I have a full calendar this weekend. Or rather, full by my standards. Quite leisurely compared with the calendars of those of you who are caring for invalid parents or raising two-year-olds. But if God had meant me to have old parents or young children, he wouldn’t have made me me.

In which case somebody else would be taking care of them anyway.

Tomorrow I ride up to Fargo, North Dakota, to St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, where I shall speak to the Georg Sverdrup Society on “Problems in Translating Georg Sverdrup.” I’m sure they could find room for you as a guest, if you find PowerPoint presentations on 19th-Century Norwegian syntax compelling.

And on Sunday I’ll be with the Viking Age Club at the Bloomington Town Hall Museum in Bloomington, MN. We’ll have an outdoor camp. The forecast high temperature is 40°, with high winds.

Vikings wore down-filled parkas, didn’t they? Sure they did.

There are questions about the story of that McCain volunteer who says she was robbed, then beaten up and then had a letter B “carved” into her face. As others have noted, it doesn’t smell right. I could be wrong, but I don’t like it.

Talk show hosts made much yesterday of graffitti painted on the homes of Sen. Coleman and Congresswoman Bachmann here in Minnesota. Some of these stories failed to notice that some Democrats’ houses were also targeted, notably that of my very liberal congressman, Keith Ellison.

When you’re a Republican, winning shouldn’t be everything.

Got a flu shot tonight. The first of my life.

Flu shots are another of those items that I’ve always categorized as “for old people.” I’ve always figured I’m tough enough to survive the flu.

But I got the flu last winter, and my reasoning changed to, “Yeah, I could survive the flu, but I, uh… would have a problem working it into my busy schedule.”

On the plus side, from all I’ve read over the decades, the flu vaccine seems to only be correctly targeted about once every three years.

More news below, for those of you who never get enough of listening to middle-aged men describing their ills… Continue reading If you’ve got a minute, I’ll show you my surgery scar too! →

The Internet Monk has a great rant on Halloween here.

My position is, basically, I agree with him. But I fear we’ve gotten to a place where it doesn’t matter anymore. The holiday has been coopted by the occultists–largely because we allowed it to be.

Hat tip: The Thinklings.

Here’s a thought that won’t be of any help at all.

Due to my remarkable decrepitude, I can remember all the way back to the 1950s (it occurred to me recently that, since I was born in 1950, and 1950 was technically part of the decade of the 1940s, I was actually born in the ’40s. That’s cool. It explains that whole Bogart vibe I give off) and I remember when the culture war was very different.

When I was a kid, there was essentially only one pressure group trying to keep people from smoking. That was evangelical Christians. We considered smoking a sin, second only to the mortal sin of drinking. Or maybe dancing.

If you weren’t around back then, you can judge what I say by looking at old movies. Everybody smoked back then. Mothers smoked while feeding their babies. Waitresses smoked while serving meals. Business offices were as smoky as Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh was as smoky as Vesuvius on a bad day. Considering how dangerous they tell second hand smoke is nowadays, it must be a sign of God’s favor that any Boomers are still alive at all. Continue reading Never mind, then →

I’m going to be speaking up in Fargo, North Dakota next Saturday. I’ll be giving a PowerPoint presentation to the annual meeting of the Georg Sverdrup Society. G. Sverdrup was a prominent Norwegian Lutheran educator around the turn of the 20th Century. He was the chief intellectual of the Lutheran Free Church movement, a (pretty small) movement to merge Lutheran theology with congregational church government.

Only a small portion of his writings have been translated into English, and a major purpose of our little society is to translate his collected works. I’m editor of the journal, and I’ve been asked to do a talk on the subject, “Problems in Translating Georg Sverdrup.”

I like to use a lot of pictures in my PowerPoints, and here’s one I’m using to illustrate a point I won’t bore you with just now:

Continue reading Hoist up the John B.’s sail →