Apparently the Chinese government wants to look so good for world visitors at the Olympics that it will allows some groups to distrubute Bibles. Ah, God bless ’em.
I’ll Buy That Guy’s Coffee Too
In Greensburg, Pennsylvania, one woman at the Starbucks drive-through decides to pay for the guy behind her too. That guys pays for the guy behind him, and two hours later, people are still paying for the next customer’s order.
Post-traumatic stress
My cold (I’m pretty sure by now it’s a cold) is still with me. The sore throat is better, but I’m more stuffed up today. And yet I went in to work, good soldier that I am. Now I’m home and I plan to lie down a bit after I’ve posted this, and before I get to some more Christmas cards.
There are a couple Minnesota connections to that Colorado shootings story. One is that one of the dead at the YWAM facility was a Minnesota native, Tiffany Johnson. Another Minnesotan, Charles Blanch, was wounded in the leg. And of course you’ve heard about Jeanne Assam, the volunteer security guard who shot and stopped the shooter (who will not be dignified by the use of his name in this post), although apparently he took his own life at the end.
According to this report, Assam was fired from the Minneapolis police force in 1997. This information caught my attention right off, since I can think of many possible reasons why a Christian might be fired in the politically correct climate of Minneapolis city politics today. But apparently she was fired for lying about an incident on a bus where she swore at a driver. Sounds more like a pre-conversion incident, though one never knows.
What is certainly true is that right now, on top of the trauma of having been involved in a fatal fire fight, and survivor’s guilt, she is facing public scrutiny directed at a past she may have hoped to have put behind her. So a prayer for her, as well as for the wounded and the families of the victims, would not be out of order.
Amazon’s Kindle May Not Be Available
Amazon’s popular new e-reader, Kindle, does not have wireless service throughout the U.S. Even in Georgia, the coverage looks sparse statewide. The same with California, and there’s nothing in Montana.
Density
Mr. Bertrand writes, “A story is not a bag of potato chips. I don’t want to rip it open and get a face-full of air. It should be full to bursting. The beginning shouldn’t present a yawning void and a glimpse of substance near the bottom. Instead, I want it to spill everywhere, to get all over everything, to untidy my life for as long as it takes to get to the end.”
Sci-Fi Is a Telling a Good Story
Author John Scalzi discusses science fiction, saying it’s a commercial genre. “Academia generally wants you to show you can write [hence literary fiction]; science fiction generally wants you to tell a story.” The idea is that if you can write and tell a great story, then you have a blockbuster or enduring classic on your hands, but that ain’t necessarily so.
Notes from an invalid weekend
I don’t have much for you tonight. I’ve been feeling sub-par since last Friday. I have a bad sore throat (moderated by Ibuprofen), and I feel run down. Flu? There’s no temperature (Seems like I never do run a temperature, no matter how bad I feel. I’m beginning to wonder if I have a defective thermometer). I’m proud to say, however, that I got the majority of my Christmas shopping done on Saturday, in spite of this handicap. (It’s true. I am a genius. Or else I’m past caring. One of those.) Sunday I spent on the couch with a couple books.
One was Forever Odd, the middle book of the three Dean Koontz’ Odd Thomas adventures published so far. Very good, moving and gripping, like the others. I noted a theological problem with the afterlife as Koontz describes it, though. Odd tells us that damned souls generally depart for Hell immediately after death. The ghosts whom he encounters and tries to help on their way are, for the most part, “good” people who have unfinished business, or are too attached to their loved ones, or are afraid of their reception in Heaven. Odd’s message to them seems to be that they’ll be welcomed by God because they’re good.
This is lousy theology. The Cross is nowhere to be seen.
I suppose that if Koontz (who is, I believe, a Catholic) had employed better theology, he’d have ended up writing “Christian fiction” which would have reached only a limited audience, though. I think there’s an element of allegory in the Odd Thomas books, instead of straight doctrine.
Still, it bothered me a little. Liked the book anyway.
I also read A Time to Hunt, another book in Stephen Hunter’s Bob Lee Swagger series. Like all of them it’s fascinating, richly researched, vivid in its action and characterizations, and satisfying all around.
The books don’t bear much thinking about all at once, though. Bob Lee and his father Earl, also hero of several of Hunter’s books, seem to be falling victim to the terrible doom of the heroes of action TV series—they have more death-defying adventures than can be comfortably believed in, in the aggregate. Earl, for instance, was murdered at a fairly young age, but Hunter has given him so many big adventures that it appears he must have had about one a month all through his short adulthood.
Bob Lee has lived longer than his dad, but he’s around 60 now, and pretty shot up. I hope he can handle all the blood and thunder his author’s still got planned for him.
Another amusing thing about the Swagger Saga is that the stories aren’t consistent with each other. Hunter cheerfully contradicts things he said in other books, and doesn’t apologize for it.
Just like a newspaper man.
They sure are good books, though.
And now, the couch beckons me.
But I’ve got to get started on the Christmas cards.
Increase Your Food Knowledge (and Vikings)
Sara Dickerman reviews a book for the epicurean in you, The Food Snob’s Dictionary. She writes, “[Q]uite funny throughout, the Food Snob’s handbook doesn’t so much seek to define individual terms . . . as define how such terms can be used to score points against other snobs or food-loving novices.”
Perhaps this book could explain why Snickers appeal to both vikings and pilgrims or how a bite of food can spare the monarachy.
Perhaps they just needed a little Greensleeves.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch…
FYI: I learned, via the Christian fandom e-mail group, about this new E-zine featuring serial Western fiction.
Nobel Prize Speeches
Another post from Mr. Key, this one comparing the speeches of Al Gore and William Faulkner.