November 2023 – Page 2 – Musings from Brian J. Noggle

Musings from a Tech Banquet

November 11, 2023 Brian J. Noggle

Last night, I attended a la-di-da technology group banquet in a suit and everything. I was not nominated for any awards, but my beautiful wife is on the board of the organization. So off to the event I went. It included a lovely dinner and everything. I spent most of the mingling time sitting at our dinner table with my trusty binder, trying to hash out a poem that probably won’t work anyway.

The group’s tech events tends to have a number of sales people and solution providers from companies that will manage your networks or manage your phones provide tech support or development work, or offer education or coaching in any number of disciplines. One rarely finds actual developers and never finds any QA professionals.

But some of the local software developers group appeared. I recognized several of them as I’ve attended a number of the group’s meetings this autumn. Turns out that several of them were up for the young buck awards. So I meandered over and struck up a conversation with a couple of them. The topic of self-assessment of expertise came up, and I said I couldn’t rate myself as a seven of ten in any programming language even though I’ve used several. “And I’m certainly not Seven of Nine,” I said.

You know, Seven of Nine.

“You know, Seven of Nine. The Borg from Star Trek,” I explained to my wife, leaving off how the actress’s divorce led to President Barack Obama. Then I looked at the two developers we were talking to, and one said, “Star Trek? I might have seen it once.”

And I was all like:

It suddenly occurred to me that I was almost twice the age of these developers, and although my heart lies more with them and their work than with tech executives, I was an old man to them.

Culturally, I am older than an old man. My tastes tend to run to books, movies, television, and even music from decades past, often before I was born. Whereas the geek culture of today tends to focus on the present. When I mentioned to the developers I work with that I have a kitten named Meow’Dib (well, formally Maud’Dib), they knew what who that was. Not from the book. Not from the 1984 David Lynch film.

Their geek culture comes from recent streaming series and video games. Not even movies so much any more. Maybe it’s good to have endless reboots even if they’re photocopies of photocopies. It’s the only thing keeping any threads of shared culture together.

The M.C. of the awards portion of the program also made a Star Trek reference because he is older than I am and also didn’t know the audience as well as he thought. At one point, he mentioned “the intrepid Captain Picard,” and I leaned toward my wife and said, “Picard did not captain the Intrepid” as I recognized it was the name of a Star Trek ship. I thought maybe it was the ship that Chekov was on in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, but when I researched immediately after the program ended, I found that the U.S.S. Intrepid was in the original series’ “The Immunity Syndrome” and was crewed entirely by Vulcans. As I last read the Blish rendition of this episode in 2005 and last year when I walked through some of my duplicates in the series, I am surprised I remembered it (and then I remembered the ship Chekov was on was the U.S.S. Reliant).

So I thought I would ambush the M.C. to give him the true flavor of a tech meeting: Someone handing him an ackshually over esoterica in expired pop culture.

I mentioned this to my wife and one of her acquaintances (and my LinkedIn connections, which is lower than acquaintance) about how amusing my plan was, but that I would not carry it out. And all of a sudden I was all like:

I am awkward and off putting even at tech events.

One of the members, an Air Force veteran, stepped up to the podium to recognize veterans, and he asked the veterans in the crowd to stand up.

Five people of 249 did. My wife was a little shocked that the group included so few. Tomorrow, at church, half of the men in the congregation will stand when called upon.

I twirled my finger to indicate the crowd and said, “They went to college.” And did so in the years after mandatory service and after the peace dividend of the end of history which has left us probably ill-prepared for what might come.

So, yeah, these are not my people natively, but I can eventually make small talk with them. Or maybe just the older people among them.

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Television Report: The Best of Groucho: You Bet Your Life (1961)

November 10, 2023November 10, 2023 Brian J. Noggle

Book cover I picked this DVD up at a church garage sale four years ago (which, come to think of it, was the last time our church had a garage sale, it seems). I watched Duck Soup and Horse Feathers in 2021, but I guess my recent viewings of old Twilight Episodes got me more in the habit of watching a couple of old shows in an evening instead of watching a film. So it continues here.

This show aired the same time as the Twilight Zone episodes: 1961ish, when television was still black and white. Color was coming a couple years later, although widespread penetration would continue into the 1970s–both my beautiful wife and I remember secondary television sets in our homes were black and white.

At any rate, this DVD features two episodes of the game show wherein a set of couples essentially play one category’s worth of Jeopardy! and try to amass a higher dollar amount than other participating couples. Each round begins with Groucho reparteeing with the couples, and this really amounts to about half of the show. Then the couple gets to choose questions from a category that they’ve previously selected with dollar amounts up to $100. If they get it right, the amount is added to their score, and if they get it incorrect, an amount is deducted–so you can see how I compare it to Jeopardy! At the beginning of the show, the duck drops down with the Secret Word, a common word, and if either of the contestants mentions it, it is also added to their score. The winning couple gets a crack at a question of higher value at the end of the program, and if no one gets it right, the value increases for the next program. That’s basically it. Groucho hamming it up and a couple of questions for contestants in between.

I found one particular thing interesting. The show looks to have three cameras: One on the contestants, one on Groucho, and one wider view. Most of the show uses camera’s one and two, but when they begin the question and and answer period, they go to the wider shot for a second, and the announcer comes in, and the viewer sees how small the set is. The contestants are on the left, the announcer has a hanging mike on the right, and Groucho is on the right, and the space between them is that of a small kitchen table (although they’re standing, and it’s not actually a table). Compared to modern game show sets, it’s tiny and intimate.

So I found it more interesting as an artifact of what was on television sixty years ago and because I like Groucho Marx more than a quiz show, although I did okay and the questions were, again, akin to the things you would find on Jeopardy! today. Maybe a little dated, but certainly closer to my wheelhouse than modern trivia nights. Where, I guess, I do okay which is not winning.

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They Saw Me Coming

November 10, 2023 Brian J. Noggle

Facebook has taken to showing me suggested posts from 1970s science fiction television programs,including stills from Battlestar Galactica and Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, and they sent me back with this one:

Let the first amongst you who has not said, “Broot-doot-doot. SPECTRA!” in the manner of Keyop cast the first stone.

I loved this show as a kid when it was in heavy syndication. I can’t remember if it came on before or after school–probably both at different times. But it was my favorite of the Japanese imports that preceded the toy-based cartoons (the Transformers, the Go-bots, G.I. Joe, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe) that would come along in a couple of years.

And, like with Airwolf doing the loop, the climax was generally not over until they reluctantly decided to use the Fiery Phoenix (where some sort of plasma fire covered their regular space ship and they were about invulnerable). Although unlike Airwolf’s loop, the Fiery Phoenix did come with a cost as demonstrated by the agonized character stills that accompanied it every time they used it.

Ah, well. Facebook seems to have turned, if not only for me, into a wellspring of nostalgia. In addition to the aforementioned shows, I get vintage cheesecake served up (some overlap) along with nostalgia-themed pages about growing up in the 1970s and 1980s. Maybe it’s just tailored that way for me since I primarily log into Facebook these days to see what I posted on Facebook in years past. Kind of like what I use this blog for primarily.

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Television Report: The Twilight Zone Volume 21

November 9, 2023November 8, 2023 Brian J. Noggle

Book cover Well, the joke is indeed on me, as I said when I reviewed Volume 19:

I’m clearly not watching them in order–well, it will become obvious when I finish the next volume and its number is not higher than 19….

Even though I shuffled them into the cabinet instead of keeping them together, I somehow ended up pulling them out in order. Well, unless there’s another one that I haven’t spotted which is somewhere in the middle of the volume numbers. Which is, again, not akin to order in the actual television series as each volume includes episodes from different seasons of the original series.

The wingspan of this volume is wider than the others; it includes an episode from the first season as well as from the fifth season whose opening was the one used on the syndicated program when I was growing up, so the one I associate most with the series.

At any rate, this volume includes:

“Mirror Image” from the first season where a woman at a bus station finds that the man at the counter and a woman in the restroom mention encounters and conversations with her that she does not recall, and she has checked her suitcase–or has she not? When looking in the restroom mirror, she sees through the open restroom door herself sitting on the bench outside. A friendly man, played by Martin Milner (who played Tod on Route 66, some episodes of which I watched in 2021 and I mentioned here and here), listens to her story but agrees with the station manager that she must be crazy. After the nice policemen take her away, Milner’s character sees himself run out of the bus station door. And he pursues his mirror image but loses him outside. And the episode ends, not with a DUN DUN DUH! but without a resolution. More speculative.
“Dust”, a message-based episode. The son of an immigrant family accidentally runs down a girl in an old west town and is sentenced to be hanged. The grasping peddlar who sold the rope to hang the young man also sells the superstitious father a bag of magic dust–a fake–to save his son. At the actual hanging, the father throws the magic dust at the townspeople, and his actions and words cause them to rethink the hanging. A message program again with no DUN DUN DUH!
“Five Characters in Search of an Exit” finds several different people in a featureless cell from which they seemingly cannot escape until a new resident convinces them to make a human pyramid to reach the edge where they discover they are toys in a toy collection bin in Victorian England. A nice bit of speculative work here even with its DUN DUN DUH!
“Ninety Years Without Slumbering” features an elderly man who believe he will die if his grandfather clock stops, so he tinkers with it constantly. His family, with whom he lives, makes plans to get rid of the clock to prove to him that it is not the case. AND IT IS NOT THE CASE! A reverse DUN DUN DUH?

An interesting collection, especially with the inclusion of something from the first season which might have been the strongest, before Serling and crew were driven by necessity to churn out more boilerplate and genre-adhering shows.

Still, my television watching these days has pretty much been confined to black and white, and it’s probably not at a personal loss.

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Movie Report: D.O.A. (1949? 1950?)

November 8, 2023November 8, 2023 Brian J. Noggle

Book cover When I mentioned that I was watching this film to my beautiful wife, she associated the title with the 1988 Dennis Quaid film of the same name (which is now almost as old as the original was in 1988). But, no, I was watching the original, which is (does math) 74 years old now. But it doesn’t seem dated to old people who remember life before computers and cell phones. Of course, the Quaid film also comes from the before time, but shots probably included office environments with PCs, so it would look slightly less alien to kids.

Also, I have seen this film listed as 1949 and 1950 in various sources, so I am not sure whether the film was released in 1949 or 1950. I guess I could watch it again and convert the Roman numerals, gentle reader, for proper accuracy in this movie report, but I am far too lazy for that.

In it, Edmond O’Brien plays Bigelow, a California accountant who decides to have a holiday away from his town and his receptionist/flame Paula in San Francisco. He joins a group of convention attendees on a night out and is unknowingly given poison by a figure in a suspicious looking get-up. When he falls ill, the doctors tell him he has only a short time to live. So he investigates and learns that someone from San Francisco named Philipos has been trying to reach him–and said fellow has committed suicide. It looks to be tied into a bill of sale that Bigelow notarized for Philips, almost forgotten because it was a while back and a routine transaction for someone passing through Bigelow’s home town, and that leads Bigelow to encounter some organized crime types who might have stolen the sold good–iridium–and whose theft put Philips into a legal jam.

There’s a twist ending, but the twist is not that Bigelow survives. The film has a frame story which seems to have been popular at the time (Double Indemnity had a similar one) where the main character tells someone the story in flashback–in this case, Bigelow is telling it to homicide detectives.

So if you’re a fan of original noir films, this one will please you. If you’re a damn kid, you’ll probably be bored through it.

I mentioned the main actor, Edmond O’Brien. You know, he won an Academy Award (for his supporting role in The Barefoot Contessa) and was nominated for another (for Seven Days in May), and he appeared in films I’ve seen like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence and a bunch of other notable films. But he’s not a common name now. He was that guy for a long time, but the world has moved onto its insipid streaming series instead.

Still, it has made me curious to watch the Quaid version. Which I think I will have to find on videocassette. Online sources indicate there are three other iterations of this film, although it counts the Jason Statham film Crank among them, so the connection to this film as the source looks to be more inspired by than remake.

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Proper Music For The Reading

November 8, 2023 Brian J. Noggle

Yesterday, Severian started a post by talking about Michael McDonald (What a Fool Believes).

WSIE provided the proper music for the occasion.

Although, to be honest, WSIE plays a hella lot of McDonald, whether with the Doobie Brothers, with a single other Doobie Brother (depicted), solo, or with James Ingram. WSIE has a pretty small playlist, and no matter how often I send a message on the request line to play the Pitch Pockets, no, here’s Steely Dan with “Aja” again.

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Book Report: Wizard by Ozzie Smith with Rob Rains (1988)

November 7, 2023November 6, 2023 Brian J. Noggle

Book cover I read Bob Gibson’s From Ghetto To Glory earlier this year, so it seemed a prime time to pick up this book as I came across it in a partial book turning this autumn.

Ozzie Smith played a generation after Gibson, starting his career in the late 1970s in San Diego before being traded to the St. Louis Cardinals. I knew him twice: Once as an enemy as a member of the team that eventually beat the Milwaukee Brewers in the 1982 World Series, and a couple of years later as a favorite on the team that then lost the World Series to the Royals and then to the Twins. He didn’t get traded; I moved from Milwaukee to St. Louis, and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch kept me awash in free Cardinals tickets for good grades. Between my brother and I, we got to see six to eight games a year gratis, so we became fans of the hometown team. So I’ve seen Ozzie Smith in person, and I’ve seen him do a back flip as he took the field, and I booed Royce Clayton when he appeared in the Dennis Quaid movie The Rookie (Tony LaRussa replaced Smith when Clayton in the 1990s, which caused a rift between the Cardinals and Smith that took years or decades to heal).

At any rate, this book does talk about Ozzie Smith’s race (he’s black), and it mentions he lived in the ghetto (Watts, during the riots in the 1960s, when Smith was very young). But the book focuses mostly on the business side of baseball–Smith’s dealings with the Padres, a penny-pinching team in that era who didn’t want to spend money on retaining players and vilified players who went elsewhere for more money, often beginning in their contract years if the players did not sign right away–to the difficulties and pressures of being a highly paid defensive player. The book also focuses on how Smith approaches self-improvement, including trying to become a better hitter even after he received a big contract.

So the book is more inspirational throughout than the Gibson book. I wonder how more modern sports bios written later than 35 years ago and with different generations scan. Probably not as hopeful as this one.

Not many books have sentences where I know exactly where I was when they happened. This one does.

Some of the fans may have had a little doubt in their hearts about then, but we didn’t. If anything, the Brewers’ rally picked us up as we came up to bat in the bottom of the sixth. We loaded the bases, and that brought up Keith Hernandez to bat against Bob McClure, who had been Keith’s teammate in Little League in California. Keith must have had the book on him, because he came through with a single to score me and Lonnie and tie the game.

Gentle reader, my brother and I left Boogie’s apartment, where his mother had been watching us while my mother had gone out, when the score was 3-1, and when we got to our apartment in the next building over, the score was tied. And we know how the game turned out–if not, you can read this book to find out–and I cried myself to sleep. For a long time, I called Bob McClure “Chicken” McClure, and that probably wasn’t fair. But I was ten, understand.

I also flagged a bit in the book where Ozzie Smith said about a trip to San Francisco for the All Star game where he was going to start the game for the second time, but he was more excited to meet Huey Lewis. C’mon, man, did Ozzie Smith say that, or did Rob Rains through that in because Huey Lewis was one of the biggest musicians of the 1980s? I guess we’ll only know when there’s an estate sale at Smith’s house–if we see a bunch Sports and Picture This on cassette, we will know he really was that excited.

Given that he retired a couple of decades ago, he’s still a beloved figure in Cardinals nation. We used to eat at Ozzie’s when we lived in Casinoport, and a relatively new medical center called Ozzie Smith IMAC Regeneration Center opened in Springfield a couple years ago.

Maybe someday I’ll come across a copy of Ozzie Smith–The Road to Cooperstown by Smith and Rains, written 14 years after this book. I’d like to think it has a similar tone, but one never knows when it comes to athletes who have retired and are not in the middle of their careers.

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Missouri Department Of Conservation Increases Daily Drone Bag Limit For Hunters

November 7, 2023November 6, 2023 Brian J. Noggle

If that’s not what the story is about, I don’t want to know what it is about.

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In Local Deep State News

November 6, 2023 Brian J. Noggle

Republic City Administrator gets smaller raise after report showed imbalance:

After KOLR 10 Investigates uncovered Republic City Administrator David Cameron received several 5-figure salary raises in recent years, city council approved a more conservative pay bump during his most recent review.

Cameron’s impressive raises included an almost $60,000 raise in 2021, which pushed his salary over $262,000 last year. But now for the first time in three years, his merit raise will come in under $10,000.

Cameron’s previous combined raises more than doubled his salary between 2018 and 2023. Taxpayers we interviewed for the original story in May were mostly shocked to learn how much he’s making.

I would say so. I would be, too.

If I recall the last city administrator in Republic ended up going somewhere bigger (Casinoport?) which illustrates that, unlike elected officials, city administrators might not represent the communities in which they’re employed–not elected. They could easily represent instead their guild (government experts) and themselves moreso than the small towns who need “expert” help.

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A Little Christmas Retail Therapy At Nogglestead

November 6, 2023November 6, 2023 Brian J. Noggle

On Thursday night and Friday, I fought vainly that old ennui. You know, the telos versus deontos: Is what I am doing good for something? Or is it good in itself? If so, why am I not going anywhere and not feeling good about being present in the moment much like I have been present in similar moments for the last fifteen years? Pragmatism versus stoicism/Buddhist mindfulness, if you would. And thinking whichever one I was supposed to be doing, I was doing it wrong anyway.

So on Saturday, I headed over to the Hobby Lobby looking for some wire and some camouflage scrapbook paper. I mentioned last year that I wanted to put my father-in-laws waterfowl calls into a shadow box, and in between then and this summer I did. I used camouflage scrapbook paper instead of fabric, and I used fishing line to tie the calls to the shadow box back. Why? Because the shadow box my mother-in-law had built for us used fishing line, which is unobtrusive, in it. But the fishing line knots, inexpertly applied by yours truly, came loose, and the calls partially fell inside the box.

So I thought I’d do with with wire this time. So I headed to Hobby Lobby for more paper and some wire. And Christmas decorations were in full bloom in the Hobby Lobby. So, on a whim, I bought a little resin Santa Claus for $3.50 and stuck him on the mantel in the living room to see if/when anyone notices.

I told my youngest we would be putting up the Christmas tree in a couple of weeks, and he protested, saying we normally don’t decorate until Thanksgiving. I pointed out that is in two weeks, regardless of whether the daily high temperatures are 75 degrees right now. And I mentioned to my beautiful wife that the local radio station that goes to Christmas music has done so for the last two months of the year.

Putting that little Santa on the mantel made me feel a little better, probably more so than the amusement of wondering if/when they will discover it (no one has so far, although everyone walks through the room several times a day) than the Christmas spirit. But it could have been worse: On the way to Hobby Lobby, I passed someone giving away free Australian Shepherd puppies. Now they would have noticed that (and I was tempted, because what eliminate ennui like a puppy?).

At any rate, it’s not like we have put up a small Christmas tree like after our Christmas-themed trunk for Trunk or Treat in 2021 or when I started playing Christmas records in October 2020. So I’m still not that guy. But I am getting closer. Also, I found a Christmas record that was misfiled in the Nogglestead LP library (where the Christmas records are the only ones kept together and sort of organized, apparently only mostly), so it’s on the desk by the record player. So the odds of it finding its way to the turntable in the next couple of days are pretty high.

UPDATE: It was less than ten minutes before I started listening to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir’s The Holly and the Ivy, the aforementioned formerly misfiled Christmas record. My beautiful wife, passing through, commented on it. But she has still not seen the Santa.

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Television Report: The Twilight Zone Volume 19

November 5, 2023November 5, 2023 Brian J. Noggle

Book cover This is the second volume of this collection that I’ve watched this month (the first was Volume 6). I’m clearly not watching them in order–well, it will become obvious when I finish the next volume and its number is not higher than 19–but this set of DVDs does not really have the episodes in any order, either, skipping through the seasons–and seemingly focusing on later seasons.

This disc contains:

“A Most Unusual Camera” wherein a couple of two-bit thieves knock over an antique store only to come up with cheap knock-offs, but they do discover something–a camera that takes photos a few minutes into the future. They figure out a way to monetize it–take it to the horse racing track and take a picture of the winner board before the race is run. They make a pile of money, but end up getting–their just desserts? In a totally tacked on twist.
“The Jungle”, wherein a project engineer who has been to Africa to scope out a hydroelectric project finds that his wife has become very superstitious, and they fear the magick of the shamans in a tribe opposed to the project. After a night at a bar, he has to walk home after car trouble and finds New York City turning into a jungle around him.
“The 7th Is Made Up Of Phantoms” wherein a National Guard tank crew finds itself on the path to the Battle of Little Bighorn with past events occurring to them in the present–or have they gone back to the past? This one ends with them cocking their modern weapons and charging down a hill into the battle. Which seems like a tactically poor decision. I mean, they abandon the tank and then do not use cover or concealment to approach but run down the hill close together. Maybe they taught things differently in the National Guard in the 1960s.
“Uncle Simon”, where a shrewish niece takes care of her wealthy but abusive uncle but is prohibited from entering his lab. When she accidentally kills him, she discovers that the will says she must take care of her uncle’s creation: a robot that comes more and more to resemble her uncle in its abusive behavior toward her.

So it’s a little better than Volume 6 in that it’s not both formulaic and sharing very similar topics, but by the end of the original series, Serling’s well must have been running dry and the stories were but a single quick DUN DUN DUH! at the end away from things you’d have seen on other programs in other genres.

I guess that’s the real story arc of most open-ended television series: they start out with imagination and promise, and after a couple of seasons the grind of producing a weekly show and probably network penny-pinching leads to weakened episodes and related viewer disappointment, ratings drops, and cancellation. I guess with modern television, they have a story arc to carry through a series, but the related knock is that they pad that story arc out with insignifica to fill a whole season.

At any rate, these programs are 60 years old at this point and can still hold my interest, although they don’t necessarily inspire me to speculative fiction as much as reading about them did.

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A Cure For Wrong Thinking

November 2, 2023 Brian J. Noggle

‘United Springfield,’ a new PAC forms to support candidates for school board, City Council:

Prominent, long-time Springfield leaders have formed a political action committee to support candidates in upcoming school board and city council races that are required by state law to be nonpartisan.

The launch of United Springfield was announced Monday, a day before potential candidates were eligible to pick up packets to run for school board.

Organizers of the new fundraising PAC said its creation is a direct response to a dramatic increase in the participation of partisan and “dark money” groups — that opt not to disclose donor names — in local elections.

Springfield would all be united if only the proles followed the instructions given to them by the elites!

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Book Report: A Week in the Life of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod (1996)

November 1, 2023October 29, 2023 Brian J. Noggle

Book cover I picked this book up off of the free book cart at church. Although I check the cart every week, or at least when my beautiful wife needs to be at church early because she’s singing, playing trumpet, or ringing bells (which might only be five out of every six weeks), I do generally wait a week or two before grabbing a free book because I do have other things to read here.

This is a coffee table book that covers seven days in the beginning of April and documents various activities going on throughout the world at churches of the LCMS, its schools, and its missions. The church, from its then-new headquarters in the St. Louis area (I drove by it many times back in the day, which is right after it opened, although I, a new driver exploring the St. Louis area for the first time, did not know that), the church called (well, not called called) for members of various congregations to take photos and submit them, and then the editors up at Concordia Publishing (in the same then-new building) selected photos from every day of the week.

So, that’s it, basically. You get churches and services on Sunday, school kids, missionaries doing their things, the little old ladies of the church doing their crafts and outreach, and the people at LCMS HQ hard at work. You’ve got some photos of church members in their professional lives, and you’ve got what seems to be an overrepresentation of church members working to get the services on the radio or to record the services on video, but I guess those distribution channels would have been pretty novel in 1996. Well, except radio–church services on the radio and television predate this book, but maybe this offered a behind the scenes look? Or maybe it was new to Lutherans then.

I admit that, with some photography books, I only glance at the photos and spend most of my time reading the captions. Such with this book: the photos themselves were fairly pedestrian, although I could not help notice that most of the fashions would have as easily been at home in 1983 as 1996. Nary a bit of flannel here. But, for the most part, the engines of any church are people in their thirties, but more likely their forties and beyond. And these people would have fixed their fashion and how they thought they should look in the 1980s. The young people tend to be in their best or, even in casual clothes, in rather timeless casual wear. The people who would chase fashion would be in their late teens and twenties, the ones looking to define themselves in how they look, and they’re pretty thin in churches now as perhaps then. Not that we’ve had a “look” aside from maybe haircuts and makeup trends this century. Or maybe I am too old to know the subtle differences that youth see.

Given that this picture book showed up on our church’s rack, of course I looked for members or names from the church that I recognized, but I did not find any I knew. I also looked for churches that I have visited, which is not a large number, but we do tend to go to a local LCMS church when possible when we’re vacationing, so I’ve been to LCMS churches in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Arkansas. I only have sort of visited one of the churches down the road from here a ways–my sons played basketball at its school, but I’ve not attended service there. One of its youth in 1996 has the same last name as the current principal of the school, to whom we have sent some money from time to time when possible.

I did, however, spot a confirmand named Kaepernick from Turlock, California, and I looked it up: It is, in fact, the former football player’s older sister from his adopted family. I also learned that not only was that former football player likely raised in the LCMS, but that he was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Geez.

At any rate, an interesting artifact, probably more interesting if you attend an LCMS church. Especially if you did so in 1996.

Now this book will not go on my read shelves immediately. It has been routed to my beautiful wife for her review, and from thence it shall likely go to my mother-in-law for review. And heaven knows if or when I will see it again.

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