To be able to say "Noggle," you first must be able to say "Nah."
A St. Louis Post-Dispatch headline explains the recent census results regarding the city of St. Louis’s population loss:
Does earnings tax hurt city? Observers split
On the other hand, many of the observed split, too, which makes it easier to observe that people and large employers are fleeing the city for some reason.
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Well, I can’t speak for the annals of the entire Internet, but a quick Google search shows I am the first.
Savor my Photoshop prowess (which, to be honest, ran smack into the fact that I spent a whole hour on it and didn’t want to waste more time on something that probably would not look much better with additional time):
Continue reading “In The Annals Of The Internet, I Cannot Believe This Has Yet To Be Done”
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Trivium about Jerry Berger, former gossip columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and St. Louis Globe-Democrat:
He bought a Sig Sauer semiautomatic pistol and began target shooting at the Bull’s Eye range on Manchester Road, taking aim at paper targets he imagined to be intruders or “a contemptible editor.” He fired straight into their hearts.
He bought a gun as a pick-me-up to fight depression after cancer.
As you might remember, I have been to Bull’s Eye. Has it been that long ago?
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Well, this is the next Executioner book. In the previous book, Mack Bolan receives word that his kid brother and his love-of-his-life are missing in Massachussetts, so Bolan goes to the East Coast to find them. He starts knocking off low end mob shops and leaves a survivor with a message: someone knows why Mack is back, and unless they want him to go really ballistic, they’d better make him happy. There is some mob dealing and wheeling, and Mack blows a lot of bad guys and their cars and/or homes up.
Note to self: I’m not going to be able to read 45 more of these contiguously; they are light snacks, for all their virtues as soul-searching, morality-affirming pulp fiction. I need something with a little more depth, or at least a little more variety, than a steady diet of these.
Which pretty much rules out an actual subscription to them. I’m not sure I could handle three of these a month, every month.
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Kudos to Dave Helling of the Midwest Democracy Project, who finds a way to bring up the Koch brothers in discussing Claire McCaskill’s airplane problems:
Sen. Claire McCaskill might want to think about calling David and Charles Koch for some financial advice.
The political world now knows McCaskill owes about $280,000 in back property taxes for an aircraft she used to travel around the state — a plane owned by a company tied to her and her husband.
As the Kochs know, though, McCaskill could have avoided this embarrassment had she simply chosen to keep the plane in Kansas. In Kansas, you see, business aircraft (but not personal aircraft) enjoy a property tax exemption.
Awesome. We witness the birth of a new logical fallacy, the Tu Kochue. It refutes Democratic misdeeds by pointing out that right now, somewhere, the Koch brothers are doing something.
But what about Rex Sinquefeld? How can analysts and commentators work him into the story, too, to make sure all the contemporary Missouri conservative boogeymen jump out and say, “Boo!”
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Tam remarks on the UN resolutions on the Libyan government and says:
As a side note, I was completely unaware that whether a government is “legitimate” or not is up to the UN Security Council…
She says she’s going to have fun with this For some of us, the laughter represents actual hysterics.
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Marko Kloos, a science fiction writer with two munchkins of his own, links to a Wall Street Journal piece about writers looking for places to write that don’t have wi-fi:
The whole world is hankering for faster Internet access. Then there’s novelist Adam Langer, who does his writing in the low-tech Hungarian Pastry Shop in Morningside Heights.
“Not only do they not have Wi-Fi,” said Langer, 43, author of “The Thieves of Manhattan.” “They don’t have any usable outlets, so I have to be incredibly focused because I don’t have a ton of time on my MacBook battery.”
Langer isn’t alone. The Hungarian Pastry Shop’s wall of framed book covers, each by authors who typed amid the cafe’s din, is testimony to the growing appeal of Internet-free spaces.
Gone are the days when a café with good enough coffee, a lax policy on lingering and an open Wi-Fi signal made it the perfect spot for writers to work. With infinite temptations just a mouse click away, many writers are seeking out an increasingly scarce amenity in a wired city: disconnected workspaces.
Frankly, the problem is one of self-discipline. Of course, as the pot, I call the kettle black, but just because I lack self-discipline does not mean I cannot recognize the same in others.
Actually, I have just started toting the laptop to the Bread Co. (which these strange people call “Panera Bread”) now that I have the youngest in a little school program that takes him for 2.3333 (repeating) hours a day, two days a week. Given that I live 20-30 minutes away from the school, it doesn’t make sense for me to come home, so some logic I used to trick my wife compels me to stop there to drink cappuccino, eat pastry, and tap out some words.
You might have noticed some longer pieces appearing here every now and again. That’s why.
I don’t need to look for a place that offers me no wi-fi. I just don’t connect to the network. I have my laptop set to not connect to any wireless network it finds automatically. Ergo, it will tell me the Panera Bread wireless network is klaxoning its SSID at a frequency that only alarums my laptop, but I dismiss the button and then get to clacking at the keyboard.
All right, it’s not so much self-discipline as it is a touch of low risk threshold. I don’t trust wireless networks I don’t control. So I wouldn’t touch it anyway. Also, note I sit with my back to the wall in the coffee shop. Okay, that’s less paranoia and more the realization that it reduces the glare on the screen from overhead lights. But some people who conduct their business on the laptops in the Bread Co. exasperate me. In full view of everyone, they’re typing away on corporate documents and then they go for a refill without password protecting their machine. I had the brief urge to change the Facebook status of a local here on Thursday, someone whose name is at the tip of my fingers because he’s the sales rep for a memorable company and he participates in the local group on LinkedIn. But I digress.
So far, the change of scenery and the compressed time frame has really focused my effort. I open a couple things in tabs on my Web browser before I leave since I will want to just read while I chomp on a cheese pastry and as an eyebreak from writing. Then, I have two pieces in mind I want to work on: a blog post of some sort and an essay/article. I can flip between the writing things and the dwindling number of browser tabs for about an hour and forty-five minutes.
This week, I’ve dropped about 1600 words each day on two blog posts and an article (about blogging). A couple weeks ago, I tapped out an article about software testing that I’ve already placed with a British magazine. I reminded that same magazine that it was holding onto another piece I submitted a year ago, and bam! Suddenly, I have two forthcoming publications. This writing thing seems so easy sometimes.
When I’m disciplined, which means when I am in an area with wi-fi that I don’t trust. And, more importantly, a time and a place where I’m focused on writing.
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My latest attempt at bumper sticker zeitgeist:
It’s available at CafePress, of course.
Buy one for your Democrat friends, if you have any left.
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I’ve read an article on CNN.com about how Japanese residents are beginning to voluntarily absent from Tokyo, the largest city in Japan. The Tokyo metropolitan area is about 30,000,000 citizens, roughly one in four of Japan’s. I mention this because that rather blows my mind. Imagine if one in four Americans lived in New York City. That’s crazy dense.
But the article got me to thinking: What would a Japanese diaspora look like? Imagine that the nuclear problems that result from the earthquake/tsunami are worse than the authorities know or as bad as the most fevered anti-nuclear-power activist can nightmare up (some speculation from someone who might know). Suppose it renders part of Japan uninhabitable, and 40,000,000 or 60,000,000 people need to relocate, many of them outside the Japanese islands proper. What would that do to the world?
Personally, I would hope that the United States would throw open her doors to accommodate as many of the displaced as possible. It would be a great humanitarian gesture, and we would get some new citizen-track people with ingenuity, productivity, and excellent anime skills. Of course, it would cause a couple issues. It might weird the immigrants out completely to live in our heterogeneous society. They might be inclined to enclave up and make little Tokyos wherever they landed, but that happens enough now anyway. It would bump US population substantially, and we’d want to ease them into our population and society as we could. The illegal immigrants from Mexico and their advocates would raise holy kiri, of course, but a great natural disaster warrants one-time consideration that escaping from failed states and faltering economies does not. If we’re going to get cityscapes that match Blade Runner, great Japanese inflow would shortcut it. On the other hand, having all the anime companies stateside would probably make Steven Den Beste’s downloads faster, which might decrease his number of Hot Air Green Room posts further.
Where would they go elsewhere in the world if they did not come to the United States? Australia? China? Korea? Southeast Asia? South America? Europe? Africa? Any large, homogeneous influx like this will radically alter the composition of whatever nation or nations took them in. What would 500,000 Japanese do to the UK? What tensions would arise if 1,000,000 Japanese moved into the Pacific regions of Russia?
An American nuclear meltdown or whatnot would not cause great outflows. Our country is wide and not densely populated. Force everyone in New York City to move out of New York City, and you could spread them across New Jersey, New Hampshire, and Maine, and a lot of us would be none the wiser. But in Asia, blocking off a small portion of habitable land will displace a lot of people.
All speculation aside, I’m more sanguine than this as to what will happen when the Japanese get those nuclear plants cooled down. But I do like to speculate for speculation’s sake. There’s a novel or series of novels in these questions.
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The term localvore is becoming big among the hippie-dippie set. Hey, I’m not knocking growing your own food–I recently uprooted my family to move to a locale where I have more room for my own gardens–and I’m not knocking supporting local farms and local gardeners who participate in farmers’ markets and roadside stands, but you’ve got a whole content industry providing books, Web sites, and even a newspaper column here in Springfield that does nothing but promote how much better local grown produce is than something grown somewhere else in the world and transported to your local grocery store.
I mean, hey, I support buying local produce when it’s fresh and cheap, but there’s no actual moral imperative to do so.
But for some people, it is a MORAL IMPERATIVE! because it’s good for the planet or something. Better for the planet than what the bourgeoisie is doing, anyway.
How many of those hectoring locovores drive Toyota Priia and listen to European techno on their Chinese-made iPhones? I’d like to see the Venn diagram on that.
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Bill Would Ban Human Cloning In Minnesota
But until a similar bill passes in Mississippi, we cannot be safe.
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Now that I am all Going Grant, I’ve also decided upon a personal scenting strategy. Well, no, that makes me sound more metrosexual than a man named Cary could stand. I’ve not started using body washes or gels; it’s still simple cake soaps sold at 36 for $5 at the warehouse store and $1 shampoo for me. I have started dabbing on a little cologne, though, since I have quite a chemistry lab of little vials of it as I recently discovered as I unpacked a little bin underneath the sink. And I wonder: has any man ever used a complete bottle of cologne?
Continue reading “Revisiting Cologne”
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They’re putting another bridge over the Mississippi River to help Illinoisianitians escape. They want to call it:
Missouri legislators want to name the next Mississippi River Bridge the “Jerry F. Costello-William Lacy ‘Bill’ Clay Sr. Veterans Memorial Bridge.” The costs associated with naming the bridge after those two local congressmen would be paid for by private donations.
Hey, I have an idea: Let’s just call it the Pork Barrel Bridge.
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I hope you like The Executioner series. As you might know from previous entries, I do. So my wife bought me 47 of them for my birthday, which means I’m probably going to read a lot of pulp paperbacks this year and next.
This is the 11th entry in the series. The long-running characters are getting established, and the history which will be referred to in the future happens now. The plot? Uh, Mack Bolan goes to San Francisco, meets an attractive woman who may be an ally or an enemy, shoots up some mafioso, and searches his soul.
That being said, that’s one aspect of the early Pendleton entries in the Mack Bolan series: Mack Bolan has a certain depth, in that he questions what he’s doing, his mortality, and his morality a bit. The books often start out with a juxtaposition of an epigraph from a known (at that time) poet and an epigram from one of Mack Bolan’s war journals. So they do try to include a little depth beyond just the gun porn and explosions. That really elevates pulp in my estimation.
A good, quick read that thematically embraces good versus evil, somewhat reflectively.
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In a slug leading to a review of the film Battle: Los Angeles, someone talks about a film he or she has not seen:
Remember ‘Black Hawk Down,’ ‘District 9,’ Independence Day,’ and ‘Cloverfield?’ The war against aliens went better in those movies.
The Somali are from another planet? Really?
The review itself, written by someone who has presumably seen Black Hawk Down, does not make the mistake the slug does.
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The man on the radio says the island of Hawaii is about to get hit by a tsunami.
Wow, how is it going to hit the Big Island and miss Molokai, Maui, Oahu, Lanai, Kaiau, Niihua, and Kahoolawe?
In other news, just yesterday, I learned the names of the major islands of the state of Hawaii to bolster my trivia knowledge. Just in time for this quip.
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To recap: A young drifter goes into a Starbucks and grabs the tip jar off the counter. A customer follows him to his car, altercates a bit, and gets hit by the car as the young drifter and his Bonnie lass leave. The customer dies.
The customer’s family sues because tip jars are an obvious target for deadly larceny.
It alleges that Starbucks “did not employ security to prevent the perpetration of such crimes” and that it “invited the act of perpetration of said crime” by having a tip jar.
Hey, why not? If Congress can mandate any decision, why cannot the courts determine that anything that can be stolen must be defended by armed security under the penalty of litigation?
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This is a 3-In-One Volume, as the dustjacket indicates, which means I might have screwed myself as far as the absolute metrics are concerned. This is the 21st book I’ve read this year, but if I’d read individual novels and whatnot, I’d be on 24. But such is life. When I read The Green Mile, someday, I’m going to take advantage of just that.
Meanwhile, this is the first book of G. McDonald’s that I have read in seven years (the last, apparently, was Skylar in Yankeeland). I read a lot of McDonald when I was in high school, back when I read a lot. These books were much fresher then, about ten or fifteen years old. Like me. But he was one of the big three Mc/MacDonalds (Ross and John D. being the others). But Gregory was the lesser of the three in output and ultimate popularity.
The books are the first three in the Fletch series. The first was made into the Chevy Chase film, albeit with some elements altered to make it more cinematic. Strangely, I like the film a little better, as it ties some things up better. In it, an investigative reporter for a newspaper goes undercover on a beach to find out the source of its drug traffic. As he does that, millionaire Alan Stanwyk hires Fletch, in his drifter disguise, to kill Stanwyk, who claims to have a fast-moving cancer. Fletch investigates both lines and solves them, but the two plotlines are parallel and only slightly converge at the end in an unsatisfying demideus ex machina. The movie ties it up better.
In Confess, Fletch, Fletch visits Boston from his recent residence in Italy. He’s seeking some paintings stolen from his fiance’s father. The father has disappeared. The father’s third wife follows Fletch to find out where her paintings are. And someone is murdered in the apartment Fletch borrowed for his stay on the night he arrives. Inspector Flynn, another McDonald character, gives Fletch enough lead to investigate the murder as well as the stolen paintings, and Fletch resolves both. These plotlines resolve a little better.
Fletch’s Fortune finds Fletch blackmailed by the CIA to bug the rooms of journalists at a national convention where the primary target, a newspaper magnate, is murdered. Fletch investigates and solves the crime.
It’s an interesting throwback, the investigative reporter. Remember when they were relevant, briefly, in the 1970s and early 1980s? Remarkable.
A good read; I tore through it, relatively. I have at least one more McDonald on my shelves–a Flynn novel–and need to revisit McDonald’s other works as well. If that’s not enough to get you to consider it, nothing is.
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I know it’s all the rage among conservatives and libertarian types these days to “Go Galt,” that is, to not work as much as you can since the more you work, the more the government takes from you in taxes and basic humanity. It’s too late for that: a couple years back, even before the election of the current president, I absented myself from the work force mostly as I became a consultant and, as time elapsed, more of a stay-at-home Dad than a consultant. So I’m not in the employment numbers anyway, and if I went Galt, our house would be two-boy-induced-rubble in a matter of hours.
But I wanted to go somewhere alliterative. If not Galt, where? I decided to Go Grant.
Continue reading “Going Grant”
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I sometimes make other people uncomfortable, and by uncomfortable, I mean I creep them the hell out. I don’t know why, but I suspect it’s because of incidents like this:
Today, I’m watching my child play with the train set in the church-run preschool corridor when one little boy tells one of the teachers/attendants about his twin brother’s cast for his broken finger, which covers the urchin’s complete hand.
Then she turns to me, the only adult in sight, and relates the story of how when she was a child, her sister was goofing off when their parents were gone and managed to knock her thumb out of its socket and jam it up into the hand itself. I agreed that it sounded painful, but the first chit-chat, small-talk comment that came to mind as I stood there, leaning against the cinderblock wall in my beaten old black trenchcoat and holding my black fedora, was:
With a thumb you can dislocate on command, you can slip out of handcuffs easily.
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