Musings from Brian J. Noggle

I bought this book at the Seasonal 80% Publisher Price Store in Springfield. Suddenly, it occurs to me that it wasn’t last autumn….it was two years ago. Wow. I paid $4.00 for the book by the unknown-to-me author because I was in an orgy of spending.

Within the text, Sheriff Bill Gaston of Posados County, New Mexico, is enjoying the night air of his county when a car full of drunk teens strikes his parked car. The driver takes off across the scrub, but Gaston and his undersheriff–who’s standing for election the following week–know where the boy lives, as he’s the undersheriff’s cousin. But the boy tries to flee again when the sheriff apprehends him at home later, and the boy dies as he falls into the path of a truck while escaping. Gastner wonders why the boy is running so hard to get away from the police for an accident that hurt no one.

The book definitively takes a retrospective, somber tone, as Gastner’s planning to retire and this book might represent a conclusion to the Sheriff Bill Gastner series. I came late to it–this was the first I’ve read–and don’t know the characters that well, but that didn’t really hurt my experience. However, its meandering tone reflected a lot of time on the reminiscing and very little on the investigation of the crime. Perhaps the book is looking to be serious fiction with a crime in it, but it shouldn’t be a series mystery then.

But it wasn’t a bad book. It’s one of several I’ve read this year set in the southwest (Killing Raven, Cyber Way, Appaloosa, and so on), so I’m beginning to want to travel down there and see how the books have captured the flavor.

Kansas City gets Super Bowl — on one condition

You can guess the condition: Missouri taxpayers pony up to sissify Arrowhead Stadium by putting a roof on it.

Supervisors vote to require neutering of pit bulls, mixes:

San Francisco supervisors unanimously approved a set of ordinances Tuesday requiring the neutering or spaying of an estimated 7,000 pit bull terriers and pit bull mixes in the city.

The legislation, sponsored by Supervisor Bevan Dufty, also will set new restrictions on the breeding of pit bulls, requiring breeders to obtain a permit from the city. People found violating the requirement to have their dog neutered or spayed could be fined up to $1,000.

One must wonder if this particular law means all currently endowed male dogs must be disenfrankcized. One suspects, given how much respect San Francisco has for other tenets of the United States Constitution, that legal protections like ex post facto don’t apply there either.

Maybe None: Is having a child — even one — environmentally destructive?:

Knight is the founder of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, an informal network of people dedicated to phasing out the human race in the interest of the health of the Earth. Knight, whose convictions led him to get a vasectomy in the 1970s, when he was 25, believes that the human race is inherently dangerous to the planet and inevitably creates an unsustainable situation.

“As long as there’s one breeding couple,” he says cheerfully, “we’re in danger of being right back here again. Wherever humans live, not much else lives. It isn’t that we’re evil and want to kill everything — it’s just how we live.”

Knight’s position might sound extreme at first blush, but there’s an undeniable logic to it: Human activities — from development to travel, from farming to just turning on the lights at night — are damaging the biosphere. More people means more damage. So if fewer people means less destruction, wouldn’t no people at all be the best solution for the planet?

One could apply Knight’s sound–but hardly valid–logic to all of life itself, since every herbivore on the planet eats weeds and damages their life cycles, and every damn weed on the plant sucks nitrogen out of the soil and changes the environment.

Why stop at living processes? Why, rain erodes landmasses! Solar flares irradiate uninhabited planets! Novae char!

The only solution is to embrace nullity!

Anything less is inconsistency.

McCain: Pentagon spending ‘unsustainable’:

Republican Sen. John McCain Tuesday said the massive Pentagon budget for the war in Iraq can’t be sustained because of the need to replace weapons.

“We have unsustainable defense spending,” said McCain, a chief proponent of military acquisition reform. “Refurbishment or replacement sooner than planned is putting further pressure on DOD’s investment accounts. We cannot sustain the number of weapons programs that are in the program of record.”

However, Medicare spending and a new drug benefit are different. Whereas each dollar spent on a bullet or a bomb gets used up when that bomb or bullet is used up, each dollar of health tax dollars extends the life of someone who will need another dollar of tax dollars tomorrow.

The more they succeed, the more they cost. Unlike wars.

Apparently, this blog is the only search result on Yahoo! for:

"how to get your wife to agree to a threesome"

Buddy, shouldn’t you have asked her if she wanted children before you married her?

Interesting narrative that the St. Louis Post-Dispatch would seem to offer with a headline like this:

Eminent domain faces roadblock in Creve Coeur

Except that the poor roadblocked practice is the mechanism by which a local government seizes property from the little guy for things like the entertainment complexes about which the Post-Dispatch routinely crows.

Because face it, citizen, you don’t buy ad pages like the casinos, sports venues, or go-cart tracks do.

Wine in juice boxes:

I guess I’ll have an answer after I crack it open.

UPDATE: Less flavor than MD 20/20, but all of the class.

Apparently, this book is only available in hardcover on Amazon for $55, but I bought my copy at the Carondolet YMCA bok fair for $1. So if I wanted to resell it, I could list it on Amazon for an exhorbitant amount, pay whatever monthly fees Amazon offers, and not sell it.

I read the first Book of Lists in high school, and I’ve always enjoyed the mixture of trivia and somewhat wry commentary; however, some decade after I read the Book of Lists 2 and The People’s Almanac, I’ve noticed more acutely the leftward lean of the authors. I mean, I know they did The People’s Almanac and its red cover in paperback should have been a tip-off, but I was a boy then and I’m a libertive now, so I’m probably more aware of it. Published in 1982, it’s chock full of Reagan-is-evilism, and one must recognize that the book was written when Reagan had been in office under two years and had spent part of that time recovering from a gunshot wound. The book includes lists for the first things the environmentalists would ban if they could, for crying out loud. Blech.

Still, it’s a good enough read as it contains enough trivia to help me keep ahead of the regular Trivial Pursuit adversaries and it allows for synthetic thought (Alcatraz closed in 1963? That’s only 13 years before The Enforcer, which means the memory of Alcatraz would have been fresher to contemporary movie viewers than grunge is to current pop culture….).

Headline of the day:

Blunt asks for query into death

Hopefully, the government can find some answers, such as Is there an afterlife? Is there any purpose to life other than laboring to feed the gaping maw of government coffer?

Talent’s amendment could save Boeing C-17:

Sen. Jim Talent, R-Mo., on Wednesday introduced a $7 billion amendment to a defense spending bill, aiming to keep open the St. Louis production line for Boeing’s C-17 transport plane.

Pentagon officials recently alerted Congress of their plan to stop buying the plane.

The amendment by Talent authorizes the Air Force to buy up to 42 C-17s in the next few years. It also calls on the military to keep the line open until the need for more “lift” aircraft to deploy and sustain forces abroad is assessed.

Gee, I wish my wife would authorize me to continue spending money until we determined whether or not I really needed to.

Next time I am voting for the Libertarian.

Yeah, why buy one song online for $.99 when I can go into an actual store and buy the song for $9.99 plus tax on an album which includes 17 songs I’ve never heard and might not even listen to once I’ve got the album ripped into iTunes?

I’m old school, baby.

(Now, please don’t ask me why I bought a Bee Gees album in the first place.)

As every other election today was some sort of referendum on how the public perceives Bush, this one must be no different:

Today is the last chance for White Settlement residents to vote on a charter change to rename the city West Settlement, a controversial proposal that has drawn nationwide attention.

How is it a referendum on the president’s aggressive strategy of fomenting regime improvement in the Middle East?

1. It takes place in Texas.

2. It’s about progressives changing a name from White something to avoid offending tender sensibilities.

If the name changes, undoubtedly it heralds a return to Democrat super-majority in Congress and the impeachment of everyone in the line of succession who is not a Democrat. Cue the happy music!

Sign, downtown St. Louis:

Park Smart – Store your valuables out of sight

I grieve this sign, for it announces that the city of St. Louis cannot protect your car from break ins and that it’s easier to go after the potential victims to indirectly admonish them for making themselves available for criminal activity. I mean, sure, it’s a good idea to store your valuables out of sight, and it’s an even better idea to not keep valuables in your car and to keep your doors unlocked so the criminal element won’t have to break the windows to look for their absence.

But why lament the powerlessness the city of St. Louis embraces by spending money on these signs? That’s counter-productive. Instead, I offer if not my support, than my other suggestions for further signage, including:

(Feel free to offer your suggestions in the comments.)

By the rules described by the Hockey Whoopass Jamboree, I must once again post the Red Wings logo to placate Michelle and David, who selected that team whereas I selected the St. Louis Blues and that team, like all other NHL teams and a couple of high school girls field hockey teams, j.v. at that, continue to beat the Blues like a bongo at a San Franscisco coffee shop circa 1967:

Say a politician wins the presidential election and then installs his little brother as attorney general. Would never happen, ainna?

Already did, my fellow young people. Already did.

When out for a romantic evening with your spouse, choose “If You Wanna Be Happy” at the karaoke bar at your own risk.

In Oakland:

It’s official. The deal that brought the Raiders back to Oakland 10 years ago is an unmitigated disaster. At Wednesday’s news conference announcing the extinction of personal seat licenses, city and county officials smiled bravely.

And why not? It’s better than crying.

As it stands right now, Oakland is clinging to the Raiders with a hope and a prayer, neither of which have proved to be an especially effective tactic in dealing with Raiders owner Al Davis. The team’s lease on McAfee Coliseum expires in 2011, which means it has until then to complete one of the greatest marketing turnarounds in the history of the NFL or the team will almost certainly leave.

As Davis said at the news conference, “We have a deal we can live with — at least for the next five years.”

Now there’s a rallying cry.

The facts are these: Personal seat licenses, which were supposed to painlessly and effortlessly retire the $200 million bond issue used to spiff up the Coliseum-Arena complex, were the worst idea since drafting Brigham Young University quarterback Marc Wilson. The licenses not only weren’t selling, they were less popular than the Denver Broncos. Even the stopgap idea, proposed by several pundits, that the Raiders should take the 10-year licenses and turn them into lifetime licenses, wasn’t going to fly.

So a professional sports team has screwed its fans with the “Personal Seat License,” nothing more than a convenience surcharge on the convenience surcharges inherent with buying season tickets, and has screwed its host city with hundreds of millions of dollars in debt.

And the cities come back for more.

An era of record movie prices, record newspaper prices, and record cable television rates coupled with increasing revenue?

Time Warner Inc., the world’s largest media company, reported an 80 percent increase in third-quarter earnings Wednesday and raised its stock repurchase program to $12.5 billion from $5 billion in an effort to meet shareholder demands to lift its slumping stock price.

The New York-based company, whose properties include the Warner Bros. studio, HBO, CNN, a major cable TV company and Time magazine, posted net earnings of $897 million versus $499 million in the same period a year ago.

Time to levy a federal punitive tax on these businesses! After all, what’s good for the oil companies should be good for the media companies who cheerlead immoral (even if rendered not illegitimate by faux populists in the legislature) profit confiscation and redistribution, ainna?

To spare the feelings of afflicted persons, this blog shall hereafter refer to the little Irish men in green with pots of gold as Hansensdiseaseachauns.

Thank you.