To be able to say "Noggle," you first must be able to say "Nah."
Amid ‘summer surge’ of new COVID variant — should we be wearing masks?
I’ve only seen a couple of headlines on the new Covid strain and did not click through because I’m not a particular Covidophile, but apparently someone has gotten the word out–perhaps on cable news or something–because both of the times I’ve been to Sam’s Club or the grocery store this week, I’ve seen people wearing masks again.
Not many, but someone has heard the huntsman’s horn and is again obeying.
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I have to say that this is the best novel based on country-and-western album liner notes that I have ever read.
Apparently, Brooks & Dunn’s albums had some stories featuring Slim & Howdy in the liner notes. Gentle reader, I gathered my Brooks & Dunn albums in those dark days of audiocassettes, which contained liner notes in very small type indeed. So I had not seen any of this material before.
Slim and Howdy are a couple of hard luck singers who meet at a used car lot and decide to pool their resources for a bit. They have some adventures recovering Slim’s guitar; wooing a couple of women from a honkytonk who then lead them unwittingly into a burglary; and ultimately into rescuing a friend and employer, the woman who owns the Lost and Found bar in Del Rio, Texas. A border town, get it? Lost and found in a border town? Yeah, the book alludes to a number of Brooks & Dunn songs like this. It probably does more than I know since my collection stops at Hard Working Man, and to be honest (as you can guess, gentle reader) my country and western listening is limited to the rare occasions (rare now as my son is mowing the lawn, and rare as it will be for a year or so until he is too busy or two gone to do so).
The bulk of the book is ultimately (I guess I already said that) to the latter quest–finding the bar owner who has been kidnapped for unknown reasons, but for whom a ransom note eventually arrives. Is it the recently fired employee, a hard case with body piercings making a fake mohawk? Is it the person from whom Slim and Howdy recovered Slim’s guitar, the person who has vowed revenge? Is it someone who has done busines with the woman’s father, who has gotten wealthy not entirely honestly? Or something else?
Well, it’s something else, a bit twee and perhaps expected. It ends up with gunplay that only scratches the heroes but mortally wounds the bad guys. And finis.
Not a bad read. Certainly targeted to Brooks & Dunn fans. The book included a CD single with the song “Gotta Get Me One Of Those”, and very stern warnings indicated you could not return the book if the envelope containing the CD had been breached. I assumed that the CD was missing, as it is on so many of my tech books, but I discovered it is intact and unbroken. Oh, the dilemma: Get the single which I will not listen to often or preserve the collectibility of this book for future generations who will not find it collectible anyway?
Well, gentle reader, they might have saved it from Napster kept it off of the iTunes store and forgotten to make it available on Amazon, but it’s on YouTube:
No word on if it’s available for free on Napster.
I did not break the seal on the CD, anyway, as it is my wont to not adulterate the books I read in any way except for some Dorito dust now and then.
At any rate, an okay, if simply told bit of modern Western. Not the amount of depth you get in, say, Louis L’Amour or James R. Wilder, but a bit of fun for Brooks & Dunn fans. Speaking of whom, holy smokes, those guys are like 70 years old now, and they’ve been retired as a musical act for over a decade. Somehow, in my head, they’re always forty-something like they were when I got the albums in the middle 1990s. And I’m still twenty-something.
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Well, I have often–well, I have once or twice–talked about the Sandlerverse and the Ferrellverse and even the Apatowverse. I’d say this is a crossover event, but really it’s an Apatow movie with Adam Sandler in the lead role, and it relies on actors from the Apatowverse (Seth Rogen, Jonah Hill), so this has nothing to do with the Sandlerverse at all. And it’s not even a comedy–it is a drama about comedians, so it has some jokes, but the situations themselves are not comic.
Sandler plays an older, established comic who went from stand-up to movie success who learns he is dying of a blood cancer, so he sort of adopts a younger comic to be his protégé and assistant and…. friend. Sandler’s character also tries to reconcile with his ex-fiancé who is now married to an Australian businessman and has two children. When he learns that his cancer is cured by the experimental treatment he received, he almost convinces her to leave her husband, but ultimately everyone learns that Sandler’s character has not really grown from his experience and is still very self-involved.
Unlike, say, Step Brothers, this lack of growth is not celebrated–it’s recognized as tragic. But, eventually, in the dénouement as the credits roll, we see a bit of a reconciliation.
Like Spanglish, this is an early dramatic turn for Sandler, but the character is not sympathetic enough to draw us in, and the Rogen-based assistant is, well, played by Rogen. He just doesn’t draw me in.
As I have mentioned, I’m probably going to miss a lot of Sandler’s later œuvre as it’s on streaming platforms and not in wide release, although perhaps if the streaming market implodes, they’ll be available elsewhere. Also, you are correct in guessing that I was disappointed that œuvre did not give me the opportunity to pretentiously use another word with accents, although I did get a chance to use one of those smashed-together letters.
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It doesn’t pay to be rich in California these days, either.
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Well, gentle reader, I have done it.
All right, I have not read the Durants’ The Story of Civilization series, but I have read the first volume which is a step in that direction. I bought most of the series in 2019, but I had to order this book from Ebay or Amazon. It’s got the embossed stamp of the previous owner, one R. Neil Schirke, on the title page, but the previous owner did not read it. Or so I assume, as this edition was poorly cut so that some of the pages were still wed together at the bottom–I carefully tore them when I needed to turn them, but some portions of the table of contents and index remain unseparated.
I have a bunch of little paper flags in the book, but it’s a lot, so I won’t drop them all here. Instead, I’ll parcel them out as “The Wisdom Of….” posts perhaps. Or I’ll get tired of having the volume on my desk (although I don’t have a place to put it on the Read shelves of Nogglestead with room for its fellows, so no rush).
But I will comment a bit on the Durants’ style and whatnot.
This book covers thousands of years in its almost 1100 pages. It starts out with a “book” defining what it means by civilization–basically, the structure of society and the art that comes with it which distinguish a civilization from a tribe. Then it delves into different civilizations by location and time period starting with the early Mesopotamian civilizations (Sumeria, Egypt, Assyria, Judea, Babylonia, and so on) in the near East; Indian civilizations in the Indus valley; Chinese dynasties; and then Japan (no love for Korea or Mongolia, for example, although the appropriate dynasty is covered in the book on China).
Each “book” within this volume goes through the civilizations discussed not entirely in chronological order, but rather chronological order by topics. So you have a timeline of government and/or social organization, and then you have chapters dedicated to various arts and occupations from industry to writing, philosophy, religion, poetry, sculpture, architecture, and/or painting, and sometimes you get these in sections of chapters which are themselves broken out chronologically. It makes it a little difficult to follow when the chapters discuss which artist was supported by which ruler–I admit I did not take copious notes whilst reading, and so I do not have a solid handle on some of the names and their eras.
Additionally, Durant (or Durants) is (are) Old Left. Which means you get some Marxism mixed into the book, with its attendant glorification of the proletariat (called proletariat and the working people are called proles, for real), denigration of “conservatives,” and even love given to leaders who redistribute wealth–but every time it happens, the system collapses under corruption which the authors blame on the corrupt people and not a system where corrupt people rise to the top. But it’s very subtle, and it only colors the work (red) a little.
Some of the early stuff where there isn’t documentation is a bit speculative, and the more closely that the history comes to Durant’s time, the more it is more current events reporting (and henced colored by his politics). The Durants are quite homers for every civilization–each in this book (and the start of the next) find something superlative for each civilization. Which is encouraging and engaging to read.
I’d wondered what it would be like to read a Chinese history written before the Communist revolution, and this one fits. To be honest, I don’t see a whole lot of difference, though. It talks about the Revolution, but it does not mean the Communist revolution–it means the revolution that overthrew the Manchu (Qing) dynasty, which ended in 1912. That is to say, within twenty-some years of the book’s writing. Living memory. The last imperial dynasty was closer to this book than the Clinton administration is to today (and more so true if you’re reading this in the archives and not in August of 2023). That’s an interesting perspective.
Which leads me to pop off with a couple of other footnotes of events that occur after this book is written that affects the areas the book covers:
The book ends with a “book” on Japan and with a section questioning whether the United States and Japan absolutely had to go to war. Whether or not we had to, we did, and that was a long time ago. Ninety years on, and we’re looking at a new dynasty in China which might be losing its grip and a regime in the United States that might be losing its grip and might pen a piece Must the United States and China go to war? But this would be commentary on current events, not history, not even the first draft of history, but rather what concerns learned men have today and not actual events that have unfolded.
Fortunately, the further volumes in the set deal with ages in Western and European civilization, so we won’t get too much more commentary except for the Old Left flavor.
So I’m on my way, and if I read two volumes of the set per year, I’ll finish in…. 2028. Although that’s discouraging–I’m getting to the age where I wonder if I won’t finish before five years from now–it’s a project I’ve undertaken, and I’m proud to have started. I’m also excited enough about it that I’ve bored people talking about Chinese history at the only party I’ve attended in recent history. So I guess it’s for my own enjoyment and amusement. And yours, gentle reader, and you can think I’m doing it all for you if you would like.
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But not tonight.
Branson, Mo., music community mourns the loss of legendary performer Shoji Tabuchi
Shoji’s After Hours was facing out, that is, in one of the record shelves at the right most position where the record is sort of visible. I tend to go from right to left when looking through the albums so I can see the fronts, and I passed over Shoji last night in favor of some Liona Boyd and a George Benson/Earl Klugh collaboration (called Collaboration for some reason).
But tonight we’ll listen to it.
I have one or two of his other records lost in the stacks.
Tabuchi was born in Japan during World War II, and as a young violinist, he heard a show by Roy Acuff, and he (Shoji) fell in love with country fiddle, so he came to the US and perfected it and eventually bought a theatre in Branson to perform there. My beautiful wife and I saw him once, many years ago. He was a staple of the Branson scene for 30 years, and it seemed as though he would go on performing forever. Perhaps he is.
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In the olden days, we used to say you’d “flipped it” when you scored enough points on a video game to overrun its maximum score and start over at 0. I remember spending more than one afternoon playing Asteroids on an Atari 2600 to accomplish this feat. Time was slower in the 1980s, or the days were longer, but playing a repetitive game for hours just to see the score restart as though you’d just started playing–try to explain that to a young person today.
It looks like television meteorologists have done something similar.
The temperatures–no, sorry, the invented temperatures of the “heat index”–will be so hot this weekend that they have gone to the opposite side of the rainbow, from the red to the violet, where they will presumably at 120 degrees or so move into the blue like it was cold.
Although to be honest, it has not gotten to 120 degrees that I recall. Over 110 a time or two. But never all the way back to blue.
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Well, this is another film in the Ferrelverse, and a 21st century film at that. I watched it without my boys even though they tend to favor Will Ferrell movies.
At any rate, the film deals with two forty-year-old manchildren, played by Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly, whose single parents meet and marry, making the, what, protagonists (Are you kidding me? We have to use that word for their characters?) as step-brothers. And they have childish spats until they discover their similar interests, when they team up for something childish, and then they have another falling out. There’s a subplot about Ferrell’s character’s younger, more successful, brother who acts as a foil for his childishness, and the younger brother’s wife who is crazy hot for the Reilly character for some reason. At the end, they all reconcile.
But they do not grow up.
I guess that’s why I prefer Adam Sandler films rather to Will Ferrell films. The Adam Sandler characters tend to start out boyish–okay, immature and grating–but they’re called to some cause outside themselves, and they grow up over the course of the film. Whereas Ferrell characters do not. The denouement is that the father of the family puts the boat that the boys wrecked into a tree as a treehouse for them to play in, and their love interests accept their, erm, foibles. So, yeah, not much inspiration to be found in this film.
A product of its time, right down to the George W. Bush quote that appears on the screen at the beginning of the film. C’mon, man, kids today don’t identify George W. Bush as the boogeyman anymore.
I cannot say that I will never again watch a Will Ferrell film–I mean, some of them which were a bit more topical had their moments–but overall, probably more of a marker of our decline than funny.
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I am not sure what any of that means, and I am certainly not going to type it into a search engine as it all sounds very dirty.
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Major League Baseball has commanded teams to pitch to Ohtani just to keep the Babe Ruth comparisons coming and to excite people and perhaps the Japanese market about Major League Baseball.
I’m not sure if it’s the world we live in or me in it that is getting even more suspicious and cynical. I would have thought it impossible, but here we are.
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Where is Samuel L. Jackson when you need him?
Passengers traveling with Iraqi Airways from Dubai to Baghdad were left roaring mad after their flight was delayed because of a bear that had broken out of its crate in the cargo hold.
Wait, no: The film is Cocaine Bears on a Plane.
It cannot miss.
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From Powerline’s The Week In Pictures:
C’mon, man, I gave something similar away for Christmas 2016:
I read Powerline’s The Week in Pictures to see if I’m in it (see also this and this).
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ABC Books had another book signing yesterday, so of course I went. I brought along my youngest who came along only because of the promise of lunch at a restaurant (which is kind of a tradition). So up we went in the early afternoon.
I was pleased to see the martial arts section was restocked. Well, restocked means it had a book and some sort of instructional material that looked like a box of cards of some sort. As the latter was $24.95, I did not get it this time.
I did pick up a couple of books.
They include:
Well, the unexpected price of the signing author’s book led to its immediate usage, as the boy and I, instead of going to a real restaurant, at some dandelion stems we found in the green space between the grocery store and the former home of my dojo in the strip mall next to it. As we were just foraging, we didn’t have the equipment to cook anything. On the other hand, we found a couple of abandoned and partially crushed soda cans which offered a mouth-moistening amount of flat and hot soda whose bounty was not covered in the book. If we two had eaten in the little diner in the strip mall, it’s entirely possible that one gyro and fries with water and a chicken parm with a Pepsi would have cost about $40 (including a generous tip which is my wont), so it’s almost a win?
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I got this book last month at ABC Books, and when I saw the date, I thought Was it that long ago? Because somehow July 2023 already seems like a long time ago. I guess it has been a long week for me.
At any rate, this collection of science fiction, horror, and other stories is part of the author’s Take Ten Tales series which has a couple of other books that I passed over because the book signing had multiple offers, so I only bought one book from each.
So I just read Into the Night, another collection by a local author with similar thematics/genresificity. So I cannot help but compare them, and I kind of liked this one better.
It is shorter, which helps, even when I’m starting out. I mean, when I pick up a really thick book, even if I really enjoy it, I tend to get a little antsy with having to stick to the book for a long time, even if it’s only a week or so. Or more, sometimes (details forthcoming). So a quick collection of 10 stories beats out a couple hundred pages of other material.
Although the stories are not as well written–which is not to say they’re poorly written, but they lack a bit of the umami in setup and character development that you get in the beginnings of the stories in Into the Night–but the story structure varies. The stories do not end with a DUN DUN DUH! and a predictable loss on the part of the human characters in the story.
So I consider it a notch above the other book, and when the author returns to ABC Books, I shall pick up some of her other work.
The book also has some room for your handwritten notes and discussion questions in the back of the book, which I thought was interesting. I cannot imagine any of my work being included in a book club discussion, but I guess this author can/could.
The book was published in 2003, which means she has slowly been putting out work over the last twenty years. Me? I’ve got a novel, a collection of poetry, and a full evening play in print, and I’ve not written much outside this blog and some professional articles in that time. Clearly, I need to do better.
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As I thought Grosse Pointe Blank was a very 1990s movie–or at least one that captured if not the feeling of being in your twenties in the 90s, at least an archetypcial representation of the same, this film captures a 1980s New York upper class zeitgeist–if not a representation of the actual experience, at least a representation of how this particular situation was presented in the 1980s. Followed in the 1990s by Sex in the City and other stylized representation of glamorous life in the big city packaged for those who are not there.
Tom Hanks plays Sherman McCoy, a bond trader, son of a bond trader, who is on top of the world. He’s making millions, he’s married to a socialite played by Kim Cattrall…. But it’s not enough, or something. His wife is more into being a socialite than in being a wife. So he has taken up with a married woman played by Melanie Griffith. He picks her up from the airport and is taking her to their love nest when they miss their exit to Manhattan and end up in the South Bronx. When Sherman leaves the car to move a tire in their way, a couple of black kids approach, probably with bad intent. Maria (Melanie) slides into the driver’s seat, and in the process of their getaway, hits one of the youths. Sherman wants to go to the police, but Maria talks him out of it.
When police don’t seem to be doing much to seek justice for the incident, an Al Sharpton-style self-aggrandizing preacher grabs onto the incident, as does a Jewish district attorney who is running for mayor–and a new assistant D.A. wants to make his mark (and maybe Maria). Bruce Willis plays Peter Fallow, a talented but often drunk journalist who gets hold of the story and helps to drum up the pursuit of the driver (but his paper just wanted the press of the injustice of it all, as the preacher and the struck boy’s mother just wanted a lawsuit payday). When they catch Sherman and look to hang it on him, Fallow looks deeper into it, and even though Sherman’s life falls apart, he is exonerated.
The film cuts between the different players and their individual storylines in the overarching story pretty well–I was kept interested through the film. I know it comes from a thick Tom Wolfe novel (which I have here somewhere), and I could see where the characters might have been better developed in a novel. I was kind of looking forward to trying the novel or another Tom Wolfe novel (I have several, of course), but my beautiful wife said she started the book but put it down. And, you know, I could see how none of the characters would be likeable. A film can move this along–and this one does–but if a writer feels contempt for his characters and doesn’t give the readers anyone to like…. Well, I don’t know that I’m going to go looking for the book, anyway.
But as a film, it’s not bad. It bombed at the box office, though, so perhaps it fell into a crevice between the 80s zeitgeist and the upcoming 90s zeitgeist. Or maybe I just am on a kick of using the word “Zeitgeist.”
You might be expecting a Kim Cattrall vs. Melanie Griffith battle tucked under the fold here, but to be honest, I am kind of a Kim Cattrall partisan even though I’ve learned her biography is a bit, erm, varied.
Instead, I’m thinking if, overall, I’m more of a Tom Hanks character or a Bruce Willis character guy. Even aside from the types of films they’re in (comedy then drama, comedy then action), I think I’m more of a Bruce Willis character guy. His characters have a working man vibe to them that Tom Hanks’ characters do not.
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