Brian J. Noggle – Page 236 – Musings from Brian J. Noggle

Those Who Would Be Our Betters Wear Shiny Yellow Pants

April 12, 2013 Brian J. Noggle

Come on, you guys know I read Forbes Life and WSJ Magazine for more than Christopher Buckley. I need to know what the people on the coasts who think they should rule over the uneducated mobs in the middle of the country are wearing. Apparently, this season, it’s shiny yellow pants.

You know what makes it even better? They’re $400 yellow pants.

Friends, this is how I will know I have entered a mid-life crisis, where I worry about my own mortality and want to steep myself in the trappings of youth and blow up a happy marriage to pursue duck-faced models in New York City: the first indicator is when I look at pants in some bizarre fashion-fashioned color and think, “I need to get a pair of those.”

(Reminder: Last season, it was purple pants.)

Buy My Books!

The Continental Palate of Brian J.

April 11, 2013May 30, 2016 Brian J. Noggle

After my recent experience with lingonberries, suddenly I’m trolling the international section of the local Price Cutter looking for interesting sounding things to consume. I mean, someone has to. No, if you’re wondering, they have not yet restocked the lingonberries after I bought one of the two jars on the shelf. The hole is still there, like a missing-toothed smile, and it will remain so until the next boat from Sweden docks in Springfield.

What did I get this time?

A German bread made from sunflower seeds. Continue reading “The Continental Palate of Brian J.” →

Buy My Books!

Book Report: Murder Twice Told by Donald Hamilton (1950)

April 10, 2013 Brian J. Noggle

Fresh from the enjoyment of the Matt Helm book The Ambushers, I picked up this book, two of Hamilton’s novellas packaged together for the burgeoning Hamilton fan base.

The first, “Deadfall”, deals with a chemist who had been under suspicion for meeting with a beautiful female Communist agent, is confronted again at his new workplace by the FBI. The questioning leads to further suspicion, his resignation, a meeting with the woman whom he has not seen in a long time, and playing the FBI against the Communists as he seeks to clear his name and to keep his former fiance from murder charges. A bit slow for modern tastes, but I can see how it fit in with the times a bit. A nice bit of twist to it in that the demure former fiance turns out to be a Communist agent and the very attractive former Communist agent is really working for the FBI. It’s sort of a twist like from the film The Mask, but forty years ahead of the Jim Carrey film, of course.

The second, “The Black Cross”, deals with a married professor who has married an attractive young lady and brought her to his old hometown in New England, where she begins to chafe at the monotony of it. After a drunken row at a party, they are involved in a deadly automobile accident that kills her. In his dazed state, he thinks he sees a man murder his wife with a tire iron. The police discourage the man from pursuing a murder investigation, and he wanders around in a bit of a daze trying to figure out who might have killed her, uncovering some secrets from her youth, including connection with a West Coast night club owner and blackmail. Hamilton does a bit to get us wondering who’s on the professor’s side and who is not, and it eventually comes to a climax that clears it up.

The two novellas date from 1947 and 1949, so they’re immediate post-war pieces, but without the punch of the hard-boiled forties guys. The second, in particular, is a bit wordy and dense for the prose’s impact. I wonder if the GI Bill sending a bunch of guys to college made the paperback writers and magazine writers do this up. Sometimes, it’s effective, like in Ross MacDonald or John D. MacDonald, but sometimes it is not effective, and bad lofty pulp is worse than the punchy, pre-Gold Eagle sort of paperbacks. Or even many Gold Eagle things, for that matter.

So I like the Matt Helm series, where the first person narrator kinda tempers this impulse, but this book was not all that.

Books mentioned in this review:

Buy My Books!

Tomorrow’s Swedish History

April 10, 2013 Brian J. Noggle

An important note on Swedish tomorrow’s Swedish history: Sweden and Belarus are enjoying a bit of rapprochement. Sweden sends diplomat to Belarus after teddy stunt:

The Swedish Foreign Ministry says it is sending a diplomat to Belarus after its ambassador was expelled last year following a Swedish advertising agency’s stunt air-drop of hundreds of teddy bears into the former Soviet state.

I’m glad to see Belarus is over the bear-bombing, but I still warn them: Do not sign a defensive pact with Sweden. Although she’s gone to war with Russia in the past, I really don’t see that happening again in the near future, unless it becomes Muslim-majority and Russia is one of the European hold-outs.

Ah, the imagination reels. As I like to say, All possibilities are possible, but not all probabilities are probable.

Buy My Books!

Tell Me Again How Making Claritin-D Prescription Only Will Keep It From Criminals

April 9, 2013 Brian J. Noggle

Union man jailed stole $800 in prescriptions from Walgreens, police say:

A Union man who allegedly took more than $800 in prescription drugs from one Walgreens store after attempting a similar heist from another store is in custody.

It’s just as likely he was after painkillers, but the criminals are gonna crimin, and hassling law-abiding citizens is a pathetic sham to make it look as though legislators are doing something.

It looks as Springfield is getting onboard with that, too.

Funny, when I moved down here, I thought it was a conservativish area, but you know what? Electoral politics is the same everywhere, and the crusading politician has achievements (often of dubious value) to claim come election time. So now your allergy medicine will be kept from you, and the city is expending tax dollars to help favored businesses, and they’re all eager to put siloed sales taxes on the ballot to dedicate money to the necessary functions of government so they don’t have to dedicate any of the bad idea slush fund to it.

It’s getting to be more like St. Louis all the time, but just a couple decades behind.

Buy My Books!

The Unremarkable, Remarked

April 8, 2013 Brian J. Noggle

Over the weekend, this blog turned ten years old. The first post date is currently given as April 5, 2003, but that might have been changed by the move from Blogspot to WordPress three years ago.

The time flies whether or not you’re having fun.

Buy My Books!

Missouri Leads the Way in Avoiding Passage of Faddish, Ineffective Legislation Outlawing More and More Individual Behaviors

April 7, 2013 Brian J. Noggle

Well, that’s not how the papers cast it, of course. They say Missouri still lags in passing key driver safety laws, mainly driving while texting.

Have you ever noticed how the newspapers always point out that this district or that community (or state) has ‘fallen behind’ others in their rates of taxation and that when legislative bodies don’t rush headlong to curtail freedom by outlawing this or outlawing that or by spending public monies profligately, that the government is somehow falling down on the job?

It’s almost as though the papers think freedom of the press means only the press should be free or something.

Buy My Books!

Day, Rued

April 5, 2013 Brian J. Noggle

You’re sort of asking for it when you teach a child how to say, “ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ,” aren’t you?

Buy My Books!

An Answer Too Detailed

April 4, 2013 Brian J. Noggle

So the six-year-old asked me “What is bric-a-brac?”

Every eager to help expand his vocabulary, I explained it was a small collection of knick-knacks or figurines/statues used for decoration. We have some bric-a-brac on our mantle (although some of it’s too large to be real bric-a-brac, which I think should have a federally mandated maximum height and volume).

Once the concept started to look clear in his eyes, I helpfully added that bric-a-brac differs from baccarat, a card game, and Bacharach, an American composer, piano player, and singer.

I hope this wasn’t for some sort of test now that I’ve confused him.

Buy My Books!

Easter’s Resolutions

April 2, 2013April 4, 2013 Brian J. Noggle

You know, New Year’s Resolutions don’t tend to work out. I mean, the holiday is based on the turn of a calendar, an arbitrary cut-off of the revolution of the planet around the sun that comes in the middle of the deepest, darkest season winter. To suddenly decide you’re going to change some element of yourself that you want to improve in the midst of the longest nights of the year seems a little, well, doomed to failure.

Which makes me wonder why Easter’s resolutions or equinox resolutions haven’t taken their place.

Look outside: Things are brightening, the skies smell sweeter, the grass is beginning to grow where the clover hasn’t choked it out (your mileage may vary). The very season of annual renascence and its attendant festivals marks an optimistic turn, a bit of change that might make the adherence to said resolutions and personal improvements more likely. By golly, if the flowers can bloom, I can lose this ten pounds of winter wait and hit the gym more often.

At least, that’s what I’m telling myself as I make my New Q2’s Resolutions.

UPDATE: Thanks for the link, Mr. Hill.

Buy My Books!

A Surprising Lead from the AP

April 1, 2013 Brian J. Noggle

High court poised to upend:

Has the world lived evolved past its history of traditional concepts of marriage and family and[sic] should the law become tolerant of alternate lifestyles?

Addressing two pivotal legal issues, … a divided Supreme Court is poised to answer those questions.

No, sorry, it’s not historic traditions and customs that evolved through millennia that should cause such soul-searching; I’m sure AP is all about dumping that without any thought higher than “HOMOPHOBE!” Instead, the pondering must occur to doubt whether the court should overturn legislation that is a couple of decades old.

Has the nation lived down its history of racism and should the law become colorblind?

Addressing two pivotal legal issues, one on affirmative action and a second on voting rights, a divided Supreme Court is poised to answer those questions.

Only in the latter case is anything to be “upended,” that is, turned over and thrown into disarray. In the former, it’s somehow different.

Buy My Books!

The Cat’s Paw

April 1, 2013 Brian J. Noggle

The Cat’s Paw:

The Monkey and the Cat (French title, Le Singe et le Chat) is best known as a fable adapted by Jean de La Fontaine that appeared in the second collection of his Fables Choisies in 1679 (book IX, No. 17). Although there is no evidence that the story existed before the 15th century, it began to appear in collections of Aesop’s Fables from the 17th century but is not included in the Perry Index. There are popular idioms derived from it in both English and French with the general meaning of being the dupe of another (e.g., a cat’s-paw). Usage of these and reference to the fable have been particularly employed in (although not limited to) political contexts.

In La Fontaine’s telling, Bertrand the monkey persuades Raton the cat to pull chestnuts from the embers amongst which they are roasting, promising him a share. As the cat scoops them from the fire one by one, burning his paw in the process, the monkey gobbles them up. They are disturbed by a maid entering and the cat gets nothing for its pains. It is from this fable that the French get their idiom Tirer les marrons du feu, meaning to act as someone’s dupe or, deriving from that, to benefit from the dirty work of others. It is also the source of the English idiom ‘a cat’s paw’, defined in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary as ‘one used by another as a tool’.

As North Korea continues on its course of heightened bluster and… well, I guess we’ll have to see if there’s an ultimate and that this is leading up to, many people are wondering when China will lean on its client state to keep them from going too far and triggering a war with South Korea and maybe the United States.

So I got to thinking: why would China not?

Maybe I’ve just been reading too much Swedish history recently and have its collection of abandoned defensive pacts in mind, but…. In a scenario coming from my wildly creative mind, North Korea invades South Korea, and the United States, led by a feckless leader who disdains allies of the United States, does not come to the aid of an ally bound by treaties. Or the military of the United States, diminished by defense cuts, does not prove adequate to the task of quickly saving its ally. Or a combination of these things.

If North Korea attacks South Korea and the response of the United States is tepid, what might China think about its prospects in an invasion of Taiwan and the United States reaction to that particular endeavor?

It costs China nothing in this scenario to let North Korea do what it would like and to see what the United States does.

Another thing I’ve taken to saying like it’s true around Nogglestead is that it’s entirely possible that World War III might take place in Asia, and the United States might only have a walk-on part.

Buy My Books!

As Seen In Robert Davies’ Living Room

March 29, 2013 Brian J. Noggle

Fans of John Donnelly’s Gold might remember that Robert Davies has a gaming setup in his living room that has a bunch of old gaming systems in it.

It does not, however, look this cool.

Buy My Books!

An Unspoken Suspicion

March 28, 2013 Brian J. Noggle

At the Telegraph, Celia Walden skates around the issue Hollywood has kissed goodbye to the steamy sex scene:

According to Vincent Bruzzese of Ipsos, a market research company, sex has been all but eradicated from Hollywood scripts over the past 18 months. “Sex scenes used to be written, no matter the plot, to spice up a film trailer,” he said in an interview at the weekend. “But all that does today is get the film an adult-only rating and lose a younger audience.”

The author of this piece blames a number of things: The expense of getting actresses naked, the fact that women over 25 are making more of the movie-watching decisions (which flies counter to the argument that they’re choosing films with explosions, giant robots, and CGI aimed at teenagers, who spend most of the money on films).

The subhead kinda hints at the real impetus: “Today’s directors would rather appeal to a wider audience”.

Who do you think that wider audience is?

Is it the teenagers sexting each other who would be put off by a sex scene in a movie? Is it the American over 25-year-old demographic that’s dragging its overt sexuality into its forties and fifties or who dress or allow their children to dress too saucily because that’s all you can buy off the rack?

You know who that over 25-year-old woman who’s making decisions like that for her family that says no to a film with boobies in it? A Christian and/or a Republican, and that’s not Hollywood’s target as it is.

No, the wider audience Hollywood is going for and that balks at sex on the screen is the rest of the world.

What passes for steamy and risque here is prohibited elsewhere, and I bet Hollywood, the business side of Hollywood, knows that its bottom line depends upon those foreign receipts and that the artistic necessity of baring Halle Berry’s breasts is trumped by the business necessity of getting the film into the Chinese market instead.

It’s not the changing face of Americans’ or Westerners’ sensibilities that Hollywood is concerned with because American and Western values, on the whole, have not been somehow trending to the more prudish in pop culture. The rest of the world, though, has steadily remained more traditional in its moral outlook.

(Link seen on Instapundit courtesy temp blogger Sarah Hoyt.)

Buy My Books!

Confronted By A Demon In The Shower

March 27, 2013 Brian J. Noggle

So I’m minding my own business in the shower, trying in vain again to scrub the slime of softened water off, when I’m confronted by a demon.

Fructis the Soul-Renderer, Flayer of the Weak, Builder of Bodies

The Shampoo demon

I mean, seriously, who brands their froo-froo shampoo with a made-up Latin derivation that brings to mind not so much the scents of watermelon and lingonberries but the rising chant of monks in horror films featuring demons and/or William Shatner and the eventual mauling of a poor, innocent teenager.

Triple nutrition? That means Fructis must feast on the hearts of three virgins.

No, this is not my shampoo. It belongs to my beautiful wife. I use the more manly Suave. It’s not manly because its name implies being smooth and confident; it’s more manly because it costs less than a dollar a bottle.

Buy My Books!

One Swedish History Book, And I Am A Changed Man

March 26, 2013May 30, 2016 Brian J. Noggle

I read Swedish History in Outline, and all of a sudden I’m trolling the grocery store’s Scandinavian section.

And buying lingonberries.

Lingonberries

Klingon berries, you ask. No, lingonberries.

What are lingonberries?

Things you should never discuss at PyCon.

Aside from that, they’re little berries from evergreen shrubs, the kind of things you tell your children to never eat.

And they’re Swedish.

Just like Gustav Vasa, but not as sweet.

Oh, the things I do and put in my mouth to amuse myself.

Buy My Books!

Like a Plumber Every Morning

March 25, 2013 Brian J. Noggle

This morning, I told my wife I was going to make my toilet.

Sometimes, I make my beautiful wife gape, and today was one such time. “What?” she asked.

She’d never heard the expression before, but that’s because she doesn’t read early 20th century detective novels. Did I get that expression from Agatha Christie or Ellery Queen? I forget.

But make one’s toilet does not refer to building a commode nor even to installing a commode and tank. Instead, it refers to shaving, washing up, and brushing one’s teeth in the morning.

Even my own generation doesn’t understand me. Truly, I am a man out of time.

Buy My Books!

The Future Forgotten, Half-Empty Bottle of Mr. Bubble

March 24, 2013 Brian J. Noggle

Tiny bubbles in the bath, make me feel maudlin not joy or wrath The strangest things strike me and make me a tad maudlin. Which, comes to think of it, would make an excellent name for a character in a book about a young man given everything who feels melancholy about it.

Tonight, I prepped a play bath for my children and dolloped a bit of Mr. Bubble into the running water, and I realized or futuremembered that some day, they won’t want toys in the bathtub or a dash of Mr. Bubble to add zing to the near-cleansing experience. I’ve already gamed it out: the older boy will one day decide Mr. Bubble is for babies, much like he decided at one point that Sesame Street is for babies, and that will be that. Perhaps the younger will hold out hope for another dash of the Mr. Bubble at some point, but he’ll follow his older brother’s lead, and he’ll stop asking for toys in the bathtub and for bubbles.

Eventually, the toys will get cleaned up and donated to a church sale or some such collection, but the last bottle of Mr. Bubble will just migrate to the rear of the cabinet. Periodically, I’ll clean and rearrange the contents of the cabinet, but I won’t want to dispose of half a bottle of Mr. Bubble. Eventually, I’ll say I’m saving it for the grandchildren, but I’ll not really know if I’m to have my line continue or if I’ll live to see it.

I’m sure I’ve mentioned before that one of the most saddening things I saw when I was carrion-crawling around the turn of the century, visiting estate sales to find books or games to list on eBay for a couple bucks, was containers of consumables marked a quarter. You never like to think this can of WD-40 that you’re tossing into your cart at Lowe’s as an afterthought might outlast you, but someday, one will.

No, I’m just Tad today because it’s not the complete recognition of mortality flashing before my eyes, but the fleeting recognition, again, that these days that I often find maddening or dull or somehow otherwise not lived entirely fully will pass and I will miss moments of them with great acuteness.

Or at least I’m planning very carefully to do so.

Note to self: stop buying the economy-sized bottles of Mr. Bubble.

Buy My Books!

Book Report: The Ambushers by Donald Hamilton (1963)

March 22, 2013March 21, 2013 Brian J. Noggle

It’s been a while since I read a Matt Helm book (four and a half years, apparently). This book has two bits in it: Matt Helm goes to a Central American country to knock off the leader of an insurgency tied to Cuba and the Soviet Union. When he does, he sees that the insurgents have somehow gotten their hands on a road-mobile medium range nuclear missile which Helm doesn’t have the ability to disable or destroy as part of his mission. He also rescues another agent who is a basket case after torture and rape.

When he returns, he finds that the upper levels of the bureaucracy are disappointed in the results of the mission, as the missile might have fallen into the hands of a government nominally American-friendly. He drives cross country to a southwestern recuperative facility with the basket case. After a day at the facility, she’s less of a basket case and wants out–so he takes her onto his next mission, seeking out a Nazi war criminal plotting some sort of insurrective event from Mexico. He finds a pair of operatives from another country working to look for the fellow themselves, and he crosses and double-crosses them as they cross and double-cross him in the pursuit.

You know, this book was eighteen years after the war. Nazis as bad guys were believable. The book seems less dated, strangely, because Nazis have been the go-to bad guy in popular culture for seventy years. Can you imagine a movie from the 1970s where the bad guys were the Spanish monarchy? I think not.

Still, the book is a very good change of pace from the Executioner novels. Looking back, I see I bought this almost two years ago in Bolivar. Huh. I’ve read a number of books from that book fair already. Mostly the paperbacks.

This blog is getting to be close to ten years old now. And mostly it serves my nostalgia for books I’ve read and where I bought them.

Books mentioned in this review:

Buy My Books!

Book Report: The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag by Robert A. Heinlein (1976)

March 21, 2013 Brian J. Noggle

This book is a collection of short stories, b-sides really, rushed out probably on the success of Stranger in a Strange Land. It includes the title story and a couple others.

Impressions:

“The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag”: An interesting premise: a man doesn’t know what he does during the day, so he hires a husband-and-wife team of private investigate him. On their first day, the husband is hypnotized into thinking he has uncovered the mystery, but only the fact that his wife saw him speaking with their target, Jonathan Hoag, keeps them from being snowed. Ultimately, that makes no sense, since we’re not clear who hypnotized him. The story turns to the bizarre and, ultimately proved disappointing.
“The Man Who Travelled in Elephants”: An interesting story about an older gentleman who mourns his wife who accompanied him across the country as a travelling salesman and then, for their amusement, across the country to fairs and shows as they told themselves they were elephant salespeople. After her death, he continues traveling by bus to different fairs, but it’s not the same without her. This nice little story has the obvious twist that might not have been so obvious when it was written.
“–All You Zombies–“: As I was reading this, I commented to my wife that at least he was not traveling back in time to schlep his mother, unlike Time Enough For Love. Well, here he does one better, I think: Going back in time to knock himself (as a woman) up with the child who will become him. For reasons unknown and unexplained.
“They”: A piece of paranoid ficton with the obvious twist. A man is locked up, sure that everyone is conspiring against him and the whole world is an illusion for some purpose.
“Our Fair City” A newspaperman and a parking lot attendant make use of–or get help from–a sentient whirlwind to unmask corruption in the city. A nice bit of whimsy.
“And He Built a Crooked House”: The only thing I’d read before in some other anthology. An architect builds a tesseract-looking house that, after an earthquake, folds into itself just as the architect is about to show it to the new homeowners.

A collection of his b-sides, really, but Heinlein (PBUH) really was a juvie rocket-jockey writer whose works achieved resonance because of the aspirational themes and understanding of human nature within them, and when he became popular and wrote adult themed Novels, they succeeded in spite of Heinlein sometimes. I like Heinlein, but with the good, you’ve got to take some not good. This book is half and half.

Books mentioned in this review:

Buy My Books!