My eyes have been opened to the criminal denial of resources to southern California, caused by George Bush and the war in Iraq.

But why stop there? Washington isn’t the only city wasting precious supplies and manpower that might have helped the impoverished denizens of southern California.

How about Hollywood?

Think of all the people who could have been evacuated in the limousines used by studio executives and movie stars.

Think of the refugees who might have been fed by the catering companies.

Think of the coffee and donuts the gofers could have fetched for the firefighters.

And all those lawyers writing contracts? They could be suing somebody or other for the mental suffering of the homeless.

Dear Heavens, when will the infamy cease?



Speaking of Hollywood, S. T. Karnick at The American Mind tells a story today of a movie actor who seems to have a conscience not dictated by the hive mind of his peers.



Television is also part of Hollywood, and tonight I’d like to give you a list of the Top Two of my favorite new network shows.

My list is restricted to two because I’ve only found two I enjoy. But they’re pretty good, I think.

My favorite is “Pushing Daisies.” You know those Walgreens commercials about “A Town Called Perfect?” The whole show is done in that style, like a children’s book. They even use (apparently) the same narrator.

The main character is Ned (Lee Pace), a pie maker with a supernatural gift. When anything dies, he can bring it back to life by touching it. The drawback is that he has to touch them again and send them back within a minute, or they’ll stay alive and some equivalent life form nearby will drop dead in their place. He makes a side income by helping his friend Emerson (Chi McBride), a private detective. He brings murdered people back to life to name their murderers, and he and Emerson split the reward money.

The complication that produces the show’s drama comes when the girl Ned loves, “Chuck” (Anna Friel, who’s just a delight to watch) is murdered, and Ned brings her back and keeps her alive (a larcenous undertaker drops dead). While Ned is delighted to have Chuck back, he can never touch her, or she’ll die again.

This wonderful plot device permits the writers to give this show an element that has almost disappeared from contemporary drama—romance. Ned and Chuck manage to kiss (through cellophane) and dance (in beekeepers’ suits), but there’s no question of their jumping into bed together. That means you have actual sexual tension here, and a relationship that isn’t consummated in the first episode. This imparts to the whole enterprise an innocence that chimes perfectly with the fairy tale staging. I love this show.

I worry though. I note from Wikipedia that Anna Friel became famous in large part for lesbian scenes and nudity on British television. A supporting character is Kristin Chenoweth, an avowed “liberal” Christian who has a Lisa Minelli-like following in the homosexual community. So I wouldn’t be surprised if they blindside me with a “gay” story one of these weeks.

But until then I’m enchanted.

Speaking of people called Chuck, there’s also a new series called “Chuck.” The concept here isn’t quite as fresh as that of “Pushing Daisies,” but it’s not bad.

Are you old enough to remember “The Avengers?” Remember how intriguing and appealing Mrs. Peel was? Not only gorgeous, but completely capable of taking care of herself when attacked by the vilest enemy spies (as a sexist I should have hated that, but somehow I didn’t when she did it)?

Well, in “Chuck” you’ve got a Mrs. Peel character, a CIA operative, teamed up with an ordinary computer nerd, the titular Chuck. Chuck (Zachary Levi) got a hard drive-full of top secret security information uploaded into his brain (don’t you hate it when that happens?), and Mrs. Peel, er, Sarah Walker (Yvonne Strahovski, She’s not Diana Rigg, but she’ll do) is assigned to babysit him while he continues his ordinary life as a computer tech at a big box store called Buy More.

Of course there’s sparks between Chuck and Sarah, and the romantic tension here comes from his realistic understanding that he is way, way out of his league with her. But there are hints that she’s warming to him, and he’s growing through the dangers he experiences every week.

Great escapist stuff. And about time, too. It’s been a while since there’s been anything this fresh, or this innocent, on TV.

You’ve seen photos of horrible fires in California, but here’s one a little removed from the flames.

Unnatural Light

Vivienne Parry asks why wet feet brings on putrid fever or the like in many literary heroines. “For, I confess,” she writes, “part of me has always longed to grab them and say: ‘You only got your slippers wet. For heaven’s sake, girl, just get a grip!'” (via Books, Inq.)

Ack. I’m worthless tonight. I’m in the grip of some kind of vague, unlocalized malaise, probably psychosomatic. Had to slug my way through work. My body seems to be saying to me, “Take it easy and feed me protein,” and that’s what I’m doing.

All in all, I’m glad I live in Minneapolis, and not southern California. All the world wants to live in S. Cal, but we Norwegians (at least the ones who haven’t absconded to Mission Viejo) sit here and say, “Yeah, the weather might be nice most of the time, but you gotcher earthquakes. You gotcher wildfires. Better to stay home where the disasters are usually less catastrophic, and generally come on a scheduled basis.”

It’s a particularly Norwegian point of view, I think–“I won’t ask much, but in return I expect very few bad surprises.” Comes from generations of explaining to our children why we continued to live in a place where the sun didn’t even rise half the year.

Same goes for living in Minnesota, more or less.

I was sent a quotation once. Forget who said it. Somebody commented on Charles Lindbergh’s not having much of a sense of humor, and the quotee replied, “Did you ever try to tell a joke in Minneapolis?”

To which my reply is, “Remember Lou Grant? Remember how funny his life was on the Mary Tyler Moore show, set in Minneapolis? Then he spun off to Los Angeles and his own show, and the yucks stopped cold.”

I think that settles that.

In closing, here’s a YouTube link from Joe Carter at Evangelical Outpost. The kind of counselor all of us neurotics dream of (played by Bob Newhart, no less). He’s just as effective as all the others, and charges you less.

In my ongoing campaign to raise the intellectual level of the blogosphere, and indeed of the world at large, I ever strive to draw your attention away from the trivial, the evanescent, and the superficial, to matters of universal relevance and substance.

Today, the subject is my face.

The spark for this meditation was a couple conversations I had in Minot (I expect I’ll be milking Minot for months in this space, since I don’t actually interact with my fellow man much in ordinary life, and that plays hob with a guy’s stock of anecdotes).

An older gentleman approached me in the Viking village on (I think) the first day. He asked me if I was Icelandic.

I told him I wasn’t, but that I’d once spent a couple days in that delightful country.

He said, “You’re a fine looking man. Handsome enough to be an Icelander. In fact you look like you could be a member of my family.”

At that point I realized I’d had this exact conversation two years ago, on my last visit to Høstfest. The same man had approached me then, and said the same thing.

I figured he was about the only Icelander at the festival, and was desperately trying to connect with someone. In his loneliness he felt compelled to go around and confer Icelandicity on random Norwegians like me.

Poignant, no?

That in itself wouldn’t have led to this post, but later on I was approached by two middle-aged ladies. They said, “We recently lost our dearly beloved brother, and you are his spitting image.”

At that point I thought, “Oh no. My old face is coming back.”

As a visual aid at this point (and against the advice of counsel), I shall re-post a picture of myself in high school which I used a while back:

I looked pretty much like this through my college years too, except that I changed to wire-rimmed glasses as a junior.

You’ll note the utter lack of distinction in this face. Ordinary brown hair. No particular bone structure to speak of. The nose, though large, is not of any identifiable shape. Is it a long face or a round face? Somewhere in the middle. Could go either way. It’s a blank slate face.

Back in those days people used to tell me all the time, “You look just like my cousin So-and-so.” Or their nephew. Or some guy they went to school with. I remember walking through Minnehaha Park in Minneapolis one afternoon while a drunken Native American yelled at me for minutes from across the grass, trying to get the attention of some buddy he’d mistaken me for.

As I grew older, and especially after I grew my beard, that sort of thing stopped. Stopped completely. I figured that the wrinkles and spots installed by Time’s little Mr. Potatohead game had finally given me an aspect that was also an artifact (Lincoln once said, “Any man over forty is responsible for his own face”).

But now I seem to be losing it. As we age, it’s well known, we start reverting to our baby faces, and it looks like my short run as a figure of distinction is coming to an end.

On the other hand, if I can get these people who think they’re related to me to co-sign a loan or two…

Somehow I seem to have been transported, all unbeknownst to me, to Seattle, Washington. Or Bergen, Norway (not that that’s a bad thing). It was raining when I left for Minot, and it was raining when I got back, and it’s raining still. We’re sopping around here. I keep flashing back to the Marx Brothers movie, “The Coconuts.” This was one of the first sound movies, and (I believe) the first fully sound-equipped musical ever filmed. They discovered paper was a problem. Paper crinkled loudly in the mikes whenever anybody picked it up, and the sound technicians (whose experience had generally begun that morning) couldn’t figure out what to do about it. So they just soaked all the paper in water. Every piece of paper in the movie looks like something lifted out of a washing machine, mid-cycle.

That’s how pretty much everything feels in Minnesota today. I heard on the radio this morning that we’re about 1/8” away from the record for the rainiest fall in history, the previous champ being 1902 or something.

This, we are sure to be told, is the fault of anthropogenic global warming.

This summer it was dry. That, apparently, was global warming too.

My question to global warming alarmists is this: “Is there any possible weather pattern that could conceivably occur that wouldn’t prove global warming to you?”

Of course not. If the weather every day next year were identical to the weather every day this year, that would be taken as proof of global warming too.

This reinforces my belief that global warming theory is, in essence, a religion. Just as there is no possible event, pleasant or unpleasant, that Christians can’t work into a general theory of the Providence of God, so there’s no conceivable weather cycle that the GW believer can’t harmonize with his doctrine.

The difference, I think, is that I admit my belief system is a religion.

And I don’t accuse people who disagree about it of being paid stooges of greedy corporations, who apparently think a planet laid waste and depopulated will present excellent marketing prospects.

Tonight when I got home from work I noticed one of my credit cards was missing. After looking in the likely places, I called the service number to replace it.

When the female person I’d been talking to had canceled it and promised me a new one, she said, “I see that your payment record with us is wonderful, and I wonder if you’d be interested in…” and then she tried to sell me a credit protection plan.

I said no thank you, but my heart was strangely warmed by her praise of my payment record. When you’re me, you have to take your strokes where you can get them.

A few minutes later I found the card, and I called back to see if I could cancel the cancellation.

They don’t let you do that.

I suppose it’s best, all considered. Now I feel like a doofus again, and the universe is back in balance.

Kevin Holtsberry at Collected Miscellany has moved his blog back to its earlier address, and is rather sad that he isn’t getting more traffic as a result. Check it out. It’s an excellent blog, mostly about books.

Via Mirabilis: A site called Library Thing which allows you to list the books you own and make contact with people who enjoy the same books. What a great concept! I’d use it myself if I didn’t hate everyone in the world, except Sissel and you.

Opinion Journal has a list of people who would have done more to earn a Nobel Peace prize than this year’s recipient, such as “Garry Kasparov and the several hundred Russians who were arrested in April, and are continually harassed, for resisting President Vladimir Putin’s slide toward authoritarian rule” and “Britain’s Tony Blair, Ireland’s Bertie Ahern and the voters of Northern Ireland, who in March were able to set aside decades of hatred to establish joint Catholic-Protestant rule in Northern Ireland.”

Speaking of Kasparov, he has a new book called, How Life Imitates Chess. Business Week experts the book in which he applies chess principles to politics. He says, “Litvinenko’s murder came on the heels of the Moscow killing of the well-known investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya . . . The killings have turned a spotlight on what the West had assumed was the autocratic but stable Putin regime. Suddenly the foreign media is realizing what we in the Russian opposition have been saying for years—the Kremlin is ever closer to dictatorship than democracy and yet is not stable at all.”

Today was my first day back at work. Since my vacation time was more stressful and strenuous than my job is, I was not any better for the time off. But that’s my own fault. Someday I should take some vacation and just rest.

No, that would be degenerate and un-Haugean (see the link in my previous post).

Nevertheless I shall blog about Høstfest and the Sissel concert. Separate posts, I think. Keep things orderly.

This was the 30th anniversary of the Høstfest (which means Harvest Festival) in Minot. Here you may see the backside of the big “30” in the entryway.

The fellow in the tall hat is Rolf Stang, professional Hans Christian Andersen impersonator. (Also professional Edvard Grieg, Henrik Ibsen and Leif Eriksson impersonator. He only actually resembles one of these characters [Grieg], but he gets away with it, and who am I to criticize?. He’s a friend of the Viking Age Club & Society, so he can impersonate Jenny Lind if he likes, as far as I’m concerned).

Here’s one of the halls, at lunchtime. People are chowing down on rømmegrøt, lefse and Swedish pancakes, but also fried chicken, hamburgers and tacos. Man does not live on traditional Scandinavian fare alone, especially if man is as old as most of the attendees at Høstfest.

Not that there weren’t some young people there. I fell in love (temporarily) several times, with various women young enough to be my daughters. Did not speak to any of them, of course, and didn’t even get any pictures.

The ladies below, in case you’re wondering, are not young enough to be my daughters, but they did have a handsome display of Norwegian rosemaling.

And here’s a nice booth where a violin maker is displaying Hardangerfeler (Hardanger fiddles) for sale. The Hardangerfele is a distinctive Norwegian instrument. It’s double-stringed, with the lower set tuned to produce harmonics. The result is a weird, evocative bagpipe-like sound. My Haugean ancestors believed the Hardangerfele to be an instrument of the devil.

And here’s part of our Viking encampment. The red chest in the middle, as well as the workbench and red shield, is (are) mine.

And yes, I noticed that after all my jokes about people in Norwegian sweaters and cowboy hats, I didn’t come away with a single picture of one of those. You’ll have to take my word for it.

Haugeans never lie.

Bird quotes St. Augustine on watching sad plays, though you could replace the emotion with another one to the same effect. “It was a sign of my desolation that I loved theatrical emotions, and looked for occasions to empathize with fake, impersonated misery.”