Writing/publishing update: I’ve worked my way through The Year of the Warrior to prepare a paper version for Kindle Direct Publishing. (Note: This is a very long book. If sheer mass of paper is gauge of literary greatness, I’m on a level with Sigrid Undset and Tolkien and Tolstoy.) I’ve tried to clean it up, fix automatically generated punctuation problems, add a comma here and there where I thought it would aid reader comprehension.

So tomorrow I figure I’ll try to upload it. I anticipate that this will not work. This book is different from the others, because Baen Books still publishes the e-book (at my request). Will the Amazon system accept a paper version from somebody else? I expect there will be problems with that.

Amazon’s customer service has actually worked well for me in the past. I just figure there’ll be hoops to jump through. I’ll keep you posted.

Above, a sweet little video from NRK, the Norwegian state broadcasting service, with one of Norway’s favorite Christmas songs, Å Jul Med Din Glede.

The first verse means something like this (literal; no attempt at versification):

O Christmas with your happiness, oh childlike desire,
We all bid you welcome. 
We all greet you with jubilant voices,
Ten-thousand times welcome!
We clap our hands, we sing and we laugh, 
So glad we are, so glad we are. 
We swing around in a circle and curtsey – and bow.

I don’t talk about politics much anymore on this blog – times have changed. Blogs are no longer a big thing for political discussion (nor for discussing books, come to think of it, but I think they’re better suited to books). The more immediate, shorter-form media like X are bigger today – though I can’t honestly say the level of discourse has improved.

But that’s beside my point. My point is that I want to touch on politics today – but not, I hope, in an inflammatory manner.

Though what I’m saying might work out more offensive (for some) than the kind of plain insult you see on X or Facebook.

Here’s what I have in mind. It’s no surprise, I imagine, that I’m pleased by the results of the recent presidential election.

But it’s not so much because I’m over the moon about the man we elected.

It’s about the fact that – it seems to me – we may be seeing at last the beginning of the end of Boomer ascendency.

I’ll grant that Donald J. Trump is a Boomer himself. (I’ll even grant, for the sake of argument, that I’m a Boomer too.)

But the leadership team he’s bringing in seems to be mostly younger people. Millennials and Gen X and… I forget what they call them all. They’re all whippersnappers to me.

I put much hope in whippersnappers these days.

The new leadership team that’s coming in never put flowers in their hair and went to San Francisco. They never dreamed of Woodstock. They never tuned in, turned on and dropped out.

In my opinion, we’ve had plenty of that.

The Greatest Generation raised us. They’d been through the Great Depression and World War II. They’d been deprived. They’d suffered. They’d tightened belts and watered down the soup through many long years.

After the War, they came home and vowed to give their kids everything they never had.

We got spoiled.

As we Boomers grew up, we were told over and over (I was there, I remember) that we were the smartest, best-educated generation the world had ever seen. We would change the world.

And boy, did we change the world.

We turned it into a hellscape. We started one war after another. We fostered radicalism and terrorism. We did our best to eradicate classical wisdom and undermine liberal democracy.

I think we’ve changed the world enough.

Maybe the kids can salvage something from the wreck.

Good luck, kids. I’m praying for you.

I have been, for the last couple weeks, a very dull boy (that’s what the journalists call a “dog bites man story”). My life has consisted of translating, reading, and some noodling on the internet for a break now and then. OK, I do sleep. I go to the gym 3 or 4 times a week, and I get up early to work on my novel-formatting 6 days a week. But basically, not much variety.

This morning I was looking for my Amazon Fire tablet. Couldn’t find it anywhere. I was going out to lunch (Perkins) and I wanted to read while eating, as is my wont. Well, I also have a Kindle reader, which I keep for emergencies (and for the inevitable day when the Fire burns out, because they never last long), so I pulled my book (the third volume of Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset) up on the Kindle. But I stopped at the gym on the way to Perkins, to see if I’d left the Fire there. They didn’t have it.

Long story short, at the restaurant I came up with a vague memory of putting the Fire down among the junk on the dining room table this morning. And behold, when I got home, there it sat, like a friend left off the guest list.

Which provoked thoughts about growing old and forgetful.

So let’s suppress that thought. How about an excursion into my murky past? I mentioned my college musical group a while back and somebody (I don’t think there was more than one) asked how our music could be heard. I answered – with some relief – that our stuff has been mercifully lost in the detritus of the analogue recording age.

And then one of my old friends posted the YouTube video above. Somebody – for some reason – has acquired our two albums and posted one song from each. The other one is disqualified for my purposes because I neither wrote it nor sing in it.

The song I posted above, “Elizabeth to Me,” is not characteristic of our output, being not religious, but a plain love song. The melody was written by my friend Chuck Pedersen. He asked me to give it lyrics. He wanted to have it addressed to his girlfriend Beth (who later joined the group and, even later, married him). The lead vocalist on this recording is yours truly. I don’t like it much – my voice seems to me uneven and weak. However, the song as a whole is, I think, not much worse than a lot of songs that became big hits in those fuzzy-minded days.

Anyway, you wanted one of our songs; here it is. You asked for it, as the judge said to the man sentenced to hang for attempted suicide.