Musings from Brian J. Noggle

I’ve been a fan of Vargas’s work since the Great Playboy Caper (someday, I’ll have to re-relate that story since I cannot find it on the blog here). Vargas (and his s-less alter ego Varga) did pinup and nude art for Esquire and later Playboy. They were always playful and attractive, so when I saw this book at Barnes and Noble, marked down, I knew it was the proper way to spend a Christmas gift card so long as I didn’t mention it in the thank you note by name.

The book chronicles the eras in Vargas life and selective art from each period from the collection of Vargas’s nephew. There’s plenty of text to tell the sad story of Vargas, from his start doing promo portraits of Zeigfield girls, to his rise when discovered by Esquire, to the final contract at that magazine that rooked him into indentured servitude, his break with Esquire, the lawsuit over the contract and its aftermath, and then his return to publication with Playboy.

He had a rough life, fiscally for sure, but he produced some great work. I cannot help but compare his life with that of Frederic Remington, whose art book I expect to complete during the Packers game next Sunday. Remington lived a generation before Vargas, and his work came from a life that was pretty cush and unfraught with drama. It puts lie to the hypothesis that great art must come from rotten lives. Sometimes art comes in spite of surroundings. Which is what I tell myself since I live a pretty cush life, which contrasts with my most productive writing period.

Although, to be honest, the Great Playboy Caper brought me more fiscal reward than my creative writing has.

So this book is worth a look if you’re not too embarrassed to buy it or be caught reading it. Because the other Republicans might ostracize one who knows who Vargas is or has an event in one’s life called The Great Playboy Caper.

I have a great new idea for a non-profit organization, and I’m going to get in on the ground floor and get rich. My stunning idea:

An Urban Chicken Rescue Organization.

Throughout Missouri and probably the nation, people are deciding that they want to raise chickens in their suburban and urban backyards (see stories in St. Louis and Springfield). These people are doing it as part of an environmental nutbar fad and they’re doing it with a bit of Internet research and without any experience in farming or treating livestock qua livestock instead of livestock qua food-providing-pet.

Ergo, when their circumstances change, when they get tired of them, or when they reach the end of the hens’ productive years, people are going to need to get rid of these damn birds. Are they going to slaughter them? Of course not! They’d just as soon slay their bichon frise or lifestyle accessory only child.

That’s where my UCRO steps in. It will give them a conscience-friendly way to get rid of their chickens without having to turn them loose on the streets (although there wouldn’t be much of a pack of stray chickens problem if there are any stray dogs or cats about or foxes, coyotes, or automobiles). UCRO can save cities from the dreaded Giant Chickens in the Sewers rumor, too, although to be honest, I’d rather help perpetuate that myth.

So send your checks and money orders as soon as I get my 501(c) status and start paying myself a hefty salary to help young green hipsters out of their foolishness. For a fool and his chicken will soon be parted for a small gift to my forthcoming charitable organization.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, not only am I a hypocrite, but I am a hypocrite!. Wait, I already bolded it. I need to bold it and italicise it (full on British italicisation, too, not that cheap American knock-off): I AM A HYPOCRITE! You should know how knees-on-cobblestones I am with this whole thing since I don’t use a WYSIWYG editor and actually have to type the tags for those embellishments, and <strong> and <em> even, not the sissy <b> and <i>.

You see, my very first op-ed was in favor of a tax increase.

Behold, the St. Louis-Post-Dispatch letters to the editor from sometime in January 1986:

In my defense, I was 13 years old at the time (almost 14!), and Mrs. Weissflug made a pretty compelling case that if the taxes didn’t go up, Northwest R-1 and maybe even North Jefferson Middle School might have to let teachers go.

25 years later, I’ve seen a little more of the world and untold similar cases presented pretty regularly on the ballot.

But that does not diminish my sin. Wait, no, I’m not a hypocrite!; I am actually a hypocrite who is also a WAFFLER! FLIP-FLOPPER!.

You may discontinue taking me seriously if you haven’t already. And if you’re that way.

Also, please note that even in 1985, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch‘s fact-checking and knowledge of St. Louis was lacking. Northwest R-1 covers part of Jefferson County, including Murphy, which used the Fenton post office (hence, my address at the time used Fenton as the town). However, Fenton itself is in St. Louis County and was unaffected by the levy. However, they titled my letter based on my address, not, you know, knowledge.

I thought this book would have a lot of ideas on building geek jewelry and crafts and whatnot. Well, no. It has, essentially, one: Use resistors and capacitors as beads!

Pretty much, that’s it. We get different designs with different colors of capacitors and resistors, but that’s the big idea, and it’s replicated over dozens of projects within the book. The author talks about different parts of electronic gizmos in the introduction, but then recommends only using new resistors and capacitors ordered from Radio Shack.

The single idea is a good one, but it’s not enough in my opinion for a full book. The story of the author’s success with the idea is neat, but the book fills out with a too-cute explanation of geek culture and identification of geek things with top ten lists designed to fill the white space in the book. That being said, one of the top ten geek blogs is linked in my sidebar (Neatorama. So kudos, John and co., although I suspect that John is one of the co. and I don’t know whose name to put in front of it.

Worth a trip to the library if you want to see the one good idea in action, but I really have given away the ending.

Time for me to come out of the closet as it were: I am a tax hypocrite.

Not to get too deeply into it, but one of the advantages of government-sanctioned marriage is the tax benefits, or at least the fact we get to only have to pay the accountant for one form. Since I think the government should probably get out of the marriage sanctioning business entirely but I take advantage of the offer, I am a hypocrite!

I don’t think that the government should ladle out tax credits for behavior it likes, such as buying the right air conditioner, buying a house, or buying the correct clothes washing machine, but I sometimes take those tax credits (although I missed out on the washing machine stimulus payola I mentioned due to laziness and, frankly, lack of enthusiasm for the project). Ergo, I am a hypocrite!

On the other hand, I have argued passionately against the government taking tax money to redistribute to individuals for individual benefit even above the lofty arguments that every individual having more (of others’ property) makes a better, more egalitarian nation. However, I still pay my FICA and social security taxes. Because I don’t practice what I preach!

I think there are a lot of Federal government programs that are not just a bad idea, such as the Department of Education or Department of Energy, but some are damn immoral (funding abortions around the world). However, I don’t deduct that percentage from my quarterly taxes because I am a damned hypocrite!

Now that we have my admission out of the way, can we separate the tax code and its thousands of pages of rulings and regulations from a reasoned discussion of principles?

No, of course not. Many of the people I discuss issues with proudly lack principles, and all they have going for them is ad homenims, tu quoques, and day-old bon mots.

This is a little souvenir book you could pick up if you were stationed in Detroit (what will they call tourists in 2014 Detroit? The National Guard). Me, I bought it since I’m a silly sucker for picture books of Detroit (see also the review for the full-sized coffee table book Detroit).

I cannot tell from the photos really when the book was published, but they still talk about the Silverdome. Part of the book is given over to the University of Michigan campus and other nearby other cities, so the authors had some trouble coming up with enough nice in Detroit to fill up this slender volume.

I have to wonder what sort of drinking problem the copywriters for this sort of thing have. I don’t intimate that they’re probably drinking on the job to write this glowing prose when Detroit was a punchline at least as far back as 1977. A real professional can make anything sound shiny and to say that Detroit is ever-ascendant while working, but when they go home and think about what they’re reduced to writing day in, day out instead of writing the sweeping novels they’d envisioned in college, I bet they tipple till they topple. Maybe I shouldn’t mock so much professional writers who get paychecks while I’m here on the blog plan with its fifty dollars a decade salary.

I’m looking through these books nowadays with an eye for patterns and images I could burn on wood. Unfortunately, all of these are so Detroit-specific, focusing on its famous buildings, that the photos are not generic enough. I could burn one of the halls at Michigan or the Renaissance Center, but only someone from Detroit might recognize it. Instead, all I get to do is make fun of the book and Detroit. Which makes it worthwhile anyway.

One of the complaints I had about the house in Old Trees is that each room had only a single- or two-bulb fixture high upon the twelve foot ceilings to serve to illuminate the rooms within it. When the sun went down, the brown/tan/beige walls soaked that light up and the home became dark and draining.

Nogglestead is a tad different. And, fortunately, in a way I can complain about: the thing has too many light bulbs in its fixtures, and its fixtures use a plethora of different bulb styles. Maybe two plethora. Maybe a full myriad of plethora. Additionally, each fixture uses instead of one or two 100 watt bulbs, sometimes a dozen or more 40 watt bulbs. It’s bright, all right, and that buzzing you hear isn’t from fluorescence. It’s from the electric meter spinning.

Observe.

This is the front porch fixture:

This fixture has three small-base candle flame candles. Not only that, but to replace them, you have to undo the decorative nut on the bottom, remove the small decorative cover, undo the nut that holds the glass and whatnot up, remove most of the fixture except for the sockets, and then replace the bulbs. I don’t bother if only one is out. I wait for them to all go dark before I do. And I’ve replaced the set twice in the 11 months I’ve lived here.

This is the foyer fixture just inside the front door:

These are 40 watt small base clear bulbs. Six of them.

This is the parlor. It’s a formal dining room, but we don’t dine formally, so it has a piano in it and an elaborate formal dining room fixture.

That’s eight of the same 40 watt small base clear bulbs.

This is the kitchen:

There are six fixtures in here that I’ve not opened yet. Would it be too much to ask that they’re standard medium base light bulbs under there? Over the sink, there’s a recessed fixture that wants a flood light, but I’ve put in a 60-watt medium base incandescent.

The living room has a ceiling fan:

I know, by now you’re thinking it’s not so bad. The ceiling fixture has six more of the 40 watt small base clear bulbs. Oh, but look more closely: it also has a downward facing small spotlight in the center that I have yet to successfully replace. Since the top (or bottom) of the bulb is flush with the edge of its socket, I can’t get a good grip on it to replace it. Currently, it has a new bulb in it, but it’s not lit, so I did something wrong.

Now, onto elsewhere. This is one of the bedrooms in the house. The house relies on medium base floods recessed in the ceiling in a number of rooms, including the offices downstairs, two of the bedrooms upstairs, and the main living area downstairs. I’ve had to replace the ones in the den downstairs a couple of times each (I’ve had these troubles with recessed floodlights before in Old Trees as well). Eventually, I can get away with using medium base regular bulbs. Sometime soon I’ll do that instead of paying for the floodlights.

In the master suite, we have another ceiling fan. This one uses medium base frosted flame bulbs. It’s the only thing in the house that does so:

All of the bathrooms use medium base clear frosted bulbs. At least they share something with other rooms.

These vanities are in addition to overhead lights, of course.

The garage and the storage areas within the house have simple sockets for your standard light bulb:

However, in all of these cases (the garage, the laundry alcove, the walk-in closet, the storeroom, and the utility room), the previous owner put CFL bulbs in. Note that all of these fixtures do not have glass bulbs over them. In each of these cases, you’re one errant ladder from a hazmat situation. Also, all of these areas are the ones you’re prone to flip the light on for a couple seconds and turn it off. This is bad for the life expectancy of the CFL. I’m moving them out of the house as fast as I can.

These two fixtures outside the garage are perfect for the light-polluting CFL bulbs. Sadly, I have only two of these external fixtures and something like four or five of them remaining in my house.

So, if you’re keeping track, my house has a lot of light fixtures:

That’s seven different types of light bulbs I need to have on hand to keep this house illuminated, and a whole pile of them on at any one time. I’d lie to you if I told you I’d rather have the lighting scheme of the old home in the new one, but jeez, Louise. I wonder where I’ll be in 2 years when incandescent light bulbs start becoming illegal by writ of Their Majesty, The Royal Congress.

Also, apologies in advance for any future brownouts I cause all by myself.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch juxtaposes these headlines today:

• Financial outlook for East St. Louis is seen as dire
  

  City revenue is expected to fall by more than 18 percent next year as officials struggle to maintain vital services, according to information presented Friday.

  Patrice Rencher, executive director of the East St. Louis Financial Advisory Authority, said the city must make “tough decisions” to deal with the expected revenue crunch next year. Revenue is projected to fall from $23.5 million this year to $19.2 million next year, Rencher said at the authority’s monthly meeting Friday.

• Could the Rams play in Illinois?
  

  When rumors had it that the owners of the St. Louis Rams are considering moving the team to a new stadium, one suggestion about a possible site came from someone who lives far outside the 314 area code.

  “It’s something to study,” said Illinois state Senate President John Cullerton (D-Chicago) in an interview with KMOX-AM earlier this month, suggesting the state could help with financing.

Basically, it’s that time again, where billionaires who own sports teams come around with their hats simultaneously held out for a handout and mournfully over their hearts in regret that they need tax money to compete because although they’re billionaires and the sports teams are making money hand over fist, thanks to creative accounting they’re really impoverished. It’s only been 15 years since the football team did this. The Cardinals did this just a couple years back. And always they publicly mull over the possibility of graciously accepting the corporate welfare from the bankrupt state across the river.

But here’s the rub: If a St. Louis sports team moves to Illinois, its gate will drop. Period. Many Missourians will be reluctant to drive over the river, across the bottlenecks of the bridges, and for an extra hour to see their sports teams. Not just because of the inconvenience, but because of East St. Louis’s reputation.

And I don’t care if Collinsville, Highland, or Edwardsville gets the stadium. To a lot of the Missouri side of the metropolitan area, the east side is East St. Louis, oil refineries, and strip clubs.

Just once I’d like to see the public officials in Missouri call this bluff. Let the Rams build a park over there. Let the Cardinals go over there when they need Busch III in 2020.

Ah, but that would mean that the public officials would have to drive over, too, to ride in the backs of their chauffeured cars for an hour, and to sit somewhere other than the boxes reserved for the honored lackeys of the aforementioned billionaires. Never mind. Public officials serve themselves, not the public.

Check out this magnus misogynus I have posted at 24thState.com.

I might not understand women, but I understand those who use statistics about women.

This is the first in what has become a 20 year series of novels. In it, Lucas Davenport hunts down a serial killer who varies his methods and his targets to confound the police but cannot help leaving notes with the rules to which he adheres in killing. The series starts right out with the tropes that become tropes as the series progresses, including as much time spent handling the media as detecting and with the soap opera loves of Lucas. I guess Sandford had a series in mind all along. After all, he did start right out with a psuedonym for it.

The books all have a very contemporary feel to them: Davenport uses all the latest technology and whatnot, and if you read the latest books, you recognize they’re current day. So it startled me a bit to read a book from the great before, where Davenport and everyone exchange notebook notes to synchronize them every morning, people need to use pay phones, and Davenport makes wall charts with paper notes. You don’t think a thing of it when Perry Mason books or Ed McBain’s detectives type up reports because most of their books came from that great Before, but when you read someone who has crossed that gap and you read his latest works first, the transition can be remarkable. Reparagraphable, even.

As with many of the Davenport series, the end seems unsatisfying and a bit contrived. Davenport sets the killer up and vigilantes him, but Davenport remembers to execute his carefully crafted execution in a state of emergency, when he’s flown in his Porsche from one twin city to the next while a crime is in progress. It’s very pat and very novelesque, as though Sandford plotted the ending before getting the book to that point, and even though it didn’t seem to fit congruously, he was going to use it anyway.

Strangely enough, as he says on his Web site, the original ending was even worse.

A decent book. Still available in paperback. I actually borrowed this from the library because I’ve run short of things to read around here (meaning that the number has dropped under 3000). I’ll look to find this if I can at a book fair to flesh out my collection.

Over at The Missouri Record, David Linton argues in favor of repealing the 17th Amendment which allows the direct election of Senators.

I agree, but I think this is going to be a hard sell to the American public which has come to believe that the key to an open government is more and more transparency and direct accountability of officials, where more and more citizen votes means better and better government.  Of course, this more accountable system allows incumbents to go to Washington, vote for government expansion for five years, and return home just before the election to claim they’re independent and fiscally conservative.  Thusly, the ruling class can fool the inattentive, and the whole More Accountability benefit falls by the wayside.  Granted, this failure rests more on the heads of the inattentive citizens than the charlatans they elect, but it circumvents the system our foresighted forefathers put into place.

The state legislators, on the other hand, are professionals (or are at least paying attention) since that is some part of their job, and they know whether the Senators serve the interests of the state or the interests of the Senators or their political party instead.  That was part of the balance the Constitution prepared for us.

But in the 21st Century, the trend is not to balance individual voter whims and trends with the power of the sovereign states.  See also the National Popular Vote movement to end-around the Electoral College.  The current popular will values the popular will, and those who seek to unravel our system of government hold out the entitlement of an uninformed vote to the masses. 

Don’t expect the masses to give it up any time soon.

(Cross-posted at 24th State.com.)

As some of you know, I’ve been reading woodburning books this year. Well, you ask, what are you going to do about it?

Well, I did this:

They’re not the first projects I’ve done, but they’re the first I’ve posted here. I know, it’s all butterflies and birds and girlie stuff, but I’m working from stencils here, not traced or freehand designs. Strangely, even in Springfield, the craft store stencil selection does not feature any stencils of guns or bucks or that sort of thing, so until I get some NRA-licensed stencils, I’m going to have to stick with these until I’m good enough to do more intricate things.

That’s what I’m doing when I’m not lamenting the state of the government. I’m teaching myself a trade I can use when the government collapses.

Also, I’m always selecting More Dry because of my raging hydrophobia. That punchline bears repeating.

Sometime next week, apparently residents hereabouts might suffer from a severe eyeglass storm warning.

City Utilities plans to begin a series of high-pressure “steam blows” over the next two to four weeks to clear boiler pipes of any debris ahead of the power plant’s commissioning later this fall.

…

The roaring sound likely will be heard for miles, and a tall plume of steam will jet skyward from the south side of Southwest 2.

The steam blows will last for several minutes, and may be done several times a day until all of the boiler tubes and related pipes are clear of any rustlike scale that may have developed inside the pipes during construction.

Miller said the steam blows also should blast out any nuts, bolts, eyeglasses, gloves or other foreign debris that may have been inadvertently left inside the pipes during construction. [Emphasis added.]

So someone has admitted leaving eyeglasses in the inner workings of this plant, and sometime next week they’re going to launch these glasses as well as small bits of metal into the air and let them land where they will. Am I reading that right?

I have a couple days to make my Kevlar umbrella.

This plant is a couple miles and a couple hilltops north of here, but we’ll probably hear it. Combine this with great plumes of smoke a couple hills to the west as the Wilson’s Creek National Battlefield conducts its controlled burns, and we’re just a couple cattle’s worth of leather-wearing highwaymen away from my worst nightmares circa 2008.

As some of you know, I got a new dryer recently. This particular unit seems to be imbued with some humidity-sensing technology since its dial no longer has just a dumb timer, but different settings based on, well, how much you serve Mother Gaia, apparently.

Now, I’m no expert on nuance, so in my black-and-white world, dry is an absolute value. Therefore, the dial that offers me more dry or less dry is probably offering me either dry or damp. Sandwiched between the two poles on the spectrum, the dial offers me the energy preferred option.

Energy preferred? Why not come right out and say it: This is what Mother Gaia wants me to choose. This is how damp and clingy the Earth wants me to wear my clothes. Its acolyte the dryer would like my clothing to retain moisture so that, when I walk around wearing these moisture-enriched clothes, I add evaporation to the water cycle and make the plants grow pretty flowers and vegetables I should not despoil for decoration or consumption purposes.

I mean, come on, why not just have a separate section of the dial for drying your hemp clothes while you’re at it?

Sadly, there are people who wash their clothes with Green cleaning products and then use the less-dry option on the dryer because that’s what they must do to avert global cataclysm. The people who want to avert a global cataclysm but don’t want to deal with the bother of line-drying their clothes, I mean. And they’re walking around in moist, dirty clothes, hoping to be blessed by Mother Gaia with actual dandelions sprouting in their knit sweaters and with lots of helpful bacteria breeding upon their unmentionables.

Meanwhile, I’m always selecting More Dry because of my raging hydrophobia.

I bought this book at the Kirkwood book fair some years back, and I started looking through it a couple baseball seasons ago. It’s definitely a flip-through kind of book, as it includes a short history of Currier and Ives and the market for illustration in the nineteenth century. Each chapter, if you will, then takes on a series from the Currier and Ives line and presents four pictures from it in full color and full page. Of course, if you’re familiar with the Christmas song, you know how the company’s prints impacted how the nineteenth century Americans viewed themselves and their countrymen and, even more importantly, impacted the nostalgia of the time. Think of it as the equivalent of their Thomas Kinkade, except instead of purposefully painting nostalgic historic scenes, they created images that were contemporary, but warmly evocative, that became nostalgic as time went on.

I like the pictures and would consider collecting the company’s prints, but I’m not as DINK as I once was, so I’ll have to watch for the foldered quarter folio prints at garage sales. I’m also considering scanning some of them to use elements within for some of my woodburning projects.

And as a final note, the book includes some of the Currier and Ives hidden animal prints, wherein the artists hid animals in the background of a picture, and the viewer could look at them to find the animals, kind of like a puzzle. I remembered when I saw these prints in the book that I had had a book of these as a child, no doubt a gift from my Nana who worked at the Milwaukee Art Museum. I don’t have those books any more, and I kind of miss them.

At any rate, worth a look if you’re into Americana or art. Also, prepare yourself for a couple of art books to come along hereabouts as I look for flipping books I can look at while I watch football games. I think my Man Points maintain status quo if I watch football while flipping through artsy books. The craft books, though, continually drain the Man Points.

Professor William Jacobson of Legal Insurrection has named MfBJN his blog of the day.

No, seriously, I have proof:

Click for full size

Welcome to Web crawlers who’ve clicked through to visit this site from thence.

If you can’t get enough Noggle, and who can?, you can visit:

• 24th State for additional posts on Missouri politics and the Tea Party.

• QA Hates You for posts on IT and software development from QA’s point of view.

How do you write this off of your taxes?

As she was getting ready to leave the hospital Tuesday with her baby, a tearful Jennifer Robinson knew how to measure generosity.

All she had to do was turn and look at Nicole Hendrix, the woman who had helped the premature baby, Max, to thrive against the odds.

Hendrix had donated her breast milk — gallons of it — to Max after his mother couldn’t make any more.

I can’t seem to find breast milk / gallon in IRS Publication 561, which covers noncash donations.

Of course, it might not be an actual donation, but a personal gift, which is not tax deductible at all.

In somewhat unrelated news, I have some tax returns here to go out and discovered this morning that were on the receiving end of some spilled children’s milk, and I have the choice of asking my former accountant to send us new copies at the cost of $300 or something outlandish (we aren’t parting on the best of terms) or mailing them in stained. Just so you know when I’m investigated and incarcerated by the Feds for sending in stinky taxes, I saved some money on it.

A pretty deadly weekend for swimmers in Missouri:

• Ohio man drowns at Lake of the Ozarks
• Union man drowns in Meramec

If this set of headlines had involved a man-made object of some sort, you can bet the government would be on the case trying to outlaw statistical outliers.

A heartwarming tale of how a courier company saved an elderly woman from a scam artist:

There will be some of that today, but first comes an attaboy for Nick Kirkou, owner of Crestwood-based Ontime Express courier service.

On Wednesday afternoon, Kirkou’s company was hired to deliver three sales contracts to a south St. Louis County woman. Pretty routine stuff, until Kirkou took a closer look.

The contracts would allow an Arizona company to charge $15,000 to the South County woman’s credit card. In exchange, the woman would get what the contracts described as a “mini laptop and wireless mouse” and 15,000 telemarketing and e-mail “blasting” leads.

Kirkou didn’t think it was a very good deal. Even with a mini laptop, whatever that is. Still, Kirkou figured, it wasn’t his place to get involved.

Then he called the woman. She seemed elderly, and an unlikely e-mail marketer.

Kirkou asked the woman, a 90-year-old widow, if she agreed to buy the sales leads. She said no. Kirkou said he called the Arizona outfit, and he couldn’t get straight answers.

You know what I ask myself?

Why was the courier reading the contents of what it was supposed to deliver?

This is even worse than those heartwarming tales of recycling facilities returning checks to their proper owners, which makes me wonder how close of attention they’re paying to other bits of recycled mail like credit card statements or credit card offers or what have you.

How come the journalists never clear that mystery up for us?

Bungalow Bill, Ann Althouse, and others are talking about the new DNC ad for the 2010 elections. That must be some effective ad, since it’s now marked a private video and is unavailable to normal YouTube viewers like you and I.

Click for full size

This makes a pretty compelling case. For something.

(Cross posted at JTGOP.com.)

UPDATE: Legal Insurrection has the video.