This occurred in near the apartment complex where I first lived in the 1970s before we moved to the projects. I just mentioned them last August.
(Link via Wirecutter.)
To be able to say "Noggle," you first must be able to say "Nah."
This occurred in near the apartment complex where I first lived in the 1970s before we moved to the projects. I just mentioned them last August.
(Link via Wirecutter.)
I got nothing, but here’s a video of Isis displaying affection during my intro call with the new team I will be leading for a couple of weeks. Note that this almost minute of love is clipped from only three minutes of meeting agenda and personal intro.
I guess that about covers who I am.
I picked up this book for the 2025 Winter Reading Challenge‘s Blends Two Genres category. To be honest, I felt a bit hard pressed to come up with even an idea of a book that could blend genres without being part of a new genre. Cookbook/mystery? It’s a subgenre. Science-fiction westerns? Subgenre. Fantasy and car repair manuals? Not yet a subgenre, but I like the thought of it and will probably try to write something along those lines presently. But this book probably stretches the category, or maybe it’s right in the center of what they meant when they came up with the list of categories.
At any rate, this book is a 416-page collection of prose short stories (not plays) based on or around the works of Shakespeare. 23 use the settings and characters from Shakespeare’s plays. 1 takes place in London when he’s alive and features some actors in his troupe and another theater company. The last imagines Shakespeare as someone who gives information regarding monarchical intrigues through his plays, and an agent is tasked with watching the plays and sussing out their meanings for the… well, not exactly the resistance, but those who think that Anne Bolleyn got framed (wow, has it been twenty years since I read another book about Shakespeare being a secret agent? It was Ruled Britannia by Harry Turtledove in December 2005).
Basically, the stories fall into a couple of types: What really happened, where we find that one of the supporting characters was really behind the events of the play (such as Hamlet or Macbeth), or the rest of the story, where the story is extended by focusing on events which happened after the play, such as The Merchant of Venice, where we see what happens when the resolution of the play has led to a later murder and how the characters have gotten on after Shakespeare’s work.
As you know, gentle reader, I have been “working on” the complete works of Shakespeare for over six years now (I started with The Tempest in January 2018 and last read Much Ado About Nothing last January, so “working on” might be overselling it). But I certainly got more out of the stories whose plays I was familiar with. So if you’re into Shakespeare, you’ll get more out of the book than someone who is not. The stories are a bit uneven–some are written in modern prose, but some dabble with Middle Englishness in a bit of a yeah, I get what you’re doing, but… way.
But it helped me to fill a slot on my way to a mug. Clearly, I will not have finished the Winter Reading Challenge in a month, but I am well-positioned to clear it before my birthday and certainly before the end of the month.
On Facebook, I posted this photo with the caption “Hopefully, this $60 worth of kindling will last us the rest of the year.”
I was waiting for someone to say You paid $60 for kindling? which is not the case.
This collection was made from the remnants of two of our front peach trees which cost $30 each a number of years ago. One died the year I pruned it. The other was half-dead, so I cut it down, too. Which leaves us with but two peach trees to not produce peaches this year due to any number of factors which has led them to not produce in the past. And probably more for us to discover if none of the known issues occur.
You know what we grow in the orchards of Nogglestead? Firewood.
Oh, and about that kindling: I had filled the box in the autumn, and we made it through the contents of it already. We’re not using “cheaters” this year as we are not spending dollars a day on Duraflame logs. I’m building the fires from scratch, so I’m using more kindling than some years. When I cut down the peach trees this autumn, I left the kindling-sized limbs and branches aside for later breaking into kindling-sized pieces, and I did that last weekend, spending a couple of hours snapping, lopping, and sawing them down and filling the box again. Given that it’s February and has been pretty warm this winter, it should hold us. And who knows what will die in the orchard next year? I might take down the fallen but growing apple tree.
Springfield cookie store is asking for help finding teens who stole tip jar
Although they have security camera footage, the media is blurring the faces of the youths.
Presumably because they’re juveniles.
But it runs counter to the stated purpose of the article.
Also not in the article: any physical description of the youths.
Last week, a…. friend? Fellow I know? died of cancer. He was 51.
Todd was a year behind me in high school, and he was pretty close with Mike if I recall. To be honest, I knew of him more than I knew him. Was more on the jockly spectrum than I was–he was a cross-country runner and wrestler, and I was National Honor Society and writer’s group. I guess he was pretty smart, too, so they tell me, but, again, I didn’t know him in high school that much.
When I was out of college, he was in a gap year between high school and the Navy, and he was in a couple of local performances, including one with the Goldenrod Showboat in St. Charles. I took my girlfriend at the time to go see the performance and the small nonspeaking part he had. I also rooked him into doing a staged reading of The Courtship of Barbara Holt which meant that a bunch of people read the scripts to each other to a mostly empty coffee house on Sunday afternoons. One of the open mic hosts had an actors group called Stages St. Louis which did this whenever it could shanghai a play and enough actors to do it, and in my younger, energetic days, I gathered a group of my friends (plus Todd plus one Stages St. Louis actress) and even got another couple of people to come see it. Todd was a little disappointed that it was only that, but he was a trouper and made it to three of the four performances.
I didn’t really hear from him for a long time after that. He went into the Navy, got into the SEAL program but did not make it completely through and became a search and rescue swimmer. After the service, he went Hollywood. We became Facebook friends sometime this century; I sent him a copy of The Courtship of Barbara Holt when he was in Hollywood–partly because he was in it and partly because, hey, maybe he would tell his friends about it.
A couple years ago, he moved back to his parents’ house in Missouri, up in Jefferson County, and he asked me to call him. I spoke with him a couple of times over the phone, hoping to become, I dunno, friends, but….
Ultimately, he wanted me to write his biography with his stories about his time in S&R and as a stuntman in Hollywood. He told me “stories” on the phone which were basically just “I met so and so when I was bartending in L.A.” with no details. To be honest, I don’t remember many of them. You can see him, what, jump over a fence as Steven Van Zant’s stunt double in some film (the one where Van Zant climbs over a fence).
So I set up a Google doc and a process where he could start telling/writing his stories about his tae kwon do classes and his military stories and his Hollywood stories. I made a number of sections and a couple of prompts, and I hoped he’d start telling/typing those stories and that I would maybe ask questions based on some of them to flesh them out and then eventually organize them into an autobiography. But he didn’t touch hit, although he started posting on Facebook that the story of his life was being written. I think he wanted me to interview him a couple of times with a steno pad and turn that into a book.
After some time, when he hadn’t even looked at the framework I set up, so I told him that I could put him in touch with a couple of former journalists who might better be what he was looking for via text, and our contact fell off after that.
He was sick the whole time, of course, although he never mentioned it.
He was a nice guy, and I’m sorry we couldn’t find a way to work together on his book. I’m also sorry that I did not get to be a better friend, but he seemed to be looking more for something from me than to be my friend. Unfortunately, I feel that way about a lot of people whom I eventually try to become better friends with.
His death has left me shaken for the whole weekend just because of my remorse–couldn’t I have written his book or at least left him the illusion that I would–and a bit of anger that that’s all the good I was to him. And guilt at making it all about me.
Whatever the lesson is to be learned here, I will continue to not learn it.