The team taking apart one of Tolkien’s homes found a postcard in the fireplace. Reporter Mike Collett-White writes:

The postcard was addressed to Tolkien at the Miramar Hotel in Bournemouth, where he and his wife Edith often stayed. [It is dated 1968.]

It is from “Lin,” which Malton [the demolition man] believed could be fellow fantasy author Lin Carter who wrote Tolkien: A Look Behind ‘The Lord of the Rings,’ published in 1969.

Depicting a scene from Ireland, it reads: “I have been thinking of you a lot and hope everything has gone as well as could be expected in the most difficult circumstances.”

The circumstances in question are not described in this report.

I hope your Independence Day holiday was a good one. Mine was about what you’d expect. My contribution to the general festivities was to put my flag out each day of the long weekend, and to eat hot dogs. I bought the good kind (the old fashioned, skin-on ones), and buns from my grocer’s bakery (far superior to the national brands). These provided me five meals over the course of the weekend, the only variety (variety’s overrated, after all) being my having to wrap the last two in bread slices, since the buns had run out.

Let us meditate for a moment on that strange artifact of American life, the unwritten law that hot dogs must come in packages of ten, while hot dog buns come in packages of eight. All our lives we’ve endured this.

When will the madness end? Continue reading Let slip the hot dogs (and buns) of war →

What does freedom mean to you? How do you define it? What does it connote? Think about that.

Now, what does liberty mean? Is it the same as freedom? Does it connote different things to you?

I ask in part because we sing an anthem with the line “with liberty in law,” and I doubt many people could describe what that means. Well, now that I look it up, many of us may not be singing that part of the song. It’s in that beautiful second verse which has a lot of objectionable material. Turn the children away from the screen for the following:

O beautiful for pilgrim feet

Whose stern impassioned stress

A thoroughfare of freedom beat

Across the wilderness!

America! America!

God mend thine every flaw,

Confirm thy soul in self-control,

Thy liberty in law!

Are we looking for liberty in law from our public servants? Do we want our government working for us by using other taxpayers’ money for programs we can’t afford or by allowing us to keep what money we can earn to use properly for ourselves and our communities?

I used Google to search barackobama.com for the words freedom and liberty. Freedom: 29,000 hits. Liberty: 14,500. Change brought in 1,080,000 of course. The candidate said, “When anti-choice protesters blocked the opening of an Illinois Planned Parenthood clinic in a community where affordable health care is in short supply, I was the only candidate for President who spoke out against it. And I will continue to defend this right by passing the Freedom of Choice Act as president.”

For johnmccain.com, freedom came in at 1,290, liberty, 305 (the change buzzword, 8,710). Here, the other candidate said, “Blessed with opportunity, and intent on the challenges of work and family, our own lives often seem too full and hectic to take notice of offenses that seem distant from our own reality. There is also the threat in a society passionate about its liberty that we can become desensitized to the dehumanizing effect of the obscenity and hostility that pervades much of popular culture.”

(Oddly enough, the numbers for Obama’s site jumped from tens and hundreds this afternoon to ten thousands and millions this evening. – ed.)

Which of these men are really talking about defending the responsible freedoms of Americans, of getting government out of the way of the people while defending justice and promoting mercy? That’s liberty in law, isn’t it?

You can tell me to shut up now.

Bill Bryson says Thomas Jefferson didn’t conceive the verbiage for the Declaration of Independence on his own, if that were possible. George Mason appears to have helped a good bit.

In case you haven’t heard, our former governor, Jesse “A Certain Part of the Body” Ventura, says he’s considering running for Norm Coleman’s senate seat.

He’d given up after one term as governor. Because (apparently) he’d determined that Minnesotans could only endure so much political farce.

But then the Democrats nominated Al Franken. Which forced him to reconsider that assessment.

I went out to dinner this evening, with an old friend (I still have a couple) who’s going through a rough stretch.

We went to a steak place, a facility that’s apparently attempting to recreate the success of the “Outback” chain in a Texas idiom.

This involved having all the waitpersons gather, at one point, to do a line dance in the aisle.

Because Minnesotans have a pretty high tolerance for farce in their dining, too.

Good steak, though.

Here’s an interesting article on some of the history of Independence Day. Take a look at the quiz at the foot this article called “The Strange History of American Independence.” It isn’t at all strange (insert semicolon) half of the question are on July 4 births and deaths, but for trivia geeks, it’s interesting. I’m pleased to say I got the Crossing the Delaware question right. I know some of that story.

I had not heard this before this year. John Newton apparently wrote the hymn “Amazing Grace” to the tune of an unknown slave song. Something to consider this Independence Day week.

Fair warning: I’m going to write a little about politics tonight. If you’ve read this blog a while, you know that a) we don’t usually do politics, and b) my political beliefs are purely derived from lists of talking points supplied by my fellow Norwegian-American Karl Rove. So consider this fair warning.

But for those of you who are staying, I want to address those Republicans among us who’ve decided to sit out this election—or even to vote for the Democrat—based on a calculation that the Republicans have fallen so low that there’s really no useful difference between the parties. I especially have in mind those who say, “The only way to save this country is to let the Democrats run it for a few years, so we fall into complete chaos and anarchy and everything goes up in flames. From the ashes a new, authentic America may arise like a Phoenix.”

Here’s my view—it ain’t gonna happen that way. Continue reading “Danger! Pleasure Ahead!” is not an effective warning →

Since we’ve been talking about Russell Crowe, I was delighted to see this story over at Dirty Harry’s Place, which reports that Crowe recently made the decision to be baptized. For all I know his theology is far off the mark (or not), but I’m a Lutheran and so believe that baptism in itself possesses efficacy by the power of the Holy Spirit. (Though the state of the Lutheran church today doesn’t provide a lot of evidence, I have to admit.)

And since all of you are passionately interested in the Vikings, I should note that this month’s Smithsonian Magazine includes a cover story about The Sea Stallion of Glendalough, the largest replica Viking ship ever built, which sailed from Denmark to Ireland a while back, and will soon be returning to Denmark.

(The Sea Stallion, by the way, is a copy of a shipwreck found in Denmark. To the amazement of archaeologists, they gradually came to realize that it was a) one big ship, rather than two smaller ones, and b) built in Ireland (this determined by analysis of the wood). There were lots of Vikings in Ireland during those centuries.

The Art of Manliness is asking readers to vote on whether swearing is manly. A rousing discussion has ensued.