Brian J. Noggle – Page 12 – Musings from Brian J. Noggle

Book Report: The Guns of Terra 10 by Don Pendleton (1970)

April 27, 2025April 25, 2025 Brian J. Noggle

Book cover Since I’m apparently reading a lot of paperback science fiction this year, I picked this book out of the paperback cluster of the paperbacks stacked on the yet unrepaired bookshelves which broke in 2014. Looking back in the annals of this blog, I bought it at Pumpkin Daze later that year, which was the same time I bought John D. MacDonald’s The Wine of the Dreamers which was one of the other paperback science fiction books by authors that are known for a different genre. Pendleton, of course, was best known for starting The Exectutioner series of books, although the Ashton Ford series (one of his lesser known lines) had elements of fantasy to them.

At any rate, a couple of years into the future, the human race has enhanced itself through directed evolution. One such fellow graduates from his military training and is about to take charge of Terra 10, an interplanetary battle device that the corporations in charge of Earth want to use to keep rebellious systems in line (this is pre-Star Wars, so it’s not based on the Death Star). The guy has been enhanced to interact with the computers quickly and think like a machine partly, and he’s large (actually, larger than most of the type). But things go sideways and he ends up on Earth, which is an agricultural powerhouse, with a group of “Reavers”–reverts who failed evolutionary enhancement and are passionate people who want to be free from the tech overlords. He falls for one of the women there, and so he becomes involved in a plot to seize Terra 10 for the Reavers to negotiate a peace with the techno overlords, but then an alien invasion force comes into the solar system, and he has to use the weapons platform to defend humanity en toto.

It definitely has mid-century paperback original vibe. It tries to grapple with some bigger issues, like how much can a man be enhanced and still be a man and whether computers serve man or does man serve computers (timely, as I sit here writing a book report knowing its main audience will be LLM scrapers of some sort and me in the future, which is more of a machine audience than man). But although it raises the questions, it does not answer them, not well. But at least it does not read like Mack Bolan In Space. No numbers falling, no statement of philosophy followed by the one-word sentence “Yeah.” So good on ‘im for trying something different.

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Good Media Hunting, Saturday, April 26, 2025: Yard and Estate Sales

April 27, 2025April 27, 2025 Brian J. Noggle

The church at the end of our farm road was having its annual(?) sale, and since I scored a couple records up there two years ago, I wanted to go. So I shanghaied my youngest, who became excited at the thought of maybe finding some collectible coins or trading cards cheap, and thought we would hit that sale and an estate sale whose sign I’d seen on Friday.

As it turns out, he was eager to stop at other sales, and a subdivision close to the estate sale was having its annual(?) subdivision sale which promised a number of sales in close proximity, and so we hit a number.

I mostly got videos.

I picked up two books at the church sale and one at the estate sale:

You Can Teach Yourself Country Guitar since I’m collecting these books but am not using them to learn the guitar I bought seven years ago.
Feasting: A Celebration of Food In Art, an art monograph centered on still lives with food.
Business French: An Intermediate Course for my beautiful wife who has been taking Duolingo lessons for, what, two years now?

I also picked up three CDs. Well, four, as one is a two disc set:

Christmas Party by She and Him wherein “She” is Zoey Deschanel. I’ll raise a glass to Charles Hill when I listen to it which will be before Christmas.
Jazz for the Quiet Times, a two disc (as I mentioned) compilation of lesser-known (or unknown) jazz artists.
The Great American Soundbook II: As TIme Goes By by Rod Stewart. And the time has indeed gone by since this CD was new.

And, oh, the videos. The estate sale, which was really a downsizing sale (so I heard), had enough of a set spread across three different rooms that I wondered if the homeowner had not owned a video store. I got a number of titles that I’ve been looking for elsewhere, such as Vintage Stock in February.

A couple of older Jackie Chan titles: Shaolin Wooden Men and Who Am I?
The second, third, and fourth Rambo titles.
Major League, which I sought specifically in February.
The Cowboy Way with Woody Harrelson and Kiefer Sutherland; I might have seen part of this at some point as I might remember the end of it, but I don’t think I’ve seen the whole thing.
VisionQuest whose name I remembered anyway.
The Crow, which I’ve seen a time or two but did not have on physical media–it’s one that my beautiful wife has said “We don’t have that?” Now we do.
Tropic Thunder which we saw in the theaters but have not seen since.
A couple of old monster movies, Godzilla versus Mothra and Rodan. To go with the one already on the top of the cabinet which I’ve avoided since I bought it a couple years ago.
The Expendables 2 since I just watched the first one two years ago.
Kung Pow: The Legend of the Fist which we watched a long time ago. I am pretty sure I have seen it since that 2016 post–hopefully, I rented it and did not get a second copy.

At the rate I’m going, that’s movie watching for a decade to come.

But the whole stack set me back about twenty-five dollars.

Which makes me wonder if I could make a go of hoovering up old DVDs, videos, and CDs for a dollar or less per and getting a booth at an antique mall and listing them for a couple of dollars each. I might have mentioned that some of the booths devoted to DVDs are charging five dollars and up for DVDs. So if I got them for a dollar each + cleaned the libraries out on bag day….

Well, I will perhaps leave that to my son. Who was eager to go to garage sales, but did not find anything for himself. We stopped at a Walmart Neightborhood Market, and he bought a $40 Pokemon box, and he was ready to be done for the day. But he has not ruled out doing them in the future, so maybe I am back to being a peddler like I was 25 years ago.

UPDATE: Originally, I said I’d bought the first three Rambo movies because I thought maybe they’d retitled First Blood into Rambo to retcon the numbering (First Blood is the first, First Blood II: Rambo is the second, and Rambo III being the third). However, I’d forgotten that the much later fourth was simply Rambo which is the one I picked up here. So I’ll have to think about picking up First Blood if I want to binge them in order.

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Book Report: Fatal Interview by Edna St. Vincent Millay (1931)

April 26, 2025April 24, 2025 Brian J. Noggle

Book cover Ah, gentle reader, I intended to make this a dual book report with a more modern collection of sonnets (circa 2019) which I had on my chairside table for some time but didn’t get into until I picked this book. And then, although I made some progress on that other book, I haven’t been compelled to complete it in the intervening ~~hours~~ ~~days~~ weeks since I read Fatal Interview. So allow me to talk a bit about this book.

Well, of course, I’ve read it–I read a pile of Millay in college and inspired my mother to go to the bad part of St. Louis (which part is bad? the whole is greater than the sum of its parts) to buy some for me when I was away in school. However, apparently, I have not bought it again in the intervening years, unlike so many, until I bought a stack of them last September. And I quickly re-read Renascence and A Few Figs From Thistles.

So: This book is about a decade later than those books, when she was established, a celebrity poet, and maybe on the downhill slide of her career (heaven forbid we apply pop music and celebrity ideas to poets). It’s a collection of LII sonnets, ostensibly about a romantic relationship mostly self-conscious from beginning to end, and, aw, hell, that pretty much explains how I approached things in my youth. Who’s my daddy? E. St. Vincent Millay.

Overall, the sonnets are a bit hit or miss. I probably have mentioned that I memorized “Love, though for this you riddle me with darts….” from A Few Figs from Thistles for open mic nights. I also memorized “Love is not all; it is not meat nor drink….” from this collection as well for performance, although it is not as exciting as the former. Or, at least, it was not as much of a hit in cafes thirty years ago.

Welp. Alrighty, then (he said, quoting a thirty-year-old movie to get down verbally with the young people today). I like Edna St. Vincent Millay, and she influenced me more in my young poetry and young affectations than even Billy Joel or Robert B. Parker. Of course, I recommend it. And deep down I hope I stumble across another old copy in the wild which I can buy and have an excuse to read again.

OH: And about this copy: Someone else treasured it. While reading it, I came across the detritus of what looked to be a ribbon in several places, and I thought it was an old bookmark. But who uses a decaying red ribbon for a bookmark. I bet someone used multiple pieces of red ribbon to mark favorites, and the decayed ribbons were later removed, perhaps by Friends of the Library. And the back endspiece has a sonnet penciled in:

I’d hoped, briefly, that it was the long-lost sonnet from a master poet which would make this into a real collectible, but it’s just a copied poem from Elizabeth Barret Browning. Not that I’m slagging on her work, but it’s not her handwriting.

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Book Report: 40 Days of Discovery (2025)

April 25, 2025April 24, 2025 Brian J. Noggle

Book cover This was the Lenten devotional from the church I attend for this year. 40 Days of Wisdom last year, the first time I’ve gone through a devotional almost in real time. Or at least at the same time as everyone else, as I did not not attend a small group or anything. Not that they were emphasized this year, perhaps as a result of the continued attendance decline with this particular church.

At any rate, although I picked it up early in Lent, I really didn’t get started really reading it for many days. The first daily devotion starts with the woman recounting the indecision that she felt when she was a girl at Disney World, and…. Well, gentle reader, I am a bad, bad man, for I still hold a little envy/resentment/outrage for people who grouse about things I never had or never can. Just imagine how I seethe inside when someone over forty complains about having difficulties with their parents–you have to imagine, because I don’t outwardly make a show of my personal ire of this sort, especially not performatively, look-at-poor-me variety. But these sorts of things get me up. I mean, aside from trips up north for the weekend or holidays down south in St. Louis with my mother’s family, the only family vacation we ever took was when my mother, who must have scrimped and saved all year, brought us down to the Ozarks for a week. Poor little me, but I did pick the book up and put it down many times when getting into the setup for the first devotional.

So, yeah, well, it’s a devotional written by members of the congregation, although I do not recognize some of the names, including a fellow with the title Reverend. They range from personal anecdotes as springboards to scriptural lessons to more earnèd pieces (such as the contributions by my beautiful wife). They’re pretty quick to read, and if you’re not giving them serious daily contemplation, they’re pretty easy to forget as well.

But I guess they’re more workbooks than things that are supposed to stick with you anyway.

And, unfortunately, because I am the Master Chief of sinners, I’ll mostly remember the hard time I had with the first devotion.

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I’m Not A Hard Workin’ Man, But….

April 23, 2025 Brian J. Noggle

Brian J. !=

But I do have a little callus on the inside of my right thumb’s knuckle from holding the safety switch on power tools.

Not circular saws, though. Mostly the little battery-powered weed trimmer which got its first work of the season today.

The callus made it through the winter, though, without subsiding so the little bit of sawing that I might have done might have helped.

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Coming To Busch Stadium

April 22, 2025 Brian J. Noggle

Cardinals set date for Pope Francis’ public viewing and funeral

With the Bucks and the Blues down in their playoff races, one’s heart turns to baseball. How are the Redbirds doing? Oh. One’s heart turns to football?

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Sure, Like All The Other Data

April 21, 2025April 20, 2025 Brian J. Noggle

Brain Data for Sale? California Updates Privacy Law to Protect Neural Privacy:

California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Saturday approved an amendment to the existing California Consumer Privacy Act to add neural data as a protected type of sensitive personal information.

California defines neural data as “information that is generated by measuring the activity of a consumer’s central or peripheral nervous system, and that is not inferred from nonneural information.” The new regulation gives neural data the same protections as other human biometric data, like face scans, fingerprints, or DNA.

Companies like Neuralink monitor and collect brain data in order for their products to function, and other apps may collect or track a user’s neural data in the future for health, fitness, productivity, or other purposes.

“Devices are being made that will read your brain waves,” California State Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan explained during an Assembly meeting on Aug. 31. “We want to make sure that’s protected under California CCPA.”

Yay, we’re saved!

Yeah, no.

Tech companies will just do it and then pay the fine when they’re caught just like they do with “oopsie!” opening the mic and cameras on the phone and whatnot.

I guess this is from last fall, but someone posted about it last week which got me to thinking about it. But not immediately, or I could properly attribute the link source (this one is from an Internet search, not from the blog post I originally saw).

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History, Rhyming

April 20, 2025 Brian J. Noggle

Sam’s Club reveals plan to eliminate checkout lanes completely with major change:

Sam’s Club, the Walmart-owned membership warehouse, is rolling out a major change to its grocery payment system and embracing artificial intelligence (AI).

The retail giant plans to phase out traditional checkouts across its 600 stores and create a friction-free shopping experience which will include customers scanning goods on the go with an app and then having and AI scanner verify the goods as customers leave. The technology would eliminate the need for receipt checks at the door.

The system, known as “Scan & Go,” was initially launched in April 2024 and allows members to use the Sam’s Club mobile app to scan their products.

The latest announcement adds the AI check, known as “Just Walk”/”Just Go” exit, to the process and will see the option of traditional checkouts being eliminated.

The new plans were announced by Chris Nicholas, Sam’s Club president and CEO, who outlined the company’s growth ambitions at its 2025 Investment Community Meeting last week.

“This is one of the fastest, most scalable transformations happening in retail today,” Nicholas said. “We’re investing with intention — in our fleet, our associates and the member experience — to become the world’s best club retailer.”

Making me do more of the work is not improving the member experience.

You know, gentle reader, I go to the local Sam’s Club once or twice a week. I have almost since we moved to Springfield, and I’ve been a member for, what, 25 years? But I am not going to do this.

For one, I’m an old curmudgeon now For two, as a longtime remote worker, my interactions with the cashiers at Sam’s Club represent some of the only in-person contacts with people on a regular basis. So I am not going to load the corporate app onto my phone so that I can scan all the goods and to let it try to track me all day long. Just so that the corporation can get a couple extra nickels from me.

Why do I say that this rhymes? Remember when some gunslingin’ marketin’ genius decided to try to make Walmart more upscale, resulting in almost $2,000,000,000 in lost sales?

I imagine this will go that way, kind of like how Walmart went all-in on self-checkouts and then pulled back.

But it will be a year or two without Sam’s Club for us. And we’ll see if Costco captures us as it has so many of our friends.

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Movie Report: The Quick and the Dead (1995)

April 19, 2025April 18, 2025 Brian J. Noggle

Book cover Not to be confused with the 1987 television movie based on the book by Louis L’Amour (or the book itself). Which, to be honest, I did: I knew enough about the title when this film came out that I thought it would have been a bastardization of the book (or television movie). But it’s not: It’s a complete story of its own that uses the same title, perhaps to draw in the people who don’t know better. I knew better, but since I just picked this film up last weekend, I popped it in right away.

So: Sharon Stone plays a woman referred to as Lady who comes into town with a burnt-out marshal’s office and shows immediately that she is not to be trifled with. It’s right before a big, bracket-style quick draw competition run by the man who runs the town played by Gene Hackman. We get introduced to a series of colorful gunfighters including Kid, played by Leonardo di Caprio, and Cort, played by Russell Crowe, and a couple of red shirts who are just there to lose. Kid turns out is actually Hackman’s kid who is constantly berates. Cort was a henchman of Hackman’s who renounced violence and became a preacher.

So, yeah, that’s the story. A bit of Lady’s past is told in flashback: Hackman was responsible for her father, the former marshal’s, death, and she’s come for revenge but is not sure whether she can actually kill him.

I mean, I can see what the director and filmographer are trying to do here. It’s a bit of a throwback to some of the great old westerns as far as filming goes–a lot of closeups and eyes moving back and forth and other stylizations which indicate that Sam Raimi liked Sergio Leone. But: A bracket-based gunfight tournament for a bunch of money (too much really) which Hackman’s character runs every so often to eliminate his competition? C’mon, man. That’s so 1990s.

But it does contain Sharon Stone at the end of her Whoa! years.

Continue reading “Movie Report: The Quick and the Dead (1995)” →

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But The Bar Has Been Lowered

April 18, 2025 Brian J. Noggle

A Chatbot Has Passed a Critical Test For Human-Like Intelligence. Now What?:

There have been several headlines over the past week about an AI chatbot officially passing the Turing test.

These news reports are based on a recent preprint study by two researchers at the University of California San Diego in which four large language models (LLMs) were put through the Turing test. One model – OpenAI’s GPT-4.5 – was deemed indistinguishable from a human more than 70% of the time.

Unfortunately, I have had the opportunity to spend some time on the “live chat” on both the sales side and technical help side of a couple of major tech companies (HP and GoDaddy). I am pretty sure that I was connected to a live person in both instances, but in both cases, quite likely someone whose second (or third or fourth) language was English working from a tightly-written script with long pauses between my “prompts” and their responses.

One suspects that the fact that you cannot tell whether you’re talking to a human might not be just because the computers have gotten better–it might be because the “chats” we have (and, let’s be honest, all communications with large companies especially tech companies) have gotten worse.

(Link via Vodkapundit on Instapundit.)

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Is That All?

April 17, 2025 Brian J. Noggle

CT scans could be a contributor to cancer, study finds:

CT scans could be an “important cause of cancer” in the United States, according to a new study.

According to the study by scientists at the University of California, San Francisco, CT scans could account for 5% of cancer cases in the U.S., more than tripling previous estimates.

Since 2007, the number of CT scans performed in the U.S. has increased by 30%. The research also indicates that CT scans are being overused for instances of upper respiratory infections and common headaches.

Not depicted: Scanners that have become ubiquitous at the exits of major retailers. Old timey ones waited for an RFID to pass through them without deactivation (no (they have been around for, what, forty years now?) but are becoming even more elaborate as they scan items in your cart to make sure you paid for them.

Not as heavy of a dose of radiation as a CT scan, but you don’t get a CT scan several times a week.

Boy, oh boy, we are all guinea pigs, all the time. Presumably because they can no longer test with actual guinea pigs.

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You’ll Need To Be More Specific

April 16, 2025 Brian J. Noggle

The article The Burden of History & the Promise of Divine Life in this month’s New Oxford Review begins:

Thirty-some years ago, I was in a dark, musty used-book store in downtown Milwaukee when a man appeared around the end of the aisle, handed me a book, and said, “Here, you really ought to read this.” I suppose if I were to add that he then mysteriously disappeared — which he did — you would think I’m making it up. But no, that is how I discovered A Canticle for Leibowitz.

C’mon, man, you’ll have to be more specific than that! Was it Renaissance Books on Plankinton Avenue which backed up to the river? I once spent a long time pawing through its magazines until I actually came up with the Saturday Review from 1957 with an article about Atlas Shrugged in it?

Was it Downtown Books on Wisconsin Avenue where I spent over an hour in the adult magazines room to score a copy of Gallery magazine with Robert B. Parker’s short story “The Surrogate”?

You have to be a bit more specific. And, wow, are my memories sharp and clear on bookstores in Milwaukee in the 1990s.

I’m guessing Renaissance Books.

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Bird Watching With Brian J.

April 15, 2025 Brian J. Noggle

Black-headed vultures have been moving into Missouri for some time; I’ve seen coverage of them in the local papers, magazines, and probably Larry Dablemont’s columns for a couple of years now. And I know the problem is getting serious as the Missouri Department of Conservation has been running ads in the aforementioned sources (minus Dablemont) saying that if you black vultures are a problem on your property (they’re known to attack living livestock), you can get a permit to kill them (the vultures). I’m under the impression that livestock producers think that step is optional, but if the state is saying maybe it’s a problem, then it’s a bad problem already.

At any rate, I did not get a photo of them, but I did see a trio of them in a field along the farm road that becomes Miller Road in Republic while I was headed to the gym this morning.

And when I got home, I saw this pygmy emu:

I bet this is the same turkey (not turkey vulture, which is the native vulture known for its bald head like a turkey) who crossed my farm road ahead of me the other day.

It’s good to see a turkey as they’re fairly infrequent in my back yard. But it’s odd to see one by itself; usually, when we see them in the valley by the creek down the road aways, you see more than one at a time. Perhaps this is a tom. Larry Dablemont would know, and he would then tell you that their numbers are in fact decreasing and that the state of Missouri doesn’t care since it makes money from turkey hunting permits and they, the government people, tend to work from computer models about populations rather than actually spending a lot of time in the icky woods.

At any rate, just a couple of bird sightings here that are atypical.

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The Lesson I Learned

April 14, 2025 Brian J. Noggle

The front page of the New York Post has a video leading to a story about the San Diego earthquake. The video depicts a woman sitting on a couch who jumps up, grabs a baby, and runs for the front door.

What caught my eye is the Roku logo and date and timestamp at the bottom.

The Roku is watching you.

But only if you turn it and give it explicit permission to do so. Wink.

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Facebook Is Reading My Brother’s Texts

April 14, 2025May 15, 2025 Brian J. Noggle

I texted him “Are you there, God? It’s me, Margaret.” And then asked him if he was on Team Blume or Team Cleary.

So suddenly Facebook is suggesting Blume books to me:

Even though I am sure I told my brother that I was on Team Cleary.

Mrs. Perkins, my fourth grade teacher, read Ribsy to the class, and I was pleased to find that I somehow already had Henry and the Clubhouse at home. I read all of the Henry Huggins books and even the Quimby books to the time (what, 1980?–some have been published since). I guess I read a number of the Blume books, too, but I identified more with Henry Huggins (and Henry Reed) than with Fudge or the girl from Blubber.

I wonder if my boys will look back on the Dav Pilkey (Captain Underpants) or Jeff Kinney (Diary of a Wimpy Kid) books the same way. Probably not.

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Whomever Wins, We’ve Already Lost

April 13, 2025 Brian J. Noggle

I’m not sure if it was a human or a Large Language Model (LLM, not Intelligence) that wrote the initial headline this morning with the word “reigns” instead of “reins.”

I’m not sure if it was a human or a Large Language Model that corrected the headline since.

Does it even matter?

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Good Book Hunting, Saturday, April 12: Friends of the Christian County Library (Ozark)

April 13, 2025April 15, 2025 Brian J. Noggle

Ah, gentle reader. I am reaching a point where I’m starting to think Do I need to buy any more books? or Do I want to buy any more books?. The stacks of Nogglestead are crammed full with little room for further additions. And at the rate at which I’m reading small paperbacks now that the 2025 Winter Reading Challenge is complete…. I mean, I’m starting to think I might not be able to read the thousands of books I already own in my lifetime. Do I really want to add more to the backlog?

Fortunately, though, a twee challenge for myself exists. Last year, I went to three of the four Friends of the Christian County Library book sales (Clever, Nixa, and Sparta). But I missed the one in Ozark, the original location when the Friends of the Christian County Library only had two sales a year in Ozark, because it fell in April, before the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library’s spring sale. As I often have recently.

But this year, I was a little more attentive, and when I discovered it was this weekend, I ditched a computer conference in Arkansas to attend (and I ditched for other reasons as well, but as a side effect, I was able to attend).

It was not at the library but instead was at a building in the park right across the street.

It was $3 bag day, but I only got two small bags’ worth.

I got a couple of books:

Gunships #4: Sky Fire which looks to be part of a men’s adventure series.
Diagnosis Murder: The Silent Partner just in case I didn’t have it. Turns out I do, and I’ve already read it. Something to sneak onto the free book cart at church, I guess.
Angles of Attack: An A-6 Intruder Pilot’s War by Peter Hunt about a pilot in Desert Storm.
Pindar: The Complete Odes in case I don’t already have them. If I do, this doubles my chances of finding it. Not that I’m likely to go looking for it; more likely, it doubles my chances of just picking it up sometime.
Sharpe’s Enemy by Bernard Cornwell. I didn’t have this already, I can honestly say didn’t have this already as I have all the Sharpe’s books together, and this one was not there.
Revolt in the Desert by T.E. Lawrence. I have one or two by or about Lawrence of Arabia; not sure if I have his book or not. I do now.
Love in Ancient Greece by Rpbert Flacelière translated by James Cleugh. Looks to be a scholarly work.
What If? 2 by Robert Crowley (not the Randall Munroe version. I knew I’d seen and maybe bought a copy of the first one in the distant past. Apparently, I have already read this one, too. The people at church are making out pretty well from this haul.
The Stingaree by Max Brand. Apparently, I’m into Westerns now so why not try some of the other big authors? No Louis L’Amour books in evidence today.
Learn to Play the Guitar by Nick Freeth. It might be a children’s book which might be just what I need since the other books haven’t done me any good.
Gus Shafer’s West with a forward by Dr. John M. Christlieb. An artist and sculptor. To help me envision the scenes in the westerns I read (as though Frederic Remington and Charles Russell could not. Sooner or later I’ll read the Time-Life set, too, maybe.
Sweden: The Land of Today with text by William Mead. Given that it’s from 1985, it’s the Land of Back Then by now.

Since I had some room, I stuffed a copy of Dating for Dummies to put on one of my boys’ bedrooms as a joke. I put it into the older son’s (who has no trouble dating) under some papers, but he spotted it immediately, so he’s putting it into his brother’s room. Which might hurt the younger as he is just now getting to the dating age but has not yet gone on a date.

I also picked up some DVDs because they were basically free:

The Transporter 3; I am pretty sure I have seen the first two (and just bought a copy of the first in 2023).
The Black Dahlia. Not the Blue Dahlia, which is the Raymond Chandler movie.
The Replacements
Ocean’s Twelve; I think I’ve seen it back in the movie-going days.
The Bourne Supremacy; I might have seen it in the movie-going days.
Basic Instinct; I think I DVRed it at one point.
The Quick and the Dead; some Substacker just mentioned the film, so now I have it. And apparently I’m set if I want to go onto a Sharon Stone kick, I’m set.

All told, $6. But I did have a ten spot on me as well, so I re-upped my membership in the Friends of the Christian County Library. I’m only in two such groups now. Well, one, maybe; I think my membership in the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library membership has lapsed until our income stabilizes.

For a brief moment, let me enjoy my tsundoku.

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Not Marking A Treasure, Unfortunately

April 12, 2025 Brian J. Noggle

A week or so every spring, the setting sun in the afternoon is aligned just right that it comes in through the lower-level patio doors and travels behind the bookshelves in the hall between our offices–a gap of no more than an inch at the widest–and strikes the wall just to the left of the curtained doorway that leads to our store room:

We call the store room “The Cat Litter Room” as most of our litter boxes are in there.

But it also holds a store of old Texas Instruments and Commodore computers as well as forty- or fifty-year-old video gaming systems.

So maybe it really is pointing the way to some ancient treasures.

Actually, we might not see it daily every year as a cloudy evening will block it.

It’s kind of like our pew at church in early service. In spring, the rising sun can come in through the stained glass and strafe us in the back pew. In fall, it can happen twice: Once before the time change and once after switching to Standard Time. We can watch the sun get closer over the course of a month, and then once it’s done with us, its rise is too early to bother anyone else. Come to think of it, the light in the pew and the light in the hall coincide.

Nothing important like NOTICING YOUR HAIR IS ON FIRE FROM TARIFFS OR TODAY’S OTHER NEWS, but something I’ve noticed over time that the other residents of Nogglestead or the back pew have not.

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Book Report: Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle by Edgar Rice Burroughs (1963)

April 12, 2025April 11, 2025 Brian J. Noggle

Book cover Wow, gentle reader. It has been sixteen years since I picked up a Tarzan book; I read Tarzan of the Apes and The Return of Tarzan. Perhaps not long after I got the books, although back in those days I was not dilligent about posting my purchases for future me to review. Also, I was not posting the scans of the covers–probably expecting the Amazon link below to carry the weight of it–so I can’t easily review how awful this brutal 1960s covers were. Ugly.

At any rate, in this, the eleventh volume of the series (originally from 1927), Tarzan is not really the main character. In it, a group of Arabs have come down into the heart of Africa looking for a fabled treasure city, and there’s some intrigue amongst them. One fellow is in love with the sheikh’s daughter, but he’s framed for attempted murder and escapes before he is killed. Meanwhile, an expedition with a couple of Americans, a young naturalist out to photograph the wildlife and a wealthy man out to hunt exotic game, and they fall out due to the brutality of the wealthy man. The young man wanders into a hidden valley, a lost world where Crusaders have taken up a defensive position and think that they’re surrounded by Saracens. But the residents of the valley are broken into two factions in two cities, and they have an annual tournament instead of war. The young man falls for the princess of one of the cities, but she’s stolen away by the leader of the opposing city. And these threads come together as the Arabs find their way into the valley. Tarzan has his moments, but the greater part of the book is given over to the other characters.

So it blends several different genres of pulp: The jungle adventure, the lost world adventure. The prose is, of course, deep and learned in a way that gets thinner in time–learned but terse in the 1940s, a little learned but thinner in the 1960s, and then mostly unlearned but thick with unnecessary description and extraneous scenes in the modern era.

I have one or two more of these paperbacks in the stacks somewhere, and I’ll look forward to reading them maybe in the near term.

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Brian J. In Big Heapum Legal Trouble

April 11, 2025 Brian J. Noggle

A couple of weeks ago, I got a couple of calls on my cellular phone which I ignored. The computer-voiced, and not even AI-voiced, message indicated I was in heapum trouble:

Oh, noes! A agarbagemalgation of legal terms, no indication of who or what or an actual phone number, and an immediate need for me to act UNDER PENALTY OF LAW!

If you cannot trust that, what can you trust?

I blocked the number and then got the same crap from a different number which I then blocked.

But unknown number, unnamed legal team, and disembodied voice IS NOT GIVING UP.

Oh, morenoes! ESCALATION! They will send me more robocalls HARDER!

I kind of feel bad for the scammers in a couple of years, when the old people will have grown up with the Internet and will trust no one or no bodiless notification from the ether.

But, you know what? 1) How can you feel bad about those people, and 2) People will still have mush for brains in a couple of years and will fall for anything. Perhaps even I, should I reach geriatricity, might with a wavering and warbling voice, believe. But that last is most unlikely in either clause.

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