World News Group has released the second season of its Legal Docket podcast with a compelling story of James King who was beaten up in 2014 by federal and state agents who assumed he was someone else.
The agents were unidentified in a black vehicle. According to King, they called him over as he was crossing the street and asked him about his wallet to see some ID. He says he thought they were going to mug him. He ran. They assaulted him, and when street cops arrived, he said, “Please God! Be real police.”
He says he would have complied with officers, had they identified themselves. The agents say they did. And they arrested him for resisting arrest.
King refused to plea bargain, which is a common tactic to avoid tying up the courts. I’m told defense lawyers have encouraged their clients to plea bargain, even though they believe in their clients’ innocence, because juries are unpredictable. King wouldn’t bargain. He wasn’t going to plead guilty to something he didn’t do, and the jury believed him.
King followed up by suing the FBI and the federal government for damages. His lawyers filed under a variety of laws, amendments, and legal rationale, which they said is standard procedure. That’s where the sticky legal issues come in. King’s suit has gone all the way to the Supreme Court, not due to the merits of his claims, but due to technical questions over his ability to sue law enforcement officers.
This isn’t the pressing news of the day, but it’s a good podcast and may take you away from the pressing news for an appropriate amount of time. All of World’s podcasts are well-produced and well-written. Not glitzy, melodramatic, or boring.
I’m happy and not happy to say I got some more translation work. I wanted the work because I need the money, but it also means I’ll have to prepare for this weekend (a meeting in Fergus Falls, then a Viking event in Brainerd) during whatever chinks of time I can find in between work sessions. It’s times like this when I feel kind of old.
Older than usual.
For your entertainment, I found a trailer for one of the previous projects I’ve worked on. “Wisting,” based on the book series by Jorn Lier Horst, one of whose books I listened to driving to Madison and back last weekend. This was one of the first projects I worked on (not much of my work actually survived the revisions), but I was taken with it, and found the books enjoyable. You can view it, as you’ll see, if you subscribe to Acorn TV. (Assuming they’re still running it)
Reading a long book, and I have a heavy translation project to fill my hours. So, nothing to review. About what shall I write today?
I don’t want to write about the state of the world. I’m not very happy about the state of the world, or the nation, or the state, or the community. I’m not all that happy about the state of my house, either. One of my sinks just clogged up.
At bedtime, I’ve been reading Jeremiah. Appropriate, in a tragic way. There’s Jeremiah, this young man who loves God, and what job does God give him? “Tell the people to repent or they’ll be punished. They won’t listen to you, but tell them anyway.”
“God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.” The problem is, His idea of wonderful is different from ours. From mine, anyway.
If I didn’t have a strong impression (very likely wrong) that I have a Calling to finish my Erling saga before I die, I’d be strongly considering taking up an even more unhealthy lifestyle, just to avoid the disaster that seems inevitable now.
Anyway.
I did accomplish one thing. With my hands, for a change.
I built (with my brother’s extensive help) a Viking chest, some years back, for use in reenactments. The picture above (my chest is red with yellow decorations) isn’t a very good one, but it’s the best I can find in my collection. A Viking chest is wider at the bottom than at the top (prevents tipping) and the two end boards are longer than the rest, creating “feet” that keep the chest off the ground (or out of the bilge water). It’s a practical design. I used a lot of construction cheats to make it looked joined, though it’s actually all screwed together.
A while back one of the feet broke. It’s been breaking off again periodically, under stress, ever since. I’d been planning to fix it for some time, by running a couple long screws up inside the boards the long way.
Last week I drilled starter holes for the screws, but found that the holes were too short for the very long screws I’d found somewhere. I went to the hardware store for a longer drill bit, and the guy sold me one he swore was the right size. It was not. It was too wide; the screws barely bit.
So yesterday I unscrewed the screws (not very hard) and dumped some toothpicks into the holes, along with Elmer’s glue. Then I coated the screws with glue as well, and tightened it all down. Seems solid.
I needed some sense of accomplishment. Finishing my translation work will help with that too. Better get back to it.
There should be a picture at the top of this post, showing me lecturing in my Victorian frock coat. But I didn’t think to have one taken. You’ll have to imagine it for yourself. This old photo of Boss Tweed should help.
The drive to Madison, Wisconsin runs between four and five hours, not counting gas and food breaks. That seems like a long drive to me in my old age, but I handled it. My chief concern was on-board entertainment, since the loaner I’m driving has no working stereo. I finally settled on buying an audio book from Amazon, and listening to it through earphones, on my Fire tablet. Worked OK, once I figured out how to start the reading at the beginning of the book. The Amazon people, like any good pushers, give you the first taste free, so I got a book I’d read already, Jørn Lier Horst’s Dregs. I’m glad I got a book I was familiar with, because sometimes one gets distracted (by Google Maps directions, for instance), and there’s no easy way to repeat text with your hands on the wheel. But all in all, a successful experiment.
As I mentioned last week, I’d been operating on the assumption that I was going to be lecturing on Saturday, then discovered it was really Friday. So I had to adjust my plans and rearrange my hotel reservation. That lost me any opening in the hotel where the meeting was, but I got a room just up the road. Within walking distance…. As if I was going to walk, with five cartons of books to carry, plus PowerPoint equipment.
The meeting was the Tre Lag Stevne, held every two years by a coalition of three Norwegian-American bygdelags. Bygdelags are associations of descendants from particular regions of Norway. Genealogy is one of their big activities. I’d spoken to them about Vikings, two years back in Alexandria, Minnesota.
This year the theme was the emigration period, including the Haugean evangelical movment. One of the organizers remembered that I came from Kenyon, Minnesota. He contacted me, saying he’d always been curious about the Old Stone Church, located between Kenyon and Faribault. Did I know anything about it? Indeed I did. The Old Stone Church (built around 1877) was the original building of my home congregation, Hauge Lutheran in Kenyon. On top of that, I grew up on a farm precisely 1.5 miles south of the old building. I had much to say on the subject, some of it pertinent.
Thus my lecture was outside of my usual wheelhouse, but I believe it went well. The audience was attentive, and they laughed in the right places. There were many questions afterward, and a lot of compliments. Book sales were good, but not spectacular as they were the last time I spoke to the three Lags. No real surprise there; you almost never do as well fishing the same waters a second time. But I made enough, along with my honorarium, to make a small profit on the trip – assuming I don’t price my time very high. Which I generally don’t.
On the way home, I had one very pleasant surprise. It’s my custom to eat at established franchise restaurants when traveling, purely out of timidity. I’ve had enough bad meals in small cafes to be leery of them – which, I imagine, has lost me as many good meals as bad ones over the years. But I pulled off the highway near Menomonie, thinking I’d find gas and a Culver’s at that exit. I got the gas, but it was the wrong exit for the Culvers’. So, being tired, I decided to take a chance on the café attached to the gas station. I wanted something resembling a genuine meal, not a burger and fries, so I gambled on the daily special, the fish dinner. I fully expected a couple of those sad, flat, freezer-dried planks of breaded fish you see so often in rural cafes.
Instead, what I found before me (after a wait, but you have to wait everywhere these days) was fish entirely indistinguishable from Culvers’ North Atlantic Cod. Which is high praise indeed. And the fries and cole slaw were better than Culvers, in my epicurean opinion.
I’ll give them a plug. The Exit 45 Restaurant. Tell ‘em I sent you, just to confuse them.
Then I drove home and collapsed.
This next weekend, a shorter trip, but more complicated and packing heavier. The Crow Wing Viking Festival, near Brainerd, Minnesota.
The co-founder of Snopes.com has been outed as plagiarist. David Mikkelson has been suspended from editing his own website, but I gather he has not been dismissed entirely, if that’s even possible since he owns half the company.
Buzzfeed News has the story today. A few years ago, a statement like that would have sounded like saying, “ClickHole reports this shocking bit of truth.” But Buzzfeed does real work now. Who would have thought?
The article quotes from a couple former Snopes staffers who say Mikkelson’s policy was to plagiarize first, rewrite into original wording later. “I remember explaining that we didn’t need to ‘rewrite’ because we’d always done this stuff quickly,” Kim LaCapria said, “He just didn’t seem to understand that some people didn’t plagiarize.”
Have you put much or any stock in Snopes recently? I haven’t looked at it for a long while, having become disenchanted with it after reading a couple articles that weren’t fact-checking at all. But most of my fact-checking for the last few years has been etymological.
In the spirit of transparency, I got distracted while writing this post by my need for a good turnip greens recipe. I thought you should know.
Because you doubtless need more American folk music in your life, here’s a choral arrangement of an 1852 hymn, “The Eternal Gates,” by Cecil Frances Alexander.
Ah the adventurous life I live! And mostly from correcting my own mistakes.
I had it on my calendar that I was speaking to a meeting in Madison, Wisconsin on Saturday. I made plans and booked a hotel room. Then I happened to look at the scheduling information this morning, and discovered I’m not speaking on Saturday, but on Friday. This required moving my travel plans up, and changing my hotel reservation. And everything I’d planned to do in a leisurely fashion, I must now rush so I can leave tomorrow morning.
I’m an obsessive, so I’m obsessing about all this a little.
Okay, I’m obsessing a lot.
Surprisingly (even to me), I’m not lecturing on Vikings this time. I’m lecturing on my home church. I’ll tell you about it on Monday.
Meanwhile, note to potential burglars: My house will not be empty. My renter will be here. They used to call him Psycho, in the joint.
What the fashionable young man will be winning in 2022.
Had lunch at the Country Kitchen restaurant today, as is my custom on Tuesdays. I don’t know why I allow myself to fall into these little routines. It only makes it easier for international assassins to track me down.
Anyway, I walked in and was conducted to a booth. After I sat down, I was approached by a bearded young man wearing a crucifix and a bolo tie (other things as well, of course, but those were what I noted). He complimented me on the way I was dressed, and asked if I rode a Harley. I thanked him and said no, I’ve never ridden a Harley.
(I pause briefly here to describe what I was wearing. I had on my usual outfit for when I leave the house – a collarless dress shirt under a Victorian vest with lapels. Black jeans and shoes. On my head, a classic Panama hat, like Charlie Chan wore.)
Was this young man “hitting on me” as they say? No, I’m pretty sure he wasn’t. He was, in fact, pretty obviously emotionally disturbed. Someone had taken him out for a treat, or for social mainstreaming purposes.
Still, I appreciated the compliment. In fact, I see it as a promising sign.
I think it’s fairly obvious that the world today is run by people who don’t have both oars in the water. Clearly this is true in the world of fashion. So for all I know, this young man is a major influencer in regard to men’s clothing.
I fully expect we will quickly notice that men are dressing in a Victorian style again.
And, since clothes make the man, society must rapidly turn around. Civilization will be saved from barbarism.
First, an update on my car. The part arrived. They tried to put it in. It turned out to be defective. They’ll order another. Estimated time window: about a month.
You probably won’t be surprised by now to know that I wasn’t surprised at all by this. I was expecting it to be the wrong part, but otherwise this was the scenario I fully anticipated.
John “Slim” Hardy is a private eye in Lancashire, England. He is a failed soldier and a serious alcoholic. He’s been hired by a woman to follow her husband, whom she suspects of having an affair.
He’s not having an affair. Slim has discovered that the man is going once a week to a secluded cove known for dangerous rip tides, where he stands reading out loud from a book. What he’s reading, Slim discovers (I forget how), is a Latin incantation to the dead.
Instead of reporting the good news to the wife and closing the case, Slim gets obsessed with the husband’s reasons for this behavior, and starts looking into his past, and into local history. Not neglecting to turn the situation fully ironic by having an affair with the wife.
If this summary sounds improbable, the rest of the book is even less plausible.
I don’t think I’ve ever read a novel so detached from genuine human motivations and behavior. At every juncture, the characters fail to do what a normal person would do, but instead act in some hysterical way. They respond operatically, or perhaps more aptly, soap-operatically.
And our hero is not just a maintenance alcoholic, like your run of the mill literary private eye. Slim Hardy is a full-fledged dipsomaniac, subject to black-outs and car accidents and completely out of control. He needs to be locked up for the protection of himself and others.
The story was sad, the narrative frustrating to read. I do not recommend The Man By the Sea.
Walter Wangerin, Jr. dealt with lung cancer for the last several years and has finally succumbed to it. He wrote many award-winning books, including the popular The Book of the Dun Cow. He was the speaker for the Lutheran Vespers radio program for about ten years (1994-2005). More recently, he was Senior Research Professor at Valparaiso University.
Pete Peterson says Wangerin cast a long shadow. “The proof of that shadow’s reach, perhaps, is that a few weeks ago when I sat down to write a short story for a forthcoming book called The Lost Tales of Sir Galahad, the tale that came out was, unexpectedly, about Walt.”
I’ve been referring to Wangerin in the past tense, but realistically, Christianly, he continues to live, even more full than he has on earth. We would say he was a good man because we approved of his life. He is a good man, even today, because of Christ. But today, I doubt he or anyone around him would refer to him or each other as good.
