A beautiful weekend, climatologically speaking. I did some stuff that a man’s gotta do in the yard, and a little housecleaning. And went to see “Star Trek,” at last. Not bad. The big thing is that it gave me the same kind of pleasure the old original series used to. Although a serious fan in my youth, my fervor abated with the years. I’m not the kind of obsessive whose whole experience is spoiled because somebody calculated the star date wrong, through failing to factor in Daylight Savings Time. All I ask is some cool visuals, a plausible (my standards are pretty low) story, some attractive women (bring back Jolene Blalock!), and good fights. And they had a sword! A sword on Star Trek! It doesn’t get much better than that, as far as I’m concerned.

Oh well, it could be better, of course. If this movie ever materializes, for instance, and if it’s worthy of its source, it’ll be worth any number of dilithium crystals.



My reading included a book I picked up in Story City, Iowa—The Passing of the Prairie, By a Fossil, by Nehemias Tjernagel. No ordering link—it’s privately published. It’s a series of biographical sketches of pioneers in the Story City area, written in the 1930s and ’40s but only recently published. The author was a Norwegian-American farm boy with cultural aspirations. He wrote music (he had a hit song, in sheet music, in Norway, and wrote a band number in honor of Theodore Roosevelt which was performed in that country), then settled down at home and devoted himself to writing and pig farming.

I had hoped it might include some mention of members of my family (I don’t imagine I need to mention again that my grandmother was born in Story City. But I did anyway, I observe). But this was about actual pioneers. My great-grandparents, though they died long ago, were latecomers.

The author wrote in the best Victorian style—never using an Anglo-Saxon word where a Latin could be found, and never giving the adverbs and adjectives ten minutes for a coffee break. I felt as if I was becoming a worse writer with each paragraph I read. He liked to call food, “toothsome edibles,” for instance, and did so twice by my count.

Here’s a sample passage, chosen pretty much at random, so that I won’t have to suffer alone:

At a certain church meeting the pastor had occasion to assemble two opposing factions in separate groups, and happened to designate to a position on the left those with whom he disagreed. Immediately a member of this faction intimated that he chose positions advisedly so as to stigmatize them by Scriptural inference as expressed in Matthew 25:33: “And He shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left.” Thus during the WARMTH of the controversy many an ill-considered phrase slipped out, which in calmer moments would be heartily repented, but, alas! was not so easily effaced from memory.

Actually I enjoyed the book, all in all, taken on its own terms.