July 2025 – Page 3 – Musings from Brian J. Noggle

Movie Report: Joe Versus the Volcano (1990)

July 2, 2025July 1, 2025 Brian J. Noggle

Book cover Of the Hanks/Ryan romantic comedies which also include Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail. As I noted in the report on the former film, this is the first of their team-ups; the others were 1993 and 1998.

And this film feels like an 80s film for sure (more like The Burbs or The Money Pit than a 1990s film). It starts out with Hanks’ character, a functionary who manages the advertising catalog library for a medical device company coming to work. It’s quite a brutal little bit, trying to get a little Metropolis or Kafka feel with dim, flickering lighting and a boss on the phone repeating himself over and over. He has to take a long lunch to go to the doctor, who tells him he has six months to live, and he will be symptom free until he dies. Joe Banks, that is, Tom Hanks, is a bit of a hypochindriac who knew it. He goes to his job, quits, tells off his boss, and asks his coworker, played by Meg Ryan, out. She’s impressed by his new fire and intensity, but when he reveals he has six months to live, she cannot handle it and leaves.

The next day, an industrialist played by Lloyd Bridges approaches Joe. He knows about Joe’s lonely life and diagnosis, so he has a proposition: On a remote Pacific island, the tribe has a tradition of sacrificing a volunteer every hundred years to propitiate the god in a volcano, and he (the industrialist) needs a mineral from the island. He hopes to trade Joe to the natives as a sacrifice and convinces Joe to go along with it since he is doomed anyway. Live like a king for a month or so of his remaining time and then jump into a volcano.

So the film is a five paragraph essay with five bits or movements, essentially. The aforementioned first bit. The second bit is a shopping spree in Manhattan outfitting himself in nice clothing and apparel for the voyage, including a very high-end set of steamer trunks. During this bit, he is counseled by his driver played by Ossie Davis who asks Banks who he really is. In the third bit, he goes to L.A. and is met by the industrialist’s shallow and vapid daughter who is an artist (played by Meg Ryan) and writes poetry but mostly lives off of her father’s money. They spend the evening together, but not the night together. She takes him to the small yacht (it’s a sailboat–was that a “yacht” in 1990? We expect more from yachts in 2025) where the industrialist’s other daughter (played by Meg Ryan) is to sail with him to the island. The fourth bit is their voyage where Banks and the good daughter get to know one another and fall in love, which happens despite a typhoon that sinks the vessel and leaves them adrift on a raft made from the steamer trunks. The final act is their arrival on the island, his decision to go through with it, and the coup de grâce ex machina where Banks and Ryan3 are spit from the volcano as it erupts, destroying the island and leaving them adrift on the steamers again. And finis!

So, yeah, it feels like an 80s movie. I mean, it’s not bad, but I cannot imagine it’s on a list of personal favorites for many people, either, unless they have special memories involved with watching it, such as going on a first date with it or something. But as for me, it’s one more to lose in the library and maybe watch again if it comes up in blogversations.

Buy My Books!

Federal Judge Seeks Headline

July 2, 2025July 1, 2025 Brian J. Noggle

Federal judge seeks clarity on whether birthright citizenship order means babies could be deported

Clearly, the babies who crawled across the border on their own can be deported. But, really, what is this all about? The babies not granted birthright citizenship are born to a mother who is not a citizen (or subject to the United States or what have you). So one presumes deportation would include the mother and the baby and to the same place–no sending mothers home and the babies to Ghana or something. That is, the United States would not want to break up families.

I have to assume that the whole exercise seeks headlines like Trump Administration Wants To Deport Babies. I’m also getting the sense that this is less effective as it once was.

Buy My Books!

“We Ain’t Seen You Around Burger World Lately. So Where You Been, Huh?”

July 1, 2025 Brian J. Noggle

Also known as “Adventures in Camping in Your Own Home.”

We had a storm come through on Sunday afternoon with straight ahead winds of up to 80 miles an hour. Wider than the derecho that took down our electric drop and toppled an apple tree which I have not yet had the heart to cut down because it’s still alive, although not thriving. We watched the winds bend the trees, and my wife said the house was shaking, although I did not feel that. She and my youngest continued to watch it, and I went back to my desk, and out went the lights.

We’re kind of used to short outages, and we had one for a couple of hours a couple years back, but this one was different.

City Utilities working to restore power to Springfield after damaging storm

(We’re not on City Utilities; we have an electric co-op.)

Earlier this year, a strong set of storms knocked out power to places in the northern reaches of the area for a week, and so I thought this time might be different. And it was. It turns out to have been 42 hours, two nights and a day and a half, without power. Of course, we did not know that then.

So our little camping-at-home adventure began.

How did we do?

Well, we had plenty of drinking water laid in (as we’re on a well, when we do not have electricity, we do not have running water, either). We had to ration flushes, which left the house smelling a bit like a gas station.

We had plenty of food, and we went out to eat a couple or three times.

We had a great opportunity to change the water filters–which is generally not a pain, but it had been a while–as we drained all water in the lines to flush toilets.

We had a great opportunity to defrost our freezer. We’ve not gotten it low enough on contents that we could put it in our other freezers for a couple of hours on a summer day. Instead, we got the chance to give the contents of our warming refrigerator to a friend with a large family who could always use extra comestibles–which includes a full gallon of milk and 24-pack of eggs fresh from Sam’s Club. And we took meat and whatnot from our warming freezer to the food bank this morning where they passed it out immediately to customers. And now we have a fresh and clean freezer. Just think that if we had defrosted it sometime in the responsible past, it might not have held until the day the food bank was open.

I read a little in the evenings by lantern light. We didn’t use candles–we have plenty of little LED lanterns that provide plenty of light for reading or writing. I carried a flashlight in my pocket because Nogglestead is dark at night; interior rooms where we live and the corridor mostly lack windows, and the nights were moonless. I remember spending the night we bought the home here, and I remember it as having been very dark indeed. We must have had the electricity turned on the next day–even on dark nights, ambient light from our security lights outside make it pretty easy to move about, but the last two days I’ve had a flashlight in my pocket.

On Monday, we went and helped a friend who had limbs of her maple tree across a driveway. After a quick bath in the pool, I went to the gym. Then, the youngest and I went to lunch and then to Relics for gift shopping. On each trip out, we hoped to return to lights beside the garage doors, but no such luck.

So, for me, it was a vacation. I work from home, and all of my work stuff is in my office. I could have schlepped to a coffee shop and plugged in a laptop and turned on my phone’s hotspot (which rapidly drains my battery, so I’d have to jack in the phone, too). But I had nothing that pressing, and I wanted to wait to see if the power would come on any minute now.

How did the rest of the family do? Well, they became a bit restive as they did on our trip to Big Cedar this year. They complained about the power being out a lot. The oldest went out several times and kept busy, but the youngest is very electronics oriented, so he would run his phone out of energy and be at a loss. My beautiful wife got restive at spots, mostly at bedtime when the household temperature was 80 degrees or so. She did get a chance to work off-site, which got her into air conditioning and allowed her to bring a bounty of power banks home.

Power came back this morning as we were on our way to the food bank, and when we came home, it took time to put things back together. I’d left the water off so that I could make sure the filter housings weren’t dripping, so I got them going, we got the washing machine and dishwasher spinning, we got the freezer out for an official defrosting (and not just leaking onto the floor behind the wet bar), and I got back to work.

So some lessons learned: We might consider getting some rain barrels. They would help with watering plants in the dry part of summer and offer toilet flushing when the power is out. We’re not considering a generator as our need for it is yet unproven–we’ve lost power for probably fifty or sixty hours total since we’ve lived here, and that’s been almost sixteen years. But if we start to see decline in power reliability, we’ll reconsider.

Also, I recently questioned whether declining quality of public works led to street problems. Do I think that declining electrical infrastructure might be a factor in the recent outages? Perhaps. I mean, there are more lines going more places, and they can’t be arsed to bury them, but: From our drives around the area after both storms, it was clear that a lot of trees completely blew over. That is, when caught in the wind, the trees just toppled, leaving bunched root balls exposed. And in the case of our friend, it was a maple tree that split, and they are notorious for that–but they grow fast, so they’re popular with builders and subdivision developers. So I cannot help but wonder if these problems are caused by non-native trees planted in development which are not suited to break deeply into the clay soil in these parts, and now the trees are reaching an age and height where they are more prone to toppling.

But I can’t be arsed to find out.

So look forward to resumption of regular book and movie reports and other twee asides.

Buy My Books!