I’m not bubbling with ideas for a post tonight. I think everyone in Minnesota is depressed at the moment. The snow from the weekend has finally melted off, and now we’re supposed to get more tonight and tomorrow. That’s March in Minnesota. We knew about it when we enlisted. But it gets old, it does.

No book to review tonight. I’m working on another Koontz, but I’m not done with it yet, and I’ve reviewed plenty of Koontz anyway. This one (False Memory) is kind of hard going for me. Not that I don’t like it. I do. But it’s about phobias and obsessions and dysfunctional families, and that hits pretty close to home. I pick it up each time with just a little dread.



Richard Widmark is dead at 93. I recall that my mother never forgave him for pushing that old lady down the stairs. But I liked him OK as an actor.

He was born in Minnesota, and I’ve always had the idea that he may have been Norwegian. I get that idea because a friend had relatives named Widmark (no relation that I know of), and I understood that they were Norwegian. “Vidmark” in Norwegian would mean “wide grassland.”

He played a Viking once, too, in “The Long Ships,” a movie every Viking buff hates pretty cordially. It’s a fun flick in its way, but the story’s idiotic, and the costumes are terrible.

On top of that, it was actually based on one of the best Viking novels ever written (next to mine, of course), Röde Orm (that’s the Swedish title) by Frans Gunnar Bengtsson. The geniuses of Hollywood, naturally, had to improve it. So they took a well-researched historical novel and turned it into an unbelievable quasi-historical fantasy.

Ah well.

I could comment on Widmark’s gun control views (mentioned in the Fox piece), but it’s been pointed out to me (with justice) that I’m too inclined to speak ill of the dead (I much prefer to attack defenseless people). Widmark had a very long marriage, which ended with the death of his first wife, and that’s awfully impressive by Hollywood standards. So full props to him for that. R.I.P.

Duffy asked Marohasy: “Is the Earth still warming?”

She replied: “No, actually, there has been cooling, if you take 1998 as your point of reference. If you take 2002 as your point of reference, then temperatures have plateaued. This is certainly not what you’d expect if carbon dioxide is driving temperature because carbon dioxide levels have been increasing but temperatures have actually been coming down over the last 10 years.”

Duffy: “Is this a matter of any controversy?”

Marohasy: “Actually, no. The head of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has actually acknowledged it.”

The article carries on to discuss press coverage and NASA’s Aqua satellite.

Tags: science, global warming, climate change, NASA

Suprasegmental: of or relating to significant features (as stress, pitch, or juncture) that occur simultaneously with vowels and consonants in an utterance. For example:

The growing list of annoying acronyms, or initialisms that the Internet encourages in the subliterate — such things as ROFL (“rolling on the floor laughing”) and the uriah-heepish IMHO (“in my humble opinion”) and, most widespread of all, the infuriating LOL (“laughing out loud”) are justified, if such awful things can be justified, among people who can’t be bothered to use words when letters will do, the fastest way to express their exaggerated reaction, which reaction might, face-to-face, be indicated, just as intolerably, by such gestures (suprasegmental features, really, but not to be found in any updated Trager and Smith) as a mouth shaped into mock-laughter, or hands placed so as to supposedly hold from bursting a mimicked heaving-with-mirth belly.

Seen here in a post on Silly Acronyms, And Useful Ones

To start with, Will at View From the Foothills has tagged Lars and me with a meme. Lars did this last week. The rules are as follows:

1. Link to the person that tagged you.
2. Post the rules on your blog.
3. Share six non-important things/habits/quirks about yourself.
4. Tag six random people at the end of your post by linking to their blogs.
5. Let each random person know they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their website.

I have to ask how one can tag random people. What would make my picks random? Nevermind, here’re my six:

1. I have worn contacts in the past. I wear glasses now, and I’ve been thinking about wearing contacts again.
2. I dislike mowing my yard, but I do enjoy planting flowers and vegetables. I may buying a tiller for our garden, because I don’t think I can borrow one. I probably won’t buy a tiller, but I’ve been thinking about it.
3. I took my little family to Disney World last September, but we didn’t go in. We tried to do several free activities available outside the parks. We failed to interest the children much, but the ice cream parlor and candy store were hits.
4. I like to try new foods, but I’m not keen on meeting new people.
5. I don’t share the usual beefs about the clichés people use when they pray. In fact, it irritates me a bit to hear people gripe about other people’s prayer habits. I understand the need for teaching us to pray better, personally and publicly, but let’s smear some more grace on this problem and avoid whining about it. Just trying to be a blessing.
6. I enjoyed watching Double Indemnity last night. That Edward G. Robinson is fantastic. I have to see him in another movie.

Now, I’ll post this entry and tag a few people later today. Feel free to volunteer.

It was a long, low-energy weekend for me. I’m still trying to fully shake loose from the flu, so I mostly sat (or lay) around, getting nothing useful done. I did vacuum the house on Saturday, because my brother Moloch and his wife were coming Sunday evening (as shall be related anon).

On Sunday, as has been my habit, I watched a couple old mystery movies from my renter’s collection. The most interesting was The Stranger, starring Orson Welles, Edward G. Robinson and Loretta Young.

It’s the story of an escaped Nazi war criminal (played by Welles) who is tracked down, in the New England town where he is living under a false identity, by Robinson, who plays a U.N. war crimes investigator.

I found it an interesting study in Hollywood culture. The movie was released in 1946, when World War II was newly over. The moviemakers were still in full Allied propaganda mode. There’s no question of good and evil here. Nazis are evil, period (which makes the portrayal of the war criminal, even by a genius like Welles, pretty one-dimensional). It occurred to me as I watched it that evil had not, in fact, ended in the world on VE Day. Even as the movie was being filmed, Stalin in Russia was systematically murdering millions of people for whom he had no use. And doubtless many of the people who worked on the movie were huge fans of Stalin. But, you know—Stalin murdered people for progressive and internationalist purposes. So that was different.

Another hangover from World War II was that the film was unabashed, non-ironic, all but Norman Rockwellian in its American boosterism. The town of Harper, Connecticut, where most of the action occurs, is a wonderful, edenic place. Everyone’s friendly. Everyone’s honest. There appear to be no bigots (even a stranger with a plainly foreign accent, coming to town, elicits almost no special notice).

At the center of the community is a church, and—get this—the church is portrayed as a positive institution. Although Orson Welles’ villain attempts to mess with the church (or rather with its antique clock, which he’s repairing) the building itself rejects him, as it were, and finally visits on him his final doom.

If this film were re-made today, I’m confident the church would be made into a haven for fascists, and somebody would point out at the end that the people of the town, in their mob anger over having a Nazi among them, aren’t really all that different from the Nazis themselves.

That evening Moloch and Mrs. Moloch showed up. They spent the night here, so we could get up at 4:00 a.m. and I could drive them to the airport. Even as I write, they are winging their way to China, to visit The Youngest Niece, who’s teaching English there.

I envy them the travel.

I don’t envy them the twenty-hour plane ride.

Can the day be far away when everybody finally agrees that the only sensible way to fly, from the point of view of security (as well as comfort and personal dignity), is to just put us all to sleep and stack us in containers? The after-effects of the sedative can’t be much worse than jet lag.

I have to pass on this metaphor alert from the Wall Street Journal’s Best of the Web:

“We hit the ground running. We’re at the bottom of the food chain but . . . we have really made a dent up here.”–Sen. Jim Webb (D., Va.) on his time in the Senate so far, quoted in the Washington Post, March 21

The pope baptizes a prominent Italian Muslim.

Italy’s most prominent Muslim, an iconoclastic writer who condemned Islamic extremism and defended Israel, converted to Catholicism Saturday in a baptism by the pope at a Vatican Easter service.

No doubt this will lead to violence somewhere, as does anything that offends “the religion of peace.” But that’s no reason not to celebrate a soul coming home.

I’m back. Somewhat. To an extent.

I actually went back in to work Friday, for about six hours. But when I dragged myself home, I was too beat to post. Today I managed to stick it out for the whole eight hours, and I’m going to try to do a couple posts here, tired or not, because I’ve been piling up stuff I want to post about for the past week, and I’m going to explode if I don’t get some of it off my chest. And exploding will do my health no good.

To start with, Will at View From the Foothills has tagged Phil and me with a meme. Although telling you unimportant things about myself is hardly a departure in this space, I’ll go ahead and do it. The rules are as follows:

1. Link to the person that tagged you.

2. Post the rules on your blog.

3. Share six non-important things/habits/quirks about yourself.

4. Tag six random people at the end of your post by linking to their blogs.

5. Let each random person know they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their website.

In honor of St. Patrick’s Day, I’ll start out my list on an Irish note, and let it blow where it lists from there.

1. Green is my least favorite color. Oh, I love the green of springtime, which can’t come soon enough for me, but when I contemplate the visual spectrum objectively, I pass over green. I don’t think I own any green clothing (lucky for me I’m not Irish). I think the reason comes from candy. In the Rules of Candy, at least from when I was a kid, green meant lime. And I hate lime. Red, on the other hand, could mean either strawberry or cherry, either of which pleases me. Nowadays you sometimes get green candy that’s apple flavored, but that’s a postmodern aberration. Apple candy ought to be colored yellow, like it says in the Bible.

2. I always resented the Irish as a boy. Partly because I hated green (see above). Partly because I couldn’t understand why the Irish deserved all this attention and Norwegians didn’t (you can say that there are a lot more Irish than Norwegians in this country, but you didn’t grow up in Kenyon, Minnesota). But when I grew to maturity, I discovered Irish music and was completely won over, to the extent of developing an Irish alter ego to narrate The Year of the Warrior. Since I got into Father Ailill’s skin, I’ve found myself occasionally thinking I am Irish, and having to remind myself I’m not.

3. In my opinion, the most beautiful woman to show up on the scene in my lifetime was the tragic Swedish-American actress Inger Stevens. She had all the standard attributes of the ice princess, the untouchable blonde Hitchcock heroine, but she also had big blue eyes and dimples. I never watch “Hang ‘Em High” (because the gallows scenes are too harrowing for me) but when I watch “Five Card Stud,” it ain’t for Dean Martin.

4. I used to be able to recite Francis Thompson’s “The Hound of Heaven” from memory. I still remember most of it, but there are gaps.

5. I’ve never met anyone famous, that I’m aware of. I’ve had contact with a few people of some note by e-mail.

6. I was co-winner of the New York C. S. Lewis Society’s Screwtape competition back around 1975. The challenge was to write a new Screwtape letter. I shared the prize (which consisted of publication in the newsletter, nothing more) with Jennifer Swift, who is, I believe, like me a minor Fantasy writer now. My letter was better than hers.

As is my wont, I shall not tag anyone else with this meme. If you want to carry it on on your own blog, be my guest.

John Coleman, the man who gave us The Weather Channel, says if global warming advocates will not stand for a debate with credible scientists who oppose their theory, then he’ll sue Al Gore for financial fraud.

“Since we can’t get a debate, I thought perhaps if we had a legal challenge and went into a court of law, where it was our scientists and their scientists, and all the legal proceedings with the discovery and all their documents from both sides and scientific testimony from both sides, we could finally get a good solid debate on the issue,” Coleman said. “I’m confident that the advocates of ‘no significant effect from carbon dioxide’ would win the case.”

Coleman has been critical of the climate change hype you see everywhere and how his cable channel, now owned by someone else, has encouraged the hype. “In December 2006, The Weather Channel’s Heidi Cullen argued on her blog that weathercasters who had doubts about human influence on global warming should be punished with decertification by the American Meteorological Society,” according to the Business & Media Institute.

“A new study by The Nielsen Co. found that the PG-rated movies with the least profanity made the most money at the U.S. box office,” reports the AP. The study shows that parents carefully screen for language in the movies they bring their kids to see. Also web chatter helps most movies, but apparently it doesn’t help horror movies.