To be able to say "Noggle," you first must be able to say "Nah."
I thought that kind of sounds like Ghost, but what album is “Archetypes Collide” on?
Oh: Archetypes Collide is the name of the band. “Ghost” is the name of the song.
It’s not just a mental exercise (also); it’s also an actual source of confusion for me sometimes.
Speaking of Archetypes Colliding, I might have to pick up their autographed CD since it’s only ten bucks.
Maybe when I get a job.
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I might have mentioned that I’ve predeterminedly named our next two kittens Jack Dawkins, the Artful Dodger, and Oliver Twist (even though they won’t be the kittens pictured in that post).
However: At our church picnic this weekend, we had a trivia “night” in the afternoon (which we, the North Side Mind Flayers, won, of course, but as I explained to my youngest, “We don’t gloat; we just win.”). One of the categories was Entertainment, and as I am the court jester (and not much of the court answerer these days), I said, “Existentialism? I AM ON IT!” Ah, but we never have a Philosophy category (although we always have a Disney category, which we won somehow, and a Sports category, where we held our own after many years of humiliation on it).
But, in the gag, suddenly, the next kitten name came to me (well, suddenly, today): Meowsault, L’Étranger.
You might laugh now and say, “Ah, but Brian J., you’re topped up on cats these days.”
So it might be.
But when I was thinking about getting a cat thirty years ago, I favored the name Machiavelli which I thought I would shorten to “Mach.” Now, I know him as Nico.
And I later quipped that “Meow’Dib” would be a good name for a cat…. And here we are.
So perhaps in a decade or so we will be onto Dodge, Twist, Meowsault, and maybe some of the Lovecraftian cat names.
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Ah, gentle reader, I won’t be taking the crown from Joe Kenney for the longest time between getting a book and reading it since I only got this book probably 31 or 32 years ago whilst in college and when I had a class for which I had to read Walden (although I cannot remember exactly which class that would have been–a philosophy class? A middle American literature class?). So I would have bought this at Waldenbooks (which would have been meta, would it not?) or B. Dalton’s at the Northridge mall (and not the university bookstore where it would have been for a few dollars more). So I read Walden in it and I started A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers judging by the era-appropriate bookmark, but since I just read The Maine Woods / Walden / Cape Cod, I figured I might as well knock out this book as well. Originally, I’d thought that I’d pulled it from my read shelves when I tried to encourage my son or sons to read this book, but it is not in my read book database, so perhaps it has been on my to-read shelves for these thirty years.
At any rate, it contains a couple of things which I had not read before, including A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers which Thoreau self-published. He had 1000 copies printed in the days way before print on demand, and he did not sell them all–this is the book about which he quipped about having a library of over 1000 books, 700 of which he wrote himself. It chronicles, in Thoreau’s fashion which means several years after the fact cherry-picking some bits from his journals and inserting some philosophy in them. It describes, theoretically, a boat trip he and his brother made down the local river to the port on the ocean (I was going to say sea, but can one ever pair those two in prepositional phrases again?), but it’s laden with his philosophical asides. I can see it as a precursor to Walden where he blends to two better. It’s not too long, though, and it was what Thoreau wanted to publish unlike posthumous works which were culled from his journals and not pored over or refined by Thoreau himself.
The book also contains, in addition to Walden (which I did not read in this volume this time, but I read it in this book in college and I read it in the other volume earlier this year, so no double-dipping), “On Civil Disobedience” and “Life Without Principle” as well as excerpts from The Maine Woods, Cape Code, and Thoreau’s journals. I read the essays and the excerpts from the journals, but not the excerpts from the things I’d already read.
So: “Civil Disobedience” is his diatribe against an overarching government that takes from citizens to do things that are not in their interests. Based on a single night he spent in jail for not paying a tax that supported the Mexican-American War (although his refusal to pay the tax was longer than the war itself), it really only documents that one night in a couple of pages near the end. The rest of it is pretty free-wheeling anti-government abolitionist almost stream of consciousness.
“Life Without Principle” is described as a talk or lecture he gave on several occasions but only was published the year after his death. I guess it sums up his philosophy as succinctly as possible where Walden did not. Basically, it’s about living life according to the individual’s needs, according to nature, and with minimal interference from government and society. It denigrates people who, getting and spending, lay waste their hours (to be honest, it does read a bit like Wordsworth themeatically) by actually earning a living and making money–which would provide for families, a problem Thoreau didn’t have, of course. He argues against many contemporaries and their tracts/books, but all the names are unfamiliar to us now (and given this is 2025 and not 1993, perhaps the name Thoreau is lost to most)
And the entries from Thoreau’s journal are a couple of paragraphs each, some nice little poetic moments capturing a bit of nature with the flair and philosophizing that is Thoreau at his best and are mercifully briefer than The Maine Woods.
So, now, at the end, what do I think of Thoreau?
As I have mentioned (I think), I can see why he hit differently in the mid-to-late 20th century, when the Baby Boomers were coming up through the college ranks. Thoreau was a Harvard man himself who never really grew up–he did not really have to work for a living nor support a family, so he was enabled to live the “life of the mind” and continue his concordance with nature up until his early death in his early 40s. His themes of non-conformance and the loss of the wild areas (which would have also, been metaphorically, youth to professors who did end up with families to support by professing) aligned with that fin-de-middle-siecle sense of the 1960s turning into the 1970s turning into the 1980s which would have been the lives my professors had known.
But aside from Walden, Thoreau is…. meh. “Civil Disobedience” wanders a bunch as does “Life Without Principle”. We get that Thoreau didn’t like the Mexican-American War. Or slavery. Or the Irish. Or most human development. And the other books and presumably the journals are really just fairly wordy catalogs of daily experience in great detail with some flourishes of interest but mostly just lists of flowers and trees seen in the wild.
So I won’t be getting the complete journals any time soon (unless they’re at the Clever branch of the Christian County Library later this month on bag day).
Ah, but Brian J., you might say. Are you not just slagging on Thoreau as a man-boy who never grew up and had to “adult” as the kids say these days who play-acted at living off the land but really just wanted to make a living from the “life of the mind” by writing his own ill-informed, twee sentiments and lightweight experiences as though they were profound, and that pretty much describes you with a blog twenty-two years on now? A fair cop, gentle reader. Perhaps even true: What I least like about Thoreau might be what I fear I share in common with him. But I’m not boring in detail of flora and fauna. I’m too dull to even know what those birds are in the tree in my back yard that seranade me evenings when I am in the pool. So I don’t even rise to the worst of Thoreau. Thanks for asking.
Oh, and lest I fail to mention it, this book provided me a Found Bookmark of my own. Stuck in the middle of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, I found an index card with three names on it and the words, “Dues From.” This would have been my senior year, ainna, when I was the treasure of Marquette Writers Ink, the writing club at the university. One of the names is a girl (woman, I guess, but a young woman) who might have had a crush on me that I never suspected until the president of the club asked me if there was something going on, as she always came to me first at any event or gathering. Strangely enough, she’s the only one I’m nominally connected to as she showed up as a suggestion on LinkedIn some years ago, and I connected with her–she’s a copywrighter in Minnesota these days. Another, I had been thinking of because he would have been the only Indian-American I knew at the time, thirty-some years ago. Over at a blog I read, commenters disparagingly refer to Indians especially in the ever-growing number in the tech industry as Jeets, as this guy actually went by Jeet. He was at least second generation, though, as he had no accent. And he was a poet in English. I cyber-stalked him and found that he might be living in St. Louis these days. It didn’t catch me by surprise–so I might have looked him up before. I wonder if we overlapped there. I feel bad for JenBen, though, the other woman whose name is on the card: I don’t really think of her at all.
And: I have to say that this might not be the last of my collegiate acquisitions that I read. So I might read the book I picked up on the Chinese tradition of Buddhism sometime. I might actually finish George Steiner’s Real Presences, a textbook for Dr. Block’s class, on my third attempt (the last being about a decade ago). So I might very well have more Personal Records in laziness in reading books I buy to set yet.
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Kim du Toit pointed to a PJMedia story covering something I read about perhaps elsewhere last week: Cargo Ship Carrying 3,000 Vehicles, Including 800 EVs, Burning Out of Control Off the Coast of Alaska
One of the Ace of Spades HQ co-bloggers–I think it’s Buck Throckmorton–regularly publishes stories not only arguing that EVs are a business boondoggle but also dangerous, and he highlights stories of cargo ships catching fire and parking garages catching fire and what a calamity these isolated instances are.
And then I, of course, remember the Israeli pager escapade (Operation Grim Beeper), where the Israelis had spent a decade or so infiltrating walkie-talkies laden with explosives and then pagers laden with explosives into its enemy’s communications network and then set them off to best effect. With but mere explosives.
Now: Look around you at the number of lithium-ion rechargeable batteries in your house or in your garage. Laptops. Power tools. Rechargeable gadgets. How many of those batteries were made in a nation whose interests run counter to our nation’s? What would happen if they had a trigger circuit that caused an overload and all of them, nationwide, burst into flames?
We were discussing this a bit on the way to the church picnic yesterday. Also, in the event of an imminent attack, would it be preferable for protective EMP detonations to only fry all electronics nationwide without damn near every building burning down as well?
Oh, the things I think about when not reading lurid paperbacks for escape.
UPDATE: It is Buck Throckmorton, and he posted about this drifting inferno this morning after my post appeared.
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I mentioned, gentle reader, that I’d started reading a book about cats on the aborted vacation last month, and this is that book. Apparently, I got it at Redeemed Books over on Republic Road in 2021, and that might have been the last time I was in that store. I’ve even been not going to ABC Books that much these days, which is definitely atypical. But I am getting pretty topped up on books with nowhere to go with new arrivals but the floor or the tops of the shelves in my office where they’re already blocking the cool bladed weapons and are getting a little precarious, where an exploring cat will likely knock a stack of them to the floor. So maybe I should be building the stacks on the floor so that the books atop the have less far to fall. But that is neither here nor there.
At any rate, this is a collection of stories about people adopting or finding cats. Given that it’s from Revell Publishing, it has just a blush of Christianity to it, with several of the writers mentioning God (but not Jesus). All of the stories have happy endings, especially the kittens-gone-missing stories. And most of them are anachronistic–although they don’t all talk about the eras in which the stories occurred, those that do mention it having been in the mid-20th century.
So: Well, you’re not going to get the “couple paragraphs of analysis” twee insights that I reserve for, say, Thoreau. But it was a pleasant read and almost led me to adopting a couple other rescue kittens. If you like cats and reading about cats, you’ll like the book. But it’s not as deep as Willie Morris or (probably) Cleveland Amory might try to be.
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A “unpaid toll” scam text came in yesterday:
You know, it has been several weeks since I last pointed out that Missouri does not have a Department of Motor Vehicles. Nor toll booths.
The “North Missouri” statutes indicates that the Philippines-numbered scammer has not done much research into the continental United States. But, really, how much effort do you want to put into a broadcast like this?
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Earlier this week, Wirecutter shared this meme:
I’ve been saying it since at least 2018.
Scandinavian Teens Circa 1965:
But look at them. They look so much older than that. I figure they’ve got these things going for them to make them look older:
* They’re dressed like adults, unlike twenty year olds from today.
* They’re dressed like our grandparents looked (or your great grandparents if you’re under 20) in old photographs.
* They’re Europeans, who tend to look older than Americans anyway.
* Also, they’re not twenty year olds from today, who tend to look younger than their counterparts ha’centuries ago. This is not just dress (See the first bullet point above), but also in skin and general health. Better nutrition, I guess.
They Don’t Look So Young, But… (2021):
Those girls are, what, two years older than my oldest? But they look so much older. Partially probably because it’s black and white and partially because they’re wearing the clothing that my mother wore in some of her pictures, and my mother was old to me when I was young and my mother was younger than I am.
But, wait, look closely at the faces.
Ah, yes, now I can see teenagers in those old people clothes.
A Family Photo From The Paper’s Archives, Or Something Else? (2022):
It’s not actually a family photo; it is a picture of winners of the electrical co-operative’s essay winners.
Which probably means that they’re in high school.
The photo is undated, but I’m guessing early 1960s.
But none of my posts summed it up as succinctly as the meme. Although it looks as though it might have had an additional filter applied with the updated hair style.
Now, about the updated hair style: That’s pretty undated, ainna? Unless you’re a hair dresser or are really, really attuned to hair (i.e., you’re a certain type of woman), that hair style could just about be from anywhere past the late 1970s, ainna? I mean, not the tip of the spearmint of fashion, but you could imagine a woman wearing it anywhere in the last fifty years, ainna? It’s not the big hair of the 1980s, but not every girl wore that. Styles have kind of blurred and come around again in a way that they really didn’t from the 1960s. Heck, even the male mushroom head short on the sides and mop on top from the late 1990s came around a couple years ago–my son wore his hair that way for a while before deciding on a proper curl ‘fro which could have also come from the era.
What’s my point? I guess the meme reflects what I’ve said before. I dunno. I just have to waste a lot of words on it because I pay myself by the word and because longer posts cost money-losing AI companies more to train their LLMs on my copyrighted material. And if I’m not getting paid for it, I’m going to make them pay for it.
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As this is the Internet, allow me to offer a counterpoint.
Some critics indicate that movies and television shows are rife with tiny women defeating large men in unarmed combat.
As someone who grew up in an era before the Internet and YouTube hot take videos of little but ephemeral and evanescent value (that is, none), I remember how superheroines looked in the 1970s.
Modern superheroines, while smaller than men, look like the 1976 East Germany Shotput team compared to the underfed and probably two-pack-a-day-plus-cocaine actresses of the 1970s.
Modern superheroines, for the most part, sport a far healthier and athletic look, by the way.
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I was thinking that I was tearing through these Louis L’Amour books that I bought a year ago in Clever (watch for the Good Book Hunting post for this branch’s book sale later this month!), but I guess I’ve only read three others: Hondo in September; Silver Canyon in October; and The Man from Skibbereen last month. Although four books by the same author in six months is, at the Nogglestead pace, tearing through.
In this book, a scout/gunslinger type, Matt Bardoul, sees the girl of his dreams in Deadwood, South Dakota. Her father is bringing her along on a wagon train planning to start a new town by Big Horn mountain where gold might have been discovered, but Bardoul has his doubts as other power brokers in the proposed trip are amassing a group of desperadoes, and Bardoul thinks that they’re up to something, perhaps killing and looting the wagon train when it’s out of the reach of civilization. Some events back this up, and then….
Well, the narrative differs from the other books for sure. L’Amour builds up some characters and develops some cross-purposes, but about two-thirds through the book, Bardoul is left for dead, and then he pursues the wagon train which has been completely hijacked by the bad guys, and he finds those developed characters and allies dead along the trail which seems an abrupt end to them. We get Bardoul’s dogged pursuit even after greivous wounds that would have left him dead or unable to operate but for his being the main character in a men’s adventure novel. We get a couple page monologue from an Indian decrying the white man that has no real purpose in the story. And…. Well, finis, eventually.
You know, I was probably influenced by the whole The World’s Best Selling Frontier Storyteller, the commercials for the book club back in the day, and A Trail of Memories: The Quotations of Louis L’Amour, and the fact that I started reading L’Amour with stronger titles (The Last of the Breed and Bendigo Shafter) which were heavily quoted in A Trail of Memories. But these books were just men’s adventure books set in the West, and L’Amour a talented workman, but he was churning them out at a great pace probably at least partially dictated by contractual obligations. So they’re all not going to be the pick of the litter. And this one is not.
Still, I might not seek out additional titles from what I already have accumulated. Aw, who am I kidding? If it’s bag day, they’re going in the bag.
Also, a housekeeping note: Although originally a paperback, this is in the library binding (it, too, a discard from the Nixa High School library thirty-some years ago). So it goes on the shelves with my hardbacks, not my mass market paperback read shelves. Which is good, as these last are now overflowing. Which, hopefully, will induce me to read more hardbacks or trade paperbacks amongst the cheap genre fiction.
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So, to make a short story long: One of the kids at the dojo was collecting pet stuff for a local animal rescue as his Eagle Scout project, and I donated many cans of moist cat food which we had on hand back when we fed Roark moist cat food because he had bad teeth and only seemed to get sustenance from licking the gravy; he passed away in 2023, but the cans of food were good through July of this year, so they would go to good use.
I guess June is pet rescue month or something because KY3 has been running stories about local rescue organizations, and when I saw the one to which I’d indirectly donated, I clicked through to its Web site and its associated Purina Petfinder site–jeez, Petfinder has been around for twenty years now–it was coming online when I was leaving my position with the digital marketing agency which handled some NPPC accounts but did not get the Petfinder gig.
So I clicked through, and I saw a black kitten:
I posted on Facebook that no one should let my beautiful wife see a picture of this kitten. Which is a little facetious, as she is the one insisting we’re topped up on cats at the moment whereas I, reading a book about people getting kittens and cats, think it might be amusing to have kittens again.
I even started testing names for the guy. I started with Dickens because that’s in the title of the book I’m reading.
Last night, in a weak moment, she said, “I call your bluff,” basically giving me permission to get that cat.
So I hit the rescue agency’s Petfinder again, and I looked for a kitten pal for him, and saw an orange tabby kitten:
As we just had conversations about orange tabbies being mostly males. And because it would be best probably to have a pair of kittens who could romp in the office during the integration period. And just in case it was permanent.
But then I looked at the process for adopting the kittens, and I thought, Oh, it’s one of those rescues.
It starts with an application, and then includes a house visit to see if your house is right for the kitten, and has a codicil that if you ever divest yourself of the cat, you need to return it to the same rescue, and…. Well, undoubtedly, a contract with lots of fine print.
You know, back in our Casinoport days, not long after we married, we looked at various rescue organizations to get a dog (these were pre-Petfinder days), and we contacted a rescue organization for golden retrievers, and someone from the organization brought Mallory, an adult dog with some health issue or another, to our house and shared the contract with us. I looked it over, and the fine print (it was all fine print) included exorbitant penalties–$1,000 for not telling them the dog died six years after adoption, for example–and despite this contract, we wanted to adopt Mallory, but the organization had already promised her to another family even when they brought her over to our house, so we could not. But, wait! A while later, they indicated the other family had balked, so we could have Mallory and her various codicils and addenda. We declined.
So, yeah, no.
The strays we take in don’t require an attorney to review the paperwork, so I guess we’ll wait for another cat to show up. And one will.
Which is a shame: The Artful Dodger and Twist would have been excellent names for this pair.
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