En passant

Apparently Mt. St. Helens may explode again. This is very intriguing. The last time it exploded, I was 23 days old. I wonder how the new eruption will affect its profile; maybe even it out again? I seem to remember this being very big news in the early eighties, or perhaps we were just singularly aware of it because of our location in nearby Oregon and involvement in Creation seminars, which gave a lot of attention to the event. I remember, when very young, licking my ice cream cones into a smooth dome and saying things like, 'This is Mt. St. Helens before it erupted.' Then I'd bite a big chunk off the (north) side and say, 'Now this is Mt. St. Helens after it erupted!'

Now it seems that swords are forbidden in Australia. Somehow this reminds me of Sleeping Beauty's father banning all spinning wheels in the kingdom. What are they going to do with all metal weapons, melt them down? Export them?

I was reading the Sunday paper and saw that Kohl's had a sale on jewelry, most notably diamond earrings. There was a pair of 1-carat diamond earrings for $600. This set me thinking. An enterprising pair of young men could buy this pair, spending only $300 each for a 1-carat diamond, which is the main expense of a diamond ring: you can buy the band and claw for relatively little. Now, I'm not fond of diamonds, but wouldn't that be a clever and inexpensive way to give your fianceé a 1-carat diamond for, oh, maybe $400 total? I thought it was a very clever scheme. Michael pointed out that earring diamonds may not be the quality required for an engagement ring. Oh, well. It's a moot point for us anyway.

So far Michael does not like our friend Johnny too well. 'He's an arrogant, bossy, know-it-all - and now I'm supposed to feel sorry for him just because he had an accident? No way! I'm not going to be manipulated like that!' I'm trying to remember how I felt about Johnny the first time I read the book. I think I disliked him at first, too. That's what I love about the book - how the characters develop and grow. I remember learning in literature class a few years ago that if a character changes through the course of a story, he is three-dimensional; if he stays the same, he is two-dimensional. I disagreed strongly with this, pointing out that a flamboyant, effusive, or otherwise interesting character can stay in the same character all throughout, but does that necessarily make him two-dimensional? On the contrary, such a character could be much more interesting than a boring person who changes throughout the course of the story and morphs into another boring personality. Think of Tristan Farnon in James Herriott's books. Does he ever change? But is he two-dimensional? Ha! Much of what we learned in that class was hocus-pocus. Well, anyway, that was a bit of a digression, but the point is that, granting that definition, the characters in Johnny Tremaine are certainly three-dimensional.