To be able to say "Noggle," you first must be able to say "Nah."
Patteran, a set of coded signs made with sprigs or something, typically associated with gypsies. (Definition)
From, appropriately, "The Gipsy Trail":
Follow the Romany patteran
North where the blue bergs sail,
And the bows are grey with the frozen spray,
And the masts are shod with mail.
I’ll be able to use this one in a sentence, werd.
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Orpiment, a yellow pigment made from arsenic. (Definition)
From "The Song of Diego Valdez":
But I remember comrades–
Old playmates on new seas–
Whenas we traded orpiment
Among the savages–
A thousand leagues to south’ard
And thirty years removed–
They knew not noble Valdez,
But me they knew and loved.
I don’t think I’ll get to use this in conversation often, though.
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I am a scofflaw.
According to this can of bathroom cleaner:
It is a violation of Federal law to use this product in a manner inconsistent with its labeling.
And:
1. Spray 6-8 inches from surface to be cleaned.
I am pretty sure that I sprayed from under 6 inches away from a toilet and maybe more than 8 inches, say 8.034 inches, away from the basin.
According to this can, I have violated Federal law several times today.
Now, I know the can is no attorney, but come on, it’s easy to imagine that such a law exists that makes it an actual crime to just let the product sit on a heavily soiled surface for only one minute just because the law says do what the instructions tell you.
Because some regulator or set of legislators saw the problem (what, people huffing aerosols? Using bathroom cleaners on ovens?) and passed/made some burden to put the fear of the Federal Bureau of Investigation into consumers who read the packaging.
Another Federal law that goes unenforced. Unless the prosecutors can’t hang someone for a real crime, and Al Capone goes to prison in the 21st century for consumer-grade solvent misuse.
Sad, isn’t it?
UPDATE Thanks for the link, Ms. K. Hey, if you’re in the IT field, check out my blog QA Hates You. Also note my IT caper novel is available for the Kindle for 99 cents and in paperback. Thanks!
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That’s one way to look at Missouri Representative Kurt Bahr’s proposed law to abrogate the contracts between subdivision/neighborhood associations and their members:
That would change statewide for future elections under a bill proposed by a legislator from nearby O’Fallon. The measure, by Republican Rep. Kurt Bahr, would prevent homeowners associations from enforcing or adopting bans on political signs.
“Should a private organization allow you to contract away constitutionally protected inherent rights?” Bahr asked.
Strangely enough, contract law does this all the time.
Consider:
And so on and so forth.
The fact of the matter is that people sign contracts and make individual agreements that limit what they can do. This does not “violate the rights” of either party in the contract or agreement any more than holding one’s tongue when one has a snarky remark violate’s one’s own right to free speech.
What Representative Bahr confuses here, as so many do, is that the Bill of Rights limits the government’s authority, not other organizations.
Anyone who signs a contract with a neighborhood association needs to honor that contract. Anyone considering moving into a home bound by such a contract needs to recognize that it is a contract, not a formality, and they need to honor it.
And the Missouri government should not step in and break these codicils when the citizens who signed the agreement didn’t read them or didn’t really expect to be held to them.
I’m not sure the non-enforcement part of the law could stand up in court anyway. After all, ex post facto is not just a river in Italy.
(Representative Bahr’s HB 1380 text here. United States Bill of Rights text here)
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I’ve got it: For our new brand campaign, a Vulcan. A Vulcan with an orchid. A Vulcan wearing platform shoes with an orchid. Yes! A Vulcan wearing platform shoes with an orchid kneeling in front of a low couch. Not a Vulcan as hot as T’Pol, though, wearing platform shoes with an orchid kneeling in front of a low couch with our handbag in front of her.
Make it so.
Lord help us, they did so.
Continue reading “High Concept”
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Did I really say I would read this book soon? The Internet doesn’t forget.
I read the first volume of this two-volume set in April 2010. The first volume collects four of Kipling’s novels. This volume has three parts: 314 pages of short stories (27 in all); 98 pages of Something of Myself; an autobiographical sketch; and 89 pages of poems (58 in total).
The first collection of short stories is what really bogged me down. Kipling wrote in so many locations, in so many styles, in so many argots that changing between short stories in rapid succession was a real challenge. In one, you might be a pair of American wealthy people looking to move to England and having to deal with the culture shock of owning an English manor where the population thinks in terms of generations instead of months or seasons. Or you might be a regiment private dealing with life on the Indian frontier. Or you might be a mongoose. The styles and idioms differ vastly between each, and you at about the time you’re really dialed in on the accent, the story is done and you’re onto the next. I put the book aside for a long period of time in the midst of the short stories to read other things with more unified metaphors. The collection includes the well-known stories “The Man Who Would Be King”, “Wee Willie Winkie”, and “Riki-Tiki-Tavi” (which will be the name of my next cat, werd, and I hope it’s as good as hunting snakes and lizards as our current aged-and-declining champion Galt).
The autobiography is very enjoyable. Kipling talks about his early days as a newspaperman in India, which in turn led to his success as a writer in England by the time he was in his 20s. He name-drops constantly–his best friend was M. Rider Haggard, the author of the Allan Quatermain tales. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle taught him golf. He talks about Robert Louis Stevenson, whom he just missed in New Zealand on one of Kipling’s round-the-world tours. He talks about the other literary luminaries in the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th and their relationship to him. He knew Cecil Rhodes, who once gave him a lion cub to raise. And so on.
The anecdotes are amusing, and the things Kipling considers are interesting in their own regard. Kipling and his wife lived for a time in Vermont, in the United States, in a couple of domiciles. One, called Naulakha, was a large estate. When rambling about, the couple meet a woman who asked if they were they were the owners of the house on the hillside in the distance (they were). Kipling admitted they were, and she told them how comforting it was to see the lights of another house in the darkness (Kipling, from that moment on, kept the lights on in the rooms facing her and the curtains open). I know the feeling now that I live out in the country–the house behind us has been empty for almost a year, and I can’t wait for the new purchasers to move in so I can see lights in it again).
Kipling was a product of many cultures from his youth in India. When the Kiplings decamped for England, their first home wasn’t right, Kipling felt, because of the Feng Shui. In the 19th century he was talking about Feng Shui. He uses the term Allah for the supreme being throughout. It’s fascinating stuff throughout.
The poems are fun to read, and the set includes the well-known “White Man’s Burden” (about the United States’ dominion over the Philipines following the Spanish-American War), “The Gods of Copybook Headings”, “If”, “Gunga Din”, “Tommy”, “Dane Geld”, and more.
Kipling gets a rap for being an imperialist running dog or whatever, but really, he’s not so simply classified. He recognizes the variety in other cultures, but he recognizes that the Western culture of the British Empire brings a certain amount of Law (see the review of Puck of Pook’s Hill from the previous volume for that progression). He also recognizes the plight of the soldier in the maintenance of the Empire, as seen throughout his poems like “Tommy” and his short stories. So although he’s not as propogandist as portrayed by unnamed and, possibly made up by this reviewer, critics, he does think that certain laws of human nature apply to all civilizations and cultures and that Western culture has done the best good for individuals and maybe mankind of the cultures that have come so far.
Kipling is great stuff, better at defending Western culture than your Hardys or your Dickenses. I wish he were more widely taught.
Now, I must send out a search party for the book’s dust jacket. I tend to take them off while I read the books so I don’t damage them (Aren’t the dust jackets there to protect the books? Shut up, he explained), and there’s no telling where it’s gotten to in the two years it’s been floating around my office during various cleanings and rearrangings of ephemera. Although I can tell you where it is not: 1) on the desktop and 2) in the spot where the other dust jackets are for books I’m currently “reading.”
While I do that, go over to Tam’s place and enjoy some Kipling sung (which sounds like a Korean dish, but isn’t.)
Books mentioned in this review:
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I bought these books at Redeemed in the local interest section because I thought they were both little reminisciences of life in the Ozarks. They’re very short–each about six pages or so (but I’m counting them as two books, dammit). But I was wrong. They’re short and independent like this because their the tracts of a local Baptist congregation, either available as a pickup for members or as leave-behinds as the Brothers and Sisters visit homes in the area.
I gave one to my wife and read one myself when we had a couple minutes to kill yesterday, and she first read The Big Fish and Gas Rationing while I read The House at the End of the Block. She said right away that it was very Baptist and didn’t make much sense. I got pretty quickly the parablic nature of my pamphlet, although I was not so harsh as to say it didn’t make much sense. But then I later read the one I had given her (and she did not read the other).
The Big Fish and Gas Rationing is a little wildy skewing as it runs through a story about the narrator having trouble understanding the man at the gas station during gas rationing (which places the story in the 1940s or 1970s). Then he meets a cab driver somewhere–I’m not sure if he’s going to the airport in Springfield or going to the airport to return to Springfield–and he and the cab driver like to fish, so they make plans to go fishing. When they do, the James River floods (aha! They’re in Springfield. Or Virginia, where a James River flows to the Potomac) and they’re stranded for a couple days atop their car — but if they’d gone to church instead of fishing, they would not be in this predicament. The narrator learns his lesson and returns to the gas station to apologize to the attendant for being impatient and rude. It really doesn’t flow very well at all.
The House at the End of the Block definitely has a better narrative. The Brother narrator and his partner are going door-to-door, and they come to a cluttered house they don’t want to visit, but do because their faith demands it. Inside, they find a drunkard who beats his wife and kids and prohibits them from attending their church, which they had previously. The next Sunday, though, the family minus the husband and the baby are waiting for the church bus, and as they go, the man has an awakening where he sees what his wasting ways have left for his family and changes. That night, they all go to church and the man is saved. Later, the man himself is going door-to-door when he encounters an old drinking buddy who the man tries to save, but the drinking buddy mocks him. Later, the drinking buddy goes to a tavern and gets into a brawl and is shot in the process. When the changed man visits the dying buddy in the hospital, the dying buddy says how wrong he is. It’s a shorter take on a Dickens kind of tale. Overall, this one flows far better than The Big Fish and Gas Rationing.
Both have a number of Bible chapters for one to review to learn more the lessons that the narrator and the others learn.
They were very quick reads, of course, and worth my (little) time because I’m into reading everything. Also, I counted them as two books to make up some ground this year for all the books over a thousand pages that I’m working on.
I was going to say you can’t buy them on the Internet, but apparently ABC Books up on Glenstone offers The Big Fish and Gas Rationing for $25.00. I wonder if that’s the in-store price. If so, it’s more than the buck fifty I paid down at Redeemed. Maybe they’re Baptist collectors’ items or something.
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On Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal ran a story about the forthcoming taxpayer holdup by the Big Football/St. Louis City Government gang. The gist:
The fight to save St. Louis’s NFL franchise comes at a tough time. The city of St. Louis, St. Louis County and the state of Missouri together still owe $153 million on the downtown dome and face deep budget cuts in other areas. But they are proposing a $124 million plan to build new club seats and a 50,000-square-foot plaza at the dome—with nearly half the cost funded by taxpayers.
In Los Angeles, taxpayers would pay almost nothing for the proposed stadiums.
Economists say large cities often fare better than smaller markets in stadium deals with professional sports teams because they can offer franchises a bigger base of potential fans, and because the larger cities are less reliant on a team to help shape their area’s image.
Despite evidence that these investments rarely pay off in purely economic terms, smaller-market cities continue to offer sports teams millions of dollars in hopes the investments will pay off by improving the quality of life, aiding in the recruitment of new businesses and burnishing their national reputation. Minneapolis and Minnesota are offering more than $600 million for a new Vikings football stadium. And Indiana still owes $649 million on the Colts’ four-year-old stadium.
Two decades after the Rams arrived from Los Angeles, St. Louis is offering millions to try to close an escape clause that could allow the team to return to the glitz of its former home. Jack Nicas has details on The News Hub. Photo: Getty Images
In larger markets, however, cities have managed to keep taxpayers largely off the hook for stadiums, such as the New York Giants’ and Jets’ $1.6 billion, two-year-old stadium and the San Francisco 49ers’ planned $1.02 billion stadium.
Indeed, taxpayers have shouldered about four-fifths of the funding for NFL stadiums in the eight smallest media markets with new facilities since 1995, according to an analysis of data from the consulting firm Convention Sports & Leisure International. During that period, taxpayers have funded less than a fifth of the cost of NFL stadiums in the eight largest media markets where new facilities have been built or are planned, according to the data.
“Investments” in public/private partnerships always work out for the private half, don’t they? The public? Not so much.
Bear this in mind when the state cuts benefits to certain constituencies and when local cities cannot provide basic services like police protection or animal control without additional taxes.
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Breitbart tells CPAC: I have videos of Obama in college and they’ll come out during the election
In Memoriam: Andrew Breitbart (1969-2012)
I’m listening to Jay Weber on the radio now, and already people are calling in to muse if something happened to him and bringing up the number of heart attacks in the Clinton administration.
I’m going the opposite direction: I see the URL for the post says draft. It’s March 1. All the news reports are reporting what the Web site says, and there’s no independent confirmation (see the current LA Times story.
My personal hopeful conspiracy theories are that this is a misscheduled April 1 joke or stunt to prove how intolerant the left is.
Because, damn, they don’t make many men like Andrew Breitbart, and I would hate to lose one.
UPDATE: Apparently, AP has done some journalism or something and confirmed it from sources not preceded with BIG. Well, damn.
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Ladies and Gentlemen, the Puma “Clever Little Bag” side-by-side with a traditional shoebox:
The text on the Clever Little Bag reads:
CLEVER LITTLE BAG
Well it’s smarter than an old fashioned shoebox because it uses 65% less paper. Even better, it means you don’t need an extra carrier bag and you can use it over and over again. Clever huh? Follow the Puma eco-table reuse this bag.
All the grammar errors are indigenous to the bag itself. Apparently, it will also save 40 billion commas and 100 million hyphens to protect the environment.
So. This clever little bag will protect the environment, how?
Instead of a fully biodegradable or fully recycleable cardboard box, we have half a cardboard box and a reusable bag. A reusable bag that’s about the size of a children’s shoe shoebox that I can use perpetually as a carrier bag. Is that what I need? Let me run down the reusable bags I have already: Book bags from every library I’ve ever befriended, a tote bag from the company that buried my mother, little cloth bags that contained linens or something, and a laptop bag. Guess which of these I use. Just one.
No, I have no use for a bag of this size. It’ll probably go right into the garbage can.
Whereas one of those demonic cardboard shoeboxes, when they’re not being recycled or breaking down quickly in a landfill, are excellent storage boxes for mementos from lovers past or gee-gaws of a certain size. I mean, really, who ever gets rid of a shoebox?
I think Puma has outsmarted itself in its quest to have a nice story to tell the environmentally conscious, which is to say, semi-conscious, amongst us.
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What’s a good sign that a bubble is inflating? The experts don’t see a bubble inflating:
Even as homeowners and commercial landlords count their losses from the great real-estate bust, Midwestern farmers are experiencing the biggest property boom in a generation.
The rapid run-up in land values is bound to make some people nervous, especially older farmers who remember how property values collapsed during the farm crisis of the 1980s. Farm economists, though, don’t yet see signs of a land-price bubble.
Economists, the experts, are always the last to know.
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Arizona man charged in hit-and-run crash in Webster Groves:
Kathleen Kinderfather of Webster Groves was struck about 7:15 p.m. Thursday at Big Bend Boulevard and Elm Street by a 2011 Nissan Altima, police say.
…
Lt. Andy Miller of the Webster Groves Police Department said Kinderfather was standing on a triangular traffic island in the eastbound lanes of Big Bend when she was hit.
That’s over by the grocery store where I’d sometimes pick up a pastry during a morning walk. I’d reach that particular traffic island if I walked through downtown Old Trees and followed Rock Hill Road all the way down to Big Bend, or perhaps down to Jackson and then over to Alma, although that route was rarer for me.
It’s strange, because I’d flagged that intersection as more dangerous on the east side of Elm if you’re trying to cross Big Bend heading south. Elm is two lanes northbound until Big Bend, when the rightmost lane is a turn only lane onto Big Bend. Drivers making that turn are generally too busy looking at traffic, blindly following the truck ahead of them, or trying to sneak through after the right turn arrow goes from yellow to off to notice a pedestrian in the crosswalk there. I’ve been narrowly missed a number of times over there.
I hope the old lady pulls out all right.
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This book collects two screenplays by the Coen brothers. I haven’t seen either of the films, although I have seen one or more of their films (answerable by the question “Have you ever seen a movie with John Turturro and John Goodman?”) (Additional parenthetical: I saw O Brother, Where Art Thou?.)
The book starts out with a film editor who did not have a good relationship with the brothers and ended up getting removed from a couple of their films. I’m not sure what it adds, but there it is.
Barton Fink is the story of a playwright from New York whose first Broadway success draws attention from Hollywood, where a studio lures him out to work under contract writing a B-picture about wrestling. Fink has to adjust to life in California and the pressures of writing something unnatural to him. He befriends the secretary of another writer drawn to Hollywood like himself and an insurance agent that resides in the hotel with him. Suddenly, there are bodies and shooting. Rather abruptly. Then it ends. Not a very satisfying thing to read, and I admit I sometimes confused Barton Fink with Ed Wood, which I’ve also never seen. But now that I’ve read one of the two, that problem is solved.
Miller’s Crossing is more straight-through with its themes. It’s a mob picture, with the lackey of one crime lord playing angles to try to prevent a mob war and to make time with the crime lord’s moll, either protecting or giving up her brother to another crime lord who wants him killed for chiseling. There are crosses, double-crosses, frame-ups, cover-ups, and a bunch of other stuff in it. It works better all the way through than Barton Fink, mainly because we’re not given a story about the problems of mobbing and then a climax about how hard it is to write a movie.
As I mentioned, these are screenplays, which is so much different from reading a play. The last screenplay I read was for Casablanca, way before this blog existed, and I don’t remember it being as complex in descriptions of shots. It reminds me of what I read in David Mamet’s On Directing Film (at least I think it was from that book) about capturing individual shots and scenes–as the Coen brothers are writers and directors (and producers), they would write a bit more from that perspective. However, if it’s not your native argot, the visualization based on shot names, you might miss some of the stage direction.
A worthwhile read, and undoubtedly it’s a textbook in some film classes.
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Ladies and gentlemen, the overpriced Frisbee-with-a-strap Captain America’s Flying Shield:
But be warned: This is not a real shield:
If it’s not impenetrable, why is it $10 at Walmart?
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A consultant says that Springfield can turn $40 million tax dollars into a cool $1 billion:
A consultant’s report estimates that a $90 million investment in the Springfield Expo Center and adjoining facilities could increase local spending over the next 25 years by more than $1 billion.
Chicago-based consultant Rob Hunden, who will present the financial impact analysis to city staff and others Thursday, estimates that public money would need to cover about $40 million of the development costs. But the taxpayers’ investment would be paid back with increased tax revenue within 25 years.
“The groups that get the tax money aren’t necessarily the groups that would invest the tax money,” Hunden said, cautioning that the estimate includes revenue to all the taxing jurisdictions in Greene County.
So, while the city would not recoup the entire $40 million investment directly, Hunden expects the combined tax revenue of the city, county, local school districts and others to increase by about $43 million overall.
Spending $40 million dollars to develop a convention center when the convention industry is in steep decline and conventioneers, those that remain, will find the opportunity to get bargain rates in larger cities as they struggle to populate their tax-funded convention centers.
I’m not sure Bernie Madoff promised this sort of return to his investors. In the 21st century, people are quite right to think that “con man” is short for “consultant man.”
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Yesterday’s Springfield News-Leader ran the following two stories on page 1, probably thinking they’re unrelated.
Gov. Jay Nixon and disability advocates are criticizing a House committee’s recommendation to cut $28 million in medical services for blind Missourians in order to make up for a reduction in higher education funding.
The House Appropriations Committee on Health, Mental Health and Social Services recommended last week cutting more than $60 million in funding to a variety of programs. Among the reductions was the money used to take care of 2,858 blind Missourians.
But the nut graf is deeper in the story:
Nixon’s initial budget proposal included a reduction of $106 million for public colleges and universities.
Cuts to higher education! Why, the students will have to make due with fewer tenured professors and more itinerant professors. The universities will have to cut staff! Because the universities cannot stop funding expensive amenities:
A new architectural addition to the campus of Missouri State University is only months away from reality.
At the construction site of Foster Recreation Center, workers are installing basketball goals, putting up supports for a climbing wall and completing a swimming pool with a lazy river.
To the tune of:
The university broke ground on the $30 million construction project in April 2010.
I know, that money comes from a student fee and not from the state’s monies, but it’s the state’s monies that make the $30,000,000 “investment” in amusement activities possible.
Because governments don’t have to prioritize spending, and if they do, they’re demonized.
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This is a chapbook from a little old lady who wrote poems about her home, her friends, and her family in the 1970s and 1980s. Its pages are typewritten (and, in some places, corrected with correction fluid and hand printing), and it’s bound by a comb binder, probably something provided by Kinko’s or the like (my chapbooks from five and six years later were saddle-stapled, which is a more professional look, I think, but this book might have been to thick for that treatment).
So I could have gone into the book with a sense of literary superiority (I’m concurrently reading Kipling’s poetry and some more by Ogden Nash), but somehow I developed a little affection for the book as I read it.
Her prolific period comes in the early 1970s, and as each poem is dated, one can read the poems she was writing up to the date of one’s own birth (if one is about forty years old) and through historical periods of one’s life. So it has that effect on one like me.
The topics of the poems are her friends and family, as I mentioned, so at times it’s like flipping through someone else’s photo album.
Other poems deal with her home, animals around them, herself, and her relationship to God. It’s pretty lightweight stuff, except it was meaningful enough to her to put to verse.
And the poems aren’t very good, but they’re not especially bad either. She has a fair sense of rhythm, relying on iambs a bunch, and she end rhymes. So she put some thought into them, unlike a lot of free versers who just blat out anything and think it’s profound.
So I enjoyed the book for what it was: an amateur writing what she thought. The copy I have is a second edition, which could very well mean there were more copies of it in the wild in 1990 than there are copies of John Donnelly’s Gold out there. Fancy that.
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Ah, the words one learns.
In creating the post below, I looked up the spelling of the word algorithm to make sure I was spelling it right (I was), and I encountered the word algorism which does not have to do with the environment or making millions on carbon credit schemes while opposing strange financial schemes that originate on Wall Street.
I’ll have to use algorismic in a sentence today and hope I don’t get slapped. Also, I need to add them both to Firefox’s dictionary since I’ll be typing them on the Internet frequently in the near term.
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So I go to Barnes and Noble to spend my birthday gift card, and I pick up three volumes of Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories: The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian, The Bloody Crown of Conan, and The Conquering Sword of Conan.
It all started when I saw The Complete Chronicles of Conan around Christmas time, but it was gone before I could buy it with a gift card. So I’ve thought about buying the paperback versions I listed above, but have been hemming and hawing until I got a $50 gift card (the books, in the store, are $17 each plus tax, unlike the lower rates you get if you click the handy Amazon links). So I bought them with the card today and a couple grubzits of my own.
So Barnes and Noble, in an attempt to remain relevant, replicated a bit of Amazon’s functionality by producing a list of recommendations that printed out with my receipt:
It recommended the other books on the shelf by Robert E. Howard that I did not pick up today.
That’s a stunning bit of artificial intelligence there, wot?
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This book is really an oversized pamphlet prepared by the National Archives in 1952. It has photographs of the Declaration of Independence, the United States Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, but the size and quality of the reproduction is such that you can’t actually read the text, and the book does not include it. What the booklet does include is a couple paragraphs about each document, why it was created and by whom, along with a photo of the related mural at the National Archive. At the end of the book, an epilogue of sorts explains what happened to each document after its creation and how it came to the National Archive.
An interesting little read, but I was hoping for the text of each when I bought the book. I am slightly educated but disappointed.
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