Musings from Brian J. Noggle

Tam explains the difference between fantasy and urban fantasy:

Nowadays, if someone tells you that a book is “fantasy”, it is best to ask if it is “urban fantasy”, because the latter, despite the similar-sounding genre name, is not at all the same thing. Sure, it may contain an elf, but if it does, she’s a bisexual wiccan detective elf who owns an occult bookstore in Miami and only increases her psychic powers through knockin’ the boots. People who would rightly be ill at the thought of necrophilia suddenly find it a turn-on if the corpse is still walking around, has fangs, and looks like Robert Pattinson.

As someone who reads some magazines about books, I knew this difference.

But wandering through the bookstore last week, looking to spend a gift card, I found end caps and end caps filled with steam punk historical science fiction. You know, science fiction kind of books set in the Victorian era using a lot of steam and pipes instead of atomic packs and nanobots.

It’s like a less imaginative retread of Jules Verne, without the future speculative nature of the Verne (instead, the stories speculate an unknown future from some safe past era that we know it turns out all right for that generation–aside from masses of their children dying in The Great War, of course–instead of the unknown future ahead of us, whose speculation would be hard).

But they no doubt feature what Ms. K would call “some arch humor and modern sensibilities” that Verne, Lovecraft, Wells, and Burroughs lacked.

Here’s a twelve question quiz about guns and the right to bear arms from the Christian Science Monitor. (Link seen via Hell in a Handbasket.)

Go on over and take it, and we’ll compare scores. Read more »

A couple days ago, Instapundit linked to this story blaming an increase in off-premises alcohol purchases on the recession:

And there’s another, perhaps somewhat unsettling, trend pushing up Beam’s bottom line: In the wake of the Great Recession, Americans are increasingly drinking at home. According to Commerce Department data compiled by Bloomberg, U.S. spending on alcoholic beverages for off-premises consumption, adjusted for inflation, has gained nearly 13 percent since June 2009, and hit a record in August 2011.

Now, that’s not necessarily bad news for anybody but bar and restaurant owners. But drinking at home is likely to be less of a social activity than raising a glass in public. And it does invoke the disturbing image of men and women across America passed out over piles of unpaid bills at their dinner tables.

Is there anything else at play here in the off-premises purchases? Pay no attention to the nanny state behind the curtain:

In one email, Ruthie’s Bar owner Jean Doublin — whose lawsuit to block the ban was denied by a local judge and now heads to an appeals court — asks council members to grant the bar an exemption.

Doublin said in her email that business at the Commercial Street bar has declined 75 percent since the ban took effect and that her requests to install an outdoor patio have been denied by the city.

…Another email from Ibarra includes a message from Knightyme Bar & Billiards owner Jim Knight listing three bars that have closed or soon will, allegedly due to the smoking ban.

“This has happened in just 5 short months,” the email said. “There are others hanging on, but for how long?”

I thought of this today as I passed the corner of Golden and Republic (he’s not going to start with the parenthetical digressions again, is he? Not in this post). There’s a freestanding church that backs right up to a bar in a little strip mall. It lies outside of Springfield proper, and a lot of communities (such as West Milwaukee) like to do away with these pubs you could walk to to have a couple beers and shoot some pool or whatever. So to protect property owners’ home values and to keep the children safe from the depravity of alcohol, prohibitionists made people drive to bars or eateries with bars attached–and then made them drive home instead of walking home.

But that little bar behind the church is probably doing all right. It’s outside the city limits, so smokers can drive there to hang out, have a couple of beers with cigarettes, and then drive home.

Watching the baseball playoffs, one has seen this commercial ad naseum:

I don’t see a tire air station right there; they’re mostly at the edge of gas station lots these days, if available at all. The fellow embarrassedly denies he’s going to the bathroom for some reason, but we might be expected to believe it. If so, what is the more problematic error?

• The man is moving to an exterior bathroom, but on modern convenience store/gas station layout has the bathrooms inside so that people pass buy the expensive convenient drinks and candy.
   
• When the man gets out, the car indicates that he has left the keys in the ignition. Ergo, if he leaves sight of the car, the car could very well be gone shortly thereafter. Not far, of course, because it’s an electric car, but gone none the less.

I wish my tax dollars had bought more attentive commercials.

So I was reading that taxpayers in Chesterfield (or people who pay taxes in Chesterfield because they shop there) are funding a dog park:

Folks hounding Chesterfield officials over the years for a dog park finally have a reason to howl in celebration.

The $118,000, two-acre Eberwein Dog Park, the first dog park in the city, is set to open to Chesterfield residents on Sept. 1. The dog park is within the new 18-acre Eberwein Park.

And I got to thinking, how else could the few who own dogs further soak the taxpaying public? And then it hit me: Public, compulsory dog school.

Listen, when you argue with a liberal about public schooling, he will say that it’s best for a civilized society as a whole if its citizens are educated in a mass-produced Procrustean factory of leftist indoctrination (well, he will say all of it up to the prepositional phrase). Then, if you show him this chart:

He’ll say something about how the increased funding raises minorities scores or something, not caring that the math indicates that a whole lot of scores have to go down to make a flat average when the mythical increase of minority scores. But that’s neither here nor there.

By that reasoning, compulsory obedience school for dogs makes a better society. Better-behaved dogs don’t bite, increasing safety. Better-behaved dogs don’t run into traffic, increasing safety. Frisbee-trained dogs provide entertainment and exercise, getting children out of the house and away from the Wii, increasing fitness and combating childhood obesity. Ergo, the government should fund dog obedience schools to indirectly improve society.

And if the costs are astronomical and rising compared to the benefit? That’s what quantitative easing is for. QED.

Ever since he watched Star Wars, the child is full of questions about it, mostly along the lines of “Are stormtroopers bad guys?”, “Is Anakin a good guy,” and “Why was there a monster in that place where they went [the garbage compactor]?”

It was bad enough when George Lucas bollixed it all up with the prequels or even with the originals when reflected upon as an adult (So they’re standing knee deep in waste water on a space station?).

However, the boy also asks questions along the lines of:

• Is Darth Vader real? No.
• Are light savers real? They’re light sabers, and no.
• Is Tatooine real? Uh….

The first four planets orbiting the star 55 Cns were discovered in the late1990′s – early 2000′s. However, they were hot gas giants. After the discovery in 2002 of the planets 55 Cnc C and 55 Cnc D it turned out that there was a wide “gap” between them. However, the results of modular simulation showed that this space can be occupied by stable planetary orbits. Only in 2007 one of the study participants, Professor Geoffrey Marcy, “stumbled” upon the fifth planet – 55 Cnc F, whose mass is equal to 0.155 of the mass of Jupiter (approximately 46 Earth masses) and is removed from its parent star by approximately the same distance as Earth from the Sun.

The new planet was “unofficially” name Tatooine – the name of the homeland of “Star Wars” characters Anakin (the future Darth Vader) and Luke Skywalker, a planet with two suns.

Great. So now I have to admit that some things from Star Wars are real, kind of, and confuse him with why, kind of like how I confuse him by telling him the Star Wars stories are real qua stories, but that the events depicted within them did not happen.

At least it will keep me from trying to explain how Anakin Skywalker will bring balance to the force by killing all the Jedi but two (one of whom dies of old age) and then killing the Sith Master and dying as the Sith Apprentice. Which is a pretty grim bit of balance bringing, that.

Bumblebee is a Volkswagen Beetle, dammit!

Almost 20 years ago, I saw The Visit at the, uh, Milwaukee Repertory Theater when I was in college. What, you don’t believe me?

Sorry, I get confused sometimes. The PAC or whatever the heck they call it now down on Wells Street was a theater complex that had a number of plays running sometimes simultaneously. Was I at the Pabst? Was I at the Caberet? Which theatre was I at that night? I went to so many.

Damn you unbelievers! Even though I was a college senior at Marquette University, I was working 50 hours a week to pay tuition and to take women to the theatre. Why, my senior year of college, I saw The Norman Conquests, all three of them, with three different women. Actually, I saw Table Manners twice with two different women because I booked them incorrectly, as the Rep was rotating them nightly and I got my nights confused.

Damn you unbelievers! Even Marquette women would let me escort them to the theater (where many had never been) when I bought the ticket (with money I made between classes and extracurricular activities and invitations to the Rep by slinging produce for 50 or more hours a week as acting manager of the Produce section of a Shop Rite). Of them, only one was a freshman kind of impressed by the attention of a senior.

So you’ll excuse me a bit of triumph here if I can’t recollect exactly which of the women who thought I was good enough for a theatre ticket as friends with which I saw this piece performed lo, those years ago.

No, what is important is the comment I made to her as we walked out: “I hate fascism.”

Heavens to betsy lou! Was it Linda, the woman-girl with whom I’d exchanged notes in the Fall semester philosophy class and who, through some miscommunication, did not know my sorta interest until the Spring? After this play, we went to a bar, and she accused me several times of patronizing her until I said, “Well, it’s all over now, you might as well drive me home.” Could be.

Where was I?

Oh, yeah, this play about Fascism and what it (metaphorically) entails is being put on by the Stray Dog Theatre in St. Louis this month.

If I still lived in the area, I’d be all on that like a stray dog on…. Well, you fill in the metaphor.

It’s the Macy’s Father’s Day Sale. Who are the fathers who will receive gifts from Macy’s?

These guys:

That’s 3 of 6 of the images that have a father and a small child in them. Note that roughly half of these fathers of small children in the Macy’s world have greying or white hair.

(Yes, I know that the second and third pix are of the same model.)

I’m making no value judgments here, just noting.

You know what I would pay to see twice? A film starring William Shatner and Shaquille O’Neal.

Shat and Shaq. What would beat that?

Since Hollywood is out of ideas and cannot probably think of something appropriately awesome, maybe a Lethal Weapon reboot with the colors reversed just so Shatner’s Murtaugh could say, “‘I’m getting too old for this s—,’ my dad says.”

How many Flash Gordon allusions do you get or make in a single day?

Today, I’ve had two.

First, while discussing teaching toddlers to laugh diabolically, a friend on Facebook said that Ming the Merciless had the most diabolical laugh. I had to agree.

Secondly, I am prone to singing to my second son, who has a monosyllabic name, “<monosyllabic name>, ah-ahhhhh!” Tonight, my wife asked me what that was from.

From the Queen theme song to the thirty-one-year-old film, old man:

Maybe it’s because my father and I caught one of the old serials starring Buster Crabbe on a Milwaukee television station in the late 1970s.

Maybe it’s because I own a DVD of episodes from the 1950s television series starring Steve Holland.

Maybe it’s because I watched that 1980 film over and over while my mother, brother, and I lived with friends who had HBO ca 1983 and Flash Gordon played a bunch amid the Fraggle Rock.

Or maybe I’m just the sort of fellow who is open to the universe and its possible Flash Gordon allusions.

So I had a couple minutes to kill in my car, so I stepped into the local grocery store and looked at the magazine rack. It’s a small grocery store in southwest Springfield, right at the town line, and it has a 20 feet by 6 foot high magazine rack, with magazine selection from bridal to local interest to computers/video games to entertainment to… Lost Treasure, a metal detecting magazine that not only includes metal detecting equipment reviews and techniques but also short historical vignettes that describe the sources of potential treasure troves that metal detectorists can think about visiting. That’s the sort of thing I like to read, and it’s the sort of thing I like to write.

The magazine rack held a number of issues, and I bought one and read much of it while killing that time in the car. And I thought: This is more amazing than the Internet.

I mean, really: The modern paradigm is anyone can spend a couple bucks on a domain name and Web hosting and can put up any sort of thing he or she likes to write. But this particular periodical took a little more effort.

I mean, someone put it all together, had it printed, had a distributor take it to various locations, and that distributor put four copies of this magazine in a grocery store for me to buy. It takes a lot of hope, risk, and infrastructure that blogging and other Web-based endeavors do not.

That is more amazing than anything I’ve seen on the Internet.

The term localvore is becoming big among the hippie-dippie set. Hey, I’m not knocking growing your own food–I recently uprooted my family to move to a locale where I have more room for my own gardens–and I’m not knocking supporting local farms and local gardeners who participate in farmers’ markets and roadside stands, but you’ve got a whole content industry providing books, Web sites, and even a newspaper column here in Springfield that does nothing but promote how much better local grown produce is than something grown somewhere else in the world and transported to your local grocery store.

I mean, hey, I support buying local produce when it’s fresh and cheap, but there’s no actual moral imperative to do so.

But for some people, it is a MORAL IMPERATIVE! because it’s good for the planet or something. Better for the planet than what the bourgeoisie is doing, anyway.

How many of those hectoring locovores drive Toyota Priia and listen to European techno on their Chinese-made iPhones? I’d like to see the Venn diagram on that.

On Saturday mornings, I listen to KMOX radio on the Internet, and heard the following advertisement. I thought it was bad enough hearing it, but I see the company has its own YouTube channel and includes the radio spot along with the bouncing ball to help you sing the jingle.

Oh, my, word.

I don’t know if it was put on the Internet stream only or if KMOX is running this ad, but….

But….

I think I’ve ruined some small part of life for you, too, now.

Also, you might get the privilege of explaining to your wife why she heard that coming from your computer.

(Thanks for the link, Tam.)

I was reading this meaningless press release about the Marvel Universe and its latest goings on and encountered this job title:

Comic book historian Alan Kistler agreed: “Spider-Man is a scientist with a different perspective than Mr. Fantastic, and he specializes in different fields, so it could be very interesting to see how his own expertise rounds out this new Future Foundation. And from another angle, it could be interesting to see how Spidey feels about essentially replacing a person he considered a friend and what kind of pressure this will place on him.”

So do you think comic book historians have a deep grounding in Western Civilization or world history or does their specific training come in lieu of it?

Barbara Bush cuts a political ad in favor of gay marriage:

And all I think is She could be Wilma Deering in the Buck Rogers reboot.

Owen Wister, The Virginian:

There can be no doubt of this: All America is divided into two classes,–the quality and the equality.

The latter will always recognize the former when mistaken for it. Both will be with us until our women bear nothing but hangs.

It was through the Declaration of Independence that we Americans acknowledged the ETERNAL INEQUALITY of man. For by it we abolished a cut-and-dried aristocracy. We had seen little mere artificially held up in high places, and great men artificially held down in low places, and our own justice-loving hearts abhorred this violence to human nature. Therefore, we decreed that every man should thenceforth have equal liberty to find his own level. By this very decree we aknowledged and gave freedom to true aristocracy, saying, “Let the best man win, whoever he is.” Let the best man win! That is America’s word. That is true democracy. And true democracy and true aristocracy are one and the same thing. If anybody cannot see this, so much the worse for his eyesight.

Of course, that was popular literature when America was on the ascent.

I’m not gonna get all down on Big Pharmaceuticals here, but don’t the names these days sound a little more mythic than they need to?

Because when I hear about Uloric, immediately I think of a giant blond man with a horned helmet, bearing the mighty four-bladed Xanax in his quest to defeat the unhuman Prinvil and their allies the demonic Zestril and to defend the mighty artifact the Zocor from the predations of the Norvasc and their tyrannical warlord Zithromax.

I think we could build a whole mythology here, or at least keep a comic book running for 40 years, not counting the time spent on alt-history and alt-present stories.

First of all, Merry Christmas to my Christian readers. And happy holidays to everyone else.

Now, I know I’ve made fun of organizations that use “Happy Holidays” instead of Merry Christmas (well, just this Catholic university). I know it’s the time for getting into high dudgeon about ignoring the significance of the Christian holiday at a time when Christianity is under siege in the country and the world. However, before one gets all a-bluster about not saying or not being excited about receiving a “Merry Christmas,” consider why one says that at all.

If it’s just a greeting-of-the-day sort of thing, nothing more than a general “Good day,” then why bother? Just say, “Good morning.”

Of course, it’s not just a timely greeting of the day. It carries additional significance. For many, it’s a reminder of the birth of Christ, the redemption of man, and the fulfillment of a promise from Yahweh. That is what the day means to Christians, and it has a very particular significance. It also celebrates a festival of sorts, some family time, good will, and the more secular emanations of the event. Peace on earth, goodwill to men and so on.

So: consider what you mean when you say Merry Christmas or Happy Holidays.

If you say “Merry Christmas,” to another Christian, of course it’s a greeting and a reminder of shared values and whatnot. If you say “Merry Christmas” to someone who is not a Christian, it’s a lot like saying, “Happy Independence Day” to a Canadian or having a Canadian say “Happy Victoria Day” to you. You might as well say “Merry Saturday.” Merry Christmas lacks the special significance textually to the non-Christian recipient. If you say it to share the general goodwill of the season, as you probably do, there’s nothing wrong with it. However, “Happy Holidays” captures this spirit, too, and organizations and commercial enterprises that deal with more than just Christians might not so much want to throw the Christian holiday to the lions as to share the goodwill emanating from the holiday to all.

Of course, if your purpose in saying “Merry Christmas” is to greet fellow Christians only and to proselytize to the non-believers at the same time, to throw in their face their heathen status, and to serve as the single calling to God after which the non-believers can burn in Hell for believing differently, I can see why it’s very important that everything in Christendom bear those words in that order.

Of course, it’s most likely not the intention. Instead, most who say “Merry Christmas” are the former, sharing general goodwill and fellowship. So what’s the difference, then, between saying, “Happy holidays” versus “Merry Christmas”?

Too many Christians think that their religion is under assault from secularists who want to take the lower case t out of Christmas because it looks like a cross and turn the holiday into Chrismas. Or something. They’re afraid that inclusiveness in cheer and well-wishing is going to strip their meaning from the holiday.

Crikey, the generic tidings of a marketing team or a right-thinking fellow can’t diminish the birth of Christ and your celebration of it that much, can they? I should hope not. Besides, the person who says it to you probably means pretty much the same thing as you do except he or she is expressing it as he or she can.

On the flip side, of course, anyone who gets wished a Merry Christmas who gets insulted because he, she, or it is not a Christian should take the tiding in the spirit in which it was probably offered and spare the self-righteous indignation at the ignorance of the Christer who offers it. For Pete’s sake, hail the all powerful Pete, All-Doing and All-Seeing immortal Pete, it’s not a direct attack on the fact that you’re different from the speaker. Punch the END button before your attorney answers and respond “Merry Christmas” or say “Happy Holidays” instead, or “May Pete’s Sweat of Opulence fall upon you” and let it go.

Headline of the day, or at least the morning before 7am: Music business leads to a career in retail industry.

Wait, I’m being handed a late-breaking bulletin!

• Theatre business leads to career in food service industry!
• Writing business leads to career in caffeine dispensation industry!
• College degree in [strSensitiveCauseDuJour] Studies leads to career in cleaning Mom’s house, reluctantly and occasionally, in return for bunk and a couple bucks for gas!

(Yes, I realize the headline links to a story about a public relations person in the retail industry, not someone greeting people at Wal-mart. But what’s the fun in going off on a tear if you have to stick to reality?)