To be able to say "Noggle," you first must be able to say "Nah."
What do Aaron Tippen, The Animals, Icehouse, and the Indigo Girls have in common?
I know, they’re all musical acts. But aside from that, I wish I knew. Almost 30 years ago, I listed them on a notepad I carried in my pocket at the time.
I mean, one is country, one is old rock, one is an 80s pop band from Australia, and one are the Indigo Girls. I like music by 3 of the 4.
I have no idea what this meant.
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I got this book two years ago at ABC Books, and it stayed on the side table for browsing during football games in 2021 and 2022, but I didn’t make it through them, mostly because I kind of gave up on browsing through books during the football games. I’m in a bit of a spot, gentle reader, as I have read fewer than 40 books so far this year, and I’ve always counted on the football browsing to make up some ground in my annual quest for 100 books read at the end of the year kind of like how churches expect to make up an outsized portion of their budgets during Christmas week. Since I gave up the habit of browsing during football games, and we’ve given up any television provider that carries football games, I won’t be doing much browsing at all in the autumn and winter.
At any rate, onto Earth Games. Well, now, this might be Grandmother Poetry: The Next Generation. Blurbs on the back come from grandchildren, and one of them indicates Grandma Ruth is 80. My Internet research (a quick search) found an obituary that aligns with that, so Ruth Loring might well have been a grandmother when these poems came out.
However, unlike the Grandmother poetry that I read from earlier eras, these poems do not often deal with home, family, and Jesus nor do they end with rhymes. Instead, they read more like the instapoetry of Rupi Kaur and Pierre Alex Jeanty in having short lines, stream of consciousness, and abstractions rather than images.
Here’s a taste:
Zapped
Round and round and round I go
my life an endless zero
forever o-ing money.
Oh oh oh!
Then owe owe owe.
Oh…
woe.
Credit card junkie
and all for naught.
More wordplay than poetry, and like I criticize (most) instapoetry, it has a few good moments scattered throughout but it’s mostly for the amusement of the poet herself.
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So, yesterday, my beautiful wife needed to be early for church to prepare for singing with the octet (choir proper being out for the summer), and she needed to stay after service not because she was naughty but because she had to practice her trumpet for playing during next week’s service. Which means I had to do something that I haven’t had to do for a number of years: I had to pick out a carry book.
Gentle reader, you might remember my concept of a carry book. Generally a paperback, and often times a seriousish book in case anyone asks what I’m reading. I carried the, well, carry book to places where I’d have a little time to sit and read. I brought it to the dojo in the days where we would spend three or four hours at the martial arts school between two boys in kids’ classes and then parents in adults classes to close the evening, or I would carry it to church to read during the Sunday school hour when my children took and my wife taught, or I would have it in the car when I was waiting to pick my boys up for school.
Well, gentle reader, those days passed and took a couple hours of reading a week from me. Ay, me.
At any rate, as I was saying, I was looking for this book to carry with me to church (c’mon, I know, the Bible would be an obvious answer, but I’ve already read that, and the Orthodox Bible I’m working my way through is a bit larger than I wanted to carry). So I went looking for Letters from a Stoic by Seneca which I just bought the day before.
And I could not find it.
I mean, I know I shuffled the stack from Arkansas onto the shelves in my office. So I put the books most recently purchased from ABC Books onto the shelves in the hallway. And they disappeared.
I spent a number of minutes looking at the shelves, and I knew they were only in the outermost rows of books on the shelves–that is, not on the rank of books behind the front row of books which holds untold treasures that I have not seen since 2016 (is it time to dust again? so soon?).
But I could not find it, so I settled on another.
I joked with my beautiful wife about how happy I was to have found a used copy of a collection of Seneca and that I would be equally happy when I found it again in a number of years. I did not mean to make it quite so true so quickly.
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Yesterday, LaDonna Greiner finally visited ABC Books to sign copies of her book I’m Here For A Purpose; as I mentioned in that book report, I had already purchased two signed copies of the book at two other book signings. But as I’d recommended she have a book signing at ABC Books as well, of course I made a point to stop by and get another copy after wracking my brain to figure out to whom to give the book. I settled on my grandmother and aunt in Wisconsin and headed up to ABC Books. Mrs. Greiner made sure to give me one of the new printings of the book where she corrected a typo that I pointed out after reading the book.
I picked up a couple other things as well.
I also got:
So I will have plenty to read once I finish The Story of Civilization. I am almost done with Our Oriental Heritage, so I’m thinking maybe I can read two volumes of the Durants’ work every year, which will mean I finish the series in 2029.
As if.
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Wimbledon’s most controversial tennis outfits ever – from spandex bodysuit to Spurs shirt
No, of course not. Most of the controversies come from the last twenty or so years, or not deep in the archives so an intern didn’t have to work too hard. Or perhaps the archives were only, erm, scantily digitized so the AI didn’t know about life before the Internet.
It does, however, include Karol Fageros, who in 1950 caused controversy wearing gold shorts under her skirt.
It’s the only black-and-white representation.
Or perhaps the world lacks photos of Gussie Moran and her visible lacy panties from 1949. Although I did include a photo of Moran and panties when I told her story in 2019.
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This book came out a couple of years after The Jeopardy! Book and refers to it as a lightweight cash-grab that only glosses on the show and presents quizzes without actually delving into the backstage workings of the show. Which, come to think of it, is kind of what I said in my review of that book in 2009 (for historical perspective, five years before I auditioned for the program, and seven months before I moved to Nogglestead from Old Trees–so a long time ago).
This book, on the other hand, is written not by ghost writers, but by one of the actual writers (who had just left the show). It includes insights into how one goes about making up the questions for each program as well as how the shows are filmed and some of the personalities involved–Alex Trebek was the producer on the first season, but he was replaced with someone that Merv Griffin had worked with previously. The book also gives short biographies of all the parties involved, from Trebek and Griffin to the various writers, producers, researchers, and receptionists.
The book also tells the history of Kings World who distributed the show and Merv Griffin Productions and how all of that works out, and how Jeopardy! was a surprise holding the #2 game show slot behind Merv Griffin/King World’s Wheel of Fortune.
Which kind of led me to the question: Has the New York Post been ragging on these game shows over the past, what, year to get a better distribution agreement or price? I mean, readers have been subjected to seemingly daily stories mining Twitter for hot takes on anything that anyone said negative about the shows.
For example:
Those are headlines from the last month. And prior to Pat Sajak announcing his retirement, the paper also ran numerous articles about bad puzzles, Sajak’s inappropriate behavior, and so on, to rag on Wheel of Fortune. Like I said, I wonder what’s up with that and suspect it’s a money thing between the Murdochs and Sony, who now owns the shows.
At any rate, definitely a better read than the other book, and probably more insightful into the show than a contestant’s book would be. The Afterword wanders away from the core topic matter and into a bit of a polemic about the role of television, even Jeopardy! on public discourse. It doesn’t really add to the book, but I guess the author thought it was important.
Also, note the timestamp on the book (1995), and note this bit of prescience:
The new game’s experience of its young existence was to be presented to George [the producer] for his comments and approval. If a particular clue bothered him he ordered it replaced. For some reason he hated references to hamsters or gerbils; he seemed to consider these creatures obscene and so that was out. Other no-nos included references to Donald Trump, the quiz show scandals of the 50s, and mentions of Zsa Zsa Gabor.
Jeopardy! declared Donald Trump persona non grata before it was cool. Or maybe it was always cool to a certain set.
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So I took a photo of Nico lying in a bathroom basin and, erm, augmented it:
Geez, that’s a meme from almost a quarter century ago.
You know, some people think that memes started with the rise of social media, but those of us who’ve been on the Internet since before the Web (well, I had access to Internet email on BBSes in the 1980s and newsgroups via Prodigy and AOL in the 1990s) know otherwise.
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World has hottest day ever recorded by humans
That’s the headline on a slug that the Springfield Business Journal has for a link to a Quartz article about how some group of prognosticators has massaged data to indicate that CLIMATE CHANGE IS REAL!!!! The Springfield Business Journal headline would seem to indicate something else has measured the temperatures on Earth, but the Quartz article makes no such claims, nor does it offer perspective on different climates over the aeons.
But the fact remains that it relies on data starting in 1880ish, and the 140 years of data collected with varied instruments in varied locations still only accounts for a very small percentage of human history and an immeasurably small percentage of the planet’s existence.
But Trust the Scientismists.
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I picked up this book from the free books cart at church. I know, gentle reader, it’s not that I lack for something to read. But our church has a free books cart with cullings from the church library and other books that people drop off. Well, other people, not me, as I rarely separate books from the Nogglestead library, and when I do, they are generally not religous or church-friendly titles. Every Sunday, or almost every Sunday, I make my way past this cart and look it over. Most of the time, I don’t pick up anything as Nogglestead is topped up on Bibles and I don’t tend to read devotionals. But I picked up this book because it is the biography of the guy who serves as the main mascot for the Kansas City Chiefs and includes the story of an accident at Arrowhead Stadium that almost killed him.
The book is biographical and starts with his youth, his attendance of Lutheran church and school, and his relationship with his family. He ends up at Mizzou, not too far from his family in St. Charles, Missouri (a little farther than I had to drive once or twice a week to visit my beautiful girlfriend who attended grad school at Mizzou when I was working as a printer in O’Fallon). Although he played high school sports (at Francis Howell North, which was originally M. Gene Henderson Junior High which I briefly attended in the middle 1980s, right before the change to the high school–given that he’s four years older than I am, he must have started elsewhere as the class of 1990 would have been the first to start and finish at FHN), he wasn’t good enough for college–but he tried out to be Truman the Tiger, the Mizzou mascot, and got the gig. And proved very successful at it–he took first or second at national mascot competitions several years running. After college, a university contact got him an interview to be Fredbird, the St. Louis Cardinals’ mascot, and then an interview to be the new Kansas City Chiefs mascot, K.C. Wolf.
Meers has been a faithful Christian throughout his life starting in his youth, but he turns his position as K.C. Wolf into an opportunity to talk to others and to make appearances at schools and in other forums to gently spread the word. He even becomes an ordained minister in the Baptist church and serves as one of the ministers in his church for a time, so he has helped wedding proposals at Arrowhead Stadium and he has performed weddings (and gave away a bride a time or two when her father was unavailable). The book is chock full of Bible versus that inspired Meers at any given moment (and as this book is signed, the signature–K.C. Wolf–has a Bible verse with it). Clearly a Godly man with a story to tell. I was pleased to do further research, and it doesn’t look as though in the nine years since he’s written the book that he’s had any scandal or divorce followed by a quick engagement like some Bible-quoting Facebook friends. Which was reassuring and inspirational in itself.
So, the accident: As part of his act, he does a little bit with a dramatic entrance at football games at Arrowhead. He started out by riding on an ATV, but he’s also appeared via airborne jumps (tried several times, with only a few successes–and the guys landing with parachutes were professionals). Meers had ridden a zip line into the stadium, and in this case he was going to jump off a light with a bungee cord attached to a zip line–I’m not sure how exactly it was supposed to work–but in the rehearsal for the stunt, something went wrong, and he hit the upper deck before the zip line carried him out over the field. The last bit of the book talks about his recovery and return to the field, which he handles through faith, although it was challenging. This book was written and published within the year it happened, so that part is no doubt fresh.
Meers is still the K.C. Wolf, although with less zip lining and crazy stunting now, which is appropriate, since he’s four years older than I am, which would make him almost thirty. Which seems improbable, since he has been the K.C. Wolf for over thirty years. But I am pretty sure time-space itself is warped these days, which makes all of that possible.
So an enjoyable and inspirational book. As intended.
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I just mentioned vacationing near a lake made by damming the Little Red River in Arkansas.
Yesterday, Facebook presented me with a suggested post about the Red River in Arkansas:
MfBJN: Training AI and bots since 2003. Which is now according to my reckoning (actually, my eternal now starts about 2012, when the youngest went to school all day and when I assumed my position at the computer here for hours and hours a day, day in and day out, with only the occasional change to the desktop wallpaper and to the billing cycles of common applications to poorly differentiate the passing seasons).
Where was I?
Oh, yeah, trying to stick in my brain the longest river not from snow melt in case that comes up in a trivia night sometime, which it probably won’t because most trivia nights are just pop culture these days. Which is just as well. I find I don’t retain trivia as well at, erm, almost thirty as I did when I was twenty.
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The Sun, a British tabloid, doesn’t recognize the importance of the day except for the importance of the delivery of a pop “star” on this date in 2023: JET DIVE TERROR Chesney Hawkes caught in mid-air horror as flight plunges 20,000ft and passengers scream in terror
And Heaven help me, I know who Chesney Hawkes is. He sang a song I mocked endlessly in 1991.
Ah, those were the days of driving around all night with Chris and Deb, playing the radio and sometimes cassette tapes. Chris or Deb liked “The One and Only”, and I think one of them bought the cassette single. Also, WKTI probably had it in heavy rotation as they tended to play the hot hits, or at least selected songs, every hour.
Apparently, the song is from a British movie starring Hawkes (Buddy’s Song), the song–his first–was his high-water mark. Although he released three albums in the 1990s and several in the 21st century, he did not have much chart success worldwide and didn’t climb very high on the charts in Britain.
The article, after all, refers to him as the singer of “The One and Only” thirty-two years later.
Man, is my brain full of one-hit wonders from when I was nineteen, and I cannot tell the modern pop tarts apart at twenty.
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Of course I picked up a local paper or three on vacation in Arkansas. Those, and the highway signs and maps were very confusing.
Alright, alright, alright. To start off, Van Buren is not a county. Van Buren is a city in Carter County, and its newspaper is The Current Local–I subscribe, of course. The hospital in Clinton is Golden Valley Medical Hospital, and Clinton (and the hospital) are on Missouri 13, almost half way to Kansas City, not US 65.
It is, however, still the Ozarks. And the taller mountain part of it.
It was odd to see a lot of familiar names in different places, though.
I know, I know. What are the odds that I will subscribe to the Van Buren County Democrat (and the Stone County [AR] Leader–I already subscribe to the Stone County [MO] Republican and Crane Chronicle)? Pretty good I say as they’re only $50 annually even out of state. Although I will probably not subscribe to the Fairfield Bay News, the volunteer-run newspaper from the resort town where we vacationed as it is only four or five sheets of paper mostly full of coupons for visitors, and it’s $70 annually.
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My goodness, it has been a year and a half since I read the first in the Harbison Mystery series (Terror Near Town, which I read in January 2022). It’s been two years since I got the series at a book signing at ABC Books. This probably means that there’s another one or two in the series since real writers are writing books whilst I write intermittent blog book reports.
This book takes place almost twenty years after Terror Near Town. Set in the Great Depression, Chet Harbison, the Spanish-American War veteran from the first book, is 51 years old and has lost a bundle in a St. Louis bank’s failure. He and his family, including his brother and his family, economize and handle different business ventures to keep themselves and their farms afloat. The Jefferson County sheriff gets Chet to agree to be a deputy to earn a little money and to mostly keep him on a short leash and to take credit for Chet’s successes.
Although there is a bit of “mystery”–organized crime is moving in on local bootleggers–the book is not a mystery–it’s a western in the vein of Louis L’Amour (which, of course, I have cottoned to after reading A Trail of Memories: The Quotations of Louis L’Amour and Bendigo Shafter last year). The crime part of the story is a small part of it, almost an afterthought. But I suppose it’s better to be in the mystery section of the book store than the Western section–although in ABC Books, I’m pretty sure he’s still in the Local Authors section regardless of where the author actually lives.
I flagged a number of things in the book, gentle reader, that were errors and oversights, such as talking about the county alderman from High Ridge (the county has a council, but I’ve never heard of them called aldermen–but, to be honest, most of my time living in Jefferson County when I was too young to pay attention to such things) or a character telling another to bring in half a cord of wood for a stove–half a cord of wood is 8 feet by 4 feet by 2 feet (64 cubic feet) which is a pretty big ask to bring inside at one time or how onerous an eighth of a mile walk is (it’s 660 feet or two football fields which is not that far). But never mind those.
I will mention one thing: One of the events in the book is a raid on the Biltmore Club which straddles the St. Louis/Jefferson County Line. Apparently, the trick was if one county raided the club, they would all run to the other side of the club in the other county. As you have often heard, gentle reader, I lived in a trailer park down Delores Drive, and I often mention going up to the flea market on the hill. The hill was overlooked by a ridge, and atop that ridge was Biltmore. It wasn’t a club in the 1980s, but they did have a little business center up there with a couple offices (and a dump). Now, I believe it’s a real retail development. But the locations in the book came very close to where I lived indeed.
A good enough read that I look forward to the two others I have in the series. Apparently, I picked up the fourth in the series last August, which means I might only be missing one in the series if one came out this year. Note how this note indicates I’m writing these book reports in stream-of-consciousness–I just now searched again for the author on the blog and only now, four paragraphs later, I discovered I had actually bought the fourth book in the series. Of course, time goes all a-wonky again since I’ll be scheduling this post, so now is several days ago. Ay. And it might well be another year and a half before I pick up another in the series, by which I might well be further behind in the series.
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I’m not talking about people who participate in relays, where different people do different legs of a single triathlon. Nor am I talking about people who actually cheat at triathlons. For example, those who know how to swim.
No, I am talking about the official IRONMAN® reading glasses I saw at Walmart.
Come to think of it, most of the serious triathletes I know are getting near 50 years old these days no matter how much the local timing company owner and running enthusiast tries to get kids into the sport, it’s members are aging. Perhaps because one must generally hit a certain level of age and middle class to have time for all the training–which includes, generally, an expensive bike and a membership or daily drop-in fees for a pool that supports lap swimming (or going to a lake, I suppose, for open water swimming). It’s not hockey, by any means, but it is not a sport without cost. Which older people can pay in cash and in time.
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I got a postcard from some new retirement company who for some reason thinks I’m thinking of retirement (which I have been, sort of, along the lines of I can never retire as I reach the age where peers who went into government service are retiring with full pension and benefits and are picking up second full-time careers, but I look at the retirement accounts I have gathered from various spots of full-time employment in my career and think, “Man, weren’t these at the same market value fifteen years ago?”)
The slug is “Here’s what financial freedom looks like”.
At a quick glance and given the kind of postcards I tend to get in the mail, I thought it was a picture of AOC pitching financial freedom and retirement products of some sort. And I cannot imagine any sort of freedom in retirement plans the congressional representative from New York would push.
Clearly, if you look longer, it is not AOC. But at a glance….
It’s the sort of thing I would have raised an issue of were I working on the marketing team. But I probably would not have been because 1) It’s direct mail marketing, not part of some technological marketing effort in which I have experience, and 2) most marketing teams these days would not understand how using AOC as a pitch woman would alienate a bunch of Americans, particularly those who plan for personally funded retirement.
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I’m sorry; when I am on vacation, time kind of loses its meaning. I mean, I know we went to the Bookmarkish Emporium on Saturday, June 24, but I am not clear on which day we went to the Fairfield Bay Library and got great bags of books for $5 each. Was it June 27? June 28? Does it matter?
What matters is that we somehow got the two bags of books into the cargo bay of the truck on the way home without impeding my vision or decapitating the boys when I braked hard.
And we did, somehow, along with a couple of bags of leftover groceries.
A note about our trip to the Bookish Emporium: I might have mentioned that I bought two books by a local author there. They are Elements of Deception and The Widow’s Ring by Mary Schaffer. However, the book stall also had a shelf dedicated to Laurell K. Hamilton. I commented on it, and the proprietrix said she (Laurell K. Hamilton) was, in fact from Heber Springs. “She’s a Klein,” someone in the salon portion of the room said (The Bookish Emporium being but a wall of books in a hair salon in Heber Springs), and when someone can identify someone else by kin name, you know it’s at least as true as Wikipedia. I did not buy any of the books, as I gave up on the Anita Blake series after, what, Burnt Offerings? Blue Moon? When the series turned from crime fiction to soap opera. Apparently, it later went to just sex, but I missed that. Or actually, I didn’t miss it.
At any rate, when we hit the library at Fairfield Bay and its books for sale at $5 a bag, well, I got two:
I was going to behave, but they had a full shelf of Alan Dean Foster books, mostly Pip and Flinx books. Of those, I got:
All of that: Less than $5.
As it stands, there was room in that bag and another, so I also got:
Additionally, the library had a couple of free book bins, which I visited during and after our sojourn, and I picked up:
I also bought four DVDs at $1 each:
Sweet Christmas, I left behind a Tommy Lasorda bio and… well, a lot. If I had more room on the ride back, the carnage would have been worse. I might have bought everything they had. It looked as though a couple of the local residents had donated these books/films and they were getting cashiered for newer works. Had I enough room in the truck, I might have bought everything.
Well, maybe not everything, but more. I did not look too closely at the DVDs as I have been on a spree lately already. And I completely bypassed DVDs in the Fairfield Bay Market that were twenty-five cents each.
As such, the total spend was about $34 dollars. $18 for the local author books at The Bookish Emporium and $14 for the books and DVDs at the library. Not bad, but now I want to do nothing but sit and read or watch movies. Which is to say nothing has changed.
Also, a bit of a problem: Where to put them all? The desk or office chair is a temporary solution at best.
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