All posts by Lars Walker

Public service announcement

To retailers who started putting out Christmas merchandise in October, and radio station programming directors who are already playing “seasonal” music, and homeowners who’ve put out their holiday lights, even though it isn’t Thanksgiving yet.

I understand. I’m a Boomer too. I know that Christmas was the most wonderful, magical time of the year when you were a kid. It was for me, too. I, too, would love to recapture that feeling.

However. You’re not a kid anymore. You’re an adult, too beaten up by life to be taken in by glockenspiel music and colored lights. Especially when you strung those colored lights yourself.

You will never get the magic of Christmas back by making the holiday longer. You’ll only get it back by making the holiday deeper.

The people who invented Christmas actually believed that God became man. That means that all our highest aspirations, dreams and hopes are not fantasy, but fact, and that Ultimate Truth came down to hang out with us a while. And then died for us. And then defeated death.

When you get that, you’ll get Christmas back.

Just thought you’d like to know.

eHarmony forced to provide same-sex matches

From Chris Field at Townhall.com, by way of Culture and Media Institute:

The California-based company will begin providing same-sex matches as part of a settlement with New Jersey’s Civil Rights Division. Garden State resident Eric McKinley filed a complaint against the online matchmaker in 2005.

Under terms of the settlement, the company can create a new or differently named Web site for homosexual singles. The company can also post a disclaimer saying its compatibility-based matching system was developed from research of married heterosexual couples. …

Because the “gay rights” movement is all about, you know, just letting people alone.

Here’s the post.

Frankenstein: Prodigal Son and City of Night, by Dean Koontz, Kevin J. Anderson and Ed Gorman

A few years back, as Dean Koontz explains in an introduction to the first book of this series, Frankenstein: Prodigal Son, he made a deal with the USA Network to write a contemporary television series based on the characters of the old Frankenstein book. One assumes that the network execs either misunderstood his script, or understood it all too well, since both parties agreed to go their own ways in the end, each party producing a Frankenstein after their own heart.

The conceit in this series of books is that, although Mary Shelley’s famous novel is based on fact, she got the ending wrong. The monster did not kill Dr. Frankenstein, nor did he die himself. Instead, endowed with extremely long life through being struck by lightning during his creation, he has lived on, mostly in hiding because of a facial injury, gradually learning to control his rage. At the start of Prodigal Son he is residing in a Tibetan monastery. He does not yet know that Dr. Frankenstein has survived the last two centuries as well, his life extended through a series of self-designed surgeries. When he does learn this, the monster leaves the monastery and travels to New Orleans, where Dr. Frankenstein now lives the life of a biotech millionaire and VIP, under a new name. Continue reading Frankenstein: Prodigal Son and City of Night, by Dean Koontz, Kevin J. Anderson and Ed Gorman →

Suppressed

Tonight, another bleak and self-absorbed post about my unhappy childhood. I’ll hide the body of it behind the fold, so as not to bum you out too much if you’re not interested in going on.

But I should mention that this won’t be a war story. I’m talking statistics and news reporting tonight. Continue reading Suppressed →

D’Artagnan’s tomb located?

The original D’Artagnan (or one of them; Alexander Dumas actually conflated the adventures of two different relatives in The Three Musketeers and its sequels) died in battle in the Netherlands, during the siege of Maastricht, in 1673. Now Dutch archaeologists think they’ve located his place of burial.

The story is here.

Tip: Mirabilis.

Exposition lesson, Part 2

Last night I set up a scene from an imaginary novel, in which a police detective says too much to his superior officer (a guy he doesn’t get along with). The imaginary author (who would appear to be me. I’m not sure how that works) is trying to give us some background on the tragic roots of our hero’s (his name is Slade) obsession with an unsolved child murder. But the method he chooses—having Slade unburden his heart to a guy he doesn’t even like (and certainly doesn’t trust), rings false for any reader with a minimal amount of human experience.

So how could the author convey this information to the reader more naturally? Continue reading Exposition lesson, Part 2 →

Exposition lesson, Part 1

I filled up my car today for less than twenty bucks. (It should be noted that my car has a pretty small gas tank.) What a good feeling that was! That’s a genuine economic stimulus payment. I can’t help thinking that people all over this country are enjoying the feeling of extra weight left in their wallets, and are getting ready to do some spending they’ve been putting off.

I’m probably wrong, but it feels that way to me.



I’m reading another Dean Koontz novel
(I’ve pretty much read all his books now). It’s one of his re-issued early works and, typically, shows numerous marks of artistic immaturity. Particularly notable are the lame jokes (his jokes tend to be a little lame even nowadays, but he’s made great progress).

But what really caught my attention was his problem with exposition, a problem I’ve discussed before in reference to other early efforts. I’m not going to excerpt any of his scenes here, but I’ll compose a Koontz-like chunk of dialogue. Continue reading Exposition lesson, Part 1 →

I’m so proud

Augsburg College, in Minneapolis, is my alma mater.

Founded in the 1870s, Augsburg was for most of its early history the center of Free Lutheranism, an effort to build a pietist Lutheran church movement exercising a congregational form of church government. These principles were abandoned entirely when the Lutheran Free Church entered a merger with other Lutheran bodies in 1962. The small rabble of churches who refused to go along with the merger began the Association of Free Lutheran Congregations, for which I work.

The point of all this is that, in spite of its historical heritage, Augsburg today is just another mainline Lutheran school, indistinguishable, except by geography, from all the other mainline Lutheran schools.

Which explains this story, in which we see contemporary academic standards of tolerance and the free exercise of thought demonstrated for all.

Tip: Power Line.

Public service announcement

(The scene opens with a shot of an American suburban kitchen. AMANDA is seen standing at a counter with a cardboard box in her hand. Her daughter HEATHER enters and observes what she’s doing.)

HEATHER: Mom, what are you doing with that rat poison?

AMANDA: I’m going to put some out, honey. I saw a rat in the pantry, and I can’t stand rats.

HEATHER (putting her hands on her hips): Mom! You can’t do that!

AMANDA: Why not?

HEATHER: Don’t you listen to the news? They told us about it in school. You can’t poison rats. It’s against the law. Continue reading Public service announcement →

The Second Saladin, by Stephen Hunter

It’s late in the day, but to all you veterans, thank you for your service. Slackers like me owe you big.

The Second Saladin, it appears to me, marks a milepost on author Stephen Hunter’s journey toward finding his niche as a novelist. Some of the elements that will make his Bob/Earl Swagger books so compelling are already there, but he hasn’t yet shaken off a tendency to demonstrate his realism through grim pessimism.

Nevertheless, I found it a compelling book. Though published in 1982 and set in that same time period, the centrality of Kurdistan to the plot makes the whole business remarkably relevant more than two decades later. Continue reading The Second Saladin, by Stephen Hunter →