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Coach Rob: This divorce. I think it is really starting to affect my daughter.
Gwen Wilde (sarcastically): Seriously? Of course your divorce is affecting your daughter: 70% of all people in prison come from broken families; she’s twice as likely to do drugs; twice as likely to drop out of school; four times is likely to have trouble fitting in; three times as likely to end up in therapy; twice as likely to commit suicide; 50% more likely to have health problems.
Gwen Wilde (Rolling her eyes): Do people not even do a freaking Google search before you decide to blow up the planet your kids live on?
LADYBALLERS (2023) is a sports drama and political satire starring, written and directed by Jeremy Boreing. It is noteworthy as being one the few conservative, countercultural films made in the year, outside of the crushingly conformist establishment media institutions, hence opposed, condemned, libeled and ignored by them, and subjected to an Orwellian Two-Minute Hate session.
As sign of this hysteria may be seen on the Rotten Tomatoes website (https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/lady_ballers) where, as of the time of this writing, the audience score from 5000 comments stands at 91% and the critic score from seven — yes, a whopping total of seven reviews from all professional film review outlets were penned — stands at 43%.
The hysteria is misplaced. LADYBALLERS is a droll comedy, not remarkably funny nor yet remarkably unfunny, not original nor yet unoriginal, but workmanlike, hence a pleasant enough way to beguile an hour and fifty minutes. The film sets out to do what it means to do, and earns many a chuckle and chortle, but no belly-laughs.
My beautiful and talented wife, Mrs. Wright, who writes under the name L. Jagi Lamplighter, appeared as one of several guests on the BLASTERS AND BLADES podcast, to discuss Magic schools, where every day is a teachable moment!
She is something of a savant on the subject, having written the UNEXPECTED ENLIGHTENMENT series, a “Lovecraft meets Narnia at Hogwarts” sort of genre, and edited three volumes in the FANTASTIC SCHOOLS anthologies series.
In the far future, where humans have become as gods, living lives of perfect peace and prosperity, Phaethon of Rhadamanthus House discovers centuries of his memory are lost. Like his namesake, has flown too high, and must be cast down: for he has committed the one act the Golden Age forbids, to have ambitions higher than utopia can contain. Now his quest is to find himself.
Lilith: “What I choose to seem to myself makes me what I am. My own thought makes me me; my own thought of myself is me. Another shall not make me!”
Eve: “But another has made you, and can compel you to see what you have made yourself.”
LILITH: A ROMANCE (1895) is the final novel in the career of Scottish writer George MacDonald.
In a way, it forms a bookend with his first novel PHANTASTES (1858), using a similar setting and genre to approach similar themes, albeit from an opposite perspective. PHANTASTES told of a youth entering fairyland, pursuing romance but finding self-sacrifice, dying and rising again to return to earth to begin a parallel life here. LILITH, in contrast, is about a man of mature years passing through a magic mirror into a desolate spirit world or limbo inhabited by the dead awaiting resurrection, where the alluring love-interest must be persuaded to the path of self-sacrifice for her own salvation. In this mirror world, those alive on earth are seen as dead, and those dead on earth are slumbering to await waking to eternal life.
Both stories are told in a fairytale fashion, with simply-drawn stock characters, heavily symbolic or poetical events, centered on moral challenges and conundrums. Neither are clear, easy, nor enjoyable reads.
After many weeks of flunking my writing quota, I rejoice to report that this week, I penned six thousand five hundred words of copy, in addition to working my day job, spending evenings with the family, and other claims on my time.
In the scene I just wrote, the quadradimensional ghostblade called Candlewit (which Sir Orlando, called the Last Templar, used to kill and then banish the Faceless Man) has been bestowed on its new bearer, with instructions never to draw it against any mortal. Letters of flame burn in the crystal depth of the blade when its true name is called our in battlecry: Curucondel.
Nor all the dark of endless night may quench this single candle’s light
Oh, and there is spaceship battle, complete with the blood-red warmoon of the space-pirates whirled out of orbit by its hypergravitic spindizzy engine, firing upon the hard beset planet of walrus-men with interplanetary range beam weapons, and receiving fire in return from the planet-killing Carrington Event Weapon from the iron moon of the defenders. STARQUEST is a space opera, not high fantasy. Except maybe it is not.
I rarely find statistics persuasive, since it is too easy to manipulate them to support either side of any argument, and rarely are the assumptions and definitions visible. What, for example, is included in “gun violence”? Does this include use of a firearm in a suicide?
However, when a statistic confirms what common sense already shows, I do not mind quoting them.
Gun violence in 6 out of the 8 largest Ohio cities dropped significantly after Ohio legalized permit-free carry of guns across the entire state in 2022:
This letter is two or three weeks late, but Ansgar is a babe in arms as yet, and may not notice the delay.
25 December AD 2023, Feast of the Nativity
Dear Godson,
This day is Christmas. So holy is this day that all witches curses fail, nor may stars and planets in adverse conjunctions shed malign influences. For this is the day, foretold since Eden, when Our Lord, the Messiah and Savior of the world is born.
Because the tradition to exchange gifts on this day has had so profound an effect on the surrounding culture, among Christians and nonbelievers alike, it is easy to forget the meaning of this central miracle, a miracle beating at the heart of human history, that this great day commemorates.
This poem appears, in part, in the front matter of E.R. Eddison’s THE WORM OUROBOROS, which I had read back when I was 16. Eddison quoted only six stanza, but I thought (for no one told me otherwise) that this was the whole of it.
Now, in my 60’s, only now have I learned there is a complete version.
Ironically, I did not know of the visitor to Elfland who could not lie until this very day: despite how unexpected the coincidence might seem, Gilberec Moth of my own invention is unrelated to True Thomas.
What I did not know what the Thomas the Rhymer, True Thomas, the Scottish foreteller who could not tell a lie, is based on a real man from history.
As the tale tells it, Thomas of Erceldoune meets the Queen of Elfland, who seeks to employ him as her harper, but he seduces her to become his leman. He harps at her court during a feast, which lasts three days there while seven years pass by on Earth.
During the ride to Elfland, whose food he dare not eat, was given an apple whose taste prevented him thereafter from ever telling a lie — hence his name “True Thomas.”
Sir Walter Scott remarks: “The traditional commentary upon this ballad informs us, that the apple was the produce of the fatal Tree of Knowledge, and that the garden was the terrestrial paradise. The repugnance of Thomas to be debarred the use of falsehood, when he might find it convenient, has a comic effect.”
The second and third parts of the poem tell of his prophecies regarding the wars between England and Scotland, and his mysterious disappearance at the end of his life, following a snow-white hart who appeared at his doorstep.
Alexander Gardner, publisher to the Queen, in 1865, in the annotated edition of THE BALLAD MINSTRELSY OF SCOTLAND, remarks “As both the English and the Scots availed themselves of the credit which his prophecies had obtained, in falsifying them, to serve their purposes against each other, it is now impossible to ascertain what the real prophecies of Thomas the Rhymer were, if he ever published such.”
He also remarks that the original and ancient poem, on which the later versions were based (such as that of Sir Walter Scott, given below) may indeed have been penned by Thomas the Rhymer.
In his words “Would it not be pardonable, from such instances as these, to suppose it at least probable, that Thomas Kymour (Thomas the Rhymer) was really the original author of this romance; and that in order to give a sanction to his predictions, which seem all to have been calculated in -one way or other for the service of his country, he pretended to an intercourse with the Queen of Elfland, as Numa Pompilius did with the nymph Egeria? Such an intercourse, in the days of True Thomas, was accounted neither unnatural nor uncommon.”
Here is the story as told by a modern (and comedic) historian.
Here is the poem:
First part:
True Thomas lay on Huntlie bank; A ferlie he spied wi’ his ee; And there he saw a lady bright, Come riding down by the Eildon Tree.
Her skirt was o the grass-green silk, Her mantle o the velvet fyne, At ilka tett of her horse’s mane Hang fifty siller bells and nine.
True Thomas he pulld aff his cap, And louted low down to his knee: ‘All hail, thou mighty Queen of Heaven! For thy peer on earth I never did see.’
‘O no, O no, Thomas,’ she said, ‘That name does not belang to me; I am but the queen of fair Elfland, That am hither come to visit thee.
‘Harp and carp, Thomas,’ she said, ‘Harp and carp, along wi’ me, And if ye dare to kiss my lips, Sure of your bodie I will be!’
‘Betide me weal, betide me woe, That weird sall never daunton me; Syne he has kissed her rosy lips, All underneath the Eildon Tree.
Thirty minutes after the polls closed, the Iowa Caucus race was called for GOP nomination for Trump, who won 99 out of 99 counties in a unprecedented landslide victory.
I just discovered that Trump only won 98 out of 99 Iowa counties. A Democrat voter entered the GOP Caucus at the last minute to cast a vote for Nikki Haley, overturning the result in one county by one vote. Dem for Nikki. Make of that what you will.
“For your viewing pleasure, I am pleased to present the official music video for Heavenly light, the titular track from the album Virtual Orchestra: Heavenly Light”
May it encourage you and help to keep things in perspective in all your daily struggles, and give you strength and hope to stand against the lies, filth and fear that the world would have us fill our souls with. It seems especially appropriate at this time of year, traditionally a time when we look back and seek to learn from our mistakes as well as looking forward to a new year and all the promises of new beginnings that it holds.
In the far future, where humans have become as gods, living lives of perfect peace and prosperity, Phaethon of Rhadamanthus House discovers centuries of his memory are lost. Like his namesake, has flown too high, and must be cast down: for he has committed the one act the Golden Age forbids, to have ambitions higher than utopia can contain. Now his quest is to find himself.
The Godzilla film franchise is the oldest in film history, beginning in 1954 and spanning some 38 films: 33 Japanese films by Toho Ltd, and five by American partners, TriStar and Legendary. Cartoons and comic books and computer games starring Godzilla are myriad.
The latest entry is GODZILLA MINUS ONE, a masterpiece of the series, and worth watching both for longtime fans of the monster, and those who have never seen such a movie before.
If you have never watched a monster movie, and have no interest in them, watch this one.
I received a charming but disturbing compliment to one of my columns on Wokeness being a materialist restatement of Gnosticism. She writes:
I absolutely LOVED your article. Me, swimming somewhere between theosophist mystic and evangelical Christian and alchemical magician and ascetic world hating environmental evolutionist, I have to say, you brought this to absolute clarity! But I am not a gnostic! I know the whole schematic and I detest it. But it drives a molehole throughout our entire existence yes.
I believe in a God that is Good although he may be unreachable and a Savior that gives us a chance to redeem ourselves by following in HER footsteps. I believe in that bridge back to Paradise and it starts with me.
My comment: I am as pleased with flattery as any man of below-average dignity, so I am glad she liked my column. I rejoice to hear that she detests Gnosticism, which I regard as a satanic parody of all that is good.
However, the waggish and casual blasphemy with which she ends her note prompts me to issue a warning, which I think may be of use to my beloved readers, or to any who have ears to hear.
The unseen world is unseen.
That does not mean we have license to invent any fables as tickle our fancy about it. The unseen may be listening.
What little we know of it comes from visions and dreams and intuitions we have gathered on our own, or from revelations, accompanied by signs and wonders, from sources in the unseen world, or spokesmen allegedly representing those sources. It is a twilight world, one glimpsed in a darkling looking-glass.
What, then, are we to make of the unseen?
In particular, what are we to make of visions or visionaries that are rare, unusual, or even contrary to what generations have held true about the unseen world?
Below is a report on the voter fraud in the 2020 Election campaign which recounts the voting irregularities and illegalities in one tidy summation. I reprint it here because it is being ignored or libeled by the press.
As best I know, no point-by-point rebuttal, answer, or explanation exists for these allegations.
The endnotes are extensive, and I hope were transferred here accurately. If not, please tell me.
Summary of Election Fraud in the 2020 Presidential Election in the Swing States
It has often been repeated there is “no evidence” of fraud in the 2020 Election. In actuality, there is no evidence Joe Biden won.
Ongoing investigations in the Swing States reveal hundreds of thousands of votes were altered and/or not lawfully cast in the Presidential Election. Joe Biden needed them. On Election Night Nov. 3, 2020, President Donald J. Trump was sailing to reelection with landslide leads in numerous battlegrounds.
In Georgia, President Trump was up by 12 points, and over 335,000 votes, with 56 percent of the vote in at 10:17 p.m.[1]
In Wisconsin, President Trump was leading by 121,380 votes and 5 points at 12:12 a.m., which Fox News anchor Bret Baier noted was “not a small margin.”
In Pennsylvania, President Trump was leading by 659,145 votes at 12:38 a.m., a full 15 points.
In Michigan, President Trump was leading by 293,052 votes and 10 points.[2]
The election was over.
However, precincts in Atlanta, Detroit, Philadelphia, Phoenix, and Milwaukee kept counting until the results reached the desired outcome, which was the opposite of the will of the voters.
