The fact that he’s going to have his memoirs published probably surprises me less (in today’s media world) than the fact that he’s still alive at all.
Via Blue Crab Boulevard: Cheetah, the chimp from the Johnny Weismuller movies, will finally tell all.
Expect a heart-wrenching account of a life-long struggle against speciesist stereotypes.
“I never got the girl,” the hominid will complain. “I really wanted to direct, but I couldn’t get past the glass ceiling.”
Since I’m on a roll with this anti-unity argument (by the way, what do you have when you don’t have unity? You have diversity. That’s a good thing, right?), I’ll extend it with some remarks on the subject of Christian unity. The opinions expressed below are my own, and do not represent the views of Brandywine Books, its employees or parent corporation, or of real persons, living or dead.
It may be different for those of you not connected to “mainline” denominations (so called because their leaders either use intravenous drugs or act as if they do), but for those of us who are so connected, it’s hard to go a week without hearing or reading some lament about “the shameful lack of unity within the Christian church,” or even “the sin of disunity in the church.”
The Fred Scuttle principle applies here, just as in politics. Fred’s idea of “popular prices” is prices he likes. The ecumenists’ (that’s the name for people who promote institutional Christian unity) idea of reconciliation is a world-wide church that runs precisely along the lines they approve of.
This is the part they never talk about. Their proposals are all very touch-feely, very kum-ba-ya. They include very few concrete proposals at first.
Because somebody’s got to give up something. I believe in congregational church government (that’s odd for a Lutheran, but I belong to an odd Lutheran group). My Catholic friend (I have at least one) believes strongly in episcopal government (that means bishops call the shots). Continue reading Fred Scuttle eclesiology
The temperature was subzero and bitter this morning when I went to work, but it eased gradually through the day. Didn’t get as warm as the forecast promised, but tomorrow is supposed to be in the teens, and we may actually see a little melt over the weekend.
This is the point where we say to ourselves, “Maybe this will be the last hard siege of the winter. Maybe it’ll be uphill from here.”
This is pure self-delusion, but self-delusion is one of the coping devices that permit us to live in this part of the country.
Today’s subject: “Bringing us all together.” One of the presidential candidates (let’s call him, oh, Baback Orama) made a speech about wanting to bring all Americans together. Dennis Prager pounced on it and has been jumping on it off and on ever since. I thought I’d comment too, because it’s a general subject I’ve been thinking about for a long time.
I first started noticing this, if I remember correctly, while watching how the news media reported on religion. Every time a liberal was elected to the leadership of a denomination, it was treated as a straight story. “Dr. Bozo, a world-renowned expert on Syro-Phoenician gerunds, has a disarming sense of humor, plays the harmonium, and is well-liked both by supporters and opponents.” That sort of thing. Continue reading Fred Scuttle politics
Today the temperature didn’t claw its way up much past zero (about 17 Celsius, for our European readers), but according to the best authorities it will be warmer tomorrow, and may get up around freezing by the weekend. Oh, how sweet that sounds—“up around freezing.” Where did I put my sunscreen?
I’ve had an unaccustomed streak of feeling unusually good for the past week or so, but tonight I’m depleted. It probably has something to do with my renter waking me up at 5:00 a.m. to jump-start his car, but I also feel as if I’m coming down with another cold. So I’m galvanizing my stomach with zinc tablets, as Phil has counseled me.
I found myself, while driving home tonight, behind a car with a bumper sticker that said, “Equal Rights Are Not Special Rights.”
I don’t think it was an act of unreasonable stereotyping for me to assume that anybody with a bumper sticker like that is very likely homosexual.
Then the car turned off into a bowling alley.
What’s wrong with this picture? I thought.
Perhaps I was observing the first emanations of a harbinger. Perhaps the creative minds that determine what’s fashionable and what’s not in our culture have decided, at long last, to embrace the noble and ancient sport of bowling.
Think of it—bowling, the new feng shui.
Bowling shirts will suddenly be trés chic, seen on all the A List celebrities, and on sale in trendy shops at exorbitant prices.
Bowling shoes will come in exciting new colors.
Bowling alley snack bars will start selling brie and espresso and white wine.
The movie “Kingpin” will be adapted into a Broadway musical.
“Bowling For Dollars” will be revived on network television in prime time.
Go now and invest in Brunswick stock. And remember, you read it here first.
You may have noted I’ve slowed down with the book reviews. This is because I’ve been writing more (for reasons I may or may not explain, depending on future events), and so have spent less time reading.
But I’m working my way through another Koontz, Midnight. One thing that strikes me as I read it is how much I appreciate the “nice” characters. This is common in Koontz, and more uncommon in novels generally than you might expect. It reminds me a little of C.S. Lewis’ That Hideous Strength, because you have to slog through hard, dry stretches featuring evil characters who are gradually losing their humanity, which only makes the bright sections, with people you like and root for, even more enjoyable.
Good characters (I think I’ve blogged about this before) are a real problem for the novelist. Villains are easy. Good characters have tripped up authors by the dozens. Sometimes they’re so wishy-washy, dull and passive that they bore the reader. Other times they’re unconvincingly cheery and chipper, and you just want to strangle them.
I can think of two reasons why authors have this problem.
If the author is not himself a very good person, he thinks he understands good people, but probably doesn’t. John 1:5: “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not comprehended it.” There’s a great scene (If I remember correctly) in Charles Williams’ All Hallows Eve, in which an evil scientist uses a device to try to monitor the mind of a virtuous woman. He finds that he can’t stand it. The environment is incomprehensible and painful for him.
On the other hand, if the author is a pretty good person, he probably isn’t paying close attention to himself, and so knows as little about how his mind works as the bad person knows.
But when it works, it works, and your reader will want to come back.
My hair’s getting kind of long. It’s below my collar, and probably longer than is strictly suitable for a Bible school librarian. I take it as a sign of great sophistication around work that nobody’s brought it to my attention yet.
I intend to get it cut next week. But this weekend we have the annual Viking Feast of the Viking Age Club & Society, so I figure I’ll keep it long until then.
Also it helps keep me warm.
I’ve worn my hair longer than not most of my life, and have continued to do so even though fashion has long since passed me by. My motivations, so far as I can discern them, are historical. Continue reading I meditate on the length of my hair
Last night on the radio, a thoughtful newslady explained to us what she said were “warning signs of frostbite.” This is a subject of more than theoretical interest just here and just now.
“The first sign of frostbite,” she said, “is a tingling sensation in the face or extremities.”
Oh yeah?
A tingling sensation in the face or extremities is not the first sign of frostbite for me. For me, a tingling sensation is the first sign of being outside in the winter. Even when it’s a whole lot warmer than it is right now.
The stages that follow are numbness and aching.
All these stages occur within the first thirty seconds of exposure.
God bless the U.S. Air Force, which invented the arctic snorkel parka that’s the only thing that makes it possible for me to actually leave the house between November and April.
The January Smithsonian Magazine includes an article on Norman Mailer by Lance Morrow.
Here’s a paragraph that struck me:
In Mailer’s work, one feels more in the presence of energy and virtuosity than of truth… Except for some journalistic bull’s-eyes in the reportage (riffs on politicians like Nixon and Hubert Humphrey and Eugene McCarthy), Mailer simply does not feel true. Reading some of his more strenuous cosmic exertions is a little like watching an actor onstage who picks up a suitcase that is supposedly full, but is, in fact, empty: the actor by body English tries to make the bag look heavy, as Mailer tries to make the sentences profound. But the audience knows.
I get the impression that when Morrow speaks of “truth” he’s writing about something he probably can’t define and doesn’t really believe in. But even for intellectuals, the heart knows. The heart can tell.
On-site report: It’s cold outside.
Editorial comment: I don’t like it.
Watch for updates as the situation develops.
Our commenter Aitchmark sent me a link to this YouTube video on the Engadget site.
The 24-barrel, tripod-mountable monster you see above, lovingly known as the Disintegrator, was rather amazingly hand-carved and assembled by Anthony Smith of the UK, who spent four months on the ambitious build. Unlike your dinky little six-shooter, this model boasts a 288-band capacity and 40-round-per-second firing capability…
You’ll note that this device was created in the United Kingdom, where gun ownership is illegal.
This, my friends is what happens when you deny men real weapons.
Actually, it puts me in mind of the days when I was an avid shooter of cap-and-ball revolvers. It took what seemed like twenty minutes to load the things (actually about five, but I was eager). Then you got to shoot for about thirty seconds. Then you had to spend an hour cleaning the things (and you’d better do a good job, because that powder residue is mostly salt).
But it’s what a man’s gotta do.
In my own part of the world (known in the reference books as the Walker Sphere of Influence) we have this story, in which a man took the utterly reasonable and sober-minded action of blowing up his old pickup truck by loading it with explosives and shooting at it from a distance with a high-powered rifle. Note that he exercised role-model-level prudence in not trying to light a fuse with a match and run away, like Wile E. Coyote. He did the job at a prudent remove. And yet people are criticizing him.
(I don’t know the guy, but the story takes place in the county where I grew up. Makes me proud, it does.)
Listen, it’s a man’s testosteronic birthright to blow things into the stratosphere and send objects hurtling at high rates of speed toward distant targets. What shopping is to women, explosions are to guys.
And if you don’t understand that, you’re a woman.
What to do? The gag about how you’d welcome a little Global Warming just about now has been done to death, but honestly, remind me again why marginally warmer winters would be a bad thing?
We had global warming back during the Viking Age, and that worked out pretty well, you know. If it hadn’t been for Global Warming, Erik the Red and his son Leif would have frozen to death on a glacier in Greenland, and then Leif would never have gone on to discover America, and we wouldn’t be speaking Norwegian today.
I had a thought while reading my Bible today. I’m not sure whether it’s a good one or not. Let me run it by you.
In Philippians 1:12-18, the Apostle Paul tells his readers that they shouldn’t be troubled by the fact that he’s been imprisoned by the Romans. “Now I want you to know, brothers, that what has happened to me has really served to advance the gospel,” he says (NIV). Then he explains that some people are preaching Christ out of goodwill, but others are preaching Christ out of “envy and rivalry… supposing that they can stir up trouble for me while I am in chains.” But, he says, “the important thing is that in every way, whether from false motives or true, Christ is preached.”
I’ve never been sure who these people were who were preaching Christ out of envy and rivalry toward Paul, and what sort of preaching they must have been doing. As best I can understand, scholars aren’t entirely sure whom he was talking about either.
But this seems like a likely scenario to me—I’d guess there’s a good chance the rival preachers were members of the Circumcision party, people who preached salvation through Christ plus the law. We know they were constant opponents of Paul’s everywhere else he went.
Paul opposed their legalism, and could be pretty cutting in talking about them in his letters. Yet his attitude here seems (to me) to be, “Even if their preaching is in error, the very fact that they’re talking about Jesus is a good thing in itself.” Maybe he’s saying, “I don’t really care what anyone says about Jesus, as long as they talk about Him. Because just talking and thinking about Him gives an opening to the Holy Spirit.”
And that leads me to the idea that maybe we shouldn’t be so quick to get upset over things like “The Last Temptation of Christ” and “The Da Vinci Code.” Maybe (I could be wrong) the proper attitude is that we should just be glad that people are thinking about Jesus at all, and trust to the power of His name to turn their hearts the right way.
Or maybe I’m reading too much into it. Let me know what you think.
Actually it’s not all that cold. About 20° F today. I’ve seen it a whole lot worse than this.
What’s got the whole state (nay, the whole region) bloodhound-faced today is the knowledge that tomorrow will be colder, and the day after that colder still, and on and on through the end of the week. I haven’t looked at the forecast past Sunday. I suspect the Monday one will say, “Supercooled through the afternoon; heat death of the universe after sunset.”
Yet we survive. We persevere. That’s what makes us better than you.
Here’s an article by Uwe Siemon-Netto, from Paul McCain’s blog Cyberbrethren, about the odd (though welcome) phenomenon of Asians converting to Christianity through the music of J. S. Bach.
I would have never expected this. I’ve always seen music as essentially non-propositional, unsuited to changing people’s minds, except by means of the lyrics.
But Bach’s music has no lyrics. It’s just very fine, intricate music on which the composer has written (at the end of every piece), “Soli Deo Gloria” (To God alone be the glory). And the testimony of an artistic job so brilliantly done seems to have an evangelistic appeal.
I suppose I shouldn’t be as surprised as I am. It actually harmonizes well with some things I’ve been thinking for a while. I’m just always surprised to be right… or anything in the neighborhood of right.
Back in the misty years of the 1970s, when I was touring with the Christian musical group for which I was lyricist, a guy came to talk to us after a concert. He said he was a follower of Francis Schaeffer, and I thought, “Great. We’ll be friends.” But he wasn’t interested in being friends.
His reading of Schaeffer had convinced him that the gospel was about reason—reason and nothing else. In evangelism, no appeal should be made to anything but the “law of non-contradiction.” Because our songs appealed to feelings as well as reason, he informed us that we were heretics and tools of the devil. I suppose he’d hoped for syllogisms in song.
I hadn’t thought the whole thing out at that point (still haven’t, for that matter), but I think I argued that, although reason is important and much neglected, it’s not the only thing.
As the years have passed, I’ve grown more convinced I was correct. Schaeffer concentrated on reason in his books because that’s the element that’s being most neglected in theology and apologetics today. But if you read those books and pay attention to more than just creating bullet points, you’ll see that he talks about the importance of love and relationships and beauty, too. His book The Mark of a Christian was not about logic, but about love.
This is entirely consistent with essential Christian theology. We believe in the Incarnation. “The Word became flesh.” (John 1:14) It’s as heretical to neglect the soft, subjective side of our lives as to neglect the rigorous, rational side.
Which is why the Lord can even call souls to Himself through music.
Hey! Maybe He could use novels too!