Category: Blogging

Me, 9:58 AM (Central) today:

And recognize that this might well be the very last time, at least according to the chronology of the writing, where you read Old and busted/new hotness.

Ed Driscoll, 8:14 PM (Eastern) today:

OLD AND BUSTED: ‘Only hot people get the Pfizer’ Vaccine rivalries descend on TikTok.

–NBC News, April 8th.

The New Hotness? Wait. So now Moderna is twice as good as Pfizer?

–Jazz Shaw, Hot Air, today.

Curse you, Ed Driscoll! But be advised that I have probably been wearing a fedora longer than you have. AND I LOOK BETTER IN IT.

I cannot help notice that all of a sudden, a lot of people are reading this eleven year old book report on It Happened In Lemay, a comb-bound self-published collection of historical anecdotes and stories about south St. Louis County published by the editor of a tiny little paper in the area.

In my imagination, several people have learned that the book contains clues to a secret of some sort, perhaps a treasure, and they’re desperately trying to find a copy (the copy?) that will lead them to wealth or something. And they will stop at nothing to get it.

Personally, I hope it’s the location of the Yocum Silver Mine so I don’t have to travel too far to find it if I work out the mystery or get caught up in the search.

Of course, the biggest puzzle might turn out to be Where is it on Brian J.’s read shelves? I mean, I read it right after we moved to Nogglestead. Back then, the read shelves were organized, but a lot of time and a thousand books have been added since that sepia-toned time.

In 2004, I mentioned that Bravenet singled out the works of John Norman in its terms of service:

Funny, Frank Herbert, J.R.R. Tolkien, and R.A. Salvatore don’t suffer from the literary persecution John Norman does. Here’s section 8d of BraveNet’s terms of service:

(d) Associate Bravenet and any Products and Services with any adult material of any sort. This includes, but is not limited to, such things as nudity, any site, page, image or service requiring any adult verification service, anything that users to be 18 or older to view or join or access, and any text, image or likeness suggesting sexual and/or inappropriate and/or illegal acts of any sort. Without limiting the foregoing, you may not use the Products and Services to store, use, contain or display pornography, adult novelties, adult toys, XXX material, escort services, Gorean, bondage, BDSM, bigotry, racism, hatred, profanity, or any material which may be insulting to another person(s) or entity;

No Counter-Earth fan pages for you, children.

Well, I see today that Lileks added Bravenet forums to The Bleat, so I went a-looking to see if Gor is still prohibited.

Although it’s now in section 9, so someone has updated the terms in the last seventeen years, although nobody removed the Gorean prohibition. Probably they didn’t know what Gorean meant. Which, to be honest, is probably why few people post Gorean content using Bravenet widgets or services. Not because anyone but me reads these terms and conditions closely.

You can probably find all kinds of Fifty Shades of Grey knock-offs across sites using Bravenet components, though. Because that’s modern stuff and not really dirty like your grandpa might have liked.

In case you missed it, today is Musings from Brian J. Noggle’s seventeenth birthday.

I should have dropped this into conversation sometime last week so you’d have known to get me something or send a card, but I wanted to see who was a MfBJN superfan, and actually, the only answer is Me Five Years from now.

But thanks to those of you who are mere readers and commenters.

Of course, in this example, the great minds would be me and the Amazon AI thing, but on the very day I post a bad lip reading GIF from Rambo: First Blood Part II, Amazon recommends to Neo that she watch the latest Rambo movie.

Perhaps all of us right-wing whackadoodle bloggers look alike to Amazon’s AI.

We must use this to our advantage.

The other day, I was torn about the proper catchphrase for this portion of the 21st century:

The Springfield area had rolling blackouts during the winter storms a couple weeks ago. I have been trying to get the phrase They’re not going to like the nineteenth century they’re voting for, but it might as well be They’re not going to like the third world country they’re voting for.

In a post Teenage Mutant Ninja Idiots, it sounds like Sarah Hoyt might favor the former:

Look, it took me a while to figure out things were going to h*ll. Mostly because…. well. I was raised in the 19th century, and some parts of it were not quite that advanced. Take toilet flushing: you take the full bucket in with you. Well, that’s how I first learned. I don’t know when grandma’s toilet had a flush installed if before or after we moved to my parents’ newly-built house which, d*mn skippy had a flush installed.

So that’s a vote for the first one, which to be honest is the one I prefer, too. But she also says:

Except that even there, you know, it was an European flush. I honestly can’t tell if Europe is just more advanced than us on the war on things that work — my best friend growing up lived in a Victorian that had perfectly functional elevated flush tanks, with no problems — or if — since friend’s house was built by an English consul — most of Europe (and the world) just cosplays modernity without any clue how it should work. I do know that my parents’ flush was low water before low water was fashionable (in a region of the world that has problems rather with too much water and back then when our water came from a well and was therefore “free”.) So, you know, you still had a bucket standing by just in case.

Also, the dishwasher was high water (but low hot water, because that cost money) and got done as soon as I was done scrubbing and rinsing the last pan. Ditto for the washer. We had a tank outside. I actually love hand-washing clothes. At least in summer. In winter, when your hands become painful from going in the water and you find out what “instant arthritis” means, it’s not so fun.

So, anyway, you see, in the states any level of “this is easier” was an improvement. I remember a day in the late eighties, when I sat down and went “The dishwasher is going. The washer is going. And I have time to write.” It was like…. trumpets sounded, I swear.

Which sounds like it could also be a vote for the latter.

I’m still on the horns of a dilemma. Rest assured, though, gentle reader, that I shall overuse the “C’mon, man” formulation in posts for the near future. At least until the lights go out.

Almost eleven years later, and I have not combed all links to the Blogspot incarnation of this blog to update them to the new domain?

Ay. I thought I had already done this. I guess not. Nine pages of search results currently. Hopefully, by the time I stumble across this post five years hence, I will have gotten them all.

This blog is not on the first page of results for brian noggle on Duck Duck Go. Or Bing.

Sigh.

I would say it’s because The Man is Keeping Me Down, but it’s mostly because, c’mon, man! It’s a blog, man. That’s so 2003.

My accountant and his wife have a podcast. You can see them on YouTube for the nonce, but given that the podcast is entitled “Right From Us”, perhaps not for long.

I spotted it when I hit his wife’s blog today because I was looking for something to read that would not be too newsy because, brother, I’d rather not right now.

Funny story: He’s actually my accountant because I spotted Mrs. C.’s blog on an old Springfield blog collection when I first moved to town (and got myself on that blogroll). She posted that he had just gone solo as an accountant right as I learned that the woman who did our taxes had retired–and I parted ways with our St. Louis tax advisor right about the time the firm was getting heavily sanctioned by the IRS. Not that my parting with that firm meant that they did not still try to send us intermittent invoices for years afterwards.

When I first met the accountant, Mrs. C. was in the other office, and I mentioned reading her blog. It was an awkward moment, as meeting someone whose blog I’ve read for a while without commenting or anything makes me feel like a cyberstalker a bit.

An awkward moment that I’m sure to recreate in a month or so when I sit down with my accountant after having watched their podcasts and learning a lot of cool things we have in common.

(Oh, and as a reminder, my attorney is not really named Bernie–it’s a song I heard again recently on WSIE and recognized immediately.)

As you might know, gentle reader, I attended a nominally Catholic, a Jesuit, university, and I am half-Cath (which is all bastard according to the summary of Catholics marrying outside the faith found in So What’s The Difference), so I have had some exposure to Catholic teachings. But not a lot of formal theological training in that regard.

Over twenty years ago, I got the phrase Ex Cathedra in my head, and I “remembered” from my university days (twenty years ago, my university days were already memories, but fresh memories, unlike today where I am not entirely sure about most of my university education, including why? and why there?) that Ex Cathedra means the instances where the Pope spoke infallibly, almost as though Jesus and/or God were speaking. I thought the Pope had done so twice, the divine incarnation and the assumption of Mary into Heaven. Shortly thereafter,I was out to lunch (gentle reader, you might think that I still am, metaphorically speaking) with a Jesuit initiate, so I asked him, and he told me that those were not Ex Cathedra pronouncements. And I believed that for twenty plus years.

Until I was researching a comment I wanted to leave on this post (I wanted to make sure I spelled Ex Cathedra correctly).

Which lead me to the Wikipedia entry on papal infallibility which indicates that the Pope spoke Ex Cathedra not twice, but seven times.

Including the two I thought were the only two.

Interestingly, the Pope spoke Ex Cathedra once about beatification, twice about Jesus Christ, twice about the Virgin Mary, and twice about…. Cornelius Jansen? That’s not a heresy with which I was familiar, and it’s interesting that Wikipedia includes these as infallible.

However, the Wikipedia entry on Ineffabilis Deus, that is, the Immaculate Conception says:

Ineffabilis Deus (Latin for “Ineffable God”) is an apostolic constitution by Pope Pius IX. It defines the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The decree was promulgated on December 8, 1854, the date of the annual Feast of the Immaculate Conception, and followed from a positive response to the encyclical Ubi primum. Mary’s immaculate conception is one of only two pronouncements that were made ex cathedra (the other in Munificentissimus Deus regarding the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin) and is therefore considered by the Catholic Church to be infallible through the extraordinary magisterium.

Which is what I said, what the Jesuit denied, and not what Wikipedia said in the infallible Pope entry.

Which is why Wikipedia is a good starting point for interesting research but should not be considered the final word.

Unlike this blog or Friar’s comments thereupon, gentle reader. These you can take to the bank.