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.

It came out OK with the garage door. Sort of. I guess.

The repair guy showed up on time on Saturday a.m., and he knew what he was doing. Instead of employing arcane, specialized tools to get the door open, as I expected, he used a lever and brute force. Then he informed me that nothing was actually broken. The bolt on a pulley had worked loose, and everything had flown apart. He put it all together, added a locking nut, oiled the rollers, and tightened the bolts. It now hangs much higher when it’s opened (meaning I can put the antenna on Mrs. Hermanson up a little higher, enabling me to hear AM 1280 The Patriot for maybe five minutes longer when I’m driving out of town), and everything runs more smoothly. It cost me on the low side of what I feared it might cost.

He also warned me that it’s an old door, and when (not if) something does break someday, they may not be able to find replacement parts.

I feel like that most days, myself.

So I was able to head out to Montevideo (no, I’m not kidding you. There really is a town called Montevideo in Minnesota. It’s over on the west side. We pronounce the name wrong, though) shortly after lunch. My recently purchased car compass proved its value when I missed an exit and realized, at length, that I was on the wrong road. I knew, however, that I was going in the right direction, so it was no big deal.

If you don’t live in the American Midwest, you may not be aware that our roads are mostly laid out on a grid—north/south roads intersecting with east/west ones. So all I had to do was turn north (it involved a detour, but everything does in Minnesota this time of year) to get back to my original course.

It was a small town journey, traveling what William Not-So-Hot Moon calls “blue highways,” under a cloudy sky that spit on me occasionally. I was in a mood to drive the speed limit, since I’d seen a highway patrolman ticketing a driver early in the journey. This led, as is so often the case, to a number of cars piling up behind me. I solved that problem by turning into a lot in one of the towns, waiting for the parade to pass me, and then pulling in again at their rear.

I arrived just in time for the wedding, said hello to some of the relations, and got seated with them. I made it through the ceremony without making a spectacle of myself, which I like to think was a pretty good achievement.

It was, I think, the biggest wedding I’d ever seen. There were eight (8) bridesmaids and eight (8) groomsmen. Two (2) flower girls, and two (2) ring bearers. I was half expecting Ruby Keeler and Dick Powell to conduct the ceremony.

Ruby Keeler and Dick Powell appeared in musicals during the Depression, which provides an elegant transition to a description of my mood that day. Weddings are like a perfect depression cocktail for me—you’ve got your happy couple enjoying the long-awaited day that I’ve been awaiting a heck of a lot longer and have given up on now. You’ve got your attractive young women, who were unreachable for me even when I was young, and haven’t come any closer with the years. You’ve got your crowd of people with whom I am expected to interact pleasantly, when I just want to run away.

I do my best. I honestly do. If people knew the things I want to say, and the faces I want to pull, they’d know that my sullen, mumbled conversation and my stone-faced, eye-contact-avoiding aspect are actually the results of considerable effort, and a genuine act of brotherly kindness.

Not that that buys me anything.

But the relatives know there’s something wrong with me, so they put up with it. My uncle and aunt (grandparents of the groom) talked to me for a while in their nearby house, and sent me off loaded down with caramel rolls and Special K Bars, when I opted to skip the reception dinner.

What was really embarrassing was that the aunt from California, whom I came to see, wasn’t there, and hadn’t even planned to be there. I’d entirely misunderstood the information I’d been given.

Still, any social event attended by me which doesn’t end with the deployment of SWAT teams and hostage negotiators can’t be called a complete disaster.

Uff da, as we Norwegians say. I got home from work tonight, parked my car in the garage, lowered the garage door, and—snap!—the thing suddenly gave way and dropped like my spirits will, once I see the bill I’m going to get tomorrow. Can’t get the door open again, needless to say, and there is no side door. So I called a 24-hour garage door service place, and they’ll send a guy out tomorrow morning.

Hopefully my car will be free in time for me to drive up to Montevideo (we have a town called Montevideo in Minnesota, believe it or not) for the wedding I’m supposed to attend tomorrow.

Of course if they can’t get it out in time, that will give me an excuse not to attend. Which, all in all, I’d prefer. Hate weddings. But my aunt from California will be there, and her health is failing, and it may be the last chance I get to see her, so I promised I’d be there.

If I have a car I can get to.

That’s all the original material I’ve got tonight. I borrowed the following meme from Grim’s Hall:

1. Name a movie you’ve seen more than 10 times.

The Outlaw Josie Wales, as I mentioned a few days ago. Probably The Three Musketeers (the Richard Lester version). I don’t think I’ve seen any of the Lord of the Rings trilogy ten times yet, but it must be getting close.



2. Name a movie you’ve seen multiple times in the theater.

Same answer.

3. Name an actor who would make you more inclined to see a movie.

Sam Elliot. Can’t think of anyone else. Robert Duvall, maybe. There was a time when Clint Eastwood would have been at the top of the list, but that time is long past.

4. Name an actor who would make you less likely to see a movie.

Sean Penn. George Clooney. Angelina Jolie. Dabney Coleman. (And if you think there’s a political subtext to most of those choices, you’re perceptive.)

5. Name a movie that you can and do quote from.

The Outlaw Josie Wales. Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

6. Name a movie musical, to which you know all the lyrics to all of the songs.

Camelot, because I was in it once (played Mordred, if you insist on knowing).

7. Name a movie with which you’ve been known to sing along.

Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

8. Name a movie you would recommend everyone see.

Local Hero (though I can’t guarantee everyone will like it).

9. Name a movie you own.

You mean the DVD? Not a lot. Josie Wales. Once Upon a Time in the West. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. The Lord of the Rings, extended edition. The Vikings with K. Douglas and T. Curtis…

10. Name an actor that launched his/her entertainment career in another medium but who has surprised you with his/her acting chops.

Can’t think of one.



11. Have you ever seen a movie in a drive-in? If so, what?

Several. I’m old enough. The first movie I ever saw was in a drive-in—Around the World in 80 Days with David Niven. My family saw it on a visit to my uncle and his family in Poughkeepsie, New York.

12. Ever made out in a movie?

What is this “making out” of which you speak?

13. Name a movie that you keep meaning to see but just haven’t yet gotten around to it.

Amazing Grace.

14. Ever walked out of a movie?

Not that I recall.



15. Name a movie that made you cry in the theater.

I must have teared up at some point in The Return of the King. Not sure, though.

16. Popcorn?

With butter.

17. How often do you go to the movies (as opposed to renting them or watching them at home)?

Almost never anymore.

18. What’s the last movie you saw in the theater?

I think it was Stranger Than Fiction, which is pathetic (my movie attendance, not the movie).

19. What’s your favorite/preferred genre of movie?

Action, I guess. I like a good fantasy, but there are so few.

20. What’s the first movie you remember seeing in the theater?

The Ten Commandments. My parents warned us not to tell our grandmother, who didn’t approve of movies.

21. What movie do you wish you had never seen?

Beowulf and Grendel.

22. What is the weirdest movie you enjoyed?

Magnolia, maybe.

23. What is the scariest movie you’ve seen?

I guess it was the original Alien.

24. What is the funniest movie you’ve seen?

The movie I remember laughing at most was The Return of the Pink Panther.

Movies fascinate me. I’m interested in what’s playing, what’s being made, who’s making them, who’s in them, and what they’re about.

I just can’t be bothered to go out and see them anymore.

Michael Medved says 3:10 to Yuma is a great traditional western, though. Maybe I’ll see that. Depends on how much the garage door people soak me for.

Wait. IMDB doesn’t list Sam Elliot as a cast member.

Isn’t there a law against that?

This is cool. I’m reading JXIIH’s novel, The Dark River, the sequel to The Traveler, and just finished a part describing free runners in London. “Ever hear of the Vast Machine?” one of the London characters asks. “It’s the computer systen that watches us with scanner programs and surveillance cameras. The Free Runners refuse to be part of the Vast Machine. We run above it all.”

Now I see an article on an actual free runner climbing walls and jumping between buildings. “Free running,” reports Brendan O’Neill, “or ‘le parkour,’ its original French name, is all about overcoming obstacles.” Sadly, these men and women give themselves to overcoming constructed obstacles when real, harder obstacles abound, but I don’t really blame them. I do the same thing in a quieter way.

First of all, a Philistine update. I think we can all agree that it’s a sad commentary on our times that so little attention gets paid to the Philistines anymore.

This item from Mirabilis reinforces, I think, my contention that the Samson story in the Book of Judges was not intended to provide a role model for us all (see my previous post about him here, which generated some controversy in Comments). Archaeologists have learned, according to this article, that the Philistines were regular consumers of pork and dog meat.

We already know that Samson broke his Nazirite vows by touching the carcass of a lion. It now appears probable that during all those Philistine banquets he intended, he ate pork and dog meat.

Like a knife in his mother’s heart, I’ll bet.

My view of Samson is that he’s an example of a guy who was given great gifts by God, but wasted them on his own passions and pleasures. A cautionary tale, a typological picture of Israel, but not a story for emulation.

Speaking of misusing your gifts, I found a very weird story from Poland by way of the New Zealand Herald. Ever wonder whether the people who come up with those grisly scenarios in the crime thrillers might not be a little twisted themselves, a little corrupted in their souls?

Apparently, at least one of them was. (Hat tip: World Views.)

So think twice before you attend your next book signing.

I know for a fact that every time a pagan deity materializes or the space-time continuum is violated in my neighborhood, the police put me under surveillance.