We at MfBJN Know The Rest of the Story

Pardon me for Paul-Harveying this, but Stuff Nobody Cares About posted a picture of 1937 St. Louis Cardinals catchers at spring training.

Including Mickey Owen:

Of the three catchers Mickey Owen had the most successful career. In 1937 the 21-year-old rookie played in 80 games for the Cardinals. Owen would become the Cardinals starting catcher in 1938 playing with the team until 1940.

Mickey Owen would eventually play five seasons with the Brooklyn Dodgers making the All-Star team four times. Owen played in the major leagues until 1954 and had a career .255 batting average. Owen died at age 89 in 2005.

As we here at MfBJN have mentioned, Owens moved to Greene County, Missouri, after his playing days. He opened a baseball school a little west of here that we passed taking my boy to a basketball game out in Avila (it’s still open), and he later ran for Greene County sheriff and served several terms. I know all this because I bought one of his re-election giveaways for a dime at a church garage sale a decade ago.

It’s just a little notepad. No telling what it’s worth, but given that he played almost a century ago, probably as much as a modern giveaway notepad. So less than the dime I paid for it likely.

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Jack Baruth Discovers Symphonic Metal

Atop Jack Baruth’s Avoidable Contact Forever yesterday, I saw a familiar face:

It’s Giada “Jade” Etro of the symphonic metal band Frozen Crown, of whom Baruth says:

As most of you know, music isn’t a full-time job for most people nowadays, so you’ll be pleased to know that Miss Etro has twelve years of experience as a dentist and orthodontist. How in God’s name have I had one implant, four veneers, and a dozen crowns… none from her. I don’t care if I die during the procedure like Ye’s mom did during her discount Mexican plastic surgery.

As I did with Kim du Toit, I welcome Baruth’s discovery of the genre, where all the bands have attractive women with pipes on the lead vocals.

And, then as now, I offer some further selections.

Vocalist:
Melissa Bonny
Mizuho Lin
Nicoletta Rossellini
Nationality:
Swiss
Brazilian
Italian
Bands:
Evenmore
Rage of Light
Ad Infinitum
The Dark Side of the Moon
Semblant
Kalidia
Walk in Darkness

Although I don’t put a lot of symphonic metal on my gym playlist (“What Lies Ahead” and “Mere Shadow” by Semblant, “Stay Black” by Battle Beast, “82nd All the Way” by Amaranthe), it’s what YouTube insists on feeding me on those occasions where I type in a song from a metal band (any metal band) and let it run. Which is not a good way to find more songs for my gym playlist, but it does introduce me to new symphonic metal bands. And the infrequent Spanish metal band thanks to Xeria.

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As I Read Bernard Cornwell Books….

I know who the Duke of Wellington was:

I KNOW nothing should surprise us these days about dumbed-down Britain. But an article on the moronic Mail Online website the other day had me choking on my cornflakes.

It read: ‘In 2020, Mandy Lieu, 38, bought 935-acre Ewhurst Park in Hampshire, once owned by the inventor of the wellington boot, the Duke of Wellington, and vowed to turn it into a world-class organic farm and nature reserve.’

The inventor of the wellington boot!

Good grief, I know teaching of British history is nowadays outrageously skewed and bowdlerised, but I didn’t realise things had got this bad.

Sharpe’s Trafalgar only mentions the duke in passing. The pompous politician or his wife is a distant cousin.

By the end of the year I shall know a heckuva lot more about the Napoleonic wars, and I should probably read the firsthand account of his retreat from Russia that I have around here somewhere.

(Link via Sarah Hoyt on Instapundit.)

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Keeping His Memory Alive

In his Sunday Night Open Thread post (subscribers only), Jack Baruth mentions Dustbury:

I was right about it, and most of my peers were wrong. But, as my old friend Charles G Hill once said, it hardly matters now.

He links to his post eulogizing Charles Hill (available to the public).

We bloggers, no matter what media, have to keep each others’ memories alive since they’re more ephemeral than most ephemera.

Doiing my bit, on Facebook on this day in 2011, I posted:

Brian J. Noggle confesses that, whenever he sees a Hyundai Equus, he wants to smash its headlights.

and Charles got it, commenting:

Way too literary for this crowd.

Definitely a well-read fellow.

Oh, and I’ve only subscribed to four or five Substacks in my time, and Avoidable Contact is the only subscription I’ve kept up. Make of that what you will, but you should make it into an endorsement.

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Proper Music For The Reading

Yesterday, Severian started a post by talking about Michael McDonald (What a Fool Believes).

WSIE provided the proper music for the occasion.

Although, to be honest, WSIE plays a hella lot of McDonald, whether with the Doobie Brothers, with a single other Doobie Brother (depicted), solo, or with James Ingram. WSIE has a pretty small playlist, and no matter how often I send a message on the request line to play the Pitch Pockets, no, here’s Steely Dan with “Aja” again.

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Hindrocket Jinxes Me

In a post about the debate last night (didn’t see it, not interested), he said:

Doug Burgum tore his Achilles tendon yesterday morning playing pick-up basketball. His participation was evidence of his determination and pain tolerance, but he was not up to par. Men older than 50 should not play pick-up basketball. I know several middle-aged men who have suddenly torn Achilles tendons, in every case playing basketball. They should stick to HORSE.

And here I promised my oldest son, who is now two inches taller and maybe twenty pounds heavier than I am, a basketball game this week.

When I tear my Achilles, I will know whom to blame.

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And Now You Know…. The Rest Of The Story

Not so much the rest of the story as an epilogue. Bayou Renaissance Man asks: Do you remember the Gimli Glider?

Gentle reader, of course I do. I read the book about it, Freefall, in 2004 on a plane on a trip to Florida, where I spent some time talking to my beautiful wife’s uncle, a former Pratt and Whitney engineer who could tell you what happened in any number of air disasters. Because I don’t like to fly, you see.

At any rate, the epilogue is that the pilot and one of the passengers some decades later met at a reunion and got together. How sweet.

And not as crazy as the stewardess who stayed in the industry and recounted how she flew in that plane again during the course of her career (which is in the book). One such incident, and I would have found another line of work. I have not even had one such incident, and I still prefer driving vacations even when the driving takes me on narrow Arkansas highways.

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We Know The Feeling

Cedar Sanderson is relearning the joys of kitten:

Gets dressed… extricates kitten from closet.
Feeds cats… extricates kitten from pantry.
Opens dishwasher… extricates kitten…
This is giving me fond memories of having toddlers.

Toast is not a bad kitten. She’s just curious, and energetic, and that’s fun to watch.

I mentioned that we found some kittens on our property last October, and I don’t know if I’ve updated you much since, but we know how Ms. S. feels.

Continue reading “We Know The Feeling”

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I Get It

Severian said today:

And yeah, I deliberately chose Taylor Swift, because she’s pretty much already an AI. As I’m sure I’ve written, I “admire” her in a way, for a certain deeply cynical value of “admire” — Sir John Hawkwood himself wasn’t that openly mercenary (did I mention that one of the reasons I love this place is that I can drop an allusion to Sir John Hawkwood and bet everyone will get it?).

Yeah, I got it. After all, I read John Hawkwood: An English Mercenary in Fourteenth-Century Italy fifteen years ago and briefly tried to get the Internet to replace Chuck Norris jokes with John Hawkwood gags (such as John Hawkwood invented the color Burnt Sienna. Poor Sienna.). I also had the domain name johnhawkwood.com for a number of years before I started culling my portfolio (I’m down to 18).

It makes one feel smaht to get allusions and references, and it’s cool to drop them into conversations. Even when nobody gets it.

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What A Long, Strange Trip It’s Been

The blog turns 20 today. It started on Blogger and Blogspot in the days before blog posts over there had titles; in January 2010, I switched over to WordPress and my own domain (I think the first post is this one), and I have since imported all the Blogspot content here and cleaned it up to replace all the internal links to point to this blog and to replace my old Amazon affiliate links with my new Amazon affiliate links (which are now also old Amazon affiliate links, as Amazon kicked me out of the program again, this time because you cheap bastards gentle readers weren’t buying anything through them).

I started it after having read other blogs for a couple of years. I had just finished my novel John Donnelly’s Gold, and I thought a blog would be a good place for me to post essays–something to keep me writing daily, or at least semi-regularly.

But it didn’t work out that way; instead, I found myself posting short, snarky bits on news items. You know, like a blog. More of a linker than a thinker (which was not the original intent, note), but I guess I found I did not have the time to write a well-reasoned essay every day.

Ah, in those early years, I was quite up there in blogs. I was in the top, what, 5000 blogs on the planet (according to the Truth Laid Bear Ecosystem). Of course, there were fewer blogs then, and they tended to be individual blogs. And then the consolidations came.

I didn’t really make a whole lot of blog friends, or blog contacts that led me into the wider blog industry. I mean, some people have made a go of it for fifteen years, whether supplementing income or deriving side income from blogging, but I never got called up to the bigs. I did some work for 24th State for a while, but that has been, what, a decade? And I never hit the big time.

These days, I’m mostly writing book reports and thoughts on movies I’ve seen interspersed with stories from my life, little humor bits, and the occasional snarky bit of commentary on the news. I’m not overly political these days because frankly, that’s wearying and boring. I can’t work up the same zeal for it as I did twenty years ago.

But I write it mostly for myself, gentle reader, for myself in a couple of years when I’m wandering back in the archives for some reason–looking to see what I thought about a particular book (and surprised how much time has elapsed since I read it) and then wandering a couple posts forward or back.

I hope you continue to find some amusement in some of the posts. Or, at very least, pleasing photos of actresses on select movie reports.

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Brian J. Joins The Cool Kids Club

Google has put a post of mine behind a Content Warning:

You know, Google, I have not used Blogger/Blogspot for 12 years now, and you’re not making me regret my decision.

Gentle reader, you can read the post here without the warning, although I will point out it’s based on a joke that Laura Bush made about her husband, President George W. Bush, at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2005:

He’s learned a lot about ranching since that first year when he tried to milk the horse. What’s worse, it was a male horse.

In terms of telling bloggers who had cases of the vapors because Chimphitler Bush! (remember the good old days?) to get a grip, I might have used the word masturbation and related slang.

What a potty keyboard I had then.

Also recently added to the cool kids club: Neo.

Clearly, Google is settling old business, perhaps before Elon Musk can buy it.

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The Latest Scandal Of Brian J.

Gentle reader, you might have noticed no Good Album Hunting or Good Book Hunting posts recently, even though the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library held its autumn book sale last week.

I did not go.

I alluded to this in book reports leading up to the event–that I might not go–but in the end, I did not go.

I had work for both my employer and my longtime client that chained me to my desk for twelve or fourteen hours a day, which made it difficult for me to get up to the fairgrounds on a weekday. Although I thought about taking a change of clothes to the NFFF Memorial Stair Climb and running through the sale briefly on Saturday, half price day, between the second and third of my stadia last weekend, but I did not–I couldn’t remember how long the stair climb actually took, so I demurred. I also did not want to go up on Sunday afternoon, bag day–in my experience, it’s pretty picked over by then, and I would not have found much.

So I did not go.

And, gentle reader, when my mother-in-law downsized earlier in the year, it broke me.

Well, all right, it didn’t break my spirit, but it really dampened my enthusiasm for book or record buying for a time. For, you see, I could get away with putting a couple or a couple of dozen books or albums on my stuffed book or record shelves, filling gaps in the to-read shelves created as I actually read books.

But the books and records we received from my mother in law were boxes’ worth. I have two boxes of books and a couple atop those boxes in my office that I cannot fit on my current shelves. I will enumerate them when I can find a place to put them. I have a box of records under the desk with the 60s folk music she favors as I have no room on the record shelves until I build more.

So, gentle reader, for the nonce, I have enough.

Or, more to the point, I cannot fit the amount that I would normally accumulate at the book sale into the existing storage.

I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’ll run up to ABC Books from time to time or pick up some records at antique malls as I do my Christmas shopping as long as the prices haven’t gotten too out of hand.

But a book sale? Not until next spring at the earliest.

And here I know you hang onto my look at what I bought! posts. Maybe I’ll do a Musical Balance post since I haven’t done one in…. almost a year? Wow.

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