I saw the picture of compromise or making do this week. In a hot parking lot (our highs were in the low 90s) a little water had collected. Three ducks sat by this quart-sized pond, perhaps imagining the 1,000 lakes of Minnesota.

Speaking of making do, I see that copy editors are ecspected to0 now everthing. Where do you go to make sure you are spelling or correctly using a phrase or word you don’t readily use? Language Log posts some facts on making do, which is not making due, akin to paying your dues or anteing up. It’s making a situation do, which is what we say with almost every post here. Eh, we’ll make this post do . . .

Henderson State University is holding an academic conference on “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and other works by scholar and all-around nice guy Josh Whedon. No joke.

Among the papers: “Buffy and Feminism,” “Buffy and Identity,” “Gender Stereotypes and the Image of Domesticity in ‘Firefly,'” “‘Firefly:’ The Illusive Safety of Big Damn Heroes” and a Durand favorite by a British scholar, “Hero’s Journey, Heroine’s Return: Buffy, Eurydice and the Orpheus Myth.”

Have the conferenced on Harry Potter, I’d like to know? How about “The Simpsons?”

Mowed the lawn tonight—a tremendous achievement and a triumph over the very forces of nature. I’ve been wanting to mow it all week, but it’s been a solid wall of rain. And I’m leaving Friday morning for Scandinavian Days in Story City, Iowa (where, as it happens, my grandmother was born) to do a Viking gig. So I very much feared the grass would be permitted to express itself in all its creativity until next week. I don’t want that. I think my neighbors are close to firebombing me for lowering property values as it is.

I’ve come to realize that Barack Obama is right on one thing. This election is bringing Americans together. Not over him—the most he’s ever done to reach across political lines is to move the line to the left. No, the one thing Republicans and Democrats can now agree on is that the Clintons are incredibly sleazy and tiresome.

Oh, you came for blogging related to literature? How’s this? Charles Dickens desk sells for $850,000 in a London auction.

The money raised at Wednesday’s auction will go the Great Ormond Street children’s hospital in London. Dickens was a close friend of the hospital’s founder and spoke at its first fundraising dinner in 1858.

The buyer, the report says, is a tarot card reader. Could be worse, I suppose. It might have been a Dan Brown reader.

I’m taking bids for my own desk, by the way. Buy it now, before I die and the price goes way up! Extra-large size, made of steel with a formica top. Genuine rust at no extra charge. You can have it for just a tenth of what they got for Dickens’ desk, and this one’s a whole lot newer!

The title above should have been the title of last night’s post, but I didn’t think of it until down in the comments.

I’m extremely pleased with that line. If this were a commercial blog, I’d print up tee-shirts or bumper stickers featuring it in large letters, along with our URL, and sell them. Because I’m a capitalist, after all, and it’s about time I got serious about grinding down the oppressed masses.



By way of Greg Slade and the Christian-fandom e-mail list, here’s a link to Galaxiki, a wiki-based online universe-building site. Greg describes it thus:

Membership is free and there are tons of community solar systems that

can be edited, but it’s also possible to acquire your own, personal

solar system.

Not my kind of thing, but surely there are some titanically grandiose among our readers.

Speaking of freedom, on June 3, 1989, many Chinese people were protesting in 100-acre Tiananmen Square when their government, who apparently cannot tolerate dissent, rebuked them. Hundreds were killed, some not in the square but in their homes. Even ambulance drivers were shot, according to this firsthand report from the BBC. It’s a sickening irony that the massacre happened in a place apparently named “gate of heavenly peace.”

This is Chairman Mao’s legacy, forced submission and debasing equality. But I think the Chinese people may rise above it, especially as the gospel spreads. They were made to be more than numbers in The People’s Machine.

This last one was the closest thing to a pleasant spring weekend we’ve had so far (at least so far as I recall), which means that it rained and was overcast much of the time, but there was that beautiful morning and early afternoon on Saturday… before it started hailing. Dime-sized servings here, no serious damage that I could see.

The man who invented the Pringle’s potato crisp cardboard tube has passed away, and some of his ashes were buried, as per his request, in one of those impact-resistant, re-closable packages.

I suffer from low self-esteem, I know, but I think I’d have to be pretty darn secure about my family’s love before I asked one of them to spoon some of me out of the urn and transfer it to a separate container. Even if they did wear a face mask.



By way of Red State, there’s a story about how the police in Great Britain are enforcing Gospel-free zones, where the presence of a Muslim majority makes it illegal to preach Christ.

I’m sure there are people on the Left who find this restriction of free speech repugnant. But I’m convinced a lot of them don’t see any problem. “Freedom of speech isn’t for you. It’s for them. Because they’re victims.”

This is one aspect of the major philosophical divide between conservatives and liberals today. Conservatives love freedom, and liberals love equality.

It comes down to your definition of equality, I think. Conservatives are terrified of equality as an absolute value, because it means the extinction of freedom. If you give people freedom, some will do better in the world than others. Then equality is gone. The race may not always be to the swift, but it is often enough to make the results unequal.

Liberals believe that the only real freedom is equality. If you insist on equality, then you can’t permit freedom in the traditional sense. Because freedom always ends up with the toys unequally distributed.

The bureaucrats of Britain see the Muslim population as an oppressed group which has been denied the equality it deserves. Therefore they must be given every freedom, and their opponents must be shackled, in order to achieve the supreme goal of equality.

It’s very likely too late for Great Britain, and for all of Europe. It may be too late for us, too. We’ll see.

Fifty teachers/professors with a bit of time on their hands have decided Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey is “the science fiction film with the most realistic vision of the future of mankind.” One professor comments, “It is not beyond the realms of possibility that artificial intelligence could turn on its creators.”

Blade Runner was deemed pretty realistic as well as The Andromeda Strain, and that’s not all.

Barry DiGregorio, research Associate for the Cardiff Centre for Astrobiology, and a member of the International Committee Against Mars Sample Return, said: “I have been campaigning against NASA’s plans to bring back samples from Mars as I believe they could possibly endanger the Earth’s biosphere with microbial contamination from the planet.

“In a worst case scenario this could lead to an Andromeda Strain-type situation. My concerns are based on the Viking biology data that were conducted on Mars in 1976. NASA have always opposed the claim that their data found microbial life on Mars, however, two NASA astrobiologists have publicly stated otherwise and I have worked with them to bring attention to their finds.”

Forgive me for wasting your time posting news of authors in Atlanta, because this next story has the smell of greater importance. Mary Rigdon has cleared state hurdles for establishing her cheesemaking dairy, Decimal Place Farm, right in the city. Elizabeth Lee reports:

Rigdon makes the cheese on her and husband Ed’s 18-acre Conley farm, tucked away at the back of a subdivision. They purchased the land 13 years ago, moving from a Grant Park house on a tenth of an acre. Decimal Place Farm is a nod to that house, where she lived when she first got interested in raising dairy goats.

Next time you’re in Atlanta, perhaps you can look her up.

Memorial Day, of course, is meant for decorating the graves of those who’ve served our country in the military. But it was always traditional in my family to put flowers on all our graves for the holiday. Being the only member of my immediate family who still lives around here, I carry the custom on, in my little way.

Memorial Day was cool and cloudy, threatening rain, here in the Twin Cities. But when I drove south to Kenyon and Faribault, where the bones of my fathers lie (metaphorically speaking; my parents are actually buried in Florida) I drove into bright sun and warmth that forced me to take my coat off. I had to put it on again when I got home. I had but crossed into and out of a stationary pressure ridge.

My brother was in town Friday night, and we went to see Indy 4. It was better than I expected, since I wasn’t expecting much. I liked the numerous digs at Communism—it’s been fifty years after all. About time Hollywood admits there were two sides in the Cold War. (Still waiting for the first Hollywood movie about the Ukrainian genocide, though.)

The worst part was Shia LeWhatever as the Marlon Brando wannabee. He plays the part with all the weight and authority of a runway model. And the scene where he swings through the jungle on vines, like Tarzan—painful. (You know, don’t you, that you can’t actually do that? Vines grow up from the ground. They don’t grow down from the treetops.)

And that was part of the overlong jungle chase scene. Not bad, but I am very weary of seeing large numbers of thugs firing automatic weapons at people with no effect whatever. I know it moves the story along, but what it really means is that the writers couldn’t figure out a clever way for the heroes to get away or to protect themselves, so they opted just to let them survive without explanation. Which is lazy.

The best part—Cate Blanchett as the evil Commie parapsychologist. The word “audacious” is being overused this year, but hers was a really audacious performance. She realized she was playing an over-the-top character, so she played the role over the top. Anybody can do that, but not everybody can make it work. She made it work. She won’t get an Oscar nomination for it, but she deserves one.

On Sunday I was in a Memorial Day mood, and I’d been enjoying Owen Parry’s marvelous Civil War mysteries featuring Abel Jones. So I pulled out my DVD of Gods and Generals. I had good memories of it, largely (I suppose) because it’s a rare example of a Hollywood film treating Christian characters with a measure of respect.

Sadly, it didn’t hold up on a second viewing. It’s probably great for a high school history class, but as a movie it was uninspired. Dull script, dull direction, dull cinematography, and not enough editing. It plays like a school pageant, with people making long speeches at each other for no particular reason, and confiding in one another without dramatic justification. And the dialogue sounded as if it was lifted from contemporary documents. That’s nice from an academic point of view, but it makes for stilted speeches. And I suspect that most people didn’t actually talk the way they wrote, even back then.

But it put me in mind of the right things.

For a bit more on Memorial Day, let’s wave that flag.