You may or may not recall (it’s seared, seared into my memory) my recent post in which I highly recommended the novel The Last of the Vikings, available on Kindle. I had to hurriedly post a correction once I had downloaded it myself and discovered that it was an entirely different (and to all appearances much inferior) English book.
I now think I see whence the problem arose. The first listing of the book I saw on Amazon was not the listing I linked, but this one, which very specifically identifies it as Johan Bojer’s book on fishing in the Lofoten Islands. I bought it today and checked it, just to make sure. Nope. Same old English novel. Now I have two copies on my Kindle.
I suppose there’s some mechanism for requesting a refund, but it’s a little late in the day to start standing up for myself now.
My publisher, Nordskog Publishing, has now posted my book trailer on their web site, here. Scroll down to the bottom of the page. It’s also on their page for West Oversea if you want to bore in and see it there too, for some reason.
Le Mot Juste: The Right Word
Mark Bertrand discovers just the right way to express his distaste for Stieg Larsson’s novels in a review of a book by another author.
Thurber Prize for American Humor
The finalists for this year’s Thurber Prize have been announced. It’s nothing earth-shattering. That was yesterday.
As solid as our political system
Library of Congress
Washington had to shut down for a few minutes today, and the stock market soared. Coincidence?
Actually, that wasn’t an earthquake. That was the economy settling.
(Cue rimshot.)
Fog by Amy Clampitt
“…houses
reverting into the lost
and forgotten; granite
subsumed, a rumor
in a mumble of ocean.”
Read all of Amy Clampitt’s poem, “Fog.” Perhaps this doesn’t describe your day or what you could have seen this morning. My area is bright and sunny, high of 93. This quiet moment is what I wanted after the last post.
Get Your Political Quotient
Political scientist Tim Groseclose has a book on media bias in which he has tried to quantify and measure political leaning in politicians and voters. His book, Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind
Mr. Groseclose says he didn’t want to write just another book claiming to expose bias among reporters and broadcasters. He wanted a scientific book that proposed solutions. Among those solutions is determining your own political quotient. On his website, you can take a 40-question quiz based on congressional roll-call votes in 2009 to see what your PQ is and how it compares to other politicians. This is not an easy quiz. The first two questions are a bit deep in the weeds, but I trudged through them to get a 7.7 PQ.
Even though this is all fairly interesting, I doubt it will change many minds. I hate thinking so cynically, but how many of us think about our civil responsibilities at all? Maybe a book like David Mamet’s The Secret Knowledge
And yet the Christian in me still holds on to the hope that even this can get better. Maybe I can’t help believing America is exceptional in this way, that all of us really can have liberty and justice.
Film review: Conan the Barbarian
With this review, I consciously renounce all right to any respect as a film critic. I loved Cowboys and Aliens, which right-thinking people seem to despise, and now I’m going to admit to the world that I enjoyed the new Conan the Barbarian, which everybody except me and a few Facebook friends seems to loathe.
I’m going to start by moving my recommendation, which I usually leave for the end of the review, to the beginning. The good things I’m about to say about Conan the Barbarian should not be taken as an endorsement for most of our readers. This movie earns its “R” rating. There is much violence, and enough graphic, special effects-enhanced gore to please Odin’s ravens. Also considerable female nudity, often in situations involving bondage. I think this was a major error on the part of the filmmakers. They could have made a movie just as good without voluntarily reducing their paying audience through shock techniques and salaciousness.
On the other hand, the “R” rating is not inconsistent with the original material.
I approached Conan the Barbarian with something less than low expectations. I mistrusted the re-boot project from the first, and Michael Medved, whose opinion I respect, hated it. So I was pleasantly surprised when, somewhere along the way, I realized I was enjoying the show. Continue reading Film review: Conan the Barbarian
Survival story
I finished reading the history book from Kvalavåg (one of my ancestral homes in Norway) about which I wrote the other day. Most of it is stuff that wouldn’t interest you much, but there was one amazing paragraph in the section on the German occupation during World War II (my translation follows):
One of the leaders of the 14-man German troop was Konrad Grünbaum. He was actually of Jewish origin, and came from the city of Furth. His civil occupation was metal work, and he had been an active member of the Socialist Workers’ Youth. Before the war he himself had been in Dachau concentration camp. He had been accused of illegal work and sentenced to three years’ punishment. Through an error he came to Norway in ̀́41 and was promoted. Grünbaum himself said later that he had had very good relations with the people in Kvalavåg while he was there, up until 1943. People used to call him “the Englishman” because he spoke only English with the people. Others called him “Grandfather.”
What a bizarre story. I can only imagine the terrors he must have suffered, worrying in his bed that somebody in Personnel would notice his ethnicity and denounce him. And after the war, what must he have felt, when he pondered the cosmic lottery win that saved his life when so many others perished?
More on Blogging: Curiosity
Trevin Wax talks about what makes a blog interesting. He boils it down to curiosity. “Curiosity works itself out in two ways,” he notes.
- “The blogger provokes a sense of curiosity and wonder in his or her readers.”
- “The blogger has an innate curiosity that enables him or her to write from a unique perspective.”
Naturally, I’m sure he’s a big fan of BwB. I mean, how could he not be?
"Never mind," Black Death edition
“The Plague in the Stairway,” by Norwegian artist Theodor Kittelsen
You know how they taught you in school that the Black Plague was caused by fleas carried by rats?
At least according to one scholar, this is probably a slander on fleas and rats.
“The evidence just isn’t there to support it,” said Barney Sloane, author of The Black Death in London. “We ought to be finding great heaps of dead rats in all the waterfront sites but they just aren’t there. And all the evidence I’ve looked at suggests the plague spread too fast for the traditional explanation of transmission by rats and fleas. It has to be person to person – there just isn’t time for the rats to be spreading it.”
He added: “It was certainly the Black Death but it is by no means certain what that disease was, whether in fact it was bubonic plague.”
People at the time believed it was caused by “bad air.” Maybe they were right, if it was caused by human-to-human contact.
G. K. Chesterton would have loved that.