To be able to say "Noggle," you first must be able to say "Nah."
We bought a box of the miniature cereal boxes as a treat for the boys. It’s like a hotel minibar for children, and it yields the same gluttonous results.
My beautiful wife, who was once the Health Minister of the Alliance of Free Blogs, was astonished. “That’s six hundred calories,” she said.
Well, yes. They are boy children, and they consume about two thirds of a box of the new and improved 12 ounce boxes of cereal each morning, so, yeah. Wait until they get about twelve and fourteen.
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Headline: Why NASA says Mayans are wrong about predicting the end of time
Article brief, courtesy MfBJN: Because they are.
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This book is a brief (fewer than 100 pages) military history of the Mongols, starting with Genghis Khan. It’s part of a series of short, topical books by Osprey Publishing that look pretty interesting; I’d look for them myself at book fairs, but I recognize that these days, I’m just sniffing among the trash left by Internet-device-enabled book dealers who will find these things before I do and will try to then sell them to me at more than $1 each. Look down there at the price of this one, for crying out loud. It’s almost enough to make me consider not returning this book to the library (but I did).
At any rate, it focuses more on the military conquests of the Mongols starting with the consolidation of their central Asian power base and continuing through their campaigns in Europe, the Middle East, China, and Southwest Asia. Its focus, as I might have mentioned, is on the military strategies and tactics of the Mongols, and the focus really, er, focuses on how brutal they were. This slender volume does not have any of the leavening effect of their administration, religious tolerance, and other homer bits that run throughout Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World.
Still, it’s a quick read, with lots of images and maps helping to fill the pages. So it’s more like a long encyclopedia entry than a scholarly book. But a good read and a good primer. Man, I’ll have to seek out some more of these Ospery books.
Books mentioned in this review:
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Good god, man, the United States is an imperialist nation.
You don’t see us measuring things in kilometers, do you?
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So I was discussing homonyms and homophones with the lad today, and I started thinking about words that are both homophones and homonyms. That is, words that sound the same but are spelled differently and have different meanings for the same spellings.
Speaking to a six-year-old, an early example that arises is butt which has two meanings (to hit with the head, the backside) and has the same pronunciation as a word spelled differently (but).
So I’ve been kind of zoning out of conversations and whatnot over the last two days as I run through words in my head. I got row (roe). My beautiful wife contributed ball (bawl).
A bit of a word on the homonyms: I disqualify slang words or meanings that are obviously related, like dough (doe), where dough’s meaning for money is because it uses bread as a metaphor or tie (Thai) because the men’s neckwear is called that because you tie it. Although one could argue that the Twin Ion Engine acronym is a different meaning, but it’s a fictional thing and an acronym and not a proper noun, which is okay. You see, the rules are in flux.
Sorry for injecting that virus into your brain’s clock cycles.
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Let’s kill two birds with one stone, shall we?
Problem: The continuing NHL labor dispute.
Problem: Hostess Brands, Inc., liquidating over a labor dispute.
Solution: Open the NHL with replacement players taken from the bakeries.
America, you’re welcome.
(First link seen via Wombat over at The Other McCain.)
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The whole left-right thing continues to lose meaning as journalists continue to use “right-wing” to mean pretty much any political belief they disagree with. Case in point:
A Hungarian far-right politician urged the government to draw up lists of Jews who pose a “national security risk”, stirring outrage among Jewish leaders who saw echoes of fascist policies that led to the Holocaust.
You see, a German fascist who wants to round up the Jews is right wing. Just like small government types in America:
America’s left-wing Occupy movement and right-wing Tea Party are just two examples of the world’s new wave of activists, a diverse and dispersed collection of movements that also includes Spain’s Indignados (the “Indignant”) and the rebellious youth of the Arab Spring.
The smearing of the term to equate Republicans and Tea Party activists as fascists works. In 2004, I remember a friend whose political leanings differed from mine (and, as I surmise it, is no longer a friend because of it) telling me that George W. Bush was going to round up the Jews. He’s not a dumb guy. But he believes it because the convenient, meaningless journalistic shorthand reinforces it.
This just in: As a Republican, I am not a monarchist.
The political term right-wing originates from the French Revolution, when liberal deputies from the Third Estate generally sat to the left of the president’s chair, a habit which began in the Estates General of 1789. The nobility, members of the Second Estate, generally sat to the right. In the successive legislative assemblies, monarchists who supported the Ancien Régime were commonly referred to as rightists, because they sat on the right side.
If there’s one political disposition to centralizing authority in a single government leader, it’s not from my branch of the Republican Party.
Republicans need to make it clear that the whole “right-wing” thing is inaccurate and historically ignorant when it’s applied to contemporary politics, and maybe the journalists and commentators will drop it.
Link breadcrumb trail:
View From The Porch > The Munchkin Wrangler > Hit & Run
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Man, how it pains me to say the words, but I do have a favorite Kenny Chesney song in spite of how he briefly ruined an element of country music with the whole Beach Cowboy schtick that even affected George Strait, for crying out loud.
At any rate, I heard it on the radio the other day. “Young“:
The strangest thing about it is the double-effect nature of it (I am Mr. Double Effect Narrator right here). When I first heard it ten years ago, I was a little wistful appropriately for my teenaged years (although briefly and only at a surface level, of course, but that is the will o’ the wist).
Now, of course, I can be both wistful for its content and wistful for the time when the song was new.
In related news, that particular clock has started on this current song from Eric Church, “Springsteen“:
The first couple of times I heard it, I thought it was a pitch-corrected song by Willie Nelson. I even did the math in my head to figure out how old Willie Nelson would have been when Springsteen came out. Not 17, but young enough to be wistful for now that he’s almost eighty.
Hey, why not something wistful from Willie, then? “Mendocino County Line“, also from 2002 and featuring Lee Ann Womack:
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I guess I’m on a diet since I bought thin-sliced bacon by mistake. Some percentage fewer calories than the thick-sliced bacon I normally buy.
Why, it’s almost like health food.
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I see Roberta X.’s moon over Roseholme Cottage and raise her one moonset over the Jones place:
I didn’t have time to mount my camera on a tripod for the shot as I didn’t have much time between deciding to take a photograph, getting the camera, and getting the photo, so it really doesn’t capture it adequately.
On the other hand, add this to one of my accomplishments in the 1:15 for this morning. If you can call it an accomplishment.
UPDATE: Thanks for the link, Ms. X.
Hey, readers of The Adventures of Roberta X., I have a novel available called John Donnelly’s Gold that’s exactly like I Work on a Starship, except it’s not in first person, the main characters don’t actually have a job, there are no starships involved, and it’s a comic heist novel where four laid off IT employees seek revenge on the CEO of the company that laid them off. So it’s exactly the same in that it’s self-published. Roberta X. herself said of the novel, “it, too is quite an adventure and one that will have you wondering how it all turns out until the very end.” Also, it’s the only place in the world where the names Brian J. Noggle and Larry Correia are mentioned together unless my nephew talks about his annual Christmas gift.
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My most productive hour and fifteen minutes of the whole day comes between 6:15, the time the alarm rings and preparation for school begins, and 7:30, when I load the children up into the truck for school.
In that magical period, I get the following done:
That’s a pretty quick moving hour and fifteen minutes, but it’s full of productive tasks, aside from the check a blog or two bit.
Yesterday, my next hour included:
Somehow, the day’s list of accomplishments runs downhill from there. I mean, I did some work and I checked some blogs, but sitting at my desks leads to a uniform experience where time just passes and only a few bullet points get done, not all of them salutatory (you checked Instapundit again? You played Civilization again?)
If I had the same focus as I have that, well, not first hour of the day–I’m often awake for an hour before the alarm rings, an hour unfocused because I’m “waking up,” I would be a millionaire. Or I would feel much more content with what I do every day. But.
The reason I’m so efficient in that hour is that I do it six times a week (including Sunday, where “church” replaces “school”), so I’m very efficient at it, having drilled in it for a couple of years now. The remainder of the day is much more fluid and changing, so I can’t have developed that efficiency and productivity that yield the (same daily) bullet points of accomplishment in them.
I guess I need to make a daily set of bullet points of accomplishment each day beyond those seventy-five minutes and then to work earnestly to ensure that they’re meaningful and that I recognize x hours of paying work, a single bullet point or a couple of lines on a time sheet, are valuable, too. Also, I should get some things done away from the computer to break it up and have, if not dramatic impact, at least some visible sign that I did something besides checking LinkedIn or Twitter.
Well, there’s the alarm. Time to get something done.
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It may sound like a plot straight out of a science fiction novel, but a U.S. mission to blow up the moon with a nuke was very real in the 1950s.
At the height of the space race, the U.S. considered detonating an atom bomb on the moon as a display of America’s Cold War muscle.
The secret project, innocuously titled ‘A Study of Lunar Research Flights’ and nicknamed ‘Project A119,’ was never carried out.
. . . .
Under the scenario, a missile carrying a small nuclear device was to be launched from an undisclosed location and travel 238,000 miles to the moon, where it would be detonated upon impact.
The headline is a bit misleading, as the plan was to detonate a single atom bomb, not to destroy the moon.
But this secret now revealed makes me wonder how good Frank J.’s sources are, as he wrote the famous essay A Realistic Plan for World Peace a.k.a Nuke the Moon:
Now the world will be pretty convinced that America is frick’n nuts and just looking for a fight, but we need to really ingrain it into everyone’s conscious so that no one will ever even contemplate crossing us. This requires making good use of our nukes. I know, nukes can kill millions of people, but they sure aren’t doing anyone any good just sitting around. I mean, how many years has it been since we last dropped a bomb on someone? No one even thinks we’ll actually use one now. Of course, using nukes shouldn’t be done haphazardly; all uses have to be well planned out because the explosions are so cool looking that we’ll want to give the press plenty of notice so they can get pictures of the mushroom cloud from all sorts of different angles. But what to nuke? Well, usually the idea is populated cities, but, by the beliefs of my morally superior religion, killing is wrong. So why can’t we be more creative than nuking people. My idea is to nuke the moon; just say we thought we saw moon people or something. There is no one actually there to kill (unless we time it poorly) and everyone in the world could see the results. And all the other countries would exclaim, “Holy @$#%! They are nuking the moon! America has gone insane! I better go eat at McDonald’s before they think I don’t like them.”
Yeah, we all thought Frank J. was crazy or just being humorous. It makes you wonder what else Frank J. has the inside dope on. Is or ever was Glenn Reynolds a puppy-blender?
(Link via Ace’s place.)
UPDATE: It looks like fellow old-timer Stephen Green got here first.
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So we watched some football on Sunday, and they ran the commercial for the remade Red Dawn (in cinemas now!).
I’m with a wise man who long ago said:
By contrast, the long-stalled remake has become a sick joke. To wit: MGM has taken the extraordinary step of digitally scrubbing the film of all references to Red China as the invading villains — substituting dialogue, removing images of Chinese flags and insignia etc. — because “potential distributors are nervous about becoming associated with the finished film, concerned that doing so would harm their ability to do business with the rising Asian superpower.” All without the PRC even uttering a single word of protest.
And who are the new invaders? North Korea. That’s right, the starving-to-death, massively brainwashed “Hermit Kingdom.” I imagine at this very moment, Hollywood script doctors are working on a revised first act in which Kim Jong Il decides it’s a good idea to let hundreds of thousands of his captive countrymen travel to America.
The invasion would last about until the invading armies discovered the American concept of the supermarket, wherein they would all eat themselves sick or into a nap where even 21st century American high school kids could win against them.
The conceit offends me. Apparently, it did not offend enough people to make it the bomb it deserves to be, but those 21st century American moviegoers might lack enough understanding of logistics, current events, and history to think that North Korea might actually pose a threat to the United States outside of maybe Hawaii.
But you know what would make this film a must-see movie for me?
If, instead of reshooting the scenes referring to China, they dubbed over them. Badly.
I would go to see it if every time the characters referred to the origin of the invaders, the actors’ mouths would say “China,” but a deep male voice in the audio track would say “North Korea.” I’d even nominate it for a People’s Choice award, if I’m eligible as a people to do that sort of thing, if the dubbing would include obvious mistakes such as referring to the capital of the invaders’ country incorrectly. The actors’ mouths would say, “Beijing,” but that deep voice (even if it was a woman speaking) would say, “Seoul” or “Manila.”
That, my friends, would be awesome.
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Lowe’s wants an Internet sales tax. For fairness.
“We lose sales every day — not just on Black Friday — but any time we compete or try to compete on an unfair playing field,” said Scott Mason, vice president of government affairs for Lowe’s, the home improvement chain, which has Black Friday specials on everything from cordless drills to vacuums to artificial Christmas trees. Lowes.com collects sales tax from shoppers in every state that has a sales tax and where the company operates stores and warehouses. “It’s absolutely a position of disadvantage.”
Meanwhile, Lowe’s continues to build in developments within Tax-Increment Financing Districts, where the sales tax is often higher than surrounding areas.
A Lowe’s home improvement store apparently will be the centerpiece of a development described in the city’s first official application to create a Tax Increment Financing district here.
Town Manager Michael Chammings said he was disappointed with the decision by Lowe’s, after the efforts of Norway and Oxford to support the project. He referenced the approval by Oxford residents of a tax increment financing district for Lowe’s, which aimed to use captured revenue to improve municipal water service to the northern part of the town.
Under a tax increment district financing plan, about $16.6 million of the property tax revenue from the center will be set aside to pay for infrastructure.
The $105 million shopping center will have several anchor tenants, including Lowe’s, Target and Belk.
Taken as a group, these ordinances establish a tax increment financing district and a business district to enable a St. Louis development company to develop a Wal-Mart store, a Lowe’s home improvement center, a housing development, and a strip center.
Now, it seems to me that Lowe’s wants its fairness both ways: It wants fair treatment in special set-asides and special tax rates in places where it directly benefits from the unlevel playing field, where tax rates differ based on location within a municipality and where tax benefits accrue to those extra equal businesses helped by the local governments often at the expense of smaller businesses in the area who didn’t get helping hands in their development and who get additional competition from the government-assisted larger stores. Some developments get them, and it’s just not fair if the ones with the Lowe’s in them don’t get them, too.
Lowe’s also wants the Internet fairness of making sure that its algorithms don’t have to calculate myriad tax rates whose myriad actually proliferates when Lowe’s wants to be part of a new development.
In other words, fairness and “level playing field” have multiple meanings depending upon how they impact the corporation. Who has, apparently, an executive in charge of helping to manipulate legislation across the country to the company’s benefit.
Lowe’s isn’t the only retailer playing this game, by the way.
(Link to the Politico piece seen on Hot Air.)
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Run out of whipped topping before you’ve run out of pumpkin pie? Dill dip makes a convenient and obvious substitute!
In an unrelated rant, what is it with fickle children’s tastes these days? One day they love something and can’t get enough, and the next they’re upset and refuse to eat almost the exact same thing.
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We’ve reached a point in our lives where we’re actually decorating for Christmas. For a while, we’ve put up a Christmas tree, since we had a family. But we’ve gone past that now and into putting little Christmasy tchotchkes around the house. Well, the living rooms. We’ve not hit that middle-of-life suburban point where we swap out artwork on the walls–unlike a certain aunt of mine–but we do put up mementos. Mostly it comes from me, of course, with my personal-relicophilia. If my mother put it up on the shelf once when I was young, it represents a Christmas tradition going back throughout the centuries. Now that the number of people with whom I’ve shared actual Christmas traditions from my youth dwindles, I need these silly little memory triggers to make sure I remain increasingly depressed during the Christmas holidays. Now, what was I saying before I was rummaging through the junk drawer for single-edged razor blades?
Ah, yes.
So now that we’re doing the little knick-knackery for Christmas, we spread them out on hearths, on bookshelves, on the piano, and whatnot. We disperse them so that when you look, you might catch a little bit of the spirit or whatnot. However, at the end of the holiday season, when we take down the decorations in early January, we don’t always get all of the bric-a-brac back in the boxes. For a week or two, we’ll find another something here or there. A sleigh. A pine cone. A stuffed Christmas tree. Something that had faded into the background over the course of the month that our eyes skipped right over it when it was time to de-Christmastiate.
If we found it in a couple of weeks, we’d still have the wherewithal to pull the boxes out of the most remote storage location in the house, which we always reserve for Christmas gear (although at Nogglestead, it’s a small closet beneath the steps, where we have to bend and twist to get the things out, but it’s not as bad as the attic at Old Trees). But after enough time has elapsed, we sort of let it go and either tuck the tchotchke into a drawer or just let it hang out for the year.
This year’s Straggler of the Year is a little elf-bearing-gifts on the clock:
My Nana gave me that a couple years ago, sometime after my first son was born. I think it came with a little boy doll that she gave us to decorate his room. For a while, it did, but after we left Old Trees for Nogglestead, the doll moved to the basement and the little elf rightfully became a Christmas decoration. Well, it would have, if we put it away after Christmas.
But atop the clock, it’s outside the normal range of the eye as it travels through the room. I sort of hid it a bit behind the clock’s facade for much of the year, but now that it’s appropriate again, he’s stepped out.
Hopefully, one of you will remind me sometime in January to pack him away this year. Undoubtedly, though, next year we will have a different winner of this annual award.
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I’ve added a couple bits to the sidebar for pulp fans like me. Well, it is for me, since I’ll be using them, but they’re good reads for paperback lovers:
That ought to hold you between my silly little book reports.
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Good god, man! Have we unlearned so much as to unleash this upon our young again?
Purple pants? Must we repeat everything of the 1970s again?
Allow me to dictate a rule of fashion to you people who aspire to be something like men, except with sore thumbs not from hitting them with a hammer while trying to be something like a man (a real man has evolved to hitting the actual nail) but from playing video games all day (although some real gamers would say they’ve evolved to have strong thumb muscles that no longer get sore, with which I would quibble over the word evolve). At any rate, the rule is:
No purple pants unless you are a clown.
Which is a bit of a tautology. If you’re wearing purple pants, you are a de facto clown. And not a scary, nightmare-fodder clown. A clown like Shakespeare would have wrote about. A buffoon from, well, not the country in the modern case, but rather from some enclave in the city where they have Brooks Brothers stores and where women smile warmly and not in mockery when walking next to someone wearing purple pants. Although I am not 100% sure that the female model in this ad is not laughing at the model in the purple pants.
I’ll not be shopping there, thank you. I’m holding out hope that George Zimmmer hasn’t loaded Men’s Wearhouse with these things so I don’t have to deal with them in the event that I buy a good suit in the near future. I’d hate to have to (and by hate to I mean “would really love to but would be conflicted by the expense of”) go to London to get a real bespoke suit.
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So my six-year-old asked me about cannibalism the other day. I’m not sure how it came up; maybe he was talking to Marc or something. More likely, he’d heard something about it at school, since he got the idea that some people practiced it. “What state do they eat their enemies?” he asked.
“They don’t do that in any state; it’s a bad thing, and there are better things to eat then people.” That’s standard Daddy lectures about natural history and whatnot. Then the Brian J. lectures about history kicked in, and the misinformation commenced.
“Did you know that cannibalism and Canada share the same root word?” I asked.
I don’t know why I do that to the poor lad; he trusts me, well, at least as far as possible, and now he’s got the notion that Canadians are cannibals.
On the other hand, there’s not a lot of ways that could go wrong. Certainly, we’ve never had Patch, my Canadian co-pilot from my testing days, over for an actual meal and probably won’t any time soon, so the boy won’t worry about what’s in the pasta’s meat sauce.
And, on the other hand, it could actually benefit the boy if, after the disintegration of civilization, the Manitoban tribe comes raiding out of the frozen steppes. He and his family will fight to the last to avoid that fate worse than mere death.
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Given the tone and type of look of this book, one can’t help but think of Rod McKuen. In tone, both are about aging poets in love with their own poetry and their role as poets, both talk about relationships coming and going and the heady starts of them and the different ways the relationships end, many of them with disappointment.
But, interestingly, Kavanaugh has a different background than McKuen: He was a priest who wrote a 1967 book about how the Church should change in all the ways that they say now that the Republican Party should change. In a speech at Notre Dame, he tore off his clerical collar and stomped on it and became, ten years later, the poet that he is in this book. His interest in marriage didn’t end with one wife, apparently, and one assumes he had other women between them. (According to his bio at the James Kavanaugh Institute.)
At any rate, the tone of the poems, as I said, are of an aging man in the middle of his life, dealing with the knowledge that he’s no longer young but not yet old. The poems have moments where they connect with men of a certain age (and had an audience in the middle 1970s, where the sweaters and the poetry books were an outward sign of coolness even in early middle age), but (as my beautiful wife pointed out), they aren’t very poetic. The verses do not contain a lot of evocative imagery drawing out the theme and conclusions. It’s philosophical musings with line breaks.
So there you go: It’s like McKuenesque poetry with a more dramatic poet backstory. There might be something in it for you, but the moments are just moments amid a whole book of sometimes repetitive sentiments. Which is what you get with any book of work by any single poet, even Edna St. Vincent Millay or Robert Frost.
Books mentioned in this review:
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