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

Movie Report: Godzilla vs. Mothra (1964)

August 9, 2025August 9, 2025 Brian J. Noggle

Book cover When I shelved the two new Toho monster movies that I bought in April–well, topped them as “shelving” them means putting them atop my unwatched video cabinet–I put them by the old Godzilla movie I already had up there. And I did not look closely, and it was only when I picked one to watch the other night that I realized I had Godzilla vs. Mothra and Mothra vs. Godzilla. Which, it turns out, are two releases of the same film (also known as Godzilla vs. The Thing, which is how I think I originally saw it forty-some years ago).

So: An egg washes ashore after a great taifun (after reading Shōgun, watch I drop transliterated Japanese words in blog posts for a couple of weeks). The fishermen sell it to a Businessman who, with his business partner, are going to make an attraction of it. Two little fairy-sized singers come to ask them to return the egg to its home from whence it was washed during the taifun (doesn’t count; it’s the same word re-used). When the Businessmen rebuff them, they turn to a Reporter, a Photographer, and a Scientist to help them. A Politician moves forward with building an industrial area after the storm, but this awakens Godzilla (this picture is the last of the Toho era where he is the antagonist) who starts destroying things. The Reporter, the Photographer, and the Scientist go to the home island of the fairy girls and the home of Mothra to seek his/her/its help in defeating Godzilla. And, after the egg hatches, Godzilla is dispatched into the sea. Until next time.

I capitalized the characters by their job titles instead of names because, c’mon, they’re archetypes, ainna?

Oh, man, did this film make me think of the olden days. On Saturday afternoons, one of the television stations in Milwaukee had a Creature Feature where they played these old Toho Godzilla movies along with classic Universal monster movies and the like, hosted by a Svengoolie knock-off. I remember seeing at least the end of this film because I didn’t understand what it meant when the recently-hatched caterpillars head out to sea, and my sainted mother explained they were returning to their home island. So I knew that much, anyway. Perhaps the original Mothra movie ended in a similar fashion. I can’t be arsed to look.

When I was at my brother’s house recently, a commercial for an upcoming bloc of twenty-year-old movies had my nephew exclaim, “Hot Tub Time Machine 2 is twenty years old?” (It is not, actually.) I asked him if that’s the first time he’s experienced the double-decade ago. It’s funny, but when I saw this film on Milwaukee television, it would have been less than fifteen years old. But it definitely looks different, more archaic, even then compared to how 21st century movies have changed (more looking like video games in big budget pictures, but Hot Tub Time Machine 2 wasn’t that).

So I suppose I will view the other monster movie (Rodan) sometime soon, and I have to think of how to dispose of my duplicate copy of this film. Which is not a true duplicate, but good enough. Free book cart at church? Maybe!

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Movie Report: Return of the One-Armed Swordsman (1969)

August 8, 2025August 6, 2025 Brian J. Noggle

Book cover I picked this up in spring of 2023 along with a stack of other films at the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library book sale. Looking back at the list, I’ve done okay on watching the films I bought then–out of 37 or 38, I guess I’ve watched a dozen or so. Which counts as okay for the video-buying excursions’ buy-to-watch-within-two-years ratio at Nogglestead.

As the Return (as with Legend) indicates, this is a sequel to an earlier film which I haven’t seen. In this film, the one-armed swordsmen is approached by a pair of swordsmen, one in black and one in white, to participate in a competition at the castle. He demurs, saying he’s just a farmer now, and they leave, but he is approached by other local “families” who have also been approached. They go, and he ends up taking up his broken sword (which looks like a big cleaver) when the bad guys persist and take the “fathers” of the families hostage–and their “sons” approach him for help. One of the sons takes the one-armed swordsman’s wife hostage to get his help. So the one-armed swordsman leads the “brothers” to the stronghold to fight the Eight Sword Kings–the big boss bad guys (well, seven guys and a girl) with gimmick powers or blades. Well, they fight some of the Sword Kings on the way, but ultimately free the “fathers.” However, during their night of celebration, the Eighth Sword King, the “Unseen” attacks with a bunch of ninjas, but the One-Armed Swordsman eventually triumphs and returns home. Until, perhaps The Legend of the One-Armed Swordsman.

It’s a particularly bloody and brutal bit of kung-fu theatre (wuxia, I believe the Chinese term is)–most or all of the “brothers” die, sometimes in bloody fashion. And I have put the family relationships in quotation marks because the dubbed version I have refers to “fathers” and “brothers,” but apparently other dubbed versions and probably the original say that these are martial arts schools, not clans, and the “fathers” are instructors while the “brothers” are students. Which kind of makes sense given how many “brothers” each family has. Still, we’re not watching for the plot. We’re watching for the stylized fighting and gimmicky villains. And we got them.

Less than a decade later, and I might have seen this on kung fu theater on Friday or Saturday night after MASH and Hawaii Five-O. No telling what films I actually saw. Come to think of it, there’s no telling how many times we actually watched this when the Odya boys were sleeping over. Five? Ten? Not as many as twenty, surely. But all the time as it seemed at the time. Then all the time ended unnoticed as it often does.

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Book Report: The Best of Wheat and a Little Chaff Number II by Leah Lathrom Wallace (?)

August 7, 2025August 6, 2025 Brian J. Noggle

Book cover As I mentioned when I bought this book in April 2023, I might be the biggest collector of Leah Lathrom Wallace in the country since I have now read both The Best of Wheat and a Little Chaff and this second volume.

So I picked this up for my upstairs poetry book. I’ve taken to reading a little poetry right before bed every night as part of my wind-down ritual. For some months, I made my way through the stack of Poetry magazines that I bought last October.

And, you know what? I prefer the grandmother poetry in this volume. It’s got rhythm, and it’s got rhyme. Its contents are about trusting in God and home considerations–including some poems for friends and family members and personal history. Actually, this volume has a number of poems by family members, which reinforces the fact that everyone with the better education system of the early 20th century wrote poems (see my own father’s poem here).

So it was a quick read, relatable (more so than modern message poetry which is about speaking the poet’s truth and not shared humanity, so the reader might be excluded from the truth at all), and it helped me wind down.

Given that the back part of the book is relative’s poetry to fill this chapbook out, I have to assume that I now own the whole set. I’ll find other works like it, though; the poetry tables at the book sales are still full of these little chapbooks by somebody’s grandma. And I’ll pick them up and get to them eventually. And, eventually, they will disappear from the poetry tables, replaced by Print on Demand works by contemporary poets. If anything at all. Ai, I am leading to a dark and depressing meta-conclusion even though this particular book was anything but.

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Book Report: Shōgun by (1975, 1980)

August 6, 2025August 6, 2025 Brian J. Noggle

Book cover After I read the first of C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy (Out of the Silent Planet), I thought I would pick up something short as a palate-cleanser. Brother, did I go wrong: This 1200+ page book, which I just bought in June (not long before I started reading it), took the better part of a month to read.

This particular volume is the tie-in to the original television miniseries and has a picture of Richard Chamberlain on the back (what, he was more than Allan Quatermain?). As you might know, gentle reader, a new miniseries was released last year, so strangely enough, if I get down verbally with the kids these days about Shōgun these days, they’ll know it from the recent television experience, whereas I read the doorstop book (see also Dune).

So:

An English pilot/navigator is aboard a ship, the Erasmus, the only remaining vessel from a small contingent set to circumnavigate the globe circa 1600 is shipwrecked on the coast of Japan with a small number of his crew. They’re captured and are going to be killed, but the local warlord, Toranaga, takes an interest in him. He, Blackthorne, the pilot, is called Anjin-san (“Anjin” is nihongo for pilot). He falls in love with a married woman, Mariko, vows revenge on a brutal samurai (that’s redundant, but Yabu is extra brutal and does not like Blackthorne), and, after saving the life of Toranaga (twice) is made hatamoto and samurai. Meanwhile, above and beyond all this, the last military leader died, leaving a council of regents. A rival on the council, Ishido, is maneuvering to ostracize/expel Toranaga. And the Jesuits have started making inroads into Japan, converting a number of people, including some provincial leaders, but they think Blackthorne, as an Englishman and Protestant, is a heretic and must be eliminated. So we’ve got a bit of a fish-out-of-water story as Blackthorne comes to appreciate the Japanese way of life–or elements thereof; a love story between Blackthorne and Mariko; and a hella lotta political intrigue. And it has 1200 pages in which to do it.

The narrative has an interesting bit of flashbackery to it; often, we get an action or situation, and then the story flashes back to the events leading up to the action or situation. Which turns out to be almost how the whole story is laid out (spoiler alert?) We do get some chatty spots where characters discuss events or situations for a couple of pages to set up context or intrigue, and these spots are a bit boggy. And although he is the Western readers’ intro into the story and the one we’re supposed to root for, ultimately, at the end, Blackthorne’s real importance kind of falls off (the book is not entitled An Englishman in Japan or Anjin-San). And the climax comes around page 1000, runs a relatively long time, and then we have a bit of a dénouement for over one hundred pages with an ending that leads not to the great battle between the rivals for the shogunate–the book ends with preparations for the war. So a bit underwhelming to a modernish reader who expects more of a payoff at the end.

So it’s very similar to The Last Samurai, although set at opposite ends of the shogunate: A Western Larry Sue comes to Japan and ends up at the domicile of a samurai, falls in love with a Japanese woman with complications, and comes to appreciate the samurai way of life. Both are a bit hagiographic on the samurai way of life with living in the moment and composing poems and whatnot, but this book does show its inherent brutality and disdain for peasants, merchants, and Christians whereas the film did not (as I have not seen either filmed rendition of this book, I cannot say how brutal they were depicted, although the Wikipedia entry for the 1980 miniseries indicates it broke many network television taboos).

At any rate, I felt a little smart reading it as I was already familiar with some of Japan’s history, Buddhism (c’mon, I know who the Amida Buddha is), and geography, but at times I was a little annoyed with the exposition until I realized that most people were not.

It’s a long book. And I definitely finished it. But I’m not eager to run out and gather Clavell’s other work.

Although I did make an allusion to the film The Fly while reading this book, and in looking into Clavell’s career (reading Wikipedia), I discovered he wrote the screenplay for the original 1958 film. So, clearly, the books published in 1980 are listening to me. Be careful! Think and say nothing!

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You Cannot Blame MfBJN For This One

August 6, 2025August 5, 2025 Brian J. Noggle

Jane Morgan, ‘Fascination’ singer and Broadway star, dead at 101

Ah, gentle reader, you might remember I have at least three Jane Morgan albums (Traces of Love, The Sounds of Silence, and In My Style), and although I did see one of them (I forget which) as I was flipping through the Nogglestead record library recently, I did not listen to it.

So her death is not because I read/listened to her, unlike so many.

And you probably cannot pin the death of Chuck Mangione on me, either, as although I did listen to Chuck Mangione right before he passed away recently, I listen to a lot of Chuck Mangione on record and on Spotify, so I “just listened” to him an awful lot of times where he did not pass away.

Thank you, that is all that the voices in my head wish to communicate at this time.

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Speaking Of The-Internet-Is-Listening

August 5, 2025August 4, 2025 Brian J. Noggle

As I mentioned, my boys and I trekked out to my brother’s place a week ago. My boys wanted to do some fishing, and they not only did some fishing, but also did some catching. Me, I hung out with my brother and his wife. And we walked the edges of his property, 25 acres of lightly rolling hills with some woods at the edges, an old barn, and, as mentioned, a fishing pond.

As we walked, we talked about:

The cross-fencing he removed because a previous owner had run cattle, but they were in the way of hay cutting; I mentioned Nogglestead had been cross-fenced at one time, and that I found the lines where the bottom strand of barbed wires were still buried back in my metal-detecting days (which, to be honest, were like two: I looked for and found a tiller pin I lost, which is why I bought a cheap metal detector, and two, the day I ran it over Nogglestead’s margin nearest the Old Wire Road and found only the barbed wire, which I initially thought might be buried power lines (double parentheses, but I now know to look at the electric lines from the road to the security lights to the actual drop which are overhead, but then I was ignaint)).
The fact that we had enough cherries for a pie and might eventually get enough blackberries for a pie if we could be arsed to go pick them.
That the boys and I were sorta doing the Rural Missouri Missouri Snapshots contest this year, and that we’d gone to the Nathan and Olive Boone Homestead State Historical Site for photos, but the closest actual State Parks to us are Roaring River State Park and Table Rock State Park (state forests and other Missouri Department of Conservation areas do not count as locations where you can take pictures for the contest.

We left on Saturday morning after that walk, and after I got home, my Facebook feed was all like:

C’mon, man. Along with with the Travis Kelce post I mentioned earlier, that is four posts that Facebook showed me within a day of talking within earshot of a phone with the Facebook app installed (and perhaps even running).

As the Philosopher said, “Blue Steel? Ferrari? Le Tigra? They’re the same face! Doesn’t anybody notice this? I feel like I’m taking crazy pills!”

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Movie Report: Happy Gilmore 2 (2025)

August 5, 2025August 4, 2025 Brian J. Noggle

Book cover You know, I would not have expected to watch this film, as it is on a streaming service and I’m an old school media kind of guy. But a week ago, we visited my brother and his family, and they have all the streaming services, and so we watched this film.

And….

Well, it was okay.

It takes place a couple of decades past the first film (obviously). Happy Gilmore became the tour champion several times, but an errant tee shot kills Virginia (after she had borne a pile of kids). Happy hits the skids, becomes an alcoholic, and drops out of golfing and ends up the lowest of the low: A grocery store produce clerk (hey! wait a minute! I was a produce clerk for a long time in a couple different places!). A wealthy guy approaches him to join his new gimmicky golf league–Happy’s youngest daughter needs $300,000 to go to ballet school (an approachable problem for every man), but Happy demurs and looks to rejoin the pro tour to make the dough. Meanwhile, in a scene reminiscient of Batman or more likely Mystery Men, someone springs Shooter McGavin from the insane asylum where he has spent the decades–to rival Gilmore or to help him?

I mean, it was okay. A lot of memberberries, a lot of flashback footage from the original, and a couple of chuckles. But some things were gratuitous, such as the inclusion of Chubbs’ son who is also missing a hand. A lot of cameos–I recognized Travis Kelce, of course, and I did not recognize Eminem–and it has a lot of the Sandlerverse in it, including bringing back Ben Stiller as Hal, this time leading a court-ordered alcohol rehabilitation program, and a pile of Sandler’s actual children. Perhaps it’s part of the nature of Sandler’s contract with Netflix that allows him to be a bit self-indulgent in his cash grabs.

But it’s not likely to be the touchstone that the other one was. I cannot think of a single line from it worth repeating, and I allude to the original with disturbing and disappointing frequency (given that it’s almost thirty years old now).

But: Some things of note outside the film itself.

One, not long after watching it, Facebook presented this to me:

While watching the film, I said to the assemblage, “That’s Travis Kelce,” when Kelce appeared on the screen. Facebook knows what I said.

Second, Ben Stiller’s character in this film compels the recoveries in his substance abuse program to do work around his house much like he had the nursing home residents doing handicrafts for profit in the original.

Meanwhile, in Missouri:

Niangua pastor charged with forced labor in Webster County:

The founder and director of a Niangua-based sober living program has been charged with six felony counts of Abusing an Individual Through Forced Labor, following a sweeping investigation that spanned multiple years and exposed a pattern of alleged exploitation.

* * * *

The charges stem from numerous allegations that Tilden used his position of authority to coerce court-ordered residents into unpaid labor under threat of being removed from the program, potentially sending them back to jail.

According to the probable cause statement, Tilden allegedly forced at least six individuals to perform extensive labor between 2023 and July 2025. The reported work included roofing, farm labor, moving personal and church property, running thrift and feed stores, and construction projects, including the building of a pole barn for which one witness said Tilden was paid $1,500.

Ripped from today’s headlines. Is this actually prevalent? Or did I just happen to see this headline (in an actual, physical paper) and it struck me because I just watched the film?

Spotting these patterns probably explains a lot of my Internet-is-listening paranoia. Which, comes to think of it, is very similar to the patterns I spotted watching Jeopardy!

But my madness doesn’t mean the Internet isn’t listening.

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Nudge: The Next Generation

August 4, 2025 Brian J. Noggle

Bioethicists Want to Infect People With Disease That Makes You Allergic to Meat

And why the hell not?

Behavioral economics and Nudge indicate that Our Betters should be able to use rules and laws to manipulate the people into doing what Our Betters think we should do. And if that fails?

Well, I guess Our Betters have to take more direct action.

As for me, if I end up with Alpha-Gal Syndrome, I’ll get it the old fashioned way. It’s been a bad year of insects here at Nogglestead. I’ve had two or three tick bites (and a couple of visitations) and a wasp sting. I’m going to housebreak a possum and name him Rikki-Tikki-Ticki, brah.

(Link via Instapundit.)

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So, How Was That Turnout?

August 3, 2025 Brian J. Noggle

On Friday, the coverage for the regularly scheduled Saturday “grassroots” protest was not only hyped in its own article but had a slot in the “things to do this weekend” feature.

And, no follow-up about how it went.

Which probably means smaller than the previous one, which was pretty small to begin with. A search of the local television news brings up a couple of pieces about the regularly scheduled “grassroots” protests in a couple of distant cities.

Not a mass movement.

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Watch Out For Her Cross

August 3, 2025August 2, 2025 Brian J. Noggle

Matty Healy comforts crying mom outside LA restaurant after Taylor Swift jab

Especially if she gets her full body into it; that will give you something to cry about.

In related news, which is unrelated actually but is a funny story: My son and I re-certified for CPR two weeks ago, and we brought along my beautiful wife so she could also get a pretty little AHA card for her overstuffed wallet.

The captain in charge and the fireman assisting asserted we should lock our elbows and rock to get the full body into quality compressions on the adult mannikin. Then, they brought out infant-sized mannikins for us to practice little two-finger compressions. And when it came time to do the bit on a choking baby, it was two-fingered modified Heimlichs and pats on the back.

When it came time to try them on the mannikin, my black-belt-havin’ wife apparently gave the little mannikin a full martial arts palm strike on it that caused the mannikin to eject the electronic parts that light up to give feedback on your CPR compressions. They clattered to the floor at the feet of the captain, and she said, “Should I not put my hip into it?”

She passed, of course, as she was the only one in the class (and perhaps ever) to make the baby actually cough up anything.

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The Bookshelf That Came In

August 2, 2025 Brian J. Noggle

Ah, gentle reader, it has been fifteen years since I posted about a gallery of the Noggle library, and this post is not going to revisit the state of the library. However, I do want to note that the brown, unfinished shelf that housed the woodworking books and magazines has come in doors.

In 2010, it looked like this:

In the decade and a half since, I am not sure I’ve acquired many repair guides, and if I did, they went to the unread stacks. But I did load it up with junk for craft projects that ~~I never got to~~ I haven’t gotten to yet.

But I’m now into year two of cleaning my garage, and I had picked up a plastic shelving unit for use in my office where it didn’t fit (my PCs didn’t fit on it in a fashion where I could have moved my printers under the desk), so I moved it to the garage in the middle of the garage. That made it look junky, so I decided to bring the bookshelves into the house–into my office–and use the wall space in the garage for the shelving.

Well, first, I had to paint it, of course.

The bookshelf has an interesting family-by-marriage history. My maternal grandmother remarried a fellow named Herb when she was in her fifties (old, I would have thought then–given she had only a few years to live, I guess it was truer than I knew). Herb was a woodworker by–hobby? Vocation? He had a professional wood shop that he gave up when they married, and he tricked out the lower level of the house they shared on the flood plain until it flooded, and then he tricked out the basement of their next rented house not on a flooded plain (and the house where my grandmother died–and the last time I saw her, I was so into my new library books that I read in her living room instead of spending time with her while she was bed-ridden–I never knew how sick she was). But Herb did not build this bookshelf.

One of his five or six children built it as a china cabinet in high school shop class. It was not a bad piece of schoolwork from fifty years ago; it’s made of solid wood, which puts it above most of our bookshelves which are particle board and laminate. My mother inherited it when my grandmother died, and I remember it on the exterior wall of her dining room–but when I went to show my beautiful wife a picture of it as a china cabinet in a photo of our family having dinner at my mother’s, it’s not there. Maybe it was on the interior wall of that dining room.

Sometime, I got possession of it; I don’t actually remember when I got it, and that bothers me a bit. I don’t think it was when my mother passed away– I did not take much of her furniture, leaving it along with the house for my brother to deal with. It might have been after my first aunt passed away, at which point my mother probably inherited a nicer china cabinet from her sister.

I say this because when I got it, I took the doors off and removed the center pieces of it to turn it into bookshelves. And I sanded some of the paint off of it. This would indicate I got it pre-children, back when I thought I would get into refinishing furniture (which I really didn’t–which is why the hardware for one of the desks in my office is packaged in the garage–I planned to refinish it 26 years ago, but I have not gotten to it yet, and it’s been in use for probably 24 of those years). When we moved to Nogglestead, it was put into the garage, and there it’s sat for the sixteen years we’ve been here.

Well, I did not stain it, but I painted it with leftover fence paint, and it’s in my office now.

It also has the distinction of combining reference material (the woodworking, home repair, and electronic repair books), books I’ve read (the paperbacks at the top), and books I have not read (things I had stacked horizontally atop the other bookshelves in my office). I’d thought I’d need it for the overflow mass market paperbacks I’d read, but the overflow did not take up much space on it. So I have commingled read with unread. But not my books with my beautiful wife’s books (I say that as though it’s a taboo, but some of the books from my childhood are mixed with her books in the family room).

I stacked the former read paperback shelves atop each other, and the three shelves together eliminated some of the only wall space available in my office for decorations. So the few of my mother’s spoon collection which I actually polished at one time and displayed in a hanging spoon collection display thing-a-ma-bob–well, they’re on my desk again, suitable for a five things on my desk post again. I’ve kind of leaned the other things from that wall–the Jordan Binnington print, a couple of woodburnings I’d given to my aunt and uncle which I got back when my aunt died, and a couple of small paintings that my great grandmother did and which I remember on the wall in the dining room in the house projects–atop the bookshelves.

But there’s no room here for the spoon collection. We’re actually getting to the point at Nogglestead that we don’t have vertical wall space for the things we’ve accrued, so some are in the garage, and some will be in the storeroom.

At any rate, that’s the story of this particular bookshelf. Which is the only heirloom-quality bookshelf we have, actually.

“I hope you like the color,” I said to my wife. Because we have five or so gallons of brown paint left.

And onto the next project: Which is cleaning and organizing the garage, and maybe finally refinishing/staining the coffee table and end tables which my brother gave me in 1999 or 2000 and which I took apart to stain evenly and which we have moved, disassembled, several times. Who knows: When the garage is finally cleaned up enough that I can get to things and that the floor is not covered with boxes, bike carriers and trainers, and donation piles, maybe I’ll get back to actually doing things in it.

Or maybe I’ll wait for 2040 to get around to it. Time will tell.

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