Musings from Brian J. Noggle

If 21st century gun laws had been in place in the 1980s, how much simpler would Donkey Kong have been if Mario had owned a Desert Eagle?

Is Professor Obama kicking General McChrystal’s ass?

Over at Outside the Beltway, Dr. James Joyner defenestrates the Daily Show’s Jon Stewart for hyperbole in blog titles.

Well, not really, since the playback is in the same window as the original post. But I wish we could see some post headlines that refer to defenestration more.

But I fear that energy efficient windows and closed HVAC-based environments have taken this word from our national vocabulary.

Meanwhile, as the link above throws the target site out of the current window, I have virtual defenestrated Dr. Joyner.

You know the United States Government spent something like $2,500,000 to air an ad in the Superbowl, right? This ad:

The official version is on YouTube here complete with the “Visionary and Director, in that order” self-loving profile.

You know, it’s not bad enough that the Department of Treasury spent that much money buying space for an ad in the Superbowl. They had to make it worse by just giving a blank check to an ad company that proceeded to make an ad company ad for it.

I’ve done some work in the field, and you can tell an ad company’s ad (or an interactive agency’s Web site) because they’re not targeted to consumers. They’re targeted to other ad companies to show how cool the producing ad company is. The ad company can break all the rules of comprehensibility and including a call to action since the ad is not designed to convince you of anything, but merely to exist in its coolness.

This ad shares some of the core features of a hip ad-man’s dream ad:

• Incomprehensibility. They’re having a meeting. The title tells us that. What is the point of the meeting? In most commercials, it’s to get to the punchline. This ad doesn’t really have a punchine, nor a core call to action. What is the viewer supposed to do? Embrace the existence of hip use of tax money budget.
• Self-reference. It’s an ad company having a meeting to talk with a client. A stupid client! Haw! There’s your punchline. Also, it’s epic, because the lives and livelihoods of those who work at ad agencies are dramatic, glamorous, and exciting (see Mad Men or just interact with ad agency people. They’re thespians without any acting skill, so they live the melodramas in their own lives. And if you let them, they make advertisements about them.)
• Expensivity. When money is no object, it will be spent. On an ad buy. On expensive sets and catering. Money is no object!

As a conservative, I feel outraged enough that the government profligately wasted Chinese bondholder money on an ad in the Superbowl. As a viewer, I felt worse that the ad sucked that badly.

I also feel a little bad for the “client,” whatever government functionary signed off on this. Didn’t he or she realize that the ad company was mocking him or her? Or was he so hip as to accept its mockery, feeling that he was in on it even though the ad agency didn’t think so?

The Cayman Islands have themselves a tagline:

Click for full size

Where once in a lifetime* happens every day.

*It’s Steve Irwin’s lifetime.

You know why the man is smiling? Because in about 18 seconds, he’s not going to have to tell his wife that he impregnated the marketing intern.

So I pull into a regular gas station of mine, swipe my new American Express Card, start filling the SUV full of boys with 87 ‘tane, and start washing salt off of the windows. Why the windows are salty here in Springfield, where most places didn’t treat nor plow the 6 inches of snow we got around Christmas, I don’t grok. But that’s not the head scratcher.

After I finish with the back window and then the front window, less of a priority because it has better internal salt removal systems, I figure that the half tank’s worth of pumping should be done. The pump is not actively forcing fuel into my vehicle, and its internal mechanisms have shut it off at five cents’ worth of gas. .021 gallons, if you’re wondering.

I figure the seal between the pump nozzle and the tank has triggered. My pickup truck has a faulty seal here so that I have to pump gas by hand at slower than the lowest automatic notch or it will trigger the nozzle shut off. So I’m familiar with the vagaries of these systems. But when I depress the nozzle trigger, it does not pump at all.

So I wonder, is the gas station’s tank empty? Or has it stopped because that’s all my credit card authorized me? I push the help button that should intercom to the cashier inside to ask him what was going on.

No response. I’d have gone in, but that would have required unloading a pair of boisterons (the physics term for energetic male children) to ask a 30 second question or to leave them for 30 seconds unattended in a car, which is felony child endangerment in 21st century America.

So I instead replace the nozzle, take my receipt for five cents, and swipe my credit card again. This time, the pump says that it cannot accommodate credit card swipes at this time. The gas station attendant hasn’t replied yet, so I take my nickel of gasoline and leave.

Wondering, of course, what happened. Credit card problem? Computer problem? Or some problem with my newish credit card, perhaps a fraud alert. Maybe there’s an APB out for me in Battlefield, Missouri, even as we speak as they search for the three desperadoes in a vehicle that’s safely hidden in a garage.

Whatever else it is, it give me something to think about and to ruminate upon all afternoon.

When I’m turning left like a bouncy-strided NASCAR driver on the track in the local YMCA, I’m not one to steal a glimpse of the women in their workout clothes. Not that I would admit on a blog my wife reads from time to time, anyway. One thing turns my head every time, though: a metal door marked YMCA Staff Only opened to reveal the workshop within.

Beyond that door lies more than a janitorial closet, although certain supplies are stashed within for easy access on the second floor. In addition to those supplies, the shelves contain various and sundry implements to perform the most basic of repairs throughout the facility and upon some of the machines within. Then my long limbs carry me beyond the doorway.

There’s something about a professional workshop that triggers a certain wistfulness within me. Upon each professional’s bench, implements and tools relevant to the job at hand lie within reach according to a logic and preference to the guy doing the job. He’s got the screwdrivers arranged as he uses them and the lead mallet on a shelf where he can grab it on his way to the end of the printing press to pound the empty paper roll from its roller. When I see the workspace, I can almost see myself doing the job, and in that moment, I slightly transcend myself.

I don’t get that sense in an office environment. If you’ve seen one cubicle, you’ve seen them all. Most of the customization from one job to another involves a different desktop wallpaper and set of applications installed upon a computer. A different set of binders on the bookshelf, if any. A different set of photographs or cutesy individual touches.

But workbenches, they have different tools and different things. I’ve worked enough different non-office environments that my different workspaces had a variety of implements. My produce back room had machete-like blades for splitting watermelon, knives for trimming ears of corn, Styrofoam trays for packaging product, and a toolbox containing numbers and signs for pricing. My art store shipping and receiving station had a tape gun for closing boxes, sundry pens for counting products, and trays for packing lists. My print shop workbench contained two bottles of highly caustic cleaners, numerous cans of differently colored soy-based ink, screwdrivers for adjusting wheels and for unlocking plates, and the aforementioned lead mallet along with a poem hanging on the file cabinet for me to memorize for my open mic nights.

Maybe my fascination with workbenches stems from my desire for a lost youth where I worked these jobs and marched ever higher in positions and placements until I broke the barrier into business casual and a career. Maybe I long for those olden days when I made something or moved some physical things every day.

Or, just maybe, they continue to trip my imagination in ways that office-based careers and their environments cannot.

Wanda Sykes speaks about meeting her “wife”:

How did you meet your wife? [They married in October 2008.]
In Fire Island. She’s French, so she had no idea who I was.

Well, that’s telling. Wanda Sykes thinks she has to go to Fire Island to meet someone who doesn’t recognize her.

Memo to Ms. Sykes: There are probably a lot of places in this country she could go an be anonymous. Most of the regions between the continent’s major mountain ranges, for instance.

The Springfield News-Leader has a sensational headline: Court sides with sex offenders.

The Missouri Supreme Court on Tuesday sided with two sex offenders, ruling they cannot be barred from handing out Halloween candy and living within 1,000 feet of schools and child care centers because those restrictions weren’t in place when they were convicted.

Missouri enacted the sex offender restrictions in 2008 and 2004, respectively, several years after either man was convicted. Citing a provision in the state constitution that bars retroactive laws, a divided Supreme Court ruled 4-3 that it would be unconstitutional to force the men to comply.

Huh. Ex post facto laws are unconstitutional. You mean the legislature cannot make my actions yesterday illegal tomorrow and punish me for obeying the law at the time I did something?

Oh, these sex offenders are the current devils against whom any action is proper. I believe that sex offenders are currently the vanguard of the concept of rule of law. Because face it, most people in the mob of our society would bring back crucifixion for these guys if they could. And then it would be crucifixion for lesser crimes. And lesser crimes still.

On the national scale, the Republican Party and rightwing commentators say that proper health care reform would include allowing insurance parties to sell across state lines and eliminating state mandates for coverage.

On the state scale, Republican state legislators push for more mandates:

“We know if we pass legislation, we will give these children a better shot,” Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Glendale, said Sunday at a rally supporting legislation requiring insurance companies to cover therapy for children with autism.

The Republican Party is a large, diverse organization. But sometimes I wonder if it has any core principles. Less government mandating does not seem to be a common bond.

Full disclosure: Senator Schmitt represents my district and is actually part of my township party club.

Here’s a touching story about how a high school football team gave up a shutout so that its opponent could have a Downs Syndrome running back get a touchdown:

So in the final stages of Benton’s third game of the season on Monday at Maryville, McCamy decided it was time for Ziesel — a 15-year-old freshman with Down syndrome — to make his season debut.

With about 10 seconds left in the game, and Benton trailing 46-0, McCamy called his final timeout, told an assistant coach to organize the team for the “Matt play” and ran across the field to the Maryville defensive huddle — and to some puzzled looks from the opposing players.

“I’ve got a special situation,” McCamy remembers telling Maryville freshman defensive coach David McEnaney. “I know you guys want to get a shutout. Most teams would want a shutout, but in this situation I want to know if maybe you can let one of my guys run in for a touchdown.”

Here’s the video:

Those kids on both teams (and the coaches) did a nice thing.

But you know what would make it even better for some people?

A compulsory government program to redistribute touchdowns from the teams who can play football to those who just try. And take 14 points from each good team each game just to run the program.

I know, I can’t leave a nice story alone. My comment doesn’t diminish the real story at all.

A riddle based on this news story: St. Louis residents happy with city police service, most tell pollsters.

What do you call a St. Louis City resident who’s dissatisfied with city policing?
A St. Louis County resident.

Lileks breaks with the church:

Given the immense stuff-reduction program I’m on, it seems counterproductive. I set aside a great many books for the thrift store today, to give you an idea of the magnitude of this effort. (The piano required moving a table, which required moving a bookcase, which required distributing the bookcase’s contents.) Five grocery bags full of books – sorry, boys, but that’s the way it has to be. There’s a certain sort of despair you feel when you look at a 500-page book about a particular subject, and you know that you read it, and you’ll be damned if you remember anything about it. There’s an enormous bio of Mao – a Maobio – and aside from the general hideous cruelty of the bastard and his miserable regime, the main thing I remember is the ruinous impact of the drive to increase steel production, how everyone had to give up their woks and build poisonous smelters in the backyard. It’s 900 pages thick.

Out go the tiny-type art history books from college, because while I know the difference between Mannerism and Rococo I am reasonably sure I will never have to concern myself between the interstitial period between the two styles. Out go the phone books with Stephen King’s name on the spine; out go tidy little non-fiction accounts of narrow moments in history that narrowly affected another narrow aspect of Western Civ. Sometimes it seems as if these books aren’t trees you plant so you can enjoy the shade decades on – they’re bouquets you wear on your mental lapel for a week or two, enjoying the fragrant aroma until the book is filed and the perfume fades.

Suck it up and get a bigger house every couple of years like we do. You do not have to get rid of books, ever.

The piece is entitled “The Case for Killing Granny“, so you know you’re in for it. The very lede identifies the core issue of a government health plan:

My mother wanted to die, but the doctors wouldn’t let her. At least that’s the way it seemed to me as I stood by her bed in an intensive-care unit at a hospital in Hilton Head, S.C., five years ago. My mother was 79, a longtime smoker who was dying of emphysema. She knew that her quality of life was increasingly tethered to an oxygen tank, that she was losing her ability to get about, and that she was slowly drowning. The doctors at her bedside were recommending various tests and procedures to keep her alive, but my mother, with a certain firmness I recognized, said no. She seemed puzzled and a bit frustrated that she had to be so insistent on her own demise.

This anecdote in defense of a government system wherein appointed or hired officials rethink the health care decisions for you removes all choice from the patient.

It gives the author’s mommy the outcome she wanted. But someone who wants to fight on and hope for a miracle? No, sorry, you get to choose death anyway.

That’s what the prosecutors indicate here:

Police in Coatesville say they stopped a white SUV being driven by a young girl on Sunday afternoon. Authorities say 30-year-old Lakisha Hogue was in the passenger seat when they stopped the vehicle. According to police documents, Hogue was laughing and said she was teaching the girl to drive.

Hogue is charged with endangering the welfare of a child, corruption of a minor and other charges.

Meanwhile, they’ve charged the child for driving without a license, endangering the welfare of the child (itself), and other charges.

Seriously, can’t the prosecutors limit themselves to just one crime for one actus reus anymore?

Rhetorical question. Of course they cannot.

Meanwhile, keep this in mind that when you’re teaching your children to drive, you’re violating all these laws unless there’s a written exception for children with learner’s permits in the actual statutes. Which, of course, there’s not.

President Obama’s remarks last night:

We are the only democracy — the only advanced democracy on Earth — the only wealthy nation — that allows such hardship for millions of its people.

Question: Does India not count as a democracy or a suitably advanced democracy? Does it suit this characterization because it has hundreds of millions whose health care is not provided by the government? Or does the President’s speechwriters ignorant of things non-European?

From the wikipedia entry on the board game Risk:

Using area movement, Risk ignores limitations such as the vast size of the world and the logistics of long campaigns.

So you mean I’ll need a navy to invade Iceland? There goes my weekend plans. Anyone want to go catch GI Joe instead?

The cover:

Brad Pitt will take risks for love. Seriously? Take risks for something of value? You don’t say. I think it would be more revealing to say Brad Pitt takes risks because he’s celebrity-insular and reckless. Unless they mean Brad Pitt shoplifts at Toys ‘R’ Us and stuffs Parker Brothers games under the baby blankets of his adopted hordes. That would mean taking Risks in a way that would be interesting.

But it’s good to know that Brad Risk, for love, is not afraid to look like Jonathan Frakes for love.

Family losing home because of seven-cent mistake:

A Michigan family is losing its home because it underpaid the mortgage by 7 cents in January, a legal aid group says.

The statement is presented as straight fact in the lead. However:

Rooks said [redacted] of Deckerville, in the Thumb, inadvertently underpaid their mortgage because a postal clerk issued a money order for $440 rather than $440.07. The couple didn’t catch the mistake and they were four weeks late making February’s payment of $690.07. She said they had been late before.

Though the Bergers caught up by mid-April, Rooks said, Countrywide Financial and its new owner, Bank of America, rejected the couple’s payments. Bank of America countered that it and earlier loan servicers bent over backward to accommodate [redacted], who has been repeatedly delinquent since purchasing the modest four-bedroom frame bungalow for $38,650 in 1997. It said [redacted] rejected a reasonable offer last week to get reinstated.

Those allegations by the people who know and who own the paper mean nothing; the paper and its wire service have their hook and story. It was the seven cents, and that illustrates how capricious and darewesay evil companies are. Only the benevolent government and its press corps can save the people.

Man wins a gunfight with a knife:

Normally you lose when you bring a knife to a gunfight, but not Ramiro Silva.
. . . .
The gunman stuffed the shotgun into a bag and ran into the woods and Mr. Silva grabbed his machete, a fearsome looking blade, and went in after him.
. . . .
Silva wacked the suspect with the sword, using the face not the blade.

Knife, machete, sword…. All the same to the kids writing news these days.

I suppose we should just be glad that it wasn’t called an assault blade.