According to Proverbs 22:13, the sluggard says, “There is a lion in the streets.”

Well, my sluggard credentials are impeccable, and I saw a lion in the streets today. Not a big lion. Not an Aslan. Not even the MGM lion. Kind of a wimpy lion, actually, sort of a Bert Lahr lion. But a nuisance nevertheless.

The lion I mean is that famous simile lion, the one that March goes out like. We got about three inches of snow today, and we expect another couple inches overnight. This wasn’t a raging snowstorm. More of a snow-globe snow, and the temperatures were so warm that it all slushed up on hitting the pavement, so it didn’t even interfere much with the drive home (though the morning drive may be interesting).

But the white carpet covers the grass, and we’re tired of it all.

Today, a historical story from my family history.

No, I tell a lie. It’s not the history of my family, except tangentially. It’s the history of the farm I grew up on.

Ours was a small farm, even by the standards of those days. 160 acres. This wasn’t unusual. A lot of people fed their families on 160 acres back then. But nobody would have called it a big farm.

Much of the information I’ll share in this piece come from an essay that was written by my great-aunt Ordella, who wrote it up for a bicentennial newspaper contest in 1976.

Our farm, in Kenyon township southwest of the town of Kenyon, Minnesota, was homesteaded by some people named Clark. It had been originally granted by the government to a man named Wade Wellman, for Civil War service (I assume that he was no relation to Manly Wade Wellman, the fantasy author, because the geography’s wrong). The original title record is a little confused, but it appears that a man named Pease operated a stagecoach way station on the property, perhaps in partnership with Clark. There was a house and an inn there, on the southwest corner of the property, on a road we always called “the old Sioux Line Road.” My dad’s cousin James wrote a history of his own neighboring farm a few years back, and tried to figure out where that name for the road came from. Nobody who ever knew seemed to be alive anymore. There doesn’t appear to be any connection to the Soo Line Railroad.

In 1916, my great-grandfather bought both these farms and moved his family up from Iowa. Everyone thought he’d been cheated on the land, because much of it (especially on the farm where I grew up) was swamp. But Great Grandpa Walker had learned about drainage tile in Iowa, and he turned it into productive acreage (characteristically he bought “overbaked” tile, essentially factory seconds, at a discount). I know this makes him an environmental criminal, but back then they valued arable land over ducks.

Anyway, Aunt Ordella says that one of the old settlers went to Great Grandpa one day and asked if he’d uncovered any human bones in his digging or plowing.

According to local tradition, he explained, two strangers had arrived at the station one night, on the way east from California. Supposedly one of the strangers disappeared and could not be found when the stage left in the morning. It was rumored that he’d been carrying a large sum of money, and that the other stranger may have murdered him for it and hid the body.

But Great Grandpa never found anything. Neither did my grandfather or my dad.

I’ve also heard a story that Jesse James and his gang stopped there on their way to Northfield to rob the bank, in a raid you’ve seen overdramatized in several movies.

I don’t believe that story. Half the farms in southeast Minnesota think the James boys stopped there.

If I understand Cousin James’ account, it was my Great Grandfather who decided to tear down the house at the old way station (re-using the lumber) and move the station building up to a new farmstead at the northeast corner of the property. This is the farmstead where I grew up, and it looked like this in an aerial photo taken before I was born: Continue reading The stage coach station →

I’m told that our temperatures remain below average, but frankly I don’t care. It’s warmer than it was a week ago, and the snow is melting away. The sun shines in the windows, warming the house without recourse to natural gas. This is good.

Sherry at Semicolon has tagged Phil and me with a meme. This is a meme of eight, but it seems pretty much identical to the meme of six I did just a short while ago. Except that, you know, it’s got eight instead of six.

I can’t account for anyone’s desire to know more stuff about me. It seems to me I purvey that commodity pretty indiscriminately around here, and the supply exceeds the demand.

However, I don’t have any bright ideas of my own tonight, so here it is.

The Rules:

Each player lists 8 facts/habits about themselves. The rules of the game are posted at the beginning before those facts/habits are listed. At the end of the post, the player then tags 8 people and posts their names, then goes to their blogs and leaves them a comment, letting them know that they have been tagged and asking them to read your blog.

My List:

1. I’m right-handed, but I generally mouse with my left hand. This is because I thought I was developing a repetitive motion problem a while back. Turns out it wasn’t the fault of the mouse, but of my sword exercises. Nevertheless, I figure it doesn’t hurt to cultivate ambidexterity. I understand it helps with rehab if you ever have a stroke, and judging by my family history, there’s a clot in there somewhere with my name on it.

2. I can wiggle my ears.

3. Contrary to the traditional mystique of the Suffering Artist, I find I’m far more creative when I’m happy.

4. Unfortunately, I’m almost never happy.

5. I’ve never gotten an ice cream headache.

6. I once voted for Al Gore in a primary, back when I was a Democrat.

7. My blood type is A Pos. The only place in the world where A Pos. blood is in the majority is Scandinavia.

8. I never tag other bloggers with memes. That would be too outgoing.

Good news: That snowstorm they promised us today failed to materialize. Instead, the snow continued to melt, and with time the sun even came out.

I’m devastated by this development, as you’ve no doubt guessed. Almost as devastated as I was by the news that “The Golden Compass” tanked at the box office.

I’m not sure if this has really been one of the worst winters in my experience or not. But the weather’s certainly been tough, and my health has spent most of the time (as the saying goes) under it. I’ve bounced from one cold to a worse cold to a cold even worse than that, finally topped off by the flu.

A couple links. In the wake of David Mamet’s coming out of the closet as a conservative, we now have an article from playwright Tom Stoppard in which, if he doesn’t actually espouse conservatism, he at least has the courage to admit that the activism of the ’60s and ’70s was mostly about partying, rather than any kind of moral principle.

I’m still bitter about that part of my life. Not because of the difficulty I had in fighting the idols of that age, but because I’m embarrassed about the extent to which I in fact pandered to those idols. Oh, I didn’t actually participate in the fun stuff. I never got high, never took advantage of the sexual opportunities. But I took seriously, and spoke respectfully about, ideas that I now recognize as total codswallop. The memory of the clothes embarrasses me, I’ll admit, but the memory of the ideas is what really makes me blush. (Hat tip: Ed Veith at Cranach.)

Via Cronaca (not to be confused with Cranach): I think this is really cool. See, back in 1860, some scientists in France figured out a way to record sound waves graphically, and they “recorded” an image of the voice of a singer performing a folk song. Today, thanks to modern technology, scientists are able to turn that graphic image into sound waves, and we can hear the singer’s voice.

I remember one time my friends and I were in Chicago, back in the early ’70s. I said I’d like to visit the Museum of Science and Industry. My friends weren’t keen, but we had an afternoon off, and finally we all went. Everyone was very cool about it afterwards, talking about how boring and stifling all this technology stuff was.

We were idiots. Technology’s cool.

Tags: snowstorm, Tom Stoppard, cool, technology

I’m not bubbling with ideas for a post tonight. I think everyone in Minnesota is depressed at the moment. The snow from the weekend has finally melted off, and now we’re supposed to get more tonight and tomorrow. That’s March in Minnesota. We knew about it when we enlisted. But it gets old, it does.

No book to review tonight. I’m working on another Koontz, but I’m not done with it yet, and I’ve reviewed plenty of Koontz anyway. This one (False Memory) is kind of hard going for me. Not that I don’t like it. I do. But it’s about phobias and obsessions and dysfunctional families, and that hits pretty close to home. I pick it up each time with just a little dread.



Richard Widmark is dead at 93. I recall that my mother never forgave him for pushing that old lady down the stairs. But I liked him OK as an actor.

He was born in Minnesota, and I’ve always had the idea that he may have been Norwegian. I get that idea because a friend had relatives named Widmark (no relation that I know of), and I understood that they were Norwegian. “Vidmark” in Norwegian would mean “wide grassland.”

He played a Viking once, too, in “The Long Ships,” a movie every Viking buff hates pretty cordially. It’s a fun flick in its way, but the story’s idiotic, and the costumes are terrible.

On top of that, it was actually based on one of the best Viking novels ever written (next to mine, of course), Röde Orm (that’s the Swedish title) by Frans Gunnar Bengtsson. The geniuses of Hollywood, naturally, had to improve it. So they took a well-researched historical novel and turned it into an unbelievable quasi-historical fantasy.

Ah well.

I could comment on Widmark’s gun control views (mentioned in the Fox piece), but it’s been pointed out to me (with justice) that I’m too inclined to speak ill of the dead (I much prefer to attack defenseless people). Widmark had a very long marriage, which ended with the death of his first wife, and that’s awfully impressive by Hollywood standards. So full props to him for that. R.I.P.

It was a long, low-energy weekend for me. I’m still trying to fully shake loose from the flu, so I mostly sat (or lay) around, getting nothing useful done. I did vacuum the house on Saturday, because my brother Moloch and his wife were coming Sunday evening (as shall be related anon).

On Sunday, as has been my habit, I watched a couple old mystery movies from my renter’s collection. The most interesting was The Stranger, starring Orson Welles, Edward G. Robinson and Loretta Young.

It’s the story of an escaped Nazi war criminal (played by Welles) who is tracked down, in the New England town where he is living under a false identity, by Robinson, who plays a U.N. war crimes investigator.

I found it an interesting study in Hollywood culture. The movie was released in 1946, when World War II was newly over. The moviemakers were still in full Allied propaganda mode. There’s no question of good and evil here. Nazis are evil, period (which makes the portrayal of the war criminal, even by a genius like Welles, pretty one-dimensional). It occurred to me as I watched it that evil had not, in fact, ended in the world on VE Day. Even as the movie was being filmed, Stalin in Russia was systematically murdering millions of people for whom he had no use. And doubtless many of the people who worked on the movie were huge fans of Stalin. But, you know—Stalin murdered people for progressive and internationalist purposes. So that was different.

Another hangover from World War II was that the film was unabashed, non-ironic, all but Norman Rockwellian in its American boosterism. The town of Harper, Connecticut, where most of the action occurs, is a wonderful, edenic place. Everyone’s friendly. Everyone’s honest. There appear to be no bigots (even a stranger with a plainly foreign accent, coming to town, elicits almost no special notice).

At the center of the community is a church, and—get this—the church is portrayed as a positive institution. Although Orson Welles’ villain attempts to mess with the church (or rather with its antique clock, which he’s repairing) the building itself rejects him, as it were, and finally visits on him his final doom.

If this film were re-made today, I’m confident the church would be made into a haven for fascists, and somebody would point out at the end that the people of the town, in their mob anger over having a Nazi among them, aren’t really all that different from the Nazis themselves.

That evening Moloch and Mrs. Moloch showed up. They spent the night here, so we could get up at 4:00 a.m. and I could drive them to the airport. Even as I write, they are winging their way to China, to visit The Youngest Niece, who’s teaching English there.

I envy them the travel.

I don’t envy them the twenty-hour plane ride.

Can the day be far away when everybody finally agrees that the only sensible way to fly, from the point of view of security (as well as comfort and personal dignity), is to just put us all to sleep and stack us in containers? The after-effects of the sedative can’t be much worse than jet lag.

The pope baptizes a prominent Italian Muslim.

Italy’s most prominent Muslim, an iconoclastic writer who condemned Islamic extremism and defended Israel, converted to Catholicism Saturday in a baptism by the pope at a Vatican Easter service.

No doubt this will lead to violence somewhere, as does anything that offends “the religion of peace.” But that’s no reason not to celebrate a soul coming home.