Two Minutes For High Kitten

I got nothing, but here’s a video of Isis displaying affection during my intro call with the new team I will be leading for a couple of weeks. Note that this almost minute of love is clipped from only three minutes of meeting agenda and personal intro.

I guess that about covers who I am.

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Book Report: Shakespearean Whodunits edited by Mike Ashley (1997)

Book coverI picked up this book for the 2025 Winter Reading Challenge‘s Blends Two Genres category. To be honest, I felt a bit hard pressed to come up with even an idea of a book that could blend genres without being part of a new genre. Cookbook/mystery? It’s a subgenre. Science-fiction westerns? Subgenre. Fantasy and car repair manuals? Not yet a subgenre, but I like the thought of it and will probably try to write something along those lines presently. But this book probably stretches the category, or maybe it’s right in the center of what they meant when they came up with the list of categories.

At any rate, this book is a 416-page collection of prose short stories (not plays) based on or around the works of Shakespeare. 23 use the settings and characters from Shakespeare’s plays. 1 takes place in London when he’s alive and features some actors in his troupe and another theater company. The last imagines Shakespeare as someone who gives information regarding monarchical intrigues through his plays, and an agent is tasked with watching the plays and sussing out their meanings for the… well, not exactly the resistance, but those who think that Anne Bolleyn got framed (wow, has it been twenty years since I read another book about Shakespeare being a secret agent? It was Ruled Britannia by Harry Turtledove in December 2005).

Basically, the stories fall into a couple of types: What really happened, where we find that one of the supporting characters was really behind the events of the play (such as Hamlet or Macbeth), or the rest of the story, where the story is extended by focusing on events which happened after the play, such as The Merchant of Venice, where we see what happens when the resolution of the play has led to a later murder and how the characters have gotten on after Shakespeare’s work.

As you know, gentle reader, I have been “working on” the complete works of Shakespeare for over six years now (I started with The Tempest in January 2018 and last read Much Ado About Nothing last January, so “working on” might be overselling it). But I certainly got more out of the stories whose plays I was familiar with. So if you’re into Shakespeare, you’ll get more out of the book than someone who is not. The stories are a bit uneven–some are written in modern prose, but some dabble with Middle Englishness in a bit of a yeah, I get what you’re doing, but… way.

But it helped me to fill a slot on my way to a mug. Clearly, I will not have finished the Winter Reading Challenge in a month, but I am well-positioned to clear it before my birthday and certainly before the end of the month.

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Footnoting the Joke

On Facebook, I posted this photo with the caption “Hopefully, this $60 worth of kindling will last us the rest of the year.”

I was waiting for someone to say You paid $60 for kindling? which is not the case.

This collection was made from the remnants of two of our front peach trees which cost $30 each a number of years ago. One died the year I pruned it. The other was half-dead, so I cut it down, too. Which leaves us with but two peach trees to not produce peaches this year due to any number of factors which has led them to not produce in the past. And probably more for us to discover if none of the known issues occur.

You know what we grow in the orchards of Nogglestead? Firewood.

Oh, and about that kindling: I had filled the box in the autumn, and we made it through the contents of it already. We’re not using “cheaters” this year as we are not spending dollars a day on Duraflame logs. I’m building the fires from scratch, so I’m using more kindling than some years. When I cut down the peach trees this autumn, I left the kindling-sized limbs and branches aside for later breaking into kindling-sized pieces, and I did that last weekend, spending a couple of hours snapping, lopping, and sawing them down and filling the box again. Given that it’s February and has been pretty warm this winter, it should hold us. And who knows what will die in the orchard next year? I might take down the fallen but growing apple tree.

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About Todd

Last week, a…. friend? Fellow I know? died of cancer. He was 51.

Todd was a year behind me in high school, and he was pretty close with Mike if I recall. To be honest, I knew of him more than I knew him. Was more on the jockly spectrum than I was–he was a cross-country runner and wrestler, and I was National Honor Society and writer’s group. I guess he was pretty smart, too, so they tell me, but, again, I didn’t know him in high school that much.

When I was out of college, he was in a gap year between high school and the Navy, and he was in a couple of local performances, including one with the Goldenrod Showboat in St. Charles. I took my girlfriend at the time to go see the performance and the small nonspeaking part he had. I also rooked him into doing a staged reading of The Courtship of Barbara Holt which meant that a bunch of people read the scripts to each other to a mostly empty coffee house on Sunday afternoons. One of the open mic hosts had an actors group called Stages St. Louis which did this whenever it could shanghai a play and enough actors to do it, and in my younger, energetic days, I gathered a group of my friends (plus Todd plus one Stages St. Louis actress) and even got another couple of people to come see it. Todd was a little disappointed that it was only that, but he was a trouper and made it to three of the four performances.

I didn’t really hear from him for a long time after that. He went into the Navy, got into the SEAL program but did not make it completely through and became a search and rescue swimmer. After the service, he went Hollywood. We became Facebook friends sometime this century; I sent him a copy of The Courtship of Barbara Holt when he was in Hollywood–partly because he was in it and partly because, hey, maybe he would tell his friends about it.

A couple years ago, he moved back to his parents’ house in Missouri, up in Jefferson County, and he asked me to call him. I spoke with him a couple of times over the phone, hoping to become, I dunno, friends, but….

Ultimately, he wanted me to write his biography with his stories about his time in S&R and as a stuntman in Hollywood. He told me “stories” on the phone which were basically just “I met so and so when I was bartending in L.A.” with no details. To be honest, I don’t remember many of them. You can see him, what, jump over a fence as Steven Van Zant’s stunt double in some film (the one where Van Zant climbs over a fence).

So I set up a Google doc and a process where he could start telling/writing his stories about his tae kwon do classes and his military stories and his Hollywood stories. I made a number of sections and a couple of prompts, and I hoped he’d start telling/typing those stories and that I would maybe ask questions based on some of them to flesh them out and then eventually organize them into an autobiography. But he didn’t touch hit, although he started posting on Facebook that the story of his life was being written. I think he wanted me to interview him a couple of times with a steno pad and turn that into a book.

After some time, when he hadn’t even looked at the framework I set up, so I told him that I could put him in touch with a couple of former journalists who might better be what he was looking for via text, and our contact fell off after that.

He was sick the whole time, of course, although he never mentioned it.

He was a nice guy, and I’m sorry we couldn’t find a way to work together on his book. I’m also sorry that I did not get to be a better friend, but he seemed to be looking more for something from me than to be my friend. Unfortunately, I feel that way about a lot of people whom I eventually try to become better friends with.

His death has left me shaken for the whole weekend just because of my remorse–couldn’t I have written his book or at least left him the illusion that I would–and a bit of anger that that’s all the good I was to him. And guilt at making it all about me.

Whatever the lesson is to be learned here, I will continue to not learn it.

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Behold My Allusions, Ye Literate, And Dispair

Tucked into a story entitled Bill Gates says he will never downsize from his mega-mansion with 24 bathrooms — despite being a single empty-nester, we get this declaration:

Xanadu 2.0 — which he named as an ode to the 1941 film “Citizen Kane” — is the epitome of billionaire luxury, featuring six kitchens, 24 bathrooms, an indoor trampoline room, a private library and a swimming pool equipped with an underwater music system.

An ode, gentle reader. An ode. Xanadu is from Citizen Kane. Ye gods.

I’ve done an Internet search to see if Gates himself called it Xanadu 2.0 or if others did, but it’s unclear. Maybe it’s deep in the book The Road Ahead which I have not read, I don’t think, and I don’t think I have a copy of in the Nogglestead library which is odd. It was like Wayne characterized Frampton Comes Alive–it was so ubiquitous in the 1990s and in used book stores and sales for a decade thereafter that it seemed like everyone had a copy that they did not read.

I found one active link that to a story that says the house was called Xanadu in a subheadline (which seems to be the source of the assertion in the Wikipedia entry on Gates’s house. I guess nobody thought of calling it La Cuesta Encantada 2.0. But that would have required not only reading more than a Wikipedia entry but also maybe knowing what Citizen Kane was about. So cinematic history or history of the profession of journalism. Either would have worked.

I’m just here to slag on journalists, whom I suspect do not read almost 100 books, including classics, every year. Because they’re busy tracking down stories by reading the Internet instead.

Oh, and if you’re looking for my comment on Gates owning a very large house (well, several) with no intention of downsizing: So what? I don’t think I would, either, especially since it has a sweet library.

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Two Words: Diverging Diamond

Family survives wrong-way crash on James River Freeway:

A series of wrong-way crashes on the James River Freeway this month, including one that sent a mother and her two children spinning across the highway, raises concerns about driver safety.

Weird how all these crashes are occurring in the area where they’ve added a bunch of diverging diamond interchanges and where they’ve been tampering with traffic patterns for years and not on the parts of US 60 with lights or more traditional on ramps and off ramps.

Probably will be a couple of years (or decades) before Experts and Professionals make a connection. Until then, I guess it’s up to us conspiracy theorists.

Oh, I know: Many of these drivers are intoxicated, and maybe some of them are not from around here, you know. But I would expect that an impaired driver might have a better chance of navigating a regular interchange than something with a lot of atypical loops and whorls.

The exciting new designs, each one different!, might look good in the sketchbooks, artists’ depictions, and the awards ceremonies and magazines, but they’re a lot less fun when you’re trying to drive them at night or in the rain even when unimpaired.

UPDATE: Props to Facebook who is on it in providing me with related content after I posted this morning:

Full disclosure: I have been a skeptic of this particular traffic pattern for a long time (I posted about them and roundabouts in a post in 2011 responding to Steven Den Beste, pbuh). And this is before I almost got creamed at a one such interchange in Joplin where I was driving the family to an athletic event some, jeez Louise, five or six years ago now. No doubt I would have been coming down the ramp to Range Line Road after having driven directly into the sunset and small city traffic. I didn’t realize the underpass was a double diamond–most of our interchanges in Springfield at the time went over the highway (although we have a couple under the highway now), so I yielded and as nothing was coming from my left, I made my right. Ha, ha! Joke was on me! The lanes immediately to the left were the southbound traffic which would have not been coming my way–southbound traffic was stopped at the light to my right across the lanes because the northbound traffic had a green light–and it was coming at 40 miles an hour on the lanes across the roadway, obscured by the pillars and jersey barriers in the middle of the road. I would say I got tootled at, but that’s not the sound of a 40 mile an hour vehicle surprised you would be so impudent as to pull out before it.

I did not get creamed, but I am very sympathetic to drivers who don’t recognize the interchange type and do something foolish. Even impaired ones.

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A Quiz

In the overnight open thread at Ace of Spades HQ last night, TRex posted this quiz:

How many have my children heard me use? Probably 30 or 32:

  • Shucks
  • Rats
  • Gosh
  • Sheesh
  • Flippin
  • Ticked
  • Heck
  • Jeepers
  • Snot
  • Wing nut
  • Criminey
  • Cripes
  • Crepes
  • Good grief
  • Cotton pickin
  • Malarky
  • What the hey
  • Dagnabbit
  • Confound it
  • Great googly moogly
  • Great Caesar’s ghost
  • Geez Louise
  • Judas Priest
  • Kiss my grits
  • Heavens to Betsy
  • What the devil
  • Jumpin’ Jehosophat
  • Gee wilikers
  • Horse hockey
  • For Heaven’s sake
  • For Pete’s sake
  • For cryin’ out loud

“Great Caesar’s ghost!” because I watched the old Superman television show back in the day.
“Geez Louise” because I’m from Wisconsin, and it sounds better in the original.
And I used “Dagnabit” so much that my youngest son used it all the time when he was five or six years old.

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Overselling It

Chocolate recall upgraded to highest risk level: Consumption ‘could cause death’

Oh, noes! Poisonous chocolate beans? How could this happen?

Federal officials have upgraded a chocolate recall to the highest risk level over fears consuming the product could “cause serious adverse health consequences or death.”

Three products from Cal Yee Farm – Dark Chocolate Almonds, Dark Chocolate Apricots and Dark Chocolate Walnuts – have been given a Class 1 classification for containing undeclared milk, according to the FDA.

In other words, take them back if you have a milk allergy.

They are not likely to catch fire in your esophagus or anything.

UPDATE: Sarah Hoyt posted about this at Instapundit this morning, but I’d scheduled this post yesterday afternoon, so I didn’t forget a hat tip. Our snark is pretty similar, though.

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Tales of the Cups

Lileks today talks about his coffee cup of the week and asks his commentors:

My favorite coffee cups have a meaning that might seem odd to someone else; my least-used has the most emotional connection; my most frequently used means nothing at all.

So share your mug stories! Worst, best, faves, etc.

C’mon, man. This is a blog. I’ve gone on about my coffee cup accumulation multiple times:

Out of My Cups (2012), wherein I talk about maybe divesting a couple of the plastic travel mugs I owned (spoiler alert: I got rid of two of the four).

I Am The Coffee Party I Was Waiting For about how many coffee cups I had back then and why I should not get rid of them (spoiler alert: I did not).

A couple of notes since the writing of the last:

  • Every year, I do the library’s Winter Reading Challenge which results in a mug; I’m about halfway through this year’s (as a reminder, although the rules say you only have to read 5 books from the 15 categories, I try to get all 15 before turning the form in). I have quite a collection of mugs from years past:

    I actually use some of them for tea, miso soup, or anything I brew downstairs, so they see some use.
     

  • In 2013, the boys would have been seven and five. I mentioned that I might get rid of some Monopoly themed cups, but I did not. And soon thereafter, my youngest, who had been exposed to the game, was delighted when he discovered them. They became his favorite cups for apple cider and hot chocolate (briefly).
     
  • I’ve only gotten a couple of additional cups since then: A cup for winning a trivia night in 2014, the plain white coffee house-like cup I got for the photo on the cover of Coffee House Memories, and a couple of additional cups that were part of the gift sets, including a camoflauge cup that my brother gave me for Christmas the year before last, come to mind.

However, the number of cups that I use has dropped.

I’ve gotten back into the habit of drinking coffee from the same cup for days on end (which was basically how I did it when I worked outside the home, using the same giant Marquette University plastic mug day after day with but a rinsing in between). Since I’ve been underemployed for a couple of months and cut the K-Cups from daily expenditures when the company I worked for no longer covered them, I have been using the drip maker upstairs and have left the cup up there, generally full, as well. So I don’t finish the last cup I pour on any given day–I start the next day by slamming that (followed by any cold coffee left in the pot). So it’s rare that the cup on the counter is empty to put into the dishwasher. I tend to use a faded Washington Times mug I got when I subscribed twenty years ago or a similar large mug whose source I have forgotten. So I use those two cups and one or two of the Library Winter Reading Challenge mugs for most of my coffee/hot brew needs.

Still, I cannot really cull them because they’re personal relics.

One thing I really do want to cull, though, is the insulated tumblers. We have received a bunch as swag or for various charitable contributions, but since I work from home, I don’t need something like it for a commute (and I use a plastic insulated Green Bay Packers cup I got from my brother some years back to take coffee on the long ride home for those long trips where I want to start out with coffee). They replaced the plastic water bottle swag we got previously for chartiable contributions and in 5K gift bags, and they occupy basically the same cabinet space. But we hardly ever use them. A couple of plastic bottles fit into bicycle water holders, but that’s about it.

Ah, well, we do have the space for them, so I don’t have to make a decision now.

UPDATE: As I was writing this post, it made me want coffee. As I headed upstairs, I told my beautiful wife about the post, and she mentioned she has another insulated metal tumbler in her office that she just received. So maybe we don’t have that much room after all.

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Movie Report: Cry Macho (2021)

Book coverI picked this DVD up last year in 2023, and it has sitten upon my game storage cabinet along with many other unwatched videos gathered over recent years until a week ago Saturday, when I felt I needed a break from the longer and, honestly, less compelling books I’m reading for the 2025 Winter Reading Challenge. So I picked this one without giving it too much thought (too much thought in selecting a movie to watch often leads me to selecting nothing, so I have to be careful to pick quickly sometimes).

The film is set in 1979–the book upon which it was based came out in the middle 1970s and has been optioned for a film pretty much since then. Eastwood plays a broken down rodeo rider fired from training horses but who is asked by the ranch owner–whom Eastwood owes for taking care of him when he (Eastwood) hit bottom after his wife and child died in an automobile accident–to go to Mexico to retrieve his son from his Mexican mother. Which is what Eastwood does, finding the mother is a party girl trollop in a large house (probably a kept woman of some sort by probably a gangster, as she has a couple of heavies at her disposal) who tries to bed him but doesn’t know where her son is since he’s running on the streets. Eastwood finds him at a cockfight and discovers that he has been on the streets since he was mistreated and otherwise abused at home. The boy runs off after Eastwood tells him his mission, and the mother shags Eastwood off (not that way–in the gets rid of him way). But the boy has stowed away in the backseat of Eastwood’s vehicle with his rooster (named Macho, although it’s not clear when he cries). And we have a bit of a road trip movie as they travel to the border pursued by the mother’s heavies and sometimes police. They end up breaking down in a village where Eastwood becomes kind of the local veterinarian and he kind of falls for a widowed cafe owner who is raising her grandchildren. Eastwood discovers that the ranch owner’s real motivation is not to raise his son but rather to use the son as leverage over some property owned in the woman’s name.

But, thematically, it’s not too far off Gran Torino, which I just watched four years ago. An older Man (capital M) takes on a youngster (of a different nationality/ethnicity) and tries to show him how to be a Man.

So since I’m getting older myself, I appreciated the theme a bit more than maybe I would have, erm, a couple years ago. But Eastwood, as he has aged, has shifted his themes accordingly which is probably why he has remained relevant when other filmmakers and actors have not.

The film does have one quirk of note: The Mexican characters speak Spanish to one another, and it’s only sometimes subtitled. Which I found odd. Y porque no puedo oir la lengua muy bien, no comprendo mucho del español.

Also, the film featured Fernanda Urrejola as the boy’s mother and Natalia Traven as the cafe owner, and I suppose that the film’s relative disappointment at the box office is the only thing that kept this from becoming an Internet Versus debate.

Continue reading “Movie Report: Cry Macho (2021)”

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Double Envy

Cedar Sanderson has a new home library that not only can hold all of her books with room to expand but also that she acquired bookshelves for the project that might have been Larry McMurtry’s (from one of his book stores).

As you might remember, gentle reader, I killed McMurtry by reading one of his books (so many people of note seem to die when I write about them on this blog).

Also, note that the number of bookshelves Ms. Sanderson acquired would not be enough to house the overstuffed library at Nogglestead.

Thank you, that is all.

(Her library looks nice anyway.)

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Define “Hotspot”

Ernie Biggs Dueling Piano Bar closing in downtown Springfield

A downtown Springfield hotspot is closing.

In a Facebook post, the owners of Ernie Biggs Dueling Piano Bar announced that this would be its final weekend. They blamed financial challenges for the decision to shut down.

Downtown Springfield has seen another wave of closures recently for evening entertainment. Not sure if it’s really due to crime, homelessness (some overlap), or the challenging economy. Heaven knows I’ve only been downtown at night a couple of times over the last couple of years. Well, I’ve been to the local business co-working space for development meetings, but not for dinner and certainly not for drinks.

But “hotspots” don’t tend to close for financial reasons.

Full disclosure: We actually went to Ernie Biggs for drinks on our anniversary twelve years ago. So maybe I’m the problem by not supporting the downtown nightlife.

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Brian J. Keeps The Traditions Alive

I went to bed last night in the 8 o’clock hour and was up before 2am. As I wandered around Nogglestead awake, I thought I would maybe get back to bed about 4am and get a couple more hours of sleep. As I drew a glass of water from the kitchen sink, I thought that in the olden days, people would get up in the middle of the night for a while before going back to bed.

This very morning, Neo posted a video about the Medieval Two Sleeps:

But, Brian J., did you read any portion of the long books you have selected for the 2025 Winter Reading Challenge? Oh, but no. Mostly I sat in the darkness and worried. Because I did not want to spoil my night vision for when I did want to sneak back to bed.

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Shocking News from the World of Science

Jesus’ real name wasn’t Jesus, scientists claim — here’s why

Scientists have discovered:

  • Jesus did not speak English.
  • Jesus was not born in the Anglosphere at all.
  • Jesus was born a long time ago.
  • Different languages have different words…. and sounds!
  • History was a long time ago. Like before Trump was president the first time.

The scientists in question are not actually scientists at all.

None of the information in the article is actually news to practicing Christians who attend a church and understand how the Bible came about.

But it’s news to a journalist, and perhaps is proof that Christianity IS BUILT ON LIES!!!!!!

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Brian J.’s Recycler Tour, Hair Metal Edition

From this day in 2012:

Brian J. Noggle thinks he can find the hidden meaning in the hourly scrambled patterns of Europe-Bon Jovi-Motley Crue-Poison on the Sonic Tap Hair Guitar Channel. He thinks the Gen X Illuminati use it to communicate amongst themselves.

Wait a minute: Nelson’s “(I Can’t Live Without Your) Love and Affection” means they’re changing cypher keys.

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Another Notto Winner

Woman thought phone call was a scam before she inherited stranger’s £400,000 estate:

A woman who was told she was set to inherit a distant relative’s estate at first thought she was being sucked into a scam.

Lorraine Gesell, a 60-year-old living in Canada, received a call to say that her mother’s English cousin had died and that she was a beneficiary. In September 2021, Raymond Barry died alone aged 85 with no next of kin. However he left behind a sizeable estate worth more than £400,000. With no will either, there was no one set to inherit it.

I’ve heard this story before.

Big plans?

Lorraine hopes to go on a holiday with the money, but says she will probably spend it on home improvements instead.

Probably for the best, as:

In total, Finders International found 47 beneficiaries across New Zealand, Canada, Australia and throughout the UK – each taking a share of the estate.

Quick Internet math indicates that the at current exchange rates, that’s about $487,400. Heirs will give 30% to the heir hunter, and the recovered estate would pay for all legal bills, and each share would cap out at about $7,000 dollars. Hopefully not life-changing money, but helpful.

Ah, but what of your long-lost cousin’s case, Brian J.? I did not sign on, but fourteen different people apparently responded to the heir hunter. It’s in the window of six months for debtors to come forward with two or three months to go.

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