January 2018 – Page 2 – Musings from Brian J. Noggle

Parenting Goal

January 13, 2018 Brian J. Noggle

I don’t want my children to understand the music of Everclear.

My parents split up on October 25, 1981, when I was nine years old. My father pulled me away from a television movie (Twirl) to sit my brother and I down into what was up until that moment my parents’ bedroom and to tell us that my mother had thrown him out. So, yeah, I have known the joy of a welfare Christmas.

Both of my children are already older than that, so I’m already ahead.

That being said, I just picked up an oldies collection: Everclear’s Ten Years Gone: The Best of Everclear 1994-2004. I’m not sure that you can really call Everclear hard rock or metal, so I’m not sure how it affects the balance of my music purchasing.

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Confession Time

January 11, 2018 Brian J. Noggle

The first time I saw Tommy Lee Jones’ name on a movie poster, for the film Under Siege…

…I thought the drummer from Motley Crüe was getting into acting.

Well, no. That would come later.

But if a film wasn’t on Showtime in the 1980s, or if an actor was not in a film on Showtime in the 1980s, I didn’t know about it.

Now, I know who he is: One of the guys who played Harvey Dent.

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Not a Safe Space

January 9, 2018January 8, 2018 Brian J. Noggle

I’ve discovered, as I comb through the archives from the earliest days of this blog, that I used to post more cat pictures. I also used to get hundreds of hits per day. Coincidence? Let’s try it out.

Here’s a picture of Chimera, one of the second generation, pawing at one of my Christmas presents right after I hung it on the wall:

Silly cat. A minute ago, this was blank wall. Now, he’s looking to see if there’s a wall safe behind this particular picture. Clearly, he does not know much about the installation of wall safes.

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Household Tips from Brian J.: Cleaning the Coffee Grinder

January 8, 2018 Brian J. Noggle

You might think, being a humble man of the people from humble origins such as I am, that I do not grind my own coffee. Friends, I can understand why you would think that! I am lazy and prefer to buy coffee pre-ground for me, and in large warehouse club quantities! I am not that particular about my coffee! It just needs to be ~~hot~~. It doesn’t need to be hot, I will drink cold coffee from yesterday or longer (skim the mold first!).

But I do have a coffee grinder. As a matter of fact, it’s not my first! I bought the first after accidentally picking up a warehouse club sized bag of coffee beans, and I didn’t want to waste them! So I got a coffee grinder to use those coffee beans–and to see if I could really taste the difference (Did I? Who cares? I NEED COFFEE, ANY COFFEE, NOW!). But I found it difficult to clean the coffee grinder, so I ended up giving the coffee beans to a co-worker who is a coffee snob and donating the coffee grinder to a thrift store!

But that was ten years ago, and when I recently made the same mistake again, I had a dilemma! Do I send the coffee to the co-worker whom I have not seen in ten years (weird, but a tempting idea!)? No, friends, I bought another coffee grinder, and I discovered this easy trick to clean it out every time!

If you’ve used a coffee grinder, you know that the bits of finely ground coffee cling to the side stubbornly after you’ve emptied it.

You can’t immerse it in water, and the grinder blade makes it tricky to get a moist or dry cloth in there. Especially around the axle of the blade! But I accidentally discovered this fool-proof method for loosening and getting those reluctant particles of caffeination out:

I drop it on the floor!

The impact loosens the covalent bonds between the ground coffee and the grinder, and its position on its side ensure the particles fly all over your kitchen floor, you can walk over them in bare feet and absorb the caffeine from them later! Because these coffee grinder particles are so fine they will slide right under your dustpan edge if you try to sweep them up.

And the coffee grinder?

Spotless!

But, Brian J., isn’t this a little rough on the coffee grinder?

Well, gentle reader, I don’t care, I NEED COFFEE NOW! Also, the grinder only has to last me the duration of this bag of coffee beans, as I still prefer some industrial machine grind my coffee for me (and blend in some protein-rich insect parts that are actually allowed under the Whole30® diet!).

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Preemption: FAILED

January 6, 2018 Brian J. Noggle

So I received the physical CD of Rebecca Black’s CD RE/BL, delayed because she was in Italy or something.

So I announced to my beautiful wife that it arrived:

ME: I got the Rebecca Black CD.
SHE: Who’s that?
ME:: She’s a pop singer that Charles Hill is really high on. She was a viral sensation. She went to a song factory or something that gave her a simple song, made a video for it, and put it on YouTube, and a lot of people hated it. “Friday”.
SHE: I’ve heard of that.
ME: It’s one of those where you’re buying it right from the artist….
SHE: Hang on, I’m going to put this [receipt? Piece of mail? I forget, but it was not the CD in question.] in your office.

A couple minutes later:

ME: …As I was saying, since I bought the Rebecca Black CD directly from her, she sent a little postcard with it.
SHE: I saw that.

Said card was still on my desk. Of course she had seen it.

My now black belt wife did not threaten the card. This time.

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I Got a 0 On This Quiz; I Call That A Perfect Score

January 5, 2018 Brian J. Noggle

Linkbait headline is 10 Things That Didn’t Exist 10 Years Ago That We Now Can’t Live Without.

Here’s the list (in descending order in the article). I’ve put in italics things I’ve used and in bold things I cannot live without.

Uber
Bitcoin
Instagram
The Selfie Stick
Spotify
“Woke”
Airbnb
Snapchat
Tesla
The iPad

Number of things I can’t live without: 0.
Number of things I use regularly: 0.

I mean, I’ve used Airbnb once, and it’s still not my go-to accommodation. I’ve got Spotify installed, and I use it once in a while to try to discover new music (I found Anna Danes and Lauren Meccia on it), but the radio stations I create based on artists I like tend to play the same bands over and over, so once you’ve listened to it for a while, it’s like listening to a radio station with a small playlist). And I have an iPad, but it’s for testing purposes mostly, and it sits on the desk needing a charge until such time as I need it for testing.

I’m getting to a point in my life where I’m becoming a bit of a Luddite. Technology and its toys and trinkets are not the meaning of life, and as I get older I recognize that you get more satisfaction from real life endeavors rather than endless selfies and incomplete games of Civilization.

So I’m proud not to need the things in the list or I’ll die. I feel justified in trying to steer my children from devices and apps as often as possible, or else they might end up writers of twee listicles mistaking the Internet for life or meaning.

Also, I really hope people can live without Tesla, especially the people who have plunked down deposits for cars that might not ever be manufactured.

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2017: The Year’s Reading In Review

January 1, 2018 Brian J. Noggle

Well, 2017 has drawn to a close, and with it, I’ve closed my annual log of books that I read. In 2017, I read 87 books, ish. As you might know, some of them have been omnibus editions, where three novels or five novels are in a single binding, and I count that as a single book for these accounting purposes.

If you’re interested, here’s what I read this year, presented in a nice list with links to the individual book reports.
Continue reading “2017: The Year’s Reading In Review” →

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Book Report: The Tao of Meow by “Waldo Japussy” and Carl Japikse (1990)

January 1, 2018 Brian J. Noggle

Book cover I closed out my annual reading with this volume. After all, I’ve read books on the various Tao this year (Tao Te Ching, The Tao of Elvis). I’ve read books purportedly by cats (I Could Pee On This) and books about magical cats (The Catswold Portal, No One Noticed The Cat). So this book fit right into my annual reading selections.

The schtick is that the author’s cat wrote 81 poems just like Lao Tzu, and each talks a little about the way. And about being a cat. In the first couple dozen poems, I wondered if the author was really trying to walk a fine line between amusing and actually trying to convey serious elements of Taoism in the book, but it hits one of the poems–I forget which one–where the author basically says that this is a humor book and not to be taken too heavily.

It’s a bit of a stretch to get a full 81 poems out of the conceit, and the results are uneven. Some are thoughtful, some are amusing, and some are sort of pro forma. But I enjoyed it enough for what it is.

Now that 2017 is over, perhaps my cat book binge can be over, and I can start focusing on ferrets or pot-bellied pigs as pets, detectives, and philosophers in 2018.

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