Here’s a story worthy of April Fool status, if it were not true. “With more than a fifth of the country submerged, millions of spiders climbed into trees to escape the rising floodwaters.” As a result, many trees are knit together with spider webs. The eery pictures look like a Ted Burton creation, but in a more positive light, the mosquito count is way down.

Every Thursday I get a copy of my home town newspaper, The Kenyon Leader, in the mail. It doesn’t take me long to read it. It wouldn’t in fact take long if I read it all through, but generally I just go to the back page and look at the obituaries, to see if any more of my classmates have died. It doesn’t seem that long ago that I was reading about the deaths of my friends’ parents, but now it’s mostly us. Not that we didn’t lose some surprisingly early—a statistically significant number, it seems to me. There was the girl with juvenile diabetes who excelled at playing the piano (she was the first to go), and the most popular guy in class with the girls (whom I envied intensely); he died in Vietnam. And the foreign-born boy who was only with us the last couple years, and never quite fit in. I forget what he died of. The big, tall guy with the Czechoslovakian name we used to tease about being a “bohonk” (but admitted to our circle of friends, a group I personally consider the elite). I don’t recall how he died either. Another guy dropped dead of a heart attack in California, apparently without warning. All within the first decade. I may have forgotten some. Our original strength was only 68 people, mind you.

Come to think of it, I think the rate of death has actually slowed down in the last decade or so. Those of us who’ve made it this far seem likely to last a little longer.

No classmates died in time for this issue, but there was a death of sorts. Our old high school building suffered a major fire. Arson is suspected. Continue reading Old school →

First page of the Beowulf manuscript.

Andrew Klavan has read Beowulf, and he wrote an essay on it for an anthology called Thrillers: 100 Must Reads. As would be expected from a writer of Klavan’s sensibilities, he gets the point entirely:

We in the modern West have been so powerful, so dominant, so safe in our homes for so long that we slip too easily into the illusion that we live at peace. We are never at peace, not really. When we go to the ballet or walk in the park or stop to smell a rose or read a book, we only do so by the good graces of the fighters who stand ready to kill and die to defend us. Soldiers on our borders, police officers on our streets—only the threat of their physical force keeps those who would murder, rob, or enslave us at bay. Every moment of tranquility and freedom implies the warrior who protects it. The world of Beowulf is the real world.

Read it all.

There’s big archaeological news today. A collection of about 70 ancient books, written on lead sheets bound with lead rings, has appeared in Israel (Jordan claims that they came originally from its territory, and is trying to get them back). Written in coded Hebrew, they appear to be the oldest extant Christian documents, and scholars are eager to examine them (if they ever get out of court.)

The director of the Jordan’s Department of Antiquities, Ziad al-Saad, says the books might have been made by followers of Jesus in the few decades immediately following his crucifixion.

“They will really match, and perhaps be more significant than, the Dead Sea Scrolls,” says Mr Saad.

“Maybe it will lead to further interpretation and authenticity checks of the material, but the initial information is very encouraging, and it seems that we are looking at a very important and significant discovery, maybe the most important discovery in the history of archaeology.”

This will be cool.

Of course it’s always fun until Opus Dei sends in its paid assassins.

Kidding! Kidding!

(Tip: Cronaca.)

Abbie Riddle of Abbie Reviews gives my West Oversea a glowing review here.

And I got an invitation to lecture on another Norway cruise today. Of course this kind of lecturing is only for the financially flush, which I no longer am, so I politely declined. But it’s nice to know I don’t have a black spot next to my name in the Great Ledger. (Or, alternatively, they may just be very, very desperate for lecturers. Maybe the armadillo juggler got sick.)

Jeffrey Overstreet reviews Jane Eyre by writing a love letter to his sweet wife, Anne. Perhaps, he says, the essence of the story is that “a sin-scarred man casts off shame, a pious woman casts off her fears, and they’re united in grace.”

There was a fascinating new episode in my continuing dispute with the fellow who took offense at my e-mail reply to him, because it appeared in blue letters. Today I got another email from him, in which he demanded that I apologize for sending him a blue email.

The customer is always right, of course, so I immediately responded with an apology.

However, due to the way our email operates, the apology was in blue letters.

I expect he was not placated.

If this were a thriller novel, this would be the point at which I start to notice strangers following me, and to receive cryptic, threatening phone calls.

I realized long ago that I would never survive a thriller novel. I’d be one of the hapless bystanders mown down in a spray of blood by the psycho, on his way to the big showdown with Somebody Who Knows How to Handle Himself. My friend Ragnar, perhaps, or my friend Michael Z. Williamson.

Had an interesting phone call this evening. A fellow in California had seen my name and address in the Sons of Norway magazine (I’m Vice President of my lodge now), and called me to find out if I possibly knew a fellow he knew long, long ago, when he lived around here. He had a family memento he wanted to give the fellow, if he was still alive.

Alas, I didn’t. Nor did the better-acquainted district officer I checked with immediately afterward.

Too bad.

Aside from not being Somebody Who Knows How to Handle Himself, I’m also not much of a private investigator.

For the record.

This video is featured on the Nordskog Publishing site, which has healthy education as its topic this week. Some of the claims here seem overstated, but I sympathize with their decisions, particularly Voddie Baucham Jr.’s comments. Christians and God-fearing people need to reject the self-indulgent messages coming from many places and take up the call to teach our children ourselves in healthy, godly communities.

A Wednesday Loom (hat tip to Roy Jacobsen)

That snow we expected yesterday turned out, on closer acquaintance, to be rather more than expected. I had to use the snow blower after all, but the job I ended up doing was pretty marginal. Relatively high temperatures meant wet, heavy snow, and in some places it did more than just jam in the chute—it obstinately refused to be augured into the works at all. I expect it will be mostly gone in a week, but it was one of the harder snow removal jobs I’ve had this winter.

I’m having temporal trouble, it appears.

That dinner I told you I was invited to tonight? Turns out it was last night. The host called me about twenty minutes after the stated time, wondering where I was. I had stood facing his wife, as she made the invitation, and dutifully noted it down IN THE WRONG SPACE ON MY POCKET CALENDAR! My shame is unbounded, ubiquitous and ineffable.

Also. At work I have one of those “atomic” clocks that readjusts itself based on a radio signal from an observatory somewhere out west. This one is an analog clock, the old fashioned kind with a face and hands. It didn’t change the hour when Daylight Savings Time overtook us, so I moved the little hands myself.

Then, sometime Monday night, the clock decided to make the time change on its own. I thought yesterday morning was going unusually fast, but in fact my clock was an hour ahead. I ate lunch at 11:00. Eventually I figured it out.

The obvious conclusion is that time is not on my side.

It’s been spring-like for the past week or so, and most of the snow has melted away, headed downriver to various places that don’t want it. It hasn’t been happy spring, though—it’s been April Showers spring weather. We haven’t seen the sun much. I went out the other night to look at the MegaMoon, but she had hid her face modestly behind a burqa of clouds.

Tomorrow the rain is supposed to turn to snow, and they’re promising as much as three inches of the stuff. Sloppy snow, I expect, and it probably won’t be worth blowing out. It shouldn’t last long on the ground. Public opinion is against it.

Tomorrow has turned out to be a strangely packed day in my personal calendar. You have to understand, I lead—by choice—a notably hapless life, if you define “hapless” as nothing happening (which is wrong, but the thought amuses me). My pocket calendar doesn’t usually include more than two or three notations a week.

And yet all kinds of stuff has landed on my Wednesday, March 23 space, as if some temporal sharpshooter placed his bulls-eye on it. First my semi-annual furnace inspection got penciled in, months ago. Then I heard from a former college roommate, who told me his son would be appearing in the role of a schizophrenic drug addict in an episode of Criminal Minds that evening (I stopped watching CM a while back, when they took an unprovoked narrative shot at homeschoolers, but I’m willing to make an exception for a friend’s kid). Then, just yesterday, someone at work invited me to dinner at their house (why I can’t imagine. I guess I’ll videotape the TV show).

But why all this at once?

I expect I’ll still be able to do a blog post, as I’ll spend the afternoon at home, waiting for the furnace guy.

I’ve been selling unwanted books from our bookstore on Amazon for a while now. Last Friday I got an order, accompanied by e-mail requests from the customer, in which he asked for some special services we aren’t able to offer (I’ll stipulate that I didn’t handle that exchange as well as I might have). But I finally promised to get him a Confirmation number from the Post Office, and e-mail it to him on Monday, when I’d be back in the office.

Coming in on Monday, I found that he’d canceled the order (which was a couple days in the mail by then). He told me that my email response to his message showed up in blue lettering (our system always makes the replies blue, to help the readers tell one mailer’s messages from the other’s). He said he considered those blue letters a threat to himself and his home, and so had canceled the order.

Are any of you aware of any scenario in which blue print is a threat to anybody?

Poster for the “The Birds,” a film starring Tippi Hedren, a native of New Ulm, Minnesota.

Before you ask, yes, I did go to New Ulm on Saturday for the reenactors’ event. It wasn’t our period, being mostly fur trade wares on sale in a local hall, but we were going to meet a guy who had some stuff to sell us that he wanted to get off his hands. We did that deal, and now my friend is pretty sure we got skinned. But skinning is what fur trapping is all about, after all.

I’ve come to think of New Ulm as a kind of mythical place, like Brigadoon, which you can only visit by accident. Although it’s a not least among the tribes of Minnesota, no one has ever built a direct route to it from the Twin Cities. It’s tucked away in a valley out of sight, so that you’re never sure you’re getting there until you’re right on top of the place.

It was even tougher than usual to get there on Saturday, because for a good stretch of the route we experienced white-out conditions. It wasn’t actually snowing, but it had snowed the night before, and now we had a strong wind that blew that new snow off the fields and across the highway, in a reasonable facsimile of a blizzard. We were actually stopped by emergency trucks and told to go back, which wasn’t the greatest idea as the highway behind us had also been effectively instruments-only for twenty miles or so. We turned onto a parallel gravel road, and a nice old couple who passed us told us that if we followed that road and “turned at Five,” it would take us directly into New Ulm. They, needless to say, were actually Underground Folk (see my novels) trying to lead us astray and put our souls in peril. Fortunately they weren’t very good at it, because the road we ended up on, though not the one they promised, did get us where we were going.

We had lunch in a local Rathskeller, where we waited about an hour for a couple hamburgers. (Anti-Norwegian prejudice lives on.) The most interesting conversation I had was with a gunsmith in a beaded top hat who insisted on telling me all about his work (which was wonderful), though I warned him at the outset I wasn’t in the market for his fine wares. Did you know that the best way to make a brass rifle barrel is to dig a very deep, thin hole in the ground, and pour the brass in straight down?

OK, you knew that. But I didn’t.