2021 – Page 11 – Musings from Brian J. Noggle

Brian J. Is Back On The Comics: Sad Sack Laugh Special #38, 1967

August 12, 2021August 11, 2021 Brian J. Noggle

So I had a little time to kill a couple of weekends ago when my youngest was playing miniature golf with his church youth group. The Fun Acre miniature golf course is, really, about an acre wedged between a strip mall and residential homes on a side street off of Campbell Avenue. It’s been there forever; the aged proprietor still mans the small shed as he did when Steve Pokin of the Daily Dammit, Gannett profiled him in 2014.

Whilst the youngster played a round with which he would ultimately be disappointed, Daddy went to the antique mall that abuts the looking mostly for cheap DVDs (LPs are now heading past $10 each, so buying them at antique malls is generally out).

I also stopped up the road at Nameless City, which has a couple of roleplaying games left but also still has a couple of tables of dollar comics. As you might remember, gentle reader, I used to hit up the Comic Cave (and sometimes got a discount for being a good customer). I liked the dollar comic boxes because they were organized; you could easily find runs of comics, even kinda new comics, for a buck each (which ultimately led to the store’s downfall–the proprietor would “subscribe” to a comic on your behalf, where he would pay the annual subscription and you promised to come buy the issues every month, and so many of you did not live up to your part of the bargain that I got your unclaimed comics for a buck each, and the proprietor could not afford to keep the shop open).

So when I am pawing through the jumbled boxes at Nameless City or Vintage Stock, I’m generally looking for interesting looking stories with low numbers, generally non-Marvel and non-DC, or I’m looking for issues in series I’ve kinda collected over time. Which leads to a lot of one-off, incomplete stories to read, but sometimes I can patch together a small run if I paw through enough boxes.

At any rate, to make a short story long, this trip I found something interesting: A 1967 Sad Sack Laugh Special from Harvey Comics:

As I mentioned, I got a large number of hand-me-down Harvey Comics from the 1960s from my aunts/great aunts. Old issues of Hot Stuff, Casper the Friendly Ghost, Wendy the Good Witch, and, likely, Sad Sack.

Basically, Sad Sack is similar to Beetle Bailey but appeared eight years before the more popular slacker/soldier. This particular volume collects multi panel newspaper comics into a single flat-spined comic book. You know, the archetype of the reluctant soldier skating by probably proved more popular during wartime, after the war with the returning GIs, and through the draft era. This particular volume, though, comes from the late 1960s, where presumably GIs in Vietnam could have read it, although I expect the schtick and motif were getting long in tooth by then. But, hey, Gomer Pyle, USMC was still on the air, so what do I know.

Sad Sack had a long history–although the newspaper cartoon only ran for 12 years, Harvey kept pumping out comics for 37 years, and Sad Sack appeared on radio in the 40s and in a movie in 1957. Mostly forgotten today except for some of us who inherited a stack of comic books almost 40 years ago.

I was pleased to find this book for a buck for the nostalgia it provided–it even smelled like those old comics, a bit musty which you don’t get from newer comics on slicker paper (and probably won’t in 40 years). The humor within is what it was, which is a bit amusing in spots particularly if you served, but probably not something that would reach today’s audiences.

But for the secondhand nostalgia.

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I Remember Then

August 11, 2021August 10, 2021 Brian J. Noggle

Over at Rural Revolution, they’ve got enough bookshelves to arrange their books by category.

There was a time, once, at Nogglestead, where we did the same thing. But that was eleven years ago.

I look back at those photos, like this one:

Or this one:

And think, “I used to have room atop the bookshelves for something other than more books?” Look at those organized shelves in the common area, only single stacked.

I am pleased to say that I do not have books stacked on the floor in my office at this time, and only a small stack of audio courses/audio books out in the living room.

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Round and Round We Go

August 11, 2021August 10, 2021 Brian J. Noggle

I drive through this coming interchange every time I go into Republic: MoDOT announces new roundabout near Wilson’s Creek National Battlefield:

MoDOT has plans for a new roundabout near Republic, which as drivers talking.

“You are essentially entering into a guessing game,” said local Param Reddy.

That roundabout will be installed at the intersection of route ZZ and Farm road 182, right by the Wilson’s Creek National Battlefield.

MoDOT officials said it would cost around $1.3 million and start construction in Spring of 2023.

As you might know, gentle reader, I oppose roundabouts for a couple of reasons, and this one will illustrate why very well.

This is the intersection in question. ZZ runs north and south and is a pretty straight state highway with good visibility in both directions. Farm Road 182 is hilly and curvy. The intersection itself is within the bounds of the Wilson’s Creek National Battlefield, so the speed limit on 182 drops to 20, but this is rarely observed. Farm Road 182 has stop signs, but ZZ has no control device.

I have come to this interchange a couple of times where I’ve had to wait behind cars at the stop sign for a couple of minutes, but rarely more.

The area is developing, so perhaps a control other than the stop sign would be in order eventually, but not a roundabout.

The roundabout is expensive; it will cost at least $1.3 million at least, and its construction will add delays to the intersection.
The roundabout slows down traffic on the highway even if there’s no merging/crossing traffic. Instead of continuing north or south at speed, drivers on ZZ will often have to slow down unnecessarily when no traffic is present on Farm Road 182.
The roundabout is inflexible. A stop light can be set to flashing yellow or enabled with sensors to know when to change based on the presence of vehicles. Not the roundabout. It’s the light rail train of interchanges. You cannot adjust it. You can only endure it.

I continue to believe that traffic engineers hate people who drive cars, and I’m starting to think that they’re all from the city and ride ebikes to work. Someone from the country who needs to go ten or twenty miles or more when driving doesn’t need a bunch of European traffic fads. We need consistent speeds to get from one point to another.

But I did not go to expensive Traffic Engineering School, which seems to lead to this thought process:

Roundabouts.
Diverging Diamond Interchanges.
Diverging Diamond Interchanges with roundabouts at each end.
Diverging Diamond Interchanges with roundabouts at each end and smoke machines! That will slow the traffic down.

If it saves just one life, it’s worth it! Although I’m not sure that in the ten years that I’ve lived at Nogglestead that one life has been lost at that intersection. Maybe, but it’s not Blood Alley by any means to warrant this imposition.

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Movie Report: Horrible Bosses (2011)

August 10, 2021August 8, 2021 Brian J. Noggle

Book cover It’s funny; this film came a year after Grown Ups, but it has a more modern, and not in a good way, sensibility. Maybe it’s the difference between an R rated comedy and a PG-13 comedy (which Grown Ups is). This film relies more on drug and sex comedy than the Sandler film. Wait, did I say, “It’s funny?” Maybe I should rephrase that.

Of course, the premise itself limits the grown-up, so to speak, potential. Three friends are having trouble at work, specifically with their bosses. One, Jason Sudekis, has a good job and is well liked by the owner–who dies, and whose good-for-nothing son (Colin Ferrell) takes over and makes our “hero”‘s life miserable. The second (Jason Bateman) is a salesman at some kind of, I dunno, high tech boiler room, his boss is played by Kevin Spacey, and this time Kevin Spacey gets to be the Alec Baldwin character from Glengarry Glen Ross instead of the Kevin Spacey character. The third, played by Charlie Day, is a dental hygenist whose DDS boss, Jennifer Anniston (I did not recognize her) who is sexually harrassing him at work. They decide over drinks that since they cannot kill their own bosses, they should kill each others’ bosses. They engage a black man (Jamie Foxx) they meet in a seedy bar, but instead of being a hit man, he offers to be their murder consultant, who gives them basic, obvious advice. So they start to stalk their respective prey and hijinks, mostly drug and sex hijinks. In the end, they don’t end up having to kill anyone and live happily ever after, at least until the inevitable sequel in 2014.

So, yeah, a modern film. Not as crass as, say, Hot Tub Time Machine 2 or Ted, but still not something I’m necessarily going to watch over and over. However, my boys will have that option when they inherit it and a dozen DVD players. And, gentle reader, I give you that option via the link below, which is a little more expensive than the buck or two I paid for it, but not that much, actually. Get ’em while they last.

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The Failing Gift-Fu of Brian J.

August 10, 2021 Brian J. Noggle

I am sure that I have mentioned from time to time that I generally begin Christmas shopping when spending gift cards that I received, or that I start picking things up very early in the year when I find something that so and so would like. It gets to Christmas time, and I’m not sure what I’ve gotten everyone, as I bought it so early in the year that I don’t remember, either.

But this year has been…. Different. We have gone through the birthday season, and I did not overwhelm my children or my beautiful wife with the gifts. The shelf in the closet has been bare. Normally, I have to wrap early gifts in ambiguous paper as I’m not sure whether a particular gift will be for a birthday, anniversary, Mother’s Day, or Christmas. But I’ve had to scramble at the last minute with a bit of “It’ll do” acceptance of a bit of guesswork.

So, what happened to me?

Was it that in the last two years, I have had to unwrap gifts for people who died after I bought their Christmas gifts? Including something I bought for my aunt who died two years ago and later gave to my sister-in-law, who died last year?

Was it general ennui based on the Recurrent Unpleasantness? Disappointment in recognizing that the extended family I have longed for was not reciprocating my attempts to connect?

Perhaps, gentle reader, it was all of the above, but I recognized something else acutely recently: I am not currently exposed to a lot of gift ideas all the time.

As I was finishing up my Wall Street Journals, I got to the weekend features section and read a book review on Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck, and I ordered a copy for my mother-in-law for Christmas.

You know, I used to see reviews for books, movies, and music all the time in National Review and First Things, not to mention Instapundit as well as in the stacks of Wall Street Journals that I accrued and eventually browsed. My subscriptions to the periodicals have lapsed, and Instapundit mostly runs promos for advertisers on Helen’s Page now, so I am just not continuously seeing snippets of interesting books and whatnot. Which, to be honest, made up the majority of the gifts I laid up, or gift schticks items I laid up when I came across them.

My boys and my beautiful wife, whocomprise most of my gift giving these days, do not really have gift schticks. They get pajamas every Christmas and novelty socks from time to time, but the boys are growing to young men now, so showering them with piles of Legos doesn’t work easily. And I can’t give everyone novelty socks every gift opportunity.

I dunno; maybe I need to re-subscribe to First Things; my subscription lapsed because I ignored all of the renewal notifications because most magazines send them bi-monthly. Or maybe I need to find some more general interest Web sites with book reports to get ideas. Because, honestly, I get Friar’s thriller book reports and a lot of information on military science fiction from various Instapundit-and Hoyt-related sources, but not the sorts of things I get for my wife and children.

Ah, well, we have some months until Christmas. Perhaps something will come to me.

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Book Report: Poems by Chris Alderman and Harold Alderman (1970)

August 9, 2021August 8, 2021 Brian J. Noggle

Book cover I was in the mood for a chapbook, so I picked up this recent purchase. I got it at a garage sale here in Springfield for fifty cents at a garage sale whose proprietrix said they had a great selection of books, but which looked to be mostly college Spanish and English literature textbooks. I think I came away with two books: this book and another piece of classical literature in the expensive but cheap college paperback edition–it’s lost in the stacks already, so I cannot tell you what it was.

This book, though, is a signed, numbered chapbook, number 159 of 300 published fifty-one years ago in California. How it got to the garage sale of a recently enfamiliated college grad in Springfield, Missouri, I cannot tell you, either, but I always find these books’ travels interesting.

It collects poems of two people with the same last name. The first section is Chris, and it’s the better section. Medium-length lines, but definitely a rhythm that said Chris read the works aloud. The second set, by Harold, is less good, but, still, overall, the collection was pleasant to read.

A quick search of the Internet does not yield a lot of information about either of the authors or them together, although one can find the book on Amazon for $17.50, which is not very chap at all.

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La Journalia E Finita

August 9, 2021August 8, 2021 Brian J. Noggle

I mentioned last November that I canceled my subscription to the Wall Street Journal after less than a year because I was not pleased with its coverage of the election and its aftermath.

I’ve also said before that I have tended to let the Wall Street Journal pile up on those occasions when I’ve subscribed to it; last November, I recognized:

I am pretty sure that it will stack up unless I make a concerted effort to clear it out, and I might as I try to get some sort of record player running this holiday season which might involve putting a component system in the parlor.

I did, in fact, get a working turntable in the parlor last year, but I had several inches of Wall Street Journals piled up.

They’ve yellowed over the year as I piled others in my local papers on top and then popped the most recent papers off of the top. Since I’m taking, what, nine local papers per week (one of which comes twice a week), I’ve gotten into the habit of sitting in the parlor and reading papers. Which has included the stack of Wall Street Journals.

So yesterday afternoon, I finished off a couple of issues from September and October 2020. Again, I quote myself last November:

And, as is the norm, the papers started piling up unread until I would (or will) months later tear through them weeks at a time, only glancing at the headlines and shaking my head, thinking We had it so good then; I know how all of this turns out.

The headlines almost a year ago? COVID, COVID, COVID, election, Trump is bad! and so on.

Not too much different than what I see on the Internet and the front page of the Daily Dammit, Gannett here in town. Only they’re more shrill now.

And to quote myself again:

But you know what I will miss? The feature writing in the Personal Journal and Friday/weekend sections along with the book, television, movie, and music reviews. The same things I rather miss out of the National Review.

Also true. But it’s not worth $25 a month or more.

Will that be the last time I subscribe to the Wall Street Journal? Time will tell, I reckon, but this time it’s not so much that it’s expensive and piles up, but also that its news coverage is not very straight any more. So probably.

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Creepy Is The New Normal

August 8, 2021 Brian J. Noggle

So I read this article in Chrome with the JavaScript off: ‘Preppers’ Quietly Stock Up for the ‘Perfect Storm’, and it mentions a prepper supply company:

Keith Bansemer, president of My Patriot Supply in Salt Lake City, said his business has grown exponentially amid widespread fears of a return to COVID-19 lockdowns, empty store shelves, and forced vaccinations that will limit personal freedoms.

And I log into Facebook minutes later in a separate browser, and I get:

You know, that’s pretty fast information sharing. Too fast.

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Movie Report: Grown Ups (2010)

August 7, 2021August 7, 2021 Brian J. Noggle

Book cover I watched this film with my boys–they were interested in it because it stars Adam Sandler, Chris Rock, Kevin James, and other comic figures they know. But I warned them that this was a more adult-oriented film, and that Sandler plays an adult in it, not the zany man-boy of films like The Waterboy, Little Nicky, or Happy Gilmore.

A junior high school basketball team wins the only championship in the school’s history; thirty-some years later, the coach of the team dies, and the team members assemble for his funeral. They include a successful agent (Sandler) whose wife is an international fashion designer and whose kids are spoiled brats; a househusband (Chris Rock) whose mother-in-law lives with he and his wife (Maya Rudolph); a hippie sort married to a woman several years his senior (Rob Schneider); David Spade playing David Spade (but not Joe Dirt); and a recently unemployed furniture store employee (James) whose wife (Maria Bello) still breastfeeds their four-year-old. They come together and spend the weekend in a lakehouse to reconnect with each other and with their families. The film climaxes with a rematch basketball game with the other team from that championship led by Colin Quinn.

I had seen this film before as a rental before my local video chain closed, so I liked it well enough to pick it up cheaply. Some of the humor is a little crass, but it’s the kind of crass that you get when you’re around friends. Believe it or not, gentle reader, even *I* can be a little crass around my friends from way back. So it fits into the movie instead of defining the movie. And it’s a movie with a lot of heart, with a message that resonates with someone who’s in the middle of that middle age, with a family and responsibilities and wondering what happened to being young–and how to get in touch with the joy of life a little bit.

So, like many films in the Sandlerverse, I’ll probably watch this one again at some point, and I’ll keep my eye out for a cheap copy of the sequel. Unfortunately, though, I might not ever see a new Sandler movie since they’re all streaming only these days. I have to wonder if 2020 kind of marks the start of what might be a dark age–I mean, if someone looks back from somewhere down the timeline, all cultural artifacts from about now are going to be gone because they were only on computers, and nobody even has a freaking floppy drive or CD ROM any more except me.

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I’d Rather Have The Product I Imagined

August 6, 2021 Brian J. Noggle

An ad for some frippery I saw on Facebook:

I thought, How cool is that! A reversible trenchcoat that turns into a cape!

Oh, but no. It’s just some overpriced “artist” putting your face on some stock portrait background. Which is not something I’m interested in.

A trench coat that you can turn inside out and it’s a cape, now that might be tempting.

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Movie Report: Joe Dirt (2001)

August 5, 2021August 1, 2021 Brian J. Noggle

Book cover Although I had seen snippets of this film on television a couple of times, I had not seen the film all the way through until I recently watched it with my boys. I picked it up on Saturday at the St. Elizabeth Ann Seton church sale along with 18 other DVDs for a dollar each, and I watched it the same night with my boys. I preface all of these comedies by saying, “This is a documentary” or “This is based on a true story,” but they are coming to view that pronouncement with suspicion.

Joe Dirt (David Spade) tells his story, partially in flashback, as he is interviewed on a radio program where the talker (Dennis Miller) belittles him. His family abandoned him at the Grand Canyon when he was eight, and Joe roamed until he found, what, a foster home? in Silvertown in the Pacific Northwest–where he befriended an attactive girl, Brandy. But Joe decided he had to go find his family, so he starts a search that takes him to the Grand Canyon, to New Orleans, to Baton Rouge, where he meets and exposes a mob boss in the witness protection program and gets kidnapped by Buffalo Bill (of The Silence of the Lambs). He eventually becomes a sensation due to his story on the air, and that helps him find his real parents, and they’re not what he hoped.

The boys enjoyed it, and I didn’t think it was a waste of time. I’m not generally a fan of David Spade. But this is not part of the Spadeverse–this is the Sandlerverse. It’s a Happy Gilmore production and has Kevin Nealon and Blake Clark playing essentially the same thing as he did in The Waterboy (a Cajun people have trouble understanding), so definitely Sandlerverse. The older boy recognized Joe Don Baker and asked what he else he was in; the boy might have recognized him from one of Timothy Dalton’s James Bond movies or two of Pierce Brosnan’s James Bond films. Or he might have been thinking of the chief in Fletch which we watched this spring. He also had a small part in Reality Bites.

So not a complete waste of ninety minutes, and something that speaks to teenaged boys more than their agèd fàthers.

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Book Report: Laugh Lines by Alison Pohn (2004)

August 4, 2021August 1, 2021 Brian J. Noggle

Book cover This book is kind of similar to Yes, Sir, That’s My Baby (and pretty much every I Can Haz Cheesburger-style Web site from the 21st century). A picture and a caption that’s supposed to be funny. This book collects images of really old people (thankfully, not merely old people like me) and has a sentence like “I’ve got those falling down arches, can’t see without my glasses, I hate gravity blues.” which is paired with a woman wearing bifocals playing a harmonica). Fun fact: I was given bifocals in 9th grade because I had trouble with the aligned text test while getting a new strength for my glasses. So I was wearing bifocals in high school, standing all of five foot something and weighing under a hundred pounds. So, yeah, I was very low on the pecking order, brah.

Another caption has a pair of elderly twins in matching outfits with the caption “Mary Kate and Ashley, consider this a warning.” Seventeen years later, you’d need a footnote on that in the 2nd Edition of this book. My boys don’t know who they are. Of course, my boys didn’t know who John Wayne was until recently, so maybe that’s more accusing my failures as a father than dated pop culture references in this book.

At any rate, I guess these things are designed to give as a gift to someone as a gag on an advancing birthday. So maybe my buying it at a garage sale and reading it really doesn’t keep with its intended spirit and purpose.

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Brian J.’s Recycler Tour Returns

August 4, 2021 Brian J. Noggle

Two years ago, I said:

Oh, no. In the silent auction, I wrote my phone number in the wrong column.

Now I owe almost nine million dollars for a peach pie and some chocolate cookies.

I was referring to the Republic Pregnancy Resource Center’s annual Bluegrass and Barbecue silent auctions (where I have shopped before).

It’s coming up this Friday, so I will have to shop very carefully.

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Alienating Readers A Badge of Honor At The Daily Dammit, Gannett

August 3, 2021August 3, 2021 Brian J. Noggle

The “article,” for paying subscribers, is entitled “Young reporter threatened; columnist told that his head is up his #*@”.

C’mon, man, we know what the readers are responding to: The hype stories from the new kid and that the closest thing that the paper has to a local columnist has been writing political diatribes knocking people skeptical of the Recurrent Unpleasantness instead of explaining what’s being built on such and such corner and what’s the story about that one thing we pass on our daily commute.

One wonders how much the article, for subscribers only, will reinforce a certain block of subscribers and how much the article will lead to cancelled or lapsed subscriptions.

I expect both, but for the Daily Dammit, Gannett to continue to shrink in size and subscriber base.

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Book Report: Fire Hammer The Executioner #215 (1996)

August 3, 2021August 1, 2021 Brian J. Noggle

Book cover You know, I have kind of enjoyed the last couple of Executioner novels (all right, mostly Rescue Run and Death Whisper), but this book is a real clunker.

To start with, the plot involves helping China. A group of Chinese rebels working with a Chinese American entrepreneur hope to bring China’s Communist government down by causing an accident at a nuclear plant in southeast China, which will also poison Hong Kong. Bolan has to track them through a couple of set pieces to Malaysia, where he works with a Chinese-American CIA agent and eventually the only remnant of a Chinese “secret service” team that tried to kill Bolan on a couple of occasions. They have to attack an enemy stronghold with a maze-like structure that can serve as a training room for various nuclear plants, which means of course we’ll have a shoot out in a maze.

Yeah, well. You know, when I read Lee Child’s Killing Floor, I mentioned that he (Child) was an Englishman trying to write in the American, and the author of this particular paperback leads me to believe he, too, might be English. But some of the same kinds of things: Calling cartridges ‘shells’ (I think) and especially the mistake in measuring distances. The mistake is this: Americans tend to measure things in terms of feet until they start getting pretty large, at which time we talk about yards. So talking about three yards is ludicrous unless you’re talking about an American football game. At one point, it goes on about how Bolan prepares himself to jump two yards and then barely caught the edge of the precipice/building as though that was a great distance–but if Mack Bolan fell that two yards, he would hit his head on the edge.

I was working myself up to a thesis that this was Lee Child in another early pseudonym, but apparently the author is a guy who lists his Gold Eagle work in his LinkedIn bio. Welp, I guess I am not as clever as I think.

Aside from the British-sounding bits, the book has some clunkers, some misplaced verbiage that could have been cut, as well as some mistakes as to which gun Bolan is holding at any given time (he fires the Beretta, then he fires the Desert Eagle, without mentioning that he’s changed weapons). Maybe that’s not a mistake, as he later goes two-handed, firing one of the pistols in one hand and a Chinese assault rifle in the other. With deadly accuracy.

So I was glad to be done with the book; apparently, it’s early in this author’s work. Hopefully, he got better.

But now that I’m down to four books in The Executioner series on my to-read shelves, suddenly I look upon them with trepidation. I was hoping to finish the series soon and feel some sense of culmination or something for having read almost 100 of them over the last decade. But it will probably be later in the year or early next that I finish the series as I’m going to look for something else for the nonce. Pamela? you say. Let’s not go to extremes, gente reader.

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Movie Report: Top Secret! (1984)

August 3, 2021August 1, 2021 Brian J. Noggle

Book cover We watched Val Kilmer in two movies over spring break (Real Genius and Top Gun). I read something about his new documentary at that time. I have since watched Tombstone, and when I read another New York Post article on the documentary, I decided to watch this movie with the boys. After all, it was on Showtime when I was in the trailer park, so I watched it over and over again while I was about their age.

Val Kilmer plays Nick Rivers, a surf rock (known for his hit “Skeet Surfin'”) who gets invited to a cultural festival behind the Iron Curtain and gets involved with the resistance who wants to smuggle a scientist out of the country before he can be forced to help the communists attack the NATO submarine fleet.

The film had more sexual content than others I’ve watched with the boys–some of it went over their heads, although I would have gotten it at that time, but I was a product of public schools for all of my education and I had a copy of the American Heritage Dictionary to look up all the things the other public school kids called me. But the film was also more accessible to them than, say, Airplane! or Hot Shots!. I dunno, maybe it’s because they saw Von Ryan’s Express last year, so they get the behind totalitarian lines thing.

At any rate, I watched this film a year or so back when I got it, so it’s definitely in the class of films I’ll watch over and over again. Just not as often as when I was stuck in a 12′ by 60′ trailer in Murphy, Missouri, with nothing but Showtime to pass the time.

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The Garden Friends of Nogglestead

August 3, 2021August 2, 2021 Brian J. Noggle

In years past, I have planted a bed of melons with cantaloupes, watermelons, and pumpkins outside the fenced in beds of Nogglestead (one of which lacks actual fence material at this point, although the posts are still there). I had some success, harvesting a couple cantaloupes, a couple small watermelons, and a pumpkin or two (which is not a large yield for years’ worth of plantings, especially since I planted plants one or more years).

This year, we have put the melons in one of the smaller beds (the one with the fencing) along with a zucchini plant and some corn.

Which means the growing fruit nestle together like this.

The youngest, the most eager tender of the garden and the assistant waterer (to my beautiful wife’s diligent work), keeps asking me if it’s time to harvest. Not yet, I say. We will wait one more day. Until something takes a bite out of them, at which point they’ll be spoiled, if history can be any guide.

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In More Uncle Ted News

August 2, 2021 Brian J. Noggle

In news other than how I made Ted Nugent a rock god, we have Uncle Ted in the real news today: Ted Nugent Resigns From NRA Board:

The National Rifle Association just lost one of its most famous board members.

In an email to the board obtained by The Reload, NRA general counsel John Frazer announced rock star Ted Nugent is stepping down from his role as a director. Frazer said the group thanked Nugent for his decades-long service on the board. He cited “ongoing schedule conflicts” as the reason Nugent would no longer serve.

I’m still a member, and I hope the organization straightens itself out. I keep nominating Darbo for the board. Maybe now they’ll listen.

(Link via Wirecutter.)

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Book Report: Sonic Warrior by Lou Brutus (2020)

August 2, 2021July 30, 2021 Brian J. Noggle

Book cover My beautiful wife, who also gave me Louder than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Heavy Metal last year, gave me this book for my birthday or our anniversary this year. So, in between Executioner novels, I picked it up.

Lou Brutus is a longtime DJ working in various cities, apparently culminating in working for SiriusXM and has been a hard rock/heavy metal fan for probably two and a half decades longer than I have. One of the local rock stations used to run his syndicated program HardDrive XL every night at 7pm, so I would catch snippets of it in the car when I was out later than I should be. So, know, gentle reader, that I could hear Lou’s voice in my head as I read the book and heard his inflection on just about every line. Oh, yeah, and you know, the Dave whose Iron Maiden poster I quoted to win my beautiful wife? After he mustered out of the Army (Airborne, natch, since I know more former Airborne than former Marines), he ended up on somewhere on one of the Deagon coasts as a DJ, so, of course, he knows Lou Brutus (as I often pointed out to my children when we heard him on the radio–I know a guy that knows that guy).

The book describes not so much his love of rock music, but more his interactions and funny anecdotes at concerts or music festivals or when meeting rock bands professionally. He got started as a kid in New Jersey going into New York to see concerts and ascended the ladder. You know, when I took broadcasting classes at the university, one of the professors talked up the fact that you had to move around a lot and go city to city to rise in broadcasting. Coincidentally, that was about the time I decided I was not going into broadcasting. I never wanted to leave Wisconsin again! Er.

So it’s a great book. The voice is humble and self-deprecating but not neurotic. You know, at this time, I would summarize a book a bit, but ultimately, he goes to a lot of concerts, meets a lot of musicians, and sometimes impresses them, but sometimes does not.

It’s a great book. I enjoyed it and actually bought a CD based on it. We’ll get to that in specific things I flagged, below the fold (a.k.a. when you click More.

Continue reading “Book Report: Sonic Warrior by Lou Brutus (2020)” →

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Good Book Hunting, July 31, 2021: ABC Books

August 2, 2021October 10, 2023 Brian J. Noggle

On Saturday, the boys and I made the trek to north Springfield to ABC Books to kill some time. The Martial Arts section is down to three books, one of which is the other Tai Chi Walking book that I did not buy. I have also scoured through the boxing/wrestling section for how-to books but came up empty. I have long-since taken the Green Bay Packers books from the football section (see Life After Favre). So this time, I hit all of the sports books and ended up getting a book from the bicycling section. And I picked up a couple volumes of poetry since I never can seem to find a short collection when I want to (but I can find several hundred page complete collections from various poets).

I got:

A Bend in the Road: A collection of poetry and artwork by the residents of Beverly Enterprises which seems to be a poetry collection from the residents of a nursing home.
The Later Romances, poems by Eric Pankey.
Carver: A Life In Poems by Marilyn Nelson, a collection of poems for young people about George Washington Carver.
The Immortal Class: Bike Messengers and the Cult of Human Power by Travis Hugh Culley. This was in the bicycling section, but I’ll bet it’s more of a Meaningful Exploration of Humanity through the lens of this particular profession by someone who went to college and wanted to write a book.

This, coupled with two books I bought at a garage sale this week, means I only have bought six books this week. Which is, unfortunately, more than I have read recently. After a powerful start to the year, I only read eight books in July. Which, I guess is pretty good at that.

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