All posts by Lars Walker

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Necessary life skills taught here

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Last week a pastor friend of mine asked to borrow my mail shirt, as he wanted to do a demonstration on “the full armor of God” at a youth conference. I had to refuse because a) my mail is rusty and oily right now, as a consequence of the recent zinc removal, and b) I needed it myself this past Sunday.

As it turned out, he borrowed a shirt from someone else. Which meant he had the unpleasant experience of trying to take it off for the first time without knowing how. Getting out of mail the wrong way (that is, trying to take it off like a sweater) is a splendid method for inducing claustrophobia and giving yourself nights of bad dreams. Getting out of it the right way is easy and fun.

Ragnar in mail

So, for future reference, this is how you do it.

1. Having removed your belt, bend forward at the waist.

2. Grab a handful of the mail behind your back, and pull it forward.

3. Keep pulling it forward until most of it is bunched up around your shoulders and neck.

4. Now pull it all off over your head. Because the weight of the shirt is now forward of your body, the whole thing will fall to the ground by force of gravity, without any further effort on your part (unless it gets caught on something). The side of the shirt that was inside will now be outside, but since there is no inside or outside (nor any front nor back), that doesn’t matter in the least.

(Photo credit: Emily Chesley)

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More mayhem

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Today I was given access to some more excellent photos of Sunday, taken by an entirely different friend, Emily Chesley. Emily is a painter (the fine arts kind), and the daughter of two old college friends.

First, a picture of me signing a copy of West Oversea. (You know I’ve got a book out, don’t you? You can order it here.)

Signing a book Continue reading More mayhem →

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Mayhem in the sunshine

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Saturday was a day for some housecleaning, a little yard work, and shopping, as Robbinsdale was celebrating Whiz Bang Days. There were multiple opportunities to pick up cheap DVDs (I like to embrace technology about the time it’s going obsolete; that’s when you get the sweet bargains!).

Sunday was Norway Day at Minnehaha Park (as previously advertised in this space), and it was a day worth waiting for. The temperature was moderate, and early clouds gave way to partly cloudy skies. The weather was dry, as has been our Viking Age Club schedule this summer. Some events have canceled altogether, and other usual venues have merely neglected to invite us this year. If it keeps on like this, we may be forced to raid a monastery.

I saw some friends and acquaintances, who stopped by. Some people who thought they might show up didn’t, but on the other hand some I didn’t expect did show up. One of them, Renae Allard, took some pictures of Ragnar’s and my second combat show, and I got her permission to share some of the best with you.

Gearing up

I like this picture very much. It’s like a screen capture from some good Viking movie (a phenomenon which does not actually exist in our universe). Continue reading Mayhem in the sunshine →

Fiction, Reviews

Tell No One, by Harlan Coben

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Notice of personal appearance: I’ll be at the Norway Day celebration in Minnehaha Park, Minneapolis, with the Vikings on Sunday, from about 11:00 to 4:00 or so. They say the weather will be nice.



I appreciated Gone for Good so much that I immediately launched into reading Tell No One, which Harlan Coben wrote just before it. I suppose it was inevitable that I’d be a little let down. There’s nothing at all wrong with Tell No One. It’s a gripping, fast-paced thriller with engaging characters and plenty of surprises. But for some reason (perhaps just a subjective identification with one main character over another), I didn’t like it quite as much.

There are actually a lot of similarities in the set-ups of both stories. Gone for Good’s hero was a gentle do-gooder, a volunteer who works with the homeless, whose girlfriend disappears and who soon comes under the suspicion of federal investigators. In Tell No One, the hero is Dr. David Beck, a young physician who has voluntarily chosen to work with charity cases in Manhattan. Three years ago, he was gravely injured when his wife, Elizabeth, was abducted and murdered by a serial killer. But now he starts getting e-mail messages that seem to be coming from Elizabeth herself. Meanwhile, the FBI has suddenly decided that he must have murdered Elizabeth, and they’ve got a warrant for his arrest. But David has an appointment to meet with Elizabeth—or whoever’s pretending to be her—this afternoon, and there’s no way he’s going to be sitting in a cell when that happens. So he runs.

Very good story. I’ve got no complaints. The language is not bad for the genre; the violence (some of it quite horrifying) is mostly off camera. There is a lesbian couple with a child who are highly sympathetic characters, so you might (or might not) want to be warned of that.

I liked it, and I’ve got no legitimate complaint.

Religion

David’s palace uncovered?

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In what could be a severe blow to recent critics who have claimed that “Jerusalem is not a Jewish city” and “David never existed,” a Jewish archaeologist has (on the basis of a biblical clue) found what looks very much like David’s palace on a hill overlooking the original Jebusite city site.

But Mazar always suspected that the palace was outside the original city, and cites the Bible to prove it. When the Philistines heard that David had been anointed, they went on the attack to apprehend him. This occurred after he conquered the Fortress of Zion, which was the actual nucleus of the city, and built his palace. The Bible says that David heard about it and “descended to the fortress,” (2-Samuel 5:17), implying that he went down from his palace, which was higher up on the mountain than the citadel/city.

Mazar told Aish.com: “I always asked myself: Down from where? It must have been from his palace on top of the hill, outside the original Jebusite city.”

Mazar says she was confident in her assessment of where the palace would be. What she discovered was a section of massive wall running about 100 feet from west to east along the length of the excavation (underneath what until this summer was the Ir David Visitors Center), and ending with a right-angle corner that turns south and implies a very large building.

Tip: Dr. Gene Edward Veith.

Bookselling

Me, the moocher

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Annie Frisbie, the Superfast Reader, sends me information about a scheme called BookMooch, a simple book exchange program. After joining, you list the books you want to give away on the site, send them to someone who asks for them (for which you get points), and then use your points to order books from other people.

Sounds like a conspiracy to take money out of writers’ pockets, say I.

Man with a stack of books in a bookstore

You know, it’s one of the ironies of life. Writers depend on the sale of new books to make a living. We only get paid for that first sale. When I shop at Half Price Books (as I do more than anywhere else), and buy used books, I’m not showing solidarity with my comrades in labor, but profiting only the carrion birds of the bookstore.

However, as a midlist author, I just don’t have a lot of money to spend on new books (which are, I think, generally overpriced). Thus do I cut mine own economic throat.

A friend just told me she found a signed copy of The Year of the Warrior in a used bookstore.

I don’t really seriously imagine that everybody who’s bought a book from me at a Viking event, and got it autographed, fell in love with it and wouldn’t be parted from it.

But it still rankles.

Take physic, pomp!

Music

“The Berserking”

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Dale Nelson sends this link, to an article from the London Telegraph about James MacMillan, an “accessible” contemporary composer who is a devout Catholic, and who has written a piano concerto called “The Berserking.”

Religion

The Archive of the covenant

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Today I was going through some stuff in our Archives. A pastor had donated some material he’d accumulated in researching a book a few years ago, and I’d been letting it sit. Today, I decided, I will start putting it in some kind of order.

Archiving is a very odd occupation, and one for which (I might mention) I have no formal training. Do I catalog a pamphlet as a book, or file it as a document? How do I organize my document files? It appears the previous librarians weren’t sure either, so I can’t even refer to their precedents most of the time.

I decided to catalog the Christmas annuals as books. Our predecessor church body published a Christmas annual, and (God bless ’em) operated with such humility that they didn’t even include publishing information in many of them (no bragging from the editors!). One issue didn’t even contain any mention anywhere of what year it was for. I had to work it out deductively, and I’m not entirely sure I got the right answer. Continue reading The Archive of the covenant →