To be able to say "Noggle," you first must be able to say "Nah."
Reviewing the 5 Most Painful Green Bay Packers History.
The top slide, not to spoil it for you, is the 2003 game against the Eagles where the Packers gave up a 28 yard pass on a 4th and 26th in the fourth quarter. You can still say 4th and 26th in Wisconsin and people will shake their heads and mutter.
Kind of like saying Don Denkinger.
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After I listened to Augustine: Philosopher and Saint, I thought about picking up some of the primary texts I have lying around. Instead, I picked up this science fiction book because it was on the shelves where I thought I had last seen the Augustine, and it has a little bit of religious theme to it. So almost the same.
In it, a doctor on the run joins a journalist on a trip to End of Nothing, a planet way out of the way that features Vatican-17, a research center/church built by robots a thousand years ago where they find room for themselves amongst the human partners in the endeavor. The robots, inspired by their human creators, are looking for one true faith and have created a super computer they call the Pope to crunch the data provided by many alien races and human “listeners” who are mystics or projectors who travel to other places outside their bodies. Over the centuries, factions have developed between those who favor promulgating the faith and those who seek knowledge as the stepping stone to true faith.
When one of the listeners visits “Heaven”–a location that matches common but not biblical depictions of heaven–everything comes to a head as the rival factions vie for power.
You know, when I read classical science fiction–not the modern stuff, and not so much the late Cold War US vs the Soviets in Space–I experience a sense of wonder that I don’t get from other genre fiction, including fantasy. Anything can happen, and I feel transported in a way I don’t with men’s adventure paperbacks, thrillers, or even historical fiction or literature. So I should really read more science fiction–it’s not as though I lack it on my shelves–but somehow I end up grabbing a different kind of book, and I lose that sense of wonder.
Perhaps I should read more science fiction. Please, someone, remind me of this in a week or so.
So, yeah, recommended.
I haven’t read much Simak (City and Mastodonia in the last decade), but he’s a fallen Wisconsin boy (fallen because he was born in Wisconsin but ended up in Minneapolis). In researching this post, I did learn that I bought two copies of Mastodonia over the years (one in October 2010 and another a year later in October 2011). So I’ll have to be careful not to pluck the second copy from my shelves in 2029 and read it again. Because, by that time, I expect to have about 20% more books on my to-read shelves than I do now. Please, someone, if you see me picking Mastodonia up again, remind me.
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Clayton Andrews is an example of multiclassing:
Clayton Andrews doesn’t fit the stereotype for pitchers. He keeps it loose before he pitches, he’s 5 feet, 6 inches tall, and he plays in the outfield on his off days.
“I don’t really have time to be just sitting around and not doing much,” the Milwaukee Brewers prospect said.
Although most baseball players are told to concentrate on one position when they reach high school, the left-handed Andrews was encouraged to express his two-way skill set throughout his career.
Rick Ankiel, on the other hand, is an example of dual-classing:
Ankiel was a pitcher with the Cardinals from 1999 until 2001, when he found himself unable to throw strikes consistently. After trying to regain his pitching form in the minor leagues and briefly returning to the majors in 2004, he switched to the outfield in early 2005. For two and a half years, he honed his skills as a hitter and fielder in the Cardinals’ minor-league system. He returned to the Cardinals on August 9, 2007.
I know, I’m an old school gamer. Kids these days only know multiclassing.
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Sometimes, when something favorable appears or happens, I am prone to saying “Happy birthday to me.”
The source, like so many of the catchphrases I spout, comes from turn of the century beer commercial that I saw over and over again when watching hockey games on television with my beautiful wife.
To be honest, repeating catch phrases or brand taglines from things my children have seen is so very unsatisfying.
And although I might not be Golden Corral age yet, I am getting close to that young lady is cute age.
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Apparently, Facebook thinks I have just turned Golden Corral age.
To be clear, I am not yet Golden Corral age. Although I have been known to eat at Village Inn during the happy hour.
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Meghan and Harry reportedly barred from using ‘Sussex Royal’ label going forward:
According to the Daily Mail, the two had hoped to leverage “Sussex Royal” into not just a new website but a “global trademark for a range of items and activities, including clothing, stationery, books and teaching materials” and a new charitable organization with the name. The pair began using the term in early 2019 after their branch-off from Prince William and Kate Middleton’s household, Kensington Royal.
Kind of how you got Trump steaks, Trump University, Trump Homes, et cetera.
However, Meg and Har’s venture would be really classy and not mockable because they’re right-thinking folk.
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The night before last, my wife read something to me that had the word “bungalow” in it, and I said that you really don’t hear about bungalows except in California.
Then, yesterday, someone linked to and quoted an article about black families leaving Chicago, and the first paragraph is all like:
Hardis White, 78, could hardly wait to break out of suburbia.
He dressed in a flannel shirt, jeans and a Bears cap, strode out of the rectangular bungalow he shares with his wife and daughter and folded his tall frame behind the wheel of his silver Nissan sedan.
So I was all like, wut?
So I read up on bungalows and learned more about the architectural style. There’s even a Milwaukee bungalow style, which I’ve undoubtedly seen a bunch of.
But I guess I read a lot of detective fiction set in California where vics, perps, and sometimes detectives live in bungalows. Which is why I was mistaken.
But a reminder that sometimes this little Internet thingy can be a force for education and not just political poo fights.
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I’m actually not sure if that’s true or not, as I did not click through on this ad:
I get it: it’s stock photography, and it doesn’t really offer anything but a sort-of pretty face to draw your attention.
But, still. I put some effort into the stock photos I select for various things (which are few and far between). But I am not a bot.
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After finishing Luther: Gospel, Law, and Reformation, I was very pleased to find that I owned this audio course about Augustine by the same professor. This course, though, was in the original shrink wrap which means I paid full price for it or at the very least paid The Teaching Company directly for it when it was on sale. So I leapt right into it.
The series is only 12 lectures, half the size of the Luther series, and it follows the same pattern with biography, historical context, and then theology, albeit abbreviated by the brevity of the series. Which, I guess, is redundant since both those words share a root.
The lectures include:
The course emphasizes the influence of Platonism on Augustine and, hence, a lot of Christian thinkers. It shares a lot of content with the Luther series, of course, where the thinkers overlap. More than the other series, though, this book reminded me how much of Augustine’s writings I have scattered amongst the Nogglestead library and made me want to read the translated primary sources that I have available.
For something to read between men’s adventure paperbacks, I would guess.
At any rate, another course that I’m glad I listened to. Which means I should change up topic matter to keep the theology from becoming repetitive and stale.
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Amid the actual economic repercussions from a disease outbreak (Cathay Pacific flags “significant” drop in H1 profit, capacity cuts due to coronavirus, Singapore downgrades 2020 economic forecast amid coronavirus outbreak, Japan manufacturers remain pessimistic as coronavirus fears grow, etc.), academics remind us that climate change might someday have a cataclysmic economic impact:
A shocking new study says extreme weather events caused by climate change could result in an economic recession “the likes of which we’ve never seen before.”
The research, published in Nature Energy, notes that financial markets are not taking into account the risks that catastrophic events such as floods, droughts and other extreme weather events will have on the economy.
“If the market doesn’t do a better job of accounting for climate, we could have a recession — the likes of which we’ve never seen before,” the study’s author, University of California, Davis accounting professor Paul Griffin, said in a statement.
Griffin added the amount of “unpriced risk” in the energy market is significant, noting this is what caused the Great Recession. “Right now, energy companies shoulder much of that risk. The market needs to better assess risk, and factor a risk of extreme weather into securities prices,” he explained.
You know the only way to avoid the economic impacts of climate change? Economic impacts–taxes and new economic incentives/subsidies/fees–that benefit climate change activists and governments.
Let’s just see how well humanity does after the current actual threat before we move onto ones that we make up.
(Coronovirus links via Instapundit.)
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SFGate.com has a gallery of Longtime celebrity couples then and now, although the pictures are actually presented Now followed by Then. But I do not want to quibble with that.
What I quibble with is the “longtime” designation. Sure, some of the couples have been together since the 1980s or 1990s, which is qualifying as a long time these days (he asserted, limping after his most recent triathlon class). But so many of the longtime couples here only became a couple during the last part of the Bush 43 administration.
Maybe that counts as a long time in Hollywood or in San Francisco. However, I go to church, which regularly celebrates 50th, 60th, and 70th wedding anniversaries. So 13th anniversaries of couplehood is a good start.
Since I mentioned it, here’s “Foreplay/Longtime” by Boston. Which runs almost eight minutes, but the intro part (“Foreplay”) is almost two and a half.
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I read The Long Winter in December, and I’ve pretty much determined I’m going to read the rest of the series by the end of the year, so here we go.
Well, sort of–I had shelved These Happy Golden Years out-of-order, so I actually read a couple chapters of it before I saw in the front that I was going out of order, so I set that aside and jumped into this book.
This book sees Laura get a job in town for a couple of weeks that will provide some money to help send Mary to college. Mary goes to college; the town develops a little more. Winter is not so bad the next year, but to alleviate cabin fever, the town decides to have weekly town meetings called Literaries that start out with a spelling bee and end with a blackface minstrel show (OUTRAGE!!!!!!!!!1!). Well, I would be outraged, except, as you all know, I am guilty of reading the banned literature, so I’m too guilty to be outraged.
The book ends with a lead-in to the next book, I can tell you as I read the first bit of it: Laura takes a teaching position at a small settlement 12 miles away (which is about the distance I traverse several times a day to deliver and pick up my boys from their school in the city). In the latter half of the ninteenth century in North Dakota, though, this was quite a distance, and she would live with a family in the settlement and not see her family–or her new beau, that Wilder boy, very often.
The book continues to evolve as the character ages. In this book, she pays more attention to clothing and fashion than in other books, and the subtle content changes over the course of the series to reflect the age of the character. I appreciate the effort and effect.
Thanks to this, I’ve learned the origin of the term “lunatic fringe”: It originally meant bangs (which Laura wants) before Teddy Roosevelt turned it into a political insult (source).
I also felt a connection with the book in that Laura receives for Christmas. She has a 1883 blue and gold copy of Tennyson’s Poems. I myself have a brown copy of the same book that was inscribed by the then-owner in 1893. So Laura Ingalls and I practically owned the same book. Although this was not her copy obviously. Not only do I have a copy of this volume, but at some time I happened upon a second and gave one to my mother-in-law.
At any rate, as I mentioned, I’ve already started These Happy Golden Years, so I shall probably finish that at some point in the next couple of weeks. I’m sure you can’t wait to hear my twee reflections on the next children’s book I plan to read.
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So we attended an archery meet this weekend, and a kind of gawky looking kid came in, and I said to my beautiful wife, “I just walked in the door.”
This thought proved delightful not only to my wife, but also brought forth a belly laugh from the teacher whose son was shooting on the same lane as the lad.
I was a thin, gawky young man. Here I am at eighteen at my high school graduation party in May 1990.
I was only spared the heavy glasses because advances in contact lenses meant they could now (that being 1988 or so) correct severe astigmatism and because, for some reason, my sainted mother sprung for said contact lenses when I was in high school. We never were very flush with money, so I cannot ever understand why she sprung for them. Were they something I got in the summer when I went to my father’s home in Milwaukee and got all my dentistry and medical things taken care of under the aegis of his union benefits? That’s more likely.
At any rate, a commercial for Kia that aired during the Super Bowl features football player Josh Jacobs wondering what he would say to his younger self:
As this is a football player, the advice is to have faith in the football.
I expect my message to myself might be different.
Have faith, young man. Although you cannot put any weight on now no matter how much you exercise or how much protein powder you choke down, eventually you will be able to put on muscle if you want. In thirty years, you could go from an adult medium to a 2 XL, you can spend lots of time in a gym, and you can listen to heavy metal whilst doing so. Which could very well make you assume some of the characteristics of the very young people who torment you now.
You can marry a beautiful woman, have a couple of good kids, and pursue an interesting and lucrative and well paid career and yet be vaguely unsatisfied with it. You might spend much of your time restless, hoping for something better, kind of like you’re rushing through these teen years. Instead of focusing on tomorrow and the next best thing and growing up, you should spend today with your brother and your mother and your family because someday too soon they won’t be with you any more.
You know, I could give my younger self the same advice I give my contemporary self, and I’d probably heed it just as little.
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You know, WSIE, the former jazz station and now smooth jazz “The Sound” from Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville, is not afraid to mix in some interesting musical choices. In addition to Sacha Boutros, Janet Evra, and Ashley Pezzotti (along with other favorites like Hiroshima, Keiko Matsui, Cindy Bradley, Al Jarreau, and so on).
Sometimes, they mix in a little Stevie Ray Vaughn and Steely Dan (and Donald Fagen solo). So they go a little towards blues rock. Today, they were all:
BTO, “Looking Out For Number One”.
You know, it’s bluesy enough to fit in with the sound. But some of us are old enough to consider BTO to be Album-Oriented Rock (later known as Classic Rock).
Fun story: I saw BTO in concert once. I have already mentioned it once, but I haven’t told you the whole story. BTO was the early afternoon act on one of the side stages at Summerfest in the early 1990s, and Weird Al was scheduled after them. So I stood on a bench amidst a bunch of aging bikers and didn’t think anything of it. I danced poorly, probably thrashed a bit, and had a great time. Then, after BTO finished, the bikers meandered off, and the Weird Al crowd of thirteen year olds mustered in, and many of them demonstrated Attitude brokered from being away from Mom for the first time, and they were getting a little restive. So I bailed out on Weird Al, the only chance I’ve had to see him live for nothing but the price of a Summerfest ticket, because I was either going to have to deal with abuse from thirteen-year-old tough guys or might end up in a scuffle with said tough guys, and even if I won (not a sure thing as I was a hundred and twenty gangly pounds at eighteen), I would have lost. You know, it probably wouldn’t have been like that, but I tend to extrapolate every conflict into physical violence as I lack the tact to defuse a situation.
Wait, where was I? Oh, yes, listening to WSIE. Which has returned to its more normal playlist of Diana Krall and Al Jarreau whilst I’ve been typing this and wondering exactly how bad I come off relating the BTO anecdote en toto. Not Toto. That’s another band entirely, and I’m sure WSIE could play some selections from them no problem.
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Logically speaking, none of these squares have buses; as a matter of fact, the image only contains a single bus spread over four squares.
I know, I am reading too much into it, but I sometimes still get a little bit anxious when trying out captchas. Sometimes the images are blurry, or the text is ambiguous as to what I’m really looking for.
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Spotted on Bobby Crais’ Facebook page:
I know the feeling, brother. This is why I need a new castle.
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Forget that other castle for sale.
I want this one instead:
A castle tucked away on 2,400 acres, visible to the outside world only from water or air, is on the market for $24.75 million — more than twice the asking price of any luxury property for sale in the St. Louis area.
It’s being touted as a once-in-a-lifetime chance to own a private estate that includes a furnished castle with a conference center and an 18-hole golf course, according to the listing by Cushman & Wakefield real estate firm.
Union Pacific has for more than 30 years owned the nine-bedroom, limestone mansion with a gun tower used in the Civil War. The railroad used it as a corporate retreat, but in 2018 decided to close it to cut costs.
I’ve read about this property from time to time in history books and whatnot, but I never thought I’d have the chance to own it.
Which depends upon me winning the lottery. But, still, like buying a lottery ticket gives you one chance where you had none without it, the property being for sale gives me a chance where I had none when it was not for sale.
Well, no, I guess I’ve always had the chance of societal breakdown leading me to becoming a regional warlord and using it as my headquarters. So maybe I have two chances now.
You can view the property listing here.
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Gentle reader, as you know, I like to spend my evenings in a recliner with a good book whilst a “fire” burns in the fireplace and smooth jazz plays (although not currently WSIE as the AirPort Express gave up the support ghost).
The other evening, a song came on as my beautiful wife entered the room, and she said, “Rise?”
“Chuck Mangione, ‘Feels So Good’,” I replied. And we repeated the exchange pretty much verbatim until I explained that it was not, in fact, Herb Alpert, and then she heard it.
I mean, I was able to authoritatively say Chuck Mangione even though this song, like “Hungry Heart” by Bruce Springsteen and “Baker Street” by Gerry Rafferty, was one that I’d heard in my youth and hazily remembered. Unlike “Hearts” by Marty Balin, this instrumental (radio edit) did not have lyrics that I could have used to look it up on the Internet were I so inclined.
But I still stream WSIE on my computer, and I heard the song a couple of times, and I remembered it and thought, It’s that song. After a couple such instances, I thought, perhaps I should learn its name since I might not get the chance again. So I paid attention when it came on again and looked at the name/artist text on the live stream.
Which is why I could with certainty that I don’t often demonstrate say, “Chuck Mangione, ‘Feels So Good’.”
How good it feels to you, gentle reader, is up to you.
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My beautiful wife and I took a date weekend to St. Charles this weekend that was originally scheduled as a polite fiction to visit my aunt but ended up being superseded by her memorial service. When a friend from my martial arts school was scheduled for his first professional BJJ match in St. Peters (the next suburb over from St. Charles), I asked my beautiful wife to schedule a trip back to St. Charles for us.
We stayed at the same AirBNB where my family and I stayed on the nigh of my aunt’s memorial service, which allowed me to pick up the suit that I had inadvertently left behind. We also took advantage of Lyft to get too and from an Italian restaurant so that we could share a bottle of wine during the meal, and I said to her, as we awaited our car, that I was going to miss services like Lyft when they failed, and I likened some of the new companies/services to the dot-com era Web sites that were going to change anything.
A headline today underlined what I said to my wife: Uber CEO says ‘era of growth at all costs is over’ after losing $8.5 billion last year.
It’s a good thing I got my suit back now, as even AirBNB is losing money ahead of a planned IPO.
I have to wonder what will happen if AirBNB goes belly up, and a lot of its “hosts” suddenly find themselves overextended in property that they no longer can make payments on.
You know what would be great? The burst of the dot-com bubble and the mortgage meltdown all at once!
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Spotted on a door of a shop on Historic Main Street in St. Charles:
An envelope taped to the shop door that says Confidential for Owner.
I cannot imagine what the envelope might contain. A note about the sale of the building with information about the new owner for the lessee? Information about the local protection racket and rates? A thank you card for a great gift purchased within?
Although it would have been very, very easy to have taken it and read it, I am not the owner, and I ain’t got no truck with no MacGuffin.
But taping something with that label to the door seems like an easy way to make sure that the confidential note does not get to the owner.
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