To be able to say "Noggle," you first must be able to say "Nah."
Forgotten bodybuilder named kids after Egyptian gods and fed them meat for breakfast
Of course, the man’s son Equanimeous St. Brown used to play for the Packers (but now plays for Chicago) and his other son Amon-Ra plays for the Lions.
Of course, I was too young to know who the father was when he was in his body-building heydey, so I could not forget something I never knew. But I know now.
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ABC Books hosted James R. Wilder, whose books are set near where I went to high school. I bought the first three books last June right after our De Soto vacation. I read the first, Terror Near Town, earlier this year, but I haven’t gotten to the others yet. Which comes to a total of three more (and the author mentioned he is 8,000 words into the fifth). So perhaps I’d better pick up the pace.
At any rate, look at this:
I got Wilder’s latest, Murder at the Morse Mill, and two Louis L’Amour paperbacks–The Lonesome Gods and Last of the Breed (ABC Books did not have Bendigo Shafter, and I forgot that I predicted Conhager would be one of the first L’Amour books I picked up.
I brought my youngest son with me, and he had an ABC Books gift card from Christmas, but he was not interested in buying a book for himself. So he applied it to my purchase, which means I spent less than $10 at ABC Books.
That has never happened before, and is unlikely to happen again.
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Animal reposts his man test. Scoring is one point per right answer. I have bolded points I scored:
Personal Hygiene
1. I use soap in the shower. A bar of soap. (Not a whole bar per shower. Also, I want a bonus point for cold showers.)
2. I do not use body washes.
3. I do not trim or pluck my eyebrows.
4. I do not get manicures.
5. I do not put any lotions, oils, balms or creams on my body unless there is some purpose either medicinal or sexual.
6. I have a “haircut,” not a “hair style.”
7. I can wash my hair with soap and a washcloth. (Okay, I don’t have enough to require a washcloth, and TBH I have been using the last of the children’s Spider-Man shampoo because they’re to Grown Up to use kid’s shampoo, but generally it’s soap. And I shave with soap.)
8. I do not wear cologne. Perfume is for girls. Aftershave is acceptable, as long as it’s Old Spice. (I am onto my second lifetime bottle.)
9. I can go from ‘asleep’ to ‘ready to leave for work/movie/date’ in under fifteen minutes. (Or triathlons or the airport.)
Personal Style
10. I own a pair of cowboy boots or engineer boots. (Counting work boots.)
11. I own more than one pair of cowboy boots and/or engineer boots.
12. I own a cowboy hat.
13. I own more than one cowboy hat. (More than one fedora and Panama hat, though.)
14. I own more than one cap with a logo from either a car company, heavy equipment manufacturer, or an agricultural supplier. (Only one John Deere hat, but several NRA hats–I would rather this count as well.)
15. I do not use an umbrella. If it rains, I have caps and hats.
16. I know the difference between a cap and a hat.
17. I own a leather jacket.
18. I own a black leather jacket.
19. I have scars.
20. I have scars that I brag about. (Most were the result of dumb mistakes, so nah.)
21. I have scars from gunshot wounds.
22. I carry a pocketknife.
23. I hang stuff on my belt. (I have been known to, but I do not frequently.)
Driving
24. I can drive a manual transmission.
25. I can drive a motorcycle.
26. I can drive a commercial truck.
27. I can operate almost any vehicle on two, four or more wheels, from a motorbike to a five-ton truck.
28. I can operate tracked machinery (i.e. Caterpillar.)
29. I can operate a light airplane.
30. I own a truck. (I used to, but now it’s strictly SUVs at Nogglestead, and SUVs are just tall sedans.)
31. I own a four-wheel drive truck.
32. My truck has branch scrapes and rock chips. Lots of them. (My old pickup was scratched up a bunch.)
33. I carry jumper cables in my truck. (And almost complete toolboxes, and one has a compressor/jumper kit.)
34. I carry a high-lift jack in my truck.
35. I carry a tow strap in my truck.
36. I carry an axe in my truck.
37. I carry a gun in my truck.
Outdoors
38. I can navigate with map and compass. (Well, probably.)
39. I can navigate by orienteering.
40. I can run a chainsaw. (Starting it is another manner–I am not the best with small engines. Perhaps I should deduct a point.)
41. I can start a fire without match or lighter.
42. I am proficient with a pistol (Not sure what ‘proficient’ means, but I hit the target near the center most of the time.)
43. I am proficient with a rifle. (Ditto.)
44. I am proficient with a shotgun. (I have not shot one much, and never at something on the wing, but when I was shooting at a can on the ground in a quarry with my old man when I was a kid, I kept missing.)
45. I can make improvised traps.
46. I can capture, kill, prepare and cook wildlife.
47. I can catch fish with purchased fishing tackle. (Although not recently.)
48. I can catch fish with fishing tackle improvised from materials obtained in the wild. (Well, I could try to noodle if I had to.)
49. I can build an improvised shelter with materials obtained in the wild.
Entertainment
50. I do not see “chick” movies unless there is a chance that I might get sex afterwards by so doing.
51. John Wayne is, very nearly, a deity.
52. I love Westerns. Especially John Wayne Westerns.
53. I enjoy movies that feature:
• Hot vampire chicks in black leather.
• Hot any kind of chicks in black leather.
• Hot any kind of chicks.
• Killer androids.
• Killer aliens.
• Zombies.
• Hot vampire android alien zombie chicks in black leather.
54. Tom Cruise is the result of a Communist plot to demoralize America by subjecting us to crappy acting.
Food
55. Vegetarian, my ass. Give me a steak.
56. The four major food groups are: Steak, pizza, beer and cheeseburgers.
57. Real men eat any damn thing they want.
58. I love bacon with near-religious passion.
59. All foods should be served with home fries and/or corn bread.
60. Everything’s better with Tabasco.
Scoring:
Total up the number of question you can honestly answer “yes.”
55+ – You’re a manly man in the manliest form.
50+ – Your testosterone level is normal, but you’re not blowing up anyone’s skirts.
< 50 – Oh, for crying out loud, cowboy up already.
I started out so strong, but in the end, I got 29 of 60, although perhaps as high as 31 or 32 with asterisks (I mean, I haven’t driven tracked equipment or a skid steer, but I have a zero turn radius lawn mower, and the concept is the same).
But, ya know, probably the best a city boy with an English degree could hope for. About the same as I scored on the Heinlein.
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It features at least one Renoir, “The Reader”. I would hide it in the living room on the wall with all the Renoir prints.
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My beautiful wife just had a professional social media campaign for her consultancy. Well, I think it was interns, as it was run through a local university, but they did a couple of video shoots and photo shoots and wrote and posted a number of things on her company’s social media pages over the course of the last couple of weeks.
So I’ve been seeing lovely professional photos of my wife scattered throughout the days. Most of them are photos of her in various locations and poses, generally with a laptop, tablet, or pad of paper at a desk or coffee shop table or whatnot.
But some of the photos are just of her hands at or near a keyboard.
So I’ve become accustomed to thinking that any set of a woman’s hands on my social media feed is a picture of my wife’s hands.
Which is odd, because they are not. And I recently had to pause because I did not recognize the pattern of the blouse in the picture, and it turns out, the photo was not of my wife’s hands.
Here, let’s see if you can figure out which picture I’m talking about:
Can you guess which one is not my wife?
Continue reading “Now When I See Women’s Hands”
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Chuck Mangione’s “The Land of Make Believe” in the original Klingon tuba:
The livestream for WSIE has gone awry, so I’m listening to KCSM which has a more pure jazz playlist, which means I get to hear things like this for the nonce.
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It’s been three years since I’ve done a Five Things On My Desk post. Clearly, they did not become the staple of the blog that I thought they might be. Also, long periods of time pass without having five interesting things on my desk at a time–or, more likely, things from previous posts linger on my desk for years.
The state of the desk has fluctuated; I’d been on a part-time contract for a year, which meant I spent about half time working and half time applying for jobs and interviewing and whatnot. So I was at the desk often enough that I kind of kept it sort of clean. That is, I had some weird stuff on it, but the papers were generally in stacks for filing. Not like the old days, when I was primarily a child care provider and only got to my desk sparingly, which meant the stuff piled up quite a bit indeed.
But, still, some half completed projects and various things brought down to sort or otherwise dispense end up on the desk for a while. Including:
I have mentioned that my mother-in-law recently downsized to a an apartment, and we’ve still got boxes of things in the garage to sort whether we want to keep them or donate them. These were her father’s waterfowl calls, a couple of duck calls and a goose call, I think. I have them on the desk because I’m hoping to put them into a shadow box. I have a shadow box, but I’d like to put some sort of camouflage background, so I’ve been waiting until I get to a garage sale and can maybe pick up a t-shirt or something for a quarter. Given how infrequently I get to garage sales these days, it might be a long time until I get that shadow box made.
Every summer, my dojo has a series of “spirit weeks,” where you get to wear things other than a gi during class. Sports team week, street clothes week, and so on. One week was patriotic week, where you could wear red, white, and blue. I thought about painting my face, and the kyoshi also joked about me painting my face, and I am just crazy enough to try it. So I ordered these face paints. As I sweat a bunch during workouts, I wanted to test the paints, so I painted my face red while I did some yard work. I noticed I was sweating pink the whole time, and by the time I got inside, I was completely clean. So I didn’t paint my face for the dojo (but you can see other times my face was painted here–it has been a while).
I guess you have seen this cup on my desk eighteen years ago.
I have a shelf on my desk’s hutch where I have some coffee cups of note–a clay one, unfired, that I made in elementary school; two signed Weber and Dolan mugs my brother picked up from WISN for me right before their show ended 16 years ago; A cup shaped like blue jeans with my name on the label that my grandmother gave me when I was in elementary school; a plastic cup customized with a middle school picture in it that my mother got me when I was in middle school; and a Boy Scouts Scoutmaster cup that had been my grandfather’s. Other stuff has gathered up there, mostly presents from my mother-in-law that require display.
I have been toying with the idea of getting a booth at an antique mall and putting things out there and maybe unloading some of my old technologies while my generation is at its earning peak and can waste money on Commodore 64s and TI-99s. I’d also put some of the various crafts that have been boxed in the garage for a decade and things like this, where I don’t even know where I got it. Was it my beautiful wife’s? Or something I picked up in my eBay days?
However, I have not yet gotten the booth, and I might not. But the cup has been removed from the crowded shelf for now. Until I clean off my desk by putting it back.
I might have mentioned that my high school made an appearance in a national news weekly in the late 1970s as an example of how bad schools were. My history teacher shared a photocopy of the story, then less than ten years old, in my freshman year. I thought it was Newsweek, and I’ve kind of looked for it, buying inexpensive 70s copies when I could, generally around the time that one of the teachers from the school that would become my high school testified before Congress. I did another quick search for it on the Internet, and saw this magazine with the cover story “High Schools In Trouble: A Tale of Three Cities”. None of them is my high school, so this wasn’t it. In the old days, I would have gone to the library and looked at the microfilm copies of the magazines. But, c’mon, man, when is the last time you saw a microfilm reader at the library?
I started my new job at the end of June, and my health insurance started on July 1. When I went to fill out the online forms for it, I discovered that the parent company requires a copy of a marriage certificate to enroll a spouse. I had never seen that before. As such, I did not know where our marriage certificate might be. So we tore the house apart for it, including the old mementos boxes. I was not able to find our marriage certificate, but I found several belonging to my ancestors.
And I found this. I thought it was a wallhanging, but I see now that you can slide it over a pillow. Parris Island–that would not have been my brother, who went to boot camp at Pendleton. My mother most likely bought this for her mother, and we have it still. I left it out of the box because I am thinking about offering it to my brother, for whom it might have slightly more meaning. I did not leave it out of the box to put in an antique mall booth. (I have already related the notion rankles me.)
All right, maybe that’s not interesting to you, gentle reader, but I will be tickled when I look back at it in a couple of years and think about what my desk must have been like today.
While I’m at it, let’s recap some of the things from Five Things on My Desk in years past.
On the other hand, I have learned who Mickey Owen was. A baseball player who opened a baseball academy in the western reaches of the county, and he was several times elected Greene County sheriff (I have a promotional notebook from one such campaign, which was on my desk then and probably still resides in the hutch cubby for notebooks).
Will this spur me to clean my desk? The magic 8-ball, if I had one (and it would be on my desk) would say “Unlikely.”
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You know, I have not done a 5K in a while, so I am definitely not up for this: Proposed Ozark Run Scenic Byway to unite communities and highlight Ozarks region.
My god, how many hundreds of miles is that?
UPDATE: I have just been handed a note. Apparently, this is not a run run; instead, Ozark Run is the proposed name of the tax spending entity or something. Still, I had better take it easy.
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Where the heck did I get this book? A quick search of Good Book Hunting posts does not yield a result. It does not have an ABC Books sticker. It does not have a price penciled on the first page which might indicate another used book store. I certainly did not buy it new as a sixteen-year-old. So I must have picked it up at a garage sale. Perhaps this year’s Lutherans for Life garage sale–I don’t see a Good Book Hunting post for that particular sale this summer, which might mean it was one of a couple books I might have picked up. Without a picture, I have no memory.
At any rate, this book is a what it says: A group of quotations, from a line in length to a couple of paragraphs, grouped in topics like Life, Opportunity, Hard Work, Family and Home, Women, Indians, Honor, the Law, and Justice, and Yondering and Dreaming.
The quotations all share a common flavor and theme, of course: The stoic Western hero on the frontier, skeptical of the soft Eastern ways, manly but not afraid to love and nurture in family ways, which includes education and discipline. It seems like some of the quotations are repeated in different chapters/topics, but it might be because they are so similar–or perhaps they repeat; I did not go back to check. Even though they’re genre and they deal with Men, someone not familiar with genre or prehistoric (that is, pre-social media) writings might be surprised at how in-touch the Western hero was with the environment and how much he respected Indians (that is, Indigenous Peoples, as the current lexicon goes, with its expiration date later in the decade).
Although Louis L’Amour had 101 books in print when this book appeared (maybe just 100, as the book list includes this volume), the quotes are taken from what seems to be a handful of them. But it did help me narrow down which of his books I would most like to read: Bendigo Shafter, The Lonesome Gods, and maybe Conhager. I have read a couple of Zane Grey books, but no L’Amour. And the country was crazy with them in the olden days–I suspect they both had their book clubs in the 1980s. I would say that “I haven’t seen them in the wild,” but let’s be honest: My “in the wild” these days is the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library book sale and ABC Books for the most part, and I tend to skip over the Western and/or fiction sections entirely. In earlier days, with smaller book sales, I would be more likely to breeze over the paperback and/or fiction sections where I might see these titles. Perhaps I’ll wander over to the Western section next month at the library book sale to look for these titles.
So a nice thing to read whilst reading other books with longer narratives or themes. Something to spend a few minutes on out on the patio, petting the newly outdoor cat at sunset, staring down the raccoons who are not afraid of humans and want the remainder of the day’s cat food. And then to pick up later.
I did flag a couple of quotations for quick comment.
Continue reading “Book Report: A Trail of Memories: The Quotations of Louis L’Amour Compiled By Angelique L’Amour (1988)”
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He suffers from newspaper reading disease:
Your mate is snuggled next to you on the couch. You’re sharing the Sunday newspaper — cuddled and cozy — just enjoying the written word together. He points his finger to print on his page and looks up.
“Hey, honey. That movie you wanted to see is getting great reviews. They say it’s Oscar-worthy.” He pauses and waits for your response.
How endearing, you think, smiling sappily. My hubby is sharing news with me. The squeak of surprised interest you emit exudes approval and encourages exposition. He squirms slightly, hunches over his page, and furrows his fuzzy brows in concentration. Oh, look. He’s hunting for more tidbits to share.
. . . .
NEWSPAPER READING DISEASE forces your mate to provide updates on printed topics that you find nauseatingly boring. He will toss sports statistics your way and pepper them with incomprehensible commentarial expletives. Sports statistics are tossed like dice and peppered with commentarial expletives.Obituaries of strangers whose names seem familiar to him (and therefore, to you) are recited, filling your head with ‘nee’ s and internment dates.
What’s the latest take on dietary prevention of cholesterol buildup? Don’t worry. His fingers are underlining the words right now, and his “listen to this” s are sure to clog your auditory canals.
There is no cure for NEWSPAPER READING DISEASE. The only treatment offering a modicum of relief is to read faster than he can talk. That way, you can enjoy the paper before his recitation begins.
I read this story in the Phelps County Focus yesterday, and as we were driving to Freistatt’s Lions Club’s Ernte Fest (a German festival), I recounted this column to my beautiful wife after recounting the story of the local columnist who had a recent cardiac procedure and was strapped to the bed for many hours in the very room where her husband died several years earlier. So it was a little meta, my recounting newspaper reading disease that I’d read about in the paper.
Also, hmmmm…. I read the column by Robin Leach (not that Robin Leach), a regionally syndicated columnist in the Phelps County Focus, but I could not find it on the Internet version of the site. But I did find it at the linked Herald-Whig, which I do not yet take. Ah, investigation indicates this paper is based in Quincy, Illinois, so I will probably not subscribe. I am not taking Illinois papers. Yet.
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I guess he’s not a toddler any more. But he got his driver’s license today, and although he did not like the chauffeur cap we got him for the occasion, I suspect he will wear it sometime. But probably not on nights when my beautiful wife and I ask him to ferry us to dinner and back. Or, as his brother would prefer, when he drives them to school on Monday.
Ach, it worked for a while; we had our children a little later, in our 30s. It was common in our cohort in the IT industry, where people established careers first, and then children later (or not at all). But we moved to Springfield when the boys were young, which meant returning to my wife’s church milieu, where couples have their children in their early 20s. So for a decade, I’ve been able to tell myself I was as young as they. But time rolls on, much like my oldest now, who has run two errands on his own in the car already.
And, of course, it doesn’t help an anxious man that all the rural newspapers are full of reports of teens dying in auto accidents.
Although this report does not indicate a teen (Crash kills 1 near Republic, Mo. Friday), it doesn’t help that I know where that is: It’s on the way to church summer camp, a road I traveled with each of my sons in turn earlier this year (the oldest a day earlier as he was a counselor, and the youngest on his last trip as a camper the next day).
Ay, mi.
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Actually, I have only done (small) triathlons with pool swims; no open water swims or practices for me.
And although I have an indoor triathlon, with a pool swim, coming up in five weeks, I have not swimmed swam swum (pick the right one) since February 21.
So I’m not sure how easier I can take it.
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The headline oversimplifies a bit: Man left in coma after tearing bicep at gym wakes up to find he’s lost his arm:
Holy cats, he strained so hard he put himself in a coma? Not so much:
“I tore my bicep in the gym, and had some surgery a couple of days later,” he remembered.
“Two weeks after that I had a postoperative infection called necrotizing fasciitis, which gave me 11 major surgeries during a 10 day coma.”
He caught an infection in a National Health System hospital in Britain.
I would comfort myself and say that couldn’t happen here, but who knows?
I’d better take it easier.
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Lileks talks about a subsite he has yet to publish Books that will never be read again:
Today’s subsite that never made it online: it’s actually stuff I got a few weeks ago. Books that will never be read again. You can’t throw them away, though. You can give them away, perhaps to a thrift store, and hope they find a good home. You fan the pages so they see light again for the first time in 70 years. You google them and find a few on Etsy or eBay.
Not in the Nogglestead library; I intend to read all my old books. The exceptions are books I’ve already read or that I have in newer editions as reading copies or sets.
Why, I even have From Gold to Grey on my side table. I should get back to that again sometime, but the elaborate Victorian page design, examples of which you see in the Lileks, makes it difficult to read during football games or when you’re easily distracted–which are the opposites of the times when I tend to pick up poetry–when I want to read a little bit at a time.
But, yeah, I hope to read those books someday. Interspersed with my other aspirational planned reading, including the Summa Theologiae and The History of Civilization. So, probably never. But I cannot say definitively never. Which is optimism for me.
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Severian calls them:
I remember a situation like this from way back in the days, involving ballplayer Chuck Finley and the awesomely named model Tawny Kitaen, who was best known (and immortalized in a lyric by a goober band unfit to hold Whitesnake’s jockstrap) as the girl who “shook her ass on the hood of Whitesnake’s car.”
The band: Bowling for Soup. The song: “1985”.
The album: A Hangover You Don’t Deserve. Yes, I have it. And now I will probably listen to it.
I hadn’t planned to mention it until next year, but soon “1985” will be closer to the actual 1985 than the song’s release is today. But that’s next year.
I was going to say that the song was not the hit off of the album, but, yeah, I guess it was.
Man, 2004 was a crazy time. Or a normal time that seems crazy now. And research, which is the YouTube search for the video indicates that the band is still touring, and will be playing St. Louis next month. I will not make it.
Now, if anyone needs me, I’m going to listen to some Juna Serita as a palate cleanser.
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Today, Wilder posts about media consumption and says:
The medium of video is “hot” (in the theory of Marshall McLuhan) and is especially wonderful for propaganda. Hot media fully engages one sense, and spoon feeds the content directly into the viewer’s mind. Cool media, like this blog, demands interaction, and demands thought.
.
Hey, I know that. Not from reading MacLuhan (although I have, a little). I learned that from Nuts About Squirrels.
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I bought this book for $10 at Rublecon last month because it’s BFM, man. Its subtitle says A Critical Appreciation of the World’s Finest Actor, which is a bit of hyperbole, of course, but the book is not so much a critical appreciation of Murray’s work, but rather an encyclopedia of alphabetical entries about movies and shows he has appeared in along with topics on his relationships with other people, including his wives and his family. Interspersed with the encyclopedia entries, we get stories about Murray’s hijinks crashing parties and spontaneous appearances with normal people.
So we agree that Groundhog Day and Lost In Translation are amongst his best films, but I disagree with the book about The Man Who Knew Too Little–I think that’s a funny movie, and I not only saw it in the theaters, but I’ve watched it many times since then on home media. I am quite a bit behind on Murray films–I mean, I’ve never seen The Razor’s Edge or Quick Change, for example, not to mention most of the Wes Anderson collaborations (although I did see The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, again, in the theaters).
The book also portrays Murray as a complex individual. Although it has its moments of homerism (such as the subtitle), some of the disputes and fallings out he’s had, not to mention a couple of bad divorces, and a reputation of being difficult (Dan Ackroyd called him The Murricane because of his mercurial nature). I mean, I guess anyone who’s been paying attention to Murray as a celebrity probably knows all this. But I somehow haven’t paid attention even though I like his work.
So a pleasant read in between chapters of other things I’m kinda reading, which really means they’re just stacking up on the table beside my reading chair. Informative. And I’m kind of pleased as well that I have so many Bill Murray films yet to see.
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Amongst the music-themed sponsored posts I see on Facebook, I have learned that David Gilmour, of Pink Floyd and solo projects, is apparently a Dallas Cowboys fan:
Well, he’s British, so maybe he thinks Dallas is really America’s Team.
Here’s the last song on his 1984 album About Face–my favorite of his solo albums. I got it on cassette, about wore it out, and now have it on CD. The song is entitled “Near the End”:
I quote it a lot. Well, relative to other songs.
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Spotted at the warehouse club store:
Sure, some of you might think that’s an ampersand and not an O, but we know followers of the kajira have to hide in plain sight.
Actually, scratch that: People who would have embraced a Gorean lifestyle based on the books are probably in nursing homes by now, and today’s alternative lifestyle crowds don’t have to hide in the face of banning.
Still, even though I’m more vanilla than true Norman aficionados, it’s the first thing I saw.
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Facebook has barraged me with ads for companies that can take a photo of your pet (or other loved one, as some of the ads indicate) and put it on a shirt.
Needless to say, they saw me coming.
That’s my black cat Isis and what she thinks she looks like.
Actually, I clicked through on another ad and bought t-shirts for the family as Christmas gifts, and I was so enamored with the designs, I bought one for myself (July is not too early for the “One-for-you, One-for-me” Christmas gift buying protocol). Also, I am comfortable announcing the Christmas gifts because the designs, which are not black cats, will delight them, and nobody in my family reads my blog anyway.
When I got shipment notification, I was a little concerned that the items originated in China; however, I used PayPal for real (I hope) this time, and I hopefully won’t need to cancel my credit card and get a new one, unlike last year.
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