One of these days I’ll get around to writing about books in this space again. My problem right now is that I’m reading a very long book which I find amazingly boring. So you have my review of that book to look forward to eventually (perhaps sometime in August). Until then, I blog on whatever catches my fancy. Or my plain.

I say “plain” because I was looking at a wall calendar I got from Half Price Books last winter. It’s a freebie, and worth that price. Instead of pretty pictures, it features monthly calendars on both the top and bottom panels (to save paper), along with tips on how to live in a more environmentally friendly manner. Continue reading Caveat elector →

Once upon a sunny morning a man who sat in a breakfast nook looked up from his scrambled eggs to see a circus elephant quietly wandering through the garden. The man went up to the bedroom where his wife was still asleep and woke her. “There’s an elephant in the garden,” he said. She opened one unfriendly eye and looked at him.

“Elephants don’t live in Kansas,” she said. Then, eyeing the clock, “But thank you for waking me up in time to watch The View.”

I had two thoughts during my weekend in Story City, Iowa. (Well, technically I had quite a few thoughts. I think pretty much all the time when I’m conscious. That’s just the kind of guy I am. But two of these thoughts were new.)

One has to do with family, and it probably won’t mean much to you, but I’ll share it anyway, because… because… because I have this forum in which to raise my barbaric yawp, I guess.

The history of Story City (at least the part that interests me) goes like this. In the 1840s, a few Norwegians began to take the gamble of traveling to this dangerous new country (where, their pastors at home liked to tell them, epidemics were rampant, wild Indians were likely to scalp them and slavers made a habit of kidnapping Norwegians to be sold in New Orleans. The part about the epidemics was true). The earliest successful settlements were centered around Lisbon, Illinois and Muskego, Wisconsin. Most of these immigrants came from what we call Western Norway (actually southwestern, but officially Norway has no south). It helped in dealing with all the strangeness and dangers to live among people from home, people whose dialects and customs you understood. Continue reading Story City Story II: The Sequel →

Verizon, Sprint and Time Warner Cable will be blocking access to child pornography through their Internet services. Verizon and Time-Warner are in the top five of worldwide Internet access providers. Sprint is one of the big three U.S. wireless providers. I’d like to see AT&T step up to the plate here. Comcast too.

Here’s a bit of awe given to thirty-one Huguenot women who would not reject their faith for 38 years. Karl Olsson writes:

To sit in a prison room with thirty others and to see the day change into night and summer into autumn, to feel the slow systemic changes within one’s flesh: the drying and wrinkling of the skin, the loss of muscle tone, the stiffening of the joints, the slow stupefaction of the senses—to feel all this and still to persevere seems almost idiotic to a generation which has no capacity to wait and to endure.

It was a good weekend. I’m sunburned, stiff, dehydrated and exhausted (I can tell my hemoglobin level still isn’t up to specs), but I had fun.

The drive down was an adventure. I had to get up at 4:30 a.m. to be in Story City, Iowa in time to set up, and it was a three-hour drive directly into a vicious south wind. But I made it on schedule. There were only three of us there, two guys and a woman, but our friend Sam from Missouri also came up with his Viking boat, which raised the tone of the encampment considerably: Continue reading Story City Story →