I decided that gunny sacks would be just the things to tote some of my Viking gear around in. So I dropped in at my local hardware store tonight. A young female employee asked me if I needed help. I asked if they had any gunny sacks.

She said, “Any what?”

She had never heard of a gunny sack in her life.

What strange world is this I find myself in, where there are people who don’t know what a gunny sack is?

Then I was thinking about how we speak about time. In Norwegian, if it’s, say, 9:55, or five minutes before 10:00, you call it “fem på ti.” Which literally means, “five on ten.”

And I remembered something I used to hear people say when I was a kid. My parents and folks around my home town would have called that time, “five of ten.”

So I’m wondering, do people say that anywhere else in the country, or is it an Americanized version of the Norwegian idiom, exclusive to areas where Scandinavians settled in large numbers?



Penn Jillette, the magician and showman, had sort of grudging praise for religious Americans in an appearance on Lopez Tonight on the TBS television network.

…I’ve got to say it was actually a shock doing the show, the religious communities in the United States of America are the most tolerant people worldwide. I mean, we did really aggressive stuff we believe strongly, and mostly got letters from Christians and Catholics saying we really like how passionately and clearly you put out your ideas. Very few nut cases.

I don’t follow Jillette’s work closely, and I’ll confess he’s offended me occasionally when I’ve tried. But I have the impression that he’s a man of rare integrity in our day, someone who refuses to tell lies just because they’ll support his views. He has my respect.

Over at The American Spectator, Mark Tooley examines the continued pattern of condescension and patronization demonstrated by mainline Protestant denominations, in their dealings with their more conservative (and soon to be more numerous) African counterparts.

Liberal church activists are reluctant to acknowledge that African Christianity has a firm mind of its own, preferring condescendingly to portray it as primitive and easily manipulated by conservative U.S. religionists. It is true that much of African Christianity is new, somewhat similar to fast growing, early American frontier revivalism in its earnest faith, populism, and strong sense of the supernatural. According to the World Christian Encyclopedia of 2001, Africa was less than 10 percent Christian in 1900 but was over 45 percent Christian by 2000. (This compares to Islam’s growth in African from 32 percent to 40 percent.) About 20 percent of the world’s Christians now live in Africa, and rates of active church attendance are higher in Africa than in much of old Christendom. One Congolese bishop estimated that more Congolese are in a United Methodist Church on a typical Sunday than in all the United States.