Author: Brian J. Noggle

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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Unfortunately, Overreaction Is Not Innoculation

Brian J. Noggle

I have speculated, apparently elsewhere, that early bits of preparation for coronavirus, including actions that retailers and businesses took before Official Middle Class Stay At Home/Close Your Shop/Actual Workers, Keep Doing What You’re Doing orders came out was to protect the companies against lawsuits which would inevitably come in the 21st century for those businesses and entities who were the last to take extreme action.

Welp.

Walmart sued over coronavirus death by family of deceased employee

It won’t be the last.

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Coronavocations

Brian J. Noggle

Brian J., so how are you spending your new free time during the coronavacation? Are you learning a new skill? Catching up on old projects? Writing that novel whose first pages you most recently pecked out some years ago? Working on your renewed interest in poetry?

Well, of course not. Those would be productive uses of my time.

For the most part, my life has not changed. I’ve been a remote employee for a long time, so my working life has not really changed.

I do have my children home all day, but it’s almost like they’re on spring break or summer vacation. They have some school assignments and Zoom meetings with their classes, but it’s a lot of video game time, arguing that they should have more video game time, and some basketball in the driveway. I have been Coronaschooling them, though, even though they’ve got a handful of assignments from me which mostly serve as an excuse to watch old movies.

The only thing I can really say that I’ve been getting done, really, this coronavacation are:

  • Blogging more frequently.
     
  • A bit more housecleaning, such as the light fixtures, which I only do semi-annually.
     
  • Installing red lights outside our office doors for visual indicators that my beautiful wife or I are on the phone:

    Although, to be honest, these are little battery operated LED lights, so it’s not like I wired up electricity and switches for them ($11 for two on Amazon). I did, however, not use the big piece of double-stick tape that came with each unit, instead opting for Velcro like I did with the old hand-held games because a two-sided tape solution was going to make for a problem when the batteries died.

    Although it gives me another idea for a project: Taking down those old games, replacing the batteries/cleaning out the battery acid/testing those games.
     

  • Spending like a half an hour putting one of our cats in a box, photographing my cat jumping out of the box, and trying to get a relatively unblurry image so I can put text on it.

    I am not kidding. I tried the iPhone, I tried a digital camera, I tried a lot of things before settling on this one. Man, cats are fast when they’re jumping out of boxes. Also, when trying not to be put back into boxes.
     

  • Sleeping. No kidding; my FitBit sleep scores are edging into the 70s and sometimes into the 80s on Saturdays, which means eight fitful hours of sleep a night. I’m going to miss it when the boys go back to school next August and I have to set an early alarm.

So this is unlike my beautiful wife who is practicing piano, trumpet, and flute and continues with her normal self-improvement programs.

Within the next week or so, I am thinking about organizing the record collection at Nogglestead now that we have received our order of record dividers from Amazon. Perhaps I will paint the fence and deck and will do this in a short amount of time (unlike years past, where the endeavor took weeks or, well, to be honest, I’ve never actually finished painting the fence).

Or I can sit at the keyboard and continue refreshing blogs for the latest news or panicked speculation about the death toll of coronavirus or, more as time passes, the erosion of civil liberties and niceties that the coronareaction has brought.

I will leave it to you, gentle reader, to speculate as to which direction I will go. Or continue.

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Coronaschooling, Efficiency Edition

Brian J. Noggle

Today at Nogglestead, we’re doing some efficient homeschooling. We’re studying both the Spanish language and sex education reviewing the works of Shakira.

Eeesh, just kidding. If I wanted my boys to be educated like that, I’d send them to public school.

Although I own the album She Wolf, I really can’t watch the whole video. I get to a certain point, and I start thinking less about how flexible Shakira is and more about how many adductor muscles I would tear if I tried to do what she’s doing.

You know, a lot of time, I cross-post these gags on Facebook so people I’ve met in real life can see them, but I didn’t post this one as my Facebook friends list contains an awful lot of pastors.

Sorry, Friar, I don’t mean to shock you with some of my more earthy posts.

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Footnoting My Humor, Reducks

Brian J. Noggle

So there’s a thing going around Facebook where you are supposed to list ten jobs, nine of which you have done and one of which you have not. Gentle reader, as you know, I have held many, many jobs in my life as I have a degree in English and Philosophy, and that leads one to a vagabond life of chasing an extra quarter an hour until you trip into a career. Or it did for me, anyway.

At any rate, I cannot do a Facebook share-your-personal-information schtick without subverting it, so I posted this:

Let me explain.

These are job declarations in Job Control Language, one of those inscrutable but efficient programming languages that run on Big Iron, that is, mainframes and whatnot.

You know, I’ve never programmed in that language, although there’s probably still plenty of jobs for programming Big Iron around. My rejoinder on Facebook is going to be that it’s the 21st century, man. But the last statement is not a job, it’s the invocation of a job library. Or something.

I know a couple of old programmers who might get the joke. Strangely enough, my sainted mother had to run JCL commands at her last government job, so she might have gotten it. But probably nobody else.

It’s so obscure that it made me laugh out loud, though. Sad!

Also, I want to remind you, gentle reader, why I do not play in these cut-and-paste-games on Facebook:

(Last image courtesy of Glenn Reynolds’ Facebook feed.)

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Book Report: Red Plush and Black Beard (Condensed) by Marguerite Higgins (1955)

Brian J. Noggle

Book coverThis is a condensed, pamphlet-sized version of a longer book (which is $300 on Amazon if you search via Bing but $8 if you search on Amazon?) about Marguerite Higgins’s experience in the Soviet Union. It clocks in at 16 pages, and I probably got it in a bundle of chapbooks/pamphlets for a buck at a Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library Book Sale some time ago. But I’m counting as a book I read regardless of the length.

At any rate, you don’t have to be a Russiaphile to know what she finds: Brutal architecture, primitive living, but a resilient and resigned people.

But enough about this little publication of the Good Reading Rack Service. It leads to a little wondering about the Good Reading Rack Service itself. The book has no price markings; what was the Good Reading Rack Service? Internet searches yield no history of the company but a boatload of entries from their series. Was it teaser giveaways for bookstores trying to sell the books themselves?

Also, how about Marguerite Higgins herself? A woman war correspondent who covered World War II, the Korean War, and Vietnam along with being the bureau head in Moscow when she wrote Red Plush and Black Beard. Wow, that’s more interesting than what she had to say about Moscow in the middle 1950s.

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