Good news: That snowstorm they promised us today failed to materialize. Instead, the snow continued to melt, and with time the sun even came out.

I’m devastated by this development, as you’ve no doubt guessed. Almost as devastated as I was by the news that “The Golden Compass” tanked at the box office.

I’m not sure if this has really been one of the worst winters in my experience or not. But the weather’s certainly been tough, and my health has spent most of the time (as the saying goes) under it. I’ve bounced from one cold to a worse cold to a cold even worse than that, finally topped off by the flu.

A couple links. In the wake of David Mamet’s coming out of the closet as a conservative, we now have an article from playwright Tom Stoppard in which, if he doesn’t actually espouse conservatism, he at least has the courage to admit that the activism of the ’60s and ’70s was mostly about partying, rather than any kind of moral principle.

I’m still bitter about that part of my life. Not because of the difficulty I had in fighting the idols of that age, but because I’m embarrassed about the extent to which I in fact pandered to those idols. Oh, I didn’t actually participate in the fun stuff. I never got high, never took advantage of the sexual opportunities. But I took seriously, and spoke respectfully about, ideas that I now recognize as total codswallop. The memory of the clothes embarrasses me, I’ll admit, but the memory of the ideas is what really makes me blush. (Hat tip: Ed Veith at Cranach.)

Via Cronaca (not to be confused with Cranach): I think this is really cool. See, back in 1860, some scientists in France figured out a way to record sound waves graphically, and they “recorded” an image of the voice of a singer performing a folk song. Today, thanks to modern technology, scientists are able to turn that graphic image into sound waves, and we can hear the singer’s voice.

I remember one time my friends and I were in Chicago, back in the early ’70s. I said I’d like to visit the Museum of Science and Industry. My friends weren’t keen, but we had an afternoon off, and finally we all went. Everyone was very cool about it afterwards, talking about how boring and stifling all this technology stuff was.

We were idiots. Technology’s cool.

Tags: snowstorm, Tom Stoppard, cool, technology

Dan Wickett is talking about new lit journals on his Emerging Writers Network, and his points out the closing of the Litblog Co-op. Perhaps people were too busy with other blogs, projects, and off-line things.

Tags: blogs, literary, literary journals, lit blogs

I’m not bubbling with ideas for a post tonight. I think everyone in Minnesota is depressed at the moment. The snow from the weekend has finally melted off, and now we’re supposed to get more tonight and tomorrow. That’s March in Minnesota. We knew about it when we enlisted. But it gets old, it does.

No book to review tonight. I’m working on another Koontz, but I’m not done with it yet, and I’ve reviewed plenty of Koontz anyway. This one (False Memory) is kind of hard going for me. Not that I don’t like it. I do. But it’s about phobias and obsessions and dysfunctional families, and that hits pretty close to home. I pick it up each time with just a little dread.



Richard Widmark is dead at 93. I recall that my mother never forgave him for pushing that old lady down the stairs. But I liked him OK as an actor.

He was born in Minnesota, and I’ve always had the idea that he may have been Norwegian. I get that idea because a friend had relatives named Widmark (no relation that I know of), and I understood that they were Norwegian. “Vidmark” in Norwegian would mean “wide grassland.”

He played a Viking once, too, in “The Long Ships,” a movie every Viking buff hates pretty cordially. It’s a fun flick in its way, but the story’s idiotic, and the costumes are terrible.

On top of that, it was actually based on one of the best Viking novels ever written (next to mine, of course), Röde Orm (that’s the Swedish title) by Frans Gunnar Bengtsson. The geniuses of Hollywood, naturally, had to improve it. So they took a well-researched historical novel and turned it into an unbelievable quasi-historical fantasy.

Ah well.

I could comment on Widmark’s gun control views (mentioned in the Fox piece), but it’s been pointed out to me (with justice) that I’m too inclined to speak ill of the dead (I much prefer to attack defenseless people). Widmark had a very long marriage, which ended with the death of his first wife, and that’s awfully impressive by Hollywood standards. So full props to him for that. R.I.P.

Duffy asked Marohasy: “Is the Earth still warming?”

She replied: “No, actually, there has been cooling, if you take 1998 as your point of reference. If you take 2002 as your point of reference, then temperatures have plateaued. This is certainly not what you’d expect if carbon dioxide is driving temperature because carbon dioxide levels have been increasing but temperatures have actually been coming down over the last 10 years.”

Duffy: “Is this a matter of any controversy?”

Marohasy: “Actually, no. The head of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has actually acknowledged it.”

The article carries on to discuss press coverage and NASA’s Aqua satellite.

Tags: science, global warming, climate change, NASA