To be able to say "Noggle," you first must be able to say "Nah."
Lifelong Cardinals fans react to the last regular season game before rebranding:
As the Springfield Cardinals’ regular season comes to an end on Sunday, so does two decades of Cardinals baseball.
On Aug. 25, the team announced it would be changing its name, logo and uniform after 20 years under the Springfield Cardinals name.
Twenty years does not a lifetime make. Around here, twenty years counts as “recently.”
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Well, Rob did warn me when I watched Last of the Mohicans last year (already? I was going to say just) that this film was, in his words, ponderous and pointless and that he regretted watching it. Well, now I share that regret with him. I bought this last February with a gift card at Vintage Stock, and it looks like I’ve watched most of the films I bought that day, including:
That leaves This Is The End as the only remaining film from that purchase that I have yet to see, so I guess I know what I will watch next.
At any rate, Daniel Day-Lewis won an Oscar for his Sean Connery imitation in this film where he portrays a prospector/miner turned oil man who is led to a rich oil property in California. He has adopted the baby boy of a worker killed in a drilling accident, and he uses the boy as a prop when negotiating with families who own land he wants to buy or lease or investors. A series of setbacks and accidents occur, and he butts heads with a charismatic clergyman member of the Sunday family who for some unfathomable reason is the twin brother of the young man who told him where to find the oil in California. The young boy is deafened in an accident, sets fire to the house and gets sent to a school for the deaf in San Francisco, a man shows up claiming to be the oil man’s half brother and becomes his assistant until he reveals that he is not.
Things happen in the movie, but it rather lacks a narrative, really. It’s more of a Movie that you look at. Shots that linger for several beats too long. A hella lotta half-lit chiaroscuro closeups. Time jumps. The very last bit of the movie takes place many years after the main story just so that the main character can alienate the son and then kill the charismatic clergyman. None of the main characters are really good people or worth rooting for. Ponderous and pointless indeed, and suddenly I’m not that interested in acquiring and watching The Gangs of New York.
Not something I’m going to watch again, but now I have it on DVD for my estate sale, presuming that anyone still has a working DVD player when I shuffle off the mortal lacuna coil.
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I got this chapbook, the winner of the Rattle magazine Chapbook of the Year prize, because I entered a poetry contest with a reading fee that came with a subscription to Rattle. Not sure when I will get to reading my new subscription–I have a great number of literary magazines to which I subscribed over the years or older copies that I’ve picked up at book sales in the past, and I have a desk drawer in the parlor full of old history magazines, Renaissance festival magazines, and beer magazines that I subscribed to around the turn of the century and years of First Things I will get to when the topical articles are history. But I had just finished Treasures of Truth as my night-ending poetry (The Rape of the Lock being a reading chairside table book, not the collections and magazines containing shorter poems that I prefer to read right before bed), so I read this book over the course of a couple of nights before lights out.
And…. Well, I guess Lance Larsen is one of my favorite poets from the second quarter of the 21st century, maybe even of the 21st century, but that’s not a high bar to clear. The work is better than Rupi Kaur and most of the self-published work that I read and pretty much all of the grandmother poetry I read. Unfortunately, though, I read the work after encountering the phrase “small i poetry” somewhere, and although the research I’ve done (a Google search) indicates this definitely (as far as an LLM knows) refers to ee cummings and his lack of capitalization to indicate wonder, contextually (if I remember), it meant how poets insert themselves into their poems. And I saw this meme again:
I know, I know, it’s been this way at least since the romantic poets, and my favorite poet (Edna St. Vincent Millay) does this consistently, and I know, I know, I do this all the time (see also). The latest poem I sent to the very contest which brought this chapbook to my door is almost two pages of me me me. So perhaps I was too harsh in my reading of this fellow’s work. Perhaps I was jealous; he’s certainly made more of a go of it than I have; poems in this volume previously appeared even in the hometown(ish) Missouri Review.
That being said: The poet-narrator of these particular poems often makes note of physical places where he is, cities and states and whatnot, and they acted as an abstraction layer–I was reading a poem, I was not in the poem. I hope I’m not doing too much of that, but, probably I am. A couple of the poems feel like filler–a list of thoughts from a hammock, for example–perhaps a good blog post, but a poem? Nah.
So: Better than average, but not on the pantheon of the best ever. Which, I suppose, is the best I can hope for, too.
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Everton, Mo., warns improper flushing could trigger sewer rate hikes:
Everton city leaders are warning residents that improper flushing habits could soon lead to higher sewer utility bills across the community.
Public works crews say they are repeatedly battling severe clogs caused by items that should never go down the drain—including hypodermic needles, washcloths, hygiene wipes, and even phone chargers.
Wait, it’s been a couple years since I’ve lived somewhere where my wastewater went somewhere other than under my failing orchard, but the wastewater not only includes what you flush but also what you run down your kitchen sink (even with the “garbage disposal” which only makes smaller bits to stick together somewhere down the pipe).
The bathroom of one of my martial arts school has the new-fangled “flushable” wipes instead of (as we have had at Nogglestead and at our home in Old Trees… almost decades ago, the cheapest non-linen infused double-ply you can buy). Yikes.
But, yeah, no. “Improper flushing”? No. A basic misunderstanding of what happens when you put something down the pipes, flushing or no, the diameters of said pipes, and….. Well, basic common sense. Which is not something you get in school or on TikTok (some overlap, too damned much in this current age). Or on “news” Web sites where your journalists are informed by TikTok and contemporary public schools.
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I mentioned after reading Bastion of Darkness last month that I had only one book left from my son’s birthday present of three paperbacks. This was the final one of the trio, not the trilogy. He got me two John Grisham legal thrillers (The Judge’s List being the other) and the third book of an R.A. Salvatore fantasy trilogy (Bastion of Darkness). It’s a twee little goal, to have read all three of the gift books, but my life is made of twee goals.
This book, pretty early in Grisham’s career (he’s still writing, but I’m not sure that his current books are quite as boffo as his earlier work, but I haven’t been paying attention to the best seller lists). In it, a lawsuit against a tobacco company goes to trial in Biloxi, Mississippi, and both the plantiff’s pool of bought-in lawyers but especially the defense funded tobacco companies and their undefeated fixer go to work on the jury to persuade or otherwise convince them, against judge’s orders, of course, to vote their way. They run into an unexpected fly in the ointment as one member of the jury, a former law school student, is apparently a drifter who has found is way into the jury pools of many such trials, but this is the first time he’s been seated, and he and a beautiful, also seemingly pastless, woman have their own agenda.
So it’s 550 paperback pages of the maneuvering with the agenda of the two coming into focus at the very end. I found it interesting for several reasons: I have been to Biloxi (and know how to pronounce it) in the time period when the book takes place; I have family nearby to this day, and a couple from church have just announced they’re relocating there; and recently, a trial has captured the headlines with a holdout juror.
A pretty good read, albeit a little long for my taste–it’s probably slightly less daunting in hardback.
But you know what it brings to mind? In the middle 1990s, we almost had a subgenre of legal fiction dedicated to lawsuits against tobacco companies, ainna? They’re still around, though, not bankrupted or banned as they hoped in the 1990s. Are there such legal thrillers about lawsuits against tech companies or social media companies? If not, why not? To be honest, as I mentioned, I don’t follow contemporary fiction much. Maybe the best seller lists are rife with them and I just don’t know it. Or is it something more sinister?
At any rate, I’ve got a copy of Skipping Christmas around here somewhere which I might read eventually, but I’m not jonesing for more legal thrillers of this type. Did Grisham and Turow really reshape the landscape in the last bit of the 20th century legal fiction world? I mean, Perry Mason was big, but that was pretty episodic and formulaic. Did these guys mark a sea change? It’s a rhetorical question of a sort. I’m not digging to find out.
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National Guard member accused of pulling gun on fellow soldier in argument over hairstyles:
A member of the Georgia National Guard deployed in Washington, D.C., as part of President Donald Trump’s task force to fight crime has been arrested for pulling a gun on a fellow Guard member in an alleged dispute over regulation haircuts.
My friend the Elvis impersonator managed to get himself a general discharge so he could grow out his pompadour back in the day. No firearms were brandished at this point, though.
One wonders if there is more to this story. Probably, but we’ll never know.
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In 2012, when I was dabbling with the Missouri Insight, I did a series of bits on small towns in Missouri, and I talked about Republic and Brookline:
Where Washington Avenue (the name of Commercial Lane after a couple of curves) meets Highway MM, you find the post office that serves Brookline and Republic (and Battlefield, and other parts of Greene County):
The Brookline Post Office
It’s a two-room cinderblock building where one of the rooms is a lobby and the other half loads mail for our rural postal carriers. I’ve been in on occasion. Nadine is always friendly, giving my child leftover stickers or stamping his hand SPOILED. What, your post office has more than one clerk? That, my friends, is urban.
At any rate, I was driving into Brookline to vote today. I drive twenty minutes at highway speeds to get to my polling place, checked once by a stop sign and twice by traffic signals. I filled out my scantrons and stepped out of the polling station, a Republic Fire District station (professionals, although part of the near parts of Republic including my domicile are covered by the volunteers).
Here’s what I saw from the doorway. Forgive me for not stitching them together for you:
Views from my polling place
Views from my polling place
Views from my polling place
Views from my polling place
The only thing in sight is a Church of Christ.
If you want to see the photos, you’ll have to click through. And if you’ll pardon me, but I don’t have photos this time, but just a description of what’s changed.
The post office is still there; it never really handled Republic’s mail–there’s a post office down off of Highway 60 that handles it–and the Brookline post office no longer handles our mail–it’s handled by the larger Republic post office. The Brookline post office is just a storefront that sells stamps now and has a wall of post office boxes. Nadine is gone now, as are her replacements including Mark, the only other one whose name comes to mind. I haven’t been to that post office in a long time.
Our polling place is no longer at the fire house. Instead, the whole family now votes across the street at the aforementioned Church of Christ.
The intersection of MM and Sawyer Road there now has a stop light. And a giant Amazon warehouse. And a strip mall servicing trucks coming out of the various new warehouses in the area. And the Iron Grain District which is a “mixed use” development which has at least one restaurant and coffee shop plus other things, including a large gas station. There’s another large gas station across from the post office. And they’re talking about widening MM from 60 to the interstate to better accommodate the big trucks.
When we moved here, we expected the suburbs to expand west on Highway M / Republic Road, but they followed Highway 60 from west Springfield instead. New shopping centers and apartment complexes are working to fill that empty space, but the lot on the corner of FF and M remains mostly empty even after having been for sale and development for most of the time we’ve been at Nogglestead. It didn’t help that the local wireless retailer put its home office in the middle of it, which might keep it from developing as retail.
But over time, I guess everything changes. But I’m still mostly the same. Which probably says something about me, and perhaps not something good.
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So for a while, off and on, I’ve been buying frozen treats for the family. Fruit juice bars in the past or ice cream sandwiches. I got away from it for a while when we skint, but our income situation has returned to an income situation, and we’re not hemorrhaging money like last year, so I’ve started picking up the frozen treats again, a ten-spot a week during the peak of summer. And although my youngest has made a habit–and, basically, a complete diet–of the ice cream sandwiches in the recent past, I have been the one eating most of them the last week or so.
Last week, on a lark, I bought a box of Drumsticks as well. If you’re not familiar, Drumsticks are ice cream cones with a chocolate and nut covering, akin to the dip you might get at Dairy Queen or other places. However, they’re pretty hard as they’re all frozen and individually wrapped unlike, say, soft serve dipped to order in molten syrup. And I shouldn’t say it was a lark, really, as I’d seen the boxes in the warehouse club freezers and thought about picking up a box for a couple of weeks before I actually did.
But, ah, gentle reader. How each one takes me back, just a little, to 1996.
I was living with my sainted mother in Lemay, Missouri. I lived with her after the university for two and a half years, and it seemed like such a long time. Those were busier days, then, and my perspective on time was that of a young man, where every year was a larger portion of my life than it is today. But now that my boys are on the cusp of leaving me, probably in less than that time frame, it doesn’t seem that long at all.
My mother handled all the shopping, such as it was. Not a lot of fresh produce–some apples and snack fruit, probably–and not a lot of things for home cooking–in addition to not being much of a cook (neither she nor, by her tutelage, me). Also, she worked second shift. The freezer was stocked with frozen things–and she would call the house line every night on her way home from work (she had a cellular phone, gentle reader, in the middle 1990s, in a bag) to ask me if she wanted me to pick up a Taco Bell Big Beef Burrito Supreme on her way home. She ate Taco Bell nightly, and would share the bounty with me if I were home and awake.
My goodness, she and I could eat nothing but junk in those days. I lived on frozen pizzas and Taco Bell and other fast food, and I tried to gain weight and lifted weights, but to no avail. I was eating several thousand calories a day, including weight gain shakes, and nothing. We both were skin bags over bones.
The freezer also has another treat: Drumsticks. The warehouse club was way up in Earth City in those days, an hour away by car, so she was not buying them in bulk, but the freezer almost always had Drumsticks in them. Oh, boy, and did I eat them. What was I doing at the time? Laying out the St. Louis Artesian? Hanging out in the gap between jobs? Playing Gemstone Warrior 3 on America Online? I had two jobs, spent a lot of time at coffee shops and open mike nights, and still somehow had a lot of time to sit in my mother’s (well, my aunt’s) house and eat Drumsticks.
I shall probably look back at this time of my life and say, “Wow, I had a lot of time.” And I spent it eating Drumsticks and feeling, briefly, twenty-four again.
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On Sunday mornings, we take the backup vehicle, an 18-year-old Chevy Trailblazer, to church because we pick up my mother-in-law, and at 83 years old, she gets better into it (her old truck when she was still independently mobile) than into our primary vehicle, an 18-year-old Lexus SUV that just turned 220,000 on the odometer (the Chevy still relatively spry with 100,000 fewer miles on it and still mostly hers as her independently mobile driving took her to New England, Canada/Michigan (almost the same, especially on multi-million dollar houses on islands in northern Lake Huron), the Grand Canyon, and Florida many times when she was taking care of her brother and later his estate. The Trailblazer now serves mostly as the younger boy’s go-to-work and go-to-school (now that he’s in college, but also when he was in high school) vehicle. So: It’s a mess, and the windshield, well…. A gentle lens for an aging actress, let’s say, with what I presume is soda spray on the inside and dust and pollen that can only be poorly cleaned using the windshield washer since the wiper blade is in pretty bad shape.
So we’re going along on the farm road where it dips between hills and trees by the pipeline pumping station, and my beautiful wife says, “Deer.” I start slowing down, and sure enough, a young deer comes running from the left side of the road. I braked, but not to a complete stop, and it thumped against the vehicle. I didn’t go over it, and I didn’t see it in the rearview mirror, hopefully because it ran off feeling abashed. It was only several miles down the road, on the way down to church, that I stopped because I was suddenly afraid that I had been dragging the poor thing. But the car showed no signs of damage.
We did have a bit of a contretemps in the car though. My wife assured me that I did not hit the deer, and my youngest and I were pretty sure we did. She had seen a deer on the right side of the road, which we did not hit, and had not seen the one on the left, which proceeded to hit us (he said defensively, more defensively than he drives, obvs).
BUT: The impact site was between the wheel well and the door, an invisible dent but that had bent that part of the fender/quarter panel juuuust enough so that the door rubbed against it loudly. Of course, taking it to a body shop for repair might have totaled the car as they recommended new fender and door panels and maybe hinges. So I (when I remembered to, when the temperature got closer to 100 degrees outside) went out with a rubber mallet, some plastic body pry bars, a screwdriver, and some pliers and…. Well, I wish I could tell you that I did an exemplary job fixing it right, but I bent it enough to minimize the rubbing so that it’s not really loud when you open the door.
I was in a similar situation just last week: I took a different route home from town than I normally do, a farm road that I only travel down once every couple of years. It’s curvier than ours, and I slowed way down on it, which meant that the frolicking young deer were able to cross safely in front of me then. I also remember that about ten years ago, someone was driving down that road hit a woman on a horse and drove on, thinking that she had hit a deer. I know how it can happen. I imagine myself doing it. But this was a deer, I assure you.
It’s the first collision with a deer that I’ve had even after 17 years in the country, so I guess I should count myself lucky more than a good driver. I might have hit a squirrel many years ago. I did hit a dog once on a pre-dawn commute through a transitioning neighborhood. Same thing; he came running from left to right, and although I braked hard, I went over him and felt him bump something under the car, but not under the wheels. I came to a stop and saw him standing in the road and decided I was not going to chase him to take him to the vets.
So, yeah, I am unschooled on the protocols of what to do when you hit an animal. Stop to make sure it’s dead? Put it out of its misery? Take it to the vet? I guess I should ask my brother; before he retired, he was hitting deer every couple of months on his morning, two-hour-on-country-highways, pre-dawn and post-sunset winter commutes. I am pretty sure that my father hit his share of things–he often had a few beers before driving up north the go hunting and a few beers on the way, but, of course, I cannot ask him, either, as he has been dead for almost thirty years now. Regardless of if I do the right thing or merely do an acceptable thing, I will mull it over for a long time and feel vaguely guilty about it all.
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4-island package on US-Canada border hits market fully loaded for $2.3M — boats included
It’s on the northeastern corner of Lake Huron (whose name I already know how to pronounce, thank you), so mighty cold in the winter (probably no ice bridge to Canada or they would have mentioned it). More of a summer home than anything else. But, dang, it looks awfully nice. As long as you don’t run out of bug spray.
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I check in on two Daily Dammit, Gannett newspaper Web sites: The Springfield News-Leader and the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. I don’t read much of them because their articles are mostly behind a very good paywall, but I do check out the local contests.
But I guess the ad pool is shrinking, because not only do we get ads for things that are not local in the “Shopping” section:
I mean, I listen to the radio all the time, so I know a lot of local jingles, but, brother, that ain’t one of them. Maybe it plays before streaming videos, YouTube content, or on obscure channels all the time. But, yeah, no clue what that is.
And we get contests clearly targeted to people in other regions, like this one:
At least, I presume the Michigan one is targeted to Wisconsin and Michigan people, but it’s on the News-Leader web site. I know that I’ve filled out the form before for a contest for a getaway at, what, the Indianapolis 500 or a golf getaway only to get denied (presumably after my contact information was saved somewhere for sale or rent) with a message that indicated they did not accept entries from my location.
Not cricket, and probably indicative of how the ad and marketing budgets are drying up for the big papers.
Oh, and I’ve also started getting calls and texts from one of the companies sponsoring the contests even though I meticulously opt out. So, in desperation, Gannett is courting a class action suit somewhere down the line.
Eh, free Internet content is worth what you pay for it, gentle reader, as you well know but are too polite to say.
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All the cool kids (Ace, Ed Driscoll, etc., etc.) are slagging on Ryan Reynolds for some pull quote from an interview where he says:
The 80s was a brutal, brutal time for people. It was a fucking mess and people forget that. It was a tremendous strife. Socio political tensions everywhere. We were still pretty fresh off a Cuban missile crisis, which was only 15-20 years before. It’s a tumultuous period, but you look back at it now and you’re like, ‘Oh, yeah. ‘Top Gun.’ Cocaine!’ Like, ‘No!’ It was really scary.”
C’mon, man. The real world was not so bad, in retrospect. We were young, and although my 80s were a series of upheavals and dealing with being the nerdy kid in the trailer park (different from my 70s, which was being the white nerdy kid in the housing projects), I have fond memories of the time because, you know what? I turned out all right in the end.
But the pop cultural zeitgeist, or at least the pop culture force-feeding, was of imminent doom. Either the Soviets were going to conquer us, or we were going to get nuked. It was the era of The Day After, Testament, and Red Dawn; it was the era of post-apocalyptic films like Mad Max, Hell Comes to Frogtown, et cetera, et cetera.
Maybe I just remember the anxiety because I was a neurotic kid (I’ve grown out of it; I’m no longer a kid) and because I don’t have any memories that remotely resembled a John Hughes or other teen comedy to overwrite it. But, yeah, it turned out to have been a good time to be a kid. Or, I presume, a yuppie that appeared in some of the other programs of the era, the ones that were designed to mock the spirit of the age and not to dampen it.
But the Cuban Missile Crisis? He’s thinking about the television series Call to Glory where it featured prominently and which was part of the not hatefully and not ostentatiously anti-American counterprogramming competing with the pro-American and more popular programming–Rambo, Rocky, the blockbusters, and the fact that the conservative characters designed to be foils for the right-thinking characters (Alex P. Keaton, etc.).
But we don’t really remember that part of the 1980s because it was, for the most part, background noise. But present.
I’ll leave the final word to the Philosopher from a 1980 treatise:
Sure, it’s from the tail end of the 1970s, but.
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Springfield-Branson National Airport (SGF) is still seeing the impacts from April’s hailstorm as visitors report glass shards from damaged cars scattered throughout the parking lots.
For those amongst us who might not be men, defined:
Toughened glass is processed by controlled thermal or chemical treatments to increase its strength compared with normal glass. Tempering, by design, creates balanced internal stresses which causes the glass sheet, when broken, to crumble into small granular chunks of similar size and shape instead of splintering into random, jagged shards. The granular chunks are less likely to cause injury.
As a result of its safety and strength, tempered glass is used in a variety of demanding applications, including passenger vehicle windows, shower doors, architectural glass doors and tables, refrigerator trays, as a component of bulletproof glass, for diving masks, and various types of plates and cookware. In the United States, federal law since 1977 has required safety glass located within doors and tub and shower enclosures.
Yeah, it would be unaesthetic to have glass from those storms still present, but it’s not likely to be sharp, at least not the glass from broken windows from the storm–although broken vodka bottles are a different story. However, the airport would have to shut down the parking lot and clear it out to completely clean the parking lots as they have overlapping vehicle stays of sometimes days or weeks. AND they just had a rolling shutdown recently for resurfacing the lots last year. AND they just tore up and replaced all the flooring on the interior. So perhaps they’re sending people out on a rolling basis with a broom and dustpan who hasn’t gotten it all yet.
Hopefully, the glass the complainant saw was from those storms and not from later theft from parked cars which would be even more depressing.
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I forgot to mention yesterday when I wrote the book report on the MacMillan’s Pocket Classics edition of The Rape of the Lock that I apparently am only the second owner of the book.
The book was not marked up/underlined like the other two Pope textbooks that have recently crossed my desk, but it did contain the previous owner’s homework assignment from 1910.
No letter grade; just a comment from the instructor or professor.
I tried to make out the name atop the assignment and on the flyleaf:
But no luck in reading it or having LLMs interpret it to see what I might learn about her.
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I thought this was the third of the small century-old textbook editions of Alexander Pope’s that I read this year, the first being a 1901 Riverside Literature Series volume that included “The Rape of the Lock”, “An Essay on Man”, and “Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot”. I remembered another volume, but it turns out that the Maynard’s English-Classic Series volume including only “An Essay on Man” I found and moved directly to the read shelves and did not count it amongst my reading total because it only contained “An Essay on Man” and not a single other poem that I could have read and thus counted the book (and could have written a book report on that single poem). If only I had read the previous book report before going looking, I would have seen that I explained this all then. But June was a long time ago, man.
At any rate, this century-old textbook is from the MacMillan’s Pocket Classics series and includes:
So I did get to read “An Essay on Criticism” which was mentioned prominently in the Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition audio course, and I thought I was home free–that the other poems would be shorter. For the most part, they were, although “Eloisa to Abelard” and “Windsor Forest” were both several hundred lines of small print long. I bogged down in “Eloisa to Abelard” for a couple of weeks and finished a couple of other books in the interim, but, here is where my larnin’ intersects: In the audio course I am currently listening to, a course on the history of the philosophy of science (or maybe those words transposed somehow), the lecturer talks about Abelard and makes an aside that another of his troubles was Eloisa, and I had this dot to connect it to. Also, the title of the 2004 film The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a film I really enjoyed after seeing in the cinema and at least once since, comes from “Eloisa to Abelard”. Don’t I feel smaht? Sometimes.
At any rate, reading the old, classic literature poets in depth like Keats and Pope here really make me appreciate some more recent poetry more. Much of the poetry they wrote relies on knowing contemporary personages and allusions to contemporary events in addition to the allusions to even more classical (that is, older) works and myths. Blooming heck, even Pindar is this way. And because they were patronized, the poets could and too often did go on at length, leading to the archaisms that I was accused of (and was probably guilty of) pursuing when I was younger (that is, in college). So, okay, I’ve read these guys. But Riley, Longfellow, Millay, and Dunbar? I re-read them.
At any rate, I think I am finally out of these little textbook editions of Pope (although the paperback complete works lurks somewhere in the stacks). But I do have a couple or three of these old green-bound textbooks of Longfellow (not including The Courtship of Miles Standish and Elizabeth which I read in 2024) and not including the really nice sixty-year-old reprint of an older edition of The Song of Hiawatha (which I read in 2018) facing out in the poetry section of ABC Books because Mrs. E. knows I’m a sucker for pretty editions of things I have already read (see also my most recent read of The Book of Five Rings). Hey, wait a minute: The Song of Hiawatha which I read in 2018 is a later reprint of the same book (featuring the illustrations of Frederic Remington). So there’s a slight chance that this edition only differs in the cover. And a slight chance that it’s enough of a difference that I’ll buy it next time I’m at ABC Books anyway.
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Kim du Toit today laments how much loudmouths “influencers” make compare to humble bloggers not on salary with a syndicate:
So yes, maybe I am jealous that today’s influencers make money hand over fist each week while I have made, at a rough guess, a few thousand dollars — over twenty years — from my type of influencing.
Yeah, if you’re talking how much this blog has made me over the years, the gross income is something like…. A hundred dollars? Probably less. A couple bucks from the Amazon Affiliates program fifteen years ago, mostly because Trey bought John Donnelly’s Gold and then some throw pillows in the same order–and then he gave it a two-star review (hopefully he liked the pillows better). Google ads? A couple dollars.
That’s gross income. Minus the cost of hosting and a year of GoDaddy’s “security” subscription (managing a SSL for me) at $400 (since cancelled because I can do it for free albeit at ninety days per). So, yeah, my “influencing” has been a rather expensive hobby. If I had kept horses, at least I could have something to eat if the need arose.
And don’t get me started (again) about how useless the blog and other social media have been at pimping my side projects.
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Tell me you don’t understand lethal threats without understanding lethal threats:
That’ll do it.
Probably too young or too female to know Run from a knife and rush a gun either.
Maybe I’ve just read too many thrillers, but I always evaluate what to do if someone comes in the door with a gun or with a knife and what I have at hand, hopefully longer than a knife or machete, to defend myself with if needed.
But grapple a person with a knife? Not if there’s another option, up to and including hitting them with a car.
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WE NEED ANSWERS!
Ah, but to quote the universe, “However, the fact has not created in me a sense of obligation.”
Yeah, security sense says no clicky, no stoppy. Also, none of your business my honest opinions. You want them, you come to the blog like everyone else Rob.
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