As a tie-in post to Lars’ review of Heat Wave and as a benefit to some of our readers, without whom we could not do, here is a photo of Nathan Fillion. (link defunct)
And here is a photo of Rainn Wilson beating Mr. Fillion up at Comic-Con this year. (link defunct)

And now, the Oxford Book of Parodies, “beginning with Anglo-Saxon doggerel and concluding with J.K. Rowling.” A parody of Beowulf gives us these lines: “Wonderlich were they enwraged / And wordwar waged.” Quote that on the subway.

So my encyclopedia of word origins has informed me the word sausage comes from the Latin salus, meaning salted or preserved. (Hmm, perhaps that is incorrect. Webster’s online has the Latin word as salsus.) It’s says it was invented by the Chinese (I can’t verify that), and it gives the recipe used to make The Great Scunthorpe Sausage, which was the longest sausage ever made for a long time. It reports the 1998 world record came from Canada for a “continuous sausage” 28.77 miles in length.

The current Guinness World Record, which may not be for exactly the same thing, is measured by weight. The 2008 Guinness report states: “The record for the largest sausage weighed 18.98 tonnes (41,859 lb) and was made by J.J. Tranfield on behalf of Asda Stores Plc, at Sheffield, South Yorkshire, UK on 27-29 October 2000.”

Oh, look. Here’s an entry on “Scandinavian words in English.”

Just a couple links from me tonight.

I just got my membership card today from the Friends of the Viking Ship, the society devoted to saving and preserving The Viking, the replica of the Gokstad ship that was sailed from Norway to America for the Columbia Exposition in in Chicago, in 1893. Nowadays replica Viking ships are fairly commonplace, but this was the very first, and no one was entirely sure it could even be done.

A few of you are Viking aficionados, so I thought I’d just mention that they’re always looking for support. It’s far from the most important cause in this sad old world, but it would be a mournful thing to be told the old ship has crumbled with no one to care.

Speaking of this sad old world, the always thoughtful Theodore Dalrymple has a profound article up at City Journal. It’s called Modernity’s Uninvited Guest. The subject is theodicy (the question of how a good God could create a world full of evil), and he relates it to the utopian fantasies of the Left, by way of Dr. Samuel Johnson’s 18th Century critique of a book of theology.

The superficiality of this argument requires, from a modern standpoint, little commentary. But even Doctor Johnson—a man with a delicate sense of personal imperfection who once stood several hours bareheaded in the rain in the Uttoxeter marketplace, in penance for having been disrespectful a half-century earlier to his father, who had run a bookstall there—did not criticize it strongly. Both he and Jenyns were a world away from our modern concerns about evil. Accustomed to our comforts and our delicate sensibilities, we would find their world unbelievably harsh; yet their notion of evil strikes us as naive and almost innocent. Despite the violence of Johnson’s review of Jenyns, the two men agreed more than they differed. They lived on the cusp of the Enlightenment but were both, at least in their treatment of evil, pre-Enlightenment in outlook. The burning question for them was not “Why do men behave evilly?” but “Why is there evil at all?”

That’s it for tonight. Tomorrow—scandal and passion among Norwegian pioneers!

It occurred to me during my walk tonight that we’re well into haying season, and I don’t think I’ve ever told you about haying.

My brothers and I didn’t do a lot of heavy farm work growing up, but the one labor-intensive time of year was haying season (straw baling too, but the tolerances were greater with straw. Also it was much lighter to lift).

Up until sometime in my childhood, my dad used to make hay more or less the old-fashioned way, cutting it and drying it in the field, and stacking it loose, either in the barn or in a shed, or (when space ran out) on the ground under a tarpaulin. We had an undersized barn, and so usually ended up stacking some hay outside. This is not a good thing. Wet and vermin get in. You always use the outside hay first, because it goes bad first.

Here’s my dad and my grandpa, some time before I was born, working on a hay wagon.

Continue reading Hey, hay! →

Travis Prinzi talks about calling and stories at The Rabbit Room.

Jocoseriosity: half-joking, half-serious, like this blog.

How many times have you hear someone speak with jocoseriosity? He makes his point with a slight spice of humor, and half the audience loves it, the other half hates it. Both remember it, so the jocoserious speaker wins.

A stressful weekend, involving lots of travel and personal insecurity. Everything went fine, except inside my head. Best wishes to the principals involved; they know who they are.



I heard about this on Michael Medved’s show this morning—our Ivy League-educated chief executive gave a speech at “the annual iftar dinner” at the White House, in which he put a little spin on the actual historical record.

“The first Muslim ambassador to the United States, from Tunisia, was hosted by President Jefferson, who arranged a sunset dinner for his guest because it was Ramadan — making it the first known iftar at the White House, more than 200 years ago.”

That presents a nice, cozy picture—cosmopolitan Tom Jefferson, out of his tremendous respect for Islam (did you know he owned a copy of the Koran?) hosted a special dinner in accordance with Islamic law, as a sign of respect for a Muslim ambassador.

Not quite the way it was. According to “The Iconoclast” at New English Review, the guy wasn’t an ambassador, but an envoy, in this country to shake us down for the ransoms of American sailors kidnapped by the Barbary pirates. Jefferson served him dinner after sundown because that was the only time the guy would eat. By all accounts he was an arrogant jerk who made no effort to understand us, and when he left nobody missed him.

Jefferson balked at paying tribute but accepted the expectation that the host government would cover all expenses for such an emissary. He arranged for Mellimelli and his 11 attendants to be housed at a Washington hotel, and rationalized that the sale of the four horses and other fine gifts sent by the bey of Tunis would cover costs. Mellimelli’s request for “concubines” as a part of his accommodations was left to Secretary of State James Madison.. Jefferson assured one senator that obtaining peace with the Barbary powers was important enough to “pass unnoticed the irregular conduct of their ministers.”

In less irritating news related to the Middle East, Joe Carter at First Things, in his weekly 33 Things post, links to these clips of a virtual model of Herod’s Temple in Jerusalem, a sight that would have been most familiar to the Lord and His disciples.

We’ve been told so many times that Jerusalem was an out-of-the-way outpost of the Roman empire, that we sometimes forget that Herod made his city a world-wide tourist attraction through the construction of a temple complex that was, in fact, one of the world’s wonders. The Roman government wasn’t entirely happy about it, either.

In response to tremendous public clamor, I shall share my views on the Cordoba Islamic Center near Ground Zero.

My views are kind of mixed, but mostly negative.

When I first heard about it, I thought, “What’s the big deal? It’s not directly on the 9/11 site. It’s just a mosque.”

But things I’ve been reading and hearing on the radio suggest that it’s not just a mosque, and that the very name is a statement of Islamic triumphalism.

I don’t know. I’m suspicious of conservative paranoia, but I’m also aware that symbolism is a very big deal with Muslims.

The thought that keeps recurring to me is, “We are told again and again, when dealing with the Islamic world, that it’s tremendously important to be sensitive to the feelings of Muslims.

“So how come that doesn’t work both ways? How come Muslims have no obligation to be sensitive to the feelings of 9/11 victims?” Continue reading Muezzin musings →