Going to town

The weather outside is perfect. It is about 74 degrees with a breeze and overcast. I'm going to downtown Asheville and take some pictures. I'll post some later this evening if I get anything interesting.

See you then.

Reading list

To all my regular readers I apologize for my light posting for the past few days. My work schedule has been heavy and I have been engrossed in reading a few of the books that I've been meaning to get to.

First is Mark Steyn's America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It. I cannot recommend this book highly enough. Steyn writes with clarity and humor and lays out the case for why the world order as we have known it is dead and gone. He explains why Islam is rising and why the Western European nations are in terminal decline. One cannot read this book and not come to the conclusion that we are living in the most interesting of all possible times - in the Chinese curse sense.

The next book I have been reading is Bernard Cornwell's The Last Kingdom. Cornwell is probably best known as the author of the "Sharpe" series of novels which follow the adventures of Richard Sharpe, a non-commissioned officer raised to the rank of ensign by Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, for saving his life during The Battle of Assaye . The series follows Sharp's participation int he Napoleonic Wars as he rises to the rank of Colonel at the Battle of Waterloo.

The Last Kingdom follows the adventures of Uthred, a fictional ealdorman (earl) of Northumbria (master of Bebbanberg - later Bamberg Castle) in the wars which saved the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Wessex from conquest by the Danes (Vikings). Uthred is captured by the Danes as a small boy and raised by a great warlord named Ragnar. He leaves the Danes after Ragnar's murder by a rival Dane and enters the service of King Alfred The Great (the only King in English history to have earned the title "The Great") who preserved Anglo-Saxon culture from destruction at the hands of the Northmen invaders (so that it could be conquered a couple hundred years later by the Normans, but that's another story).

This is the first of a new series. The second book, The Pale Horseman and the third, Lords of the North are already out (I just ordered The Pale Horseman)

Finally I am currently reading Yellow Eyes by John Ringo and Tom Kratman. Yellow Eyes is the latest in the "Legacy of the Aldenata" series (or the "Posleen Invasion" series, or the "Posleen carnography" as Ringo calls it). In short the series is about how the human race copes with an invasion of several hundred million centaurs with crocodile heads, highly advanced military technology and a taste for human flesh. The short answer is a whole lot better than might be expected considering that we are hampered by the machinations of corrupt politicians of two races.

The thing is that I'm either reading or writing, but not both. Doing both well at the same time is beyond my limited capabilities. I will be finished with Yellow Eyes by Saturday and be back to my usual pattern of posting. Until then I beg your indulgence and I urge you to consider the books that I've mentioned here. They would be well worth your while.

I'm back now

Sorry about the light posting today. I had to leave the house very early this morning in order to be able to get home in time for a dinner party that I had to attend. I'll have more tomorrow.

Back to normal

For me the "holiday season" begins in late October when I see the Halloween decorations going up. It seems a short series of steps from Halloween to Thanksgiving to Christmas/New Years. I enjoy that whole time. Fall is my favorite season and down here fall really kicks off in mid October so the holiday atmosphere coincides with the coming of the fall colors and the end of the wretched summer heat.

As I said my favorite time of year.

However I am also glad to see January 2 come around. The disruptions to my work schedule make my job harder and the television networks and cable channels tend to fill their schedules with reruns and mostly uninteresting specials at the end of the year.

All in all it will be a relief to get back to normal.

On a personal level I have a good feeling about 2007. I think that we will end up being pleasantly surprised with what the new year has in store for us.

And, last but not least, Jack Bauer will be back in a couple of weeks - along with Battlestar Galactica and the final broadcast episodes of Stargate SG-1.

See you in a bit

I'm off now to a party. I'll post some odds and ends when I get home.

Till then happy New Year everybody!

Time's gifts

While chatting with my dentist yesterday while waiting for my mouth to numb up he remarked that he and his partners frequently had female patients who told him that they would rather give birth than endure a dental procedure. He said that he couldn’t understand how anyone would choose hours of labor over an hour or so in the dentist’s chair after seeing what his wife went through giving birth to their daughter. It seems that she was in labor for nearly 24 hours before her doctor finally saw that natural birth wasn’t going to happen and gave her a C-section.

This started me thinking. A hundred and fifty years ago both she and the child would probably have died. Through the first 30 years of the 20th Century my broken tooth would have only been treatable by going to some barber with a pair of pliers and having it pulled with no other anesthesia than a few shots of corn liquor, at least in the rural area where I live. If I had I lived on the frontier I might have had to endure months of agony while it rotted out and then possibly died from infection.

When we think of the passage of time we usually think in terms of how fast time seems to pass and of the losses time inflicts upon us. We grieve for our own lost youth and the sense of emptiness we feel when our children grow up and begin lives separate from us. The sadness we feel at seeing our parents grow old and feeble and eventually die. As we grow older with the passage of time the changes in our culture can sometimes make us feel like aliens in our own homeland and we know that time is passing us by.

However time also brings us wonderful gifts. When I met my friend the dentist more than 10 years ago he was still in college and had not even started dental school. His lovely wife was only his lovely fiancée in nursing school and their beautiful daughter was only a vague plan to “have kids sometime after the dental practice was established”.

Time brought him through school and into one of the fastest growing practices in the region. It brought them to the altar and delivered their child to them. The forward march of science and technology through time allowed her and the child to survive childbirth and allowed me to survive having my hand crushed in my mid-twenties. Survive with my hand intact rather than having it sawed off without anesthetic or antiseptic and having it cauterized with a red hot iron.

My other friend’s two wonderful daughters who I first met when they were 9 and 13 and I was their Sunday School teacher have been gifted by time and are now grown women with fine husbands and children of their own (a son to one and a daughter to the other with another son and daughter on the way – let’s also hear it for married White women reproducing).

The passage of time brought us central heating and air conditioning and chemotherapy and eyeglasses and laser surgery so that we don’t need eyeglasses any more. It gave us automobiles so inexpensive that virtually all of us who want one can afford one so that we don’t have to live our lives within walking distance of everything we need.

Time gave us radio so that we can know what is happening on the other side of the world before it is old news and television beamed around the world by satellites so that we can know what is happening on the other side of the world while it is actually going on. Then time gave us the Internet so that we no longer have to believe everything we see on television.

As we experience the passage of time we gain wisdom from experience and come to truly understand the old saying that youth is wasted on the young.

As time passes it does take away things we would rather keep, but it also washes away things that are badly in need of getting rid of. Think of it; the presidencies of Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter have rendered little more than bad memories by the passage of time.

Time does both give and take away, but on balance it gives much more than it takes. If this were not so then each generation would be less than the one before it. Life would grow worse rather than better as the generations pass and every generation would view the past with envy as the Europeans mired in the chaos and misery of the Dark Ages looked back on Rome as a golden age.

It is only human to lament the things we lose to the march of the clock and calendar, but always remember to give thanks for what they bring as well.

Posting will resume tomorrow

I'm sorry for not posting anything today other than the search engine bait about Miss Nevada. Yesterday one of my molars broke when I was eating lunch. There was hardly any pain, unless I bit down. I was resigned to subsisting on soup and eggnog until Tuesday or even Wednesday but when I spoke to one of the deacons in my church (who is a dentist) about how soon he could see me after Christmas he told me to come by his office this afternoon.

He fixed me up in time for us to make the evening Christmas Eve service.

And for coming in on Christmas Eve and X-Raying and drilling and filling he charged me $50.00.

Needless to say all of my dental business are now belong to him.