To be able to say "Noggle," you first must be able to say "Nah."
4-island package on US-Canada border hits market fully loaded for $2.3M — boats included
It’s on the northeastern corner of Lake Huron (whose name I already know how to pronounce, thank you), so mighty cold in the winter (probably no ice bridge to Canada or they would have mentioned it). More of a summer home than anything else. But, dang, it looks awfully nice. As long as you don’t run out of bug spray.
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I check in on two Daily Dammit, Gannett newspaper Web sites: The Springfield News-Leader and the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. I don’t read much of them because their articles are mostly behind a very good paywall, but I do check out the local contests.
But I guess the ad pool is shrinking, because not only do we get ads for things that are not local in the “Shopping” section:
I mean, I listen to the radio all the time, so I know a lot of local jingles, but, brother, that ain’t one of them. Maybe it plays before streaming videos, YouTube content, or on obscure channels all the time. But, yeah, no clue what that is.
And we get contests clearly targeted to people in other regions, like this one:
At least, I presume the Michigan one is targeted to Wisconsin and Michigan people, but it’s on the News-Leader web site. I know that I’ve filled out the form before for a contest for a getaway at, what, the Indianapolis 500 or a golf getaway only to get denied (presumably after my contact information was saved somewhere for sale or rent) with a message that indicated they did not accept entries from my location.
Not cricket, and probably indicative of how the ad and marketing budgets are drying up for the big papers.
Oh, and I’ve also started getting calls and texts from one of the companies sponsoring the contests even though I meticulously opt out. So, in desperation, Gannett is courting a class action suit somewhere down the line.
Eh, free Internet content is worth what you pay for it, gentle reader, as you well know but are too polite to say.
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All the cool kids (Ace, Ed Driscoll, etc., etc.) are slagging on Ryan Reynolds for some pull quote from an interview where he says:
The 80s was a brutal, brutal time for people. It was a fucking mess and people forget that. It was a tremendous strife. Socio political tensions everywhere. We were still pretty fresh off a Cuban missile crisis, which was only 15-20 years before. It’s a tumultuous period, but you look back at it now and you’re like, ‘Oh, yeah. ‘Top Gun.’ Cocaine!’ Like, ‘No!’ It was really scary.”
C’mon, man. The real world was not so bad, in retrospect. We were young, and although my 80s were a series of upheavals and dealing with being the nerdy kid in the trailer park (different from my 70s, which was being the white nerdy kid in the housing projects), I have fond memories of the time because, you know what? I turned out all right in the end.
But the pop cultural zeitgeist, or at least the pop culture force-feeding, was of imminent doom. Either the Soviets were going to conquer us, or we were going to get nuked. It was the era of The Day After, Testament, and Red Dawn; it was the era of post-apocalyptic films like Mad Max, Hell Comes to Frogtown, et cetera, et cetera.
Maybe I just remember the anxiety because I was a neurotic kid (I’ve grown out of it; I’m no longer a kid) and because I don’t have any memories that remotely resembled a John Hughes or other teen comedy to overwrite it. But, yeah, it turned out to have been a good time to be a kid. Or, I presume, a yuppie that appeared in some of the other programs of the era, the ones that were designed to mock the spirit of the age and not to dampen it.
But the Cuban Missile Crisis? He’s thinking about the television series Call to Glory where it featured prominently and which was part of the not hatefully and not ostentatiously anti-American counterprogramming competing with the pro-American and more popular programming–Rambo, Rocky, the blockbusters, and the fact that the conservative characters designed to be foils for the right-thinking characters (Alex P. Keaton, etc.).
But we don’t really remember that part of the 1980s because it was, for the most part, background noise. But present.
I’ll leave the final word to the Philosopher from a 1980 treatise:
Sure, it’s from the tail end of the 1970s, but.
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Springfield-Branson National Airport (SGF) is still seeing the impacts from April’s hailstorm as visitors report glass shards from damaged cars scattered throughout the parking lots.
For those amongst us who might not be men, defined:
Toughened glass is processed by controlled thermal or chemical treatments to increase its strength compared with normal glass. Tempering, by design, creates balanced internal stresses which causes the glass sheet, when broken, to crumble into small granular chunks of similar size and shape instead of splintering into random, jagged shards. The granular chunks are less likely to cause injury.
As a result of its safety and strength, tempered glass is used in a variety of demanding applications, including passenger vehicle windows, shower doors, architectural glass doors and tables, refrigerator trays, as a component of bulletproof glass, for diving masks, and various types of plates and cookware. In the United States, federal law since 1977 has required safety glass located within doors and tub and shower enclosures.
Yeah, it would be unaesthetic to have glass from those storms still present, but it’s not likely to be sharp, at least not the glass from broken windows from the storm–although broken vodka bottles are a different story. However, the airport would have to shut down the parking lot and clear it out to completely clean the parking lots as they have overlapping vehicle stays of sometimes days or weeks. AND they just had a rolling shutdown recently for resurfacing the lots last year. AND they just tore up and replaced all the flooring on the interior. So perhaps they’re sending people out on a rolling basis with a broom and dustpan who hasn’t gotten it all yet.
Hopefully, the glass the complainant saw was from those storms and not from later theft from parked cars which would be even more depressing.
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I forgot to mention yesterday when I wrote the book report on the MacMillan’s Pocket Classics edition of The Rape of the Lock that I apparently am only the second owner of the book.
The book was not marked up/underlined like the other two Pope textbooks that have recently crossed my desk, but it did contain the previous owner’s homework assignment from 1910.
No letter grade; just a comment from the instructor or professor.
I tried to make out the name atop the assignment and on the flyleaf:
But no luck in reading it or having LLMs interpret it to see what I might learn about her.
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I thought this was the third of the small century-old textbook editions of Alexander Pope’s that I read this year, the first being a 1901 Riverside Literature Series volume that included “The Rape of the Lock”, “An Essay on Man”, and “Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot”. I remembered another volume, but it turns out that the Maynard’s English-Classic Series volume including only “An Essay on Man” I found and moved directly to the read shelves and did not count it amongst my reading total because it only contained “An Essay on Man” and not a single other poem that I could have read and thus counted the book (and could have written a book report on that single poem). If only I had read the previous book report before going looking, I would have seen that I explained this all then. But June was a long time ago, man.
At any rate, this century-old textbook is from the MacMillan’s Pocket Classics series and includes:
So I did get to read “An Essay on Criticism” which was mentioned prominently in the Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition audio course, and I thought I was home free–that the other poems would be shorter. For the most part, they were, although “Eloisa to Abelard” and “Windsor Forest” were both several hundred lines of small print long. I bogged down in “Eloisa to Abelard” for a couple of weeks and finished a couple of other books in the interim, but, here is where my larnin’ intersects: In the audio course I am currently listening to, a course on the history of the philosophy of science (or maybe those words transposed somehow), the lecturer talks about Abelard and makes an aside that another of his troubles was Eloisa, and I had this dot to connect it to. Also, the title of the 2004 film The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a film I really enjoyed after seeing in the cinema and at least once since, comes from “Eloisa to Abelard”. Don’t I feel smaht? Sometimes.
At any rate, reading the old, classic literature poets in depth like Keats and Pope here really make me appreciate some more recent poetry more. Much of the poetry they wrote relies on knowing contemporary personages and allusions to contemporary events in addition to the allusions to even more classical (that is, older) works and myths. Blooming heck, even Pindar is this way. And because they were patronized, the poets could and too often did go on at length, leading to the archaisms that I was accused of (and was probably guilty of) pursuing when I was younger (that is, in college). So, okay, I’ve read these guys. But Riley, Longfellow, Millay, and Dunbar? I re-read them.
At any rate, I think I am finally out of these little textbook editions of Pope (although the paperback complete works lurks somewhere in the stacks). But I do have a couple or three of these old green-bound textbooks of Longfellow (not including The Courtship of Miles Standish and Elizabeth which I read in 2024) and not including the really nice sixty-year-old reprint of an older edition of The Song of Hiawatha (which I read in 2018) facing out in the poetry section of ABC Books because Mrs. E. knows I’m a sucker for pretty editions of things I have already read (see also my most recent read of The Book of Five Rings). Hey, wait a minute: The Song of Hiawatha which I read in 2018 is a later reprint of the same book (featuring the illustrations of Frederic Remington). So there’s a slight chance that this edition only differs in the cover. And a slight chance that it’s enough of a difference that I’ll buy it next time I’m at ABC Books anyway.
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Kim du Toit today laments how much loudmouths “influencers” make compare to humble bloggers not on salary with a syndicate:
So yes, maybe I am jealous that today’s influencers make money hand over fist each week while I have made, at a rough guess, a few thousand dollars — over twenty years — from my type of influencing.
Yeah, if you’re talking how much this blog has made me over the years, the gross income is something like…. A hundred dollars? Probably less. A couple bucks from the Amazon Affiliates program fifteen years ago, mostly because Trey bought John Donnelly’s Gold and then some throw pillows in the same order–and then he gave it a two-star review (hopefully he liked the pillows better). Google ads? A couple dollars.
That’s gross income. Minus the cost of hosting and a year of GoDaddy’s “security” subscription (managing a SSL for me) at $400 (since cancelled because I can do it for free albeit at ninety days per). So, yeah, my “influencing” has been a rather expensive hobby. If I had kept horses, at least I could have something to eat if the need arose.
And don’t get me started (again) about how useless the blog and other social media have been at pimping my side projects.
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Tell me you don’t understand lethal threats without understanding lethal threats:
That’ll do it.
Probably too young or too female to know Run from a knife and rush a gun either.
Maybe I’ve just read too many thrillers, but I always evaluate what to do if someone comes in the door with a gun or with a knife and what I have at hand, hopefully longer than a knife or machete, to defend myself with if needed.
But grapple a person with a knife? Not if there’s another option, up to and including hitting them with a car.
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WE NEED ANSWERS!
Ah, but to quote the universe, “However, the fact has not created in me a sense of obligation.”
Yeah, security sense says no clicky, no stoppy. Also, none of your business my honest opinions. You want them, you come to the blog like everyone else Rob.
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Or, since I am reading fantasy novels these days (only one, but it’s relatively recent and top-of-mind), I could alternately title this The Undead Orchard of Nogglestead’s Revenge.
So I hit a stump two weeks ago, which bent the baffle on my mowing deck and one of the blades. It was the second stump I hit in recent weeks.
As it has become drier here in the Ozarks, which happens every August and September and sometimes even July, one of the mowings will turn the grass brown for the season no matter how much rain we get thereafter. So I’ve been delaying the cuttings. Which means a month or so back, I hit the more solid of the peach tree stumps in the front yard.
When a couple of pre-existing young maples lining the driveway were gutted by poor pruning leading to splits, I cut the maples down and replaced them with peach trees many years ago. I said that every year we learn a new way for peach trees to not produce: If the temperature drops to -10 degrees in the winter, they won’t blossom; a warm spell in early spring can cause them to blossom only to be deflowered by a cold snap later; if peaches grow, Japanese beetles come around. The one year when all the conditions were right, we got some very small peaches. Once. Well, I tried to properly prune one of the trees, and it died. The other one beside the driveway died as well, so it probably wasn’t me (and the one in the middle of the yard is half dead). Last year, I cut the two dead ones down for kindling (“You know what I grow in my orchard? Firewood.” is also a common quip).
So, as I said, a month or so ago, the penultimate mowing, I went over the more solid of the stumps in the front yard. The smaller I hit once or twice already and cut it below blade height, but I was still going around the big one. I’d meant to get out there with a pick/mattock to chop it up a bit, but I had not. So the mower grabbed the stump and pulled it out, trapping it under the mower deck. I tried circling the edge of the driveway to pull it out (perhaps damaging the mower deck in the process), but I had to jack the mower up almost a foot to work the new bit of kindling (big enough that maybe it’ll be a main feature although misshapen log) through the blades and then out the discharge.
This ultimate mowing, I had no more trouble with fruit tree stumps out front, but I hit the stump of the apple tree which toppled, but did not die, in a derecho in 2019. It had kinda lie in the back yard for those five years, sprouting some branches growing straight up but no blossoms. So I finally cut it down with a bow saw this winter, after the peach trees out front (it still lies atop the wood pile to be cut down to logs and broken into kindling). I’ve managed to mow around it all summer, but knicked it in the penultimate mowing and grabbed a hold of it this time, pulling much of its stump out. But the deck continued to make noise, so I brought it to the blacktop to check for something stuck under it, and I managed to cut my hand twice on the baffle discovering that the blade was hitting it.
Although my brother has now indicated this is an “easy fix” involving changing a bolt on the mower and hitting the baffle with a hammer a couple of times, I’ve already sent to mower to the local (and fairly close) shop to have them check the front wheels (the tires have trouble holding pressure, so I wonder if the wheels themselves are damaged and cannot make a good seal with the tubeless tires) and to adjust the steering bars so they do not overlap (a quick fix I could have made with spacers or by bending the bars, but my uncertainty and lack of historic success with small engines and equipment left me uneager to try).
And: It’s been two? almost three? weeks, and the grass has continued to grow. Scratch that: Some of the grass and other flora has continued to grow seedheads which make everything look untidy (except for the brown front grass, which I cut before I disabled the mower).
Ah, what to do? Last time we had an acquaintance starting out his lawn business do the deed, he charged us $300. Not eager to take on that expense, we demurred.
I have the small push mower that I used in Old Trees in the shed, where it’s sat for almost 20 years. I could try to clean the carb and replace the spark plug, I reckon. I think the fuel line might have been cracked as well. As I’m not sure about the availability of the parts locally and because I’m not very good with small engines, I’ve put this off as well. Perhaps that would be a good project for me to do sometime to, you know, get better with small engines. And maybe get my tiller started again. Ha, ha!
I also have a reel mower which was dull and had dry-rotting tires when I got it. Not likely given the state of the meadow.
So: I have taken the line trimmer to part of the interior back yard. I got about 20% of it with a round of battery charges. I think I will continue this course of action until I’m done with it or until the main mower comes back. The result is uneven but better than its overgrown state, and by pre-cutting, when I get the mower back, it will mulch this part of the yard better and not choke out. The rest of the yard? I might have to overlap the cut portion a bunch so that the uncut portion does not choke out the mower.
And, ah, have I used that extra space in the garage for other projects in the interim? Oh, but no. The last couple of weeks I have fallen back into the bad habit of sitting at my desk too much to too little end. And even writing long-winded blog posts count as an end.
Oh, the humanity. At least the cuts on my fingertip and palm have stopped bleeding and stopped hurting.
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I got this book in May 2025, and I picked it up sometime last year to read in the main reading chair. As you might know, gentle reader, I will often have a poetry book or chapbook beside the chair for times when I’ve reached a stopping point in a prose book (end of a chapter, end of a book), and I’ll read a short poem or two before heading up. Over the course of the last year, though, I’ve started reading poetry in the bedroom immediately before turning in, so chapbooks and the like have languished on that side table downstairs. It did not help that the material in this book is rather repetitive. But instead of returning it to the unread stacks when clearing the side table, I moved it upstairs and read it in between copies of Ideals magazine since the stack I have up there is mostly Mother’s Day issues and that, too, can be repetitive.
The poems are very Christian, with definite references to Christ, salvation, the crucifiction, and so on. It’s 156 pages’ worth of them, mostly three eight-line stanzas each, and only a couple of them do not deal directly with seeking or helping others find salvation. A couple of interesting metaphors in them, and a few of them might seem almost hymnal–I am going to share the book with my beautiful wife who would like to write some hymns in case she can get any ideas about them. The book is inscribed (but not to anyone), and a second cursive hand has a couple of notes at the end of a couple of poems describing how the poet got the idea for the poems. So perhaps she gave talks or readings as well.
The little wingdings marking the end of each poem kind of look like QR codes to 21st century eyes. The paper is a little shiny/inexpensive, and the typography looks more typewritten than National Guard memos leaked to CBS News (22 years ago, gentle reader! 22 years ago, when this blog was young) and includes some bold type which, as you remember, we made by backing up and typing over the same letters a second time (done almost 40 years ago, gentle reader, when I turned in freshman college papers typed on a Smith Corona because the Commodore 801 printer I brought to college was dot matrix without Near Letter Quality mode).
At any rate, pleasant enough when read kinda like a devotional, a couple or four poems at a time. Lyle has a pretty good sense of rhythm, but imperfect–a couple of times, I would have thrown in another syllable to make an iamb–and some end rhyming.
I do not think I will seek out her other work avidly. Well, I won’t order them; but I see that she self-published poetry starting in the 1930s, so antiquarian grandmother poetry is catnip to me, and I’ll pick it up if I can see it priced a buck. And who knows? She was born in Michigan and is buried in Oak Brook, Illinois, (and her grave marker says Poetess, Author of “Treasures of Truth) but at least one book made its way to southwestern Missouri. Even if I put Poet on my marker (or my kin do it for me), I will not have had that reach. Also, I see her work appears on a record (Devotions In Poetry With Stan Cook, Vol. 1, recordings from an old radio program). Jeez, Louise. With any chance (and perhaps but a single other purchase), I’ll be the biggest collector of Lyle (married name: Melone, but she seems to have been known by her maiden name professionally) in Missouri.
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I thought completing this book meant that I was 3/4 of the way through my birthday present of almost random paperbacks, but I guess I was counting the Heathcliff comic book in it as well; as it stands, I am 2/3 of the way through the paperbacks having already read John Grisham’s The Judge’s List. I have John Grisham’s The Runaway Jury to go, and it’s entirely possible I will get through it before I finish The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Karate, perhaps the slender volume of Alexander Pope I’ve bogged down in, and certainly before The Life of Greece.
It’s been a while since I’ve read R.A. Salvatore. I read The Sword of Bedwyr in 2012 and The Servant of the Shard in 2006, and I know I’ve read the first two parts of the Icewind Dale trilogy (and reclaimed an omnibus edition of the trilogy in January so I can re-read the first two parts and finish the whole thing which I could not in my initial collegiate reading of it because my brother only gave me the first two books in the set). Have I read anything else by R.A. Salvatore? Not in the last twenty years, apparently (according to the blog here). He was absolutely huge in the fantasy space in the 1990s, but after college, I guess my mainline reading tastes moved from fantasy to detective stuff. I mean, I read both of them interchangeably. And maybe I’m mistaken. It was thirty years ago, you know. But Salvatore was huge back then, and I think I missed most of it.
Within this book, the forces of good have defeated the forces of darkness at some cost. The main baddie, who has summoned a powerful wraith to do his bidding, is not sure he can control it in his diminished state and withdraws to his distant stronghold. A ranger and the witch daughter of the main green/nature witch in the world are conducting mop-up operations on the orcs talons, but the witch daughter feels the presence of the wraith and goes looking for him. The ranger follows, and the wraith defeats them and brings the daughter to the stronghold. And vast armies of the good guys, including ranger bands, an elf army, and the main body of the human kingdom, march out to the bastion of darkness (the bad guy’s stronghold) just as he discovers he can raise an undead army which grows each battle.
So much of the book is the events leading up to that march and the battle at the stronghold. If you’re familiar with the preceding two books, which took place hundreds of years or decades or maybe just a little while before (or both), and if you just read them, you probably get a head start on keeping the characters straight, especially as the main ranger characters (three different guys in three different places with three different goals) all have similar names. But I did all right with it anyway.
I did read the thin Wikipedia entry on the series (The Chronicles of Ynis Aielle) to pick up what I could on the lore, especially as the main magic users had Earth names as well. I guess some people on a submarine (?) survived an apocalypse/were hurled into the future after the apocalypse and became the main magicians in this world? And some of the magicians were already there, which is why they’re hundreds of years old but the others were not. That was definitely an 80s trope, ainna, the normal people or, better yet, gaming group were hurled into a fantasy world? Maybe I’m making too much of the Guardians of the Flame series and the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon.
So: An all right bit of pastiche or homage to Lord of the Rings mixed with other bits. Salvatore’s writing is pretty good and moves along all right, but with trilogies and series, it pays to already be invested in the world.
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Family furious after company sends girl Kim Jong Un costume instead of Mary Poppins:
A young student hoping to step into Book Week in the most delightful way has been dealt a cruel blow after her mother received the wrong costume just days before the parade.
While planning to attend her Melbourne school festivities as the iconic Mary Poppins, CostumeBox instead sent the 10-year-old girl a Kim Jong Un costume.
The family has been left in a scramble, racing to replace the Supreme Leader of North Korea ensemble before the parade takes place on Friday.
What is the world coming to when an Internet retailer can make a mistake?
Also, do so note it was a “Musical Nanny Deluxe” costume, not Mary Poppins. No license fees were paid to the intellectual property holder in this incident.
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Missouri froze Dolly Parton book program enrollment months before the icon’s death
Way to seize on the death to emphasize Fiscally responsible Republicans bad.
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One of the things I unboxed from my closet last week, along with some DVDs, videocassettes, and books, was a videocassette cleaner.
For you damned kids, it’s basically a videocassette, except instead of a ribbon, it’s got a bit of a cloth attached to the reels, and you put a little rubbing alcohol on it and run it through your videocassette player (let’s be honest, they’re all VCPs these days; not a lot of R’ing being done). In theory, it will wipe any gunk off of the heads that read the information from the tape. I’m not sure if they really did anything, but in the 1980s, youngling, we were studious caretakers of our cassette players, both video and audio.
You know, I see these from time to time at estate sales, but it’s not something I would buy. Now I own one, I guess. Several years ago, I thought it worth sticking it in a box addressed to myself.
But, do I dare? And do I dare? The videocassette player does not seem to have much trouble with videocassettes. Well, some are degraded, but some are not.
So I will probably keep this in my back pocket until I experience difficulty that I think might be explained by dirty heads. Until then, where should I keep it? In the unwatched videos cabinet? In the cabinet with the tech stack? Ah! The closed cabinet with the extra video game systems in it. Perfect!
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The lottery ticket vending machine (welcome to the future?) had some problem expressing the value of the Powerball jackpot coming up:
Probably hooked up to a feed of some sort that was supposed to provide those values with no fallback when those values were not available.
And, who cares?
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Every day last week, different “companies” have posted basically the same job every day slightly different:
The job descriptions are the same, basically:
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Okay, so this is not the first of the books that I’ve read from the April 2018 Friends of the Christian County Library Book Sale–I’ve read Iroshi in 2018, the two Sally Forth books, A Woman’s Work Is Never Done and Sally Forth in 2018, and Naked Came The Manatee last year. But this year, I have read two books from that book sale: This book and The Secret Power Within: Zen Solutions to Real Problems by Chuck Norris. Wow, I’m almost done with that book sale, although I have been dodging the sequels/latter two thirds of the trilogy after Iroshi and Rex Stout’s Death of a Doxy, all of which are facing out on the book shelves in the library, for several years.
But, about this book: Wow, is it an artifact of its time. The author apparently made a franchise of this topic and based it on a series of seminars he ran, presumably for upper middle class businessmen and strivers (and their wives). So although the book came out in 1993, it definitely has a 1980s sensibility to it, which is why businessman is probably an accurate depiction–the 80s women from 9 to 5 and Helen Reddy and Ronnie McDowell songs (geez, did I have to listen to those an awful lot when I was growing up)–and, I guess Trisha Yearwood‘s poet-narrators were coming up in 1994, women were hitting management positions, but, again, this book was just coming out with its sensibilities from the previous decade. Wow, that’s a lot of exegesis on an off-hand assessment that the book was geared to businessmen and spouses, but I guess I did get to dump a number of music links from way back.
A lot of the individual items are pointers to catalogues or 1-800 numbers where you can get different types of gifts; in just a couple of years, that advice which would have worked for thirty years would be out-of-date as the Internet replaced everything. Some of the ideas are definitely for the successful businessman, as they involve international travel, cruises, and riding the Concorde (also, soon to be dated). Maybe they’re just targeted to businessmen who did not buy fractional ownerships in brief periods when they were feeling flush (successful businessmen would probably have parlayed that capital into further success). The book encourages men to look for inspiration in numerous women’s magazines of the day (mostly now folded). It encourages women to look for inspiration in both Playboy and Penthouse(!) magazines.
The author favors Earl Klugh and Yanni as mood music–and I have a lot of Earl Klugh records (no Yanni, though–you don’t tend to see him in the wild, or I would probably buy it–I have Kenny G, for cryin’ out loud).
And, dig this: Books. I was a little surprised by how many of the books I’d read (poetry by Susan Polis Schutz, Chocolate: The Consuming Passion by Sandra Boynton, The Prophet by Khalil Gibran). I was surprised by the number of books in it by Ayn Rand’s inner circle (well, an excommunicated member, Nathaniel Branden’s The Psychology of Romantic Love). And I had a little flashback when I came across the title I’m OK – You’re OK by Thomas A. Harris. This book was everywhere in the 1980s, but mostly in paperback. I think my sainted mother had a copy. Which means I might very well have a copy around here somewhere, although I do not remember seeing one.
So I did flag a couple things for individual snarkiny:
176
Have you made your plans for the New Year’s Eve celebration to end all New Year’s Eve Celebrations? I’m talking about the next millennium! It’s less than 10 years away! When the calendar changes to the year 2000, and then to 2001, the planet’s going to party like never before! Start planning!
As it would turn out, I was newly happily married, but I was working in tech, so I had to carry the beeper that week in case the Y2K bug required a documentation update. And, as it turned out, I was laid low with the flu the whole week.
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For sensual, silly time:
- Blindfold her.
- Sit her on the floor next to the refrigerator.
- Feed her a variety of delicious foods: Strawberries, Hershey’s Chocolate Kisses, cherry tomatoes, cheese, ice cream, Cheerios, cookies, popcorn, yogurt, watermelon, leftover chicken, pickles, olives, maple syrup, etc.
- (There’s a great scene like this in the movie 9½ Weeks.)
You know, I’ve seen bits of 9½ Weeks late at night on Showtime with the volume off when we lived in the trailer park, but I’ve not seen the film in its entirety. I have, however, seen 9½ Ninjas many times which features a similar scene.
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You could update his entire album collection! Convert his aging album collection of beloved Beatles albums, Moody Blues tunes, and Rolling Stones records to compact discs. Converting a lifetime collection of 500-some albums would cost about $6,500.
You can see about how some of the ideas are spendy. Plus, this has not aged well: The records would have been worth more in the long run. In 2026, you would probably want to go the opposite direction, but only for Gen-X or older–so many albums of this millennium were never released on vinyl.
Oh, and 500-some? My beautiful wife wishes I were sane enough to be that limited.
549
How about a custom-made brass bed to give your bedroom an extra-personal touch?
Holy stars and garter snakes. Brass beds. Now that was a piece from that time, ainna? I’m not sure I’ve even seen those in estate sales any more. I know my favorite aunt had one, but I have not see one of those since…. Well, the 1990s, when they were passing so far out of fashion that they never made a comeback.
Or maybe they did and I missed it.
At any rate, mostly interesting as an artifact of its point in time. I guess I did get a couple of ideas from it, but a lot of things that would have been romantic for a breadwinner to do for his stay-at-home wife at the end of the 20th century, I already do. Do a chore to relieve her of it? I do most of the housework (those who will tell you women think it’s sexy are probably women who like the thought of it more than the execution of it). Make her a sweet treat? I bake pies most weeks these days, and I’m told I should make less as she is dieting. Get her chocolate? As the primary shopper in the household, I made sure that she always had dark chocolate on hand (but she’s dieting now, so don’t do it!).
I’ve gotten a few ideas and have thought of reviving some of our past traditions, however: She knows I’ve read the book, and I might be accused of getting the ideas from the book. Which might diminish it somehow.
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I did not go to the book signing at ABC Books yesterday; instead, the family went to the Crane Broiler Fest in Crane, Missouri, which has become somewhat of a family tradition.
But on Friday, I went looking for an audio course to listen to after An Introduction to Greek Philosophy. I have two boxes of audio courses and audio books on the floor in the closet (and some stacked atop them), and I had two boxes of books and things winnowed from my mother-in-law’s library and collection when she moved out of her house, what, four years ago? We culled the books for things we might want when we boxed them at her house, and then we went through them again after bringing those boxes home, and I ended up with two. Which have been in my closet for several years.
As I was digging around, I realized that the top box was half books and half videos. My book saling has been very measured this year; we have not made it to any one of the four Christian County library book sales, and it looks as though we will not make the autumn Springfield-Greene County Library book sale either. So I’ve made a little room on the bookshelves, and I’d trimmed the overflow on the video cabinets, so I unboxed one of the two boxes.
I did not take a photo of it to enumerate what she gave me, but the videos are a preponderance of historical dramas and romances/romantic comedies. So when I get around to rewatching Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet (or Kenneth Branagh’s anything, but not Much Ado About Nothing which I read in 2024), know that it’s from this haul. Also, because this has pushed the overflow onto a second cabinet, you’ll probably see movie reports about them first (but not necessarily soon). The books are some contemporary (which means late 20th century and beyond) fiction, textbookish English and literature treatments (she was an English teacher, after all), and some poetry.
What’s more striking, though, is what was in the box and that I have bought in the interim. Skipping Christmas by John Grisham, which I bought in 2025 after watching the movie version, Christmas with the Kranks in 2023, and the DVD of Leathernecks which I bought and watched in 2023. Well, I guess I really did want them after all.
So that means I only have the three boxes remaining on the floor. “Clean office closet” has been on my Goal-Task-Chore (available on the Apple App Store and Microsoft Store) for months. I kinda started around the end of the last school year when I discovered I had a box of two-pocket folders, so I vowed to cull old school supplies to offer to the Lutheran school (which also explains the partial box of school supplies that has remained on my office floor since May).
Ah, the office closet. I don’t really go into it that often. It’s an archive of old Role-Playing Games, technology and certification books from the turn of the century (when I was at the community college studying tech, I came across a listing on Ebay for thirty networking books for $100, someone cleaning out what his employer had bought him, perhaps, and I got it–and then ended up not working in networking or hardware support), older computer magazines, bric-a-brac electronics, a couple of guitar and laptop cases, some batting from my crafting days (where I only used a little batting), several camera tripods, and various envelopes.
And the blocker: My old notepads and notebooks. I have given some thought to discarding those; it’s clear that no university will want the archival papers of the successful poet. I’ve often carried a pocket notebook or the leather binder with its pads and jotted down drafts of poems in them. I have been shredding drafts of my poems recently after I have completed them, but shredding the old stuff seems a little…. Permanent. Maybe I should wait until we get our fireplace repaired so that I can throw them into the fire like a proper literateur. Maybe I’ll also throw in the marked-up copies of John Donnelly’s Gold which I had tech people I know review twenty years ago right after I finished it, or the copy of Marquette Minus One, my first completed attempt at a novel (1 of 2 completed attempts, by the way), marked up as a trade by my college crush as exchange for a theatre ticket for one of The Norman Conquests (not a date! she insisted). They were in the closet until I moved them to the store room. Ah, there are boxes and file cabinets worth of material in there I could discard before leaving it to my heirs.
But I haven’t made that decision yet, and so I’m in a bit of a holding pattern on cleaning the closet. Gentle reader, visit Polymarket or Kalshi to predict whether I finish cleaning my garage or my office closet.
Regardless, I have three things for the Free Book cart this morning: Leatherheads, Skipping Christmas, and a paperback copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Not sure why I preserved this; I have a simlar paperback copy of my own and the leatherbound More than Complete Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy from the turn of the century. Since I do not think my boys will be interested, I’ll put it out for anyone who might be, or for the church official who removes non-theological books from the cart.
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For some reason, Facebook thinks I’m a big vintage toy fan and feeds me a steady diet of people’s purchases mentioned in groups to which I do not subscribe:
Flash was my first G.I. Joe figure; my father’s then-girlfriend, later-wife bought it for me. When they were dating and first married, she got us several toys to, I guess, endear us to her or whatever. Once her son was born, though, we became the other who needed to be put down in favor of her issue. Probably didn’t help that this time coincided with our moving to Missouri and only coming to Wisconsin for a couple of weeks in the summer, and we were pretty off the hook when we did.
I might even still have it, albeit in pieces (and he’s probably missing his thumb). I don’t see it on the post from eight years ago when I finally let my boys play with the G.I. Joes.
He was a soldier. With a laser rifle. C’mon, man, that was cool. And it predates the cartoon, where they all had lasers somehow.
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