Musings from Brian J. Noggle

The Weather Radio just started shrieking a tornado warning, but the weather is clear and the Internet did not show a tornado warning.

The newspaper did, however, mention a statewide tornado warning set for just that time.

The newspaper assures us, though:

If severe weather conditions exist, the drill will be rescheduled for Thursday at 1:30 p.m.

So the siren goes off at 1:30. Is it a drill? Is it really threatening weather? I guess we’ll find out soon.

As you might have noticed in one of my DeRooneyfication posts, I have been moving LPs to my parlor. Where were they before that? Some of the ones, the ones scene in the picture in that post, were in boxes in my storeroom. Others were in my beautiful wife’s office.

You see, the ones in boxes were mostly records I inherited from my mother, some of which she inherited from her mother, which is why the collection is so heavy on Reader’s Digest boxed sets and Elvis Presley titles. Many of the titles I owned or recently purchased were on my wife’s bookshelves since she has been, off and on, ripping the records to MP3s.

Since we still had room even with the polished and repackaged 45- and 78-rpm records, I went down to her office to get more of my albums to move upstairs and to listen to. Not to steal LP Cover Lover‘s thunder, but I found some things familiar and some things strange. Read more »

The MLA explains how to cite a Tweet in your academic papers.

((Maetenloch). “There’s now a style guide for citeing Tweets” 5 March 2012, 12:30 p.m. Tweet.)

I am a scofflaw.

According to this can of bathroom cleaner:

It is a violation of Federal law to use this product in a manner inconsistent with its labeling.

And:

1. Spray 6-8 inches from surface to be cleaned.

I am pretty sure that I sprayed from under 6 inches away from a toilet and maybe more than 8 inches, say 8.034 inches, away from the basin.

According to this can, I have violated Federal law several times today.

Now, I know the can is no attorney, but come on, it’s easy to imagine that such a law exists that makes it an actual crime to just let the product sit on a heavily soiled surface for only one minute just because the law says do what the instructions tell you.

Because some regulator or set of legislators saw the problem (what, people huffing aerosols? Using bathroom cleaners on ovens?) and passed/made some burden to put the fear of the Federal Bureau of Investigation into consumers who read the packaging.

Another Federal law that goes unenforced. Unless the prosecutors can’t hang someone for a real crime, and Al Capone goes to prison in the 21st century for consumer-grade solvent misuse.

Sad, isn’t it?

UPDATE Thanks for the link, Ms. K. Hey, if you’re in the IT field, check out my blog QA Hates You. Also note my IT caper novel is available for the Kindle for 99 cents and in paperback. Thanks!

Ladies and Gentlemen, the Puma “Clever Little Bag” side-by-side with a traditional shoebox:

The text on the Clever Little Bag reads:

CLEVER LITTLE BAG

Well it’s smarter than an old fashioned shoebox because it uses 65% less paper. Even better, it means you don’t need an extra carrier bag and you can use it over and over again. Clever huh? Follow the Puma eco-table reuse this bag.

www.puma.com/cleverlittlebag

All the grammar errors are indigenous to the bag itself. Apparently, it will also save 40 billion commas and 100 million hyphens to protect the environment.

So. This clever little bag will protect the environment, how?

Instead of a fully biodegradable or fully recycleable cardboard box, we have half a cardboard box and a reusable bag. A reusable bag that’s about the size of a children’s shoe shoebox that I can use perpetually as a carrier bag. Is that what I need? Let me run down the reusable bags I have already: Book bags from every library I’ve ever befriended, a tote bag from the company that buried my mother, little cloth bags that contained linens or something, and a laptop bag. Guess which of these I use. Just one.

No, I have no use for a bag of this size. It’ll probably go right into the garbage can.

Whereas one of those demonic cardboard shoeboxes, when they’re not being recycled or breaking down quickly in a landfill, are excellent storage boxes for mementos from lovers past or gee-gaws of a certain size. I mean, really, who ever gets rid of a shoebox?

I think Puma has outsmarted itself in its quest to have a nice story to tell the environmentally conscious, which is to say, semi-conscious, amongst us.

What’s a good sign that a bubble is inflating? The experts don’t see a bubble inflating:

Even as homeowners and commercial landlords count their losses from the great real-estate bust, Midwestern farmers are experiencing the biggest property boom in a generation.

The rapid run-up in land values is bound to make some people nervous, especially older farmers who remember how property values collapsed during the farm crisis of the 1980s. Farm economists, though, don’t yet see signs of a land-price bubble.

Economists, the experts, are always the last to know.

Ah, the words one learns.

In creating the post below, I looked up the spelling of the word algorithm to make sure I was spelling it right (I was), and I encountered the word algorism which does not have to do with the environment or making millions on carbon credit schemes while opposing strange financial schemes that originate on Wall Street.

I’ll have to use algorismic in a sentence today and hope I don’t get slapped. Also, I need to add them both to Firefox’s dictionary since I’ll be typing them on the Internet frequently in the near term.

In my cabinet in the kitchen where we store our pharmaceuticals and supplements, I recently uncovered this curiosity when I tried to find a child’s liquid medicine syringe among the cat pill guns and out-of-date vitamins:

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

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

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

James Lileks on bootscrapes:

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

I AM TIRED OF THE SHOE THING

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

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

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

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

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

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

Click for full size

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s going to be a long election year.

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

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

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

This year, I have begun the process of DeRooneyfication.

Sometime when I was reading some of his columns some number of years ago, I related to one of Andy Rooney’s situations. He mentioned going into his basement workshop and finding a number of projects that had been off to the side for a number of years, including a chair that needed fixing and whatnot. Even though I was probably just the long side of thirty at the time, it resonated with me, since I’d been collecting projects and materials for projects since before I got married. Now that I’m just the short side of forty–and soon on its long side–I decided to start finishing some of those projects.

Most of them aren’t long-term, time-consuming projects, either. Most only require that I set aside a couple of minutes on consecutive nights to take the time to complete the steps the project requires. They require that I put all the pieces and material together in one place and get the things done. That’s all.

Why have I decided to do it suddenly in 2012? Perhaps it is that birthday ending with a 0 coming up. Perhaps it is the new multivitamin that I’ve started to take because I bought it some years ago and might as well use (almost a deRooneyfication project of its own). Maybe it’s a function of having cleaned and sorted my garage and finding the projects and the tools and materials to complete them. Regardless, I’ve started completing projects of some procrastination. These are their stories.

Read more »

Spotted on my to-read shelves:

I don’t remember purchasing My Book of Leaves.

Do you think my son put that book on my bookshelves because he desperately wants me to notice his work and/or to read to him, or was it just something he could do since Daddy had a little stepping stool in the office?

At the end of the aforementioned Scooby Doo, Cartoon Network’s The Hub plays an anti-bullying PSA (embedding disabled by request, because if there’s one thing you want to upload onto the torrents, it’s an anti-bullying PSA) with Tom and Jerry shorts:

I gotta ask you, which message do you think resonates with young viewers?

Frankly, I think the PSA is like one of the adult gags in the cartoons that the kids don’t get yet. It does, however, sound the proper notes to today’s concerned parents.

In the other room, my children are watching an episode of The New Scooby Doo Movies with Davy Jones in it.

The program originally aired on December 2, 1972, so I probably didn’t see it when it ran first. A couple years later, I watched it with my mother and brother, and I remember distinctly the joke that Davy Jones makes “I’ve never sung for frogs before, just monkeys.” She explained that he used to belong to a band called the Monkees.

Of course, the Monkees were most active between 1966 and 1968, when the television show appeared, but a decade later when I watched the cartoon, Davy Jones was a has-been, if a little boy thought of such things. Regardless, he was off my cultural radar, if I had such a thing at about 10.

Of course, a couple years after that, in 1985, MTV started airing the television program and brought about a brief Monkees revival. The shows played on MTV and Nickolodeon, the band toured, and I even ended up with a greatest hits album.

When the children heard that Scooby Doo was meeting Davy Jones, their only knowledge was of the guy with the locker. Although this reference precedes any of the pop-culture musings above since it’s a nautical term for the undersea place where drowned sailors go, the boys only know of it from what they’ve heard about the Pirates of the Caribbean movie series.

That’s a lot of generational history wrapped into a single episode of a forty-year-old cartoon.

I’ve been a curmudgeon since elementary school, but I cannot feel like an old curmudgeon these days when confronted by stories written, obviously, by a 20-something who thinks history began sometime in Bill Clinton’s reign.

First, this piece in Vanity Fair talking about the sameness of culture since that era:

The past is a foreign country. Only 20 years ago the World Wide Web was an obscure academic thingamajig. All personal computers were fancy stand-alone typewriters and calculators that showed only text (but no newspapers or magazines), played no video or music, offered no products to buy.

This is a surprise to anyone on Compuserve, Quantum Link, and BBSes running on CG-Net or WWIV-Net or people who used Commodore 64s or Amigas that could plays music and show short snippets of video.

Then there’s this: Five Video Games You Loved as a Kid But Will Hate If You’re Dumb Enough to Play As an Adult:

Perusing through my massive back catalog of games from my childhood has led me to one conclusion: Games of the past have more capacity to challenge the imagination than those on today’s consoles.

Pocky and Rocky for the Super Nintendo! Can any childhood be complete without it? Come on, surely I’m not the only one who has played this? No?

In essence, the 2-D warmth of games we played as children symbolize a spoiled innocence that has been long lost, which has since been replaced by so-called “Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games” (MMORPGs) and first-person shooters. Games can still be addictive, but the enhanced technological capabilities of today often provide a shortcut. Technological innovation replaced game play innovation. Today game story lines are often bogged down with tedious cut scenes which just take away from the game play more than anything else. The titles on older systems of the ‘80s, ‘90s, and first half of the ‘00s weren’t just reduced to the number of polygons or shades of green. They relied on fun game play and clever artwork to keep their patrons entertained – instead of hooking hopeless addicts with make believe social lives which require a monthly subscription fee and the final ounces of one’s self-respect.

Perhaps though, I should be more balanced about the Video Game’s Golden Days. In some ways, it was actually the Dark Ages.

This is what Pokemon Stadium looked like when it first came out in 2000. It may have been state of the art at the time, but play it now and you’d better have some killer weed.

It would be misleading to say that all of the games from the past deserve recognition. Video games are just like all media: the majority of titles were overhyped, derivative, and poorly designed. This list covers some of the worst offenders from my own vast collection. After weeks of gaming I’ve narrowed down my list to five guilty titles that were considered classics at the time of their release but now do little more than piss you off. Play at your own risk.

He was a child when the SuperNintendo was out. ‘Nuff said.

Jeez, I realize that there are gonna be kids writing because kids are cheap. I’m even almost made piece that I’ll even have doctors who are younger than I am with names like Kailee and Ayden and Tyler. All right.

But I hope they’re old enough to know things went on before they were born.