To be able to say "Noggle," you first must be able to say "Nah."
Wow, back in the day, I had a lot of blogs.
Here’s one I’d forgotten: Pop-Up Mocker.
It was me riffing on pop-up ads before pop-up blockers became standard in Web browsers.
Circa 2005.
This post violates the oath I swore on the blog back in 2004:
I won’t tell you again!
Here I am, fourteen and a half years later, flogging it.
Way back in 2003, I pooh-pooh LASIK surgery.
Spoiler alert: A couple years later, I had LASIK surgery.
Perhaps it was when I corrected the misunderstanding:
Pardon me, but my family doesn’t have a generations-long tradition for opening the front of the eyeball like a can of french-cut green beans and firing a computer-guided thing-we-used-to-call-a-“laser” against the retina until it scorched enough of the cones and rods to make things better, as though it was a military expedition to win over the hearts and minds of my optic nerve with napalm. Oh, yeah, and then they close it back up, and it either works or you’re blind, oops.
The laser doesn’t work on the retina after all.
Well, not really, but I did dedicate a lot more time to the blog in the distant past, such as that one time I put together a pod cast to make fun of something John Kerry said extraneously a couple presidential elections ago: World Exclusive!
As with the photoshops, they’re fewer these days. Where did the time go? And I don’t mean the passage of the years: I mean all the time I had every day.
Oh, yes. Children. A better use of the time, surely.
Brian J., March 2012
I went into the nursery last week, and I asked to see the Lileks.
“What?” the man asked.
“The Lileks,” I said. Well, it’s not what I tried to say, but that’s what it sounded like.
“Oh, the lilacs,” he said.
Lileks, today:
Also: next door neighbor is out back for a smoke, waves to me in the dusk, asks a favor. I come over.
“What’s up?”
“We have a dear sweet old lady coming over for dinner tomorrow,” he said. “And she just loves Lileks.”
“Well I would be honored to drop by and pay a visit,” I say, thinking as long as you’re not asking me to stay for the whole dinner, sure – pop in during dessert, surprise the old lady.
“I mean the lilacs.” He points to the bushes. “I wondered if I could snip a few.”
I included a picture in 2012 of the lilacs I hopefully planted around our propane tank. They lasted a couple years. Then we had a couple years of years of sunflowers. Then a year of tall grasses that I thought were sunflowers when they sprouted, but clearly they lacked, you know, flowers. This year, I went with hydrangea bushes. Which are almost already dead.
One of the reasons we moved to Nogglestead was to have more space for gardening, which apparently here at Nogglestead means “Making room for the Bermuda grass.” I’m beginning to wonder if that will be one of the reasons we move out.
As part of my marketing push, such as it is, for my collection of poetry entitled Coffee House Memories, I’ve started posting actual memories on the Web site.
The first one is about my reading poetry in the middle of the night on a radio station at the behest of a fellow who ran the open mike night at the Oasis coffee house and who was a substitute disc jockey at KDHX.
You can read that memory here.
As I’ve mentioned, I’m coming my archives to ensure posts have categories, and it’s an interesting and tedious process, but it uncovers a lot of nuggets.
Like this post, where I tell Steve Jobs the iPhone should have voice interaction.
I wonder if that’s actionable? Surely, some shady attorney somewhere would give it a wing.
You know, as I mentioned, I’m going through old posts and whatnot, and I notice that I used to comment on the news of the day every day.
Lately, though, my posts have been mostly music, mostly books, mostly life.
Why is that, you ask?
Well, it’s partly because I don’t want to sound like a crank on the Internet, and I don’t devote enough time to my commentary to not were I to jot a couple things here and there. Also, in the modern world, I can’t help but wonder if I would lose career opportunities based on my commentary. Although this site with its rich archives is still here, so any job opportunities I would lose I have already lost. And I’m thinking that the field that I am in has changed enough to leave me behind a bit as it were anyway.
Also, it’s partly because like reading a Rogue Warrior novel, I see the same things come up over and over again over the years, and I’d just be repeating myself.
A couple cases in point: From 2012, stories about local governments in St. Louis County and Republic looking to consolidate trash hauling to a single government-selected option. I know I’ve written at length about this as far back as my Suburban Journal days. Well, look, here the issue is again in Springfield. I wrote about it earlier this year even. What more do I have to say about it except to point out further examples?
I also spotted a story from 2008 about the Hidden Valley ski resort in St. Louis County clashing with local governments about blocking an amenity, and the resort threatened to or it will have no choice to shut down.
It just seems so dull to keep posting the same things, year after year, with little change.
It’s been a couple days (what, almost a week?) since I posted, but I have been working here behind the scenes at MfBJN.
As some of you might know, this blog has been around for over fourteen years. It started on Blogspot back before Blogger supported a title, not to mention categories. In 2010, I switched to WordPress and self-hosting (and moved my images from one site to another).
The result of the transition and the old timeyness of some posts meant that some images were missing from posts, many posts didn’t have titles, and none of them had categories. I’ve been working on them here and there, but I’ve started making an effort to catch up on them. So I’ve been reading individual posts from nine or ten years ago and reading comments (what? people used to comment here?), adding categories, and standardizing some tags.
So it seems like I’ve been working on the blog, but you haven’t seen any new content.
I’ll get back to it in a bit here. Thank you for your indulgence.
Hey! Ravenwood is still posting from time to time.
I think I’ll add him to the blogroll on this new (seven-year-old) WordPress version of MfBJN.
The Problem With Calling Something “Interesting”:
Calling something interesting is the height of sloppy thinking. Interesting is not descriptive, not objective, and not even meaningful.
Interesting is a kind of linguistic connective tissue. When introducing an idea, it’s easier to say ‘interesting’ than to think of an introduction that’s simultaneously descriptive but not a spoiler.
I often use interesting in book reports.
I suppose it’s fitting, since the book reports are the connective tissue that holds this blog together. I go periods without saying something interesting meaningful except for the book reports that I post mainly so I can look back upon them on the blog to see what I thought about this book or what else I’ve read within the last two decades by the author or on the subject.
You, gentle readers, all ten of you every day, are only along for the ride.
And by “ride,” I mean “looking for a book report on The Sire de Maletroit’s Door on Google so you can cut and paste it for a paper tomorrow.”
I’ve been going through some old posts recently, and in 2005, I predicted the cast and crew of the film version of the Valerie Plame affair. I predicted the title of the film would be The Operative Word.
Five years later, in 2010, the actual film was called Fair Game.
Sadly, the only thing my satire got correct was that Hollywood would make a hagiography of it.
Apparently, I’ve somehow started and saved fifty-some draft blog posts over the last couple of years. Some of them are fairly complete posts, some of them are incomplete enough to warrant dumping because I don’t know what I was thinking, and some are stubs for longer posts.
Regardless, because I’m lazy, I’m clearing it out and publishing things I can make whole posts from. So some of the links in the posts over the next couple of days are going to be from news items and tidbits from over the last couple of years. So comment “Dude, that’s from 2015!” as you like, but I know.
So, in my book report on Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, I wrote:
One telling word choice that jarred me was vaudeville. Certainly Kierkegaard did not use a direct translation since he preceded the American theatre form by half a century or so.
A couple weeks later, and I’m reading a book by George Burns that includes some photos, including one of a playbill for one of his and Gracie Allen’s vaudeville bits:
Note that this 1926 play bill says that it is Vaudeville’s Centennial Year. Which would put vaudeville’s origin in 1826, which is about fifteen years before Fear and Trembling was written.
The Wikipedia entry is a bit closer to my original reckoning of the origins of vaudeville in the latter part of the 19th century, but given a playbill in a George Burns book and wikipedia, who are you gonna believe? Me, I’m going with the playbill.
So I’m sorry to have spread misinformation. I didn’t look it up; I assumed I knew what I was talking about regarding the origin of vaudeville, and as the old saying goes, “When you ASSUME, you make an ASS of UME,” and ume, as I seem to vaguely recall, is French for yourself. But I’m only a blogger on an untrafficked blog. I can’t be arsed to look it up.
A couple years ago, when I posted about a weekly column and Web site I did back in the olden days, I mentioned I had my old AOL Web site stored somewhere and would someday reproduce it.
Well, I must have gotten started on it but never finished it until now.
So here’s what my Web site looked like circa 1998.
Mostly samples of my writing and the complete text of my two chapbooks of poetry and a teaser for my forthcoming book Flipside Id which I never did finish after losing touch with the artist who was working on the cover.
Back in the olden days, I used to edit photos for humourous effect. Then, I had children and no free time. Although I have a bit more free time now, I haven’t gone back to it because the interest isn’t there, and the Internet has moved onto just putting text on a still image and calling it funny.
But for old time’s sake, here are some of my favorites from the annals of this blog.
The Harry Reid series of young adult novels:
All the sweet, sweet emus after the police in Carbondale shot a loose emu:
| Emu in body armor | Emunator | Bulletproof Emu |
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I never claimed to be good at it. I only claim to have done it.
I noticed a couple days back in my referrer logs that someone from Muscatine, Iowa reading the book report for Dead Street.
Muscatine, Iowa, as I learned when I was researching the book report, is the current home of Max Allan Collins, the author of Dead Street. So I was pretty sure it was the man himself.
Given that he linked the report on his blog today, I’d say I was correct.
Collins joins Diane Duane, author of the Star Trek novel My Enemy, My Ally and Joe Clifford Faust, author of A Death of Honor as people whom I can honestly include in the plural “you, gentle reader” in my continuing posts. Although in most cases it’s an honorary title. Given my blog traffic these days, plural is an honorary title when referring to my readers.
Also, it’s why although I’m not at Nick Hornby levels in positivity (as his book Ten Years in the Tub indicates, his magazine editors prefer he only have nice things to say about books he reviews), I try to keep snark to the minimum: because the authors are people, too. Besides, all of these people have sold far more books than I have.
Also also (which is my blog equivalent of P.P.S., which nobody uses any more), this is why I’m thinking about ending my book reports with boilerplate “It’s not as good as MY NOVEL!” Just to see if I can get any self-Googling real author to spend a buck on it.
On December 14, I wondered Donald Trump: The McCaskill Manipulation Goes National?
On December 28, Allahpundit wonders the same thing:
If this sounds familiar, it’s because Democrats used the same strategy to brilliant effect in the 2012 Senate race in Missouri. The GOP primary was jammed up with three candidates; Claire McCaskill, the Democratic incumbent, wanted to do something to help Todd Akin win, believing (correctly) that Akin would be the easiest of the three to beat in a general election. The solution: Start attacking Akin before the Republican primary, knowing that a big-name Democrat’s official seal of disapproval would be a strong lure to Republican voters to consider Akin. Some of that is pure tribalism at work — Democrats are bad, therefore things they dislike must be good — and some of it is “they’ll tell you who they fear” reasoning at work. The problem is, sometimes they’re not telling you who they fear when they attack. Sometimes they’re telling you who they don’t fear and hoping you’ll fall for it.
You know, this blog was a lot more political when I started out, but I’ve drifted away from it because, honestly, I’m not sure my insights add anything and I don’t think I’m convincing anybody of anything.
I’m not even getting my insights and moments of synthetic thought out into the wild before someone else comes up with them.
This book was a mighty big deal back in the day when it came out. Bloggers were talking about it, Hugh Hewitt was talking about it. Of course, I didn’t talk about it then because I didn’t get the book fresh off the presses. I don’t tend to get my current events books new unless I get them as a gift; even then, I don’t tend to get right to them because, man, I’ve got 1960s science fiction and/or pulp paperbacks to read, man.
So, what is this book? It’s Hewitt cashing in on the relatively new blogging trend that really reached a crescendo around the 2004 election. Dude, even I was live-blogging presidential debates and nominating conventions. Although I thought blogging would be a good way to get myself writing regularly rather than a way to make money (although in those days, who knew how far you could go?) The book is pretty short; although it is 222 pages, it’s really only 156 pages of new material and then sixty pages of Hewitt’s previous columns on the topic and a number of comments from his Web site.
It’s a quick hitter “aimed” at businessmen who need to know about blogs and what they can do to a business, both positively and negatively. He thumps the washbin about executives hiring Glenn Reynolds, the Powerline guys, Ed Morrissey, and other leading lights as consultants. And it paints a fairly rosy picture of blogs.
Ten years later, most of the people he mentioned as leading lights are still leading lights, or at least bloggers I still read. There’s been a lot of consolidation in the industry, so the aggregate blog trumps individual blogging as far as the amount of noise they can raise. And the microblogging (Twitter) and social media trends quickly overwhelmed blogging, as it’s easier and more accessible to individuals to put up a pithy short sentence than to write what amounts to a short, coherent essay from time to time.
So in 2015, the book is a historical document relevant mostly for its place and moment in the history of online communication. I suppose you could read it and replace the word “blog” with “social media” and get something out of it, but there are probably more modern books on the theme all looking to make a quick two bits on explaining the current state of the Web, and they all come with an expiration date of about two weeks from now.
Strangely enough, though, I got the most out of the early comparison to the Protestant Reformation–in the early going, he likens the rise of Web logs to the changes in communication that made the Reformation possible and how the blogs paralleled it. So it has a history of the Reformation and the rise of printing in it, and I liked that.
At any rate, it might be worth your time if you haven’t read it already.
Yesterday, I got a Google search hit for "aristophanes is not your name":
The result is, of course, this bit.
Strangely, though, I am not the top Google hit for that search.
I can do better.
I’m working hard to coin a phrase here to cover the concept of the news meme, which is what you get on Twitter. It’s not news, it’s memes disguised as news.
Mewmews? Mewmes? I got nothing.