Musings from Brian J. Noggle

My desk is relatively clean these days, as I’m trying to keep ahead of things, but I do still have some strange things on my desk lingering from aeons past. To whit:

• A 2 fluid ounce bottle of Plaid acrylic paint, Raspberry color. Back when I first started beading in 2009 or whatever it was, one of the first thoughts I had was to make a peppermint bracelet with red and white seed beads wrapped around each other but joined by peppermint disks. I bought white disk beads and a peppermint color paint (Raspberry, actually), but I never painted those disks. I keep meaning to take this bottle up to the garage and put it in with the other acrylic paints, but it falls behind another pile or something and remains on my desk.
   
• A gallon-sized bag filled with spoons. These spoons were once my mother’s spoon collection. I’m not sure when they last graced her walls, but I inherited them when she passed away almost three years ago already. For a while, I’ve been moving around the display rack in which these spoons hung on the wall in our apartment in the projects, and I recently uncovered the spoons when I was cleaning my garage. So, of course, I can’t lay my hands on the display rack right now. When I find it, I’ll polish the spoons and hang them on my dining room wall.
   
• A Monroe Monro-matic CAA-10 calculator from 1954. I bought this at a garage sale or estate sale some nine or ten years ago, and I’ve had it in my storeroom for some time. Unfortunately, it doesn’t fit in the narrow cabinets I have in there, so when I last reorganized my storeroom last autumn, I brought it into my office and it’s sat upon my desk or under my desk for a couple months while I try to decide what to do with it. Maybe I’ll learn how to use it. More likely, I’ll shuffle it around my office until I return it to the storeroom or the garage.
   
• A re-elect Mickey Owen memo pad.
   
  
   
  I don’t know who Mickey Owen was, nor how old this memo pad is, but I paid a dime for it at a church garage sale here in Springfield. I haven’t yet written any memos in it, and I’m not sure if I will. It will ruin the collectible value.
   
• One Hohner Golden Note harmonica in C. I got a toy harmonica as a high school graduation present from Tim and Pixie. When I got to Milwaukee, I bought a Hohner C harmonica and tried to teach myself to play. I learned a couple short songs, but never became really adept at it. After graduating from college and after having not really practiced in a couple years, I bought two new Hohner Cs at Nottlemann Music and haven’t really practiced with them much at all. But this one is on my desk, reminding me of my failings.

By naming these things on the blog, I do tend to handle them in short order, which is why I’m bothering you with them.

Note the description of the man who robbed the bank:

Police say a man wearing a bandana and dirty white gloves robbed a bank in south St. Louis County this afternoon.

Why, oh why, in the 21st century are we remarking upon the gender of this alleged assailant? Just because males make up the vast majority of bank robbers in this country, why should gender be mentioned in the description other than to perpetuate the stereotype that only men rob banks?

(Satire aside, FBI statistics from 2010 show that blacks and whites commit very similar numbers of bank crimes. But what would a descriptor like race do in aiding the police in looking for a bank robber?).

James Lileks on bootscrapes:

I’m tired of walking across the lot to beep my ID and walk in the building and see the sign that asks me to stomp my feet to remove the snow. It comes out every year, along with a brush for scraping your boots. It has the company logo. It’s got to be more than half a century old.

I AM TIRED OF THE SHOE THING

Well, maybe in the big city, they only bring the bootscrapes out in the winter, but one of the first things I noticed when I moved to the Springfield area is that you’ll find bootscrapes outside many local businesses and whatnot.

Like outside the Republic branch of the Springfield-Greene County Library:

You’ll have to squint to see it in that picture.

Note that that esoteric branch of the library opened in 2009.

We have bootscrapes out here because we have ranchers out here. Not city slickers with their exotic footcoverings for the snow.

How long have I owned this book? Here’s a photoshopped cover of it I did in July 2005. Oftentimes, I’ve picked it up when looking for something quick to read between weightier things, but Robert Hegyes, who played Esposito in Welcome Back, Kotter died, and I heard “Welcome Back” by John Sebastian on the radio (in tribute to the aforementioned Hegyes). So now seemed the time.

You know what? This is a pretty good book for such as it is.

I’ve read books based on hourlong dramas before (Adam-12 here and here, Murder, She Wrote here), but this might be the first book I’ve read based on a half hour sitcom. And it was pretty witty and true to the characters. While I didn’t laugh out loud at any of it, I was amused enough to want to watch some of the old programs and maybe come up with other books in the series.

As with any 70s paperback, the order forms in the back are always a treat. The books available in paperback immediately preceding this book include several in the Get Smart book series and other pulp. I’ve never, to my recollection, seen a book where the order forms are clipped, indicating someone has actually used them to order books. I wonder if the sort of people who did that were the sort of people to throw books out when they were done, or whether there never really was that sort of people.

UPDATE: How soon they forget. While cataloging this book, I learned I’d already read something by this author. That would be a Happy Days book, Ready to Go Steady, which I read in 2009. This book is far better than that Happy Days book.

Books mentioned in this review:

A History Channel Club bookmark has an interesting bit of inconsistency. Can you spot it?

Click for full size

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Headline: Keep supporting fight against child abuse in the Ozarks

Yeah! Let’s beat child abuse like a red-haired stepchild!

This film is based on the book by Robert B. Parker which I read in 2005. Since I was to read the fourth book in the series, I ordered the DVD so I could watch it after I finished the last book.

And you know what? The film is better than the book.

The latter 2/3 of Parker’s books were heavily influenced by his years in Hollywood in the 1980s, so they translate very well to the screen. But Parker didn’t write the screenplay–Ed Harris, who plays Cole, did along with a co-writer. As such, he takes the ideal Parkerian hero, the fast draw dead shot who loves a fallen woman character and diminishes him compared to Hitch, the sidekick and narrator. Harris emphasizes that Cole is not book-learned like Hitch when he (Cole) struggles with words. The screenplay also contrasts Cole with Bragg, the bad guy, as being undereducated. He’s not so much an ideal man as a fast man who is simple.

Maybe that’s the way that Parker intended it. Maybe too much interior thinking on Hitch’s park shaped the narrative wrong for it to carry off. Maybe I too much read Parker’s biography into all of his books. But it’s a good enough Western film, and I enjoyed it more than I enjoyed the recent Hitch and Cole books.

DVDs mentioned in this review:

I’ve started a new blog called Missouri Insight to cover Missouri people, places, books, politics, and government.

Go check it out if you’re so inclined.

Right after I got married, I decided I was going to take up the art of furniture refinishing since the house where my bride and I rented had a garage where I could do such things. So I acquired a couple pieces to work on, and I managed to refinish a desk that had been in the family for a while that my mother had painted a shade of housing-project-leftover-paint beige. Since that was my only accomplishment in the field, maybe I should say my hobby was acquiring wooden things to refinish.

After a little under a year in our rental, we moved to Casinoport, which had no garage. But that didn’t stop me from acquiring the occasional piece or holding onto the ones I already had. So I acquired this bookshelf Read more »

This book is the fourth of the Cole and Hitch westerns, and they find the duo back in Appaloosa, site of the first film. They’re not the law now–there’s a marshal in town with designs on higher office–but they catch on with the local saloons as private security when the local shopkeepers grow tired of the real town marshal’s protection racket–the merchants pay up extra to make sure that the law arrives in a timely fashion.

While they’re defending a saloon, Cole kills the son of a local rancher (who has taken up residence in the homestead of the last Appaloosa bad guy Cole dispatched), who then hires a killer to dispatch Cole. When a raiding native threatens the town, Cole brings it to the attention of the marshal, who walks right into the native’s trap as Cole and Hitch join forces with the rancher and the killer to save the town from the natives.

It’s a quick read–quicker than The Virginian or Wild Horse Mesa– but it’s a modern book, and it probably sacrifices some depth for pageturning. Which is opposite of what I usually complain about, I know.

Books mentioned in this review:

Back in the very early 1990s–like 1990 to 1991, which is really the very late eighties and the first year of the nineties if we must be technical, but since this is a personal narrative essay we don’t, so it was the early 1990s, dammit–I was a student at the University, living in the far northwest corner of Milwaukee, and about two blocks from the Mainstream Records at Fond du Lac and Silver Spring roads. Which explains where much of my non-tuition grocery store paychecks went in those days.

One of the things they offered was cheap 10-packs of used 45 rpm singles. Read more »

Neo-neocon spots a campaign sticker:

You know, I thought that was clever when I wore it on a button in 1992.

And look where my mirthful apathy got us then.

A couple weeks ago, the NRA sent me a DVD for some sort of self-defense course, telling me that it was a free preview, and I could mail it back in the post paid envelope or I could pay them $30 in gold or silver dimes to keep it.

Well, friends, as you might know, if some manufacturer or vendor sends you something unsolicited, that is a free gift to you, and you’re under no obligation to return it or to pay for it.

As the NRA nag letter that looks a lot like an invoice but can’t be an invoice says:

Although I’m not sure how the required text telling me I’m not obligated to pay for your widely cast net amounts to a “Service Guarantee.”

Good on ya, NRA. You’re stooping to the tricks of the Time-Warner media empire and trying to trick me out of money you don’t think you can get from me honestly. Did I say “good”? I meant a good pox.

As I mentioned, I bought this book last Wednesday, and I knew it wouldn’t take me long to get to reading it and to read it once I started. Blockade Billy is a novella in a hardcover along with a short story called “Morality”.

The title novella covers the discovery of a star catcher for the Titans. Blockade Billy, as he comes to be known, is a simple-minded youngster brought up from a AA team when the Titans’ catcher is hurt. He comes to town, focuses on the game, but he has dark secrets in his past that will come to light and make him the only player ever erased from Major League Baseball history.

King’s at his best here, pulling along with just the right voice and foreshadowing. The frame story is that Mr. King is interviewing the third base coach from the Titans to discover the real story, so it’s told in a very conversational style that’s easy to read.

The short story, though, “Morality”, is hardly worth reading. It’s a dash of the film Indecent Proposal thrown in with a twisted preacher and how his indecent proposal causes a marriage to break up. There are no characters in it worth sympathizing with and it’s rather stock.

Books mentioned in this review:

It was all the way to January 4th before they started explaining how stupid Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush were:

It’s going to be a long election year.

I bought a couple of these at a book fair in the St. Louis area; I reported on the first in March 2009, right after my mother died and before I moved to the Springfield area. Strange that it’s been so long, but not long at all. Sort of.

This one precedes the first one I read by 3 years. This one, from 1978, was published when I was 6 years old. It doesn’t have a volume or issue number in it, but given that the magazine from three years later was volume 9, one would assume that the magazine itself had been published since the year I was born. Weird.

At any rate, like the other one, this one includes work by Lyn Lifshin and a host of other poets of some caliber or another. Nothing that I’ll remember discretely, unfortunately, but I could say that about most poetry anthologies, too, including the greatest works of Shakespeare and probably most of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s books.

The magazine also has an essay about the history of literary magazines in the St. Louis area. Plucky little guys. Sixteen years later, I ran my own little literary magazine in St. Louis, the St. Louis Artesian. It didn’t last as long as Image, and we never published Lyn Lifshin. So there you go.

At any rate, it’s interesting to me, so I felt the need to tell you all about it.

I paid almost full price (40% of with coupon, so “almost full price” means “more than a dollar”) for this book at the Hobby Lobby because I wanted to make sure I had something to read one warm January day when I was to take my children to the park. However, I didn’t end up reading it at the park–I can’t remember if we didn’t make it to the park or if I didn’t want the Springfield-area mommies to beat me up for being a beading sissy.

So I browsed it while watching football instead.

It’s a collection of stitched bead jewelry projects that shows one how to make the stitches and whatnot. I haven’t done any beading in a year or so, preferring to mix up my cheapskate self-made crafting Christmas giving this year. But when beading, I do like to do stitches which is more complicated and creative than simply stringing some beads and a pendant together. Although I have other reference books that show me the stitches, I’m glad to have picked up this one to freshen and inspire me and to give me some other ideas on how to use different bead sizes in my patterns.

Whether I put those patterns to use any time in the near term, though, is another question entirely.

Books mentioned in this review:

One finds the strangest things on notepads in one’s own handwriting. Or at least I do.

Chariot
Yes

Apparently, I’m in favor of horse-drawn war carts.

You know, I haven’t read a bit of pulp fantasy in a while (the previous Salvatore I read was five years ago, and that review was fun to re-read because it touched on my old gaming memories). I read The Lord of the Rings last year, I know, but this book is pulp fantasy regardless of its hard cover and dust jacket.

Within it, the son of a duke chafes under his father’s accommodation of a wizard who rules the land through his Cyclops army and subwizard governors. After he slays one of the one-eyed centurions, he flees his home and his birthright and takes up with a halfling thief. They meet a good, or at least not as bad as the baddest, wizard who tricks them into invading a dragon’s lair but gives them magic items for their trouble, including a cloak of invisibility. The duo move onto a town and live the lives of successful thieves until the cloak of invisibility reanimates the legend of its previous owner, the Crimson Shadow, and reanimates the town residents’ hopes for freedom.

As always, this is but one book in a trilogy, so it sets some things in motion that I won’t see conclude. It’s a decent enough read, but the climax and the denouement, such as they are, come rather suddenly. So, like I said in 2006, I won’t shy away from Salvatore’s other works, but I’m not running out to get them right now.

I had another thought while reading it: In modern suspense and thriller pulp, it’s pretty common to knock authors who make mistakes with guns. Is it only our lack of true familiarity as a culture with ancient weapons–aside from some real hardcore SCA geeks and the like–that keeps us from nitpicking the use of a sword? As I read this book, I noticed that the army of the Cyclopses used a variety of weapons straight out of the Dungeons and Dragons equipment charts. Thrown spears and bows for missile weapons, and then swords, battle axes, and polearms for bladed weapons. Wouldn’t you expect an army, especially an invading/occupying sort of army to have more standard equipment? Nah, I’m just trying to nitpick where none is warranted.

Books mentioned in this review:

Sometime early in my marriage, my grandmother gave me a lamp, a nice glass lamp with brass-colored steel trimmings. In our first house in Casinoport, we put this lamp in a place of honor: the floor of the closet in our spare bedroom, the one where we had our weight bench and, later, a number of arcade games.

In our defense, we did not–and still do not–have end tables where one traditionally puts table lamps, and our horizontal surfaces were at a premium. So we stored it, awaiting further accumulation of furniture that would eventually blossom as our marriage passed the cotton, linen, leather, and wood anniversaries.

However, we had a cat who sometimes liked to urinate in dark places. Read more »