The morons at PicApp didn’t have a picture of Fess Parker, so I had to settle for this. My Davy Crockett cap was way better than this one.



This is a big one in my odd little universe. I achieved sentience just about the time the Davy Crockett craze hit America, and (although it’s embarrassing for a Christian to admit), ol’ Davy (as portrayed by Fess Parker, who died today at 85) loomed about as large as Jesus there, for a while.

And in my obsessive way, I’ve remained not entirely unfaithful to the Crockett cult. I’ve read a couple books on his life, and checked out the web sites. I once visited a house “Colonel” Crockett built and lived in, near Rutherford, Tennessee. I met a guy who’d played tennis with Fess Parker once, and he could have borrowed money from me if he’d wanted to.

It always irked me that I didn’t have an ancestor at the Alamo. That was actually one of the things that bonded me with Erling Skjalgsson, hero of my novels. I hope it’s not too much of a spoiler (anybody who’s read Heimskringla knows about it) to say that Erling died a death not dissimilar to Davy’s. Because generations of my ancestors lived in Erling’s neighborhood, it’s a statistical impossibility that I didn’t have an ancestor or two who fell with Erling (I might even be a descendant of Erling himself).

So without Davy Crockett, I might have never written the books I’ve written. (“And what a loss that would have been to the world,” he whispered to himself, very quietly.)

In any case, rest in peace, Fess Parker.

A study by the Witherspoon Institute gives us the terrible social cost of porn.

From their website, they give this answer to the question of free speech and the first amendment:

In a series of cases decided since the middle of the twentieth century, the Supreme Court has narrowed the definition of what counts as obscene, and society has simultaneously grown more permissive regarding explicit portrayals of nudity and sex in magazines, in film and on television. Nevertheless, material that meets the Court’s definition of obscenity – that appeals to the prurient interest, that is patently offensive, and that lacks serious artistic, social, or scientific value – can be suppressed, while material deemed indecent though not obscene can be regulated as to the time, place, and manner of its availability. There is little question that hard-core pornography does not receive constitutional protection, even though many jurisdictions now permit its dissemination.

In their report, they give evidence for the rise in crime, trafficking, and family disruption due to our casual acceptance of pornography.

Lawrence Meyers is writing about what’s wrong in Hollywood this week and next.

Here’s the diagnosis regarding Hollywood’s present malady:

1) Movies operate in a statistical environment of extreme uncertainty


2) Uncertainty creates fear


3) Fear creates a desire to control


4) Desire to control has resulted in a multi-layered, needlessly expensive studio bureaucracy, resulting in sub optimal risk management.


5) The goal of each individual level of the bureaucracy is to insulate itself from criticism from the layer above it.


6) This results in the hiring of the most expensive, but not necessarily most talented or suitable, creative team
to manufacture product that audiences are losing interest in and are not designed to achieve maximum ROI.

Writing and performing believable characters. D.G. Myers writes, “At all events, critics say this kind of thing all the time (‘the character comes to life,’ ‘the character just never seems real’), but only now do I realize that I have no idea what they mean.”