Space radiation could be too high a fence to vault on our way to Mars. Charles Q. Choi writes, “The magnetic field of Earth protects humanity from radiation in space that can damage or kill cells. Once beyond this shield, people become far more vulnerable.”
They’ll probably figure it out in a several years.
Terry Teachout is talking about opera.
Rarely, though, has a slogan puzzled me more than the one I saw on a Baltimore billboard a couple of weeks ago. It’s the motto of the Baltimore Opera Company: Opera. It’s better than you think. It has to be. I’m not averse on principle to self-deprecation, but why on earth does the BOC think that running down opera will induce people to change their minds about it?
A 169-year-old bookstore in Halifax, Canada’s oldest, has closed.
Bertrand points out changes at Relief Journal. He writes, “By the way, if you don’t subscribe to Relief Journal, you should. It’s an ambitious magazine that’s already managed to publish some amazing work, and it gets better and better. Follow the link and find out for yourself. And if you’re planning to attend the Calvin Festival next month, be sure to stop by the Relief booth and say hello!”
I am uncultured swine, because I have allowed my subscription to lapse. I’ll rectify that soon. I wanted to go to the Calvin Fest too, until I learned how much it would cost me to attend. I’m just a poor graphic designer, relatively speaking–too poor to stay in Grand Rapids for a few days.
According to Proverbs 22:13, the sluggard says, “There is a lion in the streets.”
Well, my sluggard credentials are impeccable, and I saw a lion in the streets today. Not a big lion. Not an Aslan. Not even the MGM lion. Kind of a wimpy lion, actually, sort of a Bert Lahr lion. But a nuisance nevertheless.
The lion I mean is that famous simile lion, the one that March goes out like. We got about three inches of snow today, and we expect another couple inches overnight. This wasn’t a raging snowstorm. More of a snow-globe snow, and the temperatures were so warm that it all slushed up on hitting the pavement, so it didn’t even interfere much with the drive home (though the morning drive may be interesting).
But the white carpet covers the grass, and we’re tired of it all.
Today, a historical story from my family history.
No, I tell a lie. It’s not the history of my family, except tangentially. It’s the history of the farm I grew up on.
Ours was a small farm, even by the standards of those days. 160 acres. This wasn’t unusual. A lot of people fed their families on 160 acres back then. But nobody would have called it a big farm.
Much of the information I’ll share in this piece come from an essay that was written by my great-aunt Ordella, who wrote it up for a bicentennial newspaper contest in 1976.
Our farm, in Kenyon township southwest of the town of Kenyon, Minnesota, was homesteaded by some people named Clark. It had been originally granted by the government to a man named Wade Wellman, for Civil War service (I assume that he was no relation to Manly Wade Wellman, the fantasy author, because the geography’s wrong). The original title record is a little confused, but it appears that a man named Pease operated a stagecoach way station on the property, perhaps in partnership with Clark. There was a house and an inn there, on the southwest corner of the property, on a road we always called “the old Sioux Line Road.” My dad’s cousin James wrote a history of his own neighboring farm a few years back, and tried to figure out where that name for the road came from. Nobody who ever knew seemed to be alive anymore. There doesn’t appear to be any connection to the Soo Line Railroad.
In 1916, my great-grandfather bought both these farms and moved his family up from Iowa. Everyone thought he’d been cheated on the land, because much of it (especially on the farm where I grew up) was swamp. But Great Grandpa Walker had learned about drainage tile in Iowa, and he turned it into productive acreage (characteristically he bought “overbaked” tile, essentially factory seconds, at a discount). I know this makes him an environmental criminal, but back then they valued arable land over ducks.
Anyway, Aunt Ordella says that one of the old settlers went to Great Grandpa one day and asked if he’d uncovered any human bones in his digging or plowing.
According to local tradition, he explained, two strangers had arrived at the station one night, on the way east from California. Supposedly one of the strangers disappeared and could not be found when the stage left in the morning. It was rumored that he’d been carrying a large sum of money, and that the other stranger may have murdered him for it and hid the body.
But Great Grandpa never found anything. Neither did my grandfather or my dad.
I’ve also heard a story that Jesse James and his gang stopped there on their way to Northfield to rob the bank, in a raid you’ve seen overdramatized in several movies.
I don’t believe that story. Half the farms in southeast Minnesota think the James boys stopped there.
If I understand Cousin James’ account, it was my Great Grandfather who decided to tear down the house at the old way station (re-using the lumber) and move the station building up to a new farmstead at the northeast corner of the property. This is the farmstead where I grew up, and it looked like this in an aerial photo taken before I was born: Continue reading The stage coach station
I watching this interview right now on R.C. Sproul’s website, Sproul discussing the issues of Ben Stein’s upcoming movie, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. They mention Galileo early on, which we’ve discussed on this blog. Later on, while discussing the idea that chance is not a force of creation or anything at all, Stein says, “Chance means something if you have no better explanation.”
No, not modernizing The Count of Monte Cristo or Oliver Twist, if that were possible. The question is should pop lit books from several years ago be modernized for today’s readers with no sense of history. Speaking of Sweet Valley High, BuzzSugar says, “It’s as though Random House sat down with the ’80s editions and thought, ‘huh, these unrealistic expectations just aren’t quite unrealistic enough!'”
In other bad news, Madonna apparently wants to remake Casablanca and set it in Iraq. This is a rumor, but the article quotes an unnamed source: “She and her representatives have been touting around a project which is a remake of Casablanca. The reception has been lukewarm to say the least.”
April Fool’s Day is Christmas Day for passive-aggressives. Roy Bragg of San Antonio, Texas, says, “The main goal of April 1 should be to avoid embarrassment. Don’t say “yes” to anything tomorrow. Question anything that appears out of the ordinary. Check everything twice. If someone appears to be goofing on you, grab the nearest blunt object and hit them in the head with it.”
If you weren’t here last week, don’t miss our contest for Narnia books. Get your comment in by Wednesday night.
Tuesday being April Fool’s Day, other blogs will be telling jokes, pulling pranks, and testing your gullibility with fake news. But here on Brandywine Books, I want to edify you a wee bit with literary quizzes. I doubt regular readers will have difficulty with these, but maybe some passersby may find them challenging.
The question for my homemade quiz is simple. Which of the following statements or quotations are from the Bible (King James Version) and which are from Shakespeare’s plays?
1. “Dispute it like a man.”
2. Life is “a vapor, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away.”
3. “The evil that men do lives after them, The good is oft interred with their bones.”
4. “To whom will ye liken me, and make me equal, and compare me, that we may be like?”
5. “Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted, because they are not.”
6. “Every subject’s duty is the king’s; but every subject’s soul is his own.”
7. “Delight is not seemly for a fool; much less for a servant to have rule over princes.”
8. “Had I but serv’d my God with half the zeal I serv’d my king, He would not in mine age have left me naked to mine enemies.”
9. “The trying of your faith worketh patience”
10. “Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.”
Bonus: Does the saying, “the blind leading the blind,” originate in the Bible, Shakespeare, or elsewhere? Continue reading Is it from the Bible or Shakespeare?