Jared makes a good point on the Evangelical Manifesto released this week. "Evangelicalism won't be reformed by a long document full of distinctions signed by a who's who, particularly if that who's who thinks signing this thing is one of the most meaningful things they can do."

I wonder if this manifesto isn't largely a reaction to the public statements of people like the Evangelical Environmental Network.

The Ugly Mug Coffee Company has a good advertising campaign, possibly the most important element any coffee company can have--even more important than great tasting coffee.

An exhibit of photographs, called "Architecture of Silence - Cistercian Abbeys of France"

My final impression of my medical tests yesterday is this—if someday I were absolutely forced to acquire one chemical dependency or another, I’d definitely go for Valium.

I sat around for several hours without a care or worry. I’ve been trying to recall the last time I’d felt that way in normal life, and I don’t think there ever was one.

Nobody told me anything about what they learned—not that I asked. Hey! I was on Valium! But my in-depth research on the net (admit it—you do the same thing to when you get a health problem) indicates that I probably have an ulcer or two, and they’re testing biopsies to see whether it/they is/are caused by the coveted h. pylori.

Personally, I draw some satisfaction from the idea of having an ulcer. From childhood I’ve seen ulcers as a sort of red badge of courage, identifying really serious, responsible adults.

Today is Israel’s 60th birthday. Happy birthday, Israel. I’m not a devotee of Left Behind or The Late, Great Planet Earth, but I do believe that Israel exists for a divine purpose, and came into existence in fulfillment of God’s promises.

As it happens, this year is the 150th anniversary of Minnesota’s statehood. All across the state, you can see the celebrations, the decorations, the bunting, the fireworks.

I’m kidding. So far almost nothing has happened in commemoration of the date, as far as I can see, and I don’t expect to see much.

I remember the Centennial. I was seven years old that year. I remember special events in school, and a big parade in our little town, complete with celebrities from Twin Cities TV stations, riding on floats.

The difference is, of course, that back then we were proud to exist. Today we’re ashamed. If you took a poll, I suspect more than half of all Minnesotans would tell you that the only really appropriate way to celebrate would be to give all the land back to the Ojibway and the Lakota, and crawl back to Europe.

The only reason we don’t do that is because nobody would know what to do with the Hmong and the Somalis.

My submission for our official Sesquicentennial song:

I’m from Minnesota.
Where brave Paul Wellstone took a stand.
We stole it from the Native Americans,
Except for that little pointy chunk at the top, which we stole from Canuckistan.

I’m from Minnesota.
A very up-to-par land.
We are the source of the mighty Mississippi, according to traditional, Eurocentric map-making techniques,
And also of Judy Garland.

I’m from Minnesota.
Where we still root for the Twins.
Our winters are pretty uncomfortable,
But they help us begin to do penance for our numerous sins.

For those of you who were wondering, the test went fine, and now I'll have to wait for the results.

I had to take an anesthetic and a relaxant, and they warned me seriously not to make any important decisions today.

Well, what decision could be more important than settling on a subject for today's post?

So no topic today, on Doctor's orders.

Here's a report of trash in the Arizona desert apparently left behind by would-be immigrants crossing the border. I gather the traffickers insist that no one take anything with them--no extra clothes, backpacks, or family photos. I keep thinking that only a few time and location details would need to change to make this an old story about slavery. This looks like evidence of a preparation for their exploitation. Who could defend this?

I assisted the police with their inquiries last night.

If you read English mysteries, you know that’s a code phrase for sitting in jail. In my case, I mean the expression literally. A policeman asked me questions, and I answered them. Unhelpfully, but the best I could.

I noticed cops poking around a house across the street last night. I don’t generally watch what goes on in the neighborhood, because I don’t want to be one of those people. But when the police are prowling, it’s entertainment. (And, by the way, isn’t it nice to live in a country where, for most of us, the police are interesting rather than terrifying?)

One of them came over to my house and rang the bell. He showed me a picture on a police report and asked me if I’d ever seen this guy at that address. I told him I hadn’t. “Just a D.U.I. case,” he said.

Right. That’s what they wanted me to think. Probably so I wouldn’t panic, jump my mortgage and flee the local tax base in terror. I know how things work. I read thrillers.

Tomorrow I go in to the hospital for some tests. So if I never post here again, you’ll know the Mystery Psychopath tracked me down there, posed as a doctor, and tied up that loose end forever.

The MetaxuCafe is discussing and reporting on the PEN World Voices Festival 2008 with some good photos too. A couple notes from the top post: "[Salman] Rushdie is a Harry Potter fan."

"Rushdie, Eco and Vargas Llosa now began batting The Count of Monte Cristo back and forth, debating whether or not such 'bad writing' as this can also be great writing. All three seemed to agree that bad writing could be great writing and that this often happens."

I just finished Dean Koontz’ Icebound. This isn’t a review (it’s not my favorite of his work—it’s an early attempt to do an Alistair MacLean sort of book, originally published under a pseudonym. As a MacLean-type story, it’s long on action and suspense, short on characterization, making it not my sort of thing, overall), but it seemed to me an excellent example of plot-building in a sort of purified form.

You take a group of scientists and put them on the polar ice cap. They’re involved in an experimental project to blow a big chunk off the ice cap, creating an iceberg in order to study the feasibility of towing it southward, so as to provide fresh water for agriculture. In order to do this, they’ve just finished burying sixty shaped explosive charges deep in the ice. The next step, obviously, is to retreat as fast as possible to their base camp, miles away, and wait for the boom.

But just as they finish burying the last charge, there’s a huge earthquake. The area where they’re working becomes detached from the main ice cap, and our characters are trapped on a brand new iceberg with all those timed charges.

And then the worst ice storm in decades hits, making it impossible for ships or helicopters to evacuate them.

And then they discover they have a psychotic murderer in their midst.

That, friends, is how you raise the stakes in a story.

That’s plot in its rawest form. Put your characters in a horrible situation, then make it worse. And then make it worse again.

As I said, this is very pure plotting, very simple, done in primary colors. Your own story may deal with threats and struggles of much more subtle or internal nature. The conflict in your story may be an interpersonal struggle between business rivals or even friends. It might be the struggle of star-crossed lovers to overcome obstacles to their marriage. The conflict could even be within one character’s mind and soul.

But the principle remains the same. Some Hollywood mogul once gave his formula for an epic movie—“Start with an earthquake, then build from there.” You can call it escalation. You can call it, “Being mean to your characters.”

But it’s what plot is. It’s what keeps the reader interested.

I wasn't much of a blogger last week, and I won't be much of one this week. Part of my busyness will be preparing for Mother's Day next Sunday. I have a beautiful, enchanting wife, a mother of four, who deserves better from me at every turn, and I want to tell her so next weekend. If I can get around to it.

Anyway, here are some links of potential interest.

"Just last week, The Capital Times, a 90-year-old daily newspaper in Madison, Wis., ended its print version and began publishing only online." A strong business/technology magazine publisher is working that way too.

Kristen asks about books being made into movies in light of Prince Caspian's release next week.

The creator of "Family Guy," Seth MacFarlane, has signed deal with 20th Century Fox TV "that would make him the highest-paid writer-producer working in television."

Patrick Kurp is reading A Step from Death by Larry Woiwode:

Some of the most moving pages I’ve read thus far in A Step from Death concern the late William Maxwell, the novelist who edited Woiwode’s early work at The New Yorker. They shared another bond: Both lost their mothers while they were still boys – a loss always at the heart of Maxwell’s fiction. When they first speak of the unhealed rupture in their lives, Maxwell begins, “To lose a mother at that age --,” and stops. Woiwode writes:

“It’s all he says, and we sit in the resonance you feel in the air after a church bell rings in the steeple next door, and then a tear slides from a corner of his eye – the right the most prone to spill – and although he has said it to me, I know he’s referring to himself, too, and his mother, who died when he was ten, and he doesn’t say a word more. We attend to the resonance like tuning forks vibrating at the same frequency. He is sixty, resilient, cheerful, the only person I know who can speak with joie de vivre while tears runs, but he’s never been able to accept her death.”

P.D. James discusses life in today's world:

"Our society is now more fractured than I, in my long life, have ever known it."

The isolation, she argued, flows from a fear of difference and is fed by the sense, common in our disparate communities, that engagement is not worth the risk.
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"Increasingly," she said, "there is a risk that we will live in ghettoes with our own kind." Behind the disintegration was a spread of "pernicious" political correctness that made attempts at understanding harder.

"If, in speaking to minorities," she added, "we have to weigh every word in advance in case, inadvertently, we give offence, how can we be at ease with each other, how celebrate our common humanity?"

...

"Look at those," she says, pointing to the heavy bars on her windows. "This is how we live now. Behind bars in our own homes. I find it intimidating but I understand that it is sensible. Several of my friends have been mugged. Some of them quite horribly."

Illinois man wants to change his name to 'In God We Trust.'

Must I be carried to the skies
On flowery beds of ease?
While others fought to win the prize,
And sailed through bloody seas?

David Laskin reviews one of Naipaul's books.

Naipaul calls the book "an essay in five parts," as if to impose some sort of unity or occasion on what is essentially a collection of musings on random irritants. The early success of his fellow countryman Derek Walcott, Flaubert's exotic prose opera "Salammbô," Gandhi's mysterious hold over the soul of India — these are among subjects Naipaul swirls in his imagination like an after-dinner brandy. But in the end, the laureate leaves us more muddled than intoxicated.

The Civil War continues to take its toll. A man in Virginia, working on refurbishing a civil war cannonball, accidentally detonated it, and was killed.

I could say something about how a historical buff would choose to go, but that’s probably inappropriate. So I’ll just say that, as a reenactor myself, I understand his passion, and I salute him. I probably would have liked him.

The good folks at First Things put me on to this blog: Stuff Christians Like. And I do like it. There’s lots of truth there.

And yet it troubles me too.

Because all these jokes about how Christians make dorks of themselves just reinforce me in my habit of never saying or doing anything about my faith, for fear of looking dorky.

I wish it were possible to list the right things to do as easily as we’re able to list dumb things.

But of course that’s unnecessary.

Because the right thing to do isn’t usually a mystery. All you have to do is choose the most embarrassing, frightening, humiliating choice you’ve got, and that’s probably the right one.

And the real kicker is that two out of three times you’ll still be wrong, and you’ll still look like a dork.

Which, I guess, explains that “fools for Christ” thing.

Demonstrating once again that there is no evil beyond the reach of the human soul, we have the story of Josef Fritzl, the Austrian man who imprisoned his daughter in his cellar for 24 years and fathered seven children with her.

People are shaking their heads, unable to imagine why a man would do this.

I’ll tell you why. I’ll tell you right now. You watch the reports of the trial, when it happens, and tell me if I’m wrong.

Fritzl believes he’s the victim. He was himself abused as a boy, and he considers it horribly unfair that everyone is making a big deal out of what he’s done now, when nobody stepped in to save him when he was victimized himself.

He believes that he actually had his daughter’s best interests at heart, because if he’d let her have her freedom she’d have used it badly.

He believes he deserves some praise for installing mechanisms (or so it’s reported) that would release the captives in the event of his prolonged absence.

He believes that everyone who’s condemning him now is a hypocrite, because they’re doing things equally bad and just haven’t been caught yet.

Here's an article written by a unique Dunkin' Donuts store owner in Brooklyn, NY. She's unique b/c she's a Jewish woman partnered with a Muslim immigrant. But they are trying to get out of the doughnut business b/c Dunkin' is suing them.

Cindy Gluck says she wanted a store manager to have a 15% stake in the franchise. She made the offer, checked with corporate, learned it was against corporate policy, and withdrew the offer. Afterward, corporate sued for violation of policy.

Some believe this isn't about the policy, but about immigration. Gluck says it's about Dunkin' Donuts wanting to run small owner-operators out of business in favor of multiple store owners.

Maybe the crew of the Enterprise did travel back in time. Charles Q. Choi of LiveScience writes, "New handheld medical scanners coupled with regular cell phones resemble 'Star Trek' tricorders and could see what ails you with a push of a button."

Since January 1 in Oregon, giving sexually explicit material to anyone under 13 or material which intends to arouse the reader to anyone under 18 is a criminal act. The ACLU of Oregon and a group of bookseller and advocacies are suing to get it stopped. They say the law is too broadly written and could be abused by "overzealous police and prosecutors."

Rep. Andy Olson (R-Albany), said, "This law was carefully written to respect Oregonians' First Amendment rights. It is clearly targeted at individuals who use pornography to lure and harm Oregon's kids. No adult and no bookstore should be in the business of providing kids with the kind of content that is specifically listed in this law."

The best quote of the day comes from Dirty Harry over at Libertas, in a piece on a couple new films about Che Guevera: "I can’t imagine what it must be like to hold an ideology where Wal-Mart outrages me more than the slaughter of 600 people."