All posts by Lars Walker

Goofing

Educational post

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I’ve joined a Kvalavåg group on Facebook. Kvalavåg (as I’ve probably told you already) is a farm (more of a rural community today) on Karmøy Island, Norway. My great-grandfather was born there, and if it weren’t for the xenophobia of a naturalization judge who asked my great-granduncle, “Why don’t you call yourself by an American name?” my last name would probably be Kvalavåg today. Or Qualevaag, in the spirit of the orthography of the age. (Norwayphilia aside, I’m not sure I’d really care to have to spell my name for people six times a day.)

Anyway, somebody in the group linked to an Ikkepedia page for Kvalavåg. (Ikkepedia is related to the English language Uncyclopedia. It’s a good pun because “ikke” means “not” in Norwegian.) Having nothing amusing of my own to tell you tonight, I thought I’d translate the entry for you below. Continue reading Educational post →

Religion

How abortion oppresses women

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Chad the Elder, over at Fraters Libertas, links to a (subscription only) story at First Things, about how the availability of abortion made unplanned pregnancies entirely “the woman’s problem,” and encouraged irresponsibility in men.

But once continuing a pregnancy to birth is the result neither of passion nor of luck but only of her deliberate choice, sympathy weakens. After all, the pregnant woman can avoid all her problems by choosing abortion. So if she decides to take those difficulties on, she must think she can handle them.

Birth itself may be followed by blame rather than support. Since only the mother has the right to decide whether to let the child be born, the father may easily conclude that she bears sole responsibility for caring for the child. The baby is her fault.

Writing

Of windows and work

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I had a couple guys come out today to do some work on my basement windows. I’d found dry rot in some of them a while back, and they replaced some wood and covered over the healthy stuff with aluminum. For a reasonable price.

Afterwards, when the main guy came in and I was writing him a check, he looked at a picture of Jesus on my wall and asked, “Are you a believer?” I said, “Yes, I am.”

This pleases me immensely. I liked him right off when he came out to do his estimate (though I must admit I made my decision based on the sizes of the bids), and I like to imagine I recognized a brother in Christ through my remarkable powers of spiritual discernment.

In other news, I’ve been noodling with a new book recently, but wasn’t sure where I was going with the thing. As is so often the case, I had a character and a setting, but no plot to speak of.

Today, in the course of my regular work, I stumbled on an idea I think may be intriguing, and fairly fresh. It has to do with quantum physics and time and theology, subjects on which I am (needless to say) an acknowledged expert.

Or at least the low bidder.

Uncategorized

Producing wonders, and stifling them

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How were the stones at Stonehenge transported and set up? A construction worker thinks he knows how. (Thanks to Uncle Orvis for the link.)

Steve Carper, in the Writer’s Bloc column of this month’s Bulletin of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, quotes The New York Times, quoting Richard Dawkins, who has a low opinion of fantasy:

Dawkins said, “I would like to know whether there’s any evidence that bringing children up to believe in spells and wizards and magic things turning into other things—it is unscientific, I think it is anti-scientific. Whether that has a pernicious effect, I don’t know.”

His book for children is to explore children’s relationships with fairy tales and to encourage them to think about the world scientifically rather than mythologically.

Atheists keep telling us that they live full and meaningful lives without God, but they keep coming up with sterile nonsense like this. And then they wonder why we’re repelled by their arguments.



“I am proud to announce that I have proven shoes unnecessary!” said the scientist, after cutting off both his feet.

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This story is oddly frightening

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(But then, pretty much everything is oddly frightening.)



I’m remarkably empty of rational (or any other kind of) thought tonight, but this story caught my eye.

You don’t often find me blogging about cars.

I’m not entirely sure I’d enjoy meeting the lady, as they describe her in the article, but she definitely has her own style.

Nearly 600,000 miles later, the 90-year-old Florida woman still drives her 1964 Mercury Comet Caliente every day.

I might note that you don’t generally find cars that old in Minnesota, because of the road salt. So don’t blame me for Mrs. Hermanson’s rust. It’s society’s fault.

Oh yes. I have a book out. You can order it here.

Uncategorized

The Vinland map returns

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“The Vinland Map,” subject of much controversy over most of my lifetime, is genuine after all, according to a Danish scientist.

COPENHAGEN, July 17, 2009 (Reuters) — The 15th century Vinland Map, the first known map to show part of America before explorer Christopher Columbus landed on the continent, is almost certainly genuine, a Danish expert said Friday.

Tip: Ori Pomerantz.

Authors

Unfinished C. S. Lewis manuscript discovered

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It was known that C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien had planned to write a book about language together, but no one ever knew how far the project got, or what happened to any work done. Now a Texas scholar has announced the discovery of a draft of the first pages of the book.

Steven Beebe, Regents’ Professor and Chair of the Texas State Department of Communication Studies, discovered the opening pages of the unpublished manuscript in the Oxford University Bodleian Library and has recently documented that the manuscript was the beginning of the previously believed to be unwritten Lewis and Tolkien book.

Although C. S. Lewis started the book, there is no evidence that Tolkien began work on the project.

Thanks to Dale Nelson for the tip. Dale is always on the ball.

Religion

40 years ago Monday

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NASA marks Apollo 11 mission to the Moon 40th Anniversary

Do I remember what I was doing when man first walked on the moon?

Indeed I do.

I was traveling that summer with a team from Lutheran Youth Encounter, a “parachurch” ministry that sent teams of college-aged Lutherans to work with the youth in various congregations. We usually spent a week in each church, but we’d had a cancellation for this week, and our team’s leader (a Type-A overachiever of whom I was in awe at the time) had put us to work cold-calling churches all over the Ohio District (because that was where we were). Finally we’d found an urban Cleveland church that was a little desperate because it was between pastors, and somebody apparently thought bringing us in would provide “something for the kids.”

As I recall it, it was a pretty bad fit, and I’m not at all sure they felt they got their money’s worth. Continue reading 40 years ago Monday →

Religion

Bishop discovers heresy in the church

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Albert Mohler reports on how Dr. Katherine Jefferts Schori, Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, has finally found a teaching in the church so awful, so scandalous and offensive, that she’s willing to apply the term “heresy” to it.

Denial of the Trinity? Denial of the Virgin Birth? Denial of the Resurrection?

No, no. It’s much worse than that.

She’s found that some people actually believe that Jesus is Lord.

The overarching connection in all of these crises has to do with the great Western heresy – that we can be saved as individuals, that any of us alone can be in right relationship with God. It’s caricatured in some quarters by insisting that salvation depends on reciting a specific verbal formula about Jesus. That individualist focus is a form of idolatry, for it puts me and my words in the place that only God can occupy, at the center of existence, as the ground of being. That heresy is one reason for the theme of this Convention.

She goes on to describe a further, related heresy–believing that Jesus is the one way to God.

Tip: Dr. Paul McCain at Cyberbrethren.

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Long thoughts

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Today, when I came in from my walk, I came in to warm up, not cool down. Clouds had blown in on a puff of fall-like air. It looks like rain, but the guy on the radio says it’s not supposed to do that tonight.

I love this Global Cooling, at least in July. Speaking as the guy who pays the air conditioning bill around here.

I’m seriously tackling the Archives Room in the library now. I spent today organizing old magazines and shelving them in boxes.

This is a process that induces long thoughts. “Long thoughts” is the phrase that comes to my mind. I have the idea it’s a Norwegian idiom. That would be “lange tanker.” I have no specific memory of ever encountering those words in my Norwegian reading, but my brain insists it must be so.

“Long thoughts” (whether a genuine Norwegian phrase or the effluvient of my own imagination) are a combination of memory and melancholy. The kind of thoughts old people think when they look back over their lives. Sad memories are sad, but good memories are sad too, because they (and many of the people in them) are gone forever. Continue reading Long thoughts →