To be able to say "Noggle," you first must be able to say "Nah."
Looks like officials are reading my review of Mary Baker Eddy’s poetry:
On the plus side, if we get into a rumble, I can go to the emergency room, and they cannot.
Also, who even gets counted by Statcounter these days? LLMs learning and Christian Scientists.
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I mentioned in June that Keiko Matsui was coming to St. Louis, and I thought about scoring tickets to see her. Which I did.
However.
We did not make it up to St. Louis to see her tonight.
I might have mentioned, or perhaps I did not, that we’re replacing the fireplace and flue liner on our lower level. The flue liner pulled away from the fire box, and the fire box itself was warping from the heat–I think at one point the fire box had blowers to blow some of the heat out into the room, but they have not worked since we’ve owned the house. So we decided to replace it, and not with a smaller insert–we have a lot of brickwork around the fire box, and a small insert in it would have looked undersized. So of course we went with the irresponsible most expensive option.
To be honest, I’m not sure my beautiful wife was very gung-ho on this trip. This autumn, her days have gotten fairly busy with immovable client calls, and the overnight getaways have become sometimes bothersome. So when we learned that the installation was going to be more difficult than they thought and that they would be back today to finish. However, it rained today and will tomorrow, so nobody was going to climb on the roof today, so…. We could have gone, I suppose, when I learned that they were not coming, but my wife is working from a resort an hour away, and we’d both resigned ourselves to not go.
Ah, well. There’s always March, when Wynton Marsalis is in St. Louis. When I asked her a while back what her bucket list concert was, she said Wynton Marsalis. So he’s not only bringing the Jazz at the Lincoln Center Orchestra for a night (hopefully with Ashley Pezzotti!) for a night–which I got tickets for even though it’s also in the middle of the work week, but also playing his fifth symphony that weekend (but I could not buy tickets for in time for her birthday).
At any rate, I am a little sour on it because my lower level has been tented off for a week and will be tented off for another x. My wife has been working remotely remotelier because her office is next to the room where masons spent two days breaking bricks, where the fireplace installation people spent a day banging on cast iron, and because I have been called upon to awaken early to unlock the back door (they’re used to leaving the doors unlocked, perhaps for weeks, for access). Because I’m at the mercy of the contractors’ matching schedules and the elements. And because I’m generally sour.
Ah, I will have a good story about it–maybe even a post to be named later–and I will, presumably, have a working fireplace this winter (now, about getting some wood…). But, tonight, I lament I did not see Keiko Matsui.
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When I bought this book at a group book signing at ABC Books in 2022, I said I picked up all the first books in Ms. Keene’s multiple series that I found. And although that was true for Finding Lizzy Smith which I read in 2023, shortly after the purchase, this is the second book in the Arizona Summers mystery series (which might actually be set in Missouri, as this one is, in the summer). Who knows what Tattered Wings, the third of her books I bought that day, might hold?
At any rate: This book is set in a small, fictional town on a lake in mid or southwest Missouri called Moonstone Lake (in Catoosa County, a fictional county) where the main character, Ary, is the (adopted) daughter of a popular 80-something (the new 60) proprietor (retired) of a popular restaurant. The plot is that a friend of Ary’s comes home one night to find that her ex-husband, who has been missing or in prison for five years, has been stabbed outside her apartment. The friend turns to Liz for help, but the body disappears. And the man’s last words indicate the money is his. So they try to figure out what he meant before the murderers strike again.
To be honest, the plot is a little contrived, but this little cozy of a mystery (with recipes from the restaurant in the back) really is more about the relationships of the main character and her adopted mother and aunt and the townspeople. She’s getting serious with a town cop, and her friend is getting serious with a deputy. Her adopted mother gets arrested for running an illegal gambling ring–she and some other octagenarians were playing poker, but one man lost big and his wife dropped the dime on them. Also, she’s about to celebrate her 81st birthday which is always a big production in town.
So most of the book’s 200+ page run time describes this, and the actual murder is secondary. And, boy howdy, the book could have used proofreading. Some extraneous punctuation, some missing punctuation, spelling a main character’s name (Lewis versus Louis) differently including a switch in successive paragraphs…. The things I criticize in James R. Wilder’s books are also present here. But:
The four of us left Moonstone Lake at noon. The Catoosa County Sheriff’s office agreed to patrol for the weekend.
The author knows the difference between town police and county sheriffs and how they sometimes help each other.
At any rate, I have one more book by this author which I have already picked up to complete the set I bought. But, boy howdier, I bought a lot of books by local authors that day.
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Forget AI; it’s programmed by humans and even if Elon Musk makes 10,000 Tesla robots annually (I forget where I saw the headline, so the number might be off).
But this gives me the willies:
Engineers Gave a Mushroom a Robot Body And Let It Run Wild
Nobody knows what sleeping mushrooms dream of when their vast mycelial networks flicker and pulse with electrochemical responses akin to those of our own brain cells.
But given a chance, what might this web of impulses do if granted a moment of freedom?
An interdisciplinary team of researchers from Cornell University in the US and the University of Florence in Italy took steps to find out, putting a culture of the edible mushroom species Pleurotus eryngii (also known as the king oyster mushroom) in control of a pair of vehicles, which can twitch and roll across a flat surface.
I have read enough Lovecraft and science headlines to know that fungi (or just a mastermind, single worldwide organism) are not human, and giving them the ability to move about in the physical world is a bad, bad idea. I already suspect, sometimes, that they (it) are (is) farming us and all of nature for their (its) own ends.
(Link via Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
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Jordan Valley Health is a community health provider in the Springfield area. We’ve only been to one once, when we absolutely had to have an incoming high school senior get a Meningococcal vaccine the week before he was scheduled to start.
In the old days, which was up to a couple of weeks ago, the logo had some loosely botanical thing going on the the V in Valley:
But they’ve (expensively) redone all their signs and logos to feature…. A mama bear and cub or something?
Every time I pass one, I think it’s a veterinary office. Even the one in Republic where my son got his shot.
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Country singer Ella Langley cancels concert Friday. Here’s why
She was scheduled to play at the BOK Center which I mentioned in my recent post about my trip to Tulsa.
The “why” is a “serious security threat.” With no additional details.
Man, the news does leave us wondering with each story, ainna? Fewer and fewer details and facts, more opinion and quotes from sources close to the matter.
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Since I have joined a Springfield, Missouri, Facebook group run by an acquaintance and have slowed scrolling to read Ozarks Alive captions, Facebook thinks I should see all the regional groups and whatnot. Even when they’re not real. Like a colorful autumn photo purportedly in Joplin, with oranges, yellows, and reds. C’mon, man, they had the same extremely dry September that we had, and their trees this year are going to go from dull green to brown if they have not already (although in the northern part of the state, I presume it will be better since they had copious amounts of rain throughout the summer).
But what in the fresh hell is this?
I guess some of those names are right, but the James River is not that big and does not run through Springfield, and….
Yeah, no, that is not Springfield, and I’m not sure what the point is of mocking something like that up. Trying to sell some sort of travel slop to people who aren’t from here? Who knows.
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Wow, gentle reader: Atypically, I did not buy this set of lectures at a Friends of the Library Book Sale, but rather at a book store in Overland, Kansas, in 2022 (that trip was that long ago already?). At any rate, after the half of An Introduction to Greek Philosophy (of which I only had Part I), I delved into this set of three binders, eighteen lectures, about nine hours running time. And since I had a lot of car time this week, I polished off the last third of it pretty quickly.
It is not a science course. It is a history of the philosophy of science course. So the tack of the course is not only on scientific discoveries, but on the social impace (and Progress) each one brings. You get some early lectures on Greek philosophers and natural scientists and the tension between Being and Becoming focii, and we’ll see how they play out over the centuries and even into the quantum era which might unify the two concepts. Or not.
At any rate, the lectures include:
Ope, I missed one, but I can’t be arsed to go get them off of the shelf to review.
The lecture names are generic enough that I’m already forgetting the names of the philosophers and scientists it discusses. Well, most of them, anyway.
The author is a little left–not too bad, although he hangs onto the u in evolution, revolution, and solution a little like I (mis)remembered Old Major doing in Animal Farm (the cartoon). And he’s very eager for science to dispense with its relationship with the church and all that nonsense. Still, not filled with invective or name-calling, so still listenable like professors were in the late 20th century.
I think I would have enjoyed a course on actual science instead of the philosophy of it, but I got a little something out of this one anyway.
One of my goals (probably a stretch goal given how I waste time) is to clean my office closet so I can unbox and review the binders of audio course that I have available and pick one quickly. But that’s a stretch goal. Also, I’ve completed so many over the years that the bookshelf dedicated to the listened to audio courses is almost full. So I might have to take them out of the library binders or something. Or…. Pass them on? Hush your mouth! My estate sale is soon enough.
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Well, I found this book on my stacks four years later; I said when I bought this book with a couple others:
At any rate, it should give me a couple of handy collections of poetry to read out back in the evening. If I can find them again easily once I move them off of my desk and into the stacks of the Nogglestead library, where books just disappear.
Well, one of the other two books was Milk and Honey, which I read later that year. The other was 100 Bill Harvey Poems which I held in my very hand a couple of days ago when trying to pick a collection of poems to read while watching a football game.
I’d brought this book down from my bedroom reading chair because I’d been working on it for a while, but it was not really good browsing material. For one, it’s a loving edition of poems published posthumously by the founder of the Christian Science movement. This book is a former library edition, but its stamps are illegible and its checkout pocket has been removed; one presumes it was in a Christian Science Reading Room (I think there’s still one in Springfield; I’ll have to look to see if it’s still there when I go down Glenstone again). But it’s got gilded pages and drop capitals on each poem, and they’re…. Well, they’re mid-18th century poems harkening back to older forms. She’s imitating older styles, and she uses “ye” incorrectly.
I mean, it’s a cut above most of the 20th century grandmother poetry that I read and surely above Milk and Honey because of its decent rhythm and poetic sensibility. But I won’t remember anything of it once I put this book on the shelf. I didn’t flag anything, and I don’t remember any lines making me think they were especially well done. I mean, Riley and Dunbar are almost contemporaneous, and their vernacular poems are fun and their serious poems are markedly better.
Ah, well. In 100 years, nobody will be reading my poetry from 1990, so who am I to judge?
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Ah, gentle reader, I have done it. Again. After three years, I have completed The Life Of Greece, the second volume in The Story of Civilization series, most of which I picked up in 2019 (I finished the first volume, Our Oriental Heritage, in August 2023). At this rate, I will finish the eleventh volume in 2053 and will be able to move on to Churchill’s history series or Summa Theologiae.
The book covers the history of Greek civilization from roughly 3500 BC to the mid-first century BC. Early chapters deal with early civilization on Crete and the legendary period of Greece, including the events that would have triggered Homer’s epics and whatnot. The book really gets going with the formation of the city-states and the machinations of Athens and Sparta and the other states that rose and fell with some peaks only being decades–a lifetime. It talks a lot about individual personalities and their contributions, and a lot of the material overlaps with An Introduction to Greek Philosophy which I just listened to and the current, almost complete history of the philosophy of science course I’m listening to now. Plus I know some of the players from reading some Plato, not enough Aristotle, and as far into Copleston’s The History of Philosophy. So some of it was review. Not that I’ll remember too much of it except for that which was reinforced by the other things I’ve listened to recently, particularly the philosophical distinction between being and becoming which is something that has traded predominance in philosophy and science for decades.
The same thing I said about the first book I shall repeat here: Durant (or Durants) is (are) old school leftists, so a lot of asides in favor of socialism and throwing off the shackles of religion (in the Greeks’ case the old gods of mythology, but sometimes Christianity as well, but not the Greeks, although he does draw a line from Stoicism in its Greek roots to Christianity). He also has a tendency to go back and forth in time as he breaks eras and epochs into different silos, such as science, philosophy, painting, sculpture, and so on, so he’ll exhaust one silo and start back in another. Undoubtedly, this will become less of a problem when the individual volumes of the series compress into decades or centuries–the next one is Caesar and Christ which might only be a couple of hundred years (although who knows how far it might stretch if it includes the Byzantine empire), and others collapse into even smaller chunks of time. But in these first two books, where he covers millennia (and, in the first, the same or similar millennia spread across several cultures), the reader gets a little whiplash. Maybe the scholarly reader, or the merely educated before the 1970s reader, would not have the issue. But compared to educated men a hundred years before my birth, I’m a dunce.
So I have already placed Caesar and Christ on my chairside table, which defeats the purpose of my drive to finish off some of the thicker books on that table which have languished there for a long time. How long will Caesar and Christ remain there? I know, we’re all in suspense, gentle reader. Time will tell. But I will read some other books, or perhaps a couple of hundred, in the interim.
Oh, and I did flag some things for comment which I will displense periodically as From the Durant posts. Except this one:
Carneades of Cyrene, coming to Athens like a Greek Abelard about 193, made like bitter for Chrysippus and his other teachers by arguing with galling subtlety against every doctrine that they taught.
I bring this up because after I read Pope’s “Eloisa to Abelard” recently, I have seen or heard references to him several times, culminating in my picking up a biography of him last month. Which I might read before I finish Caesar and Christ or, at least, The Story of Civilization.
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I guess I reclaimed this book from my youngest’s bedroom in January as it was on the top of the stack, relatively, and I don’t have it mentioned in any Good Book Hunting posts. By on the top of the stack, I mean that I have again begun stacking the books atop the books atop by bookshelves, blocking view of my bladed weapons collection again, which means maybe I should actually finish books instead of working through really long books in the beginning of long series of long books. Which I am generally good at, which means I have lots of long series of books which would be good to read which I will probably never get to. But collections of cartoons? I can browse that while watching part of a football game (the first quarter of the Chiefs game since we can get those on one of our streaming services).
So: This is a collection of Far Side comics which were all the rage in the 1980s, right up there with Dilbert as to things you were likely to see cut out of the newspaper and posted on a teacher’s bulletin board, classroom door, or cubicle wall. The humor was zany, often absurd, and dealing with anthropomorphic animals, aliens, and sometimes weird people. I associate it with the 1980s, but this collection came out in 1992, so it has some George H.W. Bush jokes in it or things from that time. Maybe Desert Shield/Desert Storm?
At any rate, the daily cartoon was pretty high quality for its time and provided some amusement, but in reading them all at once in an evening, I only got a couple of actual chuckles, and I only flagged one:
As I am purportedly studying multiple martial arts at two schools (when I can drag my carcass into them, which does not coincide when classes are cancelled, when I am traveling, when I’m having contractors over for a few or many thousands of dollars’ worth of work, when I have no car because my beautiful wife is out of town, or because I am plumb lazy), that struck me. Only one of the schools features board breaks, though.
At any rate, it’s a book down (70 so far this year), and I’ve also discovered I have a Superman collection/graphic novel to browse during football games or as interludes between chapters/sections of long books in long series.
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A long time ago, I made a category on this blog called DeRooneyfication which deals with projects or repairs that have sat idle for years (or decades)
Maybe I need a new category for DeReifiedPotential as well. If you remember, I talked about What “I’m Gonna” Looks Like based on a post that defined it thusly:
Because that’s my theory as to what hoarding really is: Reified potential. What might have been, in physical form. Again, n=1 here, so take this for what it’s worth, but the hoarder in my life has elaborate justifications for every single item she’s got, and they’re all of the “I’m gonna” type.
All those newspapers? I’m gonna make a scrapbook. The empty perfume bottles? I’m gonna turn them into wind chimes. She fancies herself an artiste — she even introduces herself that way — although the only actual art she’s ever produced is a series of sketches… from back in high school, which was a long time ago. They’re buried at the bottom of a big stack of sketch pads, all filled with nothing but “gonna.” I’m gonna start sketching street scenes. I’m gonna start tomorrow.
Well, in my couple of years-long project of cleaning out the garage and my morbid recent drive to at least get rid of a couple of things before an eventual estate sale, I’ve decided to clean out the little drawer organizers in the storeroom. These plastic three-drawer units were some of the first organizers we got here at Nogglestead, and I immediately filled them up with various crafting supplies and things I bought when taking my toddlers to garage sales and watching too much Creative Juice and reading things like the Trash to Treasure series of books (not in order, but 8, 2, and 6 in 2010–I also read 1 in 2020, but that was far past my junk project material accumulating days.
The drawers have remained mostly undisturbed in the last fifteen years, although I have gone to them for Sculpey or Velcro on occasion. But I have this idea of moving my beading supplies (my beading phase was also, apparently, 2010, judging by my Facebook photos) from under my secondary office desk where they’ve gathered dust since then into the organizer in the storage room.
So I’ve started to empty the drawers in there. Started. I’ve moved several bags of stamps and one probably dry inkpad into the donation boxes (didn’t I just clear a stack of donation boxes from my garage floor this summer in a previous bout of DeReifiedPotentialling? Yes.). I tossed out a couple of foam-and-velcro-backed photos I got from some church garage sale (the little modular home on Republic Road that has since become a dance school? Maybe.) which depicted some church event. They weren’t even my family or church’s photos, and I kept them for sixteen years. I have a couple of old clocks I bought for the movements in them, the Sculpey, a lot of computer chips (to make magnets of), a stack disc magnets, the Velcro, a spool or two of ribbon, and some other things yet to dispose of–I didn’t say this would be a quick thing–but I have decided to dispose of these:
A West Bend Thermo-Serv carafe and a West Bend Thermo-Serv Hot Pot (no cord). I think I planned to put artificial flowers in them. Heaven knows we have a couple of things with artificial flora in them around the house–a vase atop the bookshelves downstairs, two coffee carafes (one painted with stained glass paint and one with streaks from old, soon-to-be-discarded bottles of my beautiful wife’s nail polish), and a vase upstairs in the kitchen, I think–from my artificial flower arranging days. For a long time I had a vintage Thermos in the garage with the same idea or maybe the thought of cutting a space for a clock in it–but that’s already gone.
I checked Ebay first, of course, and they or equivalents are widely listed at just under $20. Minus the time, the listing and processing fees, and the postage and handling, but mostly the time, it’s not worth the effort. So they’re boxed in the garage, a new growing stack awaiting donation.
You know, the Lutheran high school has a really nice, curated thrift store. Perhaps I should donate these things to the veteran’s thrift store where you got more mish-mash of bric-a-brac and tchotchkes like these.
But they probably won’t make it to a facility for weeks/months/years. So if you, gentle reader, need one to complete the look of your retro kitchen, we can deal until probably early 2028.
As to the rest of the contents of the drawer units and the beading supplies in my office…. Well, that’s what 2029 is for.
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It was quiet last week here as I went to Tulsa, Oklahoma, for a conference: Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification Midwest Conference, known to me as CMMC, uh, MC. What is CMMC? Well, in a nutshell, it is a process for Department of War contractors to prove that their technologies, processes, and practices adhere to certain different standards of security. It’s adjacent to what used to be my mainline, software quality assurance, but my wife is big into it and has a string of letters on her LinkedIn profile and many fine remunerative contract opportunities so long as the Federal government keeps pushing for it. Which it sometimes is, sometimes isn’t. But I had a chance to learn something, and I had a chance to get away for a couple of days with a beautiful woman, so I took it.
The conference was in downtown Tulsa, so we stayed at the Hyatt Regency on Second Street. The textures from our window:
That’s looking northeast from our room which was on the southern edge of the building. The Hyatt Regency has a walkout basement thing going on; Third Street is a floor higher than Second Street, so the little parkway below just north of the building is a parking garage that serves the hotel and the performing arts center. I presume Tulsa or someone offered some green roof tax credits or something, because I saw a lot of them downtown.
Downtown Tulsa wasn’t full of older buildings like you get in some places. It’s not like downtown Springfield which has a bunch of brick buildings clustered together in a fairly small footprint. We didn’t ramble too far–from just north of the BOK Center to, what, Detroit or Cincinnati Street and Second Street to Cameron (once) but mostly Archer. An early review of the history made me think the older part of town was elsewhere, but the train tracks and the train depot are within this grid, so I guess it was a relatively small town until the oil boom in the 20th century, so most of the buildings are relatively new.
We got in on Wednesday afternoon, walked a bit to find the place where the conference was held, had a nice dinner at Ti Amo, which is right near the BOK Center arena, home of the minor league hockey team and host for nationwide touring act concerts. We met up with some CMMC professionals at Cabin Boys up on Main and Cameron, our furthest venture from our hotel, a walk in a warm rain. On Thursday, the conference had a full day. I, however, did not attend the whole day, opting to play hooky for a couple of sessions to walk up to Magic City Books, a new book store (that is, it sells new books–I guess the store itself is a decade old). I was looking for a regional or local history book, but it didn’t really have “a history of Tulsa” books. Wicked/Highway 66 books, some academicish books, and Prairie City by Angie Debo, which offers a “composite” of similar towns, I guess? What the book store did have was a shelf-sized display of books (dozens) on the Tulsa Race Massacre, a 1921 event which left many black (and white) residents of the Greenwood section of the town dead. Poor Springfield only had a single lynching in 1904 to try to carry collective or city-based racial guilt into the 21st century. Tulsa had a whole pogrom.
On Thursday evening, we had some Cajun food at Bourbon Street Cafe, and on Friday morning, we attended the half day of the conference–well, my wife did; I attended a single session and handled luggage and checkout duties. Then we drove home, tried to stop in Claremore for lunch but managed to get to the Chik-Fil-A at the same time as two high school cross country teams.
Another nice little break and quick trip like our stay downtown and an upcoming overnight in St. Louis. And maybe a lead on some work for me, which would be nice.
It’s funny; Tulsa is as close as either St. Louis or Kansas City to us, but we have to now not really thought of popping down for a quick visit. Staying downtown is nice, as although there are many people working in the towers and going in and out of the parking garages, the city is really quiet in the evenings. Foot traffic is less than even downtown St. Louis (we stayed downtown in April, and I didn’t see a bunch homeless people on the streets–I was only hit up once, sitting in the hotel coffee shop no less. The restaurants were empty, although I’m sure that’s different on concert nights and when something is going on at the performing arts center, but probably not as much as a major league sporting event.
So we will probably be back. Next year for the same conference if nothing else.
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