I’m not bubbling with ideas for a post tonight. I think everyone in Minnesota is depressed at the moment. The snow from the weekend has finally melted off, and now we’re supposed to get more tonight and tomorrow. That’s March in Minnesota. We knew about it when we enlisted. But it gets old, it does.

No book to review tonight. I’m working on another Koontz, but I’m not done with it yet, and I’ve reviewed plenty of Koontz anyway. This one (False Memory) is kind of hard going for me. Not that I don’t like it. I do. But it’s about phobias and obsessions and dysfunctional families, and that hits pretty close to home. I pick it up each time with just a little dread.



Richard Widmark is dead at 93. I recall that my mother never forgave him for pushing that old lady down the stairs. But I liked him OK as an actor.

He was born in Minnesota, and I’ve always had the idea that he may have been Norwegian. I get that idea because a friend had relatives named Widmark (no relation that I know of), and I understood that they were Norwegian. “Vidmark” in Norwegian would mean “wide grassland.”

He played a Viking once, too, in “The Long Ships,” a movie every Viking buff hates pretty cordially. It’s a fun flick in its way, but the story’s idiotic, and the costumes are terrible.

On top of that, it was actually based on one of the best Viking novels ever written (next to mine, of course), Röde Orm (that’s the Swedish title) by Frans Gunnar Bengtsson. The geniuses of Hollywood, naturally, had to improve it. So they took a well-researched historical novel and turned it into an unbelievable quasi-historical fantasy.

Ah well.

I could comment on Widmark’s gun control views (mentioned in the Fox piece), but it’s been pointed out to me (with justice) that I’m too inclined to speak ill of the dead (I much prefer to attack defenseless people). Widmark had a very long marriage, which ended with the death of his first wife, and that’s awfully impressive by Hollywood standards. So full props to him for that. R.I.P.