Nobody who drives the car I drive should spend as much time on the road as I have in the last couple days.

Yesterday I picked up my uncle and aunt, who’d flown in from Maryland, and took them down to Kenyon for the family reunion. They asked me to do this even after I explained the true condition of Mrs. Hermanson, my Chevy Tracker. I can only give them credit for a level of trust equal to that of the centurion of whom the Lord said, “Not even in Israel have I seen such faith.”

As it turned out, we made the trip without incident, except for one of those incidents specially planned by the professionals at our state Department of Transportation. Those dedicated public servants believe in doing a job right, so once they had closed off the most direct route to Kenyon (Highways 55 and 56 by way of Hampton), they finished off the job neatly by also closing the southbound lanes on I35, the second best route, sending us off into the wilds of Burnsville without a marked detour. This forced me to perform the Extreme Act of stopping at a gas station for directions.

The reunion was great. We’ve had nicer weather (it was overcast but didn’t actually rain on us), but the company was good, and I had a better time than at any reunion in some years. Especially nice to see Cousin Tom from Kansas. And of course the road time with my uncle and aunt was precious. They don’t get up this way much anymore.

Today I drove up to Fergus Falls (which is just short of Moorhead) for a meeting of the Georg Sverdrup Society Board. 2 1/2 hours each way. Mrs. Hermanson again made it there and back without a tantrum.

This weekend, back to Kenyon for my high school class reunion.

I think it’s best described as vehicular Russian roulette.

The Oseberg ship. Photo credit: Daderot.

Last night’s post was kind of a downer. Let’s flee to the past then, and delight in the Viking Age, which is a matter of set facts that cannot change.

Or can they?

The fact is that the field of Viking studies is almost as dynamic and fluid as modern society. Just the other day I learned a fact that shivered my timbers, so to speak. Another of the precious facts I’ve been telling people in lectures all these years turns out to be false.

I’ve written about the Oseberg Viking ship before. Along with the Gokstad ship, also housed in the Viking Ships Museum in Oslo, it’s one of the two most famous Viking ships in the world. Miraculously preserved through being sealed in clay when they were buried during the 9th Century, they were discovered around the turn of the 20th Century, and completely altered everybody’s thinking about the sophistication of Viking culture. Continue reading Ship shape →

I wasn’t scared of Bozo as a kid. I don’t remember loving him, but I wasn’t scared of him. He was funny. Emmett Kelly was funny and sad, but I assumed kind-hearted. But many people are scared of clowns now. The Smithsonian has a history of scary clowns, saying the seeds were sown long before Gacy’s murders hit the news.

Charles Dickens, shortly after his success with The Pickwick Papers, wrote the memoirs of a clown named Grimaldi, who could joke, “I am GRIM ALL DAY, but I make you laugh at night,” because his tragic background was well known by those who loved his jokes. Linda Rodriguez McRobbie writes:

[Andrew McConnell] Stott credits Dickens with watering the seeds in popular imagination of the scary clown—he’d even go so far as to say Dickens invented the scary clown—by creating a figure who is literally destroying himself to make his audiences laugh. What Dickens did was to make it difficult to look at a clown without wondering what was going on underneath the make-up: Says Stott, “It becomes impossible to disassociate the character from the actor.” That Dickens’s version of Grimaldi’s memoirs was massively popular meant that this perception, of something dark and troubled masked by humor, would stick.

Micah Mattix has a list of best sites for literature, in response to a decent, but incomplete–no, skewed–list on some other site. If I was a responsible blogger and reader, I would monitor every site on his list.