Wednesday is Veteran’s Day, first observed as Armistice Day because on that day World War I ended. “World War I, then normally referred to simply as The Great War (no one could imagine any war being greater!), ended with the implementation of an armistice [temporary cessation of hostilities in this case until the final peace treaty, the infamous Treaty of Versailles, was signed in 1919] between the Allies and Germany at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of November, 1918,” according to a history page on the U.S. Army’s website.
Continue reading Socialism: Perpetual Civil War
Happy birthday, Martin Luther
No hidden message is implied by my noting that today is Martin Luther’s birthday. I am a Lutheran, and am grateful to God for the work He accomplished through the man from Eisleben. He had plenty of flaws and committed his share of sins, but he was God’s man.
“All who call on God in true faith, earnestly from the heart, will certainly be heard, and will receive what they have asked and desired, although not in the hour or in the measure, or the very thing which they ask. They will obtain something greater and more glorious than they had dared to ask.”
That’s probably all you’ll get from me tonight. I have a late appointment.
Autumn’s best
I got off a line today that I thought was pretty good. Over at Threedonia, Mike Kriskey had posted a link to this article about all the trouble scientists have been having with the Large Hadron Collider. The article quoted Dr. Holger Bech Nielsen of the Niels Bohr Institute, who, along with Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan wrote a series of articles over the past year and a half in which they (semi-seriously) suggested that the project wouldn’t work because God “rather hates Higgs particles, and attempts to avoid them.”
I wrote in a comment that, according to recent reports, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America is drafting a resolution to bestow its blessing on Higgs particles.
Well, I thought it was funny.
What a nice weekend. I don’t think I’ve been able to say that a single time before since last winter. Finally now, when the kindly part of the year is almost past, we’ve actually gotten a stretch of good days.
Saturday was especially nice for me, as I did absolutely nothing in the way of chores or maintenance (except for washing clothes, which is a Friday night job and therefore doesn’t count). Instead I spent the afternoon with four other Vikings at one of the guys’ houses, training for live steel combat. We have a new guy, a college student, who seems to be as unhappy as I am to be stuck in this millennium, and was champing at the bit for some cold steel action.
But it was a good exercise for all of us, and did my spirit a world of good. Afterwards our host made hamburgers and brats, and we watched the almost good Viking movie, The Viking Sagas (better than most on authenticity, weak on story, characters and acting). It was the kind of guys’ outing I haven’t had enough of most of my life, because of my peculiar tastes and interests. How bully to have a gang of like-minded sociopaths to hang out with in my old age.
WWI Reading
Here’s a link to an archive of World War I poetry.
And here’s what soldiers in trenches were reading.
Artwork Remembering the Victims of Communism
On this day, the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall:
(via The Heritage Foundation)
Disney to Refund “Baby Einstein” Buyers
The buyers of “Baby Einstein” videos were told their children would get a leg up on brain development by watching the DVDs, but no one has seen the benefits yet. Disney is now offering a refund spanning the last five years. The American Academy of Pediatrics advises against allowing two year olds watch TV, and research has shown that reading with your child helps the child develop language skills quite a bit. Texting with your baby is even better!
Ok, I made the last part up. But I’m sure listening to Mozart in the drivethru at McDonald’s or while going to sleep builds the brain. I mean, if it worked for Mozart . . .
Also on that post from the School Library Journal is a link to a list of ten good kid-lit bloggers.
That’s Not an Argument!
And now for something completely different.
New “Prisoner” Mini-series Low on Coherence
A beiger shade of pale
Joe Carter at First Things passes on a story about the “average color” of the universe, according to astronomers. You’ll quickly note that it’s about the same shade as the walls of a doctor’s waiting room. The joke is that this must be “God’s favorite color.”
It reminds me of an old Reader’s Digest story about a pastor who shows friends around his new parsonage. “Why are all the walls beige?” one of them asks.
“Because that’s the only color a committee can agree on.”
Is beige God’s favorite color? I doubt it very much.
In the first place, how do we know this universe is the only one there is? Perhaps there’s a bouquet, a rainbow of universes, running the full spectrum from infrared to ultraviolet. Perhaps we live in one of the dull ones.
My experience with God is that He Himself is anything but dull, and he doesn’t make decisions by committee. Like Aslan, He’s not a tame Lion. He has a taste for extremes, and the average beige of our universe represents a mean between the extreme joys and the extreme horrors of existence.
I have to imagine that His favorite color (like mine) is red. Because when He looks on the red of His Son’s blood, He is pleased and forgives our sins.
Stuart M. Kaminsky: Toby Peters books: An appreciation
Last night I noted, belatedly, the passing of author Stuart M. Kaminsky last month. Purely by happenstance, I was reading several of his Toby Peters mysteries at the time, and was already planning to post about them.
The hero of the series, Toby Peters, is a shabby, distinctly down-market private eye working in Los Angeles in the late ’30s and the ’40s. Despite the fact that he can’t afford any better office than a closet in a dentist’s office, lives in a seedy boarding house overseen by a batty landlady, drives a tiny old Crosley automobile, and can never find a clean shirt to wear, he continually takes cases involving prominent personalities, especially movie stars.
It has occurred to me that Kaminsky was having a joke on us, and that the real secret of Toby Peters is that he was delusional.
But when I look past that bit of spontaneous deconstruction, I find the Peters mysteries simply a lot of fun. Peters is no Philip Marlowe. Although he can handle himself in a fight (he used to box and his face shows it), he injured his back doing bodyguard work for Mickey Rooney a while ago, and has to sleep on a mattress on the floor. He doesn’t drink at all, and his favorite food is cold cereal. He has an ex-wife whom he loves, but she won’t go out with him because he’s immature. He has a brother who’s a cop, and who generally seems to hate him (he gave him his first broken nose), but who usually comes through for him in a pinch. When he needs help with his cases, he can sometimes hire an old cop or security guard, but most of the time he ends up enlisting his friends—Gunther, his next-door neighbor, who is a three-foot-tall Swiss translator, Sheldon, the fat and unhygienic dentist from whom he rents his office, and Jeremy, the retired wrestler and poet who owns the office building. The result often resembles a Keystone Kops chase more than the elegant “payoff” in a William Powell movie.
The books I’ve read in this spree were Down for the Count (concerning Joe Louis), Think Fast, Mr. Peters (concerning Peter Lorre, a splendid opportunity for some Sam Spade dialogue), Buried Caesars (Gen. Douglas MacArthur) and Tomorrow is Another Day (Clark Gable).
They were fast reads. They didn’t offend me (though there’s a little rough language and implied sex). They were often very funny, and always well-written.
Recommended.