Brian J. Noggle – Page 2 – Musings from Brian J. Noggle

I Am A Book Accumulator

May 22, 2025May 22, 2025 Brian J. Noggle

Patrice Lewis posts Book hoarders? Oh please and links to a repost of a 2017 article 10 famous book hoarders.

Lewis tut-tuts the definition of book hoarder as someone who has over 1,000 books (she and her family have about 1,750, she estimates).

I don’t include hoarder on my scale of book ownership. I tend to think of the scale this way:

Normal person: Up to, what, 20 books? Although this normalcy is fading.
“Likes books”: A couple hundred. If they’re arrayed by color or to match the room, she’s a “decorator.”
Collector: A couple thousand, but carefully selected and thematic.
Accumulator: Up to 15,000, but far more eclectic.
Professor: 15,000+.

We’re definitely in the “Accumulator” range. I have 3000 books logged in my laggy Access-based desktop database from the year 2000 and more than that unread/unlogged; my wife has maybe five bookshelves of books plus two built-ins; my boys each have two bookshelves; I have a bookshelf full of practical books in the garage; and we have a couple boxes of children’s books for the next generation in the garage as well. So maybe 9,000 or 10,000 total.

The linked article mentions one of the “hoarders” accumulates 175 to 200 books per year. Ah, gentle reader, that is three or four book sale bag days for me.

The “hoarders” in the article also have dedicated libraries, and that’s still a dream of mine. Man, when we moved to Nogglestead lo, those many years ago, we had enough room to space out and organize our library. But that was several thousand books ago.

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What “Journalists” Know Just Ain’t So

May 22, 2025May 21, 2025 Brian J. Noggle

I hammer on and on about this, but:

The state of Missouri does not have a Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV).

License offices are independently operated, often by charitable organizations, and all licensing fees go to the state’s Department of Revenue.

“DMV” comes from the pop culture, where it’s slang for the kind of thing Missouri license offices handle, presumably prevalent in California and/or New York, where movies and television shows have been made historically.

I have to be pedantic, since so much in the news just ain’t so.

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You Can Take It To The Bank

May 21, 2025May 21, 2025 Brian J. Noggle

In a story about Barry Diller’s new autobiography, the New York Post provides illustrations.

Ay, who needs AI to garble things up when we have humans who can hallucinate things for free?

(For the uninitiated and the young amongst us, note that the image is from Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F, a 2024 Netflix thing, not the first film. Or a real movie, actually.)

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I’ve Already Seen Caddyshack

May 21, 2025 Brian J. Noggle

Mattel, TriStar to Develop Film Based on Whac-a-Mole:

With films based on “Masters of the Universe” and Matchbox toy cars already in development, Mattel Films is adding a live-action/animated hybrid movie based on the classic game Whac-a-Mole to their production slate with TriStar as its partner.

“Whac-A-Mole is more than a game — it’s a laugh-out-loud battle of reflexes that has brought joy and a little chaos to families for five decades. We’re beyond excited to team up with TriStar Pictures to turn the iconic experience into a wild, action-packed ride for the big screen,” Mattel Films president Robbie Brenner said.

Whac-a-Mole was first created as an arcade game by the Japanese company TOGO in 1975, challenging players to hit toy moles that popped out of a series of holes with a soft mallet before they fell back down. The game became a cultural touchstone, often used to refer to futile tasks. Mattel acquired the trademark to the game in 2008 and has released a home version with moles that light up instead of popping out of holes.

I used to joke about making movie treatments for board games and candies.

I’m not joking any more.

So, what will the inevitable PETA protests add to the bottom line? Or will animal rights kinetic activists derail production? Time will tell, but I will probably miss the story and the movie.

(Link via the Springfield Business Journal‘s morning Today in Business email newsletter. Which, strangely enough, is the only email newsletter I read, and I’ve not been a subscriber to the paper version for probably ten years.)

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The Mind, It Wanders

May 19, 2025 Brian J. Noggle

So whilst the pastor was delivering a sermon about city and country mindsets based on a reading in Revelation, my mind wandered afield instead of hanging on every word, and….

Hey, that’s my godson as the acolyte. We don’t actually see him that often these days–they are a split Lutheran/Baptist family, and although the kids are going through the Lutheran confirmation program, they mostly attend the Baptist church. I hope he’s doing well in his moral instruction as our souls are linked in the accounting, or so I think. Maybe that’s only Catholics or something.

At any rate, he needs some direction from the pastor; he looks like he wants to take the candle lighter back to the rectory instead of putting it in the holder so he can snuff the candles after service. And ever since reading a treatise on knife fighting last month, I’ve been giving thought to what things would be handy in the event of a bad guy with a knife. And the candle holder, assuming it’s solid brass, would be handy.

But how would you wield it? It’s maybe 36″ long, so it’s a bit long for a kama:

And it’s a little short for a halberd:

Maybe like a gaffing hook?

Of course, all of these have a point instead of a snuffing bell.

To be honest, I’d probably flip it and grip it by that and for a better grip and just treat it like a stick since my dojo trains stickfighting a lot. It used to teach gun and knife defense, but the best defense against a knife is distance (run away). Or I would use it like a short halberd, poking with the lighting end and trying to grab at the knife hand with the curve.

It’s all academic, though, since I’m never on the altar, and, fortunately, nobody shows up at service brandishing a knife.

But I am thinking about affecting a jaunty walking stick with a heavy handle.

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Good Junk Hunting, Saturday, May 17, 2025

May 18, 2025May 18, 2025 Brian J. Noggle

For a second weekend in a row, my youngest and I visited several sales. Unlike last week, though, we made an excursion of it, visiting an estate sale in Marshfield, Missouri, some forty minutes down I-44 (run by Circle of Life Estate Sales, who does a number of sales in the area) and a outside the bounds of north and east Springfield. We bought nothing in Marshfield, but it gave the young man the chance to buy a couple of boxes of Pokémon boxes at the Walmart since he has picked over all the Walmarts and Dollar Generals in southwest Springfield and southwest towns like Republic, Marionville, and Aurora.

We did find a couple of things at the other sales:

On the “junk” side (which I’m starting to include to explain why my garage is so cluttered):

A scroll saw with no blades but with the manual for $13.50. I got it home and plugged it in, and it bobs when turned on according to the speed set on the dial, so this might be a really good deal. Unless I cannot actually get blades for it, the blade attachment assembly is damaged, or 16″ is too small to be really useful. I don’t actually know yet how to really use a scroll saw, so I will learn someday. Maybe.
A portable car starter/compressor for $6.00. Since my boy(s) are traveling further afield these days, it would be useful to have one in each trunk. It did not come with a power cable; hopefully it will take a common form factor, or I might spend the rest of the amount to buy one new securing a power cable on the Internet. Or I’ll throw it in a donation box myself for another yard sale.
A Blu-Ray player for $5. Because sometime too soon, in five or ten years, these will be hard to come by cheaply. You might scoff, but just wait.
A 1950s Unique “Dependable” Typewriter which looks to be a little typewriter which does not have keys but a dial to set what character you want to appear. Looks to be going for $10 on the Internet which is what I paid for it. I think I’ll clean it up and put it on a shelf to display it, but more likely it will go into a closet or a cabinet until my estate sale. Although I envision a wall with shelving to display old oddities like this, c’mon, man: All walls of Nogglestead and beyond will be dedicated to books.

An estate sale outside of north Springfield yielded a couple of LPs: Two by the Alan Parsons Project, The Turn of a Friendly Card and Eve and some two-disc compilation called Love Italian Style which includes Frank Sinatra, so not Italy Italian but Italian American.

At the last sale, I expect a writer lived there as large book collection spread over counters and tables (nice bookshelves presumably sold already) included books not only including various Writers Digest books on writing mysteries but also recent books on computers and cybersecurity, pre-med and med, architecture, and more. I got a couple:

Art and Architecture: Venice, a thick almost 600 page book not only of pictures but also diagrams, so a serious architecture book.
That’s What She Said: Contemporary Poetry and Fiction by Native American Women edited by Rayna Green. Why? I don’t know.
Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer. I saw it mentioned on a blog last week or so. I, of course, read a couple years back, and although I was not impressed with the theme, the writing wasn’t bad.
National Lampoon Jokes Jokes Jokes: Verbal Abuse Edition by Steve Ochs. Presumably, I will get some one-liners for when Finnish proverbs just won’t do.
Forensics: True Crime Scene Investigations, a college textbook that cost more than the dollar I paid for it.
Handmade Houses: A Guide to Woodbutchers Art by Art Boericke and Barry Shapiro. Which is a picture book and not diagrams.
The Language of Post-Modern Architecture by Charles Jencks. So I can better understand Lileks and Ed Driscoll’s infrequent architecture posts trashing pomo.
What My Cat Taught Me About Life by Niki Anderson. Will it be an anniversary gift since that’s coming up in mere days? Probably not!

I barely made it through the media section when someone backed a pickup truck to the back door and took all the rest away.

But I did get:

Lonesome Dove on VHS.
Meet the Spartans, a spoof movie.
The Last Samurai with Tom Cruise. We saw this in the theater back in the day, where I realize parts of the 21st century are “back in the day.”
The Expendables 3. I watched the first one in 2023 and just bought the second in April. Might as well complete the set.
National Lampoon’s Pledge This. I have been a sucker for National Lampoon-badged movies. So much a sucker for National Lampoon at all (see also the book above) that I invested in it when it was a publicly traded company. And lost all my money on it.
The Omega Man, the Charlton Hestin version of Robert Mathieson’s I Am Legend later remade into the Will Smith movie which I “recently” watched but not so recently that I wrote a report on it.

When we were checking out at that sale, the guy said if there was any book I was on the fence about buying, he would sell them to me for a quarter each. So I presume that the guys with the pickup truck bought the remaining videos at a discount to sell somewhere else. And I thought, man, if I ever open The New Curiosity Shop, I’m going to have to work out a deal with these estate sale guys.

So I spent about $60 total, which is not bad once you factor in the junk (and the fact that the records were $5 each, which is a lot for me to spend, but c’mon, Alan Parsons Project in decent covers).

I did not buy Arlo Guthrie’s Alice’s Restaurant, but I did show side 2 to my youngest to see if he noticed anything strange about it, but he did not. Quiz time, gentle reader: What would be different about side two of that LP?

The only thing the young man bought were some basketball cards he bought for fifty cents each. He looked one up on his phone and found it had some value, so he bought the lot. As we were walking out, he said that the first one he priced was some nobody Erving guy worth $1.75….

“Julius Erving?” I asked. “Dr. J.? A nobody?”

Well, he is young. And he will never hear the end of this.

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Movie Report: The Crow (1994)

May 16, 2025May 15, 2025 Brian J. Noggle

Book cover I cannot remember if I saw this film originally in the theaters–it came out right as I was finishing college, so I might have been fairly broke that summer or I might have been blowing my college graduation gifts at the time. However, this was not my first viewing of the film, although it had been some time. I’ve kind of thought about it since, and it’s one of those “Don’t we have that?” films where my beautiful wife is surprised that we don’t actually have a film in our library. But if we’ve watched it in the thirty years since its release (!), it could have been on cable or as a rental as we’ve had a television package for most of that time.

On Devil’s Night in Detroit, a group of thugs working for the local crime boss kill a woman who is protesting evictions in their building and her boyfriend. One year later, he claws his way from the grave and, guided by a crow, seeks vengeance on the gang and ultimately kills not only the gang but also the boss behind their actions and a lot of extra local crime figures to boot. So think a Goth Mack Bolan or a Gothier Frank Castle who is undead and whose wounds heal instantly. Oh, and the only people who know who he is are a tween skater girl whose mother is a junkie in the local gang’s orbit who knew Eric and Shelly and a local good cop, played by Ernie Hudson, who encounters the undead Draven on the job.

You know, it holds up well because it’s a simple movie with practical effects and heavily stylized film making. It’s almost black-and-white ate times (the source comic book was black and white), and even when it’s clearly color it uses chiascurro and darkness to great effect. A heavily Goth aesthetic, but it was 1994.

I have to wonder if it weren’t for The Crow, would there have been a Blade or The Matrix, both of which have a very similar look and industrial soundtrack?

Oh, yeah, and as a reminder: Brandon Lee, who played Eric Draven, died during the production of the film when he was accidentally shot with a prop gun. What would the 1990s have been with him as an action film star?

The film also had Bai Ling, but I just posted a photo of her in 2017. So let’s look at Sofia Shinas, who played Eric’s fiancée. Continue reading “Movie Report: The Crow (1994)” →

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Found Bookmark: A Well-Traveled Christmas Card

May 16, 2025 Brian J. Noggle

After I got home from the saling last weekend, I picked up the book The Treasure Chest, and a couple of things fell out, presumably because the former owner, or just a former owner, had marked favorite poems. Or stuck them in the book and forgot them.

One was a twenty-five-year-old church order-of-service sheet from a local church.

And a Christmas card.

The Christmas card was addressed to a Mrs. Sharp; the address was not the location of the estate sale, so the estate sale might have been from Mrs. Sharp’s next of kin, which would mean the book was untouched for a generation. Or I am speculating too much.

It’s a pretty non-descript Christmas card:

Undated, so no telling when this Christmas card was intended. But the address on the back is not local:

I thought it might be England, but that’s not the pattern of their postal codes, so I did some Internet searching.

That’s Sundby, Mors (Morsø), in Denmark:

The card is not stamped (which is unfortunate, as it would have been a boon to the Lutheran Women’s Missionary League chapter at church which collects stamps to sell to collectors as a fundraiser, and a 1950s or 1970s Danish stamp might have been worth more than the Forever Stamps I’ve been dropping in the box).

But the fact that the card is not stamped might indicate that the card was hand-delivered when cousin Sissel visited or when Mrs. Sharp went to Denmark on holiday. Or that the card was included in a box with a tin of Danish cookies.

I don’t know why found bookmarks like this fill me with such wonder. I guess because it’s a tactile relic of another era for which I can feel anemoia, the nostalgia for a place and time you’ve never been.

I used to have a Found Bookmarks blog on Blogspot; I roled it into this one when I moved to self-hosting fifteen years ago because I thought I would get some longer-form pieces out of the things tucked into books I bought and started to read. But they turned out to be more infrequent than I thought; the Found Bookmarks category will be up to 6 posts when I publish this one. And I have a folder with the actual ephemera in it, the things I posted about, as though these personal relics from a collection of other unknown people was worth preserving. I guess I’ll be a little more ruthless with such items from now on (and perhaps with that folder when I find it) because I don’t need to confuse my heirs who might wonder “Did Dad go to a Royals game in 2003?” Or, more likely, will just flip through the contents of that manila folder and shred it (contents is singular, you know, so it is the right pronoun here).

I will leave the paraphernaliaphilia and ephemeraphilia to the professional.

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The New Champion for Longest Time Between Acquiring and Reading Book

May 15, 2025 Brian J. Noggle

Joe Kenney reads a Death Merchant book forty years after acquiring it. And trying to read it for the first time.

You know, I’m not a fan of that series either; I read one in in 2012 and not another. But I’m not as dedicated to men’s adventures and contemporaneous paperback originals as Kenney is.

If I want to reclaim the crown, I’ll have to read some of the young adult fiction that my sainted aunt and godmother gave me when she gave me Captains Courageous which I read in 2010 after owning it for only 30 years.

I still have a number of (or all of) the books that my aunt gave us when I was, what, eight or nine? A couple of Hardy Boys books, maybe some Nancy Drew, a Power Boys mystery, maybe the paperback copy of Henry and the Clubhouse that I would have read in elementary school (Team Cleary all the way!)–I would have read those books in the late 1970s or early 1980s. But there were also a couple of mid-century kid-and-horse books and kid-and-dog book which I really wasn’t into at the time. And, to be honest, my boys never even got into the young adult mystery adventure stories at all.

I can probably read to reclaim the crown.

Sometime after I clear the current stack on the side table. I could reclaim the title and leave a book or two in reserve for if I ever have to reclaim it again.

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Video Report: Jeff Dunham: Arguing with Myself (2006)

May 14, 2025May 13, 2025 Brian J. Noggle

Book cover You know, I’ve seen ads in newspapers and online notifications for years about Jeff Dunham performances, probably both in St. Louis and Springfield and maybe reviews on the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel Web site back in the day, but I had not actually seen him perform in television appearances or Web snippets before. Which is odd, because I knew something about his ventriloquist act and maybe I’ve seen snippets somewhere. I knew a couple of the dummies and their names, but I know a lot more about them now.

So: It’s a ventriloquist act. He does a couple of non-dummy jokes before getting the first one out of the box. It’s Walter, the curmudgeon, who has an acid tongue and a nasty attitude. We also get to see Bubba J., the hick that looks like Howdy Doody; Peanut, which was Dunham’s first dummy; and José Jalapeño on a Stick. We get some bits where Peanut and José Jalapeño argue a bit. Dunham interacts with the audience and has Walter answer written questions submitted to them by audience members before the show. It’s probably not as much improv as having canned jokes and selecting questions to fit the gags.

Still, the program is almost twenty years old, and one wonders how his act has changed to fit the zeitgeist these days. His humor, although not especially crass, does touch on the differences between the sexes and other more taboo in 2024 subjects. He did not have Achmed the Dead Terrorist in this show, though, so I guess his act has been ever-evolving.

Amusing in a few spots and, to be honest, since it was my first exposure to Dunham (I think), it was more novel to me than, say, Gallagher whom I saw over and over again in the 1980s or any of the members of the Blue Collar Comedy Tour and better than an R-rated comedy from the later half of the first quarter of the 21st century.

If I find another special of his for another fifty cents, I’ll buy it.

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And They Still Cannot Pay Their Teachers Enough, Probably

May 12, 2025May 12, 2025 Brian J. Noggle

Inside the indoor athletic facility arms race that’s sweeping the Ozarks:

A day after Republic voted to pass a bond issue allowing it to build a multi-million dollar indoor athletics facility, the phones rang at the high school all day.

The calls weren’t from any angry residents who might have attempted to vote the issue down. Instead, they were from athletic directors and administrators all over the state. They wanted to know how the southwest Missouri school district got such a project off the ground, and if they could schedule times to visit.

Many of those same administrators called Nixa High School to see if they could tour its $18 million indoor facility, which is set to open this summer. Other possible tour sites include the facility at Logan-Rogersville High School, 20 miles down the road, or the one that opened at Ozark High a year ago.

A day after I voted against the bond issue, you mean.

Because building it is one thing, but after building it must be maintained. Every year something (and every year more) has to come from the budget which won’t pay teachers or support book, sorry, free laptops for students learning.

Meanwhile, private groups are building for-profit indoor and outdoor sports facilities; non-school are looking to build indoor facilities; and non-school governments are spending millions to acquire indoor sports facilities.

Basically, it’s the convention center arms race again, where “competing” cities overbuild capacity, find them to be financial sinkholes, and then have to upgrade them to remain competitive in chasing a limited market. All so that government officials can burnish their resumes for their next gigs and fail upward.

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As I Was Sayin’ (Tech Paranoia Edition)

May 12, 2025May 11, 2025 Brian J. Noggle

I have said, on occasion, a couple of things which I meant to be a little speculative:

It’s not that your phone is listening to you; it’s that everyone’s phone and gadget are listening to you
Companies are going to break privacy laws, covenants, and mores and are willing to pay a little fine if they get caught

Pixy’s Daily Tech News for May 11, 2025 links to this Please Donate story: Google will pay Texas $1.4B to settle claims the company collected users’ data without permission:

The agreement settles several claims Texas made against the search giant in 2022 related to geolocation, incognito searches and biometric data. The state argued Google was “unlawfully tracking and collecting users’ private data.”

Paxton claimed, for example, that Google collected millions of biometric identifiers, including voiceprints and records of face geometry, through such products and services as Google Photos and Google Assistant.

Google spokesperson José Castañeda said the agreement settles an array of “old claims,” some of which relate to product policies the company has already changed.

Do you think they were just looking at those voiceprints, or do you think they were globally matching voices with spoken text from any recording or open mic everywhere? If not, why not?

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Book Report: Beyond These Hills: A Book of Eskimo Poems photographs by Guy Mary-Rousselière (1961)

May 11, 2025May 8, 2025 Brian J. Noggle

Book cover I just bought this former library book from the Knoxville High School Library at the Friends of the Library book sale on May 3, and I jumped into it after the collection of Finnish proverbs.

This says it’s a book of Eskimo poems, but it’s really a book of photos of Eskimos and the great white north with poems as text. The photos are more interesting than the poetry, which mostly deal with the landscape and survival, and the photos show you why. The collection is 60-something now, and I wonder how different a 21st century edition of the book would look different. Many of the photos depict the outcome of a hunt, and one of the poems talks happily about having seal to eat. I mean, that’s life in the harsh environment, but people in New York who make books would likely blanche at the thought of it.

So a quick read. No poems I’m interested in memorizing and not even aphorisms or proverbs to quote to sound smart. But, wow, what interesting photographs.

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Good Junk Hunting, May 10, 2025: Estate and Yard Sales

May 11, 2025 Brian J. Noggle

Does this count as book hunting? Album hunting? Not really enough of either to be specific. I spotted signs for a nearby estate sale on Thursday and Friday, so I brought my youngest who wanted to look for collectibles like coins and cards (which would be long gone by Saturday, but he came along anyway). The southern campus of our church was also having a sale to raise money for the pre-school, and we discovered another church sale along the way.

And I got a couple things.

For books, I got:

Days of Our Lives: The Complete Family Album. While I was in college, my stepmother recorded the program (on VCR, young man, not Tivo) and I’d catch bits of it when she caught up on Friday nights. This was in the Fake Roman/John storyline era, so early 1990s. The student union common had a big television (a big deal in 1990), and it was tuned to this show during the lunch hour. I fantasized about striking up a conversation with a girl and talking about the show, but I never did. The only girl I ever struck a conversation with out of the blue was Brandy in my biology class my freshman year, which was like my first college class ever. But she was wearing a Billy Joel tour shirt, so clearly we had musical taste in common, although I would not see Billy Joel in concert for another decade.
Danmark, a book about Denmark whose text is in four different languages. So the picture to reading will be slightly higher than otherwise.
A Garden Full of Love: The Fragrance of Friendship by Sandra Kuck. A collection not unlike an issue of Ideals.
Skipping Christmas by John Grisham. I recently saw the film Christmas with the Kranks where “recently” means 2023.
The Treasure Chest, a collection of quotes and poems grouped by them by Charles L. Wallis. It must have been a great gift in the 1960s, as Ebay shows a variety of editions at different price points (but not very high). The previous owner must have liked it, as it yielded three Found Bookmarks: A Christmas Card, a church service bulletin from 2001, and a Pick 4 lottery ticket from 1987. Which means the previous owner looked through it and/or marked things in at least two different decades.

I also got a Christmas record, Christmas Music from France; I’ve already played it, and only my beautiful wife, who is studying French, might be able to determine it’s Christmas music if she listened carefully.

I got a Kenny G CD, Miracles, which is also a Christmas album.

I got a little handheld Blackjack game for a buck which I didn’t have to wait to test at home as it has working batteries already (which might almost be worth the price I paid for the game). I also got a pack of Elvis trading card, apparently from 1992. The pack was partially opened, so my son pooh-poohed the purchase even though it’s the only thing like cards we saw today. I paid a buck for it and brought it home and learned (by, again, looking at Ebay) that Ebay is rife with unopened packs for $1. Which led me to a good lecture about the economics of collectibles. Namely, that when Boomers were hitting their play money years, they wanted things from their childhood–toys, baseball cards, comic books–which were scarce because they and their parents considered them to be disposable. So they were chasing after limited stock. But their splashing money around led to a bunch of new comic and trading card companies and sets springing up, and the Boomers were snapping them up not only enjoyment, but as a speculative investment. Which leads to a glut of unopened sets of Elvis cards in peoples’ basements or climate-controlled storage facilities and listed on Ebay for less than their inflation-adjusted original price.

He’s been buying a hella lotta Pokémon cards lately, hoping to find valuable cards in packs. I guess the company is not flooding the market but are consciously choosing some scarcity, but the biggest scores and highest prices in the secondhand market are going to be from the early sets of the cards from 30 years ago, when, again, they were a toy and were not expected to be investments.

I guess the way to hit it in that sort of collectible market is to find a commodity that everyone thought was disposable but where eventual scarcity might lead to value if anyone bothers to collect mementoes of their youth in their middle age. I’m not sure this will occur to generations beyond Gen X. Maybe early, early millenials (90s kids). What do the others have good memories of their youths? Interchangeable smartphones and tablets mostly.

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Book Report: Finnish Proverbs translated by Inkeri Väänänen-Jensen (1990)

May 10, 2025May 7, 2025 Brian J. Noggle

Book cover I have dived right into the stack of “poetry”” that I purchased earlier this month partially because I have not been arsed to put them on my bookshelves yet, so they’re still on my (rather large) desk. Maybe I’m thinking with dedicated effort, I will read them all before I shelve them kind of like I’m hoping to watch all the movies atop the movie cabinet soon (but my night gig has restarted, so my reading and viewing time will be lessened for a couple of months).

The translator/editor is the child of Finnish immigrants, and this book was partially funded by a university where the translator works (or worked) in a Finnish fellowship or something, so the author has other presumably short works related to Finnish literature as well. But this book is but a collection of proverbs and sayings along with some line drawings of Finnish places and design elements. So it’s definitely a quick read–under an hour, for sure, and it has some little bits of wisdom, although some of the proverbs are not unique to Finns.

I marked a couple:

Better once too much than always too little.
You can fool others only once but yourself for a lifetime.
What you do not repair you destroy.
You do not reach Heaven in one jump.
Not all clouds bring rain.

I cannot wait to use them and announce they’re proverbs from the Finnish. You know I will.

I’m actually vicariously Finnish to a degree. One of my uncles is of Finnish lineage. His daughter is blonde and fair, but the son got the darker complection from the Noggle side of the family, so he has a Finnish last name but looks like a Mexican bandito. He, my cousin, has been to Finland to meet his relations several times and actually speaks a bit of Finnish. So I’m only vicariously Finnish, which is odd since I have lineage from just about every other European country.

So, yeah, worth the fifty cents I paid for it.

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Book Report: Sonnets and the Ballad of Alanna MacDale by Michael J. O’Neal (2019)

May 9, 2025May 7, 2025 Brian J. Noggle

Book cover I mentioned when reading Fatal Interview that I was reading another collection of sonnets simultaneously; this is it. I bought this book last spring at the Friends of the Library book sale; it’s clear I haunt the dollar (fifty cents on half price day) poetry table.

So: This is a contemporary collection, only six years old, but it’s anachronistic as the poet tries to emulate medieval sonnets. Not only does the poet affect some middle English stylings, but the sonnets are English style as well (abab cdcd efef gg, with three samples and the couplet instead of the Italian sonnet which is 8 lines and a turn for 6 lines–which is what Edna St. Vincent Millay and I wrote back in the day). And the text of all poems is italic, perhaps to look more like handwriting, but that’s always a poor design decision as it slows reading down just a bit.

The poems? Eh, okay, I guess. The rhythm is fairly suspect–the poet does not stick to iambic pentameter much.

But, you know what? They’re earnest, and I have to say I developed a little…. well, maybe not affection for them–I won’t memorize any of them for open mic nights–but I did feel a little sympathy or camaraderie with the fellow. When I was in college, my poetry professor knocked my poetry for being like reproductions of antique furniture. My later sonnets had a more modern sensibility. Even Edna St. Vincent Millay’s hundred-year-old sonnets read a little more contemporary than this book.

So perhaps this poet will also evolve. But you really have to be in the mood for this kind of thing to take much from this volume.

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I’ve Got A Bad Feeling About This

May 9, 2025 Brian J. Noggle

My cousin posted this on Facebook, an invitation to an event where she teaches yoga:

The philosophy of the Gita is that it’s your duty to go out there and slaughter your friends and family in war.

Man, if the yoga moms are gearing themselves up, something’s coming.

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Movie Report: Marked for Death (1990)

May 8, 2025May 7, 2025 Brian J. Noggle

Book cover I just watched some 1980s-era Stallone films (two of the three Rambo movies I just watched were from the 1980s), and one (meaning I) can forget the heirarchy of the action films of the day. Stallone and Schwarzenneggar were the top; Chuck Norris was no better than a B; and Steven Seagal was kind of a C-level. Just above direct-to-video or direct-to-cable fare. And eventually he would get down to that sort of level. I guess his biggest film, Under Siege, was in the future, but he had a stack of films right at the turn of the 1990s, and I tend to think of On Deadly Ground and Glimmer Man as past the peak. But that’s just me.

So: Seagal plays a DEA deep cover agent who loses a partner on a deal gone bad and he retires or takes some time off and goes home to find a former colleague coaching high school football. Jamaican posses are moving in with their crack and their brutality, displacing the Colombians and their cocaine. Although Seagal tries to stay out of it, he gets involved after a gangland massacre where he catches one of the Jamaicans, and the Jamaicans mark he and his family for death. With the help of a cop on loan from the Jamaican authorities and the football coach, they take down the powerful leader of the posse whom supposedly has strong magic, but the obvious twist is that he has a twin brother that nobody knew about even though he was always around and just out of sight.

So, yeah, it’s what you would expect: Seagal acting stoicly (or not acting maybe), some martial arts, and gun play. It’s been a while since I’ve seen a Seagal film–I’ve seen his 80s work, I saw Under Siege in the theater, and a couple of other things from the 1990s. But I am not a particular fan. And it might be a while before I watch another. Unless I find a boxed set for a buck or something.

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Some 175-Year-Old Success Story

May 8, 2025May 7, 2025 Brian J. Noggle

It looks like Associated Press is taking its cues from more modern “news” sites which are mostly opinion and reporting what people say on social media:

Sure are a lot of for-profits looking for donations these days.

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Book Report: The Buck in the Snow and Other Poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay (1928)

May 7, 2025May 7, 2025 Brian J. Noggle

Book cover I am enjoying running through the stack of Edna St. Vincent Millay books I bought last autumn–I read Fatal Interview last month, and when I went to the book sale last week, I hoped to buy additional copies of Millay’s work so I could put them in my to-read stacks and read them again. But none were forthcoming, and I still have a few unread from last autumn. Or I could dig out my existing copies to re-read, but that’s not how I roll.

At any rate, this collection is not a collection of sonnets, but most of them have good rhythm and end rhymes anyway. The fourth part of the book does include some sonnets, though. And it’s not a series of connected works, unlike Fatal Interview, but you do get the usual Millay themes of love and longing and loss.

No penciled into the end papers, but it does have a book plate naming a previous owner (Reggie Johnson) and a label from the Personal Book Shop with two locations in Boston, Massachussetts. The book shop no longer seems open, and the style of the label indicates that it’s decades old, so. Someone, probably more than one person, enjoyed this book. Perhaps someday someone else will enjoy it when it passes from my hands.

Not much of a book report, but I can only gush about Millay as she is my favorite poet bar none.

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