Author: Brian J. Noggle

This film is from the Ferrellverse of the early part of the 21st century, so it features some faces you’re familiar with if you’ve watched Anchorman or Old School, but no Wilsons or Vince Vaughn. It also has Andre 3000 from Outkast in an afro, perhaps a wig, in the height of his “Hey Ya” success. I didn’t recognize him.

The story: The owner, coach, player, and announcer of a fictional ABA team, the Flint (Michigan) Tropics, played by Will Ferrell, learns that the league will be merged into the NBA with only four teams making the move. When he learns that his team is not included, he proposes that the top four teams in the league make the leap instead–even though his team is in last place. A majority of the other owners agree, so Will Ferrell trades for a minor NBA player (Woody Harrellson; this is not his best basketball movie) who eventually becomes coach and teaches the group to play as a team. They start climbing the standings, with all of it coming down to the last game, where they can get into fourth place and maybe the NBA with a win. Unfortunately, the commissioner of the ABA says that the agreement is null, and the original four teams chosen will go to the NBA, so the Tropics play for their pride–without their best player, whom Will Ferrell trades to their opponent, the Spurs, a team going to the NBA.

So it’s amusing in spots, but, ultimately, I am less a fan of Will Ferrell’s boy-man characters than I am of Adam Sandler’s. Sandler plays Little Nicky, Happy Gilmore, and Big Daddy with a bit of vulnerability and pathos; Ferrell is just loud and obnoxious.

However, my oldest joined me in watching the film, so it was a shared experience, which is so rare these days.

Also, the film featured Maura Tierney as the love interest of Harrelson’s character, who signs with the Flint team because she lives in Flint.

Continue reading “On Semi-Pro (2008)” →

Ah, gentle reader, what of our written legacies?

As you know, I have some published works that have not been scattered widely–it has sold only, what, 100 copies, and mostly in Kindle? John Donnelly’s Gold was so narrowly distributed that I could easily determine who traded them in at a used book store.

• It looks like the copy I sent to Roberta X sold in Indianapolis, finally Well, alright, maybe that’s a bit optimistic; just because it’s no longer in the store’s inventory does not mean it sold–it could have gotten donated to a book sale or put in the dumpster to make room for something that might sell.
• I see a copy in LA that I inscribed to a client in New York is up for sale for a reasonable price–I think I will order it.
• There’s a copy in Washington–would that be one of the beta readers from almost 20 years ago that has moved up there to work for Microsoft.
• Et cetera.

It’s kind of like how I know you’ve visited my blog, gentle reader. There’s not exactly a lot of noise in the stat counter to obscure you personally.

I was quite the letter writer in college; I sent out reams of letters to family and friends in those lonely years before the Internet. Although I have kept electronic copies of each, migrated as is my wont all the way up from the 286 PC clone I was running then (and another although, although I probably still have electronic copies of letters I produced with Bank Street Writer) on floppies in the store room. I have all the letters my friends and family sent me in hard copy, though, and I have electronic copies of letters I have written since, with modern computers, but I am pretty sure that the printed letters I’ve sent to my correspondents are in the landfill by now. They’re almost all dead by now.

The short stories, novel attempts, and recent poems (not included in Coffee House Memories) are on the computer in electronic form. I will carry them forward, computer to computer, and back them up, but.

Like this blog. I’ve used it as a running commentary on books, politics, life, and humor for almost twenty years. It has some good stuff on it, a lot of detritus, but when I pass on, it like the electronic copies of things I’ve written will be forgotten, hundreds of thousands of words unread, turned off. I will not even be ephemera in someone’s basement or an antique mall somewhere.

Why, yes, in researching a post, I saw that Charles Hill’s life’s work is gone, Dustbury.com now forwarding to an amateur marketing site for some twee application.

Magnificent $5.2M mansion for sale in Missouri’s wealthiest suburb:

With a population of 361 residents, Huntleigh is one of the least-populated municipalities in St. Louis County. But it’s the wealthiest suburb in all of Missouri.

Tucked between Ladue, Frontenac, Kirkwood, and Warson Woods, you could drive past Huntleigh along S. Lindbergh Boulevard and not realize it. Despite a total land area of less than a square mile, sprawling landscapes are a way of life in Huntleigh.

Yeah, I know about Huntleigh. I set the better part of a book there. I once passed down Lindbergh in the middle 1990s and saw the sign for the municipality between Ladue and Frontenac and looked at it on a map. “That’s where the rich people live,” I told my then-girlfriend, a West County girl who is probably now, twenty-five years on, worth millions.

Gentle reader, I have accepted the opportunity to be part of the Nielsen’s radio survey.

As you might know, gentle reader, I am one of the few people left in the world (and no longer perhaps the only person under 50) who listens to broadcast radio (as well as streaming, as we will see).

I have been tasked to log time in a radio diary that lists radio stations I’ve listened to during the day.

Strangely, and sadly, this is a bit of an underrepresented radio listening period for me. As you might recall, I just bought a stack of audiobooks and audio courses at the Friends of the Library Book Sale two weeks ago, so most of my listening time in the car, maybe an hour a day or more on those days when I get into the car, are given over to listening to the lectures. Which is just as well, as I tend to flip amongst 3 radio stations during morning drive time (avoiding zoo radio) and 6 stations in the afternoons/evenings, which would be a bear to track.

So far, WSIE streaming from Edwardsville, Illinois, is the clear winner, as I listen to that whilst I’m at my desk many days when I’m not testing file uploads, which eat up the bandwidth at Nogglestead, in which case I listen to Tokyo Groove Jyoshi over and over (some of the YouTube videos are 30 minute or 60 minute live videos, so they eat up desk time). Strangely, YouTube plays better than online streams while I’m doing the uploading. At any rate, I have logged something like 16 hours a week for WSIE and 1 for KQRA, the hard rock station, so far.

The survey runs Thursday through Wednesday, one single week. It just missed my listening to KOMG, the country station I can pick up in my lawnmowing hearing protection that I wore whilst mowing the lawn last Wednesday.

Also, as I was not at my desk in the evening hours on Sunday, I did not switch over to KCSM, the Bay Area’s Jazz Station, for streaming jazz when WSIE plays the Conversation on Race (Spoiler Alert: It’s Whitey’s Fault) program. Sometimes, when I switch over to KCSM on Sunday nights, I’ll end up listening to it on Monday as well.

I’ve got two days left, and it looks like a couple more hours of WSIE to log. They’ve provided log books for the entire family, but aside from entering an hour of KQRA for the youngest, trapped in the car with me for an hour, it’s I did not listen to the radio today checkmarks for everyone.

Which further makes me feel like an anachronism in my own time.