Legendary French mime Marcel Marceau is dead.

All over France he will be memorialized today with a moment of talking.

It looked like a re-play of last night as I drove home. The sun had been shining, but now clouds were driving in, dusty-looking and gray as the contents of a vacuum cleaner bag.

So I canceled my evening walk. And then the sky cleared up. I should walk now, but I’m washing clothes, and I just ate, and… well, I’m lazy.

Tomorrow we’re going to have live steel combat practice at a Viking Age Society member’s farm down near Mankato. The weather’s predicted to be good.

And it gives me an excuse to put off maintenance chores around here.

I read this via Gaius at Blue Crab Boulevard: Jesse Macbeth, who made himself famous by “confessing” to Iraq war crimes, admitted in court today that he is “a fake and a liar.”

The Left tried this game back during the Vietnam years too and, sadly, the mainstream media didn’t have anybody to check their work back then.

Nice to know that some things have gotten better over the years.

Jesse Macbeth should pay more than spending five months in jail, though. He should be tried for treason.

I was, frankly, a draft avoider back in the Vietnam days (long story—I just didn’t think I’d make a very good soldier). But even I was angry then—and remain angry today—over the way our soldiers in that war were robbed of their honor.

Nobody pays a higher price for service to their country than soldiers. Most of them don’t really want to kill, and none of them want to die, but they do what must be done, in part, because they trust that the people at home will honor their sacrifice.

I don’t care if you think America is the equivalent of Nazi Germany. If some German made up false stories about Wehrmacht atrocities in World War II, I think he should be tried for treason too.

Warriors are special. We owe a debt to our warriors. A society can get along without almost any profession. But warriors will always be necessary, and will always deserve special veneration from those of us who sit safe at home.

Can’t post much of anything tonight. I drove home in snake-floating rain, liberally mixed with hail, and a minute after I got into the house, the power went out, where it stayed until about fifteen minutes ago. This left me unable to do much of anything, except read Andrew Klavan’s Hunting Down Amanda by candlelight. Now I’ve got stuff to catch up on. See you tomorrow.

I occasionally think about writing personal posts, but I usually avoid it. You don’t want to hear about me, and if you do, maybe I don’t want you to hear about me. It’s probably just my selfishness, which is why I could never be The Next Food Network Star–along with other, larger reasons. Anyway, I may write something personal later this week.

So, Lars was talking about actors a few days ago (Garage door blues), and coincidentally Delancey Place quotes from one of those odd books which lends support to the notion that there are books about everything. Wait, it’s an article, not a book. Still there are books about everything out there, such as The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification and Better Never To Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence. But to the point of this post–Delancey Place quotes Laurence Olivier on his stage fright: “Olivier wrote of his famous performance in ‘Othello,’ ‘I had to beg my Iago, Frank Finlay, not to leave the stage when I had to be left alone for a soliloquy, but to stay in the wings downstage where I could see him, since I feared I might not be able to stay there in front of the audience by myself.'”

Just when you think some guys have it all together.

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.)