To be able to say "Noggle," you first must be able to say "Nah."
Trump vows to ‘permanently pause’ migration from poor nations in anti-immigrant social media screed
But if they go beyond the words “President Trump,” I would be surprised.
Let me look:
Brief quotes from what was undoubtedly a much larger post leavened with the usual tropes of why he is a bad, bad man.
I would say, “Do better, AP,” but I am not sure they can at this point.
Link to the President’s post? Of course not. Don’t want to platform or normalize him, I guess.
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I mentioned that when the Hittler family moved out of the Siesta Manor Mobil(e) Home Park–and when their trailer was moved–a table was left behind which must have been stored under the trailer but forgotten. Of course, we grabbed it right away as we were still using a small apartment-sized table in our trailer.
Not long after we got it, we got a Welsh Corgi puppy from the woman who lived next to Pixie and Jimmy N whose dog had gotten pregnant from some random dog walking by. We did not take as good of care of Bandit as we should have–my mother worked all day, and we were at school, so a high-energy puppy had lots of time on his hands to gnaw on things and engage in all sorts of high-jinks even when chained in the small kitchen for the day. Oh, how wrong we did by that dog until my sainted mother took him to the shelter over an hour away and cried on the ride home. I would like to say I’m a better person now, but a guilt-inducing dream last night of a negligently injured cat indicates I fear I am not.
You know, I’m not sure when our family stopped using that table–probably when I was in high school, when my sainted mother would have had many opportunities to inherit another. Or perhaps it was after college, when we moved to the house my aunt owned in 1995 if she had a better table for us. I know that I got the Hittler table when I moved into my own apartment–I’d thrown it atop my possessions loaded in the cargo van I used to move, and when I had to brake hard, it slid forward and hit the whiplash-protective top of the driver’s seat.
When I got married, my beautiful wife had a nicer table which we used in our homes in Casinoport and in Old Trees, so it was taken apart and stored.
It makes appearances every decade or so when we have people over. In the basement of Old Trees, I set it up to have some friends over for games after our boy had gone to bed upstairs. At Nogglestead, we had a very populated Thanksgiving, probably fifteen years ago, when I set it up. But it’s been sitting in the garage since. For some reason, I stored the legs downstairs and the top in the garage until I cleaned out the store room–which I guess was just last year, but it’s been a long year.
But with the guests coming over, out it comes.
The kittens (who are 3, 3, and 2 years old now) wouldn’t mind if I kept it in the living room all year. Put together or incomplete or maybe made into a kitten jungle gym!
But after today, it will go back in the garage for another decade, maybe. Or until one of the boys moves out and needs a table which is likely to be far sooner than I really want.
At any rate, when I call it “The Hittler Table,” people hear Hitler. Which is appropriate because they are pronounced the same. But in the 1980s, Hitler was just a guy who lost a war and not the secular Devil he is now. How much of that was due to the safety of using Nazis as the only safe villains in the thrillers starting in the 1980s? Discuss.
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Unlike The Last Christmas Show, this is a Christmas novel, one I bought in September 2024 to spread among my stacks so when the season rolled around I would be able to find a Christmas novel to read as is my wont.
This short book (181 pages, but the print surface of them is small) is a fantasy novel wrapped in a frame story. In the frame story, a father of a family whose children have become teenagers tries to get them to participate in the family Christmas traditions, but they resist, so he tells them the story that is the bulk of the book. In that story, a young man with little Christmas spirit (much like the family in the frame story) cuts across a wood in the snow so he’s not late home falls into the snow globe he’d received as a gift. Within it, the meaning of Christmas is lost; he comes upon a city with the craziest enforced holiday cheer and consumerism (lots of puns about Christmas traditions abound, making it not unlike Rickshaw Riot in that way). To get home, the boy must befriend a young lady whose relation lives in the castle on the hill who provided the spirit of Christmas but has given up. And, doncha know it, he saves two or three Christmases that way (in the snow globe, in the boy’s own family, and in the frame story by serving as an example–and it is the dad from the frame story who had this adventure in the first place).
I mean, it’s nice and all, what you expect from a Christmas novel. I guess it didn’t take off–it didn’t become a series as so many other titles like it did–and it did come with a CD sampler of Mannheim Steamroller Christmas songs. It was sealed, and I started to unseal it, but I realized it was a sampler and had no new music on it, and I already have most or all of it on CD, so I preserved the collectibility of the book. Which is not likely to be that collectible at all. Apparently they’re five to ten bucks on Ebay.
Still, by getting started early, I might get in more than one Christmas novel this season. Or I’ll clutter my reading with the rest of the Ben Wolf books I have. Maybe both.
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Springfield is seeing less homicides this year compared to years past
To be pedantic, that should be fewer.
How many fewer? Looks like we’re down 18%. From 12 to 10.
Man, this is why I moved down here.
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Rest assured, gentle reader; this is not my annual Christmas novel–but it does have Christmas right in the title, so it seemed a timely read. When I picked this book up eight years ago, I must have wanted to save it for a season such as this.
At any rate, this is partially a picture book which explains its large size, but it’s basically the story of Bob Hope’s Christmas tours to various bases between World War II and Vietnam. As I mentioned, it has lots of photos of the celebrities that he brought with him and photos of different environments/bases where they performed. He includes a number of gags and quips, often self-deprecating, and the final chapter is actually a transcript/script of the final show he put on–although they were not probably that big of a deal at the onset, by the 1960s, a film crew came along and cut the shows down for broadcast television in the U.S.
The tours took place over Christmas and were often whirlwinds where they would hit multiple bases in multiple countries and sometimes on different continents and ships at sea. The troupes put on several shows a day and then had formal dinners at night with the brass or with royalty (Hope and crew often visited the King and Queen of Thailand when in Bangkok).
You know, I kind of give Bob Hope a bit of short shrift in my memories of the comedians who were old when I was young–I remember his later television specials in the 1980s, but that’s about it. Contrasted with George Burns, who had contemporary movies out at the time, I guess. And I’ve watched Burns’ television shows and read many of his books, so he seemed younger and more vital. But I’ve seen some of Hope’s movies, and it’s easy to overlook what he did for troop morale in three wars (in some situations, for different generations of soldiers with the same family). And the shows were broadcast on television. I cannot think of a contemporary who had the same impact–Gary Sinise, maybe?
Oh, and researching this post (reading the Wikipedia entry) indicates that this might have been the last television program, he continued on USO tours up until the first gulf war.
I have another Hope book around here probably very similar–I Owe Russia $1200 is somewhere–so I’ll have to pick it up sometime soon.
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I picked this book up after reading The Turquoise Lament because I have a twee goal of reading all of the Ben Wolf books I own if not this year then before I find myself in Davenport, Iowa, again.
When I read his Tech Ghost series, most recently The Ghost Pact and The Ghost Plague, I said that his plotting and pacing seem to have been heavily influenced by video games. This book absolutely leans into it. In it, a techbro CEO who steps all over the little people, which is everyone else, pushes ahead to launch an immersive online video game universe over the concerns of a very attractive underling and his brother’s objections. He straps himself into a pod for the launch, and he’s then in the game with a billion other players. Loot boxes from the sky drop initial classes, and he lands a good one–until a woman comes and steals his class information, leaving him alone to take on the only thing left–a rickshaw driver. He becompanions a space octopus NPC and goes on a series of sidequests as he tries to find a way out.
He comes to learn that the woman who stole his class is actually the woman who tried to stop him in the real world. A programmer/analyst, she built in some extra features into her avatar for troubleshooting, but it seems like the AI in charge wants to keep them in the game forever–or to kill them, which might or might not be permanent.
The authors clearly had a lot of fun with it. They make puns on a variety of video game properties, make light of a lot of the conventions, and because of the game world’s child-friendly rating, they get to throw in a lot of fake-swearing where the bad words are replaced by innocuous equivalents.
So a fun read, a little more smooth than Wolf’s earlier work. As he has a co-author here, I’m not sure if it’s the other author’s influence or if his own writing has improved. Probably a bit of both.
That said, I’m not sure how fast I want to delve into other 300+ page books in the series. Fortunately, he probably won’t have too many more available next October, and its novelty might reset by then–and I’ll remember I had a good impression from this book.
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…this might be the heist of the century:
Police: Suspect breaks into Circle K, steals only beef sticks
Round up the usual Keto suspects!
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For the second time this autumn, I found myself needing to repair a floor lamp at Nogglestead.
In the first instance, the parlor lamp which has a main upwards pointing light and a downwards pointing reading light failed as its single switch, up by the top lamp, bent or something and was touching something else which made the metal turn knob hot to the touch (not, fortunately, electrified). It took me a couple of trips to Lowes, which has a small section of basic wiring, sockets, and switches for lamps. I made this a little difficult on myself by not realizing the difference between a three-way socket and a three-terminal socket. One handles the bulbs that change the brightness, and the second is a socket whose switch controls the two different bulbs. Well, I learned something, but I bought a new floor lamp while the ordered three terminal socket came via that long-unused online store.
But I fixed the lamp anyway, which was nice because I am thinking about rearranging the living room upstairs after the holidays so I can read books while listening to records, and I planned to use the former parlor floor lamp there.
But! The floor lamp beside the reading chairs downstairs had an issue. Its plastic socket cover, which anchored the socket to the tube, broke. So the lamp and its heavy glass shade were almost freely swinging. My beautiful wife mentioned it was loose, but that probably meant it was only partially broken at that time, but one evening, it broke completely and was not attached any longer.
I took it apart and this was the assembly:
Basically, a hollow stud bolt which has threads at both ends and threads inside bolts into the tube. Another stud bolt goes into this and through the housing that holds the shade. Another nut and washer hold the housing tightly to the tube. And the socket housing fits onto the smaller stud bolt (and the socket itself goes into the plastic housing where the wire connections to the socket will be kept, hopefully, safe).
Except: The stud bolt does not fit into the commodity socket. It’s not standard. The bolt is too large.
Were it too small, I could have cheated with some tape on the threads. Actually, it looks like it has a set screw But to fix this, I would have to special order a different pair of stud bolts. If they’re available. If I could measure the sizes I would need, but I don’t have any calipers, and I checked Lowes’ Web site for pricing. And let’s just say that’s not in the cards for the nonce.
So most of it will go into recycling and whatnot. And apparently I have even more old lamp parts to collect in my garage.
Fortunately, though, I have light to read from the spare lamp I had from the parlor. Which did have a standard size bolt to connect it to the replacement socket.
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What to expect at the Mayor’s Tree Lighting Holiday Show in Springfield:
The Mayor’s Tree Lighting Holiday Show, a long-standing tradition of Springfield’s holiday season for nearly two decades, returns to Park Central Square this year.
Yes, the guy who wrote the piece is apparently 24 years old. So almost 20 years would be long-standing to him.
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Ah, gentle reader. My beautiful wife were for some reason talking about trains the other day–taking them to California or something–and I started running down a list of trains whose names I remembered.
When I was in college, lo, those many decades ago, I used to take the train from Milwaukee to St. Louis on holidays. The Hiawatha Service would take me from Milwaukee to Chicago, and I would take the Ann Rutledge from Chicago to Kirkwood (since renamed the Missouri Ridge Runner. It continued to Kansas City, and stopping in Kirkwood was more convenient for pickup in the afternoon going downtown. On Sunday mornings when I was returning north, I would catch the Texas Eagle coming out of Texas since it would get me to Chicago earlier.
And I remember the name of a couple of the other trains leaving Chicago: The Empire Builder heading to Seattle, the Empire service heading to New York, and the Sunset Limited heading to Los Angeles. If you believe the review of The Christmas Train last year, I apparently also remembered (then) the Capitol Limited and Southwest Chief.
You know, every once and again, after watching an old movie or reading a book like The Christmas Train, I think how neat it would be to take a train excursion, say from St. Louis to Chicago to Seattle to San Francisco and back. But, holy cats, a small compartment on the Empire Builder alone would be somewhere in the excess of $1000 or even $2000–and the other segments probably as much.
It’s a picturesque thought, but dayum, I’ll drive that first.
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Holly has a problem with Amazon’s new LLM:
Just in time for their Black Friday deals, Amazon has rolled out the most annoying, aggressively anti-customer thing I’ve ever seen. If you aren’t seeing it today, you will soon.
Every search results in Rufus, their AI, opening a chat window with you that’s part of the browser window, so your pop-up blocker is no help. You cannot turn Rufus off from within Amazon. If you beg it to stop, it’ll tell you that your browser settings are wrong.
If you check those and try again, it’ll tell you that only Customer Service can help you.
If you contact Customer Service, as I did, they will suggest that you stop shopping on the website and only shop on your phone.
Really think about that.
I wouldn’t know about that. I haven’t placed an order on Amazon since the end of August. Which is likely when they ended the “family” Amazon Prime thing, where I could order under my beautiful wife’s Amazon Prime account. It had been in place for many years, and it made Amazon a default for when I needed something, often trifling but sometimes more expensive.
But that all ended. And like most streaming providers, they’re throwing ads into things you watch unless, I guess, you pay even extraer. So never mind all that. I can order on other Web sites, and I can go to department stores for what I need. Amazon has lost but a couple thousand dollars annually in revenue from me, and perhaps they’ll make it up in raising prices and adding fees to everyone else.
I guess I am lucky enough to be a cranky old man who lived before the Internet became, pardon my French, merde (know that I mispronounced it in my head while typing this, and pardon me). I don’t need Amazon. I don’t need Spotify. I don’t need Kindle. I got along fine before them, and I’m getting along fine without them.
Although I still set Spotify to play a radio station based on an artist some nights, I’ve again come to recognize that the options are limited and they tend to put artists whose “radio” stations I’ve asked for onto other radio stations I ask for–Miles Davis, for example, will have Chuck Mangione and Herb Alpert, for example. I’ve also come to remember that the playlists that they come up with are rather limited in scope and duration–so if I listen to it more than once, I am heavy into repeats. I mean, I can stream actual radio stations for free, and I have a pretty extensive media library. The tradeoff of selection for convenience is starting to tip back away from the convenience of Spotify.
At any rate, I guess I’m coming up on three months Amazon-free. No reason to think that will change any time soon. Even with Christmas coming up.
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The new Springfield-Greene County Library Bookends magazine/calendar is out, and it lists the categories in the 2026 Winter Reading Challenge:
Categories include:
Looks like a cinch, although Genre New To You might be challenging–what have I not read? I hope I don’t have to turn to modern women’s monster erotica. Also, 500+ Pages might bog me down depending upon what I select. But books are all so long in the 21st century that this won’t necessarily be that difficult. Although I find modern thick thrillers to be boggy as well.
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So my beautiful wife prefers toothbrushes with smaller heads on them, and we had or have a couple left from when my boys were boys, so she grabbed one of them when replacing her last brush.
It’s a little pseudo-crayon with a suction cup base.
So I have “hidden” it by sticking it onto a vertical surface around the sink, including putting it onto the mirror, when tidying up the basin area.
Of course, this will remain amusing to me for far longer than it will be for her–which might have been exactly once, yesterday.
This also might be what eventually breaks the camel’s back and why I might be rooming with Lileks in 2026.
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Nico’s Kitty Translator. You record a cat’s meow (or anything) and get a humorous “translation.” At least, I think they’re funny.
$.99, and guaranteed to sell at least two copies. Like my other apps.
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I bought this in September, and I started it in the car not long thereafter since my primary driver still has an audiocassette player in it. But it’s getting long-in-tooth (210,000 miles, something unimaginable in my youth when my cars crapped out at ~120k miles) and it won’t be too long until its failure is just another thing on the pile of things. And my trip to Iowa in October involved a rental car, and base unit newer vehicles don’t even have CD/DVD players stock, so my great accumulation of these CD and DVD courses might prove to be a poor investment. At least until I downgrade the audio and video options in a new vehicle.
At any rate, as you know, I’m a bit interested in Christian church history, so I’ve listened to a number of similar lecture sets (The History of the Bible: The Making of the New Testament Canon in 2019 and Lost Christianities: Christian Scriptures and the Battles over Authentication, both also by Bart D. Ehrman). Given that realization (driven by searching my own blog), that explains one of the knocks I had as I was listening to the series: One, the professor was kind of repetitive, saying the same things a couple of times in a lecture (basically) or the same thing in different lectures. I thought maybe he was padding things out to fill the required time like Mr. Howe, an assistant professor at Marquette when I was there, admitted doing during the semester where I booked 18 hours of classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays–8 to 5pm with only fifteen minutes between classes–and his was the last. Ah, I’d enjoyed his asides until I learned he felt compelled to add them to keep us there the whole class period. I don’t even remember what he taught–I should get a set of my transcripts just so I can remember all the things I learned and forgot.
At any rate, here’s the course list:
Welp, I missed one, but I’ve already shelved them, so it will just have to be a mystery which.
So you can see that a lot of the material overlaps with the other courses. And three lectures on Christian anti-semitism? Three lectures on the persecutions? That’s a quarter of the total course, and it might have been too much.
I’m not saying I didn’t get anything from it–probably some insights into what some of the non-canon Christian writers were saying, and a couple of things–the turn from the charismatic, smaller communal church bodies expecting to see Christ return in short order into institutions that had staying power, or how the Roman church came to dominate through its administrative experience and relative wealth, but mostly this could have been an 18-lecture or maybe even a 12-lecture course without losing much.
Maybe I need to remember, too, that I’ve listened to a lot by this fellow and maybe be careful about getting more from him. But probably not.
And Mr. Howe, he probably made it to Dr. Howe at some point. And might well have already retired. How old am I, again? I’ve got a birthday card signed Josephus. Is that worth anything?
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Stephen Green on beef prices:
I try not to look at the price when I pick up ribeyes at Sam’s Club — but it’s less often than it used to be.
Friday night used to be steak night at Nogglestead. First, ribeyes, and then when the ribeyes went to $17 a pound, strip steaks. Which are now more expensive than ribeyes were.
What he does not mention is that Sam’s used to package ribeyes three to a pack and strip steaks four to a pack, and both are now sold in packs of two. Whether it’s to keep the sticker price down or to keep people from buying too many at a throw, neither is good.
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Maybe I should slow down on watching the DVDs of old black-and-white Dragnet shows I bought this summer. After all, having watched one in October and another earlier this month, I’m going to run out of novel things to say about each disc.
This one includes a couple of commercials–instead of Chesterfield cigarettes, we get a couple of L&M cigarette spots as well as a Post Cereals spot. So those are certainly novel. And I noticed and thought worthy of mentioning that not every show starts out with the “This is the city….” montage, but maybe half of them do–with Friday narrating over it some trivia and “I’m a cop.”
This disc contains:
Again, enough variety to keep you wondering what might come on next week episode. Most, again, adapted from radio plays.
Maybe I should start watching to see how often, or even if Jack Webb says, “Just the facts, ma’am,” which was kinda the catchphrase associated with him in my youth. Maybe not.
And watching this program, coupled with the fact that my nineteen-year-old has a professional job where he dresses in one of my suits for a variety of events, makes me think I should haunt thrift stores looking for sport jackets. I’ve fallen away from going Grant over the last couple of years. Maybe I should get back to it.
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Students explore vintage computers in UW-Milwaukee’s specialized Retrolab
A specialized lab at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee is giving students the chance to experience computing history firsthand, from late 1970s machines to early 2000s technology.
The Retrolab, housed in UWM’s History department, serves as a space where people can explore and interact with vintage computing technologies that shaped the digital age.
“It used to be that (technology) historians were able to assume that people would know what an Apple 2 or Apple Macintosh or IBC PC was and that they could write about the differences between those and how the computer technologies evolved since the first personal computers in the 70s. And that is just not the case anymore with today’s undergraduate students,” Professor Thomas Haigh, a history professor and chair of the history department, said.
Apple II, you damn kids. Apple II.
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In an article about some Kennedy or another copying that other Kennedy entitled Jack Schlossberg is shamelessly ripping off JFK Jr. with his new political campaign, some “journalist” haw-haws:
Jack Schlossberg is channeling his tragic uncle John F. Kennedy Jr. in his new campaign for Congress.
The official campaign website for Schlossberg’s run in the Democratic primary for New York City’s 12th district features the Kennedy family scion, 32, riding a bike through the streets of Manhattan while wearing a dark suit and backward cap with a backpack.
The photo is incredibly similar to ones of his famous uncle, who died in a crash of a plane he was piloting in 1999.
Schlossberg even pushes up his his right pant leg like Kennedy often did while riding his bike through the city.
Or, I guess, indicate you’ve never ridden a bike in anything other than official biking gear.
A lot of us out here west of Manhattan know that if you’re wearing pants with loose cuffs, you need to roll up or push up the pants leg on the chain side of the bike, or they’ll get caught in the chain.
Most if not all of my jeans’ cuffs from 1977-1984 looked like they’d been chewed on because I did not always do this.
To say this is imitation is maybe a stretch.
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The FTP client didn’t sqwauk at me when I uploaded the cover image, so I thought maybe I’d not written a book report on this book before. But, no, I did read it and report on it in 2011–but in the days before I posted cover images of the books (because I wanted to link them to my Amazon Associates page, but a couple program changes later, and I’m too much of a backwater to participate). I bought this, a second printing copy, in September, and I dived into it to serve as a contrast with the other video-game-based fiction I’ve been reading lately.
I’ll give you the synopsis from 2011 because I’m to lazy to resynopse:
Within this book, McGee reunites with a former acquaintance he had known when she was a teenager. Now she’s a well-to-do heiress to a comfortable living from her treasure-hunter father, and she’s sailing around the world with her new husband. She thinks her husband is trying to kill her, so McGee flies out to Hawaii. He decides she’s just unnerved and not in love with her husband and that, hey, she’s all grown up now and they’re perfect together. So she’s going to sell the boat the newlyweds have been sailing on and live with McGee.
So McGee returns to Florida, but other events lead him to wonder. An intermediary tries to get an expedition going based on the lost research of the treasure-hunting father, which leads to the realization that maybe the husband is trying to kill her. Or make her think she’s going mad.
So the story arc is going to Hawaii, meeting the girl-now-woman, convincing her she’s not mad and that her current husband is not the man for her after all. When McGee returns to Florida, an acquaintance comes to him and tries to determine if McGee is the person who came into possession of the treasure-hunter father’s notes and plans for further expeditions–the man had accompanied the treasure-hunter father, McGee, Meyer, and others on a promising but incomplete recovery operation before the father died. McGee doesn’t have the books, but when he starts looking into the offer, he discovers two things: That the people handling the estate might have left them out of the estate, and second, that the man who married the daughter is probably a psycho with a long list of murders behind him in “accidents” which have befallen people whom he thinks have wronged him.
MacDonald goes to Pago Page (American Samoa) where the girl and her husband were going to take the boat, and, honestly, I remember that the girl dies in one of the books, but it’s not this one or, apparently, The Lonely Silver Rain. When they arrive, McGee foils the plan to have the allegedly suicidal woman “jump,” and the husband dies in a cinematic fashion–the book came out after the first, and only, movie adaptation (so far) of a McGee title (Darker than Amber, 1970)–so maybe MacDonald was writing for that. His work never went totally Hollywood like Robert B. Parker’s did.
The book contains all the usual McGee-esque things: Asides lamenting industrialization/pollution/despoilation of nature and soul-searching about aging. A sad coda indicates that McGee did not marry the rich daughter as he thought he intended, as she found someone more her own age, a psychiatrist from one of her therapy programs for recovering from her ordeal.
I flagged a couple of things. One, an ackshually where Meyer is hospitalized with a viral infection, so they’re pumping him full of antibiotics; an ackshually about how many horses and other livestock an acquaintance has on five acres (too many); and a quote from Meyer about how sickness makes you turn inward and how you wonder if any other things are related to the progression of your own mortality. I also looked up a musician MacDonald mentions (he mentions Eydie Gorme in A Tan and Sandy Silence) just in case I might look for the artist’s records at book sales and whatnot. But Julian Bream is an English classical guitarist, so LPs might be thin on the ground in southwest Missouri.
So, yeah, a good read. With depth lacking in a lot of modern works, even the doorstoppers. And I’m happy to read more MacDonald–I still have a couple of paperbacks of his that I have not yet read in my stacks, and I’m always happy to revisit McGee books. Which I have to buy again to read again as it is not my wont to dig through the books on my read shelves to revisit things. The MacDonald books are altogether somewhere, buried by a mishmash of more recently read things. I will try to pigeonhole this one somewhere near them and to determine of I have a first printing of the book already. Probably not.
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