I was going to tell you about all the pulse-pounding excitement of Danish Day in Minneapolis yesterday. But you’ll just have to wait, because once again it’s taking forever to upload photos to 1) Dropbox, and then 2) to Photobucket. Not sure why that is. I didn’t have that trouble in the past.
Anyway, exciting news in the world of Early Medieval Scandinavian Geekdom today. One of the lost Lewis Chessmen has been located… forgotten in a desk drawer.
It’s always the last place you look, isn’t it?
“It was stored away in his home and then when my grandfather died my mother inherited the chess piece.
“My mother was very fond of the Chessman as she admired its intricacy and quirkiness. She believed that it was special and thought perhaps it could even have had some magical significance.
“For many years it resided in a drawer in her home where it had been carefully wrapped in a small bag. From time to time, she would remove the chess piece from the drawer in order to appreciate its uniqueness.”
Nick Louth’s Craig Gillard series, about a police detective in a small English city, has been a delight from the start. This third book, The Body in the Mist, is not only the best of the series (in my opinion) but one of the best English/Cozy/Police Procedurals I’ve ever read.
Craig Gillard has rarely talked to his (implausibly
longsuffering) wife Samantha about his family and upbringing. But a call from
his aunts in Devon, forcing them to travel there to visit them, will bring
everything to light. And it’s a horror show.
Gillard has two aunts and an uncle living near his maternal
family’s old sheep farm. One aunt, Barbara, is a hulking old troll, not terribly
bright, who runs the farm mostly by herself. His aunt Trish is a tiny little
chatterbox with a gift for emotional manipulation. And his uncle – once a
celebrity liberal clergyman – is now suffering dementia in a nursing home, and
has lost all his sexual inhibitions.
Gillard does not want to go. But apparently someone stole
Barbara’s SUV and ran a man over one night, killing him and destroying his face
so badly that he can’t be identified. The police suspect Barbara. Craig is a
policeman! He has to come and help!
As Gillard does his best to look into the problem without
stepping on the local police’s toes, Samantha gradually learns some of the
family’s secrets. After what she learns she’ll be amazed that her husband
managed to lead a semi-normal life. Dysfunctional doesn’t begin to describe it.
Also it’s possible his uncle murdered someone, years back.
The Body in the Mist was fascinating, horrifying, and sometimes darkly funny. I also noted some quite effective prose, particularly in a night scene on the farm when a storm is brewing and some mysterious beast is hunting Barbara’s sheep.
I strongly recommend The Body in the Mist. You’ll probably want to read the series in order (it starts with The Body in the Marsh). The three books (to date) aren’t expensive, and they give great entertainment for your book-buying dollar. No unusual cautions for content, expect for some creepy stuff about child molestation that happens offstage.
Pastor and author Andrew Arndt shared this quote from that great Christian musician Rich Mullins out of research he has been working on for a book with NavPress.
Doing some research on Rich Mullins for my book.
This guy. I'm not sure evangelicalism realized what it had on its hands when he was alive – a living, breathing, 20th century desert father, embracing of the essential poverty of the human condition; "all flame" as a result.
How do you know when God is calling you? Well, for me, for years I tried to avoid loneliness, because it hurt too much. Now I am beginning to recognize that maybe that’s what it feels like when God calls. Maybe when God is calling it hurts. Maybe when God calls us it feels like a pain. And for years I tried to drown and avoid that pain, and fill the ache with stuff that was destroying me. To listen to the call of God means to accept some of the emptiness we have in our lives and rather than always trying to drown out that feeling of emptiness we allow it instead to be a door we go through in order to meet God. And this is where moral purity begins to play in. Almost everything that corrupts us is something we use to fill an ache and moral purity might be nothing more than a call to accept the ache and the emptiness and to allow ourselves to go through it to where God is calling us to go. And the joy of the Christian life is that those aches are met ultimately in Christ.
When we finally pull the lifeline we’ve created to the things we’ve tried to fill our emptiness with, when we say no, it is very scary and we think will we ever stop hurting. My answer is don’t worry about hurting. Realize that this is how badly God wants you and that the hurt you’re feeling – maybe that’s the way it feels when you’re called by God so don’t try to fill or quiet it but ask God to give you the courage to face it and walk through it to him.
Benvenuto Tisi da Garofalo, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica, Rome 1510 – 20
It’s Ascension Day, a very important feast in the Christian calendar, which (like so many important feasts) is little noticed today.
I read something in one of Francis Schaeffer’s books a long time ago that left an impression on me. I’m pretty sure he was citing someone else. The idea was that the importance of the Ascension is (at least in part) that it proclaims the physical existence of Heaven. According to the testimony of witnesses, Jesus had (after the Resurrection) an actual body that could be touched and consumed food. And that body went somewhere. Not to a “philosophical other,” but to some place where bodies can live.
My renowned Viking tent (seen here a year ago) will be on display once again (God willing) at Danish Day at the Danish-American Center, 3030 W. River Parkway S., Minneapolis, this Sunday from 10:30 a.m. to 4:00 or so. I’ll be there with the Viking Age Club & Society, selling books and pretending to be a bigshot. The weather looks to be OK.
Shadows had shrunk into the objects that cast them, waiting to emerge when the day finished transitioning from morning to afternoon.
Five dystopian thrillers and it’s done now. The Jane Hawk pentalogy by Dean Koontz has been a rewarding ride, and he ties it all up pretty neatly in The Night Window.
Jane Hawk is a former decorated FBI agent. Now she’s the FBI’s most wanted fugitive, not to mention the CIA, the NSA, and any other federal agency that has a free minute on its computers. Jane found out about the Arcadians, a stealthy group of self-described human elites who have a plan to enslave the whole world through nanotechnology mind control. The Arcadians, who largely control the government, killed Jane’s beloved husband, and now they want her. But it’s not enough for her to just disappear. She has a young son, Travis, and she knows the Arcadians are hunting him, to use him as a weapon against her. She has him hidden, but you can’t hide from these people forever. They have to be unmasked and stopped.
It’s a big order, but Jane is not without resources,
particularly her friend Vikram Rangnekar, a computer genius who adores her. He used
to feel guilty about what he did for the government. Now he’s with Jane,
working hard to redeem himself.
The cast of characters, as with any Koontz novel, is Dickensian
in its variety. There’s the unlikely team of an old Jewish man and an autistic
black genius who are protecting Travis. A young filmmaker targeted for murder
by the leader of the Arcadians, who turns out to be better at survival than
even he ever imagined. There’s an appalling team of Arcadian assassins, united
by their obsession with men’s fashion.
I thought the wrap-up of the story slightly contrived, but
that doesn’t mean I didn’t weep manly tears as I read. I recommend the whole
series, and I don’t think the finale will disappoint you.
As advertised, I was at Fort Snelling National Cemetery on Saturday morning, helping to dedicate a memorial to the men of the 99th Infantry Battalion (Separate), a World War II commando unit organized and trained for an invasion of Norway. Most of its members were either Norwegian merchant sailors stranded by the Occupation, or Norwegian-American boys. Requirements were Norwegian heritage, ability to speak the language, and the ability to ski.
Although the invasion never happened as such, they participated in commando actions (some of them became part of the legendary OSS), and participated in the battle for Europe. The man in the grave above died in 1944, probably in Belgium, where the unit saw fierce fighting.
I was asked to read an invocation for the ceremony, and then I helped place battalion flags on the graves of all the 99th members buried in the cemetery. A couple of my Viking friends came too, and I thank them. It was a moving occasion. No 99th veterans were present, but a couple of their widows were there, along with some descendants.
When it comes to Memorial Day, I always seem to perambulate back to “The Mansions of the Lord,” because it just gets me right here. This version includes a lot of Ronald Reagan, so if you don’t care for that, there are other blogs in the web. Have a good day.
I want to post a photo from Saturday at Fort Snelling, but that will have to wait because the picture file is taking forever to appear in Dropbox.
I just finished a big translation job, and I have another smaller one I need to get at today. And that’s good. Because I’m a hard-working man with a vibrant life, not a fat old bachelor with odd hobbies, as I might appear to some.
To all survivors of fallen heroes, may the Lord be with you, today and every day.
I mentioned earlier that I’ll be participating in the dedication of a war memorial at Fort Snelling Cemetery in Minneapolis this Saturday, May 25. The event will be in honor of the 99th Infantry Battalion (Separate) of which I’ve written several times before. I actually have no personal connection to the unit, except for ethnicity and historical interest. But they’ve invited me to give the invocation, and I will be doing that. In Viking costume.
To see a local TV report on the event and on the unit itself, follow this link.
Tonight’s review will be even shorter than last night’s. I’ve got a big translation project (at last), and deadlines loom. Posting may be sparse for the rest of the week. We’ll see how it goes.
Fortunately, this is another Noah Braddock book, Jeff Shelby’s series about a lonely surfer/private eye in San Diego. When Close Out begins, Noah and his giant friend Carter have been reduced to doing bouncer work at a local night club. Business has been slack. But one night a woman lawyer, Cynthia Guzman, comes in to talk to Noah. She has clients she’d like him to meet. But they can’t just get together. They need to meet in a secret place.
Cautiously, Noah agrees. He is introduced to two illegal
immigrants, a middle-aged man and woman. They’ve been paying a mysterious “benefactor”
who promised to clear up their legal problems and get them legalized. But he’s
long on promises – and demands for payments – and short on results. They now
realize they’ve been cheated. Can Noah help them recover their money?
It doesn’t look like a high-paying job, but Noah is
interested. He agrees to look into it on a preliminary basis. The trail will
lead to unexpected quarters, and to risk for himself and his clients.
Like the other books in the series, Close Out is a fairly low key, enjoyable read. The author is on his immigration crusade again – again there are no non-admirable “undocumented immigrants” in sight – but the politics aren’t too heavy-handed, and Noah and Carter are fun to hang out with.
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