To be able to say "Noggle," you first must be able to say "Nah."
If I were at the Wisconsin counterprotests, I’d carry this sign:
IF YOU THINK
WALKER=HITLER
WALKER=STALIN
WALKER=MUBARAK
You’re politically and historically ignorant
THANK A TEACHER!
I know, I know, it’s a little long for a sign. But it’s a valid point, I think.
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This is a 2009 (!) entry in the Executioner series. I’ve skipped quite a few since I’ve gotten away from the original Don Pendleton ones, hey? I’m actually surprised to see they’re still writing them.
In this outing, Mack Bolan joins up with a band of assassins called the Black Cross to destroy them from within. Apparently, they’ve been commissioned to take out some government types who are looking into a defense project gone bad. Good on the author of this book: he or she managed to make the ultimate bad guy a member of the government. How modern.
It’s kind of strange the time-warping going on: the first guy killed by the Black Cross is a retiree of the government and a veteran of the Gulf War. Granted, Gulf War veterans aren’t getting that old yet, but you have to remember Mack Bolan is a Vietnam veteran. One of the Black Cross is a sixty-something martial arts expert, and the book says she’s three times Bolan’s age. Uh.
Yeah. So the book again isn’t one of Pendletons. It’s not one of the worst in the series, either, from what I have seen in my limited reading. However, everyone uses a different exotic gun, which the author gives in appropriate names and numbers, but there seems to be a basic misunderstanding about them. The word clip appears throughout instead of magazine, although the correct word crops up from time to time. Other times, the book talks about big guns chambered in .223. Uh. Right.
Additionally, the characters in the book, experts all, do some strange tactical things. One throws a knife from a distance and pins a good guy to the asphalt through his thigh, while under fire, and then she decides to use the grenades. Or when Mack Bolan is fighting his grandmother (who, if he is a Vietnam veteran, is actually closer to his age than 3x), he’s wearing a gun in a holster but doesn’t want to waste the couple of precious seconds it would take to get it out. Until, of course, the martial arts expert knocks him around for a while and then it’s time to take the risk of drawing the firearm.
If you can get around those sorts of suspensions of gaffes, as I could in this book because its pacing is brisk enough, you can enjoy this book for what it is: an adult comic book in prose. Why, the back pages even still have a form you can fill out to subscribe and get 6 new novels of this caliber (.223) every two months. Man, strangely, I was tempted. At one point in my youth, being in Gold Eagle’s stable of writers and cranking out one or two books like this every month would have been a dream job for me.
The worst thing about the book: In the end pages, again, a teaser for another book in another Gold Eagle line, Rogue Angel: The Spirit Banner:
The archeological find of the century… or a con?
When a long-sought-after map to Genghis Khan’s tomb is located, not everyone is convinced it’s authentic–archeologist Annja Creed among them. Despite her skepticism, Annja suddenly finds herself pulled along an increasingly complex trail of clues, each more remote than the last. Soon it appears that the only tomb Annja may find is her own!
Dammit! Last year when I was reading the magazine article and book on Genghis Khan, I wanted to write a book about the search for Genghis Khan’s missing spirit banner.
Those cursed fellows at Gold Eagle are like an infinite number of monkeys with an infinite number of typewriters with an infinite number of history books. Any quick thriller plot you can think of, they have published already.
At any rate, this was the last of the Executioner novels on my to-read shelves. Until I got my birthday present, which my four-year-old called “Gun Books” after returning from birthday present shopping with Mommy: 47 Executioner paperbacks from early in the series. I hope you like the reviews as much as I like the books, because the future will hold many more of them. Also, I don’t need six new ones every two months now.
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Iraq wants the US to pay for damage to Baghdad:
Iraq’s capital wants the United States to apologize and pay $1 billion for the damage done to the city not by bombs but by blast walls and Humvees since the U.S.-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein.
The city’s government issued its demands in a statement on Wednesday that said Baghdad’s infrastructure and aesthetics have been seriously damaged by the American military.
Harvey zooms in on this piece:
Baghdad’s neighborhoods have been sealed off by miles of concrete blast walls, transforming the city into a tangled maze that contributes to massive traffic jams. Despite a sharp reduction in overall violence in recent years only 5 percent of the walls have been removed, officials said.
Harvey sez:
Baghdad’s biggest problem isn’t secret police, torture rooms, mass graves, or a brutal dictator with a bad moustache, it’s traffic jams.
I think that means we won.
I say: Almost.
We won’t truly have won until Baghdad has built enough bike paths, banned indoor smoking, and issued enough personal diversity statements. And maybe graduated enough comic book historians.
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I heard this commercial on the radio today:
Head down to Lowe’s for the President’s Day sale, and you can save Benjamins, Washingtons, and the rest of them.
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In Wisconsin (and near Wisconsin, as the case may be), the Democrats in the State Senate have fled the state to prevent a quorum in a vote they would lose (some about it here). They’ve holed up in a hotel called the Clock Tower Resort in Rockford, Illinois (just over the border from Beloit). I mean, really, who thought that would be a good idea? Am I the first to come up with Wisconsin Democrats Climb Clock Tower?
My question is this: Does the legislature have any way to vote outside the capital? Can the Senate choose to hold its votes elsewhere in case of emergency or other circumstances? Can the Wisconsin Senate go to Illinois?
Because I think a bus full of Republicans chasing a bus full of Democrats down I-39 into Bloomington would be riveting television. I’d tune in.
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Ken Jennings on Watson:
Watson has lots in common with a top-ranked human Jeopardy! player: It’s very smart, very fast, speaks in an uneven monotone, and has never known the touch of a woman.
Devil woman took my Jeopardy! magick.
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It’s been a while since I’ve seen the film, but compared with reading the book, I have to remember the movie as being paced better. Maybe it wasn’t; it was, after all, a movie of the sixties.
James Bond comes into contact with Auric Goldfinger, a wealthy Brit with a lust for gold, in America, where he foils a little card game con Goldfinger ran. In Britain, Bond is tasked with finding out what Goldfinger is up to. Actually, the Bank of England suspects he’s draining the country of its gold reserve, but they can’t prove it. Bond plays a round of golf with Goldfinger and then follows him to Switzerland, gets kidnapped, and added to the plot to rob Fort Knox.
The movie’s plot differs significantly, particularly in the last plot point (the Fort Knox operation) and in pacing. The first third of the book deals with the American trip, the second with the golf game (I’ve only shot 9 holes of golf in my life, and the details of the golf game in this book go on that long–Fleming was into golf, and he shared his knowledge), and the third with the assault on Fort Knox and the denoument after that fails.
Sadly, I think the movie is better.
Also, something struck me when they were talking about Oddjob, and it wasn’t a deadly bowler: that esoteric martial art that made him so exotic and so lethal? Karate. In 1959, it made killing machines. In 2011, I’m taking my four-year-old to karate classes.
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Last night, I slept a bit roughly. Mostly because the bed was like Poland, my cats were Prussia, Russia, and Austria, and I was the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
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I was reading this meaningless press release about the Marvel Universe and its latest goings on and encountered this job title:
Comic book historian Alan Kistler agreed: “Spider-Man is a scientist with a different perspective than Mr. Fantastic, and he specializes in different fields, so it could be very interesting to see how his own expertise rounds out this new Future Foundation. And from another angle, it could be interesting to see how Spidey feels about essentially replacing a person he considered a friend and what kind of pressure this will place on him.”
So do you think comic book historians have a deep grounding in Western Civilization or world history or does their specific training come in lieu of it?
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This book has been credited as being the first Western. Wister wrote it about a bygone era: it’s set 30 years before its publication in 1902, and Wister based it on people he’d known on the plains at the time. Frankly, it’s a series of connected vignettes that chronicle events in Wyoming centered on a young man from Virginia, the protagonist, as he becomes a foreman on a ranch and woos the local schoolmarm. The narrator starts out as a greenhorn under the protection of the Virginian, but on his frequent visits to the region over the course of the years the novel encompasses, he becomes accomplished in his own right in hunting and fishing anyway.
At any rate, the Virginian has to deal with the men on the farm and in the area, including a long-running enmity with a fellow named Trampas who goes from ne’er-do-well to cattle rustler. Eventually, there will be a climactic shootout, of course, but when you remember that this is the first Western novel, you can hopefully appreciate it as not being a cliche.
The language, a sort of self-conscious educated Eastern dialect of the later 19th century applied quite a bit to the landscape of the plains and the eastern Rockies, at times flows nicely over you and at other times distracts the 21st century reader a bit from the story. All in all, though, I liked the book. With this firm grounding, I’m ready, sometime, for the other popular Westerns (Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour). Or maybe some Willa Cather. I own some of them in the self-conscious Readers Digest editions, too.
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This is a Dover thrift edition that collects a pile of sonnets that had fallen into the public domain. It collects them from a large number of authors, chiefly British and American, and includes a lot of favorites from Shakespeare, Millay, Whittier, Tennyson, Poe, Swinburne, and so on. It’s like a good sampler album of music. You find some you know and like, you find some you don’t think much of, but you also find a couple you like a whole lot and plan to look up more from the author.
This is the latest in the volumes of poetry that I’ve read aloud to my children as they’ve played so they can hear some cool words, and the older boy at four is starting to understand some of the narratives. This means it’s back to Ogden Nash since sonnets sometimes tend toward the That’s what Mommies and Daddies do.
At any rate, a good book. Worth the couple pennies it would cost you.
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So I sat down to read an English village mystery from the Thatcher era. I think it’s because of brain chemistry changes that occurred when I drank a lot of honeyed tea for a cold. When I was a kid in high school, I read a lot of these since my high school library had all of the Agatha Christie books and my grandmother had quite a collection of such which my mother inherited too early. But every once and again, I get the urge for one of these books, and so I pick up the occasional title.
This book is kind of a whodunit slash British police meanderal (which, at 160 pages, does not give it a lot of room to wander). Nanny Gray is a village oldster and, well, Nanny to a lot of the local families who lived in a cottage given to her by one of her titled charges shortly before he died. He also redid his will to make her the sole heiress, leaving out the remainder of his family. She’s also served the local Arab family, whose wife might have let slip her secret assignation with her husband’s cousin. And since she’s crotchety, she also might have offended the local miscreants. So when she’s found dead in the woods, it could be an accident, or it could be… MURDER!
Well, of course it’s murder. So the investigating officer Bone has to walk about and talk to the various people over large quantities of tea and scones and deal with his own problems (a damaged daughter and his own grieving for his lost wife and son, victims of a car accident). Eventually, he gets his man, sort of, and the story comes out. But at the end, one’s not sure that his efforts helped at all.
Maybe there’s a British lesson in there. Maybe this reflects Britain of the 1980s or how the British mystery authors of the 1980s wished it still were. One thing’s certain: this period has passed in British history, and the Thatcher era might as well be the Thomas Hardy era.
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It’s not carbon exhaust causing global warming; it’s the small magnetic fields generated by iPods and smartphones that are causing the magnetic poles to shift or disappear:
NASA has been warning about it…scientific papers have been written about it…geologists have seen its traces in rock strata and ice core samples…
Now “it” is here: an unstoppable magnetic pole shift that has sped up and is causing life-threatening havoc with the world’s weather.
Forget about global warming—man-made or natural—what drives planetary weather patterns is the climate and what drives the climate is the sun’s magnetosphere and its electromagnetic interaction with a planet’s own magnetic field.
And:
The first evidence we have that the dangerous superstorm cycle has started is the devastating series of storms that pounded the UK during late 2010.
On the heels of the lashing the British Isles sustained, monster storms began to lash North America. The latest superstorm—as of this writing—is a monster over the U.S. that stretched across 2,000 miles affecting more than 150 million people.
Yet even as that storm wreaked havoc across the Western, Southern, Midwestern and Northeastern states, another superstorm broke out in the Pacific and closed in on Australia.
The southern continent had already dealt with the disaster of historic superstorm flooding from rains that dropped as much as several feet in a matter of hours. Tens of thousands of homes were damaged or destroyed. After the deluge tiger sharks were spotted swimming between houses in what was once a quiet suburban neighborhood.
Okay, maybe I’m inferring a little more than the report states. However, as a respected Internet commentator, I must call immediately for all hipsters to drop their gadgets and buy Toyota Tundras to combat the global cooling.
For the children! And by the children, I mean of course my children since the faceless and manufactured hipster nemesis does not clutter his and her lifestyle with children.
Also, I call upon Hindmost Obama to increase the bonfires of American currency immediately to help warm the eastern seaboard.
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As some of you know, I’ve taken to baking some sweet breads these days, mostly because when life gives you zucchini (and by “gives you,” I mean overruns your yard and threatens to crush your silly brick home, mortal), you make zucchini bread. But after the zucchini ran out after a successful rogue insect team insertion, I decided to try some other breads and a couple of pies. That said, I’m no Cunegonde because I’m not that pretty.
Recipes and cook books sure have a lot of different verbs in them, don’t they? The authors use the mandate tense and order me to do a lot of different things to the poor ingredients, but I am a simple man, with a simple Oster hand mixer that goes to six. As such, whatever the verb in the recipe, seriously, they can’t mean anything but “Mix at 6,” can they?
I mean, seriously, can we lose the thesaurus here and just admit that there’s nothing to it?
Also, what’s up with the order of combining things? Just pour it in the bowl and mix it at six.
Everyone remains polite when accepting the breads, anyway. Because they fear the creepy man with the mixer with the long extension cord.
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Wow. This is a portrait of the Lileks as a young man.
I’ve read his Web site, The Bleat and whatnot, for eight years or so. I’ve bought several of his books from the middle of the last decade new. And I’m expecting one of these days to pay into his BleatPlus system. Eventually.
But finding one of these old Lileks books at a book fair is almost as hard as finding a Philip K. Dick book. And that’s because They don’t want you to read either. This one I nabbed at the Friends of the Springfield Library book fair last fall. On bag day. Which might be proof that They wanted me to read it….
At any rate, this book was written in the early part of the 1990s. Lileks has left his life in the Midwest to find his fortune as a Washington, D.C., based columnist for the Newhouse News syndicate. He was still doing that until sometime in this century, so we have some carry over there between then and later then. His wife is still in law school when he goes to D.C. and lives as a bachelor for a bit. The pieces in the book are about what you’d expect. Not a lot of political stuff, but a dabbling of world-weary kinds of wry asides now and then about the Gulf War and George H.W. Bush.
But he talks a about his smoking habit and about some youthful drug use. He remarks about what it would be like to have a kid, and a longtime student of Lileksia cannot help but enjoy the book on a different level from someone without the same daily exposure. It’s the same guy who writes the Bleat, but instead of fifty-something, he’s a punk kid.
It’s a good enough book on its own. You would have to have lived through the era awarely to get some of it, so kids won’t be looking for this on their flashread devices. But we in our thirties and up can enjoy it.
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An awesome story:
Football fans know what happened in Super Bowl I. The game, which was played on January 15, 1967, was the first showdown between the NFL and AFL champions. It ended with the Green Bay Packers stomping the Kansas City Chiefs, 35-10.
Unless they were one of the 61,946 people at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum that day, or one of the fans who watched it live on NBC or CBS, there’s one thing that all football fans have in common: They’ve never actually seen the game.
In a bizarre confluence of events, neither network preserved a tape. All that survived of this broadcast is sideline footage shot by NFL Films and roughly 30 seconds of footage CBS included in a pre-game show for Super Bowl XXV. Somehow, an historic football game that was seen by 26.8 million people had, for all intents and purposes, vanished.
….
The long search may finally be over. The Paley Center for Media in New York, which had searched for the game footage for some time, has restored what it believes to be a genuine copy of the CBS broadcast. The 94-minute tape, which has never been shown to the public, was donated to the center by its owner in return for having it restored. It was originally recorded on bulky two-inch video and had been stored in an attic in Pennsylvania for nearly 38 years, the Paley Center says.
Estimates are that it’s worth millions.
Enter the NFL.
Mr. Harwood, the attorney, says he contacted the NFL in 2005 about the tape. He says the league sent him a letter on Dec. 16, 2005 claiming the NFL was the exclusive owner of the copyright. Mr. Harwood says the NFL offered his client $30,000 for the tape and his client declined.
Geez, I realize that it’s a labor dispute year and the NFL owners have to plead poverty while building billion-dollar stadiums, but come on. $30,000?
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Author with new book out ties his name to Sarah Palin’s, Ronald Reagan’s.
Well-played. Well-played. Hope to see you on SNL this weekend, again dancing in your underwear as you struggle to remain relevant to your own ego.
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Forget the eagle, forget Uncle Sam. With this current administration, we have a new mascot.
Stunning, the Perfidy.
Whenever I think the president and his smartest-people-in-the-universe have reached the utmost limit in selling out, nay, for selling out, you get something; whenever I think the president and his collegiately credentialed Marxist studies professionals have reached the limit in giving out our nation’s long time allies, they broaden my understanding.
Witness this:
Information about every Trident missile the US supplies to Britain will be given to Russia as part of an arms control deal signed by President Barack Obama next week.
Defence analysts claim the agreement risks undermining Britain’s policy of refusing to confirm the exact size of its nuclear arsenal.
The fact that the Americans used British nuclear secrets as a bargaining chip also sheds new light on the so-called “special relationship”, which is shown often to be a one-sided affair by US diplomatic communications obtained by the WikiLeaks website.
In two years, I wonder if the United States will have any standing in the world or any allies left.
UPDATE: Thanks for the link, Ms. K.
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Well, he’s not actually a baby. My four-and-a-half-year-old son is quite precocious. Not only has he made his first pun (watching his Christmas program, he said the little girl wearing the star was the star of the show–I know, it’s obvious, but it’s a a pun and he’s four-and-a-half), but the other day he distributed his first middle.
I made some chili for myself for lunch and put some shredded cheese on it. Then, being the benevolent despot, I put a little cheese on the boys’ lunch plates and announced, “I share the cheese because I am from Wisconsin.”
“Am I from Wisconsin?” he asked.
“No, you are from Missouri,” I said mournfully. “But you come from many generations of Wisconsinites.”
“Is Grandma from Wisconsin?” he asked.
“No, Grandma was from St. Louis. But Nana is from Wisconsin.”
“So she shares the cheese.”
Bang, just like that, proper syllogism. He closed the circuit. Wow, I am so proud.
Also, I’m sorry for burdening the rest of you Wisconsinites with that burden to live up to. If the lad ever sees you with cheese, he’ll expect you to share it.
If you don’t want to, just tell him you’re from Minnesota. Or if you see him with some and want to take it, I guess you could say you’re from Illinois.
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Attention, Mayorissimo Bloomberg:
Apparently, Arizona restaurants can still use trans fats, too.
(Related story. Link via POWIP.)
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