A Work Hazard

As you might know, gentle reader, I am a software tester by trade, so part of my job includes creating a large number of first name + last name combinations.

As a reader of British tabs, I’m exposed to an awful lot of porn star and OnlyFans names, so I have this fear that I will sometime unwittingly combine a first name and a last name to match a porn star.

Actually, given the size of the industry and the number of names I’ve run through the various systems, this might already have occurred.

Probably, it would result in slightly less opprobrium than if I accidentally combined a first name and a last name to match a Confederate general.

Buy My Books!
Buy John Donnelly's Gold Buy The Courtship of Barbara Holt Buy Coffee House Memories

Musings from a Tech Banquet

Last night, I attended a la-di-da technology group banquet in a suit and everything. I was not nominated for any awards, but my beautiful wife is on the board of the organization. So off to the event I went. It included a lovely dinner and everything. I spent most of the mingling time sitting at our dinner table with my trusty binder, trying to hash out a poem that probably won’t work anyway.

The group’s tech events tends to have a number of sales people and solution providers from companies that will manage your networks or manage your phones provide tech support or development work, or offer education or coaching in any number of disciplines. One rarely finds actual developers and never finds any QA professionals.

But some of the local software developers group appeared. I recognized several of them as I’ve attended a number of the group’s meetings this autumn. Turns out that several of them were up for the young buck awards. So I meandered over and struck up a conversation with a couple of them. The topic of self-assessment of expertise came up, and I said I couldn’t rate myself as a seven of ten in any programming language even though I’ve used several. “And I’m certainly not Seven of Nine,” I said.

You know, Seven of Nine.

“You know, Seven of Nine. The Borg from Star Trek,” I explained to my wife, leaving off how the actress’s divorce led to President Barack Obama. Then I looked at the two developers we were talking to, and one said, “Star Trek? I might have seen it once.”

And I was all like:

It suddenly occurred to me that I was almost twice the age of these developers, and although my heart lies more with them and their work than with tech executives, I was an old man to them.

Culturally, I am older than an old man. My tastes tend to run to books, movies, television, and even music from decades past, often before I was born. Whereas the geek culture of today tends to focus on the present. When I mentioned to the developers I work with that I have a kitten named Meow’Dib (well, formally Maud’Dib), they knew what who that was. Not from the book. Not from the 1984 David Lynch film.

Their geek culture comes from recent streaming series and video games. Not even movies so much any more. Maybe it’s good to have endless reboots even if they’re photocopies of photocopies. It’s the only thing keeping any threads of shared culture together.

The M.C. of the awards portion of the program also made a Star Trek reference because he is older than I am and also didn’t know the audience as well as he thought. At one point, he mentioned “the intrepid Captain Picard,” and I leaned toward my wife and said, “Picard did not captain the Intrepid” as I recognized it was the name of a Star Trek ship. I thought maybe it was the ship that Chekov was on in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, but when I researched immediately after the program ended, I found that the U.S.S. Intrepid was in the original series’ “The Immunity Syndrome” and was crewed entirely by Vulcans. As I last read the Blish rendition of this episode in 2005 and last year when I walked through some of my duplicates in the series, I am surprised I remembered it (and then I remembered the ship Chekov was on was the U.S.S. Reliant).

So I thought I would ambush the M.C. to give him the true flavor of a tech meeting: Someone handing him an ackshually over esoterica in expired pop culture.

I mentioned this to my wife and one of her acquaintances (and my LinkedIn connections, which is lower than acquaintance) about how amusing my plan was, but that I would not carry it out. And all of a sudden I was all like:

I am awkward and off putting even at tech events.

One of the members, an Air Force veteran, stepped up to the podium to recognize veterans, and he asked the veterans in the crowd to stand up.

Five people of 249 did. My wife was a little shocked that the group included so few. Tomorrow, at church, half of the men in the congregation will stand when called upon.

I twirled my finger to indicate the crowd and said, “They went to college.” And did so in the years after mandatory service and after the peace dividend of the end of history which has left us probably ill-prepared for what might come.

So, yeah, these are not my people natively, but I can eventually make small talk with them. Or maybe just the older people among them.

Buy My Books!
Buy John Donnelly's Gold Buy The Courtship of Barbara Holt Buy Coffee House Memories

They Saw Me Coming

Facebook has taken to showing me suggested posts from 1970s science fiction television programs,including stills from Battlestar Galactica and Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, and they sent me back with this one:

Let the first amongst you who has not said, “Broot-doot-doot. SPECTRA!” in the manner of Keyop cast the first stone.

I loved this show as a kid when it was in heavy syndication. I can’t remember if it came on before or after school–probably both at different times. But it was my favorite of the Japanese imports that preceded the toy-based cartoons (the Transformers, the Go-bots, G.I. Joe, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe) that would come along in a couple of years.

And, like with Airwolf doing the loop, the climax was generally not over until they reluctantly decided to use the Fiery Phoenix (where some sort of plasma fire covered their regular space ship and they were about invulnerable). Although unlike Airwolf’s loop, the Fiery Phoenix did come with a cost as demonstrated by the agonized character stills that accompanied it every time they used it.

Ah, well. Facebook seems to have turned, if not only for me, into a wellspring of nostalgia. In addition to the aforementioned shows, I get vintage cheesecake served up (some overlap) along with nostalgia-themed pages about growing up in the 1970s and 1980s. Maybe it’s just tailored that way for me since I primarily log into Facebook these days to see what I posted on Facebook in years past. Kind of like what I use this blog for primarily.

Buy My Books!
Buy John Donnelly's Gold Buy The Courtship of Barbara Holt Buy Coffee House Memories

A Little Christmas Retail Therapy At Nogglestead

On Thursday night and Friday, I fought vainly that old ennui. You know, the telos versus deontos: Is what I am doing good for something? Or is it good in itself? If so, why am I not going anywhere and not feeling good about being present in the moment much like I have been present in similar moments for the last fifteen years? Pragmatism versus stoicism/Buddhist mindfulness, if you would. And thinking whichever one I was supposed to be doing, I was doing it wrong anyway.

So on Saturday, I headed over to the Hobby Lobby looking for some wire and some camouflage scrapbook paper. I mentioned last year that I wanted to put my father-in-laws waterfowl calls into a shadow box, and in between then and this summer I did. I used camouflage scrapbook paper instead of fabric, and I used fishing line to tie the calls to the shadow box back. Why? Because the shadow box my mother-in-law had built for us used fishing line, which is unobtrusive, in it. But the fishing line knots, inexpertly applied by yours truly, came loose, and the calls partially fell inside the box.

So I thought I’d do with with wire this time. So I headed to Hobby Lobby for more paper and some wire. And Christmas decorations were in full bloom in the Hobby Lobby. So, on a whim, I bought a little resin Santa Claus for $3.50 and stuck him on the mantel in the living room to see if/when anyone notices.

I told my youngest we would be putting up the Christmas tree in a couple of weeks, and he protested, saying we normally don’t decorate until Thanksgiving. I pointed out that is in two weeks, regardless of whether the daily high temperatures are 75 degrees right now. And I mentioned to my beautiful wife that the local radio station that goes to Christmas music has done so for the last two months of the year.

Putting that little Santa on the mantel made me feel a little better, probably more so than the amusement of wondering if/when they will discover it (no one has so far, although everyone walks through the room several times a day) than the Christmas spirit. But it could have been worse: On the way to Hobby Lobby, I passed someone giving away free Australian Shepherd puppies. Now they would have noticed that (and I was tempted, because what eliminate ennui like a puppy?).

At any rate, it’s not like we have put up a small Christmas tree like after our Christmas-themed trunk for Trunk or Treat in 2021 or when I started playing Christmas records in October 2020. So I’m still not that guy. But I am getting closer. Also, I found a Christmas record that was misfiled in the Nogglestead LP library (where the Christmas records are the only ones kept together and sort of organized, apparently only mostly), so it’s on the desk by the record player. So the odds of it finding its way to the turntable in the next couple of days are pretty high.

UPDATE: It was less than ten minutes before I started listening to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir’s The Holly and the Ivy, the aforementioned formerly misfiled Christmas record. My beautiful wife, passing through, commented on it. But she has still not seen the Santa.

Buy My Books!
Buy John Donnelly's Gold Buy The Courtship of Barbara Holt Buy Coffee House Memories

Trivia Night After-Action Report: A Subpar Swiftie

Last night, the Lutheran Student Center hosted a trivia night fundraiser at one of the rival Lutheran churches in Springfield. One of the hostesses called it the “Second Annual” but that is not exactly true. It is the second year in a row after a hiatus, but the LSC has held trivia nights before at the LSC on the Missouri State University campus before. I know because the North Side Mindflayers won like three in a row.

But it does illustrate a bit of the mindset and myopia of trivia nights hosted by the college students and millenials. The world starts and ends with popular culture from the time when they were born. The questions they compile lean heavily on movies and television of the 21st century as well as slant toward younger topics like children’s books and Disney. Maybe they just stopped reading after that, and if they need questions from literature, it’s recent children’s books or things assigned in high school.

With this in mind, I figured the odds of a Taylor Swift category were very, very high indeed. I mean, c’mon, man, biggest pop star on the planet and “dating” the star tight end of the Kansas City Chiefs, for whom people in this area cheer. So high as to be approaching 100%.

So I spent yesterday afternoon taking notes from her Wikipedia entry and studying the order of her albums, her hits, her few acting appearances, and some of her conflicts and controversies, although the anchor woman of got a list of previous boyfriends and the songs written about them for study.

So we got to the venue and I took one last look at my three pages of notes and crumpled them up and threw them away before the game began.

And the Taylor Swift category was: “Taylor Swift lyric or verse from the Book of Lamentations?”

Aw, hell, I didn’t know I was going to have to listen to the music, too.

So I guess I should have spent the afternoon reading my Bible instead.

As it turns out, we ended up tied for third after the table full of school teachers and the table with the church pastor on it (who I believe went ten for ten on the Book of Lamentations category). Which is out of seven.

It’s weird: I think I’m losing a step in the trivia game as we’ve not done so well with the couple of church trivia nights we’ve been to in the last couple of years, including this “second annual” event. But when I play along with Jeopardy! on rare occasions when I see it or when one of my co-workers asks a trivia question, presumably from a Jeopardy! list, I am pretty quick with the response. I really do think that there’s a real divide between these general trivia games which go back into the 20th century and beyond and the games put together here locally.

That’s what I tell myself in consolation, anyway.

And if anyone accidentally creates a Billy Joel category, I will be set. Although “old” music questions that they ask tend to come from or be about songs in rotation on the greatest hits of the 80s, 90s, and today radio stations. So like the literature questions, they’re pretty basic if you’re, erm, out of college.

Buy My Books!
Buy John Donnelly's Gold Buy The Courtship of Barbara Holt Buy Coffee House Memories

Another Generation Hearing From

I mentioned a while back that my father and I both enjoyed the music of Billy Joel. I’ve also mentioned on occasion that my boys, especially my youngest, listens to a basic playlist of 70s and 80s music that includes not only selections from the Guardians of the Galaxy movie soundtracks but also a number of Billy Joel songs from The Stranger through An Innocent Man. To be honest, I don’t know where or why he picked them up, as I only have “I Go To Extremes” on the gym playlist, and it and “We Didn’t Start The Fire” from their extra work during the school closures come from Storm Front.

At any rate, in the early 1990s, during my college years, I picked up videocassette versions of Billy Joel’s Video Album Volume 1 and Video Album Volume 2 which contained music videos from Cold Spring Harbor to The Bridge. Most of the older stuff is concert/performance videos, some shot in black and white (“Los Angelenos” and “Everybody Loves You Now”, for example). And I watched them over and over in my college years as was my wont. My father joined me on occasion and mentioned that he liked Billy Joel best when he was sneering, such as “Big Shot”, but he also like the harmonies in “For the Longest Time”.

So I dug the two videocassettes out–I think I have the Storm Front videos somewhere else–and I put one on the other night. I put volume 2 in first, not on purpose but because of the luck of the draw in the darkness, and it starts with “You’re Only Human (Second Wind)”:

“You’re Only Human (Second Wind)” and “While The Night Is Still Young” (which appears on the other videocassette) are from the greatest hits albums. I also have the former on a single, which skipped (hence it took me a long time to sing it correctly).

Not much tugs at my cynical heartstrings, gentle reader, but hearing my youngest son sing along with Billy Joel songs my father–whom my children know only through stories–enjoyed, well, that’s one of them.

You know, I have not listened to much Billy Joel these days as the music in my library has been ripped from cassettes and is disordered by the songs on the greatest hits album not appearing as part of the original albums–but I’ll have to make a point of it. Billy Joel wrote music that speaks to young men and then grows along with them, so one–I mean I–can appreciate the perspectives in them and can remember appreciating them from a younger perspective as well.

Buy My Books!
Buy John Donnelly's Gold Buy The Courtship of Barbara Holt Buy Coffee House Memories

One More Set

When my boys were young, they delighted in new sheets or new pajamas (sometimes just long underwear that they wore for pajamas) with cartoon characters on them, and they liked new novelty shirts. So I would buy them on occasion to give them a little joy and me a little joy in their joy. Brian J., did you spoil your children? In some simple ways, perhaps, but one of my love languages is gift giving, so those around me must fight against being spoiled on their own.

One year, when they were, what, two and four? Three and five? I bought them a matching set of novelty Halloween shirts from Walmart. They loved having the same shirts and dressing themselves alike, and they loved their Halloween shirts. So it became an annual thing for a couple years (they’ll remember it as all the time). The youngest, who chooses his favorite shirts and wears them almost daily even into his high school years, would wear those Halloween shirts all year round and into the next school year.

When I saw the shirts displayed this year at Walmart, well, I:

I bought them in the men’s section now, two larges. One for my high school senior and one for my sophomore. It could be the last time the oldest spends Halloween at Nogglestead.

I have put them in their rooms amidst their laundry without fanfare. We will see if they find them and wear them or if they’re lost in the maelstrom of teen boys’ rooms forever.

I shall probably do something like this with grandchildren some day if the boys extend our line.

Or, you never can tell. I might do this again next year.

Buy My Books!
Buy John Donnelly's Gold Buy The Courtship of Barbara Holt Buy Coffee House Memories

The NSFW Library of Brian J.

My current employer has a forum for posting pictures of pets, and I frequently contribute as we have kittens who are still in the doing cute stuff phase.

I have to be very careful about posting photos of the cats on my bookshelves, though, since my library has some titles which are, erm, a little spicy.

For example, I have a photo of Nico looking at either the swords or the Summa Theologiae which I was going to post, but I did not as I looked closer and found The Clitoral Truth on the top shelf. I bought it from a book club probably twenty years ago and tried reading it; the number of paper markers in it indicates I disagreed with a lot of it. Although it bills itself thusly:

The clitoris has been dismissed, undervalued, unexplored, and misunderstood for hundreds of years, but the truth is out there, and internationally celebrated sex educator Rebecca Chalker has found it. In The Clitoral Truth, Chalker offers the only mainstream, in-depth exploration devoted solely to women’s genital anatomy and sexual response. Women readers everywhere–be they straight, gay, or bisexual–will learn about the countless sexual sensations and discover how to enhance their sexual responses in a more concrete way than ever before. Enhanced with personal accounts, comprehensive illustrations, and a thorough appendix of female sexuality resources, this book helps women and their partners understand and expand their sexual potential and work toward becoming independent sexual beings.

It read, from what I recall, more like a feminism or woman’s studies textbook. Given that it now has a marked 2nd Edition, it probably is a textbook at some universities.

So I took a picture yesterday of Nico looking at the games on the wall, cropped it, and posted it without looking too closely at it because The Clitoral Truth is on the end of the other bookshelves, and as we’re finishing up some work at Nogglestead, most of the To-Read shelves are in my office currently. Not only are the books double stacked on the bookshelves, but the bookshelves are currently double-stacked–I have the bookshelves from the hallway outside my office in my office, standing in front of the office bookshelves. So The Clitoral Truth is behind another bookshelf on the other end of the bookshelves.

But I should have looked closer.

If you click it to see it larger, which I hope nobody at the office does, you can see on the top shelf Sexual Revolution which looks to be another textbook from the Modern University which I bought in 2010 but has languished, probably in the back rank, on the bookshelves in the hall for that long.

It’s not that I’ve put the more spicy titles on the top shelves to keep them away from the children. When they first could read and started looking at my bookshelves, I took some of the more, erm, concrete titles off of the bookshelves entirely, but I left the textbookish titles, including Philosophy and Sex (mentioned by name in The Courtship of Barbara Holt) on the shelves.

When we moved the books and bookshelves into my office, the disorder of the books got rearranged, and Sexual Revolution apparently got put on the top shelf. And inadvertently into official corporate communications.

If anyone needs me, I’ll be explaining this to HR and using the words “Sociology textbook.” A lot.

Buy My Books!
Buy John Donnelly's Gold Buy The Courtship of Barbara Holt Buy Coffee House Memories

The Eyeglasses Dilemma of Brian J.

Gentle reader, my journey with eyeglasses began early. When I was five years old, I had eye surgery to correct a lazy eye (my kindergarten teacher visited me in the hospital!). I was issued eyeglasses shortly thereafter, and my parents (I had two in those days, gentle reader, a halycon era I can scarcely recall except that my kindergarten teacher visited me in the hospital, and a boy in the next bed had action figures that you could take apart and reassemble differently, and he let me play with them a bit) had me wear an athletic strap to keep them on my head. And after a while, the strap was painfully tight, so I took off the glasses for good.

Well, not so good. When I got to sixth grade, my teacher, Mrs. Pickering (who had no cause to visit me in a hospital, but I remember her name just the same) brought up during parent-teacher conferences that I was a smart boy, but I was bombing all my vocabulary quizzes. Turns out that she wrote the vocabulary words on the board for us to fill in the blanks on the quizzes, and so I could not see them. So I got a pair of glasses again, big 80s glasses, and we soon moved to the trailer park where I would be a nerd at the bottom of the social ladder. I didn’t have a regular eye doctor, much like I didn’t have a regular any sort of doctor or dentist at the time. The young optometrist I saw my freshman year determined that I needed bifocals. As I started high school. Extra nerd on that scrawny little me of 1980-something. Thick, thick glasses to correct raging astigmatism.

My sainted mother sprung for gas permeable contact lenses for me sometime in my sophomore year, so I wore them through the rest of high school and through college and into the start of my working life and then into my career. But sometime around the turn of the century, I got tired of them and went back to glasses.

In 200…6? I got LASIK surgery because, if civilization collapsed (it’s been on my mind a while), I didn’t want to be one set of eyeglasses from crawling around like Velma or looking at the Nogglestead library like Burgess Meredith at the end of the Twilight Zone episode “Time Enough At Last”:

I was a bit disappointed with the result. LASIK only corrected my vision to where my glasses did. Which is normal vision. I had wanted to have eyes like a hawk, but I just had eyes like me without eight to ten ounces of plastic on my nose.

Fast forward a couple of decades years, and I started to wonder about my vision. In church, the face of the pastor is not quite clear to me, but I do sit in the back row, chief of sinners that I be. And I sometimes cannot pick out small text on signs as I’m driving by. So I went to the local LASIK outfit to see about a touch-up which I understand one needs after a couple of years.

The LASIK guy said that with a, erm, distinguished gentleman like me, the eyes are not as adaptable or good candidates for additional work, so he wrote me a prescription for eyeglasses to help with my distance vision. I took it to a shop across from the mall and paid too much to order a set of glasses that I thought looked good on me but are not the prevailing style. Only later did I realize that the eyeglass frames matched the style that my brother has worn for years–so when it came to picking something out, I picked out something that looked familiar.

I waited a couple of days for my sets of glasses to arrive–I got a pair of sunglasses, too. When they did, I popped them on, looked at the sign across the street, and….

That’s it?

The larger signs were just a touch sharper, but I couldn’t see anything with the glasses that I could without.

That was a year or so back, and every once and again, I think I should try them again. This weekend, we went to see Charlie Berens at a local theatre, and we sat in the back (cheapest of the sinners that I be). The comedian did not look as sharp as he does on YouTube, fourteen inches away. So I got them out again on Sunday and brought them to church. I did some A/B testing, or “1 or 2″ testing, by putting on the glasses and then taking them off to see how much earlier I could read street signs or to see how much clearer the pastor was when I had them on, and….

Not much. A little, but not worth the hassle of the logistics of putting the glasses on for driving or shows or church and making sure I have a glasses case (with glasses) and…. To be honest, not worth the hit to the vanity of going back from being a distinguished-looking fellow to the 5″ 6” eighty pound nerd. Which, of course, I am not, but I don’t wonder if I would not feel that way again. Also, I don’t want to become dependent on glasses. I don’t know if the science backs this up, but in my previous experience, one’s eyes behind glasses do not tend to hold steady. I always needed new, stronger glasses every eye appointment.

So I’ll put the glasses back in the drawer for another time.

You know, I’ve done something similar with my beautiful wife’s reading glasses. Sometimes, when I’m reading alone and nobody can see me, I will slip on a pair of her reading glasses to see what effect they have on my close vision and…. Not much.

Well, they do magnify the text, but if I hold my book at regular reading distance (regular because that’s where the focal point is the best–I do read best at a particular distance–is that normal?), the text is just slightly less sharp, maybe.

But a slight improvement, maybe, is not yet worth the cost.

One day, too soon, I will turn that corner. And I will suddenly need bifocals again. But it doesn’t seem to be today.

Buy My Books!
Buy John Donnelly's Gold Buy The Courtship of Barbara Holt Buy Coffee House Memories

The (Likely Briefly) Successful Kludges of Nogglestead

Gentle reader, I have successfully triumphed over a small broken appliance with a successful hack.

A couple of years ago, we bought a little cordless handheld vacuum commonly known as a Dust Buster no matter who makes them, although ours does happen to be a dustbuster® by Black + Decker. I used it to vacuum up the little bits of wood that shook off of firewood on the bricks before my fireplace every day. It’s the kind where you have to hold the power button to make it work. And it worked for about a year when it suddenly stopped. Pushing the button would not engage the motor and the suction even after charging the device for a long time.

So it languished on a side desk in my office for over a year, as things do (as you know, gentle reader!) until I recently cleared off that desk–well, I didn’t clear it, but I did remove the dustbuster® and a flashlight that’s not working–and took the things to my workbench. Which has had a blocker project on it for a couple of months. The blocker project is not the lamp–I’ve moved that, yet incomplete five years later, to a different desk in the garage. It’s a bed tray that I was hoping to do some découpage with, but I ran into a little snag painting it and just… left it there for later, which is even later from now.

With a little time to kill available to me on a Sunday afternoon, so I set aside the blocker project (perhaps for five years or more) and opened the device up to see if I could figure out what was wrong with it.

When I opened the shell, I could see it was a simple device. A battery, a charging plug, a pressure switch, and a simple motor turning a plastic rotor.

Given that it was a power switch required pressure to keep it on, I thought perhaps the external switch was not contacting the internal switch, so I pressed it tighter, and the motor ran.

I did, however, see a little spark at the top of the battery from time to time, and my original theory proved incorrect. Essentially, the little bit of metal attached to the top of the battery had come loose. When the dustbuster® lie on its back and when I pressed on it, I guess the battery was close enough that it touched or the electricity could jump the gap, but it was definitely broken apart. The battery was not in a housing where you could swap them out. It was hard-wired into the system. Or it should have been.

Now I suppose, gentle reader, I could have soldered the lead back onto the battery. One of the pyrography tools I have, the nicer one, has a soldering tip and came with some solder–and I might have another kit somewhere–but I have never soldered anything in my life, successfully or no, and I didn’t want to try and to fail on a Sunday afternoon with what would be the defining moment or capstone of my weekend.

So, instead, I got a couple of rubber bands, and….

Well, I make that sound so easy: I grabbed a couple of rubber bands, as though Nogglestead has a drawer full of them. Now, you might think this is the case, and it might well be–I have not opened some drawers in years, and I am not sure I would have noticed rubber bands on instances where I have opened some of the more esoteric drawers looking for a luggage tag or the driver’s side mirror of a 1986 Geo Storm. I mean, it’s not like the collection of 3.5″ discs from my first 286 circa 1991. I know which drawer holds those.

So I went looking for rubber bands. We don’t get nor use rubber bands a lot here at Nogglestead. It’s not like we’ve had need to buy a bag of them. Mostly, they come to us on rare occasions when the postal service sees fit to put a rubber band around a stack of our mail. Or our accountant will sometimes band our files or filings together. But we’re getting only a single hands’ counting of rubber bands annually. I put them in the little box of paper clips, which I also glean from filings our accountants sends us, but I recently discarded several as my beautiful wife was concerned the kittens might take them from the box and choke on them. But I found a rubber band under the paper clips, and I started back out to the garage with it, when the rubber band of unknown provenance and age broke. I went back to my office and found two more which appeared more supple. I know I am running on, but I want to give you a sense of how much actual moving back and forth from the actual opposite ends of my home I had to do to to acomplish this simple repair.

Where was I? Probably going up and down the stairs.

So I looped the rubber bands around the battery to ensure that the lead remains in contact with the battery. As I mounted it into its the plastic body, I had to re-weave the rubber bands a bit, but it held. And when I got the screws in and pressed the power switch, it worked.

So I have a working dustbuster® again. At least until the rubber bands snap or until I jostle it so that the lead is no longer in contact with the battery. But I feel clever for an afternoon.

Also, I am now thinking about how easy it would be to unscrew the housing and reverse the rotor on the motor so that the dustbuster® blows instead of sucks. But I don’t have many friends in real life to whom I could try this. Just a coincidence, I suppose.

Also, sorry I don’t have pictures like a proper Internet how-to, but I was eager to try it out (it worked! as I mentioned) but then I am too afraid that if I open it up again to see the magnificent harp of Icantsolder will lose its magic.

Buy My Books!
Buy John Donnelly's Gold Buy The Courtship of Barbara Holt Buy Coffee House Memories

Not the Problem at Nogglestead

Somebody that we used to know posted this on Facebook:

Ya know, that’s never been the problem here. When we have gone through phases of banana-eating here and then the phase ends, leaving us with bananas that go to baking-ripe, I’ve often made banana bread. Chocolate banana bread, no less.

The problem is that few of us will eat it.

I don’t know if it’s because we’re all lazy, and cutting off a piece is too difficult for us. Speaking for myself, I don’t tend to like sweet breads in the middle of the day. I’m okay with a doughnut in the morning, but sometime after that, I’m onto non-sweet breads. Bagels, and sweet non-breads, but not sweet breads.

In the olden days, we could take baked goods in for the teachers at their Lutheran school, but now they’re at the big impersonal public high school, that would be weird.

So we don’t throw the bananas away. We add some ingredients and invest some time in baking, and then we throw the result away.

See also Brian J.’s experiments with bread pudding circa 2008-2009.

Buy My Books!
Buy John Donnelly's Gold Buy The Courtship of Barbara Holt Buy Coffee House Memories

Brian J. Messes With The Zeihan

YouTube suggested a Peter Zeihan video (Don’t Be Surprised by China’s Collapse) when I was just looking for a Johnny “Guitar” Walker song (“Ain’t That A Bitch“) because I haven’t cleared my cookies often enough in my main browser.

And I look at his backdrop:

And my conspiracy lobe started throbbing.

Given that the continents of “Earth” are all in a semi-circle on this map, what, exactly, is on the southern hemisphere of this planet?

Understand, gentle reader, that the conspiracy lobe of my brain is equal parts my creativity for fiction, the things that gave me the willies when I was younger, and my rational concerns based on lived experience (well, with projection from some individuals to the behavior of groups).

Or is it?

Buy My Books!
Buy John Donnelly's Gold Buy The Courtship of Barbara Holt Buy Coffee House Memories

Tell Me You Have Boys Without Saying You Have Boys

It has been a while since I’ve had to clean pasta sauce off of the light fixture, but….

Last night was Homecoming and my boys were going. The oldest got the idea to get some Welch’s sparkling grape juice to take to the dance. I discouraged such behavior, because even if it were grape juice, it would upset the School Resource Officers. So, instead, they went to dinner before the dance and stopped at the grocery but returned home to drink the sparkling grape juice before the dance.

The oldest, 17, decided he would open the bottle with a winged wine opener. So he started trying to screw into the cap, but these bottles have twist-off metal caps under the foil. So he shook up, the contents under pressure, and then he managed to punch a small hole in the metal cap. And the contents under pressure….

Well, some are on the ceiling, some was on the floor, some was upon him in his homecoming finery.

But, like Pandora’s box, after the troubles blew out the top, the boy was left with about an inch of fluid in the bottom of the bottle for his trouble.

And we have a reminder that will likely last until we move out of Nogglestead and the painter who covers it all will wonder what it is.

Buy My Books!
Buy John Donnelly's Gold Buy The Courtship of Barbara Holt Buy Coffee House Memories

Shades That Make Me Feel Eighteen

I participated in a sprint triathlon in August at the YMCA, and the swag bag contained a pair of YMCA sunglasses with the neon arms.

My goodness, when I was eighteen, I didn’t wear anything other than sunglasses with neon arms, cheap ones. And we called them shades.

I misplaced my regular sunglasses, so I’ve worn this pair for about a week, and it made me feel eighteen.

And, according to my boys, I looked like an anachronism. Well, they did not say anachronism as I am not sure it’s in their vocabulary. But if they knew the word, they would apply it to me.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to party like it’s… a couple years ago.

Buy My Books!
Buy John Donnelly's Gold Buy The Courtship of Barbara Holt Buy Coffee House Memories

Good Book Album Media Hunting, Saturday, September 16, 2023: Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library Book Sale

Well, gentle reader, as with the last few sales, I was not sure whether I would schlep all the way to the other side of town to buy records and books that would, maybe, barely fit onto my existing shelves. I asked my beautiful wife Friday night if she would like to go, and she made sounds like maybe she would go just to go with me but one of us should be around to pick up the student athlete from school in the early afternoon on Saturday. So I asked my oldest son if he would like to go, and he answered with relative enthusiasm that he would. So he and I went and met with the crowd of the first hour of half price day.

We only went to the dollar section, which is half the sale but included not only books (which I didn’t really browse) as well as records, audio books, and DVDs which were fifty cents each. Those, I browsed.

And bout a few.

I only got a few books, browsing the poetry and philosophy sections on the way out. I did get a bundle of chapbooks/pamphlets for a dollar; since I just read one such short work on fraktur, I was eager to see what was available. But there was only one such bundle, which I bought.

I got:

  • Bullshit and Philosophy edited by Gary L. Hardcastle and George A. Reisch. Is reflections on On Bullshit? Time will tell.
  • The Vision of Sir Launfal by James Russell Lowell, an Arthurian legend in verse. Originally published in 1848, this book is not quite that old, but could be 100 years old or so. It pains me how recently a book published a hundred years ago would have been published.
  • Milton: Minor Poems edited by William Allan Neilson. Do not confuse this Lake English Classics edition with Milton’s Minor Poems edited by Philo Melvyn Buck in the Eclectic English Classics edition which I read in 2020. I am hoovering up the little pocket editions from this era which are still in pretty good shape, although this book is an ex-library edition with the attendant marks. The book sale had two copies of this particular volume; I picked up this one because it had a better cover.
  • What I’ve Learned About Life in the Ozarks… Our Kids’ Perspective. a 2004 fundraiser by Court Appointed Special Advocates (CASA) ot the Ozarks, a collection of short quotes by kids and photos. The kind of thing that I would pick up, but my son threw this into the box. But he’s not here to claim it now, so into the unread stacks it goes.
  • How It Was: Remembered and Fabricated by Orvey C. Buck, a self-published collection of poems from…. well, one of the included chapbooks is dated 1989, and the font is monospace, so it might have been laid out on a typewriter. Even so, the collection is probably contemporaneous with my first chapbooks.
  • One World, One Heart by Susan Polis Schultz. But didn’t I already read it? Yes. But it was the chapbook facing out on the one bundle I bought. So I got another copy. It reminds me of buying poly packets of used jukebox 45s back in the day. You could see the first and last one, and you were generally gambling on what was in between.
  • Nutshell People and Other Biota by Mykia Taylor (1989).
  • Timberlines by Mable A. Lybyer (?).
  • The Little Wilderness Poems by Mary Holman Grimes.

I also picked up five bundles of The Missouri Conservationist magazine to look for photos I can use in découpage. The magazines were essentially a nickel each, which is below even yard sale prices.

Before I hit the books, though I went through the albums. The sale did not have many, but not many people were looking through them. Still I picked up a couple.

  • Gap Mangione! When I looked at the cover, I thought, “Man, I didn’t recognize him without a hat.” But this is Cap Mangione, Chuck Mangione’s brother. It would appear that their relationship was/is better than the Gallagher brothers.
  • Living Together by Burt Bacharach.
  • In Orbit by The Three Suns.
  • This Is Perry Como.
  • Greatest Hits by B.J. Thomas so I can play his biggest hit for my boys to hear without the ooka chocka locka.
  • Sami Jo by Sami Jo. Pretty Woman on Cover (PWoC). With most of these, you can guess mid 70s folk country, and so it is here: her second album from 1976, and her last.
  • Party Boots by Boots Randolph. A two record set. Might already have it, but I spent fifty cents to make sure.
  • Montenegro in Italy by Hugh Montenegro. The composer/band leader behind the iconic spaghetti western themes.
  • Traces of Love by Jane Morgan. I have at least one of her records around here somewhere (research on this blog and certainly not any sort of organization of the Nogglestead music library indicates The Sounds of Silence and In My Style).
  • Mediterranean Cruise by Frank Carle and his orchestra.
  • Songs You Love To Remember by The Mills Brothers.
  • Melissa Manchester by Melissa Manchester. “You like Melissa Manchester, don’t you?” I asked my wife, hoping to make this whole orgy of profligacy about her.
  • Aces High by Ace Cannon.
  • Unfailing Love by Evie. Since I got her Christmas album, maybe I’m an Evie fan. Or maybe it was just fifty cents so why not.
  • Soft Lights and Sweet Music by Percy Faith and his orchestra. Apparently, this is a 1977 reissue of a 1950s original. But PWoC. Holy cats, that young lady is adorable. And if that young lady is still alive, she’s nearing eighty.
  • When Your Lover Has Gone by Teresa Brewer. A jazz singer; I’d never heard of her before.
  • Colours of Love by Hugh Montenegro. I might already have this, but it was fifty cents, so it’s best to make sure. And it would double my chances of finding it in the music library if I ever wanted to.
  • Return of the Wayfaring Stranger by Burl Ives.
  • Burl Ives and the Folk Singers Three.
  • It’s Not Just My Funny Way of Laughing by Burl Ives.
  • Singin’ Easy by Burl Ives.
  • The Versatile Burl Ives. I mean, if I really get into Burl Ives, I’d hate to spend more than $3 for a set of his records.

It’s funny how the sale has its gluts of different things. This sale had a lot of Rose Maddox, for example, where other sales have had a lot of Spanish or Brazilian music. Unfortunately, or fortunately according to my pocket book, this sale didn’t have a lot of tempting records. We might be running out of that window where I’ll find a lot of 40s-60s jazz and easy listening available. Those grandparents are probably all about downsized by now.

After the records, I hit the DVDs and pretty much collected anything that I might want to ever see.

The takings include:

  • Get Carter, a Stallone actioner of a bygone age.
  • A Quite Place, that movie about aliens that locate humans by sound.
  • Dallas Buyers Club.
  • Don Juan DeMarco, a Johhny Depp film from a bygone age.
  • How To Be A Latin Lover, which looks to be a comedy with Selma Hayek, Rob Lowe, and Kristen Bell.
  • Mr. and Mrs. Smith, the Pitt and Jolie action comedy(?).
  • A Little Unprofessional, a comedy special by Ron White. Although I apparently did not pick up the one by Larry the Cable Guy.
  • The Bookshop; I read the book in 2021.
  • Corky Romano with Chris Kattan. Heaven forgive me, but I took my wife to see this in the theaters.
  • Toy Soldiers which is not Little Green Men but instead a Louis Gossett, Jr., movie with Sam Gamgee in it.
  • Iron Mask which surely must be a retelling of the Dumas story starring Arnold Schwarzenneggar and with Jackie Chan.
  • Rocketman, the Elton John biopic which my son slipped into the stack.
  • Legionnaire, a Jean-Claude Van Damme film.
  • La La Land.
  • Bringing Down The House with Steve Martin and Queen Latifah which is not the story of the MIT card counters. I don’t think.
  • Knives Out which is a relatively new film. I’m not sure I want to see it, but maybe someday the mood will strike me.
  • Medea on the Run, one of two Medea movies I picked up. My son was stunned.
  • 15:17 to Paris; I might already have it, but I spent 50 cents just in case not.
  • Underworld which I saw a long time ago when it was new, but I have not followed the franchise.
  • Cry Macho, a recentish Clint Eastwood movie.
  • Brimstone which is not the turn-of-the-century Sci-Fi series but a western. Hopefully, not to much of a modern Western.
  • A Madea Family Funeral, #2 of 2.
  • The Predator, a recent entry in the franchise likely to disappoint me.
  • Fantastic 4 which I might already have.
  • Ambulance, a Michael Bay film the boy wanted.
  • Ad Astra, a Brad Pitt film I am not sure I heard of, but the boy wanted.
  • The Poseidon, a remake of The Poseidon Adventure. No Ernest Borgnine, no Shirley Winters, no Leslie Nielson as a straight man. I expect to be disappointed.
  • Better Off Dead with John Cusack. I’ve been kinda looking for this one, so I’m excited.
  • Argo.
  • Tomb Raider, the new one with Alicia Vikander.
  • Crazy Rich Asians.
  • The Legend of Bruce Lee, a documentary.
  • Clash of the Titans, the remake.
  • Wildthings with Kevin Bacon, Matt Dillon, Neve Campbell, and Denise Richards.
  • Casino Royale, the first of the Daniel Craig Bond movies. I saw it in the theaters, and it’s the only ones of the Craig set I’ve seen.
  • Baywatch, the comedy remake.
  • The Master Gunfighter starring Tom Laughlin. You know, Billy Jack. Well, I would not have known either (although I am pretty sure I have seen at least parts of The Legend of Billy Jack because my sainted mother liked the movie or maybe Tom Laughlin).
  • First Blood, the first Rambo movie.
  • Patch Adams and What Dreams May Come, a Robin Williams double feature.
  • Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, the first in the series which I also might have seen in the theater.
  • Olympus Has Fallen, one of the Obama-era “terrorists/bitter clingers have attacked the White House!” movies. Probably enough time has passed I can view the movie on its own merits and not part of the contemporaneous coastal zeitgeist.
  • I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, a later (well, not Netflix-later) Sandler comedy.
  • The Producers with Matthew Broderick and Nathan Lane.
  • The Deer Hunter, the Vietnam movie which captured my son’s attention.
  • Zoolander No. 2–well, it was only fifty cents.
  • Kick-Ass 2.
  • Beowulf which has a computer-assisted Angelina Jolie in it, ainna?
  • The Death of Stalin, an ensemble comedy from a bygone era more bygone than other bygone eras I’ve mentioned so far.
  • Trading Places, the Dan Ackroyd/Eddie Murphy comedy from the early 1980s.

Holy cats, that’s fifty films. I haven’t watched the last fifty I bought yet.

Looking at the list, I’m somewhat surprised just how heavily weighted it is to franchises, remakes, or reboots. But I suppose I should not be. Also, I have determined the place to get later films on DVD will be library book sales, as some of the later titles here were ex-library holdings–and libraries might be the only DVD release some titles get.

I also picked up two courses, Starting Out In Chinese and Shakespeare: The Great Comedies. So I just need to start commuting again or something to listen to these and the others I’ve acquired.

At any rate, the check made out to FOL totaled $40. If I had stopped in the Better Books Section, I would have spent more, perhaps on art monographs or old books, but I would also have had to eventually shelve them. Which is a sore subject right now as work at Nogglestead required us to move six bookshelves and their contents. It only took a little over an hour, but still.

I would proffer a pool, gentle reader, as to which film you would expect me to watch first. I cannot participate, gentle reader, as I have already watched it. But you can speculate in the comments if you would like.

Buy My Books!
Buy John Donnelly's Gold Buy The Courtship of Barbara Holt Buy Coffee House Memories

The Soon-To-Be-Forgotten New Vocabulary of Brian J.

I am not claiming to be a polymath, gentle reader, as I would have to be a far better autodidact than I am. But I sure am reading and listening widely these days, which means I have a lot of new vocabulary words getting thrown into my brain, briefly, while I’m reading/listening/studying. Soon to be fall out when I start memorizing additional heavy metal lyrics on my gym playlist.

Recently, though, I have learned the following words and could briefly say them correctly and/or read them with fairly correct pronunciation:

  • Kuduasai. I’ve started playing with Duolingo, refreshing some of my Spanish and starting, again, Japanese from scratch. Kudasai means please in a familiar sense.
  • Chavín de Huántar. This is an archeological site in Peru which has information about the Chavín culture which spread through cities in Peru about 1000 BC. I’ve had a couple of car rides/child pickup opportunities recently, so I’ve started listening to lectures again, this set being Lost Worlds of South America. I’ll probably finish this sometime in 2024, by which time I will have forgotten how to pronounce Chavín de Huántar, but I will likely remember the feline deity and whether one can build a vampire story about them.
  • As I mentioned, I’m in the process of reading The Life Of Greece by Will (and Ariel) Durant, so I am all steeped in Greek names like Polycrates and Anaximenes and Anaximander and Xenophanes, and I am pretty sure my pronunciation tracks with the Greek. I mean, I do have a cat named Chimera, which is pronounced just like it’s spelled, ainna?
  • I’ve been reading some late ninteenth century and early twentieth century short stories, so I’ve been looking up lots of words like demirep and so on. Unfortunately, I did not write down each new word as I looked it up or otherwise note it. Or perhaps it is for the best, as I would want to use them and would become more obscure than I am.

Something is bound to stick, though, gentle reader, and that will make me even more boring to talk to at parties as I suddenly lurch from creepy and silent to enthusiastic about esoterica. Which is also creepy, ainna?

Buy My Books!
Buy John Donnelly's Gold Buy The Courtship of Barbara Holt Buy Coffee House Memories