Harsh Penalty for Dumpster Diving
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Author: Brian J. Noggle
Casuality Is Not Just A River In Egypt
St. Louis Post-Dispatch, today, exclaims Blue-collar workers are paid well here:
In St. Louis, it’s good to wear a blue collar.
Despite a wide wage gap in most parts of the country, local blue-collar workers barely trailed their more educated white-collar peers in pay last year.
Last week, in an article by the very same writer, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch lamented Retail overtakes manufacturing:
After decades of industrial layoffs, the St. Louis area has hit an unsettling milestone: More residents now work in retail stores than in manufacturing plants.
The news isn’t surprising. Manufacturing employment has slipped below retailing in selected months in recent years. But last year was the first time it was true year-round.
And never the twain shall meet.
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Where Will They Put the Plaque?
The hospital where I was born is closing:
St. Michael Hospital, which is losing millions of dollars annually, will close its emergency room and most other departments starting June 5 – greatly scaling back a major health care provider for a large number of poor people.
St. Michael, 2400 W. Villard Ave., is closing its emergency room and inpatient services because the hospital’s non-profit corporate parent, Wheaton Franciscan Healthcare, can no longer afford them, John Oliverio, Wheaton Franciscan president and chief executive officer, said Monday.
I guess this might have been foreshadowing:
Glendale-based Wheaton Franciscan, which recently changed it name from Covenant Healthcare System, “doesn’t have the ability to fund indefinitely the types of losses we’ve incurred at St. Michael’s,” Oliverio said.
Convenant, as you know, means a sacred contract or an agreement. I guess were it Covenant, the company would be bound to providing care to those with whom it has made the compact. Wheaton Franciscan, on the other hand, is just a health care system.
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Book Report: Blowback by Bill Pronzini (1997)
This book represents an acquisition from the Belleville Book Fair last weekend, where I got books for an amortized $.09 each ($2.00 a bag, I bought a bag and a half since Heather didn’t fill half of her bag, I got to fill that, too, so the 24+ books cost me less than a dime each). It’s a book club edition, so the real collectors will make fun of me on the playground, but I’m an accumulator more than a true collector.
This book features Pronzini’s nameless detective, a middle-aged collector of pulp fiction who is facing his own mortality as he frets during the course of the book about the results of a biopsy on a lesion in his lung. To distract himself, he heeds the call of his old friend Harry who has a tense situation at a remote fishing and hunting camp. A jealous husband, a potentially wandering hot young wife (red haired, natch), and a number of available fellows grind against each other mentally and physically. Nameless and Harry see a van containing a stolen Oriental rug smuggler crash into the lake, but they discover the man was dead before he hit the water. A couple other bodies pile up, and Nameless needs to find out who’s doing it and survive the detection.
It’s a thin book, and obviously a series book, but it’s contained fairly well for a single book. That is, we’re not lost without background details from the previous books. It’s short and serviceable as a piece of genre fiction, a quick read and a solution that’s obvious once you realize to whom Pronzini pays homage. Definitely worth a dime. Even if it’s only a book club edition.
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A Very Noggle Corollary
- In the long run men hit only what they aim at. Therefore, though they should fail immediately, they had better aim at something high. –Henry David Thoreau
Or just use a shotgun.
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No Wonder Tickets Were So Cheap
Let’s just say the Cirque de Soleil Moon Frye was too comprehensible and too non-random to be truly French in nature. Also, the tickets were $2.50 or $1.50 with any can of beer for the hungry.
I was punkied.
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Book Report: Everybody’s Guide to Book Collecting by Charlie Lovett (1993)
I bought this book for $4.50 at Hooked on Books in Springfield at the same time as I bought Warmly Inscribed and Slightly Chipped. I found myself in the books about books section and went nuts. What can I say? I already had a couuple books in hand, and once you crack that vast barrier between having nothing and buying something, you’re done for.
Unlike the Goldstone books, which are personal narrative essays about collecting, this slender volume is a FAQ. It clocks in at a little more than seventy pages with a couple of appendices and an index. The body of the book is a series of questions about book collecting and answers provided by a book dealer. It delves lightly into why you would collect, how to collect, and what the collector terms mean. So if you’re new to collecting or need some refreshing, the book’s a nice little pocket book. A For Dummies book from before the time when their yellow bindings dominated the introductory scene.
Also, given the age of the book (1993), the book does not include the prevalence of the Internet in this hobby, but its not too out of date in spite of it, because we book collectors still like to visit the second hand shops and book fairs and whatnot.
To slip into collector mode, this edition is a nice piece of work. Although a trade paperback published by a small Kansas press, its pages are resume-quality paper. I liked it. Worth $4.50, even in a good to very good first edition? Eh, you can almost do better on the Internet before shipping and handling.
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Socks Checks In
Writing in today’s Wall Street Journal, Samuel R. Berger opines upon what the United States should do vis-à-vis Iran and says:
- ….
Aw, what does it matter what Mr. Berger says? His mucketymuckability went out the door with the documents from the National Archive in his socks.
Still, the introduction of the hallowed and revered former something-or-other with in the Pax Clintona does lend itself to an obvious solution to the Iran question. Picture: A world-reknowned figure and statesman travels on a diplomatic mission to Iran to review their plans and blueprints under heavy security. Diplomatic mission succeeds, in that Iran thinks it has bought more time from the west, but when they look back in their files for the blueprints for centrifuges and nuclear devices are mysteriously gone!
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Nothing Better Than Irreversible Body Modification Except Irreversible Body Modification That Requires Cancer-Causing Light To See
In just about any professional setting, it would be almost impossible to notice anything different about Caitlin Sabel’s wrists. They might appear a tad scarred, but nothing too out of the ordinary.
Look at them under a black light, though, and the words glow. Then, in an old-English font, her left wrist reads “regret” and her right “nothing.”
Ah, the innovative ways of parting money from fools.
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One Fewer Symptom That Brian’s Crazy
While driving along Big Bend Boulevard here in Old Trees, Missouri, our new home, I said to Heather, “Hey, it’s a half track.” Driving down Big Bend Boulevard. A half track. Heather didn’t see it, and she didn’t know what a half track was, so I had to explain it to her.
Fortunately, I could hold up a copy of the Webster-Kirkwood Times from this week and prove to her that my spotting a World War II era military vehicle tooling around town was not a symptom of my insanity.
Proving this was not a symptom of mental illness is not the same as proving sanity, I know, but I will take what I can get.
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Book Report: Bump & Run by Mike Lupica (2000)
I liked Full Court Press. I liked Wild Pitch. So of course, I was on the lookout for this, Mike Lupica’s football book. A ne’er-do-well son inherits a football team from his father, the prodigal son hopes for some measure of redemption in achieving his father’s dream….a trip to the Super Bowl. Other owners and the league, however, aren’t sure they want the new blood injecting sense into a gentleman’s sport, ownership, and the man must deal with two hostile co-owners–his siblings.
I thought I’d outgrown sports books sometime in elementary school. I’m not a sports fanatic, contrary to what my widow says. I don’t watch non-sporting events on ESPN, for example. But I like Lupica’s books because they’re well-written. Engaging and often humorous, I enjoy these books, also engaging and humorous, even though they mostly lack dead bodies, space ships, or swords. I was very glad when Heather spotted this book at the Greater St. Louis Book Fair last week for $3.00. There’s my endorsement. I’ll buy the books for more than $.33, and I’ll read them soon after getting them. Unlike the 40 other books I’ve bought in the last two weeks at these damn book fairs.
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Having Destroyed Earth’s Climate, Bush Turns His Sites On The Rest of the Solar System
New Storm on Jupiter Hints at Climate Change:
The latest images could provide evidence that Jupiter is in the midst of a global change that can modify temperatures by as much as 10 degrees Fahrenheit on different parts of the globe.
Almost as though climate change happened cylically, naturally, and without the intervention of a sentient species.
But in the good news within this bad news for environmentalists:
- It will be overlooked by the tinny orchestra of the media and public consciousness.
- Al Gore has an opportunity to his ultimate action film, this time set in space and maybe starring Vin Diesel.
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Spurious Assertion of the Day
Within a piece about computer security on Macintoshes, Arik Hesseldahl makes the following spurious assertion:
There’s two problems with that statement: First off, Mac users on average pay more for their computers, are self-selected because they tend to know more about technology than your average PC buyer, and by and large are a bit more affluent than those who buy cheapo commodity Windows PCs.
Macintosh users also self-messiah themselves as above the common rabble, so of course they’re smarter and prettier than the Windows-using hoi polloi. But more technical? Not in my limited experience.
I work in a part Macintosh, part Windows shop, and I have had to research and teach some fairly basic Macintosh procedure, such as editing the hosts files and whatnot.
That is, they’re normal users who happen to use Macintosh. On the one hand, some of them are more technical and into the glamour of their chosen technology; on the other hand, that technology and the operating system are pretty much idiot proof, so you don’t have to learn much about the technology since the GUI doesn’t crap out.
On the other hand, Windows machines are pretty much a commodity, so the basic user knowledge baseline is much smaller, but anyone with any curiosity into the technology will have to learn to get it working correctly. Additionally, since they’re default still for youngsters learning, most extremely savvy people will start on Windows PCs, whether they end up on Linux or OS X or one of the even more compartmentalized niche OSes whose acronyms are only known to cabals of the initiates. Maybe these bring the technology savvy average up enough to account for the monkeys trying to compose The Tempest in Microsoft Works or, heaven forfend, Microsoft Paint.
Still, the assertion that Macintosh users tend to know more about technology than your average PC buyer merits an objection, your honor. Perhaps Macintosh users tend to have more hubris about technology than your average PC buyer. Which plays into the hands of those who would threaten the Macintosh users’ security with viruses, trojans, and worms (oh, my!).
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A Boy Named Schmuck
The headlines were amusing the first time I saw news about this fellow, but they’ve lost something personally for me, but maybe you’ll still get a kick out of them:
Schmuck honored as national coach of year
If you were born with a name like Schmuck, you could reasonably expect to be picked upon in school. Which makes this fellow’s career choice all the more self-flagellating, as he’s a high school sports coach.
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Your One Stop Shop for Freaky Things, Werd
To quote a fellow award-winning blogger, THE REAL HONOR IS BEING NOMINATED, but it’s nice to be number one on the Google search for a website that has werd freaky things on it.
Thanks, searcher, but do remember to offset the aside with commas and make Web site two words: a Web site that has, werd, freaky things on it.
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Your Paranoia Shidoshi Knew This Would Happen
Keyless entry, OnStar, and so on and so forth. You saw convenience, and I saw it coming:
High-tech thieves are becoming increasingly savvy when it comes to stealing automobiles equipped with keyless entry and ignition systems. While many computer-based security systems on automobiles require some type of key — mechanical or otherwise — to start the engine, so-called ‘keyless’ setups require only the presence of a key fob to start the engine.
Of course, you know me; I thought that the keyed ignition system was inviting danger and a step back from cranking the engine.
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Have a Nice Day, from Family Direct Services, Inc.
An unsolicited greeting from the first company my mortgage broker could sell my name to:
Our records indicate you are not participating in our recommended MORTGAGE PROTECTION COVERAGE. You may now be eligible if you are UNDER AGE 76.
The ECONOMICAL term life insurance can PAY OFF YOUR MORTGAGE should you or your spouse DIE. It provides the SECURITY YOUR FAMILY NEEDS at the PRICE YOU WANT.
Well, if I DIE, I think normal insurances WOULD help my spouse PAY HER MORTGAGE (since, by dying, it would really no longer be my mortgage, would it?), and even if I were inclined to UP MY COVERAGE, I would probably look for a REPUTABLE INSURANCE COMPANY and not some fly-by-bulk-mail OPERATOR who probably won’t even EXIST by the time I die (hopefully sometime in the twenty-second century, the later the better) and who interrupts my daily junk mail destruction with UNSOLICITED REMINDERS OF MY OWN MORALITY, IN BOLD AND CAPITALS AS APPROPRIATE.
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The First Thing To Do When You’re In A Hole
After blowing $26,000,000 on a software system it won’t even use, the executive vice president of the University of Wisconsin system offers a mea culpa. Or the bureaucratic, non mea culpa equivalent:
“We’re very sheepish,” Mash told the state Assembly Committee on Colleges and Universities. “We couldn’t make this work. We’ve got to dig ourselves out of this hole.”
Dig themselves out of the hole? What the heck does that mean in the public sector? Oh, yeah, it means you’ll have to get more tax money to cover your mistakes.
In the real world, this fellow and/or one or two of his ill-informed cohorts would be out of jobs. But in the rarefied world of the public sector, no doubt a little sheepishness and an expression of desire to dig one’s self out of a hole will save him.
And maybe even make available another $26,000,000 in budget to spend.
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MfBJN Joins the Fight Against Obesity
To join all the cool non-for-profits and organizations now trying to stake their claim on the public consciousness, public health funding, and class action settlement dollars, Musings from Brian J. Noggle joins the fight against obesity, wherein obesity is any shape to your body that does not come from a starving, distended belly by offering the following appetite suppressant as a public service announcement:
Radish shortcake, with extra whipped cream
That’ll make you put down the bag of Doritos, eh, chubby?
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It’s a Little Early to Celebrate, Edmonton
Just because the number 8 Edmonton Oilers eliminated the Detroit Red Wings in the first round of the playoffs is a little early to start stocking up the celebratory fireworks:
On Friday cops found a 1-Teck 9 fully automatic nine-millimetre handgun, an SKS assault rifle and a rocket launcher.
On Sunday, they also seized two handguns, a shotgun, 1.4 kg of cocaine, six vials of steroids, four grams of marijuana with a street value of $60, a samurai sword and one bulletproof vest.
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