Legendary French mime Marcel Marceau is dead.

All over France he will be memorialized today with a moment of talking.

It looked like a re-play of last night as I drove home. The sun had been shining, but now clouds were driving in, dusty-looking and gray as the contents of a vacuum cleaner bag.

So I canceled my evening walk. And then the sky cleared up. I should walk now, but I’m washing clothes, and I just ate, and… well, I’m lazy.

Tomorrow we’re going to have live steel combat practice at a Viking Age Society member’s farm down near Mankato. The weather’s predicted to be good.

And it gives me an excuse to put off maintenance chores around here.

I read this via Gaius at Blue Crab Boulevard: Jesse Macbeth, who made himself famous by “confessing” to Iraq war crimes, admitted in court today that he is “a fake and a liar.”

The Left tried this game back during the Vietnam years too and, sadly, the mainstream media didn’t have anybody to check their work back then.

Nice to know that some things have gotten better over the years.

Jesse Macbeth should pay more than spending five months in jail, though. He should be tried for treason.

I was, frankly, a draft avoider back in the Vietnam days (long story—I just didn’t think I’d make a very good soldier). But even I was angry then—and remain angry today—over the way our soldiers in that war were robbed of their honor.

Nobody pays a higher price for service to their country than soldiers. Most of them don’t really want to kill, and none of them want to die, but they do what must be done, in part, because they trust that the people at home will honor their sacrifice.

I don’t care if you think America is the equivalent of Nazi Germany. If some German made up false stories about Wehrmacht atrocities in World War II, I think he should be tried for treason too.

Warriors are special. We owe a debt to our warriors. A society can get along without almost any profession. But warriors will always be necessary, and will always deserve special veneration from those of us who sit safe at home.

Can’t post much of anything tonight. I drove home in snake-floating rain, liberally mixed with hail, and a minute after I got into the house, the power went out, where it stayed until about fifteen minutes ago. This left me unable to do much of anything, except read Andrew Klavan’s Hunting Down Amanda by candlelight. Now I’ve got stuff to catch up on. See you tomorrow.

I occasionally think about writing personal posts, but I usually avoid it. You don’t want to hear about me, and if you do, maybe I don’t want you to hear about me. It’s probably just my selfishness, which is why I could never be The Next Food Network Star–along with other, larger reasons. Anyway, I may write something personal later this week.

So, Lars was talking about actors a few days ago (Garage door blues), and coincidentally Delancey Place quotes from one of those odd books which lends support to the notion that there are books about everything. Wait, it’s an article, not a book. Still there are books about everything out there, such as The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification and Better Never To Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence. But to the point of this post–Delancey Place quotes Laurence Olivier on his stage fright: “Olivier wrote of his famous performance in ‘Othello,’ ‘I had to beg my Iago, Frank Finlay, not to leave the stage when I had to be left alone for a soliloquy, but to stay in the wings downstage where I could see him, since I feared I might not be able to stay there in front of the audience by myself.'”

Just when you think some guys have it all together.

My burning question for supporters of nationalized health care:

If the U.S. adopts a single-payer health care system, where are the Canadians going to go for surgery, if they don’t want to wait a decade for a bypass?

You hate Canadians, don’t you? Don’t you?

Yeah, I know it’s “Talk Like a Pirate Day.” Why should I care? I talk like a Viking every day.

Somebody came out with a book a while back (I won’t bother to link to it) that claimed to document homosexual behavior as very common among pirates. I have no reason to doubt that. Men who stay at sea for long periods of time, with no access to women, very frequently turn to sodomy. This goes for men in prison and (formerly) boys in English public schools too. It would be ridiculous to maintain that all those guys (who generally turned back to heterosexuality as soon as women were available) were “born to be gay.”

Which brings us to this piece by S. T. Karnick about an article in (of all places) Mother Jones, questioning the idea that sexual identity is fixed. Cracks are beginning to appear in the homosexual ideological wall. So don’t give up the ship.

(Which is not pirate talk. It’s U.S. Navy talk.)

The weather forecast called for severe storms this morning. They did not appear, though the special effects guys painted the sky for it. We expect some precipitation tonight or tomorrow, and possibly some Thor’s Hammer action too. But so far it’s been just an oddly warm day for September, with the humidity high.

I’ve been e-mailing with the Youngest Niece in China, and I told her I spent yesterday afternoon sewing a new leather cover on one of my Viking sword sheaths. She asked for details and pictures (for some reason), and I figure that as long as I’m taking pictures I might as well use them here too (however arcane and boring the subject matter) thus killing two birds with one sword.

Actually, two swords.

Here’s a picture of my Viking swords and their sheaths. Neither of them is expensive or meticulously authentic, but they look pretty good if you don’t examine them too closely. My new leather covers are meant to improve that impression.

The top sword represents a late Viking sword, the kind Erling Skjalgsson might have had. If you’ve read The Year of the Warrior, there’s a scene where Erling explains why he prefers his new Frankish sword to his father’s heirloom sword (superior steel from Germany had become available). This is the sort of thing Erling was talking about. You’ll note that it’s a little broader at the hilt end, with more taper than the other sword. This is my “show sword,” the one I ordinarily wear with my costume.

The sword below is a Paul Chen Practical Viking Sword (Third Generation). It’s an earlier design, fairly common in England and Scandinavia. This is an intentionally blunt sword, meant for theatrical use and live steel combat.

I re-covered the lower sheath last Sunday, and the upper sheath yesterday.

I’d never been happy with the sheath on my show sword. It’s a cheap-o from a catalog that sells a fairly broad range of sword qualities. The sheath came with a rectangular cross-section, which was another indicator of cost-cutting. A sharp oval cross-section is more authentic. The Paul Chen, which was actually less expensive, came with a much nicer oval sheath. But then it was made in China, under conditions I don’t care to think about.

So the first thing I did was put a new cover on the Paul Chen. No work on the sheath itself was necessary. The original sheath came in beautifully finished wood, but I’m pretty brutal with my swords, chucking them in the back of the Tracker and driving them around where they rub up against stuff, so it was getting scuffed up.

A friend in the Viking Age Society had explained to me how to sew leather on a sheath. I had assumed it involved either gluing it or soaking it and letting it shrink, but he explained that what I needed to do was cut the leather to size, but leave a gap along the edges, so that the two long edges don’t touch when wrapped around the sheath.

Then you poke or punch holes along both edges, and sew them together, pulling the stitches up tight to stretch the leather. When you’re done, you have a nice tight cover.

I was pleased with the results on the Paul Chen, so I resolved to do the same with the show sword. I knew this would be harder, but I hoped that I could plane or sand the edges down to get something closer to the oval cross-section I wanted.

This proved to be impossible without actually re-building the sheath. It turned out that the pieces of the sheath had been secured with a number of tiny little nails which were not kind to my tools. So I did the best I could to round them, and had to be content with that.

This had consequences. The leather didn’t stretch as well around those flattish edges as they had around the sharp oval of the Paul Chen. But the result wasn’t awful. I can live with it.

You’ll note that the center seam is especially off-center on the show sword. I think the reason for that was that I worked almost all the way from one side, so every time I pulled the thread up tight, I tugged the whole seam toward me. Next time I do this I’ll try to change sides regularly.

You’ll also note that I put a “collar” at the top of the show sword sheath. This wasn’t to make it fancier. It was to cover a section where the leather ran out in a way I hadn’t planned.

Maybe one day I’ll go all the way and actually build a proper Viking sheath (that would involve, among other things, lining it on the inside with fleece, to protect and oil the blade). But for now I’ve slightly improved my impression and it didn’t cost me much.

I don’t have much for you tonight. I had internet connection problems, which threw me behind schedule. But I’ve got a YouTube link here. This was done by a youth group at a Pentecostal church called Livets Tabernakel (Tabernacle of Life) in Oslo, Norway. It’s not as great as it thinks it is, but blast it, there’s little enough good coming out of Norway. I want to encourage them.

James Lileks says he doesn’t like the weather today. I ought to agree with him, since in general my rule is “the warmer the better,” but I have to say I like days like today. Cool and bright.

I remember coming back to Minnesota for a vacation back when I was living in Florida. I went to a movie with my brother Moloch, and we were walking back to the car. (This was actually in Iowa, now I think of it.) It was fall, a cool day, almost chilly, but the sun shone on us. And I thought, “This never happens in Florida. In Florida, if the sun is shining, it’s hot. If it’s cold (a rare thing, but it happens), it pretty much has to be overcast.” I thought, “This is nice weather, and I’ll almost never see anything like it as long as I live in Florida.” And for some reason that seemed to me very sad.

So now I’m here again, and I’m enjoying my early fall day. My afternoon constitutionals call for a sweatshirt, and that’s really the best way to do a walk, I think we can all agree.

I think I’ll handle the looming prospect of approaching winter with denial this year. I’ll try to convince myself that, what with all this global warming and stuff, it’ll just be like a beautiful autumn day all the time until April.

I note from looking at our blog stats that most of our casual visitors come looking for the pictures I post from time to time. So I’ll post a picture tonight. But, to keep the riff-raff out, it’ll be the kind of picture that brings in the fewest Googlers: one of my family photo scans.

This is a picture of my great-grandfather, Hans (seated), and some of his numerous children. It was probably taken in the early 1950s.

The tall fellow at the upper right is my grandfather, Jack. The fellow on the left end is (if I remember correctly) his brother Peter. The others, I’m pretty sure, are some of the sisters, but I couldn’t put names on them for you. It’s been too long, and I never knew them well.

I actually knew old Hans, slightly, when I was very small. He died in 1957. He was born in 1862. It sometimes amazes me that I knew an ancestor who went that far back in history. He was born in Denmark and immigrated in the 1880s. According to what my mother told me, he left his wife and two kids in Denmark, promising to send for them when he’d saved the money, but never “got around to it.” So eventually she came over on money lent by her brother, who’d already come to America, and just showed up on Hans’ doorstep. One can imagine his delight.

I wonder if she came to regret it herself in time. Hans was (I suppose it’s a sin to speak thus of an ancestor) a man of whom nobody I ever met had a single good thing to say (except that he mellowed when he got old, and too weak to bully anyone). He drank heavily and brutalized his children. Grandpa told me, “I got a whipping every day when I was a boy. My father said that if he didn’t know of anything to whip me for, there was bound to be something he didn’t know about that deserved a whipping.” By all accounts my grandfather was Hans’ least favorite child, and he got the worst of a situation that was pretty much a snake pit to begin with.

I trace my own dysfunction back to Hans. He started (or passed on) a sequence of abuse that dominoed down to me in time.

When I get around to upgrading some of my ancestors, Hans is one of the first I’ll trade in.