev. (the Rev. stood for Revisionist) Henry Ward Beecher, proudly proclaimed the equality of all people based on evolutionary science. Julia Ward Howe’s classic song, “The Battle Ballad of the Republic,” with its classic lines, “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the horde,” expressed the humanitarian, humanist philosophy that united Americans (even when they were shooting at each other).
In the late 19th Century, the entirely secular Progressive Movement found a presidential candidate in that staunch secularist, William Jennings Bryan (who, probably under the influence of a brain lesion, later became the only American of his generation to question the theory of evolution). Another progressive cause was Prohibition, spearheaded by the entirely secular Women’s Skeptical Temperance Union.
It wasn’t until the 1950s that an insidious conspiracy of Christian fundamentalists wormed its way into American life, and started banning a lot of traditional freedoms that Americans had always cherished, like abortion and gay marriage. Where these religious fanatics came from is a mystery, since such people had never before been seen in this country. But it is the duty of all patriotic Americans to oppose them in their crusade to take away our precious constitutional rights to “choice, security, and the guarantee of happiness.” (This original wording from the Declaration of Independence has recently been restored by the Federal Department of Deconstruction Criticism.)
As General Custer once said, “The west would be nice, peaceful place, if those Indians hadn’t sneaked in and started causing trouble.”
Link sausage, June 13, 2012
Tonight, a couple links, courtesy of Facebook friends.
First of all, by way of frequent commenter (and my de facto e-publisher) Ori Pomerantz, an open letter to the Bishop of Exeter, in England, from Telegraph columnist James Delingpole. The bishop, apparently, promoted a plan to erect two wind turbines in a rural locality, and is now offended that his plan was rejected (with some rather rude comments).
What surprised me about your letter was that a man intelligent enough to have gained two degrees (one from Cambridge) and canny enough to have risen to the not totally immodest heights of the Bishopric of Exeter should yet be puzzled as to why his flock might object to having a hideous pair of bat-chomping, bird-slicing eco-crucifixes plonked next to their tranquil North Devon villages.
I like the “bat-chomping, bird-slicing eco-crucifixes.”
I love this sort of thing—when it’s in service of my own opinions, you understand. It’s what I tend to write, and then (usually) not post. Sarcasm is my native tongue.
Not generally a very effective tool in debate, though. In my experience.
And my old roommate, Brother Brad Day, sent me this link to an article at medievalists.net, describing recently discovered 11th Century documents from Spain, detailing ransoms paid to Vikings for kidnapped women.
In the second case, which is found in a document dated to 1026, a man named Octicio describes how his wife Metilli and his daughter Guncina, were captured by Vikings in the same area. In his account, the women were released from the Viking ships after he gave them “a blanket of wolf skin and a sword and one shirt and three scarves and a cow and three modios of ground salt.”
I’m always happy to read of prisoners being ransomed. The whole slavery business is touchy stuff for any Viking enthusiast. Kidnapping and extortion are so much more civilized.
Interesting to hear of Viking successes in Spain too. Most accounts usually concentrate on the great raid of 968, which was pretty disastrous and ended up with the Moors hanging Norsemen from every palm tree in the city (I forget which city it was).
Ugly Business Jargon
Forbes criticizes many useful words and phrases used by the utilitarian linguists in corporations around the world, great words like empower (“the most condescending transitive verb ever”), best practice (“pompous confection” from consultants), core competency (“Do people talk about peripheral competency?”), and take it to the next level (a reference to Super Mario Brothers).
I agree with most of this, but sometimes even these words and phrase can communicate appropriately, and while we may not choose to write with them, we don’t have to snark at those who do.