dual personalities

We are enjoying some really glorious weather for the end of August here in flyover country. High 70s and low humidity–unheard of! And the Cardinals continue to have the best record in baseball.

Way to go, boys!

Speaking of sports, here is the newest lacrosse equipment video that the boy did for Total Lacrosse.

His mother thinks he’s cool.

It is John Buchan’s birthday! You remember he (August 26, 1875 – February 11, 1940) was the Scottish novelist who wrote The Thirty-Nine Steps (among others) and served as Governor General of Canada. He was also Lord Tweedsmuir.

Fun fact: His memoir, Memory Hold-the-Door, or Pilgrim’s Way (as it was called in America) was said to be John F. Kennedy’s favorite book. Interesting.

Here’s a tidbit from chapter one:

Looking back I realise that the woodlands dominated and coloured my childish outlook. We were a noted household for fairy tales. My father had a great collection of them, including some of the ancient Scottish ones like The Red Etin of Ireland, and when we entered the woods we felt ourselves stepping into the veritable world of faery, especially in winter, when the snow made a forest of what in summer was only a coppice. My memory is full of snowstorms, when no postman arrived or milkman from the farm, and we had to dig ourselves out like hibernating bears. In such weather a walk of a hundred yards was an enterprise, and even in lesser falls the woods lost all their homely landmarks for us, and became a terra incognita peopled from the story-books. Witches and warlocks, bears and wolf-packs, stolen princesses and robber lords lurked in corners which at other times were too bare and familiar for the mind to play with. Also I had found in the library a book of Norse mythology which strongly captured my fancy. Norns and Valkyries got into the gales that blew up the Firth, and blasting from a distant quarry was the thud of Thor’s hammer.

A second imaginative world overshadowed the woods, more potent even than that of the sagas and the fairy folk. Our household was ruled by the old Calvinistic discipline. That discipline can have had none of the harshness against which so many have revolted, for it did not dim the beauty and interest of the earth. My father was a man of wide culture, to whom, in the words of the Psalms, all things were full of the goodness of the Lord. But the regime made a solemn background to a child’s life. He was conscious of living in a world ruled by unalterable law under the direct eye of the Almighty. He was a miserable atom as compared with Omnipotence, but an atom, nevertheless, in which Omnipotence took an acute interest. The words of the Bible, from daily family prayers and long Sabbath sessions, were as familiar to him as the story of Jack and the Beanstalk. A child has a natural love of rhetoric, and the noble scriptural cadences had their own meaning for me, quite apart from their proper interpretation. The consequence was that I built up a Bible world of my own and placed it in the woods.

Here is the whole book on Project Gutenberg.

Today is Greta Garbo day on TCM, so set your DVR for a line-up of good movies. I plan to check out Mata Hari (1931) which I have never seen.

Enjoy your Wednesday!