I thought it a nuisance that I’d had a fairly energetic (by my standards) weekend planned, not after, but just before, the day of my liberation from my hand splint. It was irritating in the sense that I kept thinking how much easier all of this would have been if delayed a day or two. But I also thought there was some benefit in spending the last two days of bondage busy, rather than sitting around wishing the time away.

(The splint is gone now, by the way. Free at last! Oh the joy of having ten (OK, nine—one needs a little work) fingers to use again!)

Saturday I did a lecture for a Sons of Norway lodge in Minneapolis. They were an excellent, attentive audience, they paid me a nice honorarium, and they bought books way out of proportion to their numbers. That’s pretty much my definition of a good lecture day.

Sunday was Svenskarnasdag (Swedish Day) at Minnehaha Park in Minneapolis. I brought the minimum of my equipment, and sat trying to sell books all day, letting others (mostly younger) do the fighting. Which is probably as it should be. The weather was iffy and the crowds thin, but I got my RDA of Vitamin D from the sunshine that came and went.

A friend who owns a big, powerful PC let me load up my book trailer movie project on his machine. It was exhilarating to finally run it in on something that could handle the file sizes, rather than my laptop. On the downside, better equipment made several problems apparent. My big challenge is sound. I’m fairly certain I should have done the project in some other program than Windows Live Movie Maker (even the old Windows Movie Maker), because I could really use some functionalities this stripped down software lacks. I’m reluctant to start from scratch again, though.

I think I could fix it up with recordings and overdubs. But that’s a further problem. Using the mike I’ve got, I have to be right on top of it to get a decent sound level, and that generates popping and wind noise.

Anybody know any cheap cheats for making a filter at home? I’m really not able to spring for a professional microphone at this point in my career.

We know you’re fascinated with introverts, the quiet, cool individuals who rarely speak but to criticism your latest idea. Here are ten myths about them. (via Trevin Wax)

A little late in the day (it’s almost tomorrow in Norway as I write), but today is Sissel Kyrkjebø’s birthday. Here she is doing a modern arrangement of a Norwegian bridal march. I think you’ll understand the words. I heard her do the same number the first time I saw her in concert in Minot (pray for Minot!). Her hair was about the same length then, the longest it’s been since the early ’90s, so this must have been broadcast around the same time.

At the Witherspoon Institute’s Public Discourse site, an outstanding article by Anthony Esolen on the importance of marriage, and the poverty of the sexual revolution.

Have a good weekend. My splint comes off Monday morning!

Five Ways to Fail at Design, from Harvard Business Review’s Failure Issue.

I went to church Sunday, for the first time in about a month. I’ve been out of town, for various reasons, several weekends in a row.

Frankly, I’d have been inclined to skip it, if I didn’t have absences to make up. I prefer to skip Mother’s Day and Father’s Day in church, for personal reasons. Please understand that I don’t object to the honoring of parents, just because I myself chose my mother poorly, and have not achieved fatherhood. Heaven preserve me from the kind of people who run around being all outraged all the time, because everything doesn’t include them.

But I prefer to let other people alone in their observances. I’d rather stay home in the bosom of my own bosom.

(Also, I think it would have been nice if Trinity Sunday had gotten at least equal billing. Just sayin’.)

But I went, and it was as uncomfortable as I feared. All the men were given numbered tickets as they came in, and then at a point in the service we were all asked to come forward. It wasn’t just fathers, but all men, so it was inclusive and all that. I stayed in my seat anyway, because I didn’t want to presume to patriarch status, whatever they said.

After congratulations and a prayer, they drew two ticket numbers and announced the winners of the Father’s Day drawing. I think the prizes were restaurant gift certificates.

In the cases of both winners, though, the claims came, not from the men up front, but from their wives back in the pews. Both winners had given the tickets to their wives to hold.

I think there’s some kind of profound lesson, or caution, there.

Don’t know what it is, though.

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I made a discovery lately, while in my Wild West mood, that clears up a mystery that’s bothered me, off and on, for most of my life.

My maternal grandfather had a few shelves of books in his home. One which I read with interest, and took as my own after his death, was the extravagantly titled tome, Capt. W. F. Drannan, Chief of Scouts, As Pilot to Emigrant and Government Trains, Across the Plains of the Wild West of Fifty Years Ago (As Told By Himself, As a Sequel To His Famous Book, “Thirty-One Years On the Plains and In the Mountains”). Published in 1910.

The frontispiece is a studio portrait of the old scout:

The book tells of the narrator’s adventures, first as a young protege of Kit Carson, then as a wagon train scout, and also as an Army scout fighting Indians. It’s an interesting book in the old style, with similar pleasures and difficulties as the Buffalo Bill memoir I reviewed the other day.

The books seem to have been fairly popular in their time. A source I’ll link to further along quotes a letter to H. P. Lovecraft by Robert E. Howard, who’d seen Drannan in a Texas town as a boy:

…wandering about the streets of Mineral Wells … trying to sell the pitiful, illiterate book of his life of magnificent adventure and high courage; a little, worn old man in the stained and faded buckskins of a vanished age, friendless and penniless…. what a lousy end for a man whose faded blue eyes had once looked on the awesome panorama of untracked prairie and sky-etched mountain, who had ridden at the side of Kit Carson, guided the waggon-trains across the deserts to California, drunk and revelled in the camps of the buffalo-hunters, and fought hand to hand with painted Sioux and wild Comanche.

Over the years, as I’ve read this and that about the West, I’ve looked for other mentions of Col. William F. Drannan.

To my puzzlement, there was never one. Not one. I think I recall a passing reference in an article in a Western history magazine, but nothing, ever, in a book.

I began to smell a rat. Continue reading Not exactly the code of the West →

“The liberal bias of the mainstream media tilts so far left that any outlets not in that political lane, like the Drudge Report and Fox News Channel, look far more conservative than they really are, according to a UCLA professor’s new book out next month.” writes Paul Bedard in a review of Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind

Those stitches in my head, installed last weekend in Story City, Iowa, came out today at my usual health provider. I wish it had been my splint coming off, but the splint is God’s way of saying, “Have I got your attention yet?” And of course the answer is no, so two more weeks with that.

My regular PA wasn’t available, so I saw another one, a very nice looking young woman. It was obvious she found me intensely attractive, but as is my wont I did not take advantage of her innocence.

I was down in Iowa for the weekend, not playing Viking but visiting family. They served steak for Sunday lunch, and my sister-in-law had to cut my meat up for me. Meanwhile, her daughter was cutting up her infant grandson’s food as well.

Thus life turns on its slow lazy susan, and what you gain on the swings you lose on the roundabouts.

On the way home I got a call from my realtor. He had been called by a lady in the gift shop at a rest stop in northern Iowa. Someone had found my wallet there (I still haven’t figured out how I dropped it), and she found his number on a card in it. He’d called the dean of the Bible school, who’d called my former boss, who gave him my cell phone number. It added better than an hour to my trip, but I got the wallet back, all money intact.

This is the upper midwest. The rules are different here.

More from our humor desk--a collection of actual headlines which read like they came from The Onion, e.g. “Service Rat Licks Woman When It’s Time To Take Meds” and “The Caperon, For When You Need An Apron But Also Might Need A Cape.”

Of course, the second headline is crazy for multiple reasons.