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?

Sitting in bed in the dark, Calvin says, “Sometimes at night I worry about things and then I can’t fall asleep. In the dark, it’s easier to imagine awful possibilities that you’d never be prepared for. And it’s hard to feel couragious in loose-fitting, drowsy bear jammies.”

Hobbes replies, “That’s why tigers sleep in the buff!”

I just found this search website of Calvin & Hobbes comics and some other popular cartoons. I don’t see how copyright allows for this.

(More of Calvin’s wisdom: “What good is originality if you can’t crank it out?”)

Emily Karr writes for NRO:

And it isn’t just the God-fearin’ folk [Philip Pullman] finds frightening—he duly recognizes the atheistic USSR as one of the most cruel and effective theocracies in history. In an essay in the Guardian, he explains that “the real division is not between those states that are secular, and therefore democratic, and those that are religious, and therefore totalitarian. . . . You don’t need a belief in God to have a theocracy.” It’s no coincidence that he often refers to the poseur-God who is murdered in his trilogy as “the Authority,” for it is the enforcement of any authority he despises more than God. His opinion of Catholics who take offense at his book? “Nitwits,” he says.

One is tempted to write a book with a main character named “Philip Pullman,” described with his background and vital statistics, then replace his personality with that of a power-hungry tyrant who kidnaps and slaughters children to further his own goals. Perhaps go so far as to make the literary “Philip Pullman” responsible for the enormity of pain and suffering in the world. If he objects, call him a nitwit for failing to see the deeper meaning in your work.

As long as I have a post idea I haven’t used yet, I feel rich in material. What I always forget is that my idea bench is usually about one player deep.

I’d been meaning to do a post about how Christians have gone from complaining about the commercialization of Christmas to complaining about being left out of the holidays entirely, for some time. Last night I used it, and tonight I find myself swept and garnished of topics.

Which won’t stop me from posting. I’ll just write about myself. Haven’t tried that in, oh, a day or two.



I’m in the midst of a Christmas card crisis. I’m one of those tedious people who send a Christmas letter with their cards, and I have an annual protocol for it. First I write the letter. Then I translate it into Norwegian, so I can send it to my friends and relatives in the Old Country first, since mail takes longer to get there.

An indispensable tool for me over the years, in setting those letters in Norwegian, has been a book I acquired (oddly enough) during my sojourn in Florida. It’s an English-Norwegian dictionary, where you can look up the word in English and find the Norwegian equivalent (“Boat,” for instance, is “båt.” “Tree” is “tre” [which also stands in for “wood.”]. Squirrel, oddly enough, is “ekorn” in Norwegian. I’m not kidding).

But this year I’m being handicapped by the complete disappearance of my dictionary. It ought to be somewhere right around here by the computer, since I always leave things where I last used them, and never straighten the desk up. But I’ve been through all the piles and it’s nowhere.

I blame the elves (“nisser” in Norwegian).



Speaking of Norwegian, I see that my PBS station is broadcasting the new musical production, “Northern Lights: An Evening With Sissel” tonight. Chances are your PBS station is broadcasting it too, one of these nights, during the sacred Pledge season. I’m no great booster of PBS, but this is your chance to discover why I’ve been promoting this woman all these years. I expect you to watch it. You will be tested on the material.

The timing was spot on. In my mental calendar, November is a cool month that’s all about Thanksgiving. December is a white, snowy month that’s all about Christmas. So on the selfsame day that I turned the calendar page, the Frost Giants dropped four inches of heavenly sugar on us, like theater techies lowering the “Winter Scene” backdrop from the flyspace over the year’s stage, right on cue.

But four inches was all it was. No mighty blizzard. Commerce did not cease. Schools wouldn’t have closed if it had been a weekday (probably some would have been delayed, but they wouldn’t have closed).

It did keep me from doing any Christmas shopping. The roads were kind of slick, and as you know, one of my secret shames is that Mrs. Hermanson, my Chevy Tracker, does not actually have operative four wheel drive.

I did go out, though, to my regular Chinese buffet. The Guangzhou Restaurant in Robbinsdale has become my steady Saturday lunch venue. Their buffet is not extensive, but it’s good food, and not expensive. And now they know me, and pretty much expect me. I’ve achieved the status of “regular.” They don’t actually know my name, but I have a regular booth.

It’s not hard to have a regular booth on Saturdays at the Guangzhou. I think they do a pretty fair weekday business, but on Saturdays I’m sometimes the only one around. If I don’t show up, I think of all that food going to waste, and I feel guilty. (Not that most of it doesn’t go to waste even if I do show up. Even I don’t eat that much.)

But I didn’t drive there. That is silly on the face of it, I know. All summer, when the walking was easy, I drove to the restaurant. Saturday, when the arctic wind was blowing and snow was piling up, I trudged through the drifts. This was because, aside from the minimal danger of dying of exposure, my feet were more dependable than my slightly bald tires would have been on the streets that day.

I think I’ll walk to the restaurant more often in the future.

Starting next spring.

Via Mirabilis: You know that Gospel of Judas that National Geographic made a big production of last year? The one that suggested that Judas was actually following Jesus’ instructions in betraying him, and was a great saint in Heaven?

Never mind.

Turns out it was just a bad translation.

Could happen to anybody, right? Who among us has not promoted a major TV special and sponsored a national promotional campaign on the basis of a quick-and-dirty, slanted translation?

You don’t imagine there was any agenda here, do you? Is it possible that some people at NG jumped the gun on publication and fact-checking because they had an ax to grind against Christianity?

No, no. Forget I suggested it.

I went to my Viking Age Club & Society meeting tonight (the snow isn’t expected till sometime in the morning–maybe not even till the afternoon).

Anyway, I took the exit from Hiawatha Ave. onto Lake Street in Minneapolis. And there, on a corner in the underpass, stood a guy with one of those hand-lettered cardboard signs. It said:

NEEDED:

1. WHISKEY

2. STRIPPER

3. CHEAP HOTEL ROOM

Full marks for honesty to that fellow. (No, I didn’t give him anything.)

At the meeting, members of the club gave me a Christmas gift, which was entirely unexpected. It was a copy of the new Sissel Christmas CD, in concert with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. I have it on the stereo at this moment, and it’s lovely.

It’s also autographed.

Just when I think I’ve got the world figured out, somebody’s nice to me. Sheesh.