My burning question for supporters of nationalized health care:
If the U.S. adopts a single-payer health care system, where are the Canadians going to go for surgery, if they don’t want to wait a decade for a bypass?
You hate Canadians, don’t you? Don’t you?
Yeah, I know it’s “Talk Like a Pirate Day.” Why should I care? I talk like a Viking every day.
Somebody came out with a book a while back (I won’t bother to link to it) that claimed to document homosexual behavior as very common among pirates. I have no reason to doubt that. Men who stay at sea for long periods of time, with no access to women, very frequently turn to sodomy. This goes for men in prison and (formerly) boys in English public schools too. It would be ridiculous to maintain that all those guys (who generally turned back to heterosexuality as soon as women were available) were “born to be gay.”
Which brings us to this piece by S. T. Karnick about an article in (of all places) Mother Jones, questioning the idea that sexual identity is fixed. Cracks are beginning to appear in the homosexual ideological wall. So don’t give up the ship.
(Which is not pirate talk. It’s U.S. Navy talk.)
I got an e-mail today from Dr. Tim Furnish, author of Holiest Wars, an expert on Islam (particularly the messianic variety). He said some extremely flattering things about my article at The American Spectator Online yesterday. I checked out his web site and think it well worth sharing with you. (And he’s a Lutheran.)
I guess I’m required to say that I didn’t watch the Emmys. Why, I have no idea. Nobody watched the Emmys. I might as well say, “Last weekend, I didn’t play polo.”
Anyway, I’m informed that Sally Field expressed the hackneyed opinion (which was stupid back when I first heard it, in college) that there’d be no wars if women ran the world. Which prompted the following Deathless Quotation from me:
Stand by for a Deathless Quotation from Lars Walker.
If women ran the world, we’d have wars once a month.
This has been a Deathless Quotation from Lars Walker.
Full disclosure: the insight isn’t mine. I stole it from Katie McCollow at Yucky Salad With Bones (not the top post, but the next one down. Katie never posts two days in a row. I’m sure she did it this time just to mess up my link). I merely expressed it in a pithier fashion. Which is what I do, because I’m a trained professional.
Once again The American Spectator Online has fallen victim to my charm, and printed a column by me, just as if it came from a serious person.
This one is the the third, and probably the last, of the Pastoral Letters From the Future.
The weather forecast called for severe storms this morning. They did not appear, though the special effects guys painted the sky for it. We expect some precipitation tonight or tomorrow, and possibly some Thor’s Hammer action too. But so far it’s been just an oddly warm day for September, with the humidity high.
I’ve been e-mailing with the Youngest Niece in China, and I told her I spent yesterday afternoon sewing a new leather cover on one of my Viking sword sheaths. She asked for details and pictures (for some reason), and I figure that as long as I’m taking pictures I might as well use them here too (however arcane and boring the subject matter) thus killing two birds with one sword.
Actually, two swords.
Here’s a picture of my Viking swords and their sheaths. Neither of them is expensive or meticulously authentic, but they look pretty good if you don’t examine them too closely. My new leather covers are meant to improve that impression.
The top sword represents a late Viking sword, the kind Erling Skjalgsson might have had. If you’ve read The Year of the Warrior, there’s a scene where Erling explains why he prefers his new Frankish sword to his father’s heirloom sword (superior steel from Germany had become available). This is the sort of thing Erling was talking about. You’ll note that it’s a little broader at the hilt end, with more taper than the other sword. This is my “show sword,” the one I ordinarily wear with my costume.
The sword below is a Paul Chen Practical Viking Sword (Third Generation). It’s an earlier design, fairly common in England and Scandinavia. This is an intentionally blunt sword, meant for theatrical use and live steel combat.
I re-covered the lower sheath last Sunday, and the upper sheath yesterday.
I’d never been happy with the sheath on my show sword. It’s a cheap-o from a catalog that sells a fairly broad range of sword qualities. The sheath came with a rectangular cross-section, which was another indicator of cost-cutting. A sharp oval cross-section is more authentic. The Paul Chen, which was actually less expensive, came with a much nicer oval sheath. But then it was made in China, under conditions I don’t care to think about.
So the first thing I did was put a new cover on the Paul Chen. No work on the sheath itself was necessary. The original sheath came in beautifully finished wood, but I’m pretty brutal with my swords, chucking them in the back of the Tracker and driving them around where they rub up against stuff, so it was getting scuffed up.
A friend in the Viking Age Society had explained to me how to sew leather on a sheath. I had assumed it involved either gluing it or soaking it and letting it shrink, but he explained that what I needed to do was cut the leather to size, but leave a gap along the edges, so that the two long edges don’t touch when wrapped around the sheath.
Then you poke or punch holes along both edges, and sew them together, pulling the stitches up tight to stretch the leather. When you’re done, you have a nice tight cover.
I was pleased with the results on the Paul Chen, so I resolved to do the same with the show sword. I knew this would be harder, but I hoped that I could plane or sand the edges down to get something closer to the oval cross-section I wanted.
This proved to be impossible without actually re-building the sheath. It turned out that the pieces of the sheath had been secured with a number of tiny little nails which were not kind to my tools. So I did the best I could to round them, and had to be content with that.
This had consequences. The leather didn’t stretch as well around those flattish edges as they had around the sharp oval of the Paul Chen. But the result wasn’t awful. I can live with it.
You’ll note that the center seam is especially off-center on the show sword. I think the reason for that was that I worked almost all the way from one side, so every time I pulled the thread up tight, I tugged the whole seam toward me. Next time I do this I’ll try to change sides regularly.
You’ll also note that I put a “collar” at the top of the show sword sheath. This wasn’t to make it fancier. It was to cover a section where the leather ran out in a way I hadn’t planned.
Maybe one day I’ll go all the way and actually build a proper Viking sheath (that would involve, among other things, lining it on the inside with fleece, to protect and oil the blade). But for now I’ve slightly improved my impression and it didn’t cost me much.
I see TV ads for some new fall TV comedy called “The Big Bang Theory,” about brainy geeks and their sexy female neighbor.
These are my questions:
Do non-geeks want to watch a show about geeks?
Do geeks want to watch a show about geeks?
Also the acting looks lousy.
I share because I care.
Well, as it turns out I’ll have a little time I didn’t expect tonight, after all. Let’s see if I can get this review composed and posted (composted?) before time’s winged chariot o’ertakes me, leaving tread marks on my back.
I think you’ll either love or hate Stephen Hunter’s Dirty White Boys. I almost put it down a few pages in, because the story promised the murders of a whole lot of innocent bystanders before it was done, and I don’t have much stomach for that sort of thing anymore.
But Hunter surprised me. The story wasn’t what I expected, and I found it both compelling and complex.
A lot of people in our culture, I think, misunderstand what moral ambiguity in fiction means.
Sam Spade, for instance, in The Maltese Falcon, is a morally ambiguous character. He has major moral failings, especially in that he’s having an affair with his partner’s wife. But when that partner is killed, Sam knows his duty. He has to find the killer and turn them over to the police—even though it turns out to be someone he cares about. He’s not perfect, but he knows what’s right and what’s wrong, and he does his best to choose right.
That’s moral ambiguity.
Or there are situations where everything is so convoluted that one good has to be balanced against another good, or one evil against another. Sophie’s horrible Choice in that novel is an example of such a tragic moral ambiguity.
That’s another kind.
But modern writers aren’t usually willing to wrestle with moral ambiguity that way. They take the easy way out, flippantly declaring that there is no right and wrong, and that everyone’s choices are right for them. For all the theatrics of their characters, nobody really thinks anything important is at stake.
That’s not moral ambiguity. That’s moral nihilism.
Stephen Hunter presents here a classic exercise in real moral ambiguity. It’s a tour de force, in my opinion, with echoes of Greek tragedy.
Oklahoma Highway Trooper Bud Pewtie is Hunter’s tragic hero, the good man with the fatal flaw. He’s a little like Sam Spade, but he has more guilt. A family man with two teenage sons, he wants to be a good father and a good example. But he’s betraying his family, carrying on an affair with a younger woman. In yet another betrayal, the younger woman is the wife of his partner. Bud inhabits that moral no-man’s-land we all know so well, where you can’t make up your mind to end the thing, but can’t make up your mind to make a break the other way either. So you take the path of least resistance and hope things will work out somehow.
The antagonist in the book is Lamar Pye, a sort of mythic figure—the baddest white man in McAlester State Penitentiary. He is big and strong and fearless and smart, and when he breaks out of prison along with two other prisoners (murdering two innocent people along the way) he looks forward to blazing a path of robbery and death across the state.
And yet… in his own way, Lamar is a better man than Bud Pewtie. Because, as someone mentions, he knows how to be “true to his own kind.” “His own kind” being the people close to him, the ones he considers his family.
First of all there’s his cousin Odell. Odell is a huge, powerful man with a cleft palate and the mind of a small child. Essentially sweet by nature, he’d never have hurt anyone if he hadn’t been abused by his father (Lamar killed the father) and then become attached to a criminal.
Then there’s Richard, the other escaped prisoner. Richard is an artist, a soft and sensitive type who would have been easy meat for any rapist in the prison if he hadn’t drawn a picture of a lion that Lamar liked. Lamar became his protector then, leaving him no choice but to escape when Lamar escaped.
Later on there’s Ruta Beth, a not-quite-sane farm girl with a dark secret who hides the gang and becomes Lamar’s lover. She calls them all “the family” (Odell is “the baby”).
And Lamar surprises us. After the first two needless murders, he spares the lives of a couple people whom it would be safer for him to kill. We see him caring for his perverse little family in self-sacrificial ways, and we realize that under different circumstances he could have been a great man.
But he keeps running afoul of Bud Pewtie, and somehow he can’t manage to kill Bud. Bud becomes his obsession, his target, and that leads to a final showdown between two extremely complex, morally ambiguous men.
But for all the ambiguity, Hunter never forgets which side is the right side.
Aristotle said (if I remember correctly) that tragedy should rouse “pity and terror.”
There’s plenty of that in Dirty White Boys.
Cautions for offensive language, sex and violence. Not for the fainthearted. But an outstanding moral narrative, for my money.
Sorry, nothing much tonight either. I gotta run around and do stuff, and give somebody a ride too. But here’s a link from Redstate, which amuses me. (Warning: it’s political.)
I promise I’ll try to post something tomorrow.
I don’t have much for you tonight. I had internet connection problems, which threw me behind schedule. But I’ve got a YouTube link here. This was done by a youth group at a Pentecostal church called Livets Tabernakel (Tabernacle of Life) in Oslo, Norway. It’s not as great as it thinks it is, but blast it, there’s little enough good coming out of Norway. I want to encourage them.