Back from Hostfest, alive and well and only slightly scathed. I won’t do a big post tonight, because I’m exhausted (my usual state at this point). I’ll just share a picture (there will be more tomorrow).

This is me in our Viking camp, presiding in lordly splendor, backed up by a gorgeous quilted banner that somebody in Minot produced for our exhibit. I’m wearing my brand new Viking tunic, which I got to wear for the first time that day. Unfortunately I had to give it back to the lady in our group who makes these things, because she wants to do some final finishing on it.

Tomorrow: Amusing anecdotes and passive aggression.



Note: In Photobucket this picture is right side up. I can’t figure out how to make it transfer correctly.



Update to note: Apparently it’s all right. I just needed to re-load the page. Never mind.

Erin O’Connor points to an article on academic freedom from the Chronicle of Higher Education. “Academic freedom is no longer the guiding principle of academic employment, but the privilege of the increasingly select, tenured few.”

Nothing is the correct answer for those of you at home keeping score. Harrison Scott Key notes the Swedish Nobel Prize doesn’t prefer American literature and offers a response: Invade.

Samuel, the name under which he comments on BwB, has contributed to The Rabbit Room, an interesting group blog I learned about recently. His post is Only God Can Make a Poet. “I have come to believe that beauty and the arts, creation and sub-creation, are as vital in the reflection of the glory of God to an unbelieving world as is the finest intellectual answer,” he says. Good on you, sir.

I enjoy hearing from publicists–by email preferably. When they drop by the house for a minutes of “fellowship” or whatever they call it, it gets a bit intrusive, but I enjoy getting emails and book offers from them. Some of them send books without checking first. That is, I got such a book the other day. Teen romance, not my thing. Written by three authors, unless the one author had a very long, comma-ridden name. Flipping through it, I saw preppy lifestyles, casual drug use, open air sex–my good wife said I needed to get it out of the house quickly.

Still, I appreciate hearing from publicists. It makes me wonder if this blog is discussed at those little meetings they have up in New York City.

“Yeah, I sent that one to Phil Wade at Brandywine Books.”

“Oh, you did?”

“Had to get rid of somewhere.”

“Isn’t he the guy who blogs with Lars Walker?”

“Yeah, that’s him.”

“D’you actually read that stuff?”

*cough* “Nobody around here actually reads it. We just know about it.”

“Walker has a new book coming out. Wonder if we can do the rounds for it?”

You can see where the conversation would go from there.

“The legislation is like this: some boats are sinking, so rather than bailing those boats out, you blow up the dam and drain the whole lake,” says economist John Cochrane in this article on the fact economists don’t quite buy the idea of a coming financial armageddon.

Scientists are conducting genetic studies again. They are examining patterns in mice genes. “What this suggests to us is that the Norwegian Vikings were taking these mice around and they were taking a particular genetic type,” leading to an understanding of how men migrated in the early world. Real men, you know–viking men.