The Fox is Black, a design blog, has held design re-cover contests in the past. I just saw their winner for a contest on redesigning The Wizard of Oz, which adds the word “Wonderful” to the title. It is captivating.

When you grow older, you find yourself thinking more about the past than the future. This makes sense, because you’ve got more of the former than the latter. This weekend I watched a little TV in between studying sessions, and noted the following things…

I love the new digital broadcast TV channels, like Me TV and Antenna TV, that show old programs from my childhood and youth. I watch them quite a lot, especially on weekends. On Sunday after church I had the Burns and Allen show on. They did a story centered on some absurd plan to bring a carpenter in to George and Gracie’s house to build a dresser, so they could pretend to their friends that George had built it himself. (I know that makes no sense. If you know Burns and Allen, you’ll understand sense has nothing to do with it.)

The carpenter shows up, ready to go to work.

He is wearing a suit and tie.

I’m not kidding. It seemed perfectly normal in the 1950s for a carpenter to show up at a work location in a suit and tie.

Of course it was Beverly Hills. That probably makes a difference.

On Saturday night, I was working on a paper for my class, and looked for something to watch on the tube. (I like to study in silence, but years of writing books have led me to prefer TV buzz for writing.) To my delight, Antenna TV was running a Rita Hayworth marathon. You know how I feel about Rita. So I settled in with Fire Down Below, a 1957 flick co-starring Robert Mitchum and a very young Jack Lemmon. The guys play seedy Americans running a smuggling boat in the Caribbean, who end up transporting a passportless Rita, who’s supposed to be a woman of mystery with questionable associations from World War II. Continue reading Three from the past →

Adventures in web searches: At some point this week I pondered, as I’ve often done before, the word tycoon. It always sounded vaguely Oriental to me (like typhoon), and it didn’t seem to have any relations or cognates that would hint at the usual Germanic or Latin origins.

So I did something I never bothered to do before. I looked it up on Wikipedia. And discovered my suspicion was correct.

The word tycoon is derived from the Japanese word taikun (大君), which means “great lord”, and it was used as a title for the shogun. The word entered the English language in 1857 with the return of Commodore Perry to the United States. U.S. President Abraham Lincoln was humorously referred to as the Tycoon by his aides John Nicolay and John Hay. The term spread to the business community, where it has been used ever since.

I find it interesting that the word originally just meant “ruler,” and got applied to a president, but then migrated to the business world. The reason seems obvious. We already had plenty of good words for powerful men and rulers, but we needed a new term for a distinctively American phenomenon – the driving, dynamic, successful businessman, especially of the self-made kind. Tycoon fit the bill, and it had a good sound to it.

Almost over, but there’s still time to jump in line in front of an Italian. Depending on when you read this.

Photo credit: Kelsey Patton

In a moment, the story behind the photo above, tentatively titled, “The Most Interesting Viking in the World.”

Høstfest 2013 is history, but my aches and pains linger. Those aches are not, as you might think, primarily the results of bruises suffered in fighting. I actually took remarkably little damage this year. It helps to have enthusiastic young men to bear the brunt of the combat. No, it just seems I have reached an age where sitting in unfamiliar chairs and car seats causes you to stiffen up.

Høstfest as a whole seemed to be quite a success, so far as I could tell. Minot, North Dakota hasn’t fully recovered from the flooding a couple years back, but the festival and the visitors have. Not the busiest festival I’ve seen, but plenty lively.

The interesting thing this year (as I mentioned before I left) was the involvement of the History Channel “Vikings” TV series people. If you’ve been following this blog, you know that I have almost no respect for that production, which sins against history in all kinds of significant ways. And pretty much everybody in our Viking Age Club & Society feels the same way.

But we have a relationship with Høstfest itself, and they asked us to welcome the History Channel people and participate in the promotion, particularly a “Viking cosplay” contest in which people were invited to upload photos of themselves in Viking costumes in order to win prizes. This we did. The “people from the History Channel,” in fact, proved to be (aside from a PR guy) the four lovely girls you see above, who wore copies of the battle costume of Ragnar Lodbrok’s wife in the series. They were not in fact actors, or even Hollywood people, but models recruited from an agency in Fargo. So it was easy to be nice to them, especially for me, whose idea of being nice to pretty girls is to leave them strictly alone, out of fear that they’ll think I’m hitting on them.

Nevertheless, somebody in the club – I won’t say who – thought it would be hilarious to do the photo above. And I was not hard to persuade.

As for fights, I won a few and lost a few. As so often happens, the younger guys seemed to figure out my moves as time went on, and my score went down.

I sold nearly all the books I brought. This will be the last event where I sell The Year of the Warrior paperbacks, as I’ve nearly run through the stock I acquired in my divorce settlement from Baen Books. In future I’ll just direct people to the e-book, available due to the Baen Reconciliation (new from Robert Ludlum!).

And now, pardon me while I lapse into a brief coma.

News from Høstfest in the Minot Daily News: “On Friday, a quartet of ‘shield maidens,’ better known as models for a Fargo modeling agency, appeared at Høstfest during a live steel combat demonstration by The Viking Age Club…” probably drawn by Lars and his colleagues.

Andrea Johnson writes, “The [elementary school] boys were goggle-eyed as [Gary] Anderson and Lars Walker gave a thoroughly realistic demonstration of live combat, involving the clashing of swords, the splintering of a wooden shield, and men falling to the ground so hard they lost their helmets. The weapons they were using were real, but the men are well-trained in combat.”

Aren’t those maidens cute? No doubt Lars will tell us about this year’s festival next week, but you can see him and Gary now in this video from three years back. Not a glorious moment for Lars, but every teaching moment can’t be glorious, I guess.

I have a piece up at the American Spectator Online today, here.

By way of a friend of our friend Aitchmark, here’s a blog post from VA Viper, with an embedded recording of a linguist reading what – he guesses – the old Indo-European language, from which are descended (you guessed it!) European languages and Hindi – sounded like. It’s a guess, but an educated one.

As I’ve done for some years now at this season, I’m leaving this weekend for Minot, North Dakota and the Norsk Høstfest. This is not what you’d call a relaxing vacation. I’ll be helping to set up and tear down the Viking camp, doing three combat shows a day, and this year I’ll be helping one of our guys do lectures at local elementary schools. He injured himself with a Viking axe (I’m not kidding) and needs me to do the heavy work, including the axe demonstration. Also, of course, I’ll have to check in online frequently to keep up with my graduate school class work. I should schedule a second week of vacation to rest up when I’m done.

[By the way, for the first time that anyone can remember, they’re advertising hotel rooms available in Minot during the festival. Just in case you were thinking about going.]

I won’t be driving this year again, but will be bumming rides with friends. This prevents me visiting commenters Roy and Dale as was once my wont, but Mrs. Hermanson, my car, just isn’t up to the exertion anymore.

Not sure I am either, come to think of it.

Oh yes, some people from the History Channel Vikings series (which I’ve panned here and elsewhere) will also be hanging around. Must remind myself to be nice to them.

Chances are I’ll fawn all over them like the hypocritical sycophant I am.

Martin Daubney, former editor of Loaded, talks about how bad pornography has gotten among children in Britain. Kids us Facebook and cell phones to pass around disgusting video links. Boys are being perverted, girls enraged and scared.

“Pornography is sexually traumatising an entire generation of boys.”

The children say their parents would be shocked to learn what they’ve seen, but trust them to use the Internet responsibly. No filters. Just evil.

Ironically, this article appears in The Daily Mail, which has sidebars “loaded” with soft-porn gossip links. I link to the print version above, so you can skip that part. I got this link via Facebook, BTW.

The multipurpose staircase in the Panorama House. Continue reading You Can't Do This With Digital Books →