To be able to say "Noggle," you first must be able to say "Nah."
I predicted last November that I was entering a dying time much like my family experienced in the late 1980s, where a number of family members (my grandfather, my grandmother, my step-grandfather, my step great grandmother, my cousin, and assorted great aunts) died in a short period of time. My aunt and stepmother had cancer, […]
I predicted even before the macarenavirus troubles began that a dying time was coming. As you know, gentle reader, my aunt and godmother died on Thanksgiving. Her illness and the age of the previous generation led me to my unhappy musings. Yesterday, the best man at my wedding died of a drug overdose. I had […]
When I was in late middle school and high school, which is to say the time when I lived in the trailer park and down the gravel road in the valley, a lot of family members died. I lost my grandfather, my grandmother, my cousin, a number of great aunts, my great-grandmother by marriage, and […]
When I bought this book last June, I said I thought I would confuse it with Coffee Is Better Than Therapy. And so I did; as I was reading, I was picturing the woman living in Webster Groves, but then she would mention something from Springfield, and it would throw me off. The book comes […]
Those of you who are my friends on Facebook know I’ve started baking and doing handcrafts and already suspect my masculinity. Now, you encounter a review of a book based on a television series based designed for little old ladies with cats. Well, in my defense, I would probably not have bought this book for […]
I mentioned I have a bit of a sports injury that has the smallest finger on my left hand in a splint. Over the course of the last four days, I have learned a number of things are difficult in this condition. Hit the Q key. I am not a touch typist, gentle reader, so […]
Gentle reader, I am in the process of leaving my full-time job and returning to the world of contracting, or maybe later another full-time job, but it certainly means an interesting time coming up. I have left with but the offer of a part-time contract with one of my favorite clients from the past and […]
After watching The Forbidden Kingdom and Jade Warrior, I thought I would throw in this DVD which I bought in June 2021 in Branson. I mean, I knew one of the films starred Bruce Li who was supposed to be a successor to Bruce Lee, but what did I just watch? Fist of Fear, Touch […]
The Web site of the Springfield News-Leader has a tile that presents it as a quiz: However, the title gets more to the point: These 16 television shows, movies are set in Missouri — but were they filmed here? The majority of the series [Ozark] is set in the dark, ominous Ozarks, but critics didn’t […]
Raiders of the Lost Ark (c’mon, man, it’s not Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark) Well, since I just read the novelization of this film, of course I was going to rewatch the series. Well, the real Indiana Jones movies. I picked up a VHS box set from the turn of the […]
This film came out the year after I was born, but I was aware of it and of the presence of “The Entertainer” by Scott Joplin in it (I eventually learned it) and because I had a Cracked magazine parody of it at one time, which must have somehow meant I obtained an older copy […]
It took me three nights to get through this film which I have seen before and think might be Kevin Smith’s best film. I popped it in on an evening where my resolve to watch a film was wavery, and I only got a couple of minutes into it before deciding I wanted to do […]
I was vaguely aware of this film when it came out. I was just about a year out of college, and either my friend Mike mentioned it, or perhaps the premise reminded me of Mike. But I did not see it in the cinema, nor had I seen it any time before now. Johnny Depp, […]
Well, after reading Wizard by Ozzie Smith, of course I immediately picked up Wizard by John Varley. As it happened, they were close together, relatively, on the to-read shelves in the hallway which we just turned over as we painted the hall. It turns out that this book is the middle book in a trilogy–I […]
Last night, the Lutheran Student Center hosted a trivia night fundraiser at one of the rival Lutheran churches in Springfield. One of the hostesses called it the “Second Annual” but that is not exactly true. It is the second year in a row after a hiatus, but the LSC has held trivia nights before at […]
Gentle reader, I will ask you to indulge me here a bit. I saw Ghost Rider recently, but I cannot tell you how recently that would have been since I’ve only been doing movie reports since 2020 here (recently). I mean, I am pretty sure I watched it at Nogglestead, but it could have been […]
I am not claiming to be a polymath, gentle reader, as I would have to be a far better autodidact than I am. But I sure am reading and listening widely these days, which means I have a lot of new vocabulary words getting thrown into my brain, briefly, while I’m reading/listening/studying. Soon to be […]
I don’t know where I bought this collection, but it looks to be fifteen films from the Blaxploitation era of the 1970s. And, to be honest, they’re not the best of them–one bets you could sell Shaft, Across 110th Street, Foxy Brown, Superfly, and a handful of other films singly–heck, I bought Get Christie Love! […]
I saw this film in the theater, without Mike as I just mentioned, although in this case “just” is three years ago as befits my work-from-home-addled memory. In it, Brendan Fraser plays an obnoxious dweeb customer tech support worker at a tech company in San Francisco who tries too hard to relate to his co-workers […]
My beautiful wife gave me two $25 gift certificates to Relics, so I popped by on Memorial Day to see if I could spend them. After a long weekend that I’d looked forward to that ultimately underwhelmed–I blame the banana bread fiasco–I hoped the trip would cheer me a bit. Relics gift certificates are problematic. […]