It was a pretty strenuous weekend, by my effete standards, but I made it through to the safe haven of another work week. The continuing theme was rain: I feared it; I expected it. I was pleasantly surprised.
Friday morning I drove down Highway 35 to Story City, Iowa (which, if you’ve been reading for a while, you may recall is the birthplace of my sainted grandmother) for the Scandinavian Days festival. I was representing the Viking Age Club & Society all by myself this year, with Sam the Viking, who owns the Viking boat, up from Missouri to keep me company. Here’s our camp.
E. Calvin Beisner points to an upcoming U.N. report to say climate alarmists are shifting from climate change to protecting various species around the world as another way to advance totalitarian politics.
Nonetheless, as global warming fears collapse in the face of Climategate, the green socialist machine is scrambling to be ready to switch gears. Perhaps the new rationale for global wealth redistribution and deindustrialization will be preserving biodiversity. It’s a good candidate: It has all the flaws of global warming – bad science, bad economics and totalitarian politics.
FTC may propose internet taxes on news sites to fund old school journalism outlets. “[G]overnment policy would encourage a tax on websites like the Drudge Report, a must-read source for the news links of the day, so that the agency can redistribute the funds collected to various newspapers. Such a tax would hit other news aggregators, such as Digg, Fark and Reddit, which not only gather links, but provide a forum for a lively and entertaining discussion of the issues raised by the stories. Fostering a robust public-policy debate, not saving a particular business model, should be the goal of journalism in the first place.”
“It all started with [Samuel] Beckett, I think. It was a kind of reasonable response to the horrors of the 20th century — you know, ‘No poetry after Auschwitz’. He described it as a mistake, saying: “You look back at the great writers in the English canon, and the American, and they are all funny.”
Writers such as Dickens, Jane Austen, and George Eliot all shared that trait, he said.
And now, more of the imaginary or forgotten in the literary. Here’s something from The Believer Magazine, “Short Takes on Books That Don’t Exist: Eleven Essential, Imaginary Beach Reads for Summer” by Steve Hely
The National Spelling Bee is on now, and there are protesters outside the competition who want our spelling rules changed.
Roberta Mahoney, 81, a former Fairfax County, Va. elementary school principal, said the current language obstructs 40 percent of the population from learning how to read, write and spell.
“Our alphabet has 425-plus ways of putting words together in illogical ways,” Mahoney said.
The protesting cohort distributed pins to willing passers-by with their logo, “Enuf is enuf. Enough is too much.”
Thanks to Peter Sokolowski for this link. He is a lexicographer with Merriam-Webster and claims, “English spelling is arbitrary, but it is the key to the rich history of the language. Normalize the spelling, and we lose touch with history.”
Mary DeMuth has some common writing mistakes, like weak verbs and wordiness. That needs another “ness,” doesn’t it? Wordiness-ness. Wordliness. That’s better. How about verbessence?
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