To be able to say "Noggle," you first must be able to say "Nah."
Because so much climate change relies on:
The fact that it is going to almost be 90 this weekend is not the most year ever as my Facebook memories allow:
It was this warm ten years ago, so 90 degrees in October falls into the range of the possible and not a new extreme.
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You might be asking, “Brian J., why did you pick up a book on golf?” You know, I’m asking myself the same question; after all, I have played maybe seven or eight holes of golf in my life (when Iron Maiden Dave and I hit the local park’s nine-hole course, we abandoned the game far later than the other two guys who wanted to join us to make us a foursome abandoned us). I suspect my thinking was this: I saw Razor Girl by the author which I purchased this summer and thought I should read this book before I read the novel. A “how can you eat your pudding if you don’t eat your meat?” sort of thing. So I picked this book up and worked my way through it with some other books in the interim (which should tell you what I thought of it).
The schtick of it is that Carl Hiaasen, who played a little golf in high school and college with his old man, decides to pick up the sticks (as I’ve picked up the lingo) again in his middle age. Which is about the same age as I am now (so I am pleased to think I am not old). So I guess the theme might be the struggle to recapture one’s youthful glory or or man versus himself in trying to improve on a skill game (at a certain age). But I think the book is poorly executed.
Most of it is a diary of the first 577 days of his return to golf; numbered days (not all 577, just ones where he did golf things) give a paragraph or a couple of paragraphs of his golf experience for the day which might be playing a round or buying some new golf product he purchased and maybe tried. These little italicized bits are leavened with longer internally coherent pieces about other rounds of golf he’s played or the golf academy he attended or lessons he might have had. These longer pieces seem internally coherent, as I said, and I cannot help but wonder if they were individual columns or essays placed elsewhere, and they’re unrelated to one another. Case in point: One such essay talks about Hiaasen attending Leadbetter Academy for a day-long seminar, and then a later chapter mentiones playing on a course beside the Leadbetter Academy in Florida without mentioning he’d attended it–explaining it as though this was the first time the reader heard about it. Then, I guess the book feels the need to build to a finish which is bifurcated: Hiaasen plays in a tournament, and Hiaasen completes the book. No fooling; a couple of times whether he would finish the book is questioned and whether he could gut it out after getting discouraged.
So a bit slapped together, and one guesses that the draw is that it’s a Hiaasen golf book. Of course, since it’s a 21st century Hiassen book, it certainly slaps around the boogeyman of the day, George W. Bush. If it was written in the present day, undoubtedly it would be even meaner in its asides about the devil Trump. As it stands, Trump is mentioned on page 129, but only in reference to his rumored 300-yard drives which the author, about the same age, cannot match. A new edition, not that anyone would bother, would not be so laudatory.
So I was not impressed, but I’m not exactly the target audience, which is a golfer who would read anything about the sport and maybe relate to some of the author’s experiences. The title page and dust jacket do not indicate whether one should consider this a humor book or a sports book, but you should consider it the latter.
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As I have finished the last bits of the record shelving I started to build on Labor Day Weekend, I thought I’d show you what the Nogglestead record library looks like after a decade’s worth of book sales and visits to the antique malls ostensibly for “Christmas shopping” but in the “one for you, one for me” mindset.
In the living room, we have lifted the console stereo that I just “repaired” onto the long shelf and the two little emergency wings which I had to add when I discovered right after Labor Day that the shelf was not deep enough to hold the stereo. So I added a couple of little pieces to place along the sides–the console stereo rests on a single “leg” which is a crescent along the front and sides. The back is about a half inch above where the weight rests, so I only had to build for the sides:
I’ve moved the boxed sets except for the Beethoven collection to those shelves, and I moved all the Christmas records onto the shelf (to the right). The little bookshelf to the right has the Beethoven set (not complete, unfortunately) and some miscellany.
In the parlor, the long shelves beside the desk hold most of the collection:
You can see the gap at the back where the Christmas records were. The boxed sets had been stacked in rows in a giant column next to the shelves in the corner. You can see on the desk the albums I recently bought, which I will listen to once before putting in mylar and onto shelves. Beneath the desk you can see the two boxes of records we got from my mother-in-law’s downsizing; we have room for them now, and some room for maybe…. Organizing the records? Someday.
When my beautiful wife took an office for her business downtown, she took a shelf full of CDs with her, which left this wall bare, so I built some shorter shelves:
My wife’s mother’s former records will go here when we unbox them together. I should have enough record sleeves for them. And with that, all of our record library will be shelved finally.
And you are not mistaken, eagle-eyed reader; when my wife gave up her office in town–a nonprofit with which she works has space across the street from her former office where she can work while in town–so she brought the CD tower back, and it’s now in the foyer. Which is an odd place for it as we never (hardly ever) play CDs upstairs even though we have a 100-disc CD changer from back when that was a very big deal. Come to think of it, we hardly ever play CDs at all unless they have audio courses on them.
But records? Aw, yeah, you know we’re hipsters.
How many records is that? you might wonder. To be honest, I don’t even know. I’d have to go back and count my orders for 100-packs of sleeves and then guess from there. A thousand? Fifteen hundred? I honestly don’t know. Ask me again sometime if we get them organized and in a database. But the real question is: Do we have more copies of Perry Como Sings Merry Christmas Music or Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass Whipped Cream and Other Delights? I am not sure–we probably have four or more of each–but probably the former which we will get to listen to soon.
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I have seen my StatCounter stats tick up from, well, 0 to a handful of hits per day, but with referrers like Facebook and Automattic.
Which, I presume, means that AI is scraping my content for free to add to their witches’ brews of language models.
Ms. K. posts a Twitter thread about entering nonsense words into your online content to garble and bollix up the models.
Ah, gentle reader, but my normal content probably already does just that. No need to grobblezeek at all.
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A while ago, when cleaning under the kitchen sink, including the little tip-in tray that we have immediately in front of the basin which contains, the tray contains, not the basin contains, a sponge, a razor blade, and sometimes the rubber complete water stop for the sink, a while ago when cleaning out things from below the sink or that tray, I threw out a little brush like this. I thought it came with some set of bottle cleaners, perhaps baby bottle cleaners, perhaps a brush to clean the interior of the nipples–having such a brush some fifteen years after my boys stopped drinking from baby bottles would be fairly normal for the Noggle household, and by Noggle household I mean me who doesn’t like to throw anything away even though I don’t have an immediate use for it.
At any rate, I recently discarded a brush like this–or thought about discarding it but threw it into one of the bins of cleaning tools under the sink but not the tray.
I also recently discarded a baster because the baster, which my beautiful wife uses pretty exclusively to draw the grease from pans of meatloaf, developed a crack which limited its efficacy. It might have developed this crack because I have, on occasion, tried to jam the corner of a dish cloth into it. Once or twice, it might have made its way to the dishwasher. All the while, a brush that might well have come with it languished in the cabinet.
So I’m posting this here, gentle reader, as this blog is my artificial memory assistance, and I trust that it will help me remember what that little brush is for the next time my wife makes meatloaf.
Assuming, of course, I happen upon this post whilst the meatloaf is in the oven. So perhaps all is vanity.
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As you might remember (because it’s only been a week or two, which is at the outer edge of my memory, gentle reader, but I expect more from you), I bought a stack of old Edna St. Vincent Millay hardbacks at the Friends of the Library book sale two weeks ago, and I have already (re)read Renascence.
This is a later edition of her second book (first edition is 1920) and includes four sonnets at the end and poems not found in the first edition. You know what? If I had to pick a volume of her poetry to call my favorite, it would be this one (although ask me again when I get further into the stack and you might get another answer). After all, I know two of the poems by heart (“First Fig” and the sonnet which begins “Love, though for this you riddle me with darts…”) Not only did I memorize the latter, but I used it to open up my set at poetry open mics when I played a new venue; I’d approach the mic like a normal shy poet who hadn’t read much before with a sheaf of papers, and I’d leap from the stage or in front of the mic, reciting this poem angry and throwing the papers and sometimes my hat as I did so. I also recall the other sonnets from the book (although I don’t think I ever performed them).
The other poems are pretty good to great; they have rhythm and they have rhyme, but not so much the inner- or inter-line wordplay that I use these days (although I’ve mostly abandoned the end rhyme).
Some thirty-some couple of years after I’ve read the book for the first time, I still enjoy re-reading it. I’ll probably re-read it again as I’ll be tempted to buy any other copy of it I see in the wild, and if I end up in a good place financially, I might look for a proper first edition/first printing for my real library in those days. Otherwise, I’ll have to look forward to grabbing whatever copies I find in the wild. Now that I’ve gotten ahold of the other Millay collector in Springfield’s copies, I guess it will have to be when I travel.
And note that I will probably finish another of these Millay collections before I finish another Louis L’Amour book as they’re shorter.
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You know, even when I was reading Hondo and looking at the films atop my video cabinet for something to watch, it took me several passes to realize that this John Wayne movie which I bought in in 2023, a year before I bought the book, is the film version of the book. And after I finished the book and clearly after I made the connection, I popped in the videocassette.
I won’t recap the plot of the film as it does closely track with the plot of the book, although it does cut out some of the interiority of the characters, especially Hondo. In the book, he’s a rougher character at the outset. In the film, he’s John Wayne.
I will comment on some of the places where the film would have differed had it been made in the 21st century. Uh, spoilers below the fold (but no pictures of Geraldine Page, the only woman in the film):
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This is the first of the Louis L’Amour paperbacks that I picked up in Clever in June but the second overall that I’ve read this year (Last of the Breed being the first). And, you know what? It wouldn’t surprise me if I picked up another one or two before the end of the year.
This book centers on the title character, Hondo Lane, a frontiersman who spent five years living with the Apache and who has worked as a scout and a dispatch carrier for the United States Army. He has lived alone for a long time except for a mostly wild dog that accompanies him. A spot of trouble costs him his horse, and he happens upon a ranch in a valley populated by a woman and her son. Trouble is brewing with the Apaches as they’re raising all of their tribes/lodges for war after the white man breaks another treaty. He looks to buy a horse from her, and although she says her husband is away for the day, he sees that some things are falling into disrepair which indicates the husband has been gone for a long while. He fixes up the place a bit, and sparks fly between them. Hondo has to return to the fort/camp with his dispatches warning of war, though, and the woman and the boy wonder if he will return. When he gets to the fort, he encounters the husband, a gambler and all around not good guy, and gets on his bad side. The man accuses him of being a horse thief, since the horse has the man’s brand on it, but the authorities let Hondo go since he says he is returning to the ranch with the horse. Meanwhile, the Apaches approach the ranch, and they are ready to attack even though the woman reminds them they have lived in peace for so long. When the six-year-old boy fires a pistol and grazes a subchief, the big chief and the tribe are amused, so the big chief becomes a blood brother to the boy and offers his protection to the ranch. But, eventually, he says that if the woman’s husband does not return, she will have to take an Indian brave as a husband. As Hondo heads out, the husband follows him with a partner, as they hope to rob and kill him, but through the timely intervention of Apaches who also want to ambush him, Hondo kills the husband, complicating his relationship with the wife for whom he has developed feelings. One Apache escapes, and then they hunt and capture Hondo, and….
Well, all right, I don’t want to give the whole plot away–there is some more to it than that. But it’s a good book. Mid-century westerns are definitely a cut above men’s adventure fiction or modern westerns like the Gunsmith or Longarm which are basically men’s adventure novels with horses. Given that L’Amour and John D. MacDonald came up about the same time, one can see the benefits of an early 20th century education in the writing styles. Or maybe they did not have monthly deadlines. Regardless, the writing and characters have more depth; perhaps they’re built from imaginations fired by books and stories and not movies/television and comic books.
The book also presents the Indian characters, at least as personified by Vittorio, the head chief, as wise and almost heroic and has a nuanced view of the cowboys and Indians dynamic. Hondo speaks highly of the Indian way of life and that they do not have a word for “lie” in their language and so on. So it’s entirely possible that the Boomer’s parents, those squares, were more enlightened than the gave them credit for. Certainly moreso than modern “thinkers” give them credit for. And even though he has rough edges, Hondo is a hero, and not an immoral one. He does not preemptively kill people, and he does get softened with his contact with a woman.
So, yeah, you know what? I might pick up another such book before long. I do have several more, you know, right on top of the stack.
Also, note the years in the title. The book was first published in 1952 and was still in print and in racks in the drugstore in 1985. Can you imagine a writer of the last part of the 20th century or the first part of the 21st who would remain in print that long? Stephen King, I guess. Maybe some back list Koontz and whatnot. But it’s a very short list.
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I picked this book from the shelves on September 10, along with Dogs and Cats Unleashed as a palate cleanser after almost making it through a single lopsided question in the presidential debate that evening. As you might recall, gentle reader, I bought a stack of this fellow’s books at Rublecon this year and have already read his short novel Hang Me If I Stay Shoot Me If I Run and collection of poetry Loot the Bodies.
The subtitle of the book is “Poems for The Golden Girls“, so that should give you an idea of what you’re in for. The author/poet used the episodes in the seven seasons of the show with Bea Arthur as springboards/writing prompts, and this is the result. You know, I never was a fan of the show–it was on when I was in high school, when I still watched some television, but I was not the target demographic. In this part of the 21st century, for some reason it has become a cultural touchstone for members of my generation–I’ve seen Facebook images of a slightly younger cousin, her husband, and another couple dressed up as the quartet of the Golden Girls for some event or another. I mean, cosplaying the Golden Girls? Not something that even comes close to interesting me. And even though I’m watching some old series (The Streets of San Francisco and Red Dwarf, for example), I am not tempted to buy DVDs of this particular series. So perhaps I’m not the target audience for this book, either.
At any rate, the book breaks the series into its seasons and then has a poem for each episode. Most of them deal with the events of the episode and rely heavily on that knowledge of the series and the particular episode. I flagged one poem as being good standing on its own–Season 1 Episode 23 “I want to be the person I used to be”. I flagged another, Season 3 Episode 2, “I need a favor” because it kind of alludes to O. Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi”–or maybe the episode itself did the heavy lifting from American literature. Another one, Season 6 Episode 15, “Miles to go” riffs on a Frost poem (“Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening”, in case it wasn’t obvious). I get the sense that the poet kind of patterned other of his poems on different poetry styles and/or other particular poems as well. As I mentioned, it’s really a bit of poetical doodling more than a serious attempt at meaningful poetry (I hope).
HOWEVER, the poet does go out of his way several times to make clear that gun owners are bad, that people who are not fans of state-run schools are right wing nut-jobs, that Donald Trump is a bad, bad man (if not the devil), and that the series had too many jokes about communists back in the day when this was laughing defiantly in the face of what we were told was an existential threat and that we were on the verge of extinction by nuclear warfare (one wonders if the poet ever had to do an actual duck-and-cover drill in school like 80s kids did). Which is sad: Although he seemed like a pleasant guy at the con, he would dislike me if he knew I am all of those things he does not like in the abstract. Maybe he would not want me to buy his books. Maybe he won’t be the one deciding next time I see him at a con should I pass him by. And for what? Petty self-expression? Bah.
I know, I know, you’re saying, Brian J., haven’t you taken some arch and snarky little shots at political opponents over the years? Well, yes, but this is a blog which is the medium for that sort of thing. And you’ll noticed I’ve tempered those kinds of posts and whatnot over the years as the atmosphere has become rather toxic. But I’d never (I’d like to think) do it in my poetry or fiction or even personal essays, gentle reader, because I’d like to make something that appeals to many people and gives people something to reflect on in the universal human condition, not what’s on the television or Internet right now. That ages like milk in a sippy cup left in the car in August.
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Yesterday, I said something was not a poem:
The housebound, television-informed senior wanted steak,
went to order Walmart delivery
but gasped because the price was so high,
her vote for Kamala
safely in the mail.
That, gentle reader, is contemporary commentary with line breaks.
Why do I not think it’s really a poem?
It’s short, though, and might serve as filler if I were padding out a book of poetry, but probably not. It targeted to people of a certain political persuasion in an overheated environment instead of all of humanity even if it’s not derogatory to the opposition’s supporters.
So, no, not a poem. Not worth thinking about or mentioning again. Although your mileage may vary.
Spoken as a man who read part of an Ideals magazine’s Easter issue which will be forty when next Easter rolls around and then went to bed with the doors open and thought, “Ah, the smell of spring” because he was under the influence of poems about new flowers.
So your mileage and my sanity may vary.
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I got this book a week ago at the Friends of the Library book sale. Again, I am not excited about the stack of books piled on my chair side book accumulation point, so I picked a couple of short books to read as I glacially move through those books I am compelled to read (or eventually throw back into the stacks). This promised to be a quick read, and it was.
It really is nothing more than a set of Web site listicles in print; one could easily imagine this as a blog posted over the course of time with a lively comment section, but looking on the Internet does not show anything blog about it. Blogs are so 2006 (but this book is from 2009, so coming out of the blog era). It features sections on Arts & Literature, Sports & Leisure, History & Politics, Entertainment, and Science & Nature (which makes it one Geography chapter short of a lawsuit from the Trivial Pursuit people). Some of the individual face-offs include the 80s vs the 90s, summer games vs winter games, Gandhi vs Mother Theresa, Smurfs vs Care Bears, and so on. Each has a set of snarky bullet points for each side, sometimes obvious in its preference, and it has some pages where it just lists challenges for discussion. This would probably be a good book for reading aloud during road trips–and back in the day, that was the sort of thing my beautiful wife and I did. But now everyone has headphones on and a personal device leaving the driver to listen to lectures and audiobooks unless driving on the narrow roads in Arkansas.
Some of the challenges have aged poorly and might seem in poor taste, but then again in 2009 contenders like Amy Winehouse and Eddie Van Halen were alive then. And the author doesn’t inject politics too much, although the contenders for Worst President are Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush (boy, do we have some new entrants for you). Does Donald Trump make an appearance? Oh, boy, mister, you bet he does: but as it is before his political career as the devil, it’s in the category of Balding vs Extreme Anti-Balding Measures.
Still, a quick and amusing read and perhaps worthwhile for a road trip if you can get your family from under the hood.
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The housebound, television-informed senior wanted steak,
went to order Walmart delivery
but gasped because the price was so high,
her vote for Kamala
safely in the mail.
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This would be Millay’s first book of poetry; she won a contest for her poem “Renascence” which brought her to the big city (New York) and let her be the phenomenon that she would become, both as a poet and as a young woman having experiences that would lead her to be the Taylor Swift of the Twenties. Well, not that much, but it did put her on track to professional poetry.
The book starts out with a couple of long poems, “Renascence”, “Interim”, and “The Suicide” which are heavily influenced by the long lyrics of the Romantic poets except that they have meter and rhyme. They’re not her best work, of course; I am partial to the sonnets, of course. This book contains “Bluebeard”, a sonnet that influenced me such that I wrote a dramatic monologue when I was in college with a similar theme (a lover pries into her hidden spaces and learns that she has fled him; in my monologue, a lover wants to know what is held in her lover’s closed hand only to discover it contains nothing, but that little bit of closing the hand kept a part of the speaker independent).
So I’ve read the book before, and I already have a copy (although a later edition from 1924). But I really was due to read it again, and buying this copy for only $2.00 gave me just the excuse I needed. As I mentioned, the book sale earlier this month had a number of Millay’s works, so I likely will be revisiting a number of her works in the near term. And by consolidating the previous owner’s collection with mine, I might well have the best collection of Millay in Springfield, if not Missouri.
This particular version has a previous owner’s name inside the cover: Priscilla Metcalf Glendora, 1930. The title page indicates it might have been a gift–I think it says Priscilla from with an illegible name following. However, the book is also stamped (former) property of Nathaniel Hawthorne College in Antrim, New Hampshire, which has a brief but interesting history–which begins with the college’s founding in 1962. So the book must have been donated or bought as part of a collection and hung out in the library there until maybe 1988 when the college closed its doors. How would it have gotten to Springfield? Well, Ebay or something. After all, a collector has got to have the first book by the author, ainna? And this is a nice edition with cloth pages. A fourth edition to go along with my sixth edition. I’ve taken a moment to look at Ebay to see what first editions run for, and they’re not terrible, but I probably won’t be shopping for them soon.
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Not to get all recycler tour on you, but apparently on September 24, 2009, I said on Facebook, “Brian J. Noggle fears that, if they discover that he laughs at Larry the Cable Guy movies, Marquette will take away his philosophy degree.” Which is funny in itself: Looking at the list of his credits on IMDB, I’m trying to think what Larry the Cable Guy film I saw fifteen years ago. Witless Protection? Delta Farce? Or this very film? So I laughed that long time ago, but I have forgotten what I was laughing at. It must have been on the DVR in that period right after I moved, or I have lost it in the media library. Or I was referring to a stand-up special instead of a movie.
Alright, alright, alright, what do we have here? Larry plays a loose cannon health inspector who knows all the restaurant owners in his city or territory, but his boss, played by Biff from the Back to the Future movies, wants him out. So he, the boss, pairs Larry with a straight-arrow young woman played by Iris Bahr. Together, they investigate a series of incidents at better restaurants where diners are getting sick–and Larry himself falls prey to an intestinal disorder while on a date with a pretty waitress played by Megyn Price. Which seems to point to someone eliminating rivals from the city’s Top Chef competition.
I don’t know if I laughed out loud at anything here. I mean, it’s got the standard potty humor and running gags, like Larry using inappropriate idioms with a colleague in a wheelchair or referring to his partner, who wears her hair in a tight bun and wears pants suits, as a boy. The film is amusing in spots, especially if you’re a fan of the Blue Collar Comedy tours. Which I’ve seen but before I was wasting your time with twee comments on every thing I watch. It’s no comedy classic, though, so not to be remembered fondly or culturally. If I remember it all in fifteen years.
And, sadly, it hasn’t led to any Megyn Price versus Iris Bahr or Jane versus Butlin arguments on the Internet even though it was released at the height of the blogging world.
Continue reading “Movie Report: Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector (2006)”
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I mentioned that I inherited a console stereo from my aunt who passed away in 2019 and that I took delivery of the stereo courtesy my brother and nephew in December of that year. When it came, it had a known issue of the turntable not working, and I placed it on my list of someday: I would talk to the guys at the local record store and get their recommended repairman out to fix it or start taking it apart myself to figure out what was wrong. Someday.
Well, that someday became now because once my moose of an oldest son and I lift this stereo onto the record shelf that will go under it. The other record shelves from the Labor Day weekend are already holding records in the parlor; however, when sizing the shelf to go under the stereo, I go the width/length of the console correct, but I did not factor in the depth of the unit. the shelf is 13″ deep and the console is 18″ deep. So I constructed a couple of little “wings” to go under the ends of the stereo. I built them that they can hold records, without the backing I usually put on the units as this might just end up being a tunnel for cats. I screwed the two-by-fours together over the weekend, but this was apparently an Ozarks rain dance, so I have not yet been able to paint them.
The delay, though, has given me time to consider the problem of the turntable. So I watched a couple of YouTube videos on console stereo turntable repair and started my troubleshooting by popping one of the hillbilly gospel records I got in the grab bag gift I received in May. It kind of picked up some sound but not clearly, but the sound was strong. So I looked closely at the needle and cartridge and–wait a minute, this arm does not appear to actually have a needle.
So I went to TurntableNeedles.com and found what I hoped I needed (I was going on the console model number, which they do not recommend because someone might have replaced the cartridge which holds the needle which would mean the needle won’t match the console spec). I ordered it, waited for eleven days for the first class envelope to arrive, and then….
In two minutes, I popped out the old needle assembly which did, indeed, lack a stylus and popped in the new needle, and….
Hillybilly gospel loud and in the deep, rich low sound of an old console stereo.
I speculate that console stereos have that deep, rich sound because they were optimized for the lower end frequencies that AM radio preferred (or so I learned from Jean Shepherd’s Pomp and Circumstance on a show where he talked about the different microphones and why they changed–FM handles higher frequencies better, which might be one of the reasons vocal styles changed from low crooners in the AM days to higher pop music singers when FM became more prevalent).
So it took me five years to spend the two minutes to fix it. Which is about what one would expect from me.
I played a couple of records which sounded good, but about the third or fourth, they began to get stuck. Maybe I have the needle on the wrong side (it’s a needle you can turn for different reasons, one of which I presume is to better work with 78rpm records). Or perhaps I just need to tape a penny on the arm. Time will tell. And, to be honest, it might take another five years to get around to it. Otherwise, I will have to rearrange the living room to better support spending more time in there reading.
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All right, you know what did trigger anemoia (nostalgia for something you did not experience)? This Ethan Allen catalog/look book which I bought at the Senior Center in July. I was not clear when I bought it whether it was something for collectors or a catalog, but it’s definitely a catalog. It has some bits about how great Ethan Allen stores are and how great the quality of the furniture (solid oak and select veneers, so….). The stores not only handled furniture and accents/accessories but also window treatments and floor coverings/carpets so it was a one-stop shop for when you were decorating, as it had experts on hand to help you design and decorate a room or a home from scratch.
The catalog is grouped into the different collections, from olden opulent styles like the Georgian Court to a more modern look called Heirloom which looked to be a little less expensive (and Antiqued Pine which was probably the most, erm, economical). I rather enjoyed the more elaborate styles, of course, but would have been most likely to have seen the lower end things. If I ever saw any Ethan Allen furniture in the wild, it would most likely have been those latter things. Our homes would have been decorated in garage sale chic and later inherited antiques. Heck, even my rich aunt and uncle were only aspirants to upper middle class in my youth. Maybe they later would have gotten some Ethan Allen things. I see the chain is still in business, and there’s a location in the Mid Rivers Mall area near where they lived after St. Charles.
But: The thing that really stirred my interest and nostalgia was the patterns and the colors on the walls. Wallpapers, not paneling, and oversized window treatments. Floral print upholstery. Which is not what we’ve had much of in our three homes and certainly not in Old Trees or Nogglestead. We’ve had homes where the only window treatments were blinds–at Nogglestead, the living room, parlor, dining room, hall baths, and both offices still have the blinds we inherited from the previous owners fifteen years ago–and as the ones in the parlor, dining room, and living room are paper and have been subject recently to kittens chewing the cords, they’re falling into disrepair. And the walls in both the home in Old Trees and at Nogglestead have, for the most part, remained an off-white or beige color–the neutrals that are designed to help sell a home. I mean, we have painted a couple of rooms a different color or added an accent wall, but the only texture we’ve had on the walls (aside from the knock-down cover-the-wall-defects-without-sanding treatment which is then painted all one color) is the rag-rolled blues in my office at Casinoport. And aside from a couch which my then-beautiful-girlfriend bought as she was moving to St. Louis, most of our furniture has been of a single color or solid. Heck, even our throw pillows have been mostly a single color (accoutrements with Green Bay Packers logos excepted, of course). Boring!
At Nogglestead, we’ve accumulated keepsakes and personal relics to build a layered look on mantels and whatnot, and the books jammed into their bookshelves provide a texture of sorts, but I’m wondering if a wallpaper or paneling might not make the lower level of Nogglestead more to my taste. Probably! Although my wife does not like the look of wallpaper. And have you noticed the talk of decorating has lead me to overusing exclamation points? Well, it has! As I am getting older, I am starting to really dial into the look of a home I want–but we’re not in a position to make our vision come to life–partially financially, but also partially because the “we” and “our” differs and defers to the taste of the Mrs. And to the taste of the previous Nogglestead owners.
At any rate, I read the text introducing each section of the catalog, the descriptions of the various rooms and the very palely purple prose praising the collections (but I did not read the details of each particular item found in the rooms or in groups of furniture types such as end tables or occasional tables). Forty-five years ago (probably forty-six), someone made a living writing copy for catalogs (I’ve known a few people who did that while working on their literary works–::cough cough:: Leah Holbrook). I felt a little bad for someone like that whose work was generally transient. So I read this unnamed author’s works.
I also flagged a couple of things:
Also, I looked at the back, which had a stamp of the local Ethan Allen gallery:
I had to look up the actual location to see if I could place it, and I most assuredly can: It was located in the building that now houses the Ozark Treasures antique mall. I asked my wife if she knew where it was, and she did; apparently, the store remained open until after she moved to the Springfield area, although that was less than a decade after this catalog came out. It’s unclear from the Internet when it actually closed; in 1998, it moved from this location to a former movie theatre in the mall which by 2017 was a large thrift store which closed a couple years later. I don’t remember if it was in the mall when my toddlers and I wandered through it when our car was getting serviced in a service center in the out lot, but I am not sure. So it’s possible I might have passed by such a store and never stopped in. But, to be honest, I have enough furniture with select veneers that a couple years of children and kittens have begun to peel.
The next dilemma: Do I enter this catalog into the book database I have? I mean, I have counted it as a book I read this year (currently at 69, but I am not stopping for the puerile humor of the total). But I have not counted the Ideals magazines I have read nor have I entered them into the book database (but the hardback Ideals book Houses of Worship? You bet!). So what to do? What to do? Since I am likely to crack the 25-year-old database program open and wait through its overtaxed type-ahead feature for books I have yet to review, maybe so!
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A week ago last Friday, I received an unexpected FedEx package. The contents reeked of scam.
A genealogy researcher–actually, one of a whole firm of them–found someone who just filed for probate on behalf of the estate of a distant, up-and-down the removed generations of my family tree, relative and offered to retain an attorney to place a claim on the estate as an unknown heir.
I asked my brother if he received one, as he should if it had any chance of legitimacy. He did not; I posted on the work Slack that I was pleased that some grifter thought I was a big enough whale to try to impress me with a FedEx.
A little while later, my brother reported that he, too, received one, and he called the number. My brother told me that the story was that the person died without a will and without any close relatives, and if recipients did not put in a claim, that the money would go to the state. That’s what my brother said, anyway, so I started to dream a bit, a little more than I do with lottery tickets. Even a small windfall would come in handy at Nogglestead these days as major household systems need repair or replacement–a roofing inspector from our preferred roofing company came out to look at our single skylight, and his recommendation was to pray for hail storms this spring. So I thought maybe we could replace that, and perhaps the deck…. But when I actually read the letter I received, the story my brother told did not match the letter.
But: I did a little research of my own, and discovered:
So: The “investigator”‘s cut is a third, minus the fees for the Missouri attorney that he has to hire (and anything shared between the attorney and the “investigator” such as a finder’s fee) of whatever settlement is made. Given there is a will, they might be angling for a “go away” settlement of some sort, where the estate is big enough that the executors/personal representatives can carve out some cash that is less than actually fighting the claim in court. To be shared amongst all claimants who received FedEx envelopes and signed on. So they might get a coupon for their next spurious claim for free at the end of the day. Illegal? Probably not. Sketchy? Eh….
I, on the other hand, cannot in good conscience lay claim as the deceased had at least one direct cousin, and a will, and the “investigator” got the pronoun wrong and might have misled my brother on the phone. Also, I am skeptical and suspicious, probably too much so.
On another limb since I’ve already used both hands, my brother has triggered the process (or is one of many of our other cousins twice or three times removed who have). So it’s entirely possible that in a couple of months, my brother might not only have a 25-acre homestead but a million dollars or two. At which point, I will really have to ask myself if I’m playing this game right.
And I wonder how I would react if my brother’s portion of a settlement is indeed sizable. How high would my price be? Where would my chest-thumped integrity go then?
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I mentioned when I watched The Other Guys that I might have conflated the two films. And I had in my head that I wanted to watch this film. So I picked it up recently (undocumented on this blog, so probably the beginning of August when I was Christmas shopping). And a little ways into it, I thought I’ve seen this film before. As it’s not documented on this blog and not in the video library, I presume I rented it from video store six or seven years ago. And I’d forgotten it.
The film is nominally set in 1977, but it did not trigger any anemoia in me as the depth of the representation was pretty superficial. Ryan Gosling plays an alcoholic PI of dubious morals and utility who has been hired to track down a girl named Amelia. Russel Crowe plays a thug for hire whom Amelia hires to get the PI off of her back–which he gets via thuggery. But other thugs waylay Crowe’s Healy, so he thinks Amelia might be in real danger. So they team up, and some set pieces, and….
Well, you know, the whole thing is ultimately forgettable. The film is set in the late 1970s, but really doesn’t capture the time. It does allow them to put o on the end of porno and feature a plot that revolves around Detroit automakers working with corrupt government officials from the Department of Justice (?) to prevent catalytic converters from being mandated, and the daughter of a government official (Amelia!) makes a combination porno film that exposes the collusion and corruption. But people related to the film start dying, and….
Well, don’t think too much about it. Enjoy Gosling and Crowe having a good time.
And, if you’re like me, forget the whole thing and enjoy it again later.
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World’s only ‘book shop Airbnb’ has two-year waiting list – and you need to work:
Welcome to the world’s only ‘bookshop Airbnb’ where guests can spend the night and run the store during the day. The Open Book, a quaint bookshop with a flat above, allows people to sleep upstairs and sell books downstairs.
Located in Wigtown – Scotland’s National Book Town – it offers book enthusiasts the opportunity to ”live their dream” of owning their own seaside shop. According to Airbnb, it is ”the first ever bookshop holiday residency experience” and has garnered such popularity that it has a two-year waiting list from guests worldwide.
. . . . “Booked through Airbnb, paying guests live in the self-catering apartment upstairs and run the bookshop below it for the duration of their stay.
“During their stay, guests are free to change displays, price books, re-categorise them, and make inventive use of the blackboard that entices visitors in to browse or chat.”
“Some guests are happy to quietly run the bookshop, while others come with firmer plans and creative ideas! Bibliophiles, avid readers, kindred book lovers and adventure seekers from around the world come to Wigtown to experience the life of a second-hand bookshop owner in a remote Scottish town.
Presumably this is all possible because the book sales are not the actual profit center here. It sounds as though proceeds of actual book sales or portion thereof are donated to charity.
Still, a clever idea. Better than opening a secondhand bookshop in the 21st century. And given my abilities in running finances, I am inclined to make that big mistake. I should consider a location where I could have an AirBnB with it as well.
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