Month: June 2007

Good Book Hunting: June 9, 2007

Brian J. Noggle

As promised, my beautiful wife and I attended the St. Charles Book Fair this year for the third year in a row. Last year, my beautiful wife was also my very pregnant wife, so this marked the first time we ventured to the convention center was a trio instead of a duet.

The book fair is apparently becoming more popular, as it was more crowded this time out. A large number of people stopped to socialize with each other in front of the tables of books, too. Popularity and population make book fairs annoying. I mean, what’s with the people who review these tables from left to right. Don’t you realize it’s easier to read the spines if you move from left to right? I jumped large sections of tables when encountering the meandering throng of people after something in particular instead of avaricious book hoarders like me. I mean, when you want something for sure, go to eBay or something. Don’t spend hours lingering over the mystery table hoping you’ll find a first edition of A is for Alibi. You probably won’t.

The selection was good, though. Perhaps slightly too good. The volunteers continued to put out books as space opened on the tables. As you know, this discourages the seriousish collector in me, as I will automatically assume I’ve missed stuff and accellerate my browsing when I see that no matter how dilligently I review all titles, I will have missed something by the dint of its addition after I passed. Brutha, that’s too much like professional software quality assurance, my day-to-day existence, for me.

Still, I found a pile of middle McBain era books (Heat, Tricks, Bread, Mischief) and an Evan Hunter crime novel (Criminal Conversation). I picked up two John D. MacDonalds (More Good Old Stuff, a second collection of short stories in hardback and The Lonely Silver Rain, a late Travis McGee novel I bought because it was a 3rd printing and although I suspected I have a 1st printing, at $2 a hardback, it cannot hurt to be sure). I picked up some unknown bit (State’s Evidence because it had a cool cover and I already had picked up a box I needed to fill), the sequel to The Total Woman, a couple of Neil Simon’s plays (but I didn’t buy the one by Tom Stoppard that I saw), a couple of mysteries by old school mystery writers Ellery Queen and Rex Stout, a nonfiction book by Mike Lupica, a book of predictions for the next 20 years written in 1980, a book on how to fix audio and visual equipment, a Where Are They Now book written in the late 1960s which could better be cast as Who Remembers These People in the 21st Century (James Lileks for one and perhaps me in a couple months), and a book entitled Overlooked Treasures about collectibles that few people collect.

You can see I was somewhat discriminating in mysteries, but once the box started filling up, my threshold for purchase dropped as it usually does. I limited myself to one box, fortunately. The book fair offers dollies, and if one of the volunteers had seen me schlepping 40 pounds of books and offered me another box and a dolly, well, let’s just say the stacks below would have been taller.

Here’s the result, $67 dollars later:

St. Charles Book Fair Purchases

That’s 27 books for me, 10 for Mrs. Noggle, and a collection of 10 cent audiocassettes that will provide our iTunes with a massive influx of 80s music (and, judging by the presence of an Eric Carmen tape, plenty of flashbacks for me).

So this weekend I bought half as many books as I read this year. Which means that I’m somewhere like 60 books in deficit now.

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Personal Chart History

Brian J. Noggle

My beautiful wife got me a set of musical reference books from a garage sale or book fair. The titles include The All Music Book of Hit Singles which compiles the top 20 singles by month from 1954 through 1993 and provides the results in monthly charts for the United States and the United Kingdom on opposite pages so you can compare the two. Each page has three such charts and 3-4 bullet points of trivia for the quarter. I thought I could go through these charts as my nightstand book, a book I read in very small snippets in the 10-15 minutes preceding sleep on the occasional nights where I am in bed and the lights are on for those minutes. Ultimately, it wasn’t a good choice, because I found myself opting for sleep rather than reviewing historical charts (I only made it to 1959). So as I took the book from the nightstand and removed the bookmark, I flipped it open to the late 1980s, a time period where I was more directly related to the music on the charts.

The book fell open to July 1988, and suddenly I was there:

July 1988 top 20

I don’t mean I was suddenly at the page, because although I was suddenly on that page, that’s not worth commentary. No, friends, suddenly I was in July 1988.

It’s late at night. We only got to stay up until 9pm (well, we had to be in our rooms at 9pm, but the de jure 9pm evolved to de facto 10pm or thereabouts) on school nights (in high school, no less). In July, 1988, we’ve moved from the mobile home in Murphy to the single family home down the old gravel road (Ruth Drive, or Route 5 alternately but less so at that time). The house was far into a valley from the nearest two lane state highway (MM, which runs from House Springs through Otto and onto Antonia); if we were so inclined, we could walk about 30 minutes to that T intersection where Heads Creek Road met MM, but rarely did, since it was another 40 minutes to Otto or an hour or more to House Springs on the two lane, no shoulder highway. At the time we moved in, the valley offered spotty television reception from St. Louis and did not have cable television. Or private telephone lines. At the end of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, we still had to pick up the phone receiver and make sure none of our neighbors was using the line before placing a call. Party lines, they called them.

But I didn’t have to worry about that late at night. Or much during the day, either; we weren’t the most popular children.

Our mother took great pride in moving us way into nowhere where she could afford $40,000 worth of house on over an acre of land, most of which was flat. We had trees, we had a lawn that it took 3 hours to mow with push mowers (not reel mowers, thankfully), and we had a shady spot with poisonous snakes. We even had one or two kids who didn’t want to beat the snot out of us on sight. The house itself was a ranch with an attached two car garage and a full unfinished basement. Three of the bedrooms were bedrooms, and a fourth room that could advertise as a bedroom (with basement access) served as our computer room. A grey computer desk held our Commodore 128 (yes, that desk). I spent many nights that summer seated on the wooden folding chair in front of that grey/beige keyboard, typing programs in from Ahoy!, Compute’s Gazette, Run, and Commodore Power Play into memory and saving them onto old floppies.

While I typed those old programs in, a shelf audio system with cassette deck, turntable, and tuner played the songs from that chart. It would have been Y 98; 103.3 KHTR had already changed to oldies a couple years before. Y 98 hasn’t altered its format that much and still uses the KYKY designation, so it’s probably due to change to smooth jazz any time now.

I can almost close my eyes and remember the bookshelves to my left, the battered metal office desk to my right holding an ancient Remington electric typewriter and a 1960s styled electronic word processor that could save your documents to cassette and could print them on rolls of paper. Even then, once in a while, a feeling of future nostalgia would wash over me and I would press the sounds of the trees outside the window and the stillness of the house into my memory for someday. Somedays like today.

My brother was just turning toward the harder rock, so he would have favored “Pour Some Sugar On Me”. “Make Me Lose Control” and “The Flame” both acutely remind me of that particular era and, indeed, the particular selfshot of me at the computer, trying to proofread typos or to enjoy the always disappointing simple little games that resulted. Late at night, me and that Commodore 128 after everyone had gone to bed. Until the cable company pulled its lines and private phone lines behind it, I wouldn’t even have Bulletin Board Systems again. Just me, that radio, and the Miami Sound Machine or the soul of “Terence Trent D’Arby”, whom I mocked then and continue to mock now. Some years later, I would have disposable income and would own a number of those songs on cassette or 45, but then I only had the radio and the endless time of youth in the summertime, nights to spend typing from magazines and dreaming of a future whose days and nights matched those, but better.

And here I am.

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Congressional Hearings To Follow

Brian J. Noggle

Milk price to take jump:

It costs more to drive to the store these days – and once you get there, you can expect to pay more for milk.

Driven up by high transportation costs, an increase in feed prices and even a drought in Australia, the price of milk is likely to rise by up to 40 cents a gallon over the next few months, dairy market forecasters say. Cheese prices could go up by 60 cents a pound.

If the increases occur, a gallon of whole milk would cost an average of $3.78 nationwide, based on the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s monthly survey of milk prices in 30 metro areas.

Sure, the milk industry says it’s rising costs, but is it really….

  • Record profits in the milk industry?
  • Collusion with the soft drink industry to sell more soda to children and their parents?
  • Government meddling to make children more unhealthy so unelected and “merit”-based government employees can further erode parental authority ?

Because once we go off the rails of believing people who actually know and study the industry, we open ourselves to the infinite possibilities our uninformed minds can confect. That, my friends, is the essence of freedom.

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That’s My House

Brian J. Noggle

That’s how we used to call it, back in the housing projects in my youth. We’d say, “That’s my car” or “That’s my house” when we saw something particularly snappy.

Like this house, whose description in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel says:

Secret passages: One, from the media room to the master bedroom

How it works: A section of a built-in bookcase is a door set on vertical piano hinges, which keep it upright as it rolls open on casters. The media room sees a bookcase, and the bedroom sees a door.

The next section is “Why?” but I think anyone in Generation X or later comes with an implied because it’s cool.

Image here.

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Unnecessary Program Must Continue, Program’s Budget Recipients Say

Brian J. Noggle

Few Francis Howell high schoolers test positive for drugs:

A year of mandatory random drug testing in the Francis Howell School District produced few positive tests, according to district leaders who say they want to continue the program next school year.

A little more than 2 percent of mandatory random tests of Francis Howell District high school students were positive for drugs, administrators said Thursday.

Jim Joyce, the district’s director of communications, said 16 of the 660 random drug tests came back positive, finding marijuana, amphetamines or cocaine.

For those of us keeping track at home, that’s a program that was projected to cost $60,000 per year. Or $3750 for each positive result.

But obviously, the program must continue because parents are clamoring for it:

The district originally had planned a voluntary testing program for middle school students, too. Joyce said the district decided to focus on perfecting the high school program after only a small percentage of parents signed their children up for the program.

No, this is about getting budget and getting power over students. Regardless of its actual results, it must continue, for the state knows better than you peasant parents.

Coming soon, a Rapid Response Counseling Team equipped with surplus military gear and no-knock warrants to make you understand drugs are bad!

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Book Report: Dirty Linen by Tom Stoppard (1976)

Brian J. Noggle

Perhaps this was a funnier play in 1976 in London. Maybe it was written specifically to get Luan Peters into lingerie onstage. But it’s about dalliances of Members of Parliament that are threatening to diminish the public’s respect for them and a select committee designed to deal with it. Except all the members of the committee have dallied with the clerk who’s supposed to take notes for them.

There’s an interlude that’s called a second play (New-Found-Land) designed to shout out to a London theatre luminary at the time.

Overall, to British and sort of dated. Which is why I wouldn’t expect to see it as is onstage any time soon. But no doubt someone in America would be able to adapt the theme and ride Stoppard’s name for a production of it.

Books mentioned in this review:


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Book Report: From the Corner of His Eye by Dean Koontz (2000)

Brian J. Noggle

I cannot believe I read the whole thing.

This book clocks in at almost 600 pages, overwritten the whole time as though Dean Koontz single handedly has to support a struggling simile factory in southern Georgia. He layers his similes like an onion; even when you peel away all the layers of the metaphor, it’s still an onion. To Stephen King’s Shakespeare, Dean Koontz is not even Ben Jonson; he’s that other guy they don’t even offer survey courses for.

Let’s see here, there’s a plot: a guy murders his wife for no reason (no, it’s because he’s a psychopath trying to broaden himself by killing the woman he loves); he becomes obsessed with the name Bartholemew. Also, he raped this one underage girl, who has a baby girl. A woman who’s pregnant has an auto accident on the way to the hospital that kills her husband; his last request is that she name the boy Bartholemew. The underage girl dies giving birth, so an aunt raises the girl. The children are prodigies who can also go other places. The boy goes blind. A cop chasing the psychopath gets left for dead by said psychopath instigates psychological warfare against the psycho. And the psycho kills people.

Meanwhile, Koontz dedicates many pages to similes, many paragraphs to minor characters with only roles as extras, and we navigate through several plot lines ultimately related but whose relationships are not too compelling. Then, after 500 pages, we get a three page sudden climax, and then we can roll over and go to sleep for the 40 page denouement that is supposed to tell the rest of the story about the kids and their powers. But come on. I could have almost read Anna Karenina by the time I was done with this book.

I liked Odd Thomas well enough, tolerated Mr. Murder passingly, and just read Forever Odd. However, this book really has me dreading reading any of the other Koontz volumes on my shelves, and that’s not a good kind of dread for a horror/thriller writer. It spills over to the unread John Saul books who are painted by being too close to the Koontz books.

Don’t bother with this book. Let me be a lesson to you.

Books mentioned in this review:


 

 

 

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Also, Your Dogs Must Now Be Trained To Sniff Explosives

Brian J. Noggle

Everything you own, citizen, is at the government’s leisure and at its disposal. Or some government officials think:

American cell phones can already check e-mail, surf the Internet and store music, but they could have a new set of features in coming years: the Department of Homeland Security wants them to sense biological, chemical and radioactive material.

Putting hazardous material sensors in commercial cell phones has been discussed in scientific circles for years, according to researchers in the field. More recently, the idea gained support among government agencies, and DHS said publicly in May that it wants businesses to start coming up with proposals.

No doubt the wireless carriers are all behind this proposal because they’ll have an excuse to make everyone upgrade to new, more expensive phones and to charge all customers new monthly fees to support the mandatory program.

Not to worry:

Like the built-in GPS function many cell phones now offer, customers would have the option of turning the sensors off, McGinnis said.

Got that, citizen? For marketing e-mail, you have to expressly opt-in, but for intrusive government surveillance programs, you have to expressly opt-out, with that opt-out no doubt going to a database of people who suspiciously opted out.

I have no problem if this becomes a netcentric program like SETI At Home, but the government and its cronies in corporations don’t play like that. Because the government knows what’s best for you!

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Don’t Forget To Cut the State-Funded Violins Announcing Each Program Cut

Brian J. Noggle

The San Francisco Chronicle laments the death of a wasteful tax-funded project:

For just 10 cents a day per child, California public school kids are getting to eat fresh apples, oranges and strawberries along with their Pop-Tarts and doughnuts at school breakfast.

At least, that’s been true for the last two years under the pilot Fresh Start program, designed to steer kids away from obesity and diabetes and toward healthy foods.

But Fresh Start is in jeopardy just as preliminary reports are showing its initial success. In an effort to cover a $366 million funding gap in the education part of the state budget, the Legislature recently cut the $11.1 million that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger proposed to keep Fresh Start going in the next school year and make it permanent.

The cut incensed child nutrition specialists and advocates.

California has accidentally done the fiscally responsible thing and eliminated a goofball project that steps outside the bounds of the government’s responsibilities. Notably, those who received the largesse are upset.

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Things I Can Do That My Father Cannot

Brian J. Noggle

Blogs are getting a lot of pixel inches out of an essay entitled I Can’t Do One-Quarter of the Things My Father Can, which plays into an Instapundit narrative about the loss of traditional male skills. In my defense, I’d like to point out that I know how to do a number of things that my father can’t do. These include:

  • Order a Starbucks drink just the way I want it.
    Face it, it’s only a triple venti cap, but I not only know the sizes of the cups, but I know the order in which the barristas call it. My generation knows how to express its drink preferences in ways the Greatest Generation or Baby Boomers can only dream of, which is probably why they mostly still drink coffee.
  • Hook up any game console to any television or entertainment center.
    What, you don’t have the cables? Brother, I have all sorts of cables and transformers so I can still hook that old Nintendo Entertainment System to your Yamaha receiver.

  • Operate video game controllers.
    Let’s face it, when confronted with keys marked with triangles, squares, and Xs, my father would totally be lost.

  • Time shift my television viewing.
    I’m no longer bound to watching Lost on Wednesday nights, which means I can watch something else, probably something I had to record because I was watching a recorded episode of Lost.
  • Insightfully quote culturally meaningful films.
    Because a proper quip from Office Space or catchphrase from Napoleon Dynamite identifies the user as intelligent and witty enough to use canned touchstones instead of uttering original thoughts or keeping my mouth shut and sounding smarter.

  • Blithely ignore the implications of my dependence.
    Mommy State and Daddy Professionals are only a phone call away if I’m not afraid of ceding my rights to free thought and using all of my revolving credit on lifestyle maintenance.

So there you go. Maybe I do lack some basic skills required at the root level for survival, but I have mad skillz to mindlessly enjoy the fruits of an increasingly fragile modern civilization.

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Fighting Words Threshold Lowered

Brian J. Noggle

China says U.S. warning on toothpaste irresponsible:

China has branded a U.S. warning against using its toothpaste as irresponsible, saying low levels of diethylene glycol (DEG) were not harmful.

“So far we have not received any report of death resulting from using the toothpaste. The U.S. handling (of this case) is neither scientific nor responsible,” China’s General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine said in a statement posted on its Web site over the weekend.

This from a government who thinks bumping an electronics surveillance plane is responsible piloting.

In some quantum universe, this is one of the beginning shots in a war between China and the United States. When its exports collapse because the Chinese Administration of Quality Supervision (motto: Good Enough For Government Work Is Good Enough For Everything) doesn’t actually stop the country from exporting poisonous substances as consumables and customers die, China’s economy collapses. To save face amongst its preening ruling elite, the country makes its desperate gamble for Taiwan and thar she blows.

Part of my gift as a writer and a paranoia shidoshi is the joy of extrapolating the worst possible scenario from a bad press release.

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Fun With No Parking Signs (I)

Brian J. Noggle

Here’s a little personality test for you:

No Parking personality test

If you look at that and think, “Wow, couldn’t they have said that with a single no parking any time sign?”, you obviously are one of those people who see the world in black and white, in parking and no parking. You cannot wrap your mind around the shades of grey, the layers of nuance between No Parking Any Time and No Parking Here To Corner.

But then again, not everyone can go to college and get a ::sniff:: humanities degree.

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MfBJN’s Water Conserving Tips

Brian J. Noggle

Instapundit linked to a list of Top 10 Great Ways to Save Water. This list was useless to me for the most part because it was geared to water wastrels in the first place. Criminey, here’s the list:

  • Apply no more than 1 in. of water per week to your lawn in two applications.
    For Pete’s sake, if I water the lawn, I will have to mow the lawn. If Mother Nature wants me to have a pristine lawn, it will rain nicely to support it, and Mother Nature will make sure that the poison ivy that invades the yet-unnamed Noggle homestead in Old Trees needs the disappearing honeybees for pollination.
  • Use a sprinkler timer to avoid over watering.
    I have never owned a sprinkler in my life.

  • Use drip irrigation hoses in flower beds, covered by a thick layer of mulch.
    Great Caesar’s ghost! How does one get a thick layer of mulch to adhere to drip irrigation hoses in the first place?

  • Replace deteriorated flapper valves in toilets.
    I could do this because I actually have toilets, but I also have a poorly-constructed drain system in my house that could use an extra goosing from some additional clean water flow from time to time. Also, I’m lazy and don’t want to get into it.

  • Use a solar cover on the swimming pool when it’s not in use.
    A swimming pool? Lords of London, I don’t have a swimming pool. Who does in these days where you’re liable not only for drowning, but for the cases of West Nile disease that could have been borne by mosquitos bred in your pool?

  • Repair dripping faucets.
    Always a good plan, but my relatively new faucets don’t drip.

  • When possible, relocate indoor potted plants outside on a deck if a gentle rain is expected.
    A deck? Brother, I moved to a neighborhood that has traffic and have put a front porch swing on my home to ensure I wouldn’t become one of those deck-dwelling creatures segregated to their own family units in the suburban zoo, so I don’t have a deck, thank you very much, and I am not going to construct one because Gaia whispered it in your ear. Also, a number of semi-feral cats have taken residence here, and they look at indoor plants as a salad bar whose contents should be retched upon the rug. So we don’t have indoor plants, either. If we want to talk to flora, we engage the poison ivy in witty banter.

  • Cover vegetable gardens with a layer of straw mulch to reduce soil evaporation.
    A good idea. I’ll keep this in mind when President Bush encourages victory gardens. Until then, I’ll get my fresh produce the normal way: putting on a bunny costume and raiding the neighbor’s yard.

  • Replace shower heads with low-flow types.
    That’s easy advice for office-job types, but some people need the flow to get real grime off of themselves. Not that I’m speaking for myself here, but I’m too lazy to do that myself and too cheap to hire a plumber.

  • Conserve water while car washing.
    I don’t have a car, thankyouverymuch, I have a truck. Also, I don’t wash it, for crying out loud; the dirt is an extra buffer between me and that BMW whose driver is arguing on a cell phone with a soon-to-be ex-husband.

Holy cannoli, that’s a lot of advice for the hoity-toity types with swimming pools and landscaping and/or water features on their grounds.

You want to conserve water? Here’s the MfBJN list for you, short form:

  • Drink more beer.
    Sure, you’ll flush the toilet more, but you’re adding water to the local system. Yeah, far away someone wasted water brewing it, but that’s not your fault. You’re only trying to rectify the mistake.
  • Stop bathing.
    Personal hygiene uses a lot of water. Stop shaving and brushing, too.

  • Club a baby seal.
    Do you know how much those things drink? Also, the pelt makes a nice mulch for your vegetable garden or flower bed, preventing premature evaporation.

  • Creative car maintenance.
    To quote the ever wise Jed Eckhart: “Well, when you grow up… then you’ll know these things, Danny. Now get up here and piss in the radiator.”

Now that’s advice the rest of us can effectively ignore.

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