Mowed the lawn tonight—a tremendous achievement and a triumph over the very forces of nature. I’ve been wanting to mow it all week, but it’s been a solid wall of rain. And I’m leaving Friday morning for Scandinavian Days in Story City, Iowa (where, as it happens, my grandmother was born) to do a Viking gig. So I very much feared the grass would be permitted to express itself in all its creativity until next week. I don’t want that. I think my neighbors are close to firebombing me for lowering property values as it is.

I’ve come to realize that Barack Obama is right on one thing. This election is bringing Americans together. Not over him—the most he’s ever done to reach across political lines is to move the line to the left. No, the one thing Republicans and Democrats can now agree on is that the Clintons are incredibly sleazy and tiresome.

Oh, you came for blogging related to literature? How’s this? Charles Dickens desk sells for $850,000 in a London auction.

The money raised at Wednesday’s auction will go the Great Ormond Street children’s hospital in London. Dickens was a close friend of the hospital’s founder and spoke at its first fundraising dinner in 1858.

The buyer, the report says, is a tarot card reader. Could be worse, I suppose. It might have been a Dan Brown reader.

I’m taking bids for my own desk, by the way. Buy it now, before I die and the price goes way up! Extra-large size, made of steel with a formica top. Genuine rust at no extra charge. You can have it for just a tenth of what they got for Dickens’ desk, and this one’s a whole lot newer!

The title above should have been the title of last night’s post, but I didn’t think of it until down in the comments.

I’m extremely pleased with that line. If this were a commercial blog, I’d print up tee-shirts or bumper stickers featuring it in large letters, along with our URL, and sell them. Because I’m a capitalist, after all, and it’s about time I got serious about grinding down the oppressed masses.



By way of Greg Slade and the Christian-fandom e-mail list, here’s a link to Galaxiki, a wiki-based online universe-building site. Greg describes it thus:

Membership is free and there are tons of community solar systems that

can be edited, but it’s also possible to acquire your own, personal

solar system.

Not my kind of thing, but surely there are some titanically grandiose among our readers.

Speaking of freedom, on June 3, 1989, many Chinese people were protesting in 100-acre Tiananmen Square when their government, who apparently cannot tolerate dissent, rebuked them. Hundreds were killed, some not in the square but in their homes. Even ambulance drivers were shot, according to this firsthand report from the BBC. It’s a sickening irony that the massacre happened in a place apparently named “gate of heavenly peace.”

This is Chairman Mao’s legacy, forced submission and debasing equality. But I think the Chinese people may rise above it, especially as the gospel spreads. They were made to be more than numbers in The People’s Machine.

This last one was the closest thing to a pleasant spring weekend we’ve had so far (at least so far as I recall), which means that it rained and was overcast much of the time, but there was that beautiful morning and early afternoon on Saturday… before it started hailing. Dime-sized servings here, no serious damage that I could see.

The man who invented the Pringle’s potato crisp cardboard tube has passed away, and some of his ashes were buried, as per his request, in one of those impact-resistant, re-closable packages.

I suffer from low self-esteem, I know, but I think I’d have to be pretty darn secure about my family’s love before I asked one of them to spoon some of me out of the urn and transfer it to a separate container. Even if they did wear a face mask.



By way of Red State, there’s a story about how the police in Great Britain are enforcing Gospel-free zones, where the presence of a Muslim majority makes it illegal to preach Christ.

I’m sure there are people on the Left who find this restriction of free speech repugnant. But I’m convinced a lot of them don’t see any problem. “Freedom of speech isn’t for you. It’s for them. Because they’re victims.”

This is one aspect of the major philosophical divide between conservatives and liberals today. Conservatives love freedom, and liberals love equality.

It comes down to your definition of equality, I think. Conservatives are terrified of equality as an absolute value, because it means the extinction of freedom. If you give people freedom, some will do better in the world than others. Then equality is gone. The race may not always be to the swift, but it is often enough to make the results unequal.

Liberals believe that the only real freedom is equality. If you insist on equality, then you can’t permit freedom in the traditional sense. Because freedom always ends up with the toys unequally distributed.

The bureaucrats of Britain see the Muslim population as an oppressed group which has been denied the equality it deserves. Therefore they must be given every freedom, and their opponents must be shackled, in order to achieve the supreme goal of equality.

It’s very likely too late for Great Britain, and for all of Europe. It may be too late for us, too. We’ll see.