Brian J. Noggle – Page 106 – Musings from Brian J. Noggle

Movie Report: Short Circuit (1986)

July 2, 2021July 2, 2021 Brian J. Noggle

Book cover This film played on Showtime over and over in the mid-to-late 1980s when I was confined in rural spaces and had little to do but to watch the films over and over again, so I have seen it many, many times although not in some decades. It comes from a time when Steve Guttenberg was a bankable star, and I probably wanted to be Steve Guttenberg more than any other character. Smart, funny, a bit self-depricating and fundamentally unserious–I actually have grown up into that and with a beautiful co-star. So I guess the imprinting worked.

At any rate, in this film, robot-looking robots designed for military use put on a demonstration by big wigs. After the demonstration, one is struck by lightning and jumbled; through a comic mishap, it gets taken off the base and starts wandering. It falls in with the owner of a food truck (in the 1980s? What? Food trucks were not invented in 2015?) played by Ally Sheedy. She’s used to taking in strays. The robot, Number 5, seeks input, so it ends up reading all the books she owns and watching all the television it can. Meanwhile, the scientists from the military lab (Guttenberg and Fisher Stevens, soon to be cancelled if not already for playing a stereotypical Indian) look for the robot at the same time as the head of security leads a team to capture it. Eventually, the Guttenberg scientist (who polymathically created and engineered the software and hardware for the robot) decides that the robot has become sentient and tries to keep the company from disassembling Number Five who then fakes his own death to live freely.

So it’s an amusing movie which spawned a Guttenberg-less sequel and fed a number of catch phrases that I might have worked into conversation then and even more recently (“Number Five is alive!”, “No disassemble!”, and “Nice software!” among them).

The film also has supporting characters played by character actors who were all over. Austin Pendleton plays the head of the lab–we last saw him as the bumbling public defender in My Cousin Vinny. G.W. Bailey plays the head of security for the lab, a role he was probably typecast as he played the head of security in Mannequin and the sergeant in the Police Academy movies, most of them with Steve Guttenberg. I am pretty sure if I watched modern movies, I could make similar connections, but honestly, all I see these days are superhero movies (Chris Evans was Captain America and the Human Torch! Ben Affleck was Batman and Daredevil!). Maybe the eighties connections stick with me more because I was young then, and because I watched those films over and over.

I watched the first part of the movie alone last weekend, but my youngest wandered in a little later with a gaming device in his lap to watch, sort of, the last bit of it. After it was over, I apologized that we watched the same movie twice. After all, DARYL has a very similar story: A military project robot that becomes self aware and cute and/or wise-cracking; after faking its own death, it is free to live with its favored humans. Man, the 80s. What an optimistic time to be alive. Except for the threats of hyped nuclear war and the post-apocalyptic settings in an awful lot of movies.

Of course, the film has Ally Sheedy in it, which must have led to a lot of contemporaneous Internet discussions of Ally Sheedy versus Molly Ringwald, but none of us were on the Internet (well, I was not except for some access to Internet email through dial-up BBSes).

Continue reading “Movie Report: Short Circuit (1986)” →

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Less Than A Long-Standing Sports Record From 2015

July 2, 2021 Brian J. Noggle

US jobless claims fall to 364,000, a new pandemic low

That’s in a whole year.

Clearly, everything is the newest, best, or somethingest in all of remembered history, which began in 2016 or thereabouts when our journalists started paying attention in college.

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Brian J.’s 2021 Beard Adventure: Ended

July 2, 2021March 31, 2022 Brian J. Noggle

I mentioned when reporting on the movie Safe that every couple of years, I decide to grow some facial hair. I mean, it’s the fashion. The same people who mocked Duck Dynasty ten years ago for the long beards have grown them out, followed by the tech trend setters like Jack Dorsey. As I’ve said before, I would believe that the elites were not angling for another Civil War again if only they were not growing their beards out for it.

As I said on June 17, I was growing it out. Continue reading “Brian J.’s 2021 Beard Adventure: Ended” →

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So, Brian J., How Do You Pack For A Three Day Getaway?

July 1, 2021 Brian J. Noggle

Well, given that I was not thrilled with my reading material that I brought along for my De Soto vacation, to pack for my trip to the resort on the lake at the beginning of the week, I packed eight books, including three that I was in the midst of already:

On the vacation, I finished the three that I was in the middle of reading and a couple of magazines that were a couple of years old. So I had a pleasant blend of things to read, thanks.

And a good, albeit late, trip to pick up some additional reading material.

My beautiful wife tells me about how many books she has on her iPad, but I am still the sort who needs to read the books on paper.

And, most importantly, I had enough that I could pick and choose from so that I would not feel bored nor compelled to simply read the Internet on my iPad.

Mission: ACCOMPLISHED.

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Book Report: Three Comedies by Aristophanes edited by William Arrowsmith (1969)

July 1, 2021July 1, 2021 Brian J. Noggle

Book cover I started this book right after listening to Socrates because the audiobook mentioned that the idea of Socrates as a blasphemer probably comes more from the play The Clouds (in this volume) than his actual dialogues with Athenians. Also, it was at the top of the stack which is odd since I bought it three years ago and not recently.

At any rate, the plays are purportedly translated, but really they’re adapted for modern audiences circa 1969–this particular volume was someone’s (presumably) college textbook around the time I was born. The plays have some highlighting, mostly the aforementioned The Clouds, but no dialoguing with the text notes in the margins–that would come later, I guess, as it was quite the thing when I was in school. Or maybe the owner of this textbook thought about as much of it as I did.

As a product of that black age, has illustrations in it that would get a gentleman’s D in elementary school art classes.

I mean, can you imagine living in a time where someone, probably someone well paid in the publishing industry, thought that that would add to the reading experience? How little they thought of the hippies on the college campuses.

As I mentioned, these plays are adapted, not translated. That means that some liberties have been taken with the original text to make them more palatable for 20th century students. For example, a communication from Olympus is given as a telegram; the plays contain some Biblical allusions; and the poems have end rhymes. Although Aristophanes might have done the last of these in the original Greek, it’s likely he did not include the first two unless he was some kind of prophet indeed. With that in mind, it makes it hard to analyze just how many fart and gay sex jokes were in the original to compare it to, say, Hot Tub Time Machine 2 to see if humor in the classics of antiquity was truly as crude as modern works.

At any rate, about the plays:

The Birds is about two guys who a la Kipling’s “The Man Who Would Be King” try to convince the birds that they, the birds, are the real gods and that they, the birds, should set up their own kingdom and have men sacrifice to them instead of the gods. They, the men, hope to be important figures in this new kingdom called Cloudcuckooland (whether that’s the name in the original is unclear). As the birds go along, a whole set of men in grifting occupations (politicians, philosophers, artists) comes along to wet their beaks, so to speak.
The Clouds deals with a father who has accrued debts because his son likes high living and owning horses, so he tries to get his son to attend the school of Sokrates next door to learn to be a sophist who can argue his way out of debts. One of the things Sokrates says in the play is that the gods do not exist; instead, it is the clouds that provide everything and are all powerful. When the son does not attend the school, the father tries himself but is not very smart; eventually, the son does attend, learns to argue, and uses that power to upend traditional structures and to be indolent. So, kind of like an actual university education except without the ability to actually argue part. This is the strongest of the three plays.
The Wasps, the third play, is ~~translated~~ adapted by someone other than the editor. It pokes fun at old men serving on juries and voting to convict everyone. The son of such a man tries, in a very comic fashion, to keep his father from attending the juries one day, and the father tries to escape from the house in various methods, but is ultimately stymied by the son and the servants/slaves. The other jury members, also old men who speak of their time at wars, come buy to try to free him, but they do not succeed, and finally the son gets the father to stay and to judge things in the household. This has it’s moments, but it’s probably the weakest of the three as it kind of veers off in the end.

So the plays have comic moments, set ups that read well for humor in the play, but of course they’re structured like classical Greek plays (called Old Comedy in the academic) with choruses and with the playwright or an actor portraying him coming out an appealing for the audience to vote for his play for the prize at the drama festival. The choruses and sometimes characters break the fourth wall.

But, again, I am not sure how many of the jokes are kind of retold from the original. The plays name a lot of names with end notes explaining who they were, and it’s a bit troublesome to flip to the back of the book to get the notes about who they are–I would have preferred these as footnotes, but the end notes sometimes ran to paragraphs as the professionals got their profsplaining on.

Also, in a scandal of all scandals, I did not read the introductory material. At all. Sometimes I will wait until the end, reading the original material before reading what I should think of it, but this time I bypassed it entirely because I’m not reading this to write a paper on it, and I don’t need the citations. Am I counting this as a whole book, albeit a single book, in my annual reading total anyway? You bet your bippy. And am I counting The Birds as an animal-based book for the purposes of the Summer Reading Challenge 2021? You bet. I have yet to determine, though, if it’s animals in another country (Cloud Cuckooland) or Featuring Imaginary Creatures. Probably the former, as I might squeeze in a fantasy novel in the coming months.

So: An amusing read if you’re into reading classical literature. Amusing enough for a blend of 2300-year-old and 50-year-old gags. Better than Hot Tub Time Machine 2 anyway.

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The Forgotten Dental Appointments of Brian J.

July 1, 2021 Brian J. Noggle

So I have a dental appointment today. I scheduled it specifically for July 1 because of course I would remember I have a dental appointment on Canada Day. But I’ve not been so diligent in recent years in recalling my dental appointments.

The penultimate penultimate time, that is the appointment before the appointment before last, I almost missed it; it was a ten o’clock appointment, a little later than normal–I usually schedule them after I drop the boys, and now just the youngest, off at the Lutheran school in Springfield so I could drop them and get my teeth rotated while I was in town. It was fortunate that it was a ten o’clock appointment because I dropped the boy off and made it all the way home when I got a reminder text that I had an appointment at 10, which gave me time to get back in town and make the appointment.

My penultimate appointment I actually missed. I mean, I got all the reminders–the office gives me a card that I can lose on my office desk, emails a month in advance, calls on the phone a couple of days before, and a couple of text messages asking me to confirm the appointment. I saw all the reminders with the dates, and I thought Thursday. I was certain I had a dental appointment on Thursday. However, that date fell on Wednesday.

So I got a text message on Wednesday from my dental hygenist. “Hi, this is Nicole at the dental office. You had an appointment scheduled for 9am, and I wanted to ask if everything is okay.” So I called back immediately, apologetic, and got it rescheduled. As an added bonus to my embarrassment, my iPhone picked up the first name in that message and now assumes that this phone number belongs to Nicole. Which means every couple of months, I get calls from Nicole and texts from Nicole saying, “I can’t wait to see you tomorrow!” I have added this as a contact with the dental office name in it, but it still thinks it’s Nicole. Which means I have preemptively explained this to my beautiful wife many, many times. Just like an adulterer would.

So, as I mentioned, I have a dental appointment today. I got a text reminder of it as I was driving back from my getaway this weekend, and I mentioned it to my wife that it was a 10am appointment the next day, and that I would probably need her help to remember it. Because 23 hours is a long time for me to remember things.

So, of course, yesterday afternoon, I was making plans to go to the gym first thing this morning and to do some marketing afterwards. And I held these plans in mind for much of the evening until I remembered I have a dental appointment today.

An 8am dental appointment, I have fortunately re-discovered. I had been scheduling them for 9am to be assured of making it. I mean, I drop my son off at a little before 8am, and the dentist’s office is a couple of minutes away, but I did not want to be detained in traffic and show up a minute late. Which left me with time to kill in town, preferably not drinking copious amounts of coffee and filling my teeth with pastries for Nicole to contend with. However, we recently agreed that it would be okay for me to schedule for 8 and be a couple minutes late sometimes. So it’s been 8am for a couple of visits, yet I forget.

Why do I have so much trouble with the dental appointments?

I think it’s because I’ve gotten accustomed to a calendar of days, not a calendar of dates.

I mean, my weeks tend to be filled with similar goals, tasks, and travels. The gym, the markets, errands, car servicing, transporting kids, blogging, nap, work, martial arts on weekdays; martial arts sometimes on Satudays and chores; and church, nap, chores on Sundays. So the day of the week more determines what I am to do than the date. Which means when I encounter something requiring a specific date, such as a doctor’s appointment, I get a little flummoxed, and if I get it in the wrong day of the week–when I remember it–I can get it wrong with certainty.

Also, the constant barrage of reminders might have the opposite effect, kind of like magazine subscription renewals–you get too many of them, and you miss the important one when your subscription is actually expiring.

Or it could be a character flaw, but let us dismiss that out of hand, gentle reader. I am an Internet blogger; I have no character to be flawed.

So what are the odds that I have spent too much time this morning blogging about dental appointments and miss or are late to one? Better than average.

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Good Book Hunting, June 29, 2021: The Thrift Stores of Branson

June 30, 2021July 25, 2021 Brian J. Noggle

Gentle reader, I sneaked out again for a couple of days on you. My sons are at camp this week, so my beautiful wife and I drifted away to a Branson resort for a couple of days on our own. It was not the first time we’ve gotten away since we had kids–we went to St. Louis a year ago, and to Tampa a couple years before that on business. So we do have these adult getaways, but only every couple of years on average. This might have been our fourth in fifteen years of child husbandry.

At any rate, we planned to go hiking in a state park, but scattered showers enjoined in a downpour just as we were getting out of the car, so we altered our plans to visit a couple of thrift stores in downtown Branson. We hit the animal shelter thrift store and another “thrift store” next week that did not say what charitable organization it supported, so it might have been a second hand store.

I got some books, DVDs, books on tape, and a couple of CDs.

The books include:

Journey to China by the National Geographic Society just in case my Sinophilia rages again.
The Male Factor by Shaunti Feldhahn. Purportedly the secret rules of men in the workplace that every woman should know. Probably me, too. The book was from the second thrift store; it looks like that shop intakes a bunch of remaindered books kind of like Sheldon used to at the Collector’s Book Shop in University City.
The Night Thoreau Spent In Jail, a play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee.
Frederiksborg Museum, a picture/memento book from said museum. Where is Frederiksborg? Ask me during or after football season if I even watch any this year.
The Almost True Story of Ryan Fisher by Rob Stennet; apparently the story of a real estate man that decides to woo Christian clients. And might end up redeemed himself.
Dispatches from Bitter America by Todd Starnes, a political current events remainder. I don’t know why I bought it. I don’t tend to read books like this very often, but I pick them up slightly more often. A remaindered copy.
The Rick and Bubba Code by Rick Burgess and Bill “Bubba” Bussey. Purportedly a humor book. Also a remainder.
Dave Barry’s History of the Millenium by Dave Barry. I don’t think I have it, but it was a buck, so we will give it a try.
Memoirs of a Public Servant by Charleston Hartfield.
Secrets of a Tabloid Reporter by Barbara Sternig.
Car Guys vs. Bean Counters by Bob Lutz; a former auto executive draws a distinction between visionaries and the corporate guys, I bet.
Road to Paradise by Max Allan Collins. Clearly, I am collecting his books for a time when I decide I really, really like him.
Treasure in Hell’s Canyon by Bill Bulick. A Double D Western. Which is probably not like the DD Westerns Randisi writes; this looks like a kids’ book.
Myths and Mysteries of Missouri by Josh Young. This looks a lot like something that Larry Wood would write if Larry Wood would write this.
Crowdpleaser by Marc Smith who purportedly founded poetry slams. So these should have good, long lines and rhythm.

Were I betting man, I would place money that I read the play or the poetry first.

Man, I don’t know where I am going to go with these books. I was just getting the shelves kind of tidy. It looks like I have made some room up on top reading Executioner novels recently, but that won’t account for them all. I might be getting close to stacking on the floor again, which seems a little like a defeat.

I got two audio books, Just a Guy by comedian Bill Engvall and Shakespeare’s Sonnets which is not an audio book but rather a collection of the actual sonnets. The latter is on audiocassette, which means if I ever get another vehicle, I will have to have a sound system with CD players and audiocassette player installed. Bluetooth? Optional!

Speaking of CDs, I got two music CDs: Exitos y Recuerdos by Selina because I have Paulina Rubio and Shakira, so why not some Selina? Also Greatest Hits by Nino Rota which is apparently Italian for Henry Mancini as they’re all movie themes.

I also picked up a bunch of things to watch:

I got:

A couple Mel Gibson movies, Ransom and Maverick. It’s easy to forget Ransom or confuse it with Payback as they’re both one-word crime thrillers. But I should already have Payback in the library as it’s based on the Donald Westlake as Richard Stark Parker novels.
Four Highlander movies; I am pretty sure I have them as I just watched them a year or so back, but I spent four bucks to make sure.
Her Alibi with Tom Selleck and Paulina P. I have yet to see it, which is weird, since I like Tom Selleck. Remember he made a bunch of movies in the 80s where he was the lead, but he really did not have success on the big screen without Ted Danson and Steve Guttenberg–but he did all right in television Westerns.
Tombstone, which I did not own until now and have only seen probably once before back in the day.
Shanghai Knights with Jackie Chan and Owen Wilson. I don’t own and have not seen the first movie (as I mentioned when I talked about Rush Hour).
Quantum of Solace. I am a bit behind on my Craig Bond movies. I think I have only seen the first.
Assault on Precinct 13. This is the 2005 remake; I saw the original 1976 film some time ago.
Hamlet at Elsinore which is a hoity toity British production of some sort.
A Bruce Lee two movie disc (pictured in error with the books) containing Fist of Fear, Touch of Death and Blind Fist of Bruce which actually stars Bruce Li. I will have to watch them first to see if I can watch them with the boys.

If I were a betting man, I would bet the first of these that I watch will be Tombstone with the longer odds on Her Alibi. Of course, were you to bet with me, I would watch what I bet on first to win, so don’t fall for it. That said, we will know the answer soon, as they are next scheduled for the amusement park this weekend. And they have a week of VBS volunteering coming up, so I will continue my summer of increased movie scheduling. W00t!

At any rate, the total haul, including a couple of frames for crafts and a necklace of my wife, was fifty some dollars. More expensive than a hike, assuredly, but many hours of enjoyment to come and perhaps the cost will be recouped at my estate sale.

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On Socrates read by Lynn Redgrave (1995)

June 28, 2021June 26, 2021 Brian J. Noggle

Book cover This is not a Teaching Company/The Great Courses production (or even Modern Scholar). It’s a mid-1990s Knowledge Products two cassette set that I bought this spring, so it weighs in at about two hours. Amazingly, instead of college professors holding their own lectures, though, they feature Hollywood talent. Lynn Redgrave, for example, handles the heavy duties on this particular–what, item? Set? At any rate, the two cassettes. When it comes time to quote either Socrates or other people talking about Socrates, other vocal talent comes in–often with appropriate accents and whatnot. My beautiful wife found it distracting, but I did not.

Well, as you know, gentle reader, Socrates left no writings of his own–the dialogues of Plato feature Socrates as a character in them, perhaps derived from his actual works, but probably not exactly. This, um, bit explains that the earlier Plato dialogues are probably more from Socrates real concerns and later things are Plato’s work with Socrates as a character. The book/series/audiocassettes focus as much on Socrates’ life as his work, and some contemporaries or relatively contemporaneous sources talk a bit about Socrates’ life (in appropriate Serious Classics Voices, although not so much in Greek accents).

So, you know what, it’s not a bad bit of drive time. Of course, all of you are not driving a top-of-the-line ca. Obama Elected truck that also has an audio cassette player in it, but brothers and sisters, I assure you that when I have another vehicle and upgrade the sound system, I am going to ask for a cassette deck in it just so I can continue to listen to these sub-dollar bits of lectures in them.

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Good Book Hunting, June 26, 2021: ABC Books and The Library

June 28, 2021June 26, 2021 Brian J. Noggle

On Saturday, ABC Books had a book signing from a local author and the Library Center, our home library branch, had an author signing books like they used to a long time ago, so we made a circuit to the north end of Springfield and then down south to the library.

ABC Books had author James R. Wilder; one of his books is Tough Times in Grubville. Grubville is not too far from where I graduated high school (closer than De Soto), so we talked a bit about the area.

I also found a couple things in the Martial Arts section as well. Overall, I got:

Three Executioner novels: Force Down, War Hammer, and Black Hand. You are right, gentle reader–I have already read these books (see here, here, and here). These are gifts for my oldest son, who is turning fifteen here soon, and whom I’m trying to get interested in adult fiction finally. It’s also a bit of a twist: When he was four, right after we moved to Nogglestead, my beautiful wife took he and his brother out to go shopping for a birthday present for me. Although she swore them to secrecy, he announced immediately after getting out of the car, “We got you books about guns!” So it’s a bit of turnabout. I looked in the suspense and the thrillers section before asking Ms. E. in a low voice, “I don’t want to offend you, but do you have any Executioner novels?” She did, and I wanted to pick out a couple that I had read and thought was good, and I did not want to get him one I haven’t read, but I ended up getting him this three pack. And I know where to go to pick up others when I finish up the ones I have and want to fill in some gaps.
Old Acquaintances, a signed book by Ursula Gorman, a local author (?) who has a couple books at ABC Books. More than I do, certainly.
Terror Near Town, Tough Times in Grubville, and Sheriff Without A Badge, the three books by James R. Wilder. I learned from my mistakes with Mary Phelan: Buy all the books in case you like them.
Ultimate Aikido by Yoshimitsu Yamada with Steven Pimsler and Deadly Karate Blows: The Medical Implications by Brian Adams. Ms. E. said they had just gotten those into the Martial Arts section, and I said I know. She said that there are two or three other people who prowl that section regularly, and I admitted it was probably good that two did not show up at the same time.
At the library, I got Tea in the Time of COVID by Ann Kynion. It’s 100 musings from the first 100 days of the lockdowns last year. I expect it to be similar to Coffee Is Cheaper Than Therapy.

I must admit, gentle reader, that since I have finished he Winter Reading Challenge and broke off of reading movie and television books, I’ve been kind of wandering aimlessly and fruitlessly. I have been stacking up incomplete books in my book accumulation points; I have been underwhelmed and not really been excited about what I am reading; and I have been dulling the pain with uneven Executioner novels. So it’s good to have in my hands books that look interesting and that I might be excited to read.

Ha! Just kidding. While typing this post, I have put them into the nebulous Nogglestead to-read stacks, and they’re lost for a couple years.

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Movie Report: The Ref (1994)

June 27, 2021June 26, 2021 Brian J. Noggle

Book cover I have made a gag in the past, probably on Facebook, that now that we have settled that Die Hard and Lethal Weapon are Christmas movies, we have to move on to proving that The Ref is a Christmas movie. After all, it has family coming over for the holiday meal and a story about redemption. Well, maybe not redemption.

Within it, Denis Leary, fresh from his stand-up comedy special success but before the award-winning program Rescue Me, stars as a burglar whose job on Christmas Eve is thwarted, and the local police bottle the town up to try to catch him. He kidnaps a couple (Kevin Spacey and Judy Davis) on their way home from marriage therapy and keeps them prisoner in their home as he tries to figure out an escape. Complications arise as their malcreant son is on his way home from military school and the man’s mother and other relations are coming for dinner. The burglar deals with the bickering and family drama as the film takes on, as so many do, suburban decay.

So amusing at times, but not a high comedy–better than Hot Tub Time Machine 2 but not as good as the National Lampoon movies I’ve seen recently (see this and this).

But it’s still worth bringing forth as a Christmas movie and arguing on the Internet about it.

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Book Report: Death Whisper The Executioner #208 (1996)

June 26, 2021June 24, 2021 Brian J. Noggle

Book cover I have been pleased with a couple of the Executioner books I’ve picked up lately. This book and Rescue Run are a cut above, although this one does get a little outlandish at the end.

In this book, Bolan goes to Arizona near the border to investigate a mining company that runs the town and runs off or kills those it cannot control. A lawman known to the man from Justice dies, triggering Bolan’s investigation, and he basically discovers that Soviet deep agents have acquired the mining company and have built a large tunnel into Mexico for smuggling. Bolan has to bust it up, but the mining company has hired an army of ex-Spetsnaz troops to defend the complex.

So Bolan has to singlehandedly, with the help of the dead lawman’s daughter, now the chief of the local police, put a stop to it. Which he does in a set of exploits that get a little ridiculous at the end, and the Able Team and Phoenix Force parachute in to help mop up.

So a cut above, but trending down.

Also, who wrote this, Lee Child?

Larquette snapped out of her daze. She pulled a lever action rifle from a rack off the wall and chambered a round. With a sudden afterthought, she snatched up an extra box of shells and then positioned herself in a crouch between the filing cabinets.

If enough of these books call rifle food shells, I’m going to start doing it, too.

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Do It The Brian J. Way

June 26, 2021June 26, 2021 Brian J. Noggle

This article hit my email inbox from the local athletic shoe store’s parent company: How to Make Your Running Shoes Last Longer.

To be honest, I didn’t read it because I have a better method.

Don’t run.

My running shoes, unlike me, are immortal.

I keed, I keed! But I have not been running that much this year. An indoor triathlon, an in-person 5K, and a couple virtual 5Ks. Which means, in calendar months, my shoes are getting up there indeed, but they don’t have much mileage in them.

I might replace them soon, though, as my walking shoes are getting worn, and I use my old running shoes as my walking shoes.

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Movie Report: Anger Management (2003)

June 25, 2021June 24, 2021 Brian J. Noggle

Book cover This movie is a two-fer, at least for where Brian J.’s Rule 5 movie report posts go: It has both Marisa Tomei (from My Cousin Vinny) and Heather Graham (from License to Drive). However, although it probably is the best part of these movie reviews, I am not posting more pictures of these ladies at this time.

The film also features Adam Sandler and Jack Nicholson. In it, Adam Sandler plays an executive assistant working for a pet supply company who is mild mannered and less of a man boy than his normal roles. On a flight to St. Louis, he sits next to an obnoxious man and touches a flight attendant to get her attention–which she calls assault, so Sandler’s meek character is tased and arrested. In lieu of jail time, the judge sentences Sandler to anger management therapy–run by the obnoxious man (Nicholson). So he joins anger management group therapy with the usual collection of Sandler character actors (John Turturro, Allen Covert) and, after another incident, gets personal high-contact therapy–Nicholson’s character moves in with him. It leads to some amusing set pieces–Dave (Sandler) picks up Heather Graham in a bar and goes home with her, only to reject her sexual advances because he has a girlfriend; a confrontation with a childhood bully who is now a Buddhist monk leads to a brawl at a monestary; a trial separation between Dave and his girlfriend (Tomei) leads to Tomei’s character dating Nicholson’s character; and finally, the climax at a Yankees game stocked with cameos as self including Rudy Giuliani, Derek Jeter, Roger Clemens, and so on.

So it was amusing, which is honestly the rating I give most comedies. It’s not raunchy (PG-13), but there’s some sexual humor in it. It was a bit different to see Sandler playing a more sedate role and having Nicholson chew the scenery. You know, I am going to run up to the Netflix barrier some day, where Sandler’s films are only available, maybe, online. But I’ve got plenty of his oeuvre to catch up on before then.

Also, in searching the Internet for anger management several times, I might have set myself up for a Red Flag something or other. Which is the risk I run to bring high quality content like this to you.

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Truly, A Man Ahead Of His Time

June 24, 2021 Brian J. Noggle

In an article entitled John McAfee dead: Inside the Internet millionaire playboy’s wild world of guns, drugs, and jungle harem of seven women, appropriately lurid as it’s in a British tabloid, we get this photo and caption:

John McAfee. So ahead of his time that he was on Twitter. In 1972.

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Book Report: Selected Poems by Mary Phelan (2004)

June 24, 2021June 24, 2021 Brian J. Noggle

Book cover I bought this collection of poems at the Webster Groves Book Shop; it (this book, not the book shop) was on the local interest bookshelf near the door. The book is chapbook-sized, but chapbooks aren’t really that chap any more–when I was hawking Unrequited and Deep Blue Shadows, I priced them at $3 each. This volume was like ten bucks; although the author had another volume available, I only bought one in case I didn’t like the poems. Which is kind of the opposite reaction I have when buying cheap LPs, wherein if I find a bunch from a new artist for a buck each, I buy them all in case I like the artist. The philosophical difference is the difference between a buck and ten bucks, I guess.

Which is a shame, as I did like the poems in the book.

They deal with aging, traveling, family matters, and whatnot; the poet might have been a professional instructor in the liberal arts or might just have been a vagabond when younger. But the poems have heart, rhythm, and relatively longer lines at times, so I enjoyed them. Not grandmother poetry at all.

You know, this book is dated 2004, and the poet would have been in St. Louis at the time, but it was five or six years after my Coffee House Memories days, so I have no idea who she is and don’t recognize any names in her acknowledgements/thank yous. Perhaps she was an academic-minded poet and not a coffee shop/open mic brawler like me. Or maybe that few years was long enough to completely turn over the crowd.

So worth a read. The next time I am in the St. Louis area, I hope to pick up a copy of the later collection.

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Movie Report: DARYL (1985)

June 24, 2021June 23, 2021 Brian J. Noggle

Book cover I saw this film early in the trailer park years–it seems to me that I saw it over and over, which probably meant it was on Showtime but rotated out pretty quickly. Of course, we got our first VCR right after we moved into the trailer, so I suppose we could have gotten it as a rental in the days when every grocery store and some gas stations rented videocassettes. Which, conceptually, is about as dated as this film.

Basically, the film starts en media res–a car is getting chased by a helicopter, and the man driving the car lets a boy out before driving over a cliff; the boy is picked up by an elderly couple and taken into town. My youngest, who was watching the film with me while trying to simultaneously play a video game, got confused immediately because the thought he’d already missed a plot point or two–but that got him watching the film. At any rate, the boy apparently has partial amnesia, so he’s placed with foster parents (Lenny and Mary Beth Hurt). They discover that he’s good at a lot of things, but he’s a little lacking in social skills. He befriends a neighbor boy who teaches him a little about being a kid, and when it’s going good, his “real parents” show up to claim him.

They’re scientists who essentially “built” him. He’s not a robot, really–he’s got the body of a human and will grow and whatnot, but a computer for a brain. They learn that he has become almost human (not that Almost Human) with emotions and preferences. The military shuts the program down and orders the scientists to terminate Daryl. Instead, they break him out of the military facility.

You know, I misremembered the doctor who breaks him out as being played by Dabney Coleman, likely because I saw a lot of Dabney Coleman in those days; however, the kindly doctor is played by Josef Sommer who has played similar characters his whole life (I remembered him from 2000’s The Family Man).

At any rate, kind of a neat film, not high art, but if you’re a kid about Daryl’s age, it might speak to you a bit. I liked it when I was that age, and my youngest son liked it well enough. And the lad did not offer any comment on the “ugly” people in it since the film does not include romantic plot points or women in bikinis, but it did include Colleen Camp.

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Book Report: Coffee Is Cheaper Than Therapy by Ann Conklin Unruh (2015)

June 23, 2021May 16, 2025 Brian J. Noggle

Book cover I bought this book almost two weeks ago (already?) when we visited Old Trees during our vacation and promptly read it since it’s a collection of short, what, essays? A woman in late middle age or early later age meets friends for coffee, and she captures some of the things they talk about into these brief paragraph or so musings. They’re kind of grouped by topic, but mainly they’re just musings on life, the goings on in the world, and family by a local author.

It clocks in at 102 pages with room in the back for discussion questions (and To and From on the frontspiece) that indicates this book is not supposed to be heavy literature but rather something to perhaps trigger other discussions. But, you know, discussions between people, not “discussions” that are Serious Political Messages You Must Present Strenuously Until Your Family Agrees Just To Shut You Up. The entries are not Political, but sub-political. That is, real life, but which percolates up into the political these days, unfortunately.

And I liked the–voice? The paragraphs are a little thin to really have a narrative voice. But I agreed with a lot of it, which kind of worried me: Why am I, so very young-thinking and -acting (why, I just this week showed off a bit in martial arts class by doing a set of ten push-ups as clapping push-ups which I impressed my sainted aunt with on one of my visits to the St. Louis area in 2019), why am I agreeing with a woman of a certain age so much?

Because I guess I am getting to that certain age, albeit reluctantly. And, as this blog attests, I was a curmudgeon in my relative youth.

The author is a toastmistress, she mentions in the book, and the book came with a the top of Toastmasters Item 163 which is a ballot/evaluation form for speakers at a meeting. Given that only the top remains, I have to wonder if this book was used as part of the discussion at a Toastmasters event and then found its way to the Webster Groves Book Shop. As you know, gentle reader, I once thought about (and created) a blog called Found Bookmarks (now a category on this blog, and the sparse entries in that category indicate why it never went anywhere. This stub would not warrant a full entry in that line, but it did make me look up the local Toastmasters clubs–and there are five entries in Springfield, Missouri, in 2021. So now I am thinking about maybe sitting in and seeing what it’s all about.

So, definitely worth my time in reading on my vacation. Better than an encyclopedia of disasters, truly, but that’s a lower and lower bar to clear.

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Movie Report: Air America (1990)

June 23, 2021June 23, 2021 Brian J. Noggle

Book cover Well, this should have been a blockbuster, ainna? A young Mel Gibson in his heyday, a young Robert Downey, Junior, version 1.0 fresh from the Brat Pack days. A buddy film set, part comedy and part adventure, with corrupt government officials as the bad guys, flying action scenes and stunts, and….

Well, it’s a bit underwhelming.

The plot is that a helicopter traffic reporter (Downey) loses his job and gets his license to fly revoked stateside, but a secret government agency recruits him to join an outfit in Laos that flies and drops supplies to various locations in southeast Asia, from guns to friendlies and aid to outlying villages. He meets the crazy pilots who are already in country, who do the flights by day and party really heartily at night. One (Gibson) takes the new pilot under his wing, and the new guy learns that the old hand is amassing arms to sell to finance his retirement. After Downey and another pilot crash, the local warlord, an ally of the leaders of their outfit, rescue some “flour” and leave the fliers stranded. So Downey plans his revenge on the local opium processing plant, which involves setting up a couple of grenades–but it only throttles production for a little bit and kicks up a hornets’ nest of revenge. Subplots involve a senator (Lane Smith, last seen in My Cousin Vinny) on a fact-finding mission looking for evidence of drug smuggling and an American aid worker working with refugees whose underdeveloped storyline only exists to provide a redemption story for Gibson’s character (the refugee camp is located in poppy fields that rival factions converge on to harvest).

It’s hard to say why it doesn’t really work. The pacing? Are the characters just outside the relatable range? Is the pacing a little slow? Is the main problem or conflict under-defined so we don’t really know what’s at stack until the middle or end of the movie? I mean, Gibson and Downey should be at the height of their charisma, but it’s kind of wasted. A script that is not sure how buddy it is or how serious it is with a message? Probably all of these things.

So it will go into the library and not represent something I watch over and over again, but I guess it’s good for completeness’ sake in the ouevres of Gibson and Downey.

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Focus Grouping The Next Pandemic

June 23, 2021 Brian J. Noggle

Let’s ask the audience, the general public, how panicky they get with this story: Springfield pediatricians see rise in patients with RSV, uncommon for summer months:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is warning parents about a national rise in the respiratory infection RSV, Respiratory Syncytial Virus, this summer.

RSV is common in the fall and winter, similar to the flu season, but not very common in the warmer months. Mercy pediatrician Dr. Laura Waters says her office didn’t see as many cases during the typical season, but they are seeing an uptick now.

”I had a couple of weeks ago about five or six kids who were actually seen over one weekend in the emergency room,” Dr. Waters says. “Later that week I actually had a child that ended up in the ICU with it.”

You know, perhaps the constant drumbeating of disease and whatnot will have the benefit of informing people how contingent life really is, and how precious it is, if we can remove some of the sense of absolute safety that many Americans from the middle and upper classes and the elites have from birth.

Just kidding. I am not sure that’s possible.

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Book Report: Rock On: An Office Power Ballad by Dan Kennedy (2008)

June 22, 2021June 23, 2021 Brian J. Noggle

Book cover The book bears the subtitle An Office Power Ballad. It details the author’s brief employment as a marketing executive at a record company headed for a takeover told in a series of short vignettes. The voice is a bit neurotic, a bit “I can’t believe I’m here” laced with imposter syndrome as he meets different musical artists and normal-in-these-books corporate interactions.

So it’s kind of like mixing one’s Stanley Bing (Lloyd What Happened and You Look Nice Today) and one’s Joshua Ferris (Then We Came To The End) except that it’s not fiction. The book goes through those office politics and through his layoff with some anecdotes about being laid off (shades of Executive Blues by G. J. Meyer).

The book kind of disappointed me; as it’s just a collection of vignettes, it doesn’t really lead to anything beyond the amusement of its anecdotes. Still, it was better vacation reading than an encyclopedia of disasters.

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