It was a quiet weekend, highlighted by a little shopping and housecleaning, as well as church as usual. Today it’s good and stinking hot—the first day this year I’d characterize by that precise and objective characterization. Nearly 100 degrees, at least on my back porch. I like it. I’m a summer baby, never really comfortable until I’m uncomfortably warm.

I recently wrote a paper for the Georg Sverdup Society (for the benefit of newcomers, that’s the scholarly society for which I serve as Journal editor. We’re mostly devoted to translating the works of Prof. Georg Sverdrup of Augsburg College, one of the founders of my branch [or “perversion,” some of our Lutheran readers are thinking] of Lutheranism—a sort of congregational Lutheranism).

My premise was that the roots of our peculiarity (or “perversion,” as above) may partly be found in Norwegian social tradition going back to the Viking Age. (Norwegian Lutherans in America were remarkable in that they split up into a number of competing Lutheran fellowships, unlike most of the other Scandinavian-Americans, who founded purely ethnic, one-size-fits-all church bodies). I suggest (I don’t think it’s provable one way or another) that this contentiousness (dare I say “diversity?”) may spring—in part—from the old Viking-Age political system, which Prof. Torgrim Titlestad calls “confederative,” and for which Erling Skjalgsson (hero of West Oversea, of which you may have heard) lived and died.

I sent the article to my friend and blurb-writer Dr. John Eidsmoe, because it occurred to me that this would be red meat to him. And indeed he responded quickly, correcting a couple of points of fact, but also very interested in my premise. He said, “You might say that Erling Skjalgsson was the Robert E. Lee of Norway.” That struck me odd at first, but on consideration there’s a lot to be said for it.

He also suggested that I might be the world’s greatest expert on Erling. Very flattering, but not true. Prof. Titlestad knows rings around me. Maybe I’m the greatest expert in America. But I’d bet there’s some hungry professor in some obscure Midwestern history department whom I’ve never heard of, who did a brilliant (and neglected) doctoral thesis on Erling. And who is very bitter about it, and will probably hunt me down and shoot me if my novel’s a success.

Still, it’s nice to be flattered. Flatter me all you like. I’ll make mordant, self-deprecatory jokes, but secretly I’ll like it, and don’t let me tell you otherwise.

“I’m ready (to die), but I’m going to wait for the movie,” said a 10-year-old cancer patient, waiting to see Pixar’s latest movie. The girl, Colby Curtin, was too sick to go to a theater, so a family friend called Pixar and Disney to ask if they would help her watch the movie before she died.

A Pixar employee brought a DVD to the Curtin family along with movie-related toys and stayed while the family watched. Colby couldn’t open her eyes to see the film. Her mother described the scenes to her. The family didn’t know “Up” focuses on an old man holding on to the dreams he had with his departed wife. They knew primarily that the story had lots of balloons and that Colby wanted to see it.

She died that evening.

It amused me today, for some reason, to recall that I know where to find a washroom at the fish market in Bergen, Norway. Oddly, I experienced almost as much pleasure in remembering that accomplishment as in the thought of being published (which just goes to show you there’s something very, very wrong with me).

Mark you, it’s not the greatest washroom you’ve ever used. For one thing, you have to pay to get into a stall. You pay an attendant, who—although I used the Men’s Room—was a woman, at least the last time I was there.

See, that’s what comes of Socialism. Verily I say unto you, if Pres. Obama (peace be upon him) and the Democrats have their way, soon all our washrooms will be pay toilets, and all the men’s rooms will have female attendants.

And it’ll do you no good staying home, because private washrooms will be outlawed. THIS WAY TO THE PEOPLE’S FACILITIES. YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK. PLEASE TAKE A NUMBER.

OK, I think I’ve taken this train of thought far enough down the track.

It’s one thing for an editor or columnist to call for censorship of bad or disfavored ideas by rounding up people who hold those ideas. It’s another thing for the attorney general to call it. I wonder if hate crime law is inacted, will it make attempted assault just as harshly punished as assault under some circumstances? Worse than that, the current bill apparently allows the federal prosecutors to try a person twice for a single act of qualifying hatred.

The US Commission on Civil Rights says the bill currently in the Senate “will do little good and a great deal of harm.” In a letter to several senators, the commissioners wrote:

“We regard the broad federalization of crime as a menace to civil liberties,” stated the commissioners. They pointed out that the loophole to “double jeopardy” exists because the authors of the Bill of Rights “never dreamed that federal criminal jurisdiction would be expanded to the point where an astonishing proportion of crimes are now both state and federal offenses.”