First of all, thanks to Dave Lull for sending me a link to this article by Stephen Hunter. If you’re not aware that I consider Hunter one of the truly great thriller writers of our time, you must be new here (in which case, welcome. Our membership fee is reasonable, and may be wired directly to my personal bank account). Apparently Hunter had a heart attack recently. Take care of yourself, Stephen! I still haven’t gotten over losing John D. MacDonald!



Today it got up to +16° (-9 Centigrade), and it was wonderful. Needless to say, if yesterday had been 25°, it would have been terrible. I’ve said before (why haven’t you quoted me yet?) that there are only two temperatures in the Northern Plains in the winter—colder than yesterday and warmer than yesterday. I don’t approve, but it’s true.

I hate the Subjective. It’s hard to get away from it, though. Modern society has placed the Subjective on the cultural altar where the Bible used to rest, so questioning it has become a sort of contemporary heresy (as Clarence Thomas learned during his Supreme Court confirmation process). Making everything Subjective is easy, because it requires nothing more than experience, and we’ve all got some of that. No thought is necessary. Plus, it’s popular. A hard combination to fight.

Einstein is supposed to have explained his Special Theory of Relativity by saying that time spent sitting on a sofa with a beautiful girl on your lap passes much faster than time spent sitting on a hot stove. Maybe it’s an apocryphal story. If he did say it, I can’t believe he was serious. The watch on my wrist, the instrument which measures whatever time is, doesn’t change its pace based on where I’m sitting. A scientist observing my watch would note that the hands moved at a consistent pace. And that’s how science works, blast it.

So I don’t buy it.

And if you disagree, well, that’s your reality. Don’t you dare impose it on me.

Here’s a very nice meditation on the TV show “Monk,” (which I haven’t been able to see since I cut my cable, but I remember fondly), by Dean Abbott on S. T. Karnick’s The American Culture blog. I’m not sure I agree with the assumption that a Christian subtext actually exists in the series. I’m sure such a subtext can be found by those who want to find it, but whether the writers intended it seems questionable to me. But Abbott doubtless knows more about the writers than I do. Either way, I think the piece has excellent things to say about life in general.

What to write about today? I haven’t finished reading a book recently (I’m working on a book of history, which goes a little slower than novels. I’ll tell you about it soon. Have to take a break from Koontz now and then).

There’s always the weather. God gave us weather so that human beings would always have something to make conversation about. Which means, I suppose, that He intended Minnesotans to be the most voluble people on earth.

Which isn’t the case, if you’ve ever visited here.

Today the high was about +1° F (that’s in the neighborhood of -20° C). It’s been vile for several days, but tomorrow the temperature’s expected to soar to about 15. And it should keep getting warmer into next week.

I’ve been trying to think back about childhood winter memories. I grew up on a farm, on a gravel road. When the big blizzards came, we’d be cut off from civilization for a short time. Never long. We were never driven to eat the dog. We had cows and pigs and chickens who could have served that purpose if necessary, but it never came close. We might have run out of ice cream or bread for a day (we produced our own milk and eggs. We pasteurized the milk on a burner on the stove. We sold our good eggs and ate the ones that had small cracks in them. It’s odd to think of it now, but we did not refrigerate those eggs. We kept them in a carton by the stove, at room temperature. I suppose I must be immune to salmonella after years of that. We went through those eggs pretty fast, though).

We’d turn on WCCO radio from the Twin Cities on the morning of a blizzard, to learn whether school was closed. They’d read the names of all the closed schools in their large listening area. The Faribault station would probably have a shorter list, but we didn’t really trust the Faribault station. WCCO’s school closing announcements had the weight of social authority.

If we got a real dandy storm, a white-out, the roads would drift over and there’d be no going anywhere until the snow plow came through, which could be a while. A day off from school didn’t mean a day of leisure, of course. Aside from the usual chores, we’d have to dig out our driveway once the snow stopped. The fact that we had a short driveway wasn’t an advantage in that regard, because if we’d had a long driveway Dad would probably have bought a snowplow for his tractor and done it that way. Since he had two (later three) sons, he saw no reason to spend money to do a job we could do for free. Once Moloch and I went away to college, he bought the plow.

I didn’t hate shoveling snow as much as I hated most farm jobs. It was clean, for one thing, and it was warm once you’d gotten into the rhythm of the thing. And it was a simple job with a clear goal. You knew how much progress you’d made, and you knew when you were done.

That didn’t stop me from griping. I knew, by way of television, that lots of people lived in a state called California, where it never snowed and (apparently) nobody had any chores, but spent their free time at the beach.

I seem to recall a blizzard where our TV went out. That was tough. In that case there was nothing to do but sit around with the family, listening to the house creaking. I suppose we must have talked, but I can’t imagine what about.

I probably read a book.

In our last episode, I was saying how charming I found the English actress Heather Angel, who played Bulldog Drummond’s fiancée in five films and went on to a fairly successful career, working with Hitchcock among other directors.

I note from her Wikipedia entry that she married a television director named Robert B. Sinclair. In 1970, their home was invaded. Her husband tried to protect her, and was killed by the burglar.

On top of the shock and grief of such a traumatic experience, I can’t help thinking that the irony must have been agonizing. How many times had she done movie scenes where there was a fight over a gun, and the hero saved her life? But when it came to real life, it didn’t work out like in the movies.

Irony, in its more drastic forms, is a pretty cruel thing. I recall that shortly after “The Rockford Files” series ended, James Garner got into a road rage incident with another driver, and the other driver cleaned his clock and left him badly injured. Granted, Jim Rockford wasn’t the most two-fisted of TV detectives, but he usually figured out a way to sucker-punch his opponent and run away.

Then there’s the “Superman Curse.” I still remember what a shock it was when George Reeves shot himself. An early moment of cognitive dissonance. “Wait—how can Superman shoot himself? Bullets bounce off him.”

Ditto when Christopher Reeve fell of a horse and broke his neck. How can the most powerful being in the physical universe be paralyzed?

So if you hear one day that I’ve been smashed to jelly by the hammer of Thor, you’ll know that Irony has struck again.

What notable incidents of Irony you can think of?

Today was, by common consensus, a particularly nasty winter day. It was far from the coldest we’ve had this year, and far from the windiest or snowiest. But the elements so mixed within it as to create a sort of ideal balance in which each contributed optimally to human discomfort.

Tomorrow looks to be about the same.

And yet, over the weekend—particularly on Saturday—you could feel that we’ve swung closer to the sun now. Those sunbeams had some punch. Patience is all we need. Time is on our side. Puff and blow all you like, Winter—the cavalry is on the way!

On Sunday I watched four old English Bulldog Drummond movies. My renter has a bargain collection of old mystery movies, and he lent it to me. I was interested to see the Drummond flicks because I’d read something S. T. Karnick wrote about the author of the stories, H. C. “Sapper” McNeile. I believe I may have read a Bulldog Drummond story once, but I have no memory of it. I don’t know how well the movies retained the spirit of the stories.

Although the character of Bulldog Drummond was first played in a sound movie by Ronald Colman, most of these films star an adequate actor named John Howard. One odd exception is “Bulldog Drummond Escapes,” which stars a very young Ray Milland. Although Milland was a good actor with a distinguished career ahead of him, he’s absolutely awful in this role. Drummond, at least in the movies, is a sort of Peter Pan type, a grown man with a boyish enthusiasm for adventure and danger. He also talks a lot of piffle, kind of in the style of Lord Peter Wimsey. Milland doesn’t seem to understand that you have to handle piffle lightly. He seems to take his piffle seriously, which makes him just appear nuts.

The father figure who balances the boyish Drummond is Col. Nielsen, a Scotland Yard inspector who tries to gently restrain his excesses. Nielsen is played by various actors in the series, most interestingly by John Barrymore. Being Barrymore, he gets top billing in the films in which he appears, and takes a more active part in the story. Instead of an aged, sedentary figure, Barrymore’s Nielsen is a mature daredevil in his own right, mixing personally in the main action. I have no doubt that Barrymore insisted on this, and that the scripts were rewritten to make him a more romantic figure. I wouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t originally demand the part of Drummond.

It’s fascinating to watch Barrymore at work. His style of acting was entirely different from the sort of thing we have today. He represented an older thespian tradition that centered on conveying the beauty of the text, rather than baring the soul of the character. Very often, in this blog, when I compare the things of the past to the things of the present, I’m advocating for the old stuff. I don’t feel that way about acting. The old style of acting may have had its beauties, but I like the new way of doing things better.

I did a play with a guy in Florida, when I was in community theatre, who belonged to the old Barrymore school. He didn’t so much speak his lines as utter them. He struck attitudes on stage, and presented his profile for the admiration of the audience. He had a hundred pointless stories about his days in theatre in New York City—all the plays he did that failed, all the big plays he almost did, and all the famous people he exchanged a couple words with at parties. (The character of Sean in Blood and Judgment is based on him, to some extent.) He was an older man than I, but not so old that he wouldn’t have been a contemporary of Marlon Brando and all the actors of the Method school. I can only assume he made a conscious decision to reject Stanislavsky. If so, he made a bad choice. Then again, based on my acquaintance with him, I’m not sure he possessed the minimum intelligence necessary to practice the Method. All in all he was an ass, and nasty to the techies and stagehands, which is always the mark of a coxcomb.

I did appreciate the opportunity to observe a dinosaur in action, though.

(One final observation: the actress Heather Angel, who often played Drummond’s fiancee in the films, was absolutely adorable.)

Made my annual trip to the tax preparer after work tonight. I ended up a victim of Urban Sprawl, as the business had moved way the heck out to the northwest (where the buffalo still roam and men are men, I trust). I had their directions with me, but as I followed the road eastward, (apparently) past all development, and found myself surrounded by gravel pits, I figured I must have gone the wrong way (I often get turned around, reading maps. I think I have an internal compass, but I also have an internal distorting magnet). So I turned back west, and that was no better. Finally I broke down and used my cell phone to call them (costs me money, since mine is designed for emergencies only. Which this was), and the lady explained that I’d been right the first time. I’d just lost confidence.

There’s a lesson here, I suppose. Something about putting your hand to the plow and not looking back, or Lot’s wife, or something. You can be wrong because you went the wrong way, or you can be wrong because you went the right way, but insufficiently.

In my heart, though, I believe that if I’d stubbornly kept on east on my first try, the space-time continuum would have spiraled, the earth’s crust would have shifted, and my goal would have turned out to be west after all.

Have a good weekend.

Though the link to Valentine’s relics was appealing (see last post), let me offer you a better Valentine’s Day post even though you will probably see it the day after. Here’s a fun, artsy video of Anderson & Roe playing their arrangement of Astor Piazzolla’s “Libertango.”