The Navy Hymn
Eternal Father, strong to save,
Whose arm hath bound the restless wave,
Who bidd’st the mighty ocean deep
Its own appointed limits keep;
Oh, hear us when we cry to Thee,
For those in peril on the sea!
Going Home
Loch Rannoch
Category Archives: Uncategorized
What I did on my summer vacation
I’m taking a week of vacation this week. So far I haven’t done much, except get started with my second summer grad school class, about which more anon.
[Isn’t “anon” a wonderful word? Evocative, useful, and likely to get you punched in the face if you ever speak it in real life.]
Anyway, the City of Robbinsdale made a point of messing with my schedule. Last week I got notice that they were going to turn the water off in my neighborhood from 9:00 to 4:00 on Monday, weather permitting, to work on infrastructure, whatever that is. So I planned for the shut-off, and then it rained all day. Thus the great California Emulation was moved to today.
Now I don’t know about you, but I’m reluctant to spend seven hours in a place without a working toilet. So I determined to go somewhere where clean and sober transients are welcome, and toilets are plentiful – America’s most pointless tourist attraction, the Mall of America.
I haven’t used my cane in weeks, but I brought it with me today, knowing I’d be walking more than I have for more than a year. I hobbled around and rested at intervals, and made it through OK.
I hadn’t been to the Mall in years. I was surprised at how boring I found it. Perhaps it’s old age, and being out of touch with the times, but I saw little that didn’t look to me like fashion-driven, disposable gimcrackery. I suppose I felt some kind of Puritan snobbery, a judgmentalism that comes from a place less than virtuous. But I didn’t see the point. Continue reading What I did on my summer vacation
How to Speak Middle English
Death of an Avenger
Yesterday was notable, aside from a Supreme Court decision with which I strongly disagree, in seeing the death of a man who has been a major influence on my life (and who probably wouldn’t have been at all pleased to know it, from what I know of his social views).
Patrick Macnee (1922-2015) is best remembered as the only permanent star of what I consider one of the greatest TV series ever produced, the BBC series The Avengers (not to be confused with the Marvel Comics books and movies). The Avengers appeared on American TV just as I was entering an uncomfortable adolescence, and left me with an enduring love for slender, auburn-haired women (Diana Rigg), and three-piece suits (Macnee).
Yes, it was a breakthrough show for a trope I’m now thoroughly sick of – the delicate little woman who beats up 200-lb men in groups – but it was new and interesting back then, and hey, it was Diana Rigg. I was desperately in love with her.
The show was not intended to be what it eventually became, the spritely, half-comic show we remember. It started in 1961 as a gritty, realistic program. It was a spin-off of a series called Police Surgeon, starring actor Ian Hendry. In the first episode of The Avengers, his character, Dr. David Keel, loses his fiancée, murdered by drug dealers. He is recruited by a shadowy semi-official character named John Steed (Macnee) to help him apprehend the criminals. Keel signs on enthusiastically (it’s his way to “avenge” the woman he loved), but is often put off by the ruthless methods of Steed, who at this stage was as much a thug as a charmer, and had no distinctive style of dress. Continue reading Death of an Avenger
If I smell strangely of herring today…
It’s because I got a mention at Tony Sacramone’s Strange Herring blog.
Needless to say, I bought it, along with a pristine copy of Wolf Time, as mine is a mess from frequent use. I announced proudly that I “knew” the author, Lars Walker. Gary seemed impressed, and added that the books were now long out of print, betokening some knowledge of Lars’s work.
Read the rest here.
Technology Is For the Family
Matthew Murphy paid attention the last time he rode Disney’s Carousel of Progress, and he noticed something more than the air-conditioning.
“I learned from the ride that Mr. Disney did admire technological progress, but not exclusively. In fact Mr. Disney thought that technology could make life better for the family. . . . He hoped technology would improve family life, not destroy it, and his company sought to strike that balance between technological progress and the institutions that define humanity.”
Learn Better Handwriting
Learning better handwriting from a calligrapher. I’d like to have better cursive writing, but all of my bad habits have been congealed by playing the journalist.
Must Art Be a Gigantic Effort?
Peter Crawley asks, “Does art have to be such hard work? A laborious investment of blood, sweat, tears and occasionally some writing?”
“While working for the post office,” he says, “Anthony Trollope would write before his shift began, from 5.30 to 8.30 each morning, requiring exactly 250 words every 15 minutes. If he finished one novel before 8.30 am, he immediately began another. ‘Let [the artists’] work be to them as is his common work to the common labourer,’ Trollope said. ‘No gigantic efforts will then be necessary.'”
His readers didn’t think so. They were outraged that Trollope may be closer to a hack than what they imagined him to be, a long-suffering saint of the arts.
The Freedom That Undermines Itself
“Universities are addicted to censorship, and the Department of Education is their partner and enabler.”
David French writes about Title IX and students who have sued to restrict the statements of their professor. There he explains the ramifications of modern liberalism, which is self-destructive in the sense that it undermines the principles at purports to celebrate. In another article, he explains what happened at Northwestern University when a feminist professor wrote in favor of student/teacher relationships.
“Two students filed Title IX complaints against her, claiming that she’d violated federal law with her essay and a subsequent tweet. In essence, they were claiming that her writings on matters of public concern constituted unlawful gender discrimination.” More than that, they complained when others shared their complaints and spoke in favor of academic freedom.
While there is a huge, stinking pile of liberalism in this squabble, one of the lessons is the real threat to students in American universities like Northwestern. If they want to believe that love is what you make it, then they’ll have to realize they have kicked down all of the fences. All of them. The students have no grounds for complaint against a professor who supports sexual license, but if they idea scares them, they need to get out and reconsider their own self-destructive ideas.
Remembering Carl
“Chicken Eggs 29563-360×480 (4899748717)” by Emilian Robert Vicol from Com. Balanesti, Romania – Chicken Eggs_29563-360×480. Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
For no conceivable reason, I’ve decided to relate another childhood memory, something I haven’t done here in a while.
I grew up on a farm outside Kenyon, a small town in southeast Minnesota. We operated what they now call a “diversified agricultural operation,” which means we grew and raised whatever we could think of that would earn back worth the trouble.
One of the things we raised was chickens. I’m not sure how many we had; maybe about a hundred; probably less. The numbers fluctuated, I’m sure. In any case, one of the daily chores was to “pick the eggs,” to gather them from the box nests we had for them in the chicken coop. I have breathed a lot of powdered chicken manure in my time; it accumulated on the floor and we just walked on it. It dried fairly quickly. A doctor told me I have a spot on one lung that’s common in people who’ve worked with chickens; it might come from those days.
After the eggs were gathered in a pail, we took them into the house and down to the basement. There we would wash them in a special solution, swishing them in a bucket with many, many holes, inside a larger bucket of the washing solution, clockwise and counterclockwise until they looked clean.
Then the person doing the job would take them to another room in the basement, where we kept the Big Egg Carton. There was a stool there for sitting on and a bright light hanging from the ceiling. Each egg would be examined for cracks, and any lingering crud on the eggs would be sanded off with a sandpaper block. Then the eggs were placed in cardboard trays inside the big carton, several layers stacked one on top of the other.
(Eggs with cracks were kept for our own use. We kept them in a regular egg carton, the kind you see in stores, on a counter next to the stove. We didn’t bother to refrigerate them. We used them up pretty fast.)
When the carton was full, we’d load it in Dad’s Studebaker pickup and take it to town. There, in the southeast corner of town, near the railroad tracks, was Carl Larson’s poultry operation. Continue reading Remembering Carl