June 2019 – Page 2 – Musings from Brian J. Noggle

My Lucky Day

June 13, 2019 Brian J. Noggle

Yesterday was the latest in my series of lucky days.

So I packed my bags for a martial arts class, and I hoped to attend one or more while my children did Vacation Bible School (I would have just said VBS, but I’m not sure how well an increasingly secular society would understand just the abbreviation). As we were driving to church, I heard a ticking from my car echoed as we passed other cars. As I changed a directional signal earlier in the day, a strange procedure that had me lying under the truck and groping with one hand into the bowels of the vehicle, I wondered if I’d moved something that was now rhythmically striking something.

I got the kids to VBS and made it to the martial arts school with five minutes to change before the early class. I pulled into a spot with a car on the left and an empty space on the right. I got my bags and went around to the passenger side of the car so I could navigate more easily with the duffel bags.

Wherein I spotted a nail and a bracket in the right front tire with an attendant hissing sound of escaping air.

I ran down the scenario in my head: I could change the tire now, or I could change the tire after class, and get the boys. Of course, this is the newer truck, so I’m not even sure where the jack and doughnut are.

It’s a most inconvenient time to be down a vehicle; my beautiful wife is traveling for work this week, so the family’s second car is sitting in the airport parking lot.

So I got into the bathroom to change into my gi, and it occurred to me that it was 5:45, and the tire shop around the corner was still open. And the tire probably had enough air in it to make it to the tire shop.

So I left the martial arts school and made it to the tire shop ten minutes before their closing. I made arrangements for the boys’ grandmother to pick up the boys if I had to leave the car overnight, but the tire shop accommodated me and replaced the tire after their official closing time.

So it really was my lucky day: if I hadn’t gone around to the passenger side of the car, I wouldn’t have seen the problem, and I might well have tried to drive off with a flat tire and might not have had time to pick the kids up. If I hadn’t discovered it and gotten to the tire shop before it closed, I might be down a vehicle and have had to figure out how to get it to a shop and to chauffeur the kids around until my wife returns.

Whenever I have a car issue that could leave me stranded, and I handle it correctly, I feel delightfully competent as an adult. The feeling doesn’t last–I’m soon back to the general “What am I doing?”

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That’s Not What The Sign Says

June 12, 2019 Brian J. Noggle

The headline and article in the Greene County Commonwealth might contain a typo:

Because, as we know, the sign says something different:

It might have taken 13 years to get the plat approved, but the existing subdivision is only now filling out with homes.

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The Random Bulls of Nogglestead

June 11, 2019 Brian J. Noggle

As we live in the country, you might not be surprised when the random bull shows up at Nogglestead.

But sometimes, I have to explain.

My children have been home this summer instead of going to various camps to occupy them whilst their parents work (working from home can be especially challenging during the summer time). They’ve had a lot of time playing video games, and apparently all the video games these days have integrated audio with them, so my youngest has spent a lot of time saying loudly, “Do you have a mike?”

When they had a friend over one Sunday afternoon, they all spent time playing individual games on their individual devices instead of playing with their friend. So I printed out a picture of Michael Jordan and waited until my youngest was playing on a gaming system that did not have a microphone.

“Do you have a Mike?” I asked him.

“No,” he said. At eleven, he knows the proper inflection for how can you even ask that?

“Here,” I handed him the color picture.

It’s floated around our lower level since. Being it’s a color print out, nobody wants to dispose of it willy-nilly, without enough time elapsing and reflection.

You know I had children specifically so I could make Dad jokes, ainna?

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Calling It

June 10, 2019June 8, 2019 Brian J. Noggle

I hereby call the pun to be made on January 1, 2021, “2020 is hindsight.”

Don’t try to take it away from me.

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In My Defense, I Pronounced It Correctly

June 9, 2019June 9, 2019 Brian J. Noggle

So the martial arts school where I study has replaced a water wall, which really was more of a water on the floor by the wall in the brief period where it was operational, with a fish tank to which they’re slowly adding fish, and I mentioned that I knew a guy who had a saltwater tank and was raising anemone. Sea anemone, that is, not the terrestrial flower after which it is named.

One of the listeners made mock of my pronunciation of the word, which immediately made me self-conscious of my pronunciation.

via GIPHY

As you know, gentle reader, I have learned a vast quantity of my vocabulary from books, so I’m especially self-conscious of pronouncing things incorrectly. Recently, I’m pretty sure I’ve stumbled over perfidy and have ruled out of using opprobium in conversation.

Which is just as well; the Internet tells me I missed an R in it.

Perhaps I should start making use of that little “Say it” button so I know how to pronounce things. Unfortunately, when I’m about to drop an exotic word in conversation, that button isn’t handy, and looking it up on my phone fails to make me look smart in the moment.

Oh, and back to anemone. The question was whether I was throwing an extra N in it. In my defense, I might have said “an anemone.”

But the problem wouldn’t have occurred in the first place if I’d said sea anemone, which is what I was talking about. But I know aquaria less than I know exotic words and how to use them.

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Good Album Hunting, Saturday, June 8, 2019: SEAS Sale and Relics Antique Mall

June 9, 2019June 8, 2019 Brian J. Noggle

So yesterday, I found myself at the St. Elizabeth Ann Seton annual sale, and they had a couple of boxes of records. I found a couple that looked interesting and bought them along with a couple of glass vases to etch.

Then, I found myself at Relics Antique Mall as my wife is looking for some wall decorations for the guest room that we painted three years ago and have had bare walls since. While she looked for something to match her tastes, I flipped through some bins of records. Some of the bins are getting nuts as far as pricing goes–one of my go-to end caps had some priced at $14 or $24 dollars (although the sign said half off of everything, that’s still a little much for my taste). However, another stalwart end cap still had records for $3 each, and I’m getting more comfortable with buying records at that price.

So here’s what I got:

The capstone is Blow Your Own Horn by Herb Alpert. After the 1970s, his music was selling more on cassettes, I guess, so it’s rare to find something of his from the 1980s. Unfortunately, it skips a bit on the first song.
Knock on Wood by Amii Stewart.
Stephanie by Stephanie Mills, best known around these parts for singing “Bit by Bit” on the Fletch soundtrack.
Uptown by the Neville Brothers. I just got an Isley Brothers album, and I sometimes confuse the two acts. By building my collection, I’ll get them straight.
Welcome Back by John Sebastian. I’ve seen this on this end cap before and thought I’d buy it someday for his rendition of the Welcome Back, Kotter theme song. Today was that day. I also noted some albums that I’ll buy later, someday, but I’d better make it sooner rather than when the prices go up to $5 each and I won’t be so inclined to explore.
Fred Astaire’s Greatest Hits. I’m not sure what his greatest musical hits are, actually, and the album cover itself does not say (and, like a fool, I did not look at the album itself, so I hope it’s in there).
Today’s Romantic Hits / For Lovers Only vol. 2 by Jackie Gleason. Someday, I might have a pretty comprehensive collection of these.
Jackie Gleason Plays The Most Beautiful Girl in the World. Ditto.
I’m Looking For A Four Leaf Clover by Jo Ann Castle. It features a comely lass on the cover, so I expected a songbird from the middle 1960s. Apparently, the artist is the ragtime piano player from the Lawrence Welk show and is not the young lady on the cover.

So it was about $20 total.

I also bought a new circular saw so I can continue on my construction of the new record shelves today. Unless I spend the whole day blogging, I guess.

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A Downside of Nogglestead

June 8, 2019 Brian J. Noggle

If I still lived in Old Trees, I could walk to two jazz festivals this year.

There’s the Old Webster Jazz and Blues Festival, which I visited a long time ago and saw a set of Erin Bode’s show. She’s not there this year, for some reason, but trumpeter Jim Manley is.

And due to a dispute with the local parks, the U[niversity] City Jazz Festival has moved to Old Orchard this year.

You know, sometimes I wonder if moving to the country really was best.

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In Case You Have To Round Kick Zdeno Chara

June 8, 2019June 7, 2019 Brian J. Noggle

An ad for a smoothie shows a woman throwing a round kick (or a whip/hook kick, depending upon the way she swung her leg) way above her head:

I don’t know who she would kick that would be that tall. Zdeno Chara, the 6′ 9″ defenseman for the Boston Bruins?

One of the knocks on tae kwon do is that its focus on forms and pretty kicks doesn’t have real-world applications. However, kicks like this do demonstrate flexibility and body control which come in handy when you kick like that a little lower.

Full disclosure: The school where I study martial arts blends tae kwon do kicking in with other martial arts. And although I can round kick head high, I cannot round kick (or whip/hook kick) Zdeno Chara in the head.

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Pretty Good On This Quiz

June 7, 2019 Brian J. Noggle

Millennial dads have pathetic DIY skills compared to baby boomers:

Are dads’ essential DIY skills in decline? According to new research, millennial dads are less capable than their own dads when it comes to everyday DIY fixes, preferring to rely on professional help instead.

A new poll of 1,000 millennial dads and 1,000 baby boomer dads found that when a DIY task needs to be done at home, more than half of millennials prefer to call a professional.

Tools owned:

Cordless drill (although I don’t have enough batteries).
Stepladder (One and a convertible step ladder).
Set of screwdrivers (a bunch of screwdrivers, not a matched set).
Hammer (More than one).

Tasks:

Change a car tire on the side of the road (last performed last winter, in the dark, on ice).
Unblock a toilet or sink (well, I can do it sometimes; I had trouble with my mother-in-law’s toilet this spring).
Reset a tripped circuit breaker (well, it took me a long time to reset the GFCI in my garage because the outlet was behind a pile of things on the built-in shelves, and it took me years to find it.
Open a stuck pickle jar with their hands (Come on, I lift weights for a reason).
Repair a flat tire on your child’s bike (to be fair, my beautiful wife certainly could as she is a serious cyclist).
Restart a stopped furnace (I probably ought to learn it).

I tend to run self-analysis on this front as my father was very toxicly masculine and was steeped in the knowledge of the outdoors (a former Boy Scout and lifelong hunter), car repair (when we lived in the projects, he had a second 1967 Chevy Impala that he kept for parts), and household repair (in Noggle and Son Remodeling, he was the third generation).

I’m not as bad as a millenial dad who answers polls on the Internet, but I’m not near my father or even my brother (or, perhaps, my sainted mother) in basic competence. But I’m getting better about it.

(He said as he was taking bids to replace his gutters).

The actual Alarm blog post presents this in a light more flattering to millenial dads, who are replacing DIY skills with knowing to buy quality tech products like whatever Alarm.com offers. Hey, I can’t knock the blog post too badly. I’m contracted to write blog posts like it from time to time.

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Book Report: Sanibel Shell Shocked by Art Stevens (1992)

June 6, 2019September 3, 2022 Brian J. Noggle

Book cover Speaking of beach vacations, I dived right into this book after buying it last week in Branson. I felt a little like I was betraying Branson by reading about another vacation destination while vacationing in Missouri. But that didn’t stop me from reading the book.

It collects newspaper columns by Art Stevens who was (is?) a part-time resident of Sanibel Island, splitting time with New Jersey, where he made enough in six months to afford a spot on the island. Although this book dates from 1992, Stevens’ column continues to this day.

It takes on topics such as tourists, alligators, and development on the island. It’s Florida stuff, the kind of thing you find in Barry or Hiassen (and treated more seriously in John D. MacDonald books). As I started the book, perhaps I expected too much of the author; perhaps he suffered in comparison to Barry, who is about the only humor columnist that has made me laugh out loud.

However, some of the columns amused me. So the humor is akin to Mike Royko when he was doing his outlandish pieces.

So worth the read if you’re into Sanibelernalia.

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A Beach Vacation And More

June 6, 2019 Brian J. Noggle

I mentioned we’re looking to plan a beach vacation next year. We were thinking of Florida, but we might end up in Hawaii if my beautiful wife learns you can have a beach vacation and hundreds of cats:

Some come to Hawaii to swim and frolic in the legendary turquoise surf. Others sprawl in the sun with skin slathered in lotion until they are as crispy, oily, and golden as a potato pancake.

Me? I came to Hawaii for the cats.

There is a magical place — call it heaven, Shangri-la, Xanadu, or Abraham’s bosom — where more than 600 cats roam on a 3-acre sanctuary. For crazy cat ladies and gentlemen such as myself, the Lanai Cat Sanctuary certainly sounds like heaven on earth.

Well, my fellow cat fanciers, I made the pilgrimage, and I’m happy to report that the Lanai Cat Sanctuary does not disappoint.

It beats alligators.

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Book Report: Cabal by Clive Barker (1985, 1988)

June 5, 2019June 4, 2019 Brian J. Noggle

Book cover Clive Barker was all that in the late 1980s. He had a couple of movies out, including Hellraiser and, um, what’s that other one?

Well, this book collects a novella and several short stories. The novella, “Cabal”, talks about the Nightbreed. Ah, there it is!

At any rate, this book has on the outside edge of my to-read shelves since I cleaned up my library (::cough, cough:: three years ago). I read Barker’s Books of Blood (I, but that was before they needed Roman numerals) in 1994, and I’ve picked up a couple of his books here and there because every once and again, I think I’ll read some horror and maybe write some (which tends to come out more like H.P. Lovecraft than Stephen King or one of the modern Urban Fantasy people).

At any rate, this book contains:

“Cabal”, in which a mentally unhealthy individual is convinced he’s committed horrible murders, so he tries to go to a remote Canadian town where monsters are welcomed. Once there, he finds that he is not the monster he thought he was, but there are monsters in this world–human and otherwise.
“The Life of Death”, wherein a lonely woman becomes enamored with the thought of the dead and becomes a killer inadvertently and meets Death, although not in the way she expected.
“How Spoilers Bleed”, wherein some adventurers acquire land rights in the jungle and try to displace a native tribe only to fall under a curse.
“Twilight at the Towers”, wherein an espionage agent discovers he’s not just human, and that he has more in common with others of his kind than his handlers.
“The Last Illusion”, wherein an investigator with experience (not pleasant) with the occult is called to help protect the body of a magician from dark forces.

I mean, they’re okay stories, a bit gory as expected and with a touch of S&M (graphic at times) that spawned more than one Goth in the 1990s.

So perhaps I’ll read a couple more of these 1980s horror books that I’ve accummulated over the years. Back then, horror books (as with so many other books) were thinner, running 200 or 250 pages (this volume is 338, but broken over multiple stories, it seemed shorter), and horror books must have been fairly popular in book clubs, as you can see bunches of them available at book sales. For a little while, yet. I have to wonder if they’ll all disappear soon as the baby boomers finish downsizing and if another burst of availability will occur when the readers of Generation X start downsizing.

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Book Report: Who Built That by Michelle Malkin (2015)

June 4, 2019June 2, 2019 Brian J. Noggle

Book cover I don’t know where or when I bought this book; it cannot have been too long ago as it’s a book of recent vintage and it was not buried in my to-read shelves. I picked it up to read because I might be going to an event where Malkin is speaking this autumn, and I wanted to be able to say I read one of her books.

At any rate, this book is not a political polemic as one might expect from a political commentator. Although the book piggybacks off of an Obama quote (“You didn’t build that.”), the book focuses on a number of what Malkin calls “tinkerpreneurs”: inventors whose innovations changed our lives, sometimes in ways that seemed small but had big impact. She looks at Carrier and Lyle (air conditioning), the Roebling family (steel cables and suspension bridges), Libbey and Owen (glass), and others. The book looks at how many of them had humble origins (and by humble, I mean nineteenth century origins, which meant they went to work, often in manufacturing, and then improved upon the things they did every day through mehanical automation). No eight year degrees in inventing for them.

So it was an inspiring book. One of my stretch goals for my life is to get a patent for something. Unfortunately, I’ve ended up working in computers, where patents and innovation are squirrelly instead of actually working for a living. So it’s made me want to tinker (where other books make me want to write more).

I just need to clear some space in my garage to get going.

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Riddle

June 4, 2019June 1, 2019 Brian J. Noggle

How is mowing the lawn at Nogglestead like playing Mario Kart?

You have to dodge a lot of turtle shells.

I saw this fellow in the grass from a couple of mower widths over and couldn’t figure out what it was until I got right up on him and nudged him with the front wheel. After that, I let him be, and he thought he had his own bug blind in the middle of the yard and was content to hang out there for as long as I could tell.

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The Long Suffering Beautiful Wife of Nogglestead

June 4, 2019 Brian J. Noggle

So we’re discussing the relative intelligence of our cats at Nogglestead, and I insinuated but then walked back that our largest cat is not very smart.

At which point, I told my beautiful wife, “If we had a dumb cat, we’d name him Shane.”

“Why Shane?” she asked (for it).

“Dumb cat Shane, baby. Dumb cat Shane,” I responded.

It was the sort of joke that I knew wasn’t particularly funny, but a couple beats later, I laughed out loud at the sheer Brianness of it.

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When In Ridgedale, Drink As The Norwegians Sing

June 2, 2019June 1, 2019 Brian J. Noggle

Book cover I cannot understand why this is not an aphorism. Perhaps it’s better as a koan: What does it mean?

It means that, when choosing a wine to go with our meal at the Devil’s Pool restaurant at Big Cedar last week, I selected the wine that goes best with Norwegian heavy metal covers: Frog’s Leap Zinfandel.

Frog Leap Studios, of course, is the name of Leo Moracchioli’s venture. Here’s a recent song of his, a cover of Madness’s “Our House” that advertises Leo’s house for sale:

I looked into it; the house is roughly $300,000 in real money. Located in the balmy southeastern part of Norway, if I lived there, I’d expect to bump into Morton Harket, Pal Waaktaar-Savoy, and Tine Thing Helseth all the time.

But, alas, I am a man of modest means and cannot afford tiny little houses with awesome recording studios in the shed. Or castles closer by.

Where was I? Oh, yes, the wine. Very nice.

Apparently, I have a thing for wines that remind me of heavy metal bands. Or just a thing for wine.

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The Brian J. Strategy to NRA Dream Gun Raffles

June 1, 2019 Brian J. Noggle

Kim du Toit today posts a response to the NRA Dream Gun sweepstakes.

It’s a decent-enough selection of guns, I suppose — but the problem is that I would only want to own a few of them (4/18), namely:

Browning A5 Sweet Sixteen (16ga)

Remington 870 (20ga)

Kimber 1911 Raptor II (.45ACP)

Colt King Cobra (.357 Mag)

,,,and I’m kinda iffy about the short barrels on the last two anyway. The rest of the guns are either in the wrong chambering (.224 Valkyrie?), duplicates of stuff I already own (.30x bolties), or a type of firearm I don’t care to own anyway (AR-15 variants) — even for free. (If I were promiscuous when it came to guns, then I could take any of the eighteen, but I’m not That Guy.)

I enter these every time they come along, and frankly, I am That Guy, I suppose. I don’t have a gun budget, and the NRA competition would quickly fill my (new-if-I-win) big gun safe.

When I enter, I make my selection based on common chamberings between guns at the prize level, chamberings I’d be able to get cheap ammo for, and then name (Weatherby over Ruger) just for bragging rights.

But I never send a contribution; there’s a checkbox at the bottom for declining but entering since no purchase is necessary.

As a matter of fact, I’ve got an outgoing entry on my desk that I haven’t mailed as I’ve been out of town. Probably the same sweepstakes that Kim got. I’ll probably mail it tomorrow and forget about it as odds are very low in winning.

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Good Book Hunting, May 29, 2019: Calvin’s Book’s, Branson, Missouri

June 1, 2019 Brian J. Noggle

This week we spent a couple of days at Big Cedar Lodge down in Ridgedale, Missouri. Of course, I hid that fact from you, gentle reader, by queuing up a week’s worth of posts so you wouldn’t know to come ransack the fabled libraries of Nogglestead in my absence. Clearly, you cannot trust me at all.

But since we were near Branson, of course we had to stop at Calvin’s Books.

As we had packed our SUV to the brim with cooking gear, food, and clothing, I exercised some discipline in my purchases.

I got:

Sanibel Shell Shocked by Art Stevens, a collection of humor newspaper columns from the 1980s and very early 1990s. While in Branson, my beautiful wife started talking about booking our vacation next year. A beach vacation. She’s hoping for Sanibel Island. So this book was the first that I saw, and I picked it up.
Herschend Family Values, a polemic about the Herschend family, who bought the Marvel Cave attraction, built Silver Dollar City around it, and turned it into a vast business empire.
Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer about a guy who sells everything, hitches to Alaska, and walks into the woods only to be found dead shortly thereafter.
Bait and Switch by Barbara Ehrenreich. In hardback. Which might prove damaging.
The Coloring Book by Colin Quinn. A musing on race relations from that guy from the MTV game show Remote Control (no, the other guy) and the actor in A Night At The Roxbury.

Unfortunately, Calvin’s didn’t offer a good selection for my children, who failed to pack any books for the trip (also, toothbrushes, it was revealed on the last night there).

Since I only bought five books, I could conceivably read them all by the end of the year.

Ha! Just kidding.

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