Author: Brian J. Noggle

I Guess I’m Taking Another Paper

Brian J. Noggle

So I mentioned that I subscribed to four papers recently. Previously, I’ve been taking a couple of local weeklies, and I’ve let my oldest read them after I finished. He’s been a little unimpressed with them.

But he likes The Wall Street Journal. A lot. And I can see why: It’s a national paper with national and international news, business reports, and feature writing every day instead of a couple pages of news stories including little informal columns covering small towns and churches and perhaps a column to read every week (Jim Hamilton or Larry Dablemont). So he gets the paper off of the driveway and reads it before I do most days.

And it has inspired him to start his own paper.

He’s starting high school this fall. By this age, I had worked for two middle school papers and had put out at least on dot-matrix-printed newspaper, the fan letter for the official Cricket Fan Club that I mentioned here (with other Cricket pictures and memories here and here).

I already have the first copy of the South Street Journal on my desk. It has stories about Mixer, Microsoft’s game streaming service, closing down as well as some recycled jokes. Not a lot of news, though, as Nogglestead is pretty quiet of late. So it’s more of a Reader’s Digest than a Wall Street Journal.

And it’s better than spending all of his day on video games and YouTube compilations of YouTube videos. Although I am pretty sure some of the time he spends on the laptop working on his articles he’s really cruising Instagram. Just like a real journalist. Except I guess they use Twitter.

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Not Exactly Small Businesses

Brian J. Noggle

Airbnb was like a family, until the layoffs started:

On May 5, after almost two months of working alone in his San Francisco apartment, Brian Chesky, Airbnb’s chief executive, cried into his video camera.

It was a Tuesday, not that it mattered because the days had blurred together, and Chesky was addressing thousands of his employees. Looking into his webcam, he read from a script that he had written to tell them that the coronavirus had crushed the travel industry, including their home rental startup. Divisions would have to be cut and workers laid off.

“I have a deep feeling of love for all of you,” Chesky said, his voice cracking. “What we are about is belonging, and at the center of belonging is love.” Within a few hours, 1,900 employees — a quarter of Airbnb’s workforce — were told they were out. [Emphasis added.]

LinkedIn cuts 960 jobs as pandemic puts the brakes on corporate hiring

Microsoft’s professional networking site LinkedIn said on Tuesday it would cut about 960 jobs, or 6% of its global workforce, as the coronavirus pandemic is having a sustained impact on demand for its recruitment products. [Emphasis added.]

Wow, those are some huge tech companies. I can’t imagine how it would take that many people to do a tech company, but then again, I’m not a millionaire or billionaire, so it’s clear that the tech companies I’ve worked for never were that, erm, successful.

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It’s A “I Stabbed Myself With A Fork” Kind Of Monday

Brian J. Noggle

Really, I did; this morning, when emptying the dishwasher, I did the cutlery first (as always). In my haste, though, I started closing the drawer before the last fork fell into place, which meant that the drawer hit the bottom of the fork. As the fork was still in a non-horizontal position, its tines were caught my finger and rammed my finger into the counter above the drawer, and I ended up with a couple tines a couple millimeters in my left forefinger.

I tossed the fork in the sink and headed for the first aid, leaving a bloody trail behind me.

But I got it stopped all right–puncture wounds are easy!–and went back to the kitchen, where I found that the fork had gone into the sink and down into the garbage disposal, almost making the morning a two-fer of folly.

Although “Stabbing a man with a fork” was not really on my bucket list, I’ve done it. And you can bet I’ll use it to start conversations.

With strangers.

Because one thing on my bucket list is to get a reputation befitting Glen from Stan Makita’s Doughnuts.

So far, so good.

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The New N-Word

Brian J. Noggle

Roger Stone calls black radio host Mo’Kelly a racial slur during interview:

“I don’t really feel like arguing with this Negro,” Stone could be heard saying.

* * * * *

“Thirty years as an entertainment professional, twenty of them in radio. ‘Negro’ was the first pejorative uttered.”

So Negro is a pejorative now?

That’s going to retcon a whole bunch of racism, ainna? I mean, in the early part of the century, that’s how you referred to African Americans when talking about Race. Of course, then the preferred term was Black, capital B, then Afro-American, then African American (and Black with a capital B was kind of looked down on as an almost pejorative, and now we’re back to Black with a capital B. And if you use or ever used the wrong one (or, perhaps, if you are also part of a targeted minority like Trump supporters or conservatives) at the time when only one is right, you’re an instant Racist and/or White Supremicist.

Definitely a trick to attack the wrongthinkers. I wish I could say clearly a trick, but I’m afraid it’s not transparent to a lot of people.

Meanwhile, let’s examine some other New Racists who used the new bad word:

  • James Baldwin:

    To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.

  • W.E.B. DuBois:

    The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife, this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self.

    (Note that he also says American which doubles the thoughtcrime probably.)

  • Malcolm X:

    The liberal elements of whites are those who have perfected the art of selling themselves to the Negro as a friend of the Negro. Getting sympathy of the Negro, getting the allegiance of the Negro, and getting the mind of the Negro. Then the Negro sides with the white liberal, and the white liberal use the Negro against the white conservative. So that anything that the Negro does is never for his own good, never for his own advancement, never for his own progress, he’s only a pawn in the hands of the white liberal.

  • Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.:

    But I mean as far as the average Negro today, he knows nothing about Africa. And I think he’s got to face the fact that he is an American, his culture is basically American, and one becomes adjusted to this when he realizes what, what he is.

  • George Washington Carver:

    We know nothing about Africa, although our roots are there in terms of our forbearers. But I mean as far as the average Negro today, he knows nothing about Africa. And I think he’s got to face the fact that he is an American, his culture is basically American, and one becomes adjusted to this when he realizes what, what he is.

  • Langton Hughes:

    If you want to honor me, give some young boy or girl who’s coming along trying to create arts and write and compose and sing and act and paint and dance and make something out of the beauties of the Negro race-give that child some help.

  • John Howard Griffin, author of Black Like Me:

    You place the white man in the ghetto, deprive him of educational advantages, arrange it so he has to struggle hard to fulfill his instinct for self-respect, give him little physical privacy and less leisure, and he would after a time assume the same characteristics you attach to the Negro.

  • Booker T. Washington:

    There is a class of colored people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public.

Come see the inherent systemic racism, and by that, I mean the system of finding racism where it’s not.

Also, is colored people a racial slur when people of color is not?

It would is so hard to keep track and to keep in Right Thinking these days. Which, I suppose, is the whole point.

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Not Exactly A Valentine’s Gift

Brian J. Noggle

So someone thought “You Are My Sunshine” in a music box would make a romantic gift of some sort.

I suppose that’s really sweet if you’re only familiar with the first verse, which is the happy romantic one.

The rest, though:

I expect many people have only been exposed to the first verse in that French’s Mustard commercial from twenty thirty almost forty years ago.

And parents of a certain age who sang the first verse to their children.

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Book Report: Fully Empowered by Pablo Neruda (1962, 1995)

Brian J. Noggle

Book coverI picked this book up shortly after 100 Love Sonnets because I couldn’t think of another time where I’d be more primed to read more Neruda. As I have mentioned, I read a bit of a middle 1970s translation of Neruda that was, erm, not very literal–it inserted 1970s slang into the work where Neruda had not put it. 100 Love Sonnets, by my survey of the original Spanish on the left-facing pages, was very close. I hoped this volume would be, too.

Oh, but no.

It’s not as bad as the glimpse I had earlier (which is not this book; I looked for “I ain’t got no truck with death” specifically). This book does not throw slang into the mix, but it does use some synonyms for direct translations where I wonder how much license the translator took and why.

Also, the poems are longer, a little more free-flowing, and of varying topics, sometimes of a political nature, that makes the poetry more modern than 100 Love Sonnets. Which means I like it less to begin with.

At any rate, I probably did catch the book at the right time. I probably wouldn’t think anything that Neruda wrote would equal 100 Love Sonnets anyway, so it’s best to have read them almost back to back. Now, of course, undoubtedly two or three other volumes of Neruda’s work will catch me by surprise when I go looking for something to read. Or, worse, I’ll stumble across a second copy of this, translated with a different title, in a couple of years and will accidentally re-read these poems again without knowing it.

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Somewhere, Trog Is Smiling

Brian J. Noggle

Aaron Rodgers and Danica Patrick break up after more than two years together.

Me, too. Hopefully, now he can focus on football.

Aaron Rogers, I mean. Not Trog. He is from Wisconsin, so Trog will focus on the Packers, which is more than football. The Packers is life.

But that’s not why Trog celebrates, of course.

(Explanation to everyone but me: There once was a Wisconsin-based blogger Troglopundit who had a schtick that he liked Danica Patrick. I’ve posted about it from time to time even after his blog ended. Because it allows me to post news about the comely Danica Patrick under the pretext of doing it “for Trog.”)

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Ms. K Doesn’t Care How Old You Feel, Old Man

Brian J. Noggle

However, she notes:

And you know what? It might be that many years again until I see the biggest geek sensation of 2016. When I come across a DVD set at a garage sale. Or while scavenging an abandoned farmhouse After.

Brian J., why did you take a screenshot of the tweet instead of embedding it? you might ask. Because, gentle reader, if there’s one thing I’ve learned in 17+ years of blogging, it’s that embedding something means that I won’t see in 2031 what I embedded because Goowitterple will have retired the format, so I’ll have no idea what I was planning to watch in 2050-something.

Which, of course, won’t be useful anyway if there’s an After, but I’ll still be able to use the DVDs I scavenged as a rudimentary mirror. How did I get so old? I will ask myself.

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The Older He Gets, The More He Sounds Like Leonard Cohen

Brian J. Noggle

David Gilmour has a new song, “Yes, I Have Ghosts”:

He’s sounding a little more like Leonard Cohen these days, but not the older Leonard Cohen.

Of course, I hear parallels that aren’t there, so he probably does not.

He has long been my favorite member of Pink Floyd, and I was listening to his solo album About Face today, when I remembered he had this song out. So I got it for the cost of a couple of planned shipping delays from Amazon.

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I Am Not A Player Or A PUA

Brian J. Noggle

and I say that I’ve come to appreciate a wider beauty in women as I’ve gotten older, but….

I don’t think I’d ever have called that woman a dog.

What? She’s hugging the aforementioned dog, and the advertising company cropped it so there would be a pretty girl to catch your eye instead of another dog? HUSH YOUR PUPPY!

You know, I am not sure what principle determines that I am the target audience for canine vocalization cessation, but I see ads for this a lot. I live out in the country; I don’t care if other peoples’ dogs bark, and if my dogs bark, I want to hear what they have to say. I haven’t clicked through to see if the treatment is for your dogs or the yappy dog in the suburban next yard that prevents you from sleeping, but, brother, that isn’t here.

UPDATE: I hit Publish on the post, and I go to another Web site, and:

A different not-a-dog and her dog.

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Book Report: Blood Rules The Executioner #149 (1991)

Brian J. Noggle

Book coverThis book is the first part of a trilogy called the Medellin Trilogy. So it includes appearances by Phoenix Force and Able Team, two spin-off series, as they work together, but separately, to deal with the narcotics traffickers who were bad guys of the era, before everything went back to the Nazis. Come on, there was a James Bond movie and a Tom Clancy novel/movie in the same stripe.

At any rate, Bolan goes to Columbia to bring some pain to the cartels in the area; one of the other teams goes to Panama to take on the strongman leader who’s also a drug conduit (and whose name is not Nanuel Moriega); the other team goes to Miami to deal with the local dealers there and to maybe find a high-powered assassin for one of the cartels. Bolan does his thing playing the cartels against each other, the team in Panama encounters some high powered mercenary talent that one of the team members knows from his time in the Israeli Defense Forces; and the team in Miami links up with an anti-drug crusader who provides them with tips on dealers and factories, a member of the team gets involved with her on a personal level, and in a plot twist that I saw coming from forever away, she is the asssassin who takes orders directly from the leader of the biggest cartel!

So we end with a cliffhanger: The guy involved with her disappears!

At any rate, I checked my shelf, and it looks as though I have the first and the third books in the series. Which kind of matches the experience I had with a lot of fantasy novels that my kid brother, an impressionable Marine back then, gave me when he was in the Corps. He ended up with a lot of incomplete trilogies, and he gave them to me for Christmas one year. So I’m not entirely sure how most of the Forgotten Realms sagas ended. Which led me to a dilemma: do I order the middle book or not?

Well, I discussed it with my beautiful wife, and she encouraged me to order it. So I did. I paid like $5 for an Executioner novel, and suddenly I’m getting further from my goal of reading all the ones I have. Ay, well. I will probably finish this three-book set before I forget what’s going on. Which is always a danger with boilerplate books like this.

I’ve also looked ahead a bit at other books, and it looks as though the trilogy thing for Executioner novels did not become a normal staple in the years ahead.

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Internet Cattin’

Brian J. Noggle

I don’t know why I thought of this joke whilst sitting on the pool deck watching my youngest jumping off the diving board.

But I did.

I know, it requires knowledge of Roman history as well as understanding that large cats are called chonkers on the Internet for some reason. To be honest, I could explain the former to you better than the latter.

I know, I could have used Vittles instead of Victuals, but for some reason the slang variant did not come to mind immediately come to mind even though Tender Vittles was a cat food brand back in the day. But I am a snob.

At any rate, I hope you chuckled. Or, as the kids of the Internet say, LOLed.

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In Other Words, It Succeeded

Brian J. Noggle

Emergency grant program for small businesses is out of money:

A pot of money meant to help prop up small businesses during the coronavirus pandemic has run out of funds.

The Economic Injury Disaster Loan Advance program, a federal measure offering grants of up to $10,000 to entrepreneurs, has ended after reaching the $20 billion funding limit allowed by Congress, the Small Business Administration announced Saturday.

In other words, the program successfully distributed the funds allocated to it by Congress. And by the end of June, no less! Very efficient.

Good job, now back to your other tasks, everybody.

(Link via the Springfield Business Journal, who shriekingly titles the story Emergency grant program runs out of cash.)

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Book Report: William Partridge Burpee: American Marine Impressionist by D. Roger Howlett (1991)

Brian J. Noggle

Book coverYou know, he’s a marine impressionist because he painted seaside towns and whatnot, not because he went to Parris Island. As I come from a family of real Marines, I feel the need to make this distinction early. Not that you would have been confused otherwise, gentle reader; I know you’re discerning. But I wanted to again bask in the reflected glory of my relative who served whilst I studied poetry at the university.

At any rate, Burpee was a late 19th and early 20th century painter from Maine who lived/showed in Boston for a while. He seems to have come from some money, and he worked for a time as a bookkeeper before chucking it all for his art. And he did well, showing in Boston as I mentioned among some of the other notables of the time, including Sargent and Monet. He doesn’t have a Wikipedia page, if you can believe such a thing possible. And you can find his work for sale at a thousand dollars a throw, which means of all the art books I’ve read, his is the most likely for me to acquire to hang alongside my garage sale Renoirs.

At any rate, the work is okay. A lot of landscapes, but some figures, and as you know, I like figures in my Impressionism.

I have mentioned that the text with these books tends to run in two ways: One, you have the critic-themed text talking about the influences and comparing the artist to other works, often looking at an artist’s evolution and using a lot of cant. The second tends to the biographical in nature, and I prefer that because reading a bunch of name-dropping text making comparisons and contrasts that I won’t get bore me.

This book, on the other hand, does both: At the start and end, we get the comparisons, but in the middle, Burpee takes a trip to Europe at like fifty, and he travels through France, Italy, and whatnot for two years. We get a lot more detail about his life at that time, but then we’re back into the other. So a bit whip-sawed, but not bad.

So I’m glad to have read it and glad to have written this review so I can some time in the coming years look back at it and say, “Oh, yeah, that guy.”

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That’s Not Funny

Brian J. Noggle

We have, on occasion, shared knock knock and other jokes at the dinner table, and most of them are not especially funny, which makes us laugh the harder.

I mean, my oldest used to memorize them from joke books and retell them. Then, my youngest, who did not grasp humor really, would try his own, and we’d get something like:

Knock, knock.
Who’s there?
Boo.
Boo who?
Boo YOU!

That brought tears to my eyes, and I could not stop laughing, because that has an actual knock-knock joke punchline, and he did not use it.

Friends of ours related how their children made up their own non sequitur punch lines that also involved giant chickens in some fashion; at Nogglestead, the giant chickens at the door were doing crazy things and ruining your property values. These, too, punch above their actual humor in how much we laugh at them.

Last night, I debuted a new one I wrote, well, last night:

Knock, knock.
Who’s there?
Rookie law enforcement official on my first no-knock raid. Oh, dammit!

Nobody laughed, so I guess that’s another one to not send to Reader’s Digest.

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This Weekend’s History Lesson

Brian J. Noggle

We’re spending time at home again, so we have had the opportunity to watch a couple of films over the weekend.

Such as this history lesson:

Which is not much of a history lesson at all, given that it’s purportedly set in the protodynastic period in Egypt which runs like 3000 B.C., when two actual Egyptians bore the title King Scorpion, and the Rock plays the last of the Akkadians, which is is out of time since the Akkadian empire did not rise until about 2300 B.C., seven hundred years after, and the “Akkadians” are assassins, which seems to be patterned on the Order of Assassins from roughly 1100 A.D.

So, that is to say, it was not a very good history lesson at all but rather a lesson not to get your understanding of history from the cinema.

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