Author: Brian J. Noggle

Science Continues Todd Akin’s War on Women

Brian J. Noggle

Instapundit links to a study with the titilating name of Female mediation of competitive fertilization success in Drosophila melanogaster. What does the study investigate?

“Because females of most species mate with multiple males within a reproductive cycle, intrasexual competition and intersexual choice can continue in the form of sperm competition and cryptic female choice,” says Pitnick. “Our investigations have demonstrated that the morphology of the female reproductive tract, which is rapidly divergent, determines how females bias paternity in favor of particular sperm morphologies. In fact, complex ejaculate-female and sperm-female interactions are emerging as more the rule than the exception.”

Remember when Todd Akin said:

It seems to me, first of all, from what I understand from doctors, that’s really rare. If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.

In other words, the female reproductive tract, which is rapidly divergent, determines how females bias paternity in favor of particular sperm morphologies. Well, maybe. If my interpretation of the summary of the article of a study based on a limited data set and some mind reading on Todd Akin’s part are accuratish.

Of course, those who felt Akin was waging a war on women lit into him for legitimate rape, which implies that some rapes are illegitimate. What he meant to imply, as far as I can guess, is legitimate claims of rape. This, you see, implies that claims are not legitimate, and copulation outcomes where those claims might not be true might not have the same impact on how females bias paternity, and that in cases of legitimate rape, the female might bias against.

It’s science, so it’s tricky and full of doubt and “we thinks” and room for error.

But politics is less so. Especially when flocks of low information workers linger around politicians’ every appearance like a flock of nightingales around the house of the dying. If they catch onto a phrase they can use, they shriek and caper all night as they work themselves up over it without considering the words and meaning of it. If they don’t, they calm down quickly and wait for the next appearance.

So the truly thoughtful and skeptical will at the electoral mercy of the “thoughtful.”

Which reminds me of a proverb: Do not be wise in your own eyes.

Buy My Books!
Buy John Donnelly's Gold Buy The Courtship of Barbara Holt Buy Coffee House Memories

Then, They Came For The Chainsaws

Brian J. Noggle

Aw, c’mon, I thought this was a free country. You mean this is against the law?

Lincoln County deputies arrested Herzog on Sunday. Authorities say she yelled at children using coarse language, videotaped and photographed them and walked toward them with a chainsaw to frighten them.

I would have expected someone with coarse language to use a power sander myself, but I used to dabble in fiction, so I contrive things.

Buy My Books!
Buy John Donnelly's Gold Buy The Courtship of Barbara Holt Buy Coffee House Memories

I Aspire

Brian J. Noggle

35,000 books:

Tom Johnson, 83, lives in the museum that is his home. In his own non-digital way, he curates his family’s legacy, the estimated 35,000 books and manuscripts that share his 113-year-old meandering and musty house on the Osage River.

Johnson has built wooden corridors that link the family three-story home to the family library, built in 1899 by his grandfather for a collection of 8,000 books, and another that connects the house to the annex library, built in 1990 when the library overflowed. Grandfather Thomas Moore Johnson (1851-1919) was known as the “sage of the Osage.”

There are two tours a month, it looks like. One of these days, I shall make a pilgrimage.

Buy My Books!
Buy John Donnelly's Gold Buy The Courtship of Barbara Holt Buy Coffee House Memories

I’ve Seen Direct to Cable Movies That Start Like That

Brian J. Noggle

So we visited a church garage sale at St. Elizabeth Ann Seton church in Springfield on Saturday. It was bag day, and that’s like catnip to me. I rub my cheeks and roll on the junk you can buy, especially late in the day on bag day.

No, this isn’t a Good Book Hunting post, as I only bought three books (X-Men, the novelization of the film; A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf; An American Plague: The True and Terrifying Story of the Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1793 by Jim Murphy; and The Worldly Philosophers by Robert L. Heilbroner)–and who wants to see a photograph of just four books?

Instead, I bought a bunch of things for craft work to add to the backlog of other craft things accumulating since I’ve moved away from doing anything at my workbench but have yet to alter my acquisition of things to do at my workbench. I also bought a stack of videocassettes to join the hundreds of other films that I’ve not watched since buying them at garage sales and book fairs.

But that’s neither here nor there. I did make one purchase that sounds like it could be the plot of a cheap slasher film.

I picked up this CD because its title and text were complete in German:

Kveldssanger album cover

I expected either heavy metal or some heavy gospel of some sort (given I bought it at a church garage sale.

When I got home, I cracked it open, and I saw:

Kveldssanger CD book interior

Well, then I hoped it was not gospel of a dark and disturbing sort.

Given the font on the cover, I was just going to trust iTunes’s music database to fill that all in, so I popped it in to import, and iTunes could not find it on the Internet.

You see how this could be the beginning of a cheap horror franchise of which I would be only a small part? A Daemonic CD from a twisted Catholic church that unleashes unearthly forces when played or on the Internet when imported into iTunes?

So I looked more closely and did an Internet search, and the album is Kveldssanger by Ulver, a Norwegian black metal band who changed it up with this, their second album. It sounds folky and, instead of metal screaming vocals, some neo-chanting.

Which really doesn’t detract from the whole strange dark CD invokes dark forces motif.

Note that I bought this CD on the week where I posted this. Life has a way of connecting dots for us. Well, all right, our minds do, or at least mine tends to move in strange directions that seem to be patternic.

And, if you’re wondering, it’s the first of the two CDs I bought this weekend. The second? The Best of Barry White. Which goes to again prove I am eclectic.

Buy My Books!
Buy John Donnelly's Gold Buy The Courtship of Barbara Holt Buy Coffee House Memories

But If They’d Suffered From Allergies, They Would Have Been Thwarted

Brian J. Noggle

Springfield is debating whether to make pseudoephedrine-containing drugs prescription only, and its police chief says the mere proposal is making the streets safer.

But.

Federal agents say they have busted a local drug conspiracy throughout Christian, Greene and Webster counties that has distributed Mexican meth.

Somehow, this will be grounds for more laws. Maybe we need to prevent citizens from driving to Mexico.

Buy My Books!
Buy John Donnelly's Gold Buy The Courtship of Barbara Holt Buy Coffee House Memories

Book Report: Miami Massacre by Don Pendleton (1970, 1982)

Brian J. Noggle

Book coverThis book is a stunning departure from the series, wherein Mack Bolan….

Aw, who am I kidding? Mack Bolan hits a hard site in Phoenix and follows its bosses to a big deal meet-up in Miami, where the mafia heads are getting together to finally take drastic steps to eliminate The Executioner. He liberates a couple women who were under the thumb of the mob and shoots a lot of bad guys and perpetrates an audacious assault on a couple of hard sites. In other words, it’s a lot like the other books in the series.

What’s most interesting in these books is the evolution of the mythology and the beginning of the plot points that get resolved later. In this book, the Talifero brothers are introduced; they’ll hound him off and on for a couple of books.

The book also has a side plot where Bolan helps and is helped by Cuban counterrevolutionary guerrillas. How quaint. In 1970, perhaps that seemed like a possibility. In 2013, that’s a very dated relic.

At any rate, I pick these books up as filler or breaks from longer reading. I’m getting a little down on them, especially when it comes time to say something intelligent about them on the Internet, so maybe I ought to read something else for a while.

Books mentioned in this review:

Buy My Books!
Buy John Donnelly's Gold Buy The Courtship of Barbara Holt Buy Coffee House Memories

Book Report: An Ozark Boy’s Story by John K. Hulston (1971)

Brian J. Noggle

I bought this book at a local used book store (Redeemed Music and Books, if you must know) on one of my local history sprees.

The author is an attorney, the progeny of a pretty successful businessman in the first part of the twentieth century, and it covers the attorney’s formative years in school, college, and the military during World War II. The first chapters jump around a bit, and I thought it reminiscient of Over the Hill and Past Our Place (also by a successful man looking back on his life from almost the same time period). The recollections in the beginning are rather pasted together willy-nilly, but the book improves as it goes along and as the boy reaches an age where he can remember the stories better.

As I said, he was the son of a successful businessman, so his experiences in the depression years are mostly recognizing that the depression is going on. The lad goes to the University of Missouri and then goes on to become a lawyer before joining the military in World War II. It’s not high history; it’s more of a vanity project where the fellow put his story down for his family. But the glimpses of the cities around Springfield in that era and the college experience make it very interesting in spots. So it’s worth it if you’re looking for that sort of flavor amid a whole lot of name-checking people who mattered eighty or ninety years ago.

The book has a date range on it, 1915-1945. The author has another book about his time as an Ozarks lawyer after World War II, and I’ll keep an eye out for it.

Books mentioned in this review:

Buy My Books!
Buy John Donnelly's Gold Buy The Courtship of Barbara Holt Buy Coffee House Memories

A New Hobby For Gimlet

Brian J. Noggle

Studying Finnish:

Michael Brown’s long hours of studying the exotic language of Finnish may seem like a pretty noble use of time.

An American international-relations major at the University of Washington in Seattle, he aims for a life in foreign service. Finland’s strategic role in the Arctic and as a vocal member of the euro zone means his investment in the language could be a good bet.

But, Mr. Brown’s interest has a much more casual origin.

“It was heavy metal, unmistakably,” Mr. Brown said when asked what inspired him to pursue a language spoken by a nation that has fewer people, at 5.4 million, than Washington state. Finnish bands perform with a “dark woodsy resonance” that he has come to love, he says, and “the poetic and obscure nature of the Finnish tongue really gave it a unique wave.”

Mr. Brown isn’t the only one to channel a love for the metal genre into the pursuit of learning an obscure tongue. A band of young metal heads—spanning Romania to Singapore—have taken up a Northern European language in order to better appreciate or even mimic their favorite metal bands.

Buy My Books!
Buy John Donnelly's Gold Buy The Courtship of Barbara Holt Buy Coffee House Memories

Lawbreakers Stop Breaking Law Because New Law Is Proposed

Brian J. Noggle

Truly, this is a display of some yoga-stretched flexible logic:

Pseudoephedrine could soon be available by prescription-only in Ozark and Springfield. It is an effort to make the key ingredient for methamphetamine harder to access. City leaders in both towns planned to take up the issue in meetings on Monday night.

. . . .

So far this year, there have been 24 meth lab busts all across the city, but there was only one bust in May, near a house in the 2000 block of North National Avenue. Williams believes the change is thanks to increased education surrounding the proposed ordinance.

That is, those who would break the law and who cannot stop breaking the law due to their meth addiction have stopped breaking the law because a new law has been proposed.

Actually, the logic is pretty consistent. More laws, less crime. Always. And if there are more lawbreakers, somehow, with more laws, we need more laws and attendant inconvenience to the law abiding.

Buy My Books!
Buy John Donnelly's Gold Buy The Courtship of Barbara Holt Buy Coffee House Memories

Larry Conners Sacked

Brian J. Noggle

In the service of their convenient Goddess of Journalistic Objectivity, Belo Communications / KMOV sacked anchorman Larry Conners:

In a statement on the station’s website, president and general manager Mark Pimentel said:

“We regret to announce that Larry Conners is no longer a KMOV news reporter.

“For KMOV, there is no higher cause than unbiased, objective news reporting. It is what our viewers expect and it is what we work very hard to deliver. We can accept no less. Larry is certainly entitled to his opinion, but taking a personal political position on one of the Station’s Facebook pages creates an appearance of bias that is inconsistent with important journalistic standards.

“Larry’s departure has nothing to do with the particular position he took, but it does have to do with our belief that his actions made it impossible for him to report for KMOV on certain political matters going forward without at least an appearance of bias. Bringing you accurate and unbiased reporting is the reason we exist.”

Which is, of course, nonsense.

I wondered:

Larry Conners has been on the air in St. Louis for a long time. Undoubtedly his salary is pretty good (from his perspective). Is it bad from KMOV’s persepective? Is Belo / KMOV looking to dump an anchor fondly enjoyed in the St. Louis area because he’s old and expensive, and they have seized upon this as a reason to do it, to make it Conners’ fault, and to seek the approval of the hipster/Washington Avenue loft demographic?

Further down in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch article, past the fatuous journofan service, we get the real meat of the nut:

Professionally, Conners has been taking hits at KMOV, which replaced him in late April with former sportscaster Steve Savard (alongside Sharon Reed) on the marquee 10 p.m. newscast.

For several months, Savard had filled that slot while Conners recovered from shoulder surgery. Ratings for the Savard newscasts were better than with Conners, sources said, leading station officials to make the switch permanent when Conners returned to work.

Savard also has been anchoring, again with Reed, the 6 p.m. newscast since Conners went off the air because of this recent flap. Generally, stations have their top anchor team host both the 6 p.m. and 10 p.m. newscasts.

His Facebook posting provided a convenient excuse and time to sack him. So the corporate powers-that-be did that, and made a Show of Their Integrity in doing it.

Now, back to their regular slant, no doubt, which is licking the hand of government that feeds them access.

Man, powerful people are sure getting comfortable in telling transparent falsehoods, are they not?

Buy My Books!
Buy John Donnelly's Gold Buy The Courtship of Barbara Holt Buy Coffee House Memories

Springfield’s Most Wanted, Age 5 (Allegedly)

Brian J. Noggle

This actually happened to a friend:

On Sunday evening, we attended a gospel concert by a group from a college in New York, a group that includes my children’s babysitter from when they were babies and toddlers. We agreed to host her and another group member overnight, which meant that we were treated to a dinner at the hosting church. My children, at the prompting of their father, traveled through the gym to get the members of the choir to autograph their programs, and they eventually cajoled the tour bus driver to sign as well.

As a reward, after the dinner, the bus driver let them sit in the bus driver seat and honk the bus horn. Now, this is a full touring bus, not a school bus. The sort of vehicle where you have to start the engine to get the horn to work. A truck horn kind of horn.

The older boy sat in the seat and tootled the horn, at least as much as one tootles and industrial-grade noisemaker that blasts out a 100 decibel chord.

The younger boy, freshly five (which means he can be tried as an adult for noise violations, I understand) hopped into the seat and played that truck horn like a percussion instrument, beating out a tempo not unlike the one a choir member had tapped out on a conga drum during the concert.

And how he grinned. Beamed. He thought that was the highlight of his young life, and he might be right.

The bus driver joked about the neighbors calling the police, and we dispersed to treat the young ladies in our charge to an Andy’s Frozen Custard and a night’s sleep.

The next morning, we discovered the neighbors called the police.

But the memory of that grin–of course we didn’t take pictures or film it, that’s evidence and requires a degree of foresight we lack. But I will never forget that smile of pure joy in simple loudness and power to make that loudness that the boy shone. Even though he probably will.

It’s worth whatever fines the driver has to pay or years taken out of his life in prison.

What a cool story for my friend to relate. Would someone look up the statute of limitations on noise violations for him?

Buy My Books!
Buy John Donnelly's Gold Buy The Courtship of Barbara Holt Buy Coffee House Memories

Government Critic Removed From Broadcast Television

Brian J. Noggle

KMOV anchorman Larry Conners posted on Facebook that he might have been targeted by the IRS for asking a tough question of President Obama during an interview before the election.

For posting on Facebook this sort of musing, his television station pulled him from the air and stifled him with a gag order:

Longtime KMOV (Channel 4) anchorman Larry Conners is “off the air” until further notice.

The station is examining Conners’ recent allegations that he was targeted by the Internal Revenue Service after interviewing President Barack Obama.

“He’s not suspended. We just all thought it made sense (for him) to take a few days off,” news director Sean McLaughlin said Thursday.

“We take this very seriously, and we don’t expect this to drag on. We’re still looking into the situation and weighing our options,” he said.

That’s the story from yesterday. On Monday, the inquisition moves forward:

A meeting between KMOV (Channel 4) executives and anchorman Larry Conners — who is off the air until further notice — has been set for Monday.

The station is examining Conners’ recent post to Facebook alleging he was targeted by the Internal Revenue Service after interviewing President Barack Obama.

Today, Conners’ attorney, Merle Silverstein, issued a statement saying Conners “is barred by corporate from making statements, posting on Facebook, or participating in interviews on the IRS issue.”

Silverstein’s statement concludes, “That is the only reason for his silence.”

The story is all full of the Sanctity of Unbiased Journalism:

Michael Valentine, a vice president with Belo Corp., KMOV’s parent company, told the news website BuzzFeed that Conners “owes a duty to our viewers to report in an unbiased manner.”

“His Facebook post and his Twitter posts, as a result, were inappropriate,” he said. “And we don’t condone personal posts that jeopardize the journalistic nature of our business. It’s really that simple.”

How cynical am I? Let’s peel back the layers of cynicism:

  • I wonder if Belo / KMOV minds if its on-air reporters speculate off-hand in an approved fashion, which might be pro-government. Because we’ve all seen how the papers and news stations have pretty much become lick-spittles for government at all levels, whether through multi-part and seemingly multi-annual booster sessions for additional government children’s programs (Springfield News-Leader, do you recognize anything about yourself here?) to promoting government largesse on sports facilities to approval of government incentives for redevelopers of downtowns or new developments of strip malls to strip sales from existing, full tax-freight paying businesses (unless, of course, the new development will have a Walmart, which is viewed with skepticism to say the least). Would he be on the air today if he’d mused that he thinks this is all blown out of proportion? Come on, cyn with me.
     
  • Is KMOV and its parent Belo afraid of what this now-viral musing of its anchor might mean to future access to the powerful or–dare we say it–corporate relations with the IRS?
     
  • Larry Conners has been on the air in St. Louis for a long time. Undoubtedly his salary is pretty good (from his perspective). Is it bad from KMOV’s persepective? Is Belo / KMOV looking to dump an anchor fondly enjoyed in the St. Louis area because he’s old and expensive, and they have seized upon this as a reason to do it, to make it Conners’ fault, and to seek the approval of the hipster/Washington Avenue loft demographic?

I guess we’ll know more on Monday, but regardless, this is a poor, poor reflection on KMOV and Belo.

Buy My Books!
Buy John Donnelly's Gold Buy The Courtship of Barbara Holt Buy Coffee House Memories

In My Day, Sonny, It Was After A Trial

Brian J. Noggle

St. Louis man convicted after firefight with police

In my day, people who were engaged in writerly arts, especially professionals in the field, had some expertise with these crazy preposition things and tried to use the right ones to accurately convey whatever knowledge or propaganda they were trying to pass on to the reader.

I see from reading the story that the fellow was convicted of charges stemming from the firefight, so I guess he could be convicted for the firefight, but he’s convicted after the firefight just in the same way that he was named after me.

I also see this firefight occurred because

[He] had a history of misdemeanor convictions related to marijuana possession when a SWAT team went to his Shreve Avenue apartment on March 5, 2012, to execute a search warrant on a tip that he was dealing it.

Lovely. A SWAT team going for a small-time drug dealer. The gunfire at the SWAT team justifies the SWAT team going after small-time drug dealers.

Buy My Books!
Buy John Donnelly's Gold Buy The Courtship of Barbara Holt Buy Coffee House Memories

The Only Swedish You’ll Ever Need To Know

Brian J. Noggle

Today’s lesson in the Swedish language: Ogooglebar means unGoogleable; that is, something you cannot find on the Internet using a search engine.

Or maybe not.

I’m not really sure how useful the word really is given that most things are, in fact, discoverable on the Internet.

And, yes, I am a little behind on my Wall Street Journal reading, but I’m almost caught up. At which time I can begin blogging about the hot stock tips from last year’s Forbes.

Buy My Books!
Buy John Donnelly's Gold Buy The Courtship of Barbara Holt Buy Coffee House Memories

Pop Quiz

Brian J. Noggle

I took Pew’s short Science and Technology online quiz because I like quizzes, and:

13 of 13

Of course.

The problem with the quiz, of course, is the wording of some of the questions. Also, the repetition of global warming as scientific consensus.

When the question is, “Most scientists agree,” one must recognize that most scientists are not specialists in the field under question. Which goes triple if you include ‘social’ scientists.

(Link seen on AoS ONT.)

Buy My Books!
Buy John Donnelly's Gold Buy The Courtship of Barbara Holt Buy Coffee House Memories