I found this video by way of The Evangelical Outpost. Joe didn’t actually link to it, but he linked to something else that gave me a further link to this.
I haven’t tried it and can’t vouch for it. But it seemed too cool not to share.
Not much of a post, I know, but I gave you the Colebatch link this morning, and this evening I’m saving your CDs. Whaddya want from me?
I don’t have a favorite in the presidential primaries yet, and I’m growing more tolerant of all of them (except Ron Paul, whom I like as little as John McCain). So I’m not campaigning here. I’m just blogging. Dennis Ingolfsland points out some interesting commentary on Mike Huckabee, which calls him a reflection of William Jennings Bryan.
On 22 August 2001, The Trojan Room coffee pot was turned off. Now THAT was reality TV. I should put a coffee cam on BwB.
Hal G. P. Colebatch wrote a great essay on Christian themes in Tolkien, Star Wars and Harry Potter for The American Spectator Online today.
C. S. Lewis is also involved (as a subject).
Mowed the lawn tonight, for my evening exercise. The grass was kind of wet. I don’t like to mow wet grass as a rule, but they’re predicting more rain tomorrow and Friday, so if I don’t do it now I’ll have to hack my way through it with a machete (or my new saex), like Ramar of the Jungle.
Anybody out there remember Ramar of the Jungle? I actually recall it from re-runs, but it got re-run a lot. My primary memory of the show is how the characters would be hacking their way through the jungle (with machetes, not saexes), and somebody would pause and point off to the right or left. Then the film would (with extreme clumsiness; you could almost hear the projector clunk) switch to stock footage of lions or giraffes in the savannah. It appeared that they almost never went anywhere in the jungle except along the edge, where it bordered the savannah.
Which raised the question, why not just walk through the savannah, and save yourself all that hacking?
I wanted to link to this post by Gaius over at Blue Crab Boulevard. Partly because I think it’s a pretty clever comic pastiche of Conan Doyle, and partly because the news story that sparked it just makes me mad.
This, in my opinion, is the real problem with increasing government “compassion and care” in our lives. It put this kid’s parents in an impossible situation.
The law allows parents to do only one thing to discipline a kid – talk sternly to him. That’s it. Anything more would be child abuse and get them into Really Big Trouble.
So the only thing the neighbor who found the kid a nuisance could do, in a situation where Stern Talks weren’t working, was report him to the police.
And the police have only one weapon – they put people in jail. Which is what they did with this kid. It was insane, and I’ll bet everyone involved knew it was insane. But the law – the law intended to protect the child – left them with no other option.
This is what happens when the government becomes the parent. The world is full of horror stories about traditional families that abused and mistreated children (I have a story like that of my own). But that’s how freedom works. You get a small percentage of excellent homes, a large middle of middling homes, and a small percentage at the bottom of very bad stuff.
But when the government raises the kids, Churchill’s description of economic systems kicks in. He said Capitalism is the unequal distribution of wealth, and Communism is the equal distribution of poverty.
Traditional families are an unequal distribution of good nurturing. But government parenting is the equal distribution of dysfunction. Has anybody raised in a government institution ever grown up well-adjusted?
I’ve just got to share this post from Junkyard Blog. Not all pictures are worth a thousand words, but that one is.
I picked up Dead Simple by accident. I’d intended to check a book by J. J. Jance out of the library, having not tried her work yet, and through inattention I went home with the book that had been shelved right next to the volume I meant to take. Once I got it home and discovered my mistake, I figured I might as well give it a shot.
I’m not sorry I did. It was an interesting and well-plotted book. I can’t give it the highest accolades, for reasons I’ll explain, but it kept me turning the pages.
The set-up is tremendous. Michael Harrison is a young English entrepreneur. He makes a lot of money and lives in style. He’s about to marry a gorgeous woman whom he loves very much.
When the book begins, Harrison is half-unconscious in the back of a van, pub-crawling with his buddies as part of his bachelor party. Michael has been a ruthless and rather cruel practical joker, especially in relation to his friends’ bachelor parties, and they have a dandy revenge in store for him.
They put him in a coffin (one of the friends works at a mortuary) and bury him in a shallow grave with a bottle of whiskey, a dirty magazine, a flashlight and a walkie-talkie. There’s an air tube to keep him from suffocating. The plan is to leave him there for a few hours, then dig him up again.
Except that there’s an accident, and his friends end up either dead or in a coma.
And when Michael’s partner, who missed the party because of a delayed flight, comes home and hears the news… he does nothing at all. In spite of the fact that he knows Michael is buried out there somewhere.
I love a neat set-up like that. And James keeps the tension rising, revealing information to the reader in careful, cruel doses. When you think things can’t get any worse, they do.
The hero of the book is Detective Superintendent Roy Grace of the Sussex Police (I wish James had chosen another name. Whenever I read “Grace said…” I think of a woman). He’s the most interesting character in the book. A man alone (his beloved wife simply disappeared a few years back), he lives mainly for his work. The big handicap in his career seems to be his advocacy of the use of psychic evidence in his investigations.
Needless to say, that’s a problem for me. I consider most (perhaps all) psychics frauds. If any are not frauds, then they are in contact with dangerous spiritual forces, and anyone who contacts them is putting himself in severe peril. The author’s bio on the flyleaf says that Peter James has a “deep interest” in the paranormal.
This is not quite “playing the game,” by the rules of traditional detective fiction. Dorothy Sayers, in her essay “Problem Picture” in The Mind of the Maker, quotes the following question asked of applicants to the Detection Club:
PRESIDENT: Do you promise that your Detectives shall well and truly detect the Crimes presented to them, using those Wits which it shall please you to bestow upon them and not placing reliance upon, nor making use of, Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition, Mumbo-Jumbo, Jiggery-Pokery, Coincidence or the Act of God?
CANDIDATE: I do.
Of course times have changed, and Miss Sayers wouldn’t have cared for a whole lot of what goes on in mysteries today. But I can’t help thinking that appealing to the supernatural in what is presented as a standard mystery is a bit of a deus ex machina. I think I’d feel the same if prayer were used similarly in a Christian mystery (but who knows? Maybe I’m deluding myself).
Detective Grace’s tentative attempts to begin dating again, in his rare free moments, provide an appealing subplot, helping to flesh out what is really the only fully-rounded character in a plot-driven book.
But the plot is driven very well indeed.
All in all an entertaining novel, but I have no great desire to read more by the author.
What did I order, if the waitress repeats it by saying, “Drag one through Georgia?” Amy points out an interesting site on diner slang.
Here are twenty reasons you may want to put down that fantasy novel before you are disappointed by a lame story (according to the writer). One reason: “characters repeatedly ‘respond,’ ‘demand,’ ‘deny’ or ‘wonder’ their dialogue. You get ONE of these per chapter, and even that’s pushing it, buddy. They can ‘say’ things. They can occasionally ‘ask.’ And, since I’m an Anne of Green Gables fan, they can ‘ejaculate’ if they must. But THAT’S IT.” [by way of The View]
It was a rainy weekend, and today was rainy too. Almost constant, soaking rain. This is good (except for the folks in the southeastern part of the state who suffered flooding). Up to this weekend, we had below average rainfall. Now suddenly we’re above it. I hope it’s not too late to help with the crops.
It did put a damper on our Viking Age Society’s annual Viking Youth Day event, held at the Danebo Hall in Minneapolis, under the sponsorship of the Sons of Norway. We had both indoor and outdoor activities planned, but it ended up being only indoor. Some kids came (with their parents, of course), but they all went home after lunch, and we left ourselves shortly thereafter.
Discovered something fairly disturbing today. James Lileks at buzz.mn mentioned that great impersonator, “Iron Eyes Cody,” (the “crying Indian” in the famous environmental ad), who turned out, on closer examination, to have been a second-generation Italian-American. The Snopes article he linked to contained a further link to this piece about “Forrest Carter,” author of Gone To Texas, the novel that was the basis for one of my favorite movies, The Outlaw Josie Wales. Turns out that Forrest Carter was in fact Amos Carter, an active white supremacist well known to the FBI.
I never read The Education of Little Tree (Carter’s putative autobiography), but I read Gone To Texas, and I’m not sure I perceived all the subliminal racism the author of that article seems to find in it. I did note one wrong note in the book, though. Lone Watie, the character played so well by Chief Dan George in the movie, describes himself as a “Cherokee. Full-blooded, I reckon,” in the book.
I knew this was misleading, because historically the full-blooded Cherokees sided with the Union (Lone Watie fights with the Confederacy). It was the mixed bloods who, by and large, owned slaves and supported the South. I’m not sure what point was served by that misdirection, but it struck me as odd at the time. Perhaps Carter had a message of racial separation in mind.
Carter was far from the only author to obscure his real identity. A famous example was B. Traven, author of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. To this day, nobody’s sure who the heck he was.
Maybe that’s what I ought to do. I’ve pretty much sputtered to a halt as Lars Walker. Maybe I should re-invent myself as Luisa Wahlid, a Mexican-Pakistani lesbian living in this country illegally, forced to live in hiding (in a carbon-neutral compound in Oregon) because the CIA is trying to assassinate her for knowing too much about Bush’s lies in Iraq.
Nah, I expect it’s already been done.
So which shall we choose? Experience or truth? The left wing of an airplane, or the right? Love or integrity? Study or service? Evangelism or discipleship? The front wheels of a car, or the rear? Subjective knowledge or objective knowledge? Faith or obedience?
Damn all false antitheses to hell, for they generate false gods, they perpetuate idols, they twist and distort our souls, they launch the church into violent pendulum swings whose oscillations succeed only in dividing brothers and sisters in Christ. The truth is that Jesus Christ is Lord of all—of the truth and of our experience. The Bible insists that we take every thought captive to make it obedient to Christ. (D. A. Carson, Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church, p. 234) (found here)