Author: Brian J. Noggle

Bandit’s Naughty Dog Adventure.

I mentioned Bandit last year; he was a puppy with too much energy to be left in a trailer all day whilst we were at school and when my sainted mother was at work.

But the inspiration for this game came from a casino commercial that came on in our hockey-watching days: A little terrier mix is walking down the street, getting into trouble, and when the dog catcher throws him into the back of the animal control van, there are two poodles there, and the message is that the dog, like casino attendees, would be lucky?

At any rate, at some point, I started jotting down a treatment for a television series based on the concept of a naughty dog called The Naughty Dog Show. I didn’t get beyond a couple pages of notes on it, but here, decades later, is a little LLM-developed game.

From Lileks today recounting a previous communal living arrangement:

One night my roommate, a very normal fellow who was also an absolute weed fiend and once put the phone books in a trash can, put a target on the can, and stood in his closet at the far end of the dorm room and fired his rifle at the target, was making tea, and put one of those immerser coils into water.

Not the weed fiend part, but:

One summer weekend when we were visiting from Missouri, my father wanted to take us shooting, probably down at the quarry where we would some other time go. But: His wife had taken the checkbook, perhaps to thwart his plans. This was in the days before ATMs were common (in Milwaukee, they were called Tyme machines, and to have access to one cost a touch of money itself). The way to get cash on the weekends would be to go to a store where they knew you, in his case West Side Liquor, and write a check to CASH, and they would give you money out of the till. But you had to be a really good customer, and my father was.

So: He took an old cardboard Tide laundry detergent box, stuffed it with newspaper, and got out an old .22 rifle–the bent one? Perhaps. Perhaps it was not bent yet. At any rate, he moved some furniture from the wall in the room in the refinished basement which would later become my bedroom during my college years, took position at the bar all the short way across the small house, and told us we would aim for the dot over the i in the brand name. He fired one round and then went to look at the Tide box. He’d hit that tittle, all right, and the bullet had passed through the Tide box completely and embedded in the wood paneling of the wall behind. It was the only round fired that day.

Man, the past was a different place, ainna? Growing up in the working class and with a father who was rather fond of his beer. I mean, I was there, and I can hardly recount it because…. Who does that? Well, not me, not now.

As I might have mentioned, I am working through a stack of old Ideals magazines which I have accrued from book sales or have rediscovered in my chairside magazine rack as my liminal before-bed reading. It has often, but not always, been my habit to read just a little bit in my bedroom here at Nogglestead for a little bit before turning in. For a while, I had a large lamp on the bedside table, and I read the Bible, part of the Book of Mormon, and some nonfiction there. That was years ago; since, we have moved things around, and I can’t actually think which lamp it would have been–certainly not the blocker project lamp, which is actually on my to-do list for finally finishing up after a decade, although I might have to repaint it from scratch. But this time, I’ll know that acrylic paints dry in hours, not days, so I will move faster on it. When I get around to it. Someday.

At any rate, after the bedroom makeover or remakeover or whatever happened to that lamp, we’ve moved a chair in the corner, we received a lamp with a bad switch when my mother-in-law moved one of her recentish moves; in 2023, probably, Nico swapped out the switch to a kind that she would not have wanted, so it ended up by that red spinning chair.

So I’ve been reading poetry there at night, chapbooks, college literary magazines, complete collections, and so on. I winnowed the stack of literary magazines to just Ideals, though, as I was not looking for a lot of prose right before bed. Just light verse where I could read a couple and leave off.

These particular issues are from the 1980s mostly, and I have a preponderance of Mother’s Day issues because they made great gifts apparently. They stretch from their final years in Milwaukee and beyond to the first couple of years in Nashville. We see some editorial shifts over the years; some issues have recipes, prose, travel items, and “reader submissions” where readers submitted poetry, and those published got $10 (which is more than most poets make today on publication). But, sometimes, they feature something else: Pages torn from the magazine.

Ah, gentle reader, do you remember an era when people would tear poems out of their magazines or their newspapers and put them on their refrigerator or on their bedroom mirrors? I think I came at the end of that era–it was something the preceding generation(s) did, and although I might have done it once or twice, it’s not a regular thing. Of course, I suppose that could be partially because newspapers and magazines do not regularly publish poetry these days. The same people who regularly interacted with nice, serviceable, lightweight poetry probably also dabbled in it.

But not me. Although I can discard a lot of magazines which I’d rather keep from current subscriptions (First Things and New Oxford Review come to mind), I cannot mar a copy of a literary magazine or Ideals. I have a lot of former textbooks with highlighting, underlining, and marginalia, but my “dialoguing with the text” days did not extend past college where the professors really insisted on it. I received an embossing tool for Christmas a couple years ago (maybe a decade, but not so long ago when you’ve gathered several decades in memory), but I have not stamped my monogram into any books. Nacho cheese dust is a different matter, I admit.

I have always kind of thought that I was just a caretaker for these books and magazine, that I was holding onto them for the next generation. I’m not sure that my boys will want them, although the oldest is starting to read again. He recently asked if we had a copy of Summa Theologiae–of course I do (on the to-read shelves). When the youngest was in fourth grade, he boasted that whatever book his teacher mentioned reading we already had (although this was no longer true when they went to public high school and some of their reading became more current topically). Wouldn’t it be nice if they retained some or all of this library to have that same opportunity for their children? If they have children. If they read.

Ah, but likely not. I won’t be marking, discarding, or donating my books during my lifetime (unlike some reified potential in the garage and maybe, soon, my closet). Well, except for those duplicates I find and put on the free book cart at church.

As to my poems, I suppose it would be pretty to think someone would tear my work out of a magazine for their mirror, but that’s…. Unlikely. My latest publication appearance was in an online university literary magazine (still up in 2026 but maybe not in 2027). Not a peppy little uplifting poem to brighten one’s every morning. Well, maybe one of the two is. But. I guess the best I can hope for is that someone reads them at all.

I guess I need to make a checklist of Ideals magazines that I can use out in the wild to see if I’m buying the same ones over and over again (which happens). Maybe something to mark whether an issue is missing pages so I can look for a more complete copy. That would require two things: One, organizing my collection (not too bad now since it’s only a stack about 12 inches tall, the equivalent of a modern branch library’s philosophy section when you strip out the Buddhism. Two, I need to finish my upcoming game and build an app for just such a thing. Maybe next week.

I thought it looked like an interesting job: QA Automation Lead with lots of eCommerce experience. Jeez Louise, I have all sorts of flavors of that. So I applied.

But the job had a wrinkle: It wanted me to write a cover letter answering questions like the most challenging thing in my life and how I overcame it, something something, and the last three books I read.

Oh, yeah. I was all on that. I listed The Space Trilogy, The Law of Gun Barrel City, and River City, P.I., the James R. Wilder book I just bought and whose review is forthcoming, and in looking back at the blog here, I see that I’ve forgotten To Rise Again At A Decent Hour.

Which happens. I was working from my spreadsheet list, and I’d failed to enter the title in the annual total. Sometimes, when I get to the end of the year total and start building the Year in Reading post, I’ll find that I wrote a report for a book that I didn’t put in the annual list, or I’ll have put something in the list which I failed to write a book report on. The latter is less likely, though, as completed books end up on the desk for a cover scan and a book report (sometimes sitting on them for a week or more, as the latest Wilder book indicates–I finished it on July 25 and have yet to write the report for it. In my defense, it’s sitting on the scanner glass, so it’s a little out of sight.

So: I have made a mistake which will undoubtedly result in my rejection. I kid! I kid! Because I’m probably already laid low by a “knockout” question.

What is a knockout question? Silly person who is not job hunting at the end of the first quarter of the 21st century. A knockout question is where you answer honestly a question like “Do you have three years experience in Python?” or “Have you built a test suite from scratch using AI?” It’s a simple switch that lands you in a reject pile without any context or discussion. No, I don’t have three years in Python, but I have experience in numerous languages and some noodling in Python (building a functional API using Flask, setting up a test suite and writing beginning tests in a proof of concept). But, no: To eliminate the great mass of applications that frictionless applications have made possible, they knock out applicants based on meaningless binaries. Which is just as well as HR assistants screening applicants don’t know what those things mean either.

I actually got that second one, “Have you built a test suite from scratch using AI?” this week. It was the third step of the process: The first was the application, the second was the 50 question test with word analogies, spatial reasoning, math, and whatnot–they never tell me the score of those which is a damned shame, because I would be pretty proud of the results each time. But step 3 was three knockout questions, the third of which was one of the “On a scale of 1 to 10, how much do you love AI? Answer 11 or higher.” questions. To be honest, it’s more work than you need because most of the modern frameworks scaffold up a project for you pretty easily, and you’re not going to get a lot out of LLMs which lack awareness of your application unless you, I dunno, share login credentials with them which seems like a bad idea. And last year, I worked on a project where my manager used AI to scaffold up a project he did not understand and could not troubleshoot when I tried running the project on Windows (he’s a Mac, and so on). I troubleshot to the limits of LLM capability, or at least I stopped when ChatGPT said, “Okay, we’re going to have to rewrite Playwright…..” The ultimate solution was to run it in PowerShell instead of using the command line because of the different ways dependencies were resolved, or something. You see, I could answer intelligently why not, but it’s a boolean. True or false, and false is buh-bye. I said no and clicked submit, and the next screen said After careful consideration, nah, bro. Well, not exactly, but the “careful consideration” was not.

At any rate, the knockout question after the hour’s effort of cover letter was: Are you in Canada?

The posting on the job board said Remote – Worldwide. The posting in the Application Tracking System (the winner by knockout!) said Colombia. The application asked if I was in Canada. Was it a knockout question? Who knows? I have not been rejected yet, but it might be their policy only to hit the No button after hiring someone (After careful consideration…..) or not at all.

But I guess I will find out. Or not.

So many of the “career coaches” on LinkedIn and whatnot offer the same advice: Tailor your resumes for each job. Research the companies you’re applying to. Write targeted cover letters every time. Which might have made sense in the old days, but now you’re just wasting more time on jobs whose automated processes are seeking to winnow out the greatest number of applications they can for arbitrary reasons. So, nah. I’ll do it sometimes, and I’ll do the assessments sometimes if they’re fun practice tests for if I ever decide to take the Mensa test. But two hour screen-sharing camera on coding exercise video recording? Nah. Feesa etho.

At any rate, I did find the discrepancy in my book accounting, and I am pleased to say that I’m at 54 books for the year. But it’s almost August. I’d better fall upon some art monographs and poetry chapbooks, stat.

Well, there is more to the story than that.

So when I run errands in town, I reach out to my mother-in-law, 84-years-old and living independently not far from church, to ask if she needs anything from the market or to see if she wants me to do anything for her while I’m in town. In this regard, “in town” can mean in any town because she does not want to be a burden on us, so any time I’m going anywhere that does not involve a gi or a shower afterwards, I ask if she needs anything.

I was actually headed to the “eastern” part of Springfield (which is now the middle part of Springfield in some parts of Springfield these days). Barnes and Noble and Staples on Glenstone Avenue. So I asked her if I could pick her up a copy of the latest issue of Metal Hammer while I was out. She demurred.

I was disappointed with my visit to Barnes and Noble. I was looking for a book on the CompTIA Network+ certification, and I circled the store a couple of times before finding that the computer books section has shrunk to about 24 inches on a single shelf–almost as small as a public library’s philosophy section–and the selection had books on the Security+ and A+ certifications, but not the one I was looking for. The store did not have a copy of Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning which I had noticed on my mother-in-law’s table on Sunday, and I have seen/heard it mentioned several times “recently,” so I hoped to score my own copy. Too soon, too soon, my mother-in-law’s copy will be available to us, but I’ll let the oldest have it if he’s still reading (and if he’s over the fashionable anti-zionism of the current day). I also considered buying a copy of Writers Digest to price its advertising in case I want to spend a couple bucks promoting Wunyo Submission Tracker the old fashioned way. So: No Network+, no Frankl, but it did have the most recent Writers Digest. For $10. Instead of buying just the magazine, I flipped through its last pages and found little in the way of classified ads.

And no Metal Hammer magazine, either. The music section was given over to special edition collectible collector’s issues for individual artists, which I guess can have a longer shelf life than a regular magazine.

So, later in the evening, I texted my mother-in-law that I could not have gotten Metal Hammer for her after all. And she responded that she thought I was referring to an actual magazine, and….

Ah, gentle reader, I have been holding out on you.

I have mentioned that books tend to accumulate on the little table beside my chair; however, at some point, I got a little magazine holder, probably to “refinish” it, and placed it back there. And that, gentle reader, is where magazines go for decades. I am pretty sure that I have worked through most of the magazines that I picked up (at that same Barnes and Noble) when I was first publishing John Donnelly’s Gold so I could send review copies (one, Suspense magazine, reviewed it). I have a couple of crossword puzzle books which had been my sainted mother’s. And I had a copy of Metal Hammer magazine from some years ago:

That’s the December 2019 issue.

You see, the magazines languish down there because I do not read magazines there; I read books in that chair. I read magazines in the chair in the parlor or the rocking chair on the front porch. I haven’t actually put magazines down there in years, either, so they’re just…. languishing.

I sent the photo to my mother-in-law, and I then looked at what else I have in the magazine holder.

Two issues of Ideals magazine.

Which is good; I’ve been reading old copies of this magazine that I’ve gathered at book sales as my liminal bedtime reading in the bedroom. However, I found that I had seven different Mother’s Day issues, and months of paeans to idealized mothers was kinda wearing on me. My sainted mother kept a roof over our heads and food in the kitchen, but she was never to my recollection anything like the mothers in these poems. So it will be good to interleave some other holidays. As it stands, I actually have an Ideals Christmas collection beside the reading chair–I started it, what, in 2024 as a possible “Christmas” book for Christmas time, but it’s two hundred pages of prose telling, basically, the exact same idealized paean Christmas in my youth story. So clearly I bogged down on it.

So for fun, I texted my mother-in-law that the Metal Hammer magazine was in with two old (and they’re older, not 1980s) issues of Ideals.

“Wow! Mom loved them.” she replied.

Her mother, born in, what, 1910? loved Ideals. And she, my mother-in-law, more into literary fiction and Viktor Frankl, does not.

Ah, gentle reader. I have to recalibrate my terms. Now that I am getting to grandfather age (my grandmothers and mother would have been grandmothers by this numeral), what I’ve previously called “grandmother poetry” should now be called “great-grandmother poetry.”

Ay, me.

Robert Stacy McCain, who is now just The McCain, says as an aside in a post about the current Madison mayhem and its cause célèbre:

If you fell on hard times, would you become homeless? Almost certainly not, because you have friends and family who would take you in until you got back on your feet.

Ah, gentle reader. That is not true for all people, and I don’t wonder if it’s not an increasing number of people.

I’ve run just this simulation for myself in my mind; as you know, I am currently “between contracts” and have been without full-time work in my field for almost two years now (but only contractless for a couple of months). I am not especially close to anyone in my family except, almost by my almost-monthly letters to my grandmother who is now on hospice care. I’d thought I could bunk with my brother, but he’s on an income so fixed he cannot do any extra driving to meet me in Hartville or Houston when I’m taking one of my regional trips (kinda suspended currently because he has inspired me, and because I have martial arts classes scheduled almost every day). If my beautiful wife decided to boot her unemployed husband who lays about doing martial arts classes, taking care of the house, and developing twee little apps that sometimes sell, and once in a while multiple copies…. Yeah, if she kicks me to the curb, I will be fluxxed.

Not good to dwell on the scenarios; I can only do my best, and if it happens, I can only do my best.

Ah, enough of that. Let me read some Lileks to cheer up.

Twice yesterday I read about old soda vending machines that were chests where you slid the glass bottles in slots.

First, Lileks on his Substack:

It would be my most specific pop memory for years, until I found myself working down South as a seed salesman for Northrup King in the summer of 1979. I drove the highways and backroads in an unairconditioned van, stopping at small towns and suburban grocery stores, taking orders and picking up the wire racks they no longer needed. In one hamlet I pulled over for gas. Blazing day. There was one of the old pop coolers, the chest type where you’d slide the bottle down a metal trench line to an opening. They had Nehi. I’d never had a Nehi. I’d only heard of it from M*A*S*H, as it was Radar O’Reilly’s favorite beverage. Well, when in Rome, Georgia, etc. Popped the cap on the bottle opener, and took a sip.

The second was in River City P.I..

I’m not sure I’ve ever heard of these devices before, but I read about them twice today.

In case you’re wondering, here’s kinda what they looked like:

Another thing for me to consider collecting and fixing up, but I’m not doing so much of those things these days, so probably not. I have a garage to clean and a couple of nigh-thirty-year-old refinishing projects to handle first.