Author: Brian J. Noggle

Carryout in the Time of Corona

Brian J. Noggle

We’ve only done carry out two times in the time of Corona, and it was only for two orders. The restaurants were a combined 0 of 2 and on their way to a combined 0 of 3.

The first time was a week or so back when my beautiful wife went through the drive-through at Popeye’s and ordered a bucket of chicken, some biscuits, and a chicken sandwich. When she got home, we discovered an emptiness where the sandwich should be. We didn’t go back for a sandwich.

Yesterday, we ordered carryout from Zio’s, a small Italian joint that has kind of gone downhill in the last decade but still has good salad dressing that my wife favors. So she ordered four entries and salads because they had a special going on. They had to make some substitutions based on their stock–a lot of bowtie pasta substitutions. She discovered that they had left a ticket open when taking phone orders and had included someone else’s meal on our ticket, so she cleared that up, or so she thought.

My wife went to pick it up and to see how the apocalypse is coming along, but when she got home, we discovered that they had sent us only two entries, one of which looked incorrect (my sausage, peppers, and penne bow-tie pasta looked like it had white sauce on it instead of marinara). So she called again, and they offered to make it right, so we both went out into the wasteland.

We got there, and a row of cars awaited orders. A single worker came out after a bit, bringing orders, and she brought our corrected order–but as she walked away, we discovered it was still missing an entree. So she brought that out after a couple of minutes, and we could all sit down to dinner an hour later than we’d hoped.

I understand that restaurants are running on skeleton crews right now–the Zio’s employee told me she’d only just been brought back yesterday because of the demand–but their management had better realize that when people are working to support these restaurants through this time of uncertainty. But mistakes in the carry-out might create ill will that will linger longer than the coronavirus. And, unfortunately, on my part, the effect is cumulative. So I’m likely to remember each successive problem as worse than the first.

I feel worst for my poor wife. This rarely happens to me because I always check stuff in the drive through or at the point of pickup. Because I have a couple of picky eaters in my family with special ordering predilections.

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Yesterday’s Poem and Talking Back To Eternity

Brian J. Noggle

So we’ve been talking about allusion in our poetry studies. I compared allusion to memes which are all the hotness these days, and how that kind of is the same thing: A “new” work refers to an older work with which you are familiar, and you get a zing from knowing what the new work means invoking the old. A little line can include a lot of meaning when you understand the meaning behind those words, the larger experience of having read the work alluded to.

I said it’s kind of like memes because when you see one of the current Smudge the cat memes:

You recognize the context of the meme: The angry woman says something, perhaps incorrectly, and the cat weighs in with the truth, which is sometimes incorrect in its own way. But you get the punchline because you’re already familiar with the joke.

A meme is nothing compared to an allusion, though, in terms of power or the amount of information shared with the reference because poems and other works (such as the Bible, something often alluded to) have a lot more density and meaning to them.

So I explained to my boys, hoping it would stick that alluding to, say, Longfellow poem in a cartoon would have more depth and staying power than a mere mash-up or meme. After all, they’re steeped in the Internet from the last couple of years (since their self-awareness and receiving the school laptops), but they have no idea what I has a bucket means.

At any rate, then I mentioned a little bit about how poems sometimes completely respond to each other. Examples include Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold and the reply The Dover Bitch by Anthony Hecht and The Passionate Shepherd To His Love by Christopher Marlowe and the reply The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd by Sir Walter Raleigh.

Yesterday, we did a poem from Amoretti by Edmund Spenser:

One day I wrote her name upon the strand,
But came the waves and washed it away:
Again I wrote it with a second hand,
But came the tide and made my pains his prey.
Vain man (said she) that dost in vain assay
A mortal thing so to immortalize;
For I myself shall like to this decay,
And eke my name be wiped out likewise.
Not so, quoth I; let baser things devise
To die in dust, but you shall live by fame;
My verse your virtues rare shall eternize,
And in the heavens write your glorious name:
   Where, when as Death shall all the world subdue,
   Our love shall live, and later life renew.

Not exactly a reply, but more of a humorous update, today we have:

One day I sprayed her name upon the wall,
but then it got erased by blasting sand.
I tried again with neon pink in hand,
but later on they greyed my urban scrawl.
“You dope,” said she, “what are you trying to do?
Each time you paint my name, they’ll cover it,
and take away whatever little wit
you crafted there; your scratching won’t show through.”
“So what?” I said. “When I’ve used up my paint,
and both our names inside their little hearts
are blasted by the city’s cleansing men,
I’ll take some pride in knowing that the taint
of darker paints or sand-scorched building parts
are secret signs of joys that once had been.”

That’s one I wrote; it is, of course, available in Coffee House Memories.

I’m not saying that the Spenser poem influenced me, but I also have another response/update to it entitled “A Carved Tree (I)” which begins:

One day I carved her name into a tree

“A Carved Tree (II)” represents an update to the poem “A Carved Tree (I)” but not a reply or update of the original source.

Clearly, I was into sonnets and sonnet series/cycles when I was younger.

Unfortunately, that means that “O Capitan! My Captain!” will have to wait until tomorrow and not the anniversary of Lincoln’s Death. And I can mention to the boys that it appears in the movie Dead Poets Society. Although with the word Poets right in it, you would have to expect some poetry.

So poems can be a way of talking back to eternity. Memes, though, are merely talking back to today.

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That’s Not Exactly What It Says

Brian J. Noggle

Headline: DOJ says to ‘expect action’ on religious gatherings and social distancing regulation.

The news item comes from a tweet:

The Federal government is not going to act on religious organizations; it is looking to monitor lower governments’ actions, that is, state and local governments’ enforcement on social distancing as it regards to religious organizations.

No doubt this is in response to anecdotal stories about governments ticketing drive-in services and whatnot.

However, the oversimplification in the headline makes it sound like the Federal government itself is getting ready to crack down on churches and synagogues. But that is not my reading of it.

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Homeschooling, Week 4, Day 1: A Film Suggested By “We Didn’t Start The Fire”

Brian J. Noggle

So on Saturday, we had our discussion triggered by the Billy Joel hit “We Didn’t Start The Fire” as we tried to give them a concise history of troubles in Asia in the 20th century as well as boxers Billy Joel followed as a youth.

We got to the lines:

Buddy Holly, Ben-Hur, space monkey, Mafia
Hula hoops, Castro, Edsel is a no-go

And I told them about the film, briefly.

When it came time to watch a movie on Sunday, I found I have a two-videocassette set in its original cellophane wrapper. As it’s a three hour and forty-five minute movie, I guessed rightly that there would never be a time when I wanted to see the film more acutely than then, when we could watch part of it after church and then another part of it after chores.

I’m sure I knew at some point that it was subtitled “A Tale of the Christ”–I think I had a copy of the book pass through my hands in my eBaying days, but as it started with the birth of Jesus, I apologized to my children that it was apparently a Christmas movie instead of an Easter movie. However, the film ends on Good Friday, so it’s a Holy Week movie.

I called it on Facebook “uplifting Easter story of bloody vengeance,” sort of Gladiator but with Jesus, but that’s a little oversimplification, of course. But you can see how the former had its roots in Ben-Hur. Which must have been quite the spectacle in the cinema in 1959.

It was enough to keep my boys pretty rapt in it over both parts. Which is either a testament to the story or the big budget (for 1959) special effects.

One of my boys has a shorter attention span than the other, especially when it comes to old movies. He’s prone to wander in and out and then ask what’s going on instead of, you know, watching. The younger, though, will sit through almost anything with his father, such as National Velvet. Since my beautiful wife only tolerates old movies with me occasionally, I think I’ve found an old movie buddy to watch the to-view shelves at Nogglestead.

Come on, you had to know I have to-view shelves of VHSes and DVDs at Nogglestead that differ from the viewed shelves, ainna?

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Sign Me Up

Brian J. Noggle

Seen in a New York Post video that appears at the top of most of their stories for a while, and that I accidentally played somehow:

I’d say Sign me up except I’ve been a remote QA tester for, what, seventeen years now?

Although I keep my eyes on the job markets, and the listings are a little thinner than they’ve been in the past, and most of the listings are for automated testers and software development engineers in test, which are the magick elixirs to low-cost “quality” to which we’ve all become inured.

Also, note that this home-based worker’s workspace differs from mine in two significant ways: In mine, the pastry and baked goods case is never that full, and the videos reflected therein are heavy metal.

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Book Report: The First Four Years by Laura Ingalls Wilder (1970, ?)

Brian J. Noggle

Book coverThis book has an introduction to it written by Wilder’s attorney who explains the provenance of this book since Laura Ingalls Wilder did not publish it, and it did not appear until after Rose Wilder died. So it was published by the estate, the intellectual property machine that later came up with other “generations” of Little House books likely not envisioned by Laura Ingalls Wilder herself. And I can guess why.

This book is short, only 134 pages, and it outlines the first four years of Laura and Almanzo’s marriage, their hardships holding onto both homesteads Almanzo had, and the birth of Rose. The book does not go into details, and it does not include actual scenes, really, between the characters.

What we do get is a lot of bad things happening. Almanzo buys a lot on credit, and his crops fail due to new and inventive ways (a hail storm right before harvest, four days of extreme heat before harvest). He retrenches a bit, but at the end, their last shanty burns down. And the book ends. The Wilder family moves to Missouri afterwards, but On The Way Home is not considered part of the series generally.

I can see why and how this book was not included in the books Wilder published. The books through These Happy Golden Years are romanticised, where the men are generally competent–although some hints of less do appear–and the families generally come out okay at the end of the book. The earlier books in the series describe “Laura”‘s childhood through her marriage, and the marriage and her moving into her first house as a bride kind of cap that story arc. This book, on the other hand, does not really provide much of a coda to the series or cap it like the end of These Happy Golden Years did.

So I can see why she was content in her lifetime to stand pat on the books as she published them. Because they were uplifting and set a good example, whereas this book lacks that.

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Homeschooling Modern History through Pop Music Unit 2

Brian J. Noggle

Yesterday, we did spend about an hour and a half talking about "We Didn’t Start The Fire" and its representation of the middle of the 20th century and how great concerns that lasted for weeks were eventually distilled into a couple of words in a song (my prediction: if someone writes this for the 21st century, they’ll call it the “Wuhan flu” because of how it scans and how it can easily rhyme).

The boys, as is their wont (or won’t) tried to do the bare minimum required, so they often had basic answers for the lyrics that were technically correct but that did not indicate why those places or names were important in the 1950s or 1960s. And only once (Sugar Ray) in three possible did they list a band and not the actual historical figure or event (the other two being Berlin and U2).

But I’m thinking about continuing this with another unit based on “This WIll Be My Year” by Train:

It lists current events from certain years between 1985 and the first decade of the 21st century. It’s not as densely packed, so it should not take them a procrastiluctant two weeks to do it.

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Book Report: The House of Man by William A. Bone (1919)

Brian J. Noggle

Book coverThis book, like Red Plush and Black Beard, is a pamphlet-sized publication that I probably bought in a bundle. It’s subtitled “A Lecture”. Research indicates that the presenter was a humorist/poet who performed on the chautauqua circuit (see this and this where he was on the bill with Carrie Nation). Hey, I know what a chautauqua is! So although one might, at the outset, think it’s a piece by a clergyman and this represents a sermon or theological lecture of some sort, it’s not.

What is it, then? Well, I suspect an entertaining and potentially uplifting/inspiring way to pass an hour or so in a tent in the summertime.

His conceit is something out of Maslow’s heirarchy of needs or chakras: basically, mankind consists of four “floors”: The base needs, the heart, the intellect, and the soul, and he ties them to levels in the body. He then goes onto a little politics trying to stretch the metaphor, but it doesn’t work.

The prose is chock full of poems of the author’s own creation to illustrate the point. The poems aren’t half bad; better than the typical grandmother poetry, but they would have to be–he wrote and probably refined these poems for performance.

In the middle of the book, he goes into a riff about black churchgoers and a sermon delivered to them in dialect, which includes the word niggers, which will probably give modern audiences the vapors if not make them faint right out. Of course, it’s not racist–it’s a black preacher telling a black congregation to quiet down–kind of like its appearance in modern rap songs (but in this case, it’s a white author using it, so: vapors).

Wait a minute, Brian J., did you just type out the whole n-word? I did. It’s just six letters, not a magic talisman.

I’ve had to type it and a lot of other squicky words in testing content filters in my day job. And I grew up in the projects, so I’ve heard it. I might even have said it, but I cannot remember doing so and probably wouldn’t have as I was a small white boy in the projects, and saying THE BAD WORD in anger would likely have led to a beating. But that was in the 1970s, when Blazing Saddles was made. Somehow the word got worser since then, if you can imagine. A word. But I digress. And I used a derogatory term for Caucasians in this paragraph, and you probably went right over it.

He also uses the term mick in a couple poems, but, again, they’re Irish people calling themselves that. So according to modern accounting, I guess he’s twice as anti-Irish as Racist. But in neither case is he saying that blacks or Irish people are bad. Which is what racism and anti-Irishism is, don’t forget. Not just using words neutrally.

To be honest, those parts of the book in dialect, including the Black church scene and the two Irish poems, really bog the reading down as you have to try to sound out the phonetically spelled words. But, again, this was written not so much as a “lecture” but as a performance piece that had to fill an hour or so in a tent on a hot summer evening.

So it’s an interesting piece as much for what it is as what it says.

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Ziggy Suggests a Poem

Brian J. Noggle

Instead of saddling my children with the task of writing a poem to which a movie alludes (such as "Trees"), how about we turn to Ziggy?

The poem is "The Arrow and The Song" by Longfellow:

I shot an arrow into the air,
It fell to earth, I knew not where;
For, so swiftly it flew, the sight
Could not follow it in its flight.

I breathed a song into the air,
It fell to earth, I knew not where;
For who has sight so keen and strong,
That it can follow the flight of song?

Long, long afterward, in an oak
I found the arrow, still unbroke;
And the song, from beginning to end,
I found again in the heart of a friend.

It’s been a couple of years since I read The Song of Hiawatha. I should read more Longfellow.

And do you remember that distant past of forty years ago when mass-market cartoons would allude to literature for their gags?

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Book Report: Ziggys of the World Unite by Tom Wilson (1976) / Catss by Gross by S. Gross (1995)

Brian J. Noggle

Book coverBook coverI got both of these books this week from ABC Books, and I jumped right into them as I procrastinate starting the next of the Miss Marple novels in my omnibus. So let that speak to my character: I jumped right into the cartoons instead of naughty book.

You know, I haven’t seen Ziggy in the local papers lately. I’m not sure if that’s because his presence on the funny pages are just so much like the atmosphere that they don’t stand out or if the Ziggy’s syndication has contracted. But reading through a bunch of Ziggy cartoons at once led me to realize what a sad sack Ziggy was. Kind of an everyman, a bit lonely, a bit Existential. Still, I got a couple of chuckles out of the collection which is more than I can say for some of the multi-panel strips (such as Sally Forth) from back in the day. Some of the humor refers to then-current events, so maybe my boys won’t understand when they make off with this book, but, as I sad, I chuckled.

I was pleased to see that Catss by Gross was not of a type with 101 Uses for a Dead Cat; apparently, Gross is the name of the cartoonist and not the type of humor one finds within. Instead, it’s a number of one-panel cartoons featuring cats. Several of them appeared in The New Yorker, so it’s that sort of dry, sophisticated pictured wit. I got a chuckle or two out of the book; not as much as the volume of Ziggy, but enough to be pleased to have read it (quickly).

Now, enough procrastinating; back to the Agatha Christie. After I read the other comic book I bought at ABC Books this week.

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Must Be Some Kind Of Hybrid

Brian J. Noggle

So I’ve planted Elephant Ears by our deck ever since we moved to Nogglestead because my oldest son, as a toddler, liked them when we saw them on our rambles around Old Trees. Traditions come from such humble origins.

At any rate, I bought some of these this year:

Come on, isn’t that redundant? Why would you call them mammoth elephant ears instead of mammoth ears?

Are you afraid people will be disappointed the resulting plants are not wooly?

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Good Book Hunting, April 9, 2020: ABC Books Online Order

Brian J. Noggle

As I remind you, gentle reader, you can order books from the ABC Books. Or you will be for a couple weeks yet, before I end up having bought the entire inventory.

So I got the chance to unpack it and play “What did I click on last weekend?”

Apparently, I added these things to my cart:

  • Ziggys of the World Unite, a collection of Ziggy cartoons. Research indicates it’s still a thing, but I’m not sure if I’ve seen it in the local paper when I’m at the dentist’s office, which is the only time I see the local paper in its physical manifestation.
  • Whiskey words & a shovel by r.h. Sin, a collection of poetry by a poet with a lot of books at ABC Books.
  • Two plays by Eugene O’Neill, A Moon for the Misbegotten with Gabriel Byrne on the front cover and The Iceman Cometh with Kevin Spacey on the front cover. So you know they’re older plays but still relevant in New York.
  • Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony by Lewis Thomas.
  • Sartre for Beginners by Donald Palmer by the same Marxists that brought us Einstein for Beginners.
  • Catss by Gross by S. Gross. A collection of cartoons about cats, I guess.
  • The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science by Tom Bethell. I’m not sure if I’m going to read this first or encourage my oldest to read it to counter some of the notions he’s getting from pop culture and TikTok. Which he doesn’t have, but apparently, YouTube contains montages of them.

So the weeks are basically like this: On the weekend, I place my order; on Thursday, I get my order, and it’s like Christmas because I don’t know what I ordered; and then I cannot wait until the weekend to place another order for five or ten books whose name and subject matter I will remember by Monday. Redux.

I’ll be happy when the current unpleasantness is over, when we can cruise up to ABC Books on a Saturday afternoon to attend a book signing by a local author and pick up a couple of books plus the in-house author’s work.

Which is why I hope you’ll join me, gentle reader, in placing an order to help make that dream of mine happen.

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I Know The Feeling

Brian J. Noggle

British man runs marathon in backyard during lockdown

Not the insanity of running a marathon anywhere, but my exercise has been lacking in the past few weeks. A couple body weight exercises here and there, some basketball with my boys. But not a lot of discipline.

I have, however, discovered that the perimeter of the un-wooded section of Nogglestead is almost exactly one third of a mile.

We’re not doing road running here as my youngest is not ready for running on farm roads with no shoulder and cars passing at fifty or sixty miles an hour. I’m not sure I’m ready for that. Maybe he is ready but I’m holding him back. Regardless, it’s three laps to a mile trail running, so a little over nine laps to a 5k. I’m not ready for that yet–my slow pace on the mile above represents not only me slacking but me recovering from a bout of plantar fasciitis. So I’ll take my eleven minute mile over uneven terrain. And we will see what today brings.

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A Conversation At A Place Somewhat Like Nogglestead

Brian J. Noggle

WIFE: (reading a box label) Cartridges, Small Arms? Are those…
HUSBAND: Yes.
WIFE: Did you buy a lot?
HUSBAND: [laughs in Kim du Toitian] No.

Kim du Toit probably has more rounds in his pockets.

But one of the things at the start of the current unpleasantness was that I was comfortable with our food situation, but I felt we might be a little light on ammunition in the event of a larger breakdown. I mentioned this to my beautiful wife, and she said I should take care of that. So I did.

But do we have enough guns?

[laughs in Kim du Toitian] No.

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Ante, Upped

Brian J. Noggle

Schumer calls for up to $25,000 in ‘heroes’ pay for coronavirus workers

Sen. Chuck Schumer is calling for up to $25,000 in “heroes” pay for front-line health care and service industry workers as Congress pushes ahead with a new coronavirus crisis rescue package.

* * * *

Nurses, truck drivers, grocery store clerks and others are “risking their lives” to care for Americans amid the COVID-19 pandemic and economic shutdown, he said.

Ludicrous on the face, of course, but so was the $1000 checks or whatever we’re supposed to be getting to mail back to the government.

Oppose it, and you hate these workers, hey?

No word on politicos who are sheltering in front of microphones get “heroes” pay for continuing to not keep their social distance from news microphones. Heaven knows they count themselves amongst the heroes for voting to shovel Monopoly money into the wind.

Bigger corporations would be expected to foot the bill for the pay hike, he said, while the federal government would provide funding for smaller firms.

Oh, I see: Prices are going up. And you’re all fired.

Yeah, I see who cares about the working man. Not all heroes work on Capitol Hill, but those that do wear Ds.

On the other hand, I wonder how corporations will enjoy the double-whammy of lawsuits and additional expenses they’re voluntold by Democrats in Washington.

This just in: I opted to click Refresh like the fool I am.

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