Tag: a personal note

Coming Close–So Close!–to 4,000 Hits

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

Here’s Ty Cobb, the first to get 4,000 hits. It took him many years to do it, and I’m a much nicer person than he was.

December of 2015 is already a record month for this blog. But if I can run up another 200 hits before they drop the ball tomorrow night, I will have made it to 4,000 hits for the month.

Well, what’s that, in the total scheme of things? I dunno, but it’ll make me feel good. Never got 4,000 hits in a month.

WordPress informs me that I have posted on this blog every single day of 2015, so far, with only tomorrow left to go. So I’ve held up my end, right?

And remember, I’m still taking requests for hymns. That window will be open every day from now on.

And if you’re new to this blog, please click “Books” (at the top of the page) and take a look at my Bell Mountain series of novels. Sample chapters, covers, blurbs–it’s all there.

Now to hunker down and see if we can make it to 4,000…

P.S.: WordPress has clarified this for me. If you visit the site and read one post, and then another, it counts as one Visitor, but two Views.

Trivial But Annoying

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Here is a jidrool who managed to get himself stuck inside a trash can. Don’t let this happen to you! I mean, don’t you hate it when that happens?

I have mentioned such disagreeable suburban customs as leaving little plastic bags of dog poo everywhere, and aiming powerful floodlights at your neighbor’s bedroom window every night. Somehow these aren’t classed as microaggressions and you can’t get people to stop doing them.

Here’s another suburban cultural practice–dumping your garbage into somebody else’s garbage can.

Do they do this in your town? In my town Public Works picks up the trash once a week, so you put your full can on the curb in the evening and they empty it into the garbage truck early in the morning. Your result should be an empty can.

Often, however, by the time you come out to get the trashcan, it’s already full of other people’s fast-food packaging, leftovers, soda cans, and similar detritus. People must stop their cars and dump this stuff into the first empty garbage can they see.

This is the coarsening of our culture. This is a country full of people who never move beyond reading comic books (if they read anything at all), are still in collidge when they’re 25, obsess over how much free stuff they can get from the government, think zombies might be real, throw baby showers for out-of-wedlock  births, and throw their trash into someone else’s can. This is the fruit of public education. This is video games and text messages. This is leaf blowers.

We really could live a lot better than we do. But we’d have to do it on purpose.

Stop the Lousy Writing, Please!

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

Again, yet again, I plead with my fellow fantasy novelists: enough already with the rotten writing! Please don’t do it anymore. Please!

Do what? Please lay off the following:

Don’t try to write your book as if it were a graphic novel–that is, a flaming comic book. Just for once try to write as if you thought grownups might read it.

Don’t make all your characters talk like you think teenagers talk. Come on, now–a lot of teens are nowhere near as dumb as all that, and the ones who are, are not going to read anything anyway. Do try to lift your dialogue some distance above the level of a text message.

Don’t resort to the bleeding obvious. I mean, don’t call the bad guys “bad” or “diabolical” or “reprehensible,” etc. Don’t editorialize about your characters. “And then the nefarious villain, Maalox the Dwarf, snickered evilly, distorting his tremendously ugly face, and spoke with unpardonable disrespect to the beautiful princess with nice knockers and incredibly lovely blond hair that was like something indescribably beautiful, ‘Hah! You’re all tied up, now you can’t do your jumpin’, spinnin’ kicks…” If I never again read anything like this, it’ll be too soon.

Try to avoid, in your narrative passages, such contemporary slang terms as “taking them out” or “being there for her” or “got a problem with that,” and all the rest, too depressingly numerous to mention.

Please don’t write like this anymore. It gives fiction a bad name, and contributes to the non-development of the reader’s brain. It might even actually kill off brain cells–we’re waiting for the research to be published.

 

Gotta Blog This!

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

Permit me this small self-indulgence.

A reproduction of this painting–Swan Lake, by Konrad Muller-Kurzwelly, a 19th century German landscape artist–used to hang in my family’s living room for as long as I can remember. And I loved it! I loved to look at it and imagine myself going into the painting, I guess to feed the swans. It always gave me a deep sense of peace.

I’m posting it here in case I should never find it again.

Carol, ‘O, Tannenbaum’ (Nat King Cole)

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This carol, sung in German, was a Christmas fixture at my grandpa’s house, and my mother used to sing it to us, too. It’s here at my wife’s request.

How I miss those Christmases at grandpa’s house! It was amazing, how many people could fit into it for a family Christmas.

But, as Our Lord Jesus told us, “In my father’s house are many mansions…”

We will have a place to stay when we get there. Amen.

A Wee Memory Break

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

My father really liked this song, “Cindy Oh Cindy.” Hearing it again opened up my memory banks…

I have just thought of something that I haven’t thought about in many years.

Once upon a summer’s day, my Grammie and her new husband, John, took me to Island Beach State Park for swimming and fishing. I think I was 11 years old. John was a retired Dutch sailor. He told great stories and played the harmonica like nobody’s business.

We had a long drive down to the park, and when we got to the first gate, there was some kind of problem and they were turning people away. We got up to the booth, expecting to be told we couldn’t come in: but then the man in the booth saw John and burst into Dutch.

It turned out he and John were old, old friends who hadn’t seen each other in donkey’s years. The man’s name was Rudi.

“You wait a minute,” he said, “I wrote you a note, then they let you in.” He scribbled something onto a piece of paper–a happy old man with the tip of his tongue slipping out as he concentrated on writing in English–handed it to John, and waved us through the gate.

Grammie read the note aloud. It said, “This are my frends, please let them in.”

And she said, “You could get into heaven with a note like that.”

I’ll bet they did, too, all three of them.

The Carol Got to Me

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

I listened again to The Holly and the Ivy, and this time it really got to me. It brought tears to my eyes.

I don’t want you to think I’m some kind of weeping willie, although it has always been my way not to withhold tears from those to whom tears are due. If you can’t be stirred by the beauty of holiness in Jesus Christ… well, I don’t know.

Tears of joy are a small tribute to pay to Christmas–the day we have chosen, by custom, to celebrate the Incarnation, the word made flesh, our salvation. Those are very large gifts. And along with them, we receive love, family, sweet memories, and hope.

This is an evil age we’re living in, and we need to know that our God has not forgotten us. That’s what the carol was telling me. It took a few hours to sink in.

God is nigh. That is the lesson. He is never farther than a prayer away, and sometimes even closer than that.

My aunt, the last of my family in her generation, is now in a safe place which has already done her lots of good. And just in time for Christmas, too. This was a gift, and I am thankful for it. Not the first gift I have ever received from my God, and surely not the last. So I give thanks for Christmas, for Jesus Christ coming down from heaven and into the world, where I am. And for all the other gifts that go with it.

Back from the Nursing Home

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Patty and I went to the nursing home this morning to see my aunt.

Every day, for a long time, I prayed God not to let my aunt run out of money and have to go into a nursing home. God did not see fit to grant that prayer.

I’m glad He didn’t! In fact, I’m so glad, I could just about cry.

Today my aunt did more talking than she has for two or three years. Today she smiled at me for the first time in at least two years. She was well-groomed, looked more comfortable than she has in quite a while, and they’d put her in a portable bed and moved her out into the hall to socialize with other patients. She has made friends there who come in and chat with her several times a day.

This much stimulation has done her a world of good. And it has re-taught me a lesson that must be learned again and again:

God really does know best.

My Hometown Fans

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

Okay, I understand: people in your home town see you in the flesh and conclude you can’t be of any importance. It’s hard to impress people who know you.

My books used to occupy a nice place on the shelves at my local library. But since the arrival of a new library director, my books have been banished to a “Local Authors” ghetto in the most remote region of the building, along with Mrs. Gesundheit’s genealogical researches and Grandpa Fongo’s reflections on the best local parade of 1956. One more step, and these books would be under the floorboards.

When I asked the new library director to please restore my books to their former place, she looked at me quizzically, the way Godzilla looks at a power plant before he kicks it to smithereens, and said, “Well, you are self-published, aren’t you?” Like any Local Author couldn’t possibly be good enough to be paid for his work.

For the sake of those among you who do publish your own writing, I will limit the description of my reply to the word “no.”

Anyhow, I looked again today and my books are still in the Local Authors ghetto where no one in this town will ever discover them and read them.

You just can’t make it in your own home town.

College Isn’t Day Care, Prez Sez

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

The president of Oklahoma Wesleyan University, Dr. Everett Piper, has had a bellyful.

Students at his institute of higher learning were protesting a university chapel service: some brainless twollop said he felt “victimized” by the text, I Corinthians 13–one of the most beautiful chapters in the Bible, the one about faith, hope, and love. Anyway, this dope said it made him feel bad.

Dr. Piper’s reply to this is well worth reading ( http://godfatherpolitics.com/26763/conservative-college-president-tells-students-to-suck-it-up-college-isnt-a-day-care/ ). Let me quote very briefly:

“Our culture has actually taught our kids to be this self-absorbed and narcissistic! Any time their feelings are hurt, they are the victims! Anyone who dares challenge them and, thus, makes them ‘feel bad’ about themselves, is a ‘hater,’ a ‘bigot,’ an ‘oppressor,’ and a ‘victimizer.'” And he concludes: “This is not a day care. This is a university!”

Yes, indeed, we’ve taught these collidge dolts to be self-absorbed and narcissistic. Having been unable to find it in themselves to give the kids their time, a lot of modern parents make up for it by spoiling and overpraising them. And then, of course, we’ve got some towering examples of narcissism and self-absorption. In any speech by that toad Obama or that satyr, Bill Clinton, how many times is the word “I” spoken?

This what happens when everybody goes to college. Education is devalued past zero and into the negative numbers.

***

Yes, I’m feeling a bit crabby today. We had to rush off to the nursing home this morning, after getting a panicky and rather long phone call yesterday just as supper was about to be served–and when we got there, the storm had already passed, problems solved, no need for us to be there, really. And a few other problems that are not worth mentioning, but all the same, vexing.

Please bear with me.