In my ongoing campaign to raise the intellectual level of the blogosphere, and indeed of the world at large, I ever strive to draw your attention away from the trivial, the evanescent, and the superficial, to matters of universal relevance and substance.

Today, the subject is my face.

The spark for this meditation was a couple conversations I had in Minot (I expect I’ll be milking Minot for months in this space, since I don’t actually interact with my fellow man much in ordinary life, and that plays hob with a guy’s stock of anecdotes).

An older gentleman approached me in the Viking village on (I think) the first day. He asked me if I was Icelandic.

I told him I wasn’t, but that I’d once spent a couple days in that delightful country.

He said, “You’re a fine looking man. Handsome enough to be an Icelander. In fact you look like you could be a member of my family.”

At that point I realized I’d had this exact conversation two years ago, on my last visit to Høstfest. The same man had approached me then, and said the same thing.

I figured he was about the only Icelander at the festival, and was desperately trying to connect with someone. In his loneliness he felt compelled to go around and confer Icelandicity on random Norwegians like me.

Poignant, no?

That in itself wouldn’t have led to this post, but later on I was approached by two middle-aged ladies. They said, “We recently lost our dearly beloved brother, and you are his spitting image.”

At that point I thought, “Oh no. My old face is coming back.”

As a visual aid at this point (and against the advice of counsel), I shall re-post a picture of myself in high school which I used a while back:

I looked pretty much like this through my college years too, except that I changed to wire-rimmed glasses as a junior.

You’ll note the utter lack of distinction in this face. Ordinary brown hair. No particular bone structure to speak of. The nose, though large, is not of any identifiable shape. Is it a long face or a round face? Somewhere in the middle. Could go either way. It’s a blank slate face.

Back in those days people used to tell me all the time, “You look just like my cousin So-and-so.” Or their nephew. Or some guy they went to school with. I remember walking through Minnehaha Park in Minneapolis one afternoon while a drunken Native American yelled at me for minutes from across the grass, trying to get the attention of some buddy he’d mistaken me for.

As I grew older, and especially after I grew my beard, that sort of thing stopped. Stopped completely. I figured that the wrinkles and spots installed by Time’s little Mr. Potatohead game had finally given me an aspect that was also an artifact (Lincoln once said, “Any man over forty is responsible for his own face”).

But now I seem to be losing it. As we age, it’s well known, we start reverting to our baby faces, and it looks like my short run as a figure of distinction is coming to an end.

On the other hand, if I can get these people who think they’re related to me to co-sign a loan or two…

Somehow I seem to have been transported, all unbeknownst to me, to Seattle, Washington. Or Bergen, Norway (not that that’s a bad thing). It was raining when I left for Minot, and it was raining when I got back, and it’s raining still. We’re sopping around here. I keep flashing back to the Marx Brothers movie, “The Coconuts.” This was one of the first sound movies, and (I believe) the first fully sound-equipped musical ever filmed. They discovered paper was a problem. Paper crinkled loudly in the mikes whenever anybody picked it up, and the sound technicians (whose experience had generally begun that morning) couldn’t figure out what to do about it. So they just soaked all the paper in water. Every piece of paper in the movie looks like something lifted out of a washing machine, mid-cycle.

That’s how pretty much everything feels in Minnesota today. I heard on the radio this morning that we’re about 1/8” away from the record for the rainiest fall in history, the previous champ being 1902 or something.

This, we are sure to be told, is the fault of anthropogenic global warming.

This summer it was dry. That, apparently, was global warming too.

My question to global warming alarmists is this: “Is there any possible weather pattern that could conceivably occur that wouldn’t prove global warming to you?”

Of course not. If the weather every day next year were identical to the weather every day this year, that would be taken as proof of global warming too.

This reinforces my belief that global warming theory is, in essence, a religion. Just as there is no possible event, pleasant or unpleasant, that Christians can’t work into a general theory of the Providence of God, so there’s no conceivable weather cycle that the GW believer can’t harmonize with his doctrine.

The difference, I think, is that I admit my belief system is a religion.

And I don’t accuse people who disagree about it of being paid stooges of greedy corporations, who apparently think a planet laid waste and depopulated will present excellent marketing prospects.

Tonight when I got home from work I noticed one of my credit cards was missing. After looking in the likely places, I called the service number to replace it.

When the female person I’d been talking to had canceled it and promised me a new one, she said, “I see that your payment record with us is wonderful, and I wonder if you’d be interested in…” and then she tried to sell me a credit protection plan.

I said no thank you, but my heart was strangely warmed by her praise of my payment record. When you’re me, you have to take your strokes where you can get them.

A few minutes later I found the card, and I called back to see if I could cancel the cancellation.

They don’t let you do that.

I suppose it’s best, all considered. Now I feel like a doofus again, and the universe is back in balance.

Kevin Holtsberry at Collected Miscellany has moved his blog back to its earlier address, and is rather sad that he isn’t getting more traffic as a result. Check it out. It’s an excellent blog, mostly about books.

Via Mirabilis: A site called Library Thing which allows you to list the books you own and make contact with people who enjoy the same books. What a great concept! I’d use it myself if I didn’t hate everyone in the world, except Sissel and you.

Opinion Journal has a list of people who would have done more to earn a Nobel Peace prize than this year’s recipient, such as “Garry Kasparov and the several hundred Russians who were arrested in April, and are continually harassed, for resisting President Vladimir Putin’s slide toward authoritarian rule” and “Britain’s Tony Blair, Ireland’s Bertie Ahern and the voters of Northern Ireland, who in March were able to set aside decades of hatred to establish joint Catholic-Protestant rule in Northern Ireland.”

Speaking of Kasparov, he has a new book called, How Life Imitates Chess. Business Week experts the book in which he applies chess principles to politics. He says, “Litvinenko’s murder came on the heels of the Moscow killing of the well-known investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya . . . The killings have turned a spotlight on what the West had assumed was the autocratic but stable Putin regime. Suddenly the foreign media is realizing what we in the Russian opposition have been saying for years—the Kremlin is ever closer to dictatorship than democracy and yet is not stable at all.”