The Argyle Sweater by Scott Hilburn for November 17, 2012

Kid has his priorities all screwed up.

And he wants to be a jazz moot horn player.

Is that why I always have extra crispy treasure?

Just wait a few years when he’ll learn about Multiplying.

Why, back in my day, we used to pillage all day just for fun. We pillaged until the sun set and our moms had to call us in for dinner. None of this indoors fancy math stuff for us! What’s wrong with kids these days?

…..and grab the women and stampede the cows.

The family isn’t Hagar the Horrible’s.

I remember back in the fifty’s we were graded on “deportment”. I had no idea what that even was – but I’ll bet you a ton of money they no longer grade that.

I took five years of Old Norse when I was going to school. It wouldn’t have helped you. Modern Norwegian is considerably different from Old Norse. If your grandparents had been Icelandic, however, it would have been different. The writtten language hasn’t changed much in over a thousand years, and the spoken language very little. If Eirik the Red sailed through a time warp and showed up tomorrow in Reykjavik harbor, he could talk to the people and be understood (but he would have an odd accent). It would be as if any schoolchild could pick up a copy of Beowulf and read it without having to translate, or carry on a conversation with Ælfred the Great.Just once, I’d like to see a cartoonist draw a Viking with an authentic helmet, i.e., one that doesn’t have horns.

sit on it

It’s never too late to learn a language.

I’m a fan of Sigur Ros at the age of 59.

Too much book larnin’ will rune you!

Iceland also has a thing about making new laws. I do not know about now, but in the 80s, only adults could buy and drink ale, mead, wine. The kids would drink liquor, because the law was about the spirits of the day, back a millennium or so, they did not distill then.

Then you can learn to speak to your more distant relations. Family is family.

I read that Iceland enforces its antiquity of its language by prohibiting loan words from other languages, expressing new concepts in Icelandic compound words instead, sometimes doing so with a poetic sensibility that a skald would admire: the word for pager, for example, translates as time-thief.

Papa could be a priest, wearing his liturgical headgear…although then the question would be why he would care about the kid’s looting skills.

Hasn’t Papa ever been in a situation where he and his fellow Vikings had trouble figuring out how to divvy up the booty? Maybe even come to blows over the question?

There was a ceremonial helmet found with long thin horns heading upward, not bovine-looking, but that’s about it. Remove the spout from the funnel/helmet of Lucky Eddie, round it off a bit, and you will have a fairly accurate Norse helmet – nose guard optional.

When I ws in HS in the U.S., there ws a guy who rode a motorcycle all over town, wearing a Viking helmet with the horns, n each horn had a flashing red light on it! Maybe he ws a reincarnated, Eric the Red! ;-D