America waits in hushed anticipation, one question on its trembling lips: “Does Walker feel better?”

Walker replies (in an impressive, deep voice), “I’m not actually sure.”

Saturday I woke up hopefully (I always feel sort of fair when I first get up), thinking “I can probably manage going to church to set up today…” (as I’ve mentioned, my church meets in a gymnasium, and my team is called on to set up the stage and chairs once every five weeks) “…and then do some Christmas shopping, and get a couple things at the grocery store.”

After an hour or two (spent mostly on the couch) I thought, “I’ll have to call in AWOL on the set-up, but I can probably do some shopping and go to the grocery store. I don’t have much left to buy.”

A couple hours later I said, “I guess I can still get some groceries. That’s not far to drive.”

And then I gave up on the groceries too.

Sunday I spent reading books, in a prone position.

Today I went in to work, and put in my time. I was not a human dynamo, but I was there and I did what a man’s gotta do.

I’m still coughing, though, and still don’t have much of a voice. If it doesn’t clear up soon I suppose I’ll have to see the doctor and inquire delicately about bronchitis.

I stopped at the drug store tonight, and while I was inside a young woman clipped the corner of Mrs. Hermanson, my Tracker, and tore her front bumper off. She had me paged in the store, and gave me her name and phone number (the young woman, that is. Not Mrs. Hermanson). She said she was driving her father’s car, and didn’t have any ID or insurance information on her. She wants to handle it outside insurance.

I’m not delighted about this, and I figure there’s a good chance she’ll just change her phone number once I give her the estimate, but I don’t know what else I could do under the circumstances.

Then again, I suppose if she were out to rip me off, she could have just driven away.



For Pete’s sake, girl, if you wanted to give me your phone number, you could have just introduced yourself!

How long do you think it’ll be before some expert announces that the smell of fresh-cut pine boughs causes cancer?

Yeah, I’m feeling a little better. Compared to the last couple days. Compared to waterboarding. Compared to sitting through a re-run of Family Affair. I put in another full day at work, but I have all the energy and zest for life of… well, of a middle-aged, depressive Norwegian. Normal, in other words. Normal with a deep desire for sleep, a bad cough, and a voice south of James Earl Jones’.

I like the deep voice. One of the many dreams life has denied me, like the dream of being six feet tall, was the dream of singing bass. I got as far down as baritone, but people usually assume I’m a tenor. I don’t want to be thought of as a tenor. I want to be thought of as a bass—a sea-bottom bass with an extra Y chromosome.

The pleasure is reduced by the fact that only about half of my words actually get out. I alternate between no voice of all and a bass rumble: “(Croak) name is (croak) Walker.”



Now I shall crawl away to the sofa.

Hugh Duncan has a good podcast on A Charlie Brown Christmas.

Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year is w00t. You can celebrate with by styling your bod in this.

Lost Mark Twain play is heading to Broadway. A researcher “was not thrilled to find the drawer crammed with Twain plays she had not yet read and didn’t care to.” But when she did read through that drawer, she found Is He Dead?She said:

“He had even managed, and this was not necessarily his strong suit, a plot, with memorable characters and hilarious scenes. I thought it held great promise.” She wasn’t the only one. In a letter dated Feb. 5, 1898, Twain wrote that his wife found the new comedy “very bully.”

The play had never been performed. Why?

The explanation left politely unspoken in rejections he received was that the play as it stood was lumpy and only intermittently funny.

“It has a great idea,” [playwright David Ives] allowed. “In movie terms, La Boheme meets Tootsie. But even at first reading I thought it really does need help. The construction is like a shack that is not very well buttressed; at the slightest touch, pieces of it would fall off.”

Apparently the Chinese government wants to look so good for world visitors at the Olympics that it will allows some groups to distrubute Bibles. Ah, God bless ’em.

My cold (I’m pretty sure by now it’s a cold) is still with me. The sore throat is better, but I’m more stuffed up today. And yet I went in to work, good soldier that I am. Now I’m home and I plan to lie down a bit after I’ve posted this, and before I get to some more Christmas cards.



There are a couple Minnesota connections to that Colorado shootings story. One is that one of the dead at the YWAM facility was a Minnesota native, Tiffany Johnson. Another Minnesotan, Charles Blanch, was wounded in the leg. And of course you’ve heard about Jeanne Assam, the volunteer security guard who shot and stopped the shooter (who will not be dignified by the use of his name in this post), although apparently he took his own life at the end.

According to this report, Assam was fired from the Minneapolis police force in 1997. This information caught my attention right off, since I can think of many possible reasons why a Christian might be fired in the politically correct climate of Minneapolis city politics today. But apparently she was fired for lying about an incident on a bus where she swore at a driver. Sounds more like a pre-conversion incident, though one never knows.

What is certainly true is that right now, on top of the trauma of having been involved in a fatal fire fight, and survivor’s guilt, she is facing public scrutiny directed at a past she may have hoped to have put behind her. So a prayer for her, as well as for the wounded and the families of the victims, would not be out of order.

Amazon’s popular new e-reader, Kindle, does not have wireless service throughout the U.S. Even in Georgia, the coverage looks sparse statewide. The same with California, and there’s nothing in Montana.

Kyle Ambrose is talking Scrabble and words what begin with x. Before I press the “Publish Post” button for this one, let me take a moment to say that I enjoy using the word “what” as I did in the first sentence. It’s a British dialect thing, isn’t it? Probably marks me as nerd for laughing about sentence structure. Better to laugh than to complain. Ah, well . . . where’s that button?