Is That The Name Of The Song Or The Band?

I thought that kind of sounds like Ghost, but what album is “Archetypes Collide” on?

Oh: Archetypes Collide is the name of the band. “Ghost” is the name of the song.

It’s not just a mental exercise (also); it’s also an actual source of confusion for me sometimes.

Speaking of Archetypes Colliding, I might have to pick up their autographed CD since it’s only ten bucks.

Maybe when I get a job.

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But I Have Another Idea….

I might have mentioned that I’ve predeterminedly named our next two kittens Jack Dawkins, the Artful Dodger, and Oliver Twist (even though they won’t be the kittens pictured in that post).

However: At our church picnic this weekend, we had a trivia “night” in the afternoon (which we, the North Side Mind Flayers, won, of course, but as I explained to my youngest, “We don’t gloat; we just win.”). One of the categories was Entertainment, and as I am the court jester (and not much of the court answerer these days), I said, “Existentialism? I AM ON IT!” Ah, but we never have a Philosophy category (although we always have a Disney category, which we won somehow, and a Sports category, where we held our own after many years of humiliation on it).

But, in the gag, suddenly, the next kitten name came to me (well, suddenly, today): Meowsault, L’Étranger.

You might laugh now and say, “Ah, but Brian J., you’re topped up on cats these days.”

So it might be.

But when I was thinking about getting a cat thirty years ago, I favored the name Machiavelli which I thought I would shorten to “Mach.” Now, I know him as Nico.

And I later quipped that “Meow’Dib” would be a good name for a cat…. And here we are.

So perhaps in a decade or so we will be onto Dodge, Twist, Meowsault, and maybe some of the Lovecraftian cat names.

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Book Report: Walden and Other Writings by Henry David Thoreau (1989)

Book coverAh, gentle reader, I won’t be taking the crown from Joe Kenney for the longest time between getting a book and reading it since I only got this book probably 31 or 32 years ago whilst in college and when I had a class for which I had to read Walden (although I cannot remember exactly which class that would have been–a philosophy class? A middle American literature class?). So I would have bought this at Waldenbooks (which would have been meta, would it not?) or B. Dalton’s at the Northridge mall (and not the university bookstore where it would have been for a few dollars more). So I read Walden in it and I started A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers judging by the era-appropriate bookmark, but since I just read The Maine Woods / Walden / Cape Cod, I figured I might as well knock out this book as well. Originally, I’d thought that I’d pulled it from my read shelves when I tried to encourage my son or sons to read this book, but it is not in my read book database, so perhaps it has been on my to-read shelves for these thirty years.

At any rate, it contains a couple of things which I had not read before, including A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers which Thoreau self-published. He had 1000 copies printed in the days way before print on demand, and he did not sell them all–this is the book about which he quipped about having a library of over 1000 books, 700 of which he wrote himself. It chronicles, in Thoreau’s fashion which means several years after the fact cherry-picking some bits from his journals and inserting some philosophy in them. It describes, theoretically, a boat trip he and his brother made down the local river to the port on the ocean (I was going to say sea, but can one ever pair those two in prepositional phrases again?), but it’s laden with his philosophical asides. I can see it as a precursor to Walden where he blends to two better. It’s not too long, though, and it was what Thoreau wanted to publish unlike posthumous works which were culled from his journals and not pored over or refined by Thoreau himself.

The book also contains, in addition to Walden (which I did not read in this volume this time, but I read it in this book in college and I read it in the other volume earlier this year, so no double-dipping), “On Civil Disobedience” and “Life Without Principle” as well as excerpts from The Maine Woods, Cape Code, and Thoreau’s journals. I read the essays and the excerpts from the journals, but not the excerpts from the things I’d already read.

So: “Civil Disobedience” is his diatribe against an overarching government that takes from citizens to do things that are not in their interests. Based on a single night he spent in jail for not paying a tax that supported the Mexican-American War (although his refusal to pay the tax was longer than the war itself), it really only documents that one night in a couple of pages near the end. The rest of it is pretty free-wheeling anti-government abolitionist almost stream of consciousness.

“Life Without Principle” is described as a talk or lecture he gave on several occasions but only was published the year after his death. I guess it sums up his philosophy as succinctly as possible where Walden did not. Basically, it’s about living life according to the individual’s needs, according to nature, and with minimal interference from government and society. It denigrates people who, getting and spending, lay waste their hours (to be honest, it does read a bit like Wordsworth themeatically) by actually earning a living and making money–which would provide for families, a problem Thoreau didn’t have, of course. He argues against many contemporaries and their tracts/books, but all the names are unfamiliar to us now (and given this is 2025 and not 1993, perhaps the name Thoreau is lost to most)

And the entries from Thoreau’s journal are a couple of paragraphs each, some nice little poetic moments capturing a bit of nature with the flair and philosophizing that is Thoreau at his best and are mercifully briefer than The Maine Woods.

So, now, at the end, what do I think of Thoreau?

As I have mentioned (I think), I can see why he hit differently in the mid-to-late 20th century, when the Baby Boomers were coming up through the college ranks. Thoreau was a Harvard man himself who never really grew up–he did not really have to work for a living nor support a family, so he was enabled to live the “life of the mind” and continue his concordance with nature up until his early death in his early 40s. His themes of non-conformance and the loss of the wild areas (which would have also, been metaphorically, youth to professors who did end up with families to support by professing) aligned with that fin-de-middle-siecle sense of the 1960s turning into the 1970s turning into the 1980s which would have been the lives my professors had known.

But aside from Walden, Thoreau is…. meh. “Civil Disobedience” wanders a bunch as does “Life Without Principle”. We get that Thoreau didn’t like the Mexican-American War. Or slavery. Or the Irish. Or most human development. And the other books and presumably the journals are really just fairly wordy catalogs of daily experience in great detail with some flourishes of interest but mostly just lists of flowers and trees seen in the wild.

So I won’t be getting the complete journals any time soon (unless they’re at the Clever branch of the Christian County Library later this month on bag day).

Ah, but Brian J., you might say. Are you not just slagging on Thoreau as a man-boy who never grew up and had to “adult” as the kids say these days who play-acted at living off the land but really just wanted to make a living from the “life of the mind” by writing his own ill-informed, twee sentiments and lightweight experiences as though they were profound, and that pretty much describes you with a blog twenty-two years on now? A fair cop, gentle reader. Perhaps even true: What I least like about Thoreau might be what I fear I share in common with him. But I’m not boring in detail of flora and fauna. I’m too dull to even know what those birds are in the tree in my back yard that seranade me evenings when I am in the pool. So I don’t even rise to the worst of Thoreau. Thanks for asking.

Oh, and lest I fail to mention it, this book provided me a Found Bookmark of my own. Stuck in the middle of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, I found an index card with three names on it and the words, “Dues From.” This would have been my senior year, ainna, when I was the treasure of Marquette Writers Ink, the writing club at the university. One of the names is a girl (woman, I guess, but a young woman) who might have had a crush on me that I never suspected until the president of the club asked me if there was something going on, as she always came to me first at any event or gathering. Strangely enough, she’s the only one I’m nominally connected to as she showed up as a suggestion on LinkedIn some years ago, and I connected with her–she’s a copywrighter in Minnesota these days. Another, I had been thinking of because he would have been the only Indian-American I knew at the time, thirty-some years ago. Over at a blog I read, commenters disparagingly refer to Indians especially in the ever-growing number in the tech industry as Jeets, as this guy actually went by Jeet. He was at least second generation, though, as he had no accent. And he was a poet in English. I cyber-stalked him and found that he might be living in St. Louis these days. It didn’t catch me by surprise–so I might have looked him up before. I wonder if we overlapped there. I feel bad for JenBen, though, the other woman whose name is on the card: I don’t really think of her at all.

And: I have to say that this might not be the last of my collegiate acquisitions that I read. So I might read the book I picked up on the Chinese tradition of Buddhism sometime. I might actually finish George Steiner’s Real Presences, a textbook for Dr. Block’s class, on my third attempt (the last being about a decade ago). So I might very well have more Personal Records in laziness in reading books I buy to set yet.

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Sleep Tight, America

Kim du Toit pointed to a PJMedia story covering something I read about perhaps elsewhere last week: Cargo Ship Carrying 3,000 Vehicles, Including 800 EVs, Burning Out of Control Off the Coast of Alaska

One of the Ace of Spades HQ co-bloggers–I think it’s Buck Throckmorton–regularly publishes stories not only arguing that EVs are a business boondoggle but also dangerous, and he highlights stories of cargo ships catching fire and parking garages catching fire and what a calamity these isolated instances are.

And then I, of course, remember the Israeli pager escapade (Operation Grim Beeper), where the Israelis had spent a decade or so infiltrating walkie-talkies laden with explosives and then pagers laden with explosives into its enemy’s communications network and then set them off to best effect. With but mere explosives.

Now: Look around you at the number of lithium-ion rechargeable batteries in your house or in your garage. Laptops. Power tools. Rechargeable gadgets. How many of those batteries were made in a nation whose interests run counter to our nation’s? What would happen if they had a trigger circuit that caused an overload and all of them, nationwide, burst into flames?

We were discussing this a bit on the way to the church picnic yesterday. Also, in the event of an imminent attack, would it be preferable for protective EMP detonations to only fry all electronics nationwide without damn near every building burning down as well?

Oh, the things I think about when not reading lurid paperbacks for escape.

UPDATE: It is Buck Throckmorton, and he posted about this drifting inferno this morning after my post appeared.

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Book Report: A Dickens of a Cat and Other Stories of Cats We Love edited by Callie Smith Grant (2007)

Book coverI mentioned, gentle reader, that I’d started reading a book about cats on the aborted vacation last month, and this is that book. Apparently, I got it at Redeemed Books over on Republic Road in 2021, and that might have been the last time I was in that store. I’ve even been not going to ABC Books that much these days, which is definitely atypical. But I am getting pretty topped up on books with nowhere to go with new arrivals but the floor or the tops of the shelves in my office where they’re already blocking the cool bladed weapons and are getting a little precarious, where an exploring cat will likely knock a stack of them to the floor. So maybe I should be building the stacks on the floor so that the books atop the have less far to fall. But that is neither here nor there.

At any rate, this is a collection of stories about people adopting or finding cats. Given that it’s from Revell Publishing, it has just a blush of Christianity to it, with several of the writers mentioning God (but not Jesus). All of the stories have happy endings, especially the kittens-gone-missing stories. And most of them are anachronistic–although they don’t all talk about the eras in which the stories occurred, those that do mention it having been in the mid-20th century.

So: Well, you’re not going to get the “couple paragraphs of analysis” twee insights that I reserve for, say, Thoreau. But it was a pleasant read and almost led me to adopting a couple other rescue kittens. If you like cats and reading about cats, you’ll like the book. But it’s not as deep as Willie Morris or (probably) Cleveland Amory might try to be.

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It Never Works On Pedants

A “unpaid toll” scam text came in yesterday:

You know, it has been several weeks since I last pointed out that Missouri does not have a Department of Motor Vehicles. Nor toll booths.

The “North Missouri” statutes indicates that the Philippines-numbered scammer has not done much research into the continental United States. But, really, how much effort do you want to put into a broadcast like this?

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As I Was Sayin’

Earlier this week, Wirecutter shared this meme:

I’ve been saying it since at least 2018.

Scandinavian Teens Circa 1965:

But look at them. They look so much older than that. I figure they’ve got these things going for them to make them look older:

* They’re dressed like adults, unlike twenty year olds from today.
* They’re dressed like our grandparents looked (or your great grandparents if you’re under 20) in old photographs.
* They’re Europeans, who tend to look older than Americans anyway.
* Also, they’re not twenty year olds from today, who tend to look younger than their counterparts ha’centuries ago. This is not just dress (See the first bullet point above), but also in skin and general health. Better nutrition, I guess.

They Don’t Look So Young, But… (2021):

Those girls are, what, two years older than my oldest? But they look so much older. Partially probably because it’s black and white and partially because they’re wearing the clothing that my mother wore in some of her pictures, and my mother was old to me when I was young and my mother was younger than I am.

But, wait, look closely at the faces.

Ah, yes, now I can see teenagers in those old people clothes.

A Family Photo From The Paper’s Archives, Or Something Else? (2022):

It’s not actually a family photo; it is a picture of winners of the electrical co-operative’s essay winners.

Which probably means that they’re in high school.

The photo is undated, but I’m guessing early 1960s.

But none of my posts summed it up as succinctly as the meme. Although it looks as though it might have had an additional filter applied with the updated hair style.

Now, about the updated hair style: That’s pretty undated, ainna? Unless you’re a hair dresser or are really, really attuned to hair (i.e., you’re a certain type of woman), that hair style could just about be from anywhere past the late 1970s, ainna? I mean, not the tip of the spearmint of fashion, but you could imagine a woman wearing it anywhere in the last fifty years, ainna? It’s not the big hair of the 1980s, but not every girl wore that. Styles have kind of blurred and come around again in a way that they really didn’t from the 1960s. Heck, even the male mushroom head short on the sides and mop on top from the late 1990s came around a couple years ago–my son wore his hair that way for a while before deciding on a proper curl ‘fro which could have also come from the era.

What’s my point? I guess the meme reflects what I’ve said before. I dunno. I just have to waste a lot of words on it because I pay myself by the word and because longer posts cost money-losing AI companies more to train their LLMs on my copyrighted material. And if I’m not getting paid for it, I’m going to make them pay for it.

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Small Women Superheroes of the 21st Century

As this is the Internet, allow me to offer a counterpoint.

Some critics indicate that movies and television shows are rife with tiny women defeating large men in unarmed combat.

As someone who grew up in an era before the Internet and YouTube hot take videos of little but ephemeral and evanescent value (that is, none), I remember how superheroines looked in the 1970s.

Modern superheroines, while smaller than men, look like the 1976 East Germany Shotput team compared to the underfed and probably two-pack-a-day-plus-cocaine actresses of the 1970s.

Modern superheroines, for the most part, sport a far healthier and athletic look, by the way.

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Book Report: Westward the Tide by Louis L’Amour (1977, 1981)

Book coverI was thinking that I was tearing through these Louis L’Amour books that I bought a year ago in Clever (watch for the Good Book Hunting post for this branch’s book sale later this month!), but I guess I’ve only read three others: Hondo in September; Silver Canyon in October; and The Man from Skibbereen last month. Although four books by the same author in six months is, at the Nogglestead pace, tearing through.

In this book, a scout/gunslinger type, Matt Bardoul, sees the girl of his dreams in Deadwood, South Dakota. Her father is bringing her along on a wagon train planning to start a new town by Big Horn mountain where gold might have been discovered, but Bardoul has his doubts as other power brokers in the proposed trip are amassing a group of desperadoes, and Bardoul thinks that they’re up to something, perhaps killing and looting the wagon train when it’s out of the reach of civilization. Some events back this up, and then….

Well, the narrative differs from the other books for sure. L’Amour builds up some characters and develops some cross-purposes, but about two-thirds through the book, Bardoul is left for dead, and then he pursues the wagon train which has been completely hijacked by the bad guys, and he finds those developed characters and allies dead along the trail which seems an abrupt end to them. We get Bardoul’s dogged pursuit even after greivous wounds that would have left him dead or unable to operate but for his being the main character in a men’s adventure novel. We get a couple page monologue from an Indian decrying the white man that has no real purpose in the story. And…. Well, finis, eventually.

You know, I was probably influenced by the whole The World’s Best Selling Frontier Storyteller, the commercials for the book club back in the day, and A Trail of Memories: The Quotations of Louis L’Amour, and the fact that I started reading L’Amour with stronger titles (The Last of the Breed and Bendigo Shafter) which were heavily quoted in A Trail of Memories. But these books were just men’s adventure books set in the West, and L’Amour a talented workman, but he was churning them out at a great pace probably at least partially dictated by contractual obligations. So they’re all not going to be the pick of the litter. And this one is not.

Still, I might not seek out additional titles from what I already have accumulated. Aw, who am I kidding? If it’s bag day, they’re going in the bag.

Also, a housekeeping note: Although originally a paperback, this is in the library binding (it, too, a discard from the Nixa High School library thirty-some years ago). So it goes on the shelves with my hardbacks, not my mass market paperback read shelves. Which is good, as these last are now overflowing. Which, hopefully, will induce me to read more hardbacks or trade paperbacks amongst the cheap genre fiction.

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She Called My Bluff, And I Folded

So, to make a short story long: One of the kids at the dojo was collecting pet stuff for a local animal rescue as his Eagle Scout project, and I donated many cans of moist cat food which we had on hand back when we fed Roark moist cat food because he had bad teeth and only seemed to get sustenance from licking the gravy; he passed away in 2023, but the cans of food were good through July of this year, so they would go to good use.

I guess June is pet rescue month or something because KY3 has been running stories about local rescue organizations, and when I saw the one to which I’d indirectly donated, I clicked through to its Web site and its associated Purina Petfinder site–jeez, Petfinder has been around for twenty years now–it was coming online when I was leaving my position with the digital marketing agency which handled some NPPC accounts but did not get the Petfinder gig.

So I clicked through, and I saw a black kitten:

I posted on Facebook that no one should let my beautiful wife see a picture of this kitten. Which is a little facetious, as she is the one insisting we’re topped up on cats at the moment whereas I, reading a book about people getting kittens and cats, think it might be amusing to have kittens again.

I even started testing names for the guy. I started with Dickens because that’s in the title of the book I’m reading.

Last night, in a weak moment, she said, “I call your bluff,” basically giving me permission to get that cat.

So I hit the rescue agency’s Petfinder again, and I looked for a kitten pal for him, and saw an orange tabby kitten:

As we just had conversations about orange tabbies being mostly males. And because it would be best probably to have a pair of kittens who could romp in the office during the integration period. And just in case it was permanent.

But then I looked at the process for adopting the kittens, and I thought, Oh, it’s one of those rescues.

It starts with an application, and then includes a house visit to see if your house is right for the kitten, and has a codicil that if you ever divest yourself of the cat, you need to return it to the same rescue, and…. Well, undoubtedly, a contract with lots of fine print.

You know, back in our Casinoport days, not long after we married, we looked at various rescue organizations to get a dog (these were pre-Petfinder days), and we contacted a rescue organization for golden retrievers, and someone from the organization brought Mallory, an adult dog with some health issue or another, to our house and shared the contract with us. I looked it over, and the fine print (it was all fine print) included exorbitant penalties–$1,000 for not telling them the dog died six years after adoption, for example–and despite this contract, we wanted to adopt Mallory, but the organization had already promised her to another family even when they brought her over to our house, so we could not. But, wait! A while later, they indicated the other family had balked, so we could have Mallory and her various codicils and addenda. We declined.

So, yeah, no.

The strays we take in don’t require an attorney to review the paperwork, so I guess we’ll wait for another cat to show up. And one will.

Which is a shame: The Artful Dodger and Twist would have been excellent names for this pair.

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Book Report: A Collection of Poems and Stories by Jack Buck (2001)

Book coverAs I just read a volume of poetry by early 20th century radio man Bud Rainey (Jes’ Dreamin’), I thought about this book in 2008 when it was relatively fresh. And lost it in the stacks. But, coincidentally, it was also in the same section of the shelf from which I grabbed a stack of unrelated books so that I would have a wide selection of books to read on vacation (as with Homicide Near Hillsboro). These two books represent the only books I read on vacation, actually, although I started a couple more.

So: Well, it is a collection of Jack Buck’s poems and not short stories but rather a couple of anecdotes from the early part of his broadcasting career, many of which are a little more boozy or slightly salacious than one would expect from someone who was by the time the book came out an elder statesman of broadcasting (who decries trash radio in an address included in this book). The book itself is a fundraiser for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation–apparently, Buck had a relationship with a fan suffering from the disease–and the book also includes an address given when he received an award from the foundation. In his addresses, he gives a little boilerplate politicking about being in favor of schools and also in favor of the government subsidies for Busch Stadium III (which was still in the negotiating stages at the time, as though the Cardinals would really move to Illinois). I see the state and the city of Kansas City are going through the same thing for the Royals now, but moving to Kansas City, Kansas, or Overland Park is not as big of a divider as moving to Illinois would be. So when it comes up again in a couple of years for the Cardinals again, call their bluff.

Eh. What about the poetry? Kinda like grandma poetry, but without God for the most part and with a more modern sensibility: shorter lines, less rhythm, and lesser vocabulary. I mean, I’m not knocking it; the guy was writing poetry, but it wasn’t as good as even the Rainey, but it was a way of expressing one’s self in a semi-disciplined fashion.

Full disclosure: In 2001, Jack Buck read one of his poems at the first Cardinals game (in Busch II) after the attacks on September 11. I was in the stands for it along with a couple of friends from Wisconsin who came to visit and helped me get a better sense of return to normalcy. That poem is not in the book which presumably came out earlier in the year. But St. Louis indulged Jack Buck his poetry because he was Jack Buck, not because the poetry was particularly compelling. But he was of maybe the last generation (or maybe it was early Boomers) who wrote poetry just because. And I don’t see the self-conscious efforts like the ones in the Springfield News-Leader‘s Poetry from Daily Life will change that much. But good on ’em for trying.

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“I Didn’t Pick These At Random,” I Told The Guy At The Music Store….

“I have eclectic music tastes. And a gift card to use.”

On Wednesday, as part of our comebackation, we ran some errands. Basically, the youngest needed new shoes, and the Entertainmart is just down the road a couple of shopping centers. My beautiful wife got me a gift card for our anniversary much like she got me one at Vintage Stock for Valentine’s Day. As I’m accumulating quite a backlog of movies to watch based on the Valentine’s Day gift card and recent estate sale purchases, I was not eager to buy more films.

So I got some CDs.

I’d kind of hoped to get some jazz CDs, but the sections in their small music offerings were not clearly labeled, and I think the jazz was mixed in with the pop. And although this is not a proper Musical Balance post, it does kind of track with the metal and songbirds bit.

I got:

  • Drops of Jupiter by Train.
  • All My Tomorrows by Grover Washington, Jr. I have a lot of his records on vinyl; this is my first CD.
  • “The End of Heartache” by Killswitch Engage. The joke’s on me; this is a single from the Resident Evil: Apocalypse soundtrack, but it was priced like a full album.
  • The Lightness of Being, a 3 disc set of ambient lounge and chill out tracks. Only two of the CDs ripped. I hope the first did not install malware.
  • Two old Pink Floyd albums, Obscured by Clouds and The Piper at the Gates of Dawn from their early Syd Barrett bluesy acid sound days before their big success working out Roger Waters’ daddy issues.
  • Four Chords and Seven Years Ago by Huey Lewis and the News. A later album which I hadn’t gotten around to getting.
  • Three by Diana Krall: All For You, Love Scenes, and The Girl in the Other Room. I think I have a crush on Mrs. Costello.

The ten CDs/sets ran $49.62, leaving me with 38 cents on the gift card which I might never use.

It was only after I finger-walked through the CDs that I saw the cheap records in bins below a new record display. It’s just as well, though; I haven’t listened to all the records I got at the book sale in April yet.

So I have already listened to the Pink Floyd albums and part of the Krall collection, but I’m still mostly streaming WSIE at the desk. So maybe I shouldn’t run out and buy stacks of CDs any more. Although Tokyo Groove Jyoshi has a new album coming out next week….

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Book Report: Homicide Near Hillsboro by James R. Wilder (2024)

Book coverAh, gentle reader, although this is a signed copy of James R. Wilder’s latest novel from last year, I did not get it personally inscribed at his book signing as I had something else going on at the time. Which is just as well, and probably for the better. When I attended the book signing for Death in Dittmer, I brought my beautiful wife along and then proceeded to spend an hour and a half standing there and talking with the author as the poor girl starved–I failed to see her behind the author table making time to go gestures, and she then sat in the car for a bit and was about to walk to a restaurant herself when I finally emerged from the book store. Well, I certainly avoided that this time. Although I do not see a Good Book Hunting report that mentions this book–my purchases at ABC Books have been very intermittent and small in scope of late–I am pretty sure I bought this about Christmas time last year. And it took me almost half a year to read it mostly because it was lost in the stacks until I gathered books by the handful from one particular shelf for vacation this year and it was there by chance.

Unlike the previous books, this book does not pick up the moment after the last ended, which is for the better for readers who get them out of order.

In it, the Chief of Police from Hillsboro, with whom Chet Harbison (of the “A Harbison Mystery” Harbisons) has butt heads in past books, is found dead under a covered bridge, mangled almost beyond recognition. His sergeant the bully expects to be made the chief of police instead. The Hillsboro sergeant friend of Chet, recently busted to corporal, are injured in a botched bank robbery, and the bully sergeant appears to beat Chet’s deputy friend Pete who has just taken down the inside man on the bank job. As Chet investigates, he finds that the police chief was not the war hero he portrayed himself as and is living a double life with a second wife. Meanwhile, the first wife and her cousin (some saphostry involved) are eager to get the insurance money and pressure the sheriff to find them innocent of suspicion. And as Chet (and crew) investigate, they find that someone in town was involved in planning the bank robbery, someone who knew the police chief often spent Wednesday nights away from Hillsboro with his second wife. Suspicion on the murder falls upon the brother of a local butcher, a ne’er-do-well who has disappeared with the brother’s truck. The ending resolves with a not unexpected twist and ultimate justice implied in an epilogue.

A pleasant read, but not without typos. I offered to proofread for him in 2023, but he thought I was offering expensive professional services. I should reach out to him and tell him I’ll do it for an advance copy of the book and maybe a retconned mention in the book.

Of course, I enjoy these books a little more because I lived in northwestern Jefferson County from seventh grade through high school and a little beyond, so I’m familiar with towns he mentions. In this book, for instance, he mentions that Chet meets Hillsboro town officials at the Russell House. Ah, gentle reader, I “just” ate at the Russell House myself (wherein “just” means in 2021 as part of our Desoto vacation). So little tidbits like that are especially meaningful and part of the reason I enjoy these books maybe more than comparable works.

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Book Report: The Maine Woods / Walden / Cape Cod by Henry David Thoreau (1993)

Book coverSo why did I read Walden earlier in the year? I’d gotten it in my head that it was for the 2025 Winter Reading Challenge–I said as much in another book report in April, but I didn’t actually slot it into any of the categories. Huh. Perhaps I was just reading it to race my youngest to whom I recently gave a copy and who might have had to read it for school. Regardless, I did not do a book report on it when I finished it because it’s in this omnibus three-books-in-one edition. And the omnibus only counts as a single book in the annual count because my rules are so arbitrary that Calvin has said to me, “Hey, how about a little consistent structure to your framework, buddy?”

At any rate, I’m not going to go into too much detail. This is a blog and not a paper for a college grade, gentle reader. But I will say something about each.

The Maine Woods chronicles several trips that Thoreau made into Maine; once to visit the largest mountain in the state and a couple other trips up and down the rivers and lakes just to take in the scenery and to enumerate and describe all the birds and the flowers and the trees found along the way. Actually, I found it tedious because that’s what it is. He tells about traveling by water, a little about the swamps along the way, and not much narrative flow. We get small asides about his philosophy, how man is changing the landscape, but the land is pretty wild and pretty much untouched except for logging. I mean, even events that could be exciting, such as a companion getting separated from the party overnight, is told pretty laconically. It was only 185 pages, but it took me a long time to slog through it. The book qua book was published after Thoreau’s death; I expect he would have tightened it if he meant it for print as a book. The book is structured in long chapters for each trip and subsections for days on the trip. Which is fitting, as people put it together from his journals after he died.

Walden chronicles the time that Thoreau spent in a small shack on Walden Pond (not On Golden Pond, which is different, you damned kids). Thoreau spent over two years there, but he condensed the journal entries into topical chapters and kind of made it seem like only a single year as he kind of follows the seasons–but the text is pretty clear that he’s talking about multiple years, so I’m not sure why current exegesists (current being late 20th century insist he pretended it was only a year.

At any rate, this is one of the two “books” that Thoreau published in his lifetime (the other, A Week on the Merrimack and Concord Rivers, was much shorter, so one might think it’s only a long essay). So it represents what Thoreau wanted published and a degree of refinement you don’t get in the posthumous works.

Themeatically, he muses on living the simple life, paring one’s needs down to the bare minimum, and rhapsodizes about nature and decries man’s progress in building things and destroying habitats and whatnot in the name of progress. It is strangely approachable not only because this was a theme popular even in the latter half of the 20th century, but the words he uses–cars for rail transportation, for example, or “”Who would live there where a body can never hear the barking of Bose.” (which is a brand of speaker and headphones today)–make it seem like he’s almost writing it in the middle 20th century and not the middle 19th century.

And I am sure it hit the Greatest Generation and early Boomers differently than someone today. I mean, they had exurban woods, at least in the north and northeast and parts of the south, where they rambled as kids which were developed for suburbs. So they knew what the loss of the wild places they played felt like. But here in the 21st century, kids have far diminished room to ramble even if they can be torn from devices long enough to do so. My boys played a bit in the wood break behind our house in the brief gap when they were old enough to play unsupervised and the time the oldest got his first phone because he was going into high school and might need to be in communication with his folks. And although I was kind of limited to the (big) block of the housing project or the trailer park or whatnot, my father told stories of hopping on a train as a kid with a gun to go hunting. So I knew what this felt like if only by proxy, the loss of those “wild” spaces (ours were not really wild, the old edges of the Army Reserve base in Milwaukee or the wooded hills above the trailer park or, it turns out, the toxic creek below it). But they’re gone now, too, lost in the past.

So it’s clear why it was a college favorite back then. It’s not a bad read; a bit more poetical in tone than what we would prefer today (or at least what I prefer in my paperback fiction selections). And it provides some things to think about. But more archaic now than it would have been in 1990.

Cape Cod is another book drawn from his journals and published after his death. It covers a trip that Thoreau and another took walking Cape Cod to Provincetown, a several week journey of 60+ miles. He talks about the sea, seamen, lighthouses, and living on this rural sandbar where not much grows. It starts of with a bang, a chapter on a shipwreck and the aftermath, talks about “wreckers” who gather jetsam and floatsam. And most of the wood for home fires comes from driftwood. Back then, the Cape did not have roads or rails, so they walked. An interesting excursion, and a little better than The Maine Woods, but still gets into the weeds, literally. At the end, they take the ferry back to the mainland. I was reading Jes’ Dreamin’ about the same time as this book-within-the-book, and I noted that both depict eras in areas which have been heavily developed since the authors wrote about them as bucolic and/or backwater rural areas.

SO: I guess the whole thing is worth reading if you’re in an English department somewhere focusing on mid-19th century American literature (c’mon, man, they’re still got to be one somewhere, maybe Hillsdale or something) and you need to read it for work and for your dissertation or continued non-perishing publishing. But these are not for everyone. I’m not even sure they’re for me in retrospect. But I’ve read this bonzer of a book, and it’s good for me to read bonzers of a book from time to time since I have so many, and reading them clears more space than paperback originals.

Oh, and Thoreau did not think much of the Irish. He dings them several times. So some small inclusions in the diamond of his thought. He was imperfect, and unfortunately undoubtedly the complete works of Thoreau, including, what, fourteen or fifteen volumes of a journal (not available at Nogglestead, and not on order), will undoubtedly prove it more clearly.

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I’ve Got That Going For Me, Which Is Nice

Wilder writes about AI in Robot Brains and Breakouts and burnishes my job prospects:

Computer Science majors now have the highest unemployment rates of recent grads. English poetry majors have better job prospects. I guess “learn to code” can be replaced with “learn to think about an ode”.

I’d feel better about that if writing poetry paid money (that one science fiction poem aside). I actually have a couple pieces appearing next month, but they paid nothing, not even contributors’ copies since it’s an online journal.

But I’ll be helping to train the next generation of LLMs, so I’ve got that going for me, which is nice. If only the poems weren’t about having a death wish.

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Book Report: Jes’ Dreamin’ by Bud Rainey (1938)

Book coverI jes’ picked up this book earlier this month, and I brought it with a stack of other poetry books to the chairside table for some shorter reading after working my way through chapters of a longer book (The Maine Woods, Walden, and Cape Cod by Thoreau). And I guess I jumped on this one first.

So this is a self-published volume from 1938; apparently, Rainey was a radio personality in Connecticut. Presumably he read some of these poems on the air, and they definitely have the rhythm of a polished performer. Most of them are four to eight sestets or octets with mostly iambic buy with some anapaest thrown in for variety. Thematically, they’re Americana, not unlike what you might find in Ideals magazine, although Rainey writes an awful lot in the vernacular, not only dropping the final consonant of words but also using rural phonetic pronunciations like shadder for shadow. So some possible James Whitcomb Riley influence there (see the book reports for Little Orphant Annie and Other Poems and Old School Day Romances to see what I’m talking about).

I’m doing the math here, and somehow 1938 was seventy-seven years ago. That hardly seems correct, but I’m a manchild who still watches dumb movies, so I probably still think it’s 1980something when I do my default time calculations. Rainey would have been a contemporary of Edna St. Vincent Millay and Ogden Nash, but his poetry appears not to have been picked up by a major publisher. Perhaps he wanted to keep the rights for himself. Or maybe the collections of poetry were just a larf. As a result, the books look to be kind of rare.

What seems incongruous, or might, is that he was a broadcaster in Connecticut (WTIC, I believe, but I’ve closed the tabs and can’t be arsed to look it up again–oh, all right, I did verify it was WTIC–no point in me hallucinating like an LLM would please add aside in the self deprecating style of Brian J.). Which, in the 21st century, I think of as suburban or even urban because of its proximity to New York City (although I have never been to Connecticut, although my beautiful wife has). The Google map shows a lot of green which would indicate it’s not completely overdeveloped. So it was my mistake in thinking it was rural. The film Holiday Inn is set contemporaneously with when this book was written, roughly, and it depicts Connecticut as the height of yokels in the sticks. So I guess the incongruity was based on my misconception of Connecticut.

At any rate, if you like the kind of poetry that you find in old Ideals magazines with a touch of the Riley, you’ll probably enjoy these books. Nothing is going to really stick to your intellectual ribs–nothing in here compelled me to memorize it–but a better read than the current issue of Poetry magazine anyway.

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Movie Report: Meet the Spartans (2008)

Book coverAfter picking this film up at an estate sale, I popped it right in. After all, the dumb comedies move to the head of the line here at Nogglestead on evenings when a modern action film seems too heady. And its only because I’m familiar with the film makers (I watched Epic Movie last year), a couple of Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker knock-offs, that I chose this over the National Lampoon-badged film with Paris Hilton. Which I will probably watch by-and-by.

At any rate, this is basically a spoof of 300 with side bits poking fun at contemporaneous things like American Idol, America’s Top Model, and other reality shows. It’s got some off-color humor to it, a bit of making fun of the homosexual tropes of the buff men in leather, and whatnot. Amusing in spots but it is what it is.

It has Kevin Sorbo several years past his Hercules days (and Kull the Conqueror) playing the lieutenant and Carmen Electra playing the wife of Leonidas. You spot some other people whom you think you should know, or I did, but I didn’t know them. And the collection of people portraying other famous people were so spot-on that I thought Paris Hilton actually appeared in the film making light of herself. But it was Nicole Parker instead.

I know, I know: Usually when I mention an actress by name, I post photos. But I’m too lazy today to go hunting for photos.

So: Here I am, at Rotarian or Knights of Columbus age, watching dumb comedies. I don’t know if that’s keeping me eternally youthful–doubtful–or if it means I’m a man-child who needs to grow up. Probably the latter.

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Book Report: The Official Baldknobbers Book of Jokes Volume I (1999)

Book coverAh, gentle reader. Even with the gluttonous trips to library sale bag days and more recent trips to estate sales and garage sales on the weekends, I still scout the free book cart at church for things to pick up. And last Sunday, I was particularly greedy, snatching up this book as well as a book about the book of Genesis. From the Bible. Which is more what the free book cart tends to proffer except when some of us sneak more secular works onto it. Like this one.

The Baldknobbers are a long-running show down in Branson, and this is probably a self-published book to include amongst their souvenirs. The copyright date is 1999, but they could very well have stock of it down there even now. Branson shows aren’t really my thing, Yakov excepted, so I don’t know if I’ll ever see them or the Presleys (both of which claim to be the first show in Branson, I think).

So of course I read it in a night or two as something else to read after finishing a chapter of the Thoreau omnibus I’m hoping to finish soon. It’s purportedly a list of jokes that the emcees have used over the years, so they’re very twentieth century equivalents of what you would find in Reader’s Digest. Not especially edgy humor, which is fine: I’m not too into crass, although the only joke that I actually laughed at dealt with bodily functions: One fellow is complaining to a friend that his wife is on a fiber kick, so he’s eating bran in the morning, bran in the evening, and bran at night. The friend asks, “But are you regular?” And the fellow says, “Regular? I’m thirty days ahead!” Probably complete with the exclamation point.

So, eh, it passed a little time in church before the service and a couple of minutes before bed a couple nights. And it was free, which was nice.

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