Barnes & Noble (bn.com) is running a little promotion for reviewers. Write at least 100 words in review of one of their products, and you will earn one chance for winning a vacation trip. If it’s a first review, you’ll earn two chances.
Do I need to recommend which things (ahem) to review?
I should have known this: today is the 70th anniversary of the attack by Germany on Norway and Denmark, in 1940.
Mitch Berg (who, I’m embarrassed to admit, knows the subject far better than I) tells the story here.
Norway thus became the only country conquered by Hitler to never surrender to the Nazis. Haakon, leading Norway’s legitimate government (no country ever recognized, even by the dubious standards of world diplomacy, Vidkun Quisling’s puppet regime) at the head of over 20,000 troops in exile, 50,000 troops in the underground, and the 22,000 men and hundreds of ships of Norway’s merchant marine.
(Speaking of dragons, I looked up a old poem telling the story of St. George and the Dragon. I’m a little nervous about the authenticity of my source, but it appears legit. The story is preserved in The Golden Legend, and I assume it was first recorded there in print. I don’t think this is what was written in that book, but a derivative from it or from oral history.)
Of Hector’s deeds did Homer sing,
And of the sack of stately Troy,
What griefs fair Helena did bring,
Which was Sir Paris’ only joy:
And by my pen I will recite
St. George’s deeds, and English knight.
Against the Sarazens so rude
Fought he full long and many a day,
Where many gyants he subdu’d,
In honour of the Christian way;
And after many adventures past,
To Egypt land he came at last.
Now, as the story plain doth tell,
Within that countrey there did rest
A dreadful dragon fierce and fell,
Whereby they were full sore opprest:
Who by his poisonous breath each day
Did many of the city slay.
The grief whereof did grow so great
Throughout the limits of the land,
That they their wise-men did intreat
To shew their cunning out of hand;
What way they might this fiend destroy,
That did the countrey thus annoy.
Continue reading A Dreadful Dragon Fierce and Fell!
Bill O’Reilly gives us his favorite obscure words, so you can call someone a nebbish pettifogger, if you like. Isn’t pecksniffian a Dickens’ word?
Credit ROFLRAZZI.COM Thanks to Loren Eaton for the link.
Steve Bradford, who I credited with yesterday’s link, had this link today. It’s a review of How To Train Your Dragon by Nathan D. Wilson, that draws a very, very different conclusion from mine:
But that’s not what was served up. Instead, dragons were bad. They raided the village stealing sheep. They burned it down constantly. They killed people. Lots of people. And here’s one of a few things that stunned me. Why did they do these evil things? Well, because they served The Dragon. The big one. The huge, ancient, evil one. And the story progresses not with one small boy (Hiccup) successfully communicating to his father (Stoick) that dragons were misunderstood, but with that boy crushing The Dragon’s head and . . . losing his foot in the process.
That message never even crossed my mind while I saw the movie. And frankly, I don’t think many other viewers took it that way either. But still, if that’s what Cressida Cowell, the author of the books the movie was based on, intended, I probably owe her an apology or something.
I often get things wrong. Continue reading Dragons, and Pythons
Caribou Coffee plans to be “the first U.S. coffee chain to commit to buying coffee grown only under sustainable farming practices developed by the Rainforest Alliance.” The Rainforest Alliance is a non-profit organization that works with farms to improve their crops and farming practices.
I hope they charge very little for certifying a farm. I can understand the cost for teaching farmers how to improve their work, but to merely put the Rainforest Alliance stamp of approval on a crop shouldn’t cost the farmer much, if anything. The farmers are barely making a living as it is, aren’t they? Why burden them to have their work approved by Americans?
Andrew Peterson has a beautiful post from his writing retreat. “What I do when I build roads isn’t that much different from what you do,” an old logger told him. “I have to figure out how to get from here to there. I look at a place and imagine a road. Takes a fair bit of creativity.” He goes on.
Patrick J. Deneen, the Tsakopoulos-Kounalakis Associate Professor of Government at Georgetown University, argues that teaching the Great Books is essentially worthless if the teacher treats them all as equally true.
contemporary arguments on behalf of the Great Books are often as pernicious, and even indistinguishable from, the forms of value relativism that they purport to combat. Many conservative academics have become lazy in the defense of the Great Books, content to let the phrase stand in for a deeper and potentially more contentious examination of the various arguments within those books and the West itself, and of the need for university faculties to provide some kind of organized and well-formed guidance to students on how best to approach these texts.
In short, teachers must have a bias for the truth in order to guide students through these great works. Reality must be recognized in the classroom. Because if an interest in ideas, no matter how ridiculous, is the highest virtue for a teacher, it barely matters what he is teaching. The outcome will be similar. Students will believe their own opinions are the only ones that matter, regardless their merits.
This year’s National Poetry Month promotional art quotes from this poem.
“Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour”
by Wallace Stevens
Light the first light of evening
In which we rest and, for small reason, think
The world imagined is the ultimate good.
This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous.
It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,
Out of all the indifferences, into one thing:
Within a single thing, a single shawl
Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth,
A light, a power, the miraculous influence.
Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.
We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,
A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous.
Within its vital boundary, in the mind.
We say God and the imagination are one.
How high that highest candle lights the dark.
Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.
Phil, were you aware of this blog, Bible Design Blog? It’s from J. Mark Bertrand, and I’m amazed I never heard of it before (chances are, of course, you linked to it, and I just forgot.)
Anyway, it’s a cool blog about Bible design, Bible binding, and even Bible rebinding. Very nice.
Thanks to Steve Bradford for bringing it to my attention.