Alibris.com, a great network of used and rare bookstores, takes reader reviews now, and they are holding a contest to encourage customers to write their opinions.
Moka.com is launching mBooks, “inspiration, innovation, and education via SMS text-Messages or email.” This appears to be similar to the daily emails I get from delanceyplace.com, an excerpt of the day service.
This is a good week to ask this question. Are you comfortable at rest? Do you feel you have too much to do to stop for several minutes to be quiet, watch the grass grow, listen to the rain?
This “horror story” looks to be both an answer to prayer and call for intercession. May God save Mexico, her children, and Ms. Ribeiro.
It only got up to about fifty today, with cloudy skies, and tonight it’ll rain. It might turn to snow.
See, I told you. The stab isn’t coming in March as I predicted, I grant you, but Madame March just handed the shiv off to Lady April. Lady April is just as villainous as Madame March, and the more dangerous because we trust her more.
In case you were wondering what happened with the police cordon I reported on Friday, it was indeed a serious business. And it ended in tragedy. Though not as awful a tragedy as it might have been.
According to news reports, a man named David Dahlen, previously incarcerated for bank robbery in California, walked into the Four Seasons Mall US Bank in Plymouth, Minnesota (which is next door to my dentist’s office, as it happens) with a gun. It’s unclear whether he left with the money he wanted or not, but he fled the bank and entered a house in the neighborhood. He forced the woman who lived there to leave at gunpoint. She called the police, and they sealed off the area. And waited.
While they waited, trying to contact him, he called his family. Then he put the gun to his chest and shot himself. After some hours the police entered the house and found the body.
It’s a sign of the depravity of our times that a story like that seems almost sweet. Here was a guy with a gun, on the run. The standard procedure for someone in that situation, in recent years, has been to take hostages or just shoot down innocent bystanders.
Robbing a bank is a bad thing. Pointing a gun at innocent people is a bad thing. I don’t want to be misunderstood on that. And I consider suicide a mortal sin.
But this guy had the chance to end his life like a Tarantino movie, and instead he chose to go out like someone in a Bret Harte story. In my book, that wins him a few sympathy points.
How many times have I heard of a hostage or sniper situation in the last few years and thought, “If you want to kill yourself, just kill yourself—don’t murder people who want to live”?
May the Lord have mercy on David Dahlen.
Here’s a link to a video from a Hollywood guy on how liberals think. In short, any kind of values or culture must not be judged better or worse than any other, relatively speaking. Arguments ensue.
More rain today, and it’s supposed to rain even more over the weekend, then snow early next week.
But it’s Friday. I don’t intend to go out any more than I have to over the weekend, anyway.
I stopped for groceries on the way home. A side street at the grocery store intersection had been cordoned off by the police. Cop cars were parked all over. A news helicopter hovered patiently overhead. I don’t know what was going on, but somebody was involved in a life-or-death drama, just a few hundred feet from where I was buying bananas.
It seems wrong, somehow, that we can be utterly oblivious to the sufferings and stresses of our fellow humans, even near at hand. I often remember that episode of Star Trek where Mr. Spock felt a sudden psychic pain when a Vulcan starship exploded.
On the other hand, I have to admit what we’ve got is a mercy—a kind of spiritual and emotional air-lock system. C.S. Lewis pointed out in The Problem of Pain that, by God’s kindness, the greatest amount of pain that can exist in the universe is limited to the greatest amount that one individual can endure. That may be a lot of pain, but there is no accumulation of common suffering.
There’s been some “buzz” around the blogosphere about the proposal in the Minnesota State Legislature to make the Tilt-A-Whirl the Official State Carnival Ride. The proposal was made by a representative from Faribault, where the Tilt-A-Whirl was invented and continues to be manufactured.
Let me state for the record that, as a person born in Faribault myself, I fully support this initiative, and indeed any initiative intended to promote anything or anyone originating in Faribault (pronounced “Fair-boe”).
I plan, in fact, to petition to have myself named Official Minnesota Washed-Up Midlist Author.
I have less than nothing to say tonight. Anything I said would actually reduce the sum of public knowledge, just as a carbon credit is supposed to reduce global warming (but doesn’t).
Gleaned from a comment at Luther At the Movies: Scenes from Luther’s life done in Legos! That’s what I call culture!
For Aitchmark and other cat-lovers: This piece by Austrialian writer Hal G. P. Colebatch on cats in literature.
Sorry, that’s all I’ve got. Wake me when it’s summer.
Today is a rainy day, cool but not cold. My lawn is starting to green up.
I still expect another snowfall before spring.
I meant to post the pictures below on Monday, but was prevented for reasons explained yesterday. Then I figured I’d better review the Barnitz book while its memory remained fresh (memories go bad faster than ripe bananas for me these days). So I left it to today to report on my big weekend project.
The Vikings had two kinds of swords. One, called a sverd, was a double-edged, one-handed broadsword. The other was similar to the sverd, but had only one cutting edge. This somewhat cheaper sword was called a saex (or seax, or sax). There was also a shorter version called a scramasax, which was used as a utility knife, chef’s knife and backup weapon. A few weeks ago I bought this replica scramasax on eBay:
The knife itself is pretty decent. It appears to be a copy of a 7th Century Frankish scramasax presently located in the Cleveland Museum of Art (which I’ve visited, years back—great arms and armor collection). A knife like that is kind of early for my own Viking “impression,” but it wasn’t uncommon for weapons to be passed down from generation to generation.
The main problem with this knife, and the reason, I suspect, why the guy on eBay is selling them off cheap, is the sheath that comes with it. This sheath’s first sin is the black leather, which is something all serious reenactors eschew. It seems the Vikings did not blacken their leather.
Secondly, the sheath has too narrow a “collar.” The collar is important in a knife hung horizontally (in the Viking manner), because you need to hold it in the sheath with friction, as you can’t depend on gravity. But this sheath’s collar is too narrow to allow the knife to be completely sheathed. The guard comes up against it and is too big to squeeze inside. The only way to use this sheath is to slit the collar’s closed side, creating a pair of “wings” on either side that hold the knife only loosely. Since the knife is grip-heavy, this makes it prone to slipping out, especially in the action of live steel.
So I made a sheath of my own. It looks like this:
I’m pretty happy with it. It’s tight enough to hold the scramasax securely, and the rear belt loop is far enough toward the collar to make it hang pretty straight. You’ll note that the knife is suspended with the cutting edge upward in this configuration, but that’s something many reenactment groups prefer, or even insist on. It has the advantage of putting the weight down on the knife’s spine, which then doesn’t cut into the bottom of the sheath (an academic point here, since I gelded the blade for live steel use). And it’s no problem to draw that way, because it’s worn behind the back.
My real innovation is the shape of the collar. Instead of it being cut straight across, it’s cut at an angle. This wasn’t the result of a plan, but of the shape of the piece of scrap leather I was using. Once it was done, though, I found I rather liked it. It has a humped, whale-backed appearance that looks very Scandinavian to me.
Probably wouldn’t be approved by the English reenactors, though. But I already know the English reenactors would laugh my impression off the field.
My vengeance, needless to say, would be terrible to behold, but that would be bad for transatlantic relations.
If today’s weather were a meal, I wouldn’t be able to afford the restaurant where they serve it.
It’s 65° right now, and tomorrow’s supposed to be even nicer. When I took my evening walk, it seemed like everybody else in the community had the same idea. Pasty-faced Minnesotans were crawling out of their lairs, blinking in the sunlight, and stretching themselves like badgers (Gophers would be more appropriate, since the badger is Wisconsin’s animal, but badger sounds better).
Life felt good.
Which, of course, it isn’t.
I don’t do much politics here, with good reason, but I’d like to go on record with the opinion that the Islamists have now been notified that they can have anything in the world they want, including the full submission of the United States to Sharia law, if they remain ruthless enough for long enough.
I’m sure the American left will be perfectly content to watch their gay friends being stoned to death, just as long as we’re not at war. The important thing is not to be at war.
My big question is, once Islam has conquered the world, and the only war left is the one between Sunnis and Shiites, which side will the left support?
I’m a slave of mutabilitie, as Chaucer might have put it. One e-mail, and all of a sudden my attitude changes and the world looks brighter.
The e-mail to which I refer is one I got this afternoon, from a woman representing the local chapter of the Nordmanns Forbundet, a Norwegian-American friendship organization I once actually belonged to (though in Florida). They had a speaker cancellation for their April meeting, and she wondered if I could take the gig at short notice. She’d met me when I spoke to a Sons of Norway group in St. Paul last year.
Somebody needs me! I regard myself with scorn in my mind’s eye, saying, “You pathetic loser. Somebody shows you a little attention and you wag your tail like a dog.”
Yeah, I do. Having no self-esteem of my own, I depend entirely on outside reinforcement for my satisfaction.
I think my depression the last few days may have been a symptom of an unconscious feeling of closure. I’ve always considered my lecturing career a sort of dragging appendage of my novel writing, like a long tail. I’ve basically stopped advertising myself as a lecturer since I lost my publisher, so I’d figured the Owatonna gig on Monday was the final shot. The last gasp of the tail end of my life as an author.
But now it’s OK, at least until the middle of April. I’m not quite gone yet.
A second consideration is that it pays an honorarium, which will help with my ongoing financial crisis. It occurs to me that this is one of God’s methods of providing for me on a One Day At A Time basis, just like the Bible says.
I’m always hesitant to talk too loud about these manna deliveries. I don’t want to sound like one of those enthusiasts who gets a smile from a girl and decides it’s God’s will that he marry her, or has a cancer remission and loudly proclaims he’s been completely healed forever. Guh-lory!
So I sin in the opposite direction, denying God the praise He deserves.
But today I’m giving credit where credit is due.
Did I do good, God? Huh? Huh?