It’s Friday (in case you haven’t been paying attention), and I made it through the week. My cold is getting better, as is my hand (but more slowly).

I have a meeting tonight, and a meeting tomorrow. All in all, I’d far rather lie on the couch.

From an anonymous source: The Omnificent English Dictionary in Limerick Form. I don’t see how that can possibly be improved on.

Made contact today (through Facebook), for the first time in about forty years, with a former college roommate, now a retired military chaplain. He says he still tells the story of how I helped him find assurance of salvation (he’d been one of those who kept going back to the altar to be converted, again and again) by taking him through 1 Peter 1:3-12.

I’d forgotten about the incident entirely. As with most of my relationships, I’d remembered mainly the mistakes I’d made and dumb things I’d said.

If I weren’t me, I’d probably feel some satisfaction in that. I’m grateful to him for telling me about it, in any case.

Novelist D.J. Taylor complains that the men of letters seen in several literary works over the years can’t make a living today. There are several reasons, of course. I think lack of imagination on the part of media owners is a good reason, but you can’t blame folks for lacking imagination. (via The Literary Saloon)

Jeffrey Herf writes about the new totalitarian movement in the world:

In the last decades of the Cold War, no one was surprised that many American liberals frowned on sharp and vocal criticism of communist regimes and communist ideology. But there is a surprising irony in contemporary Western political and intellectual life. Many liberals, including the Democratic Party leadership, have been reluctant to acknowledge that radical Islam has more in common with fascism than it does with the attack on liberal democracy from the radical Left. Like the fascists from earlier times, radical Islamists attack every component of the liberal tradition: the Enlightenment, the great democratic revolutions, the principle of the separation of religion and state, full equality for women and, in recent decades, for homosexuals, and yes, of course, opposition to anti-Semitism. How strange that Franklin Roosevelt’s armed anti-fascism should live on so strongly in mainstream American conservatism but find few advocates among his American liberal successors.

I’ve been spending the evening doing computer upgrading. I’ll be back with you tomorrow.