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.