Well, if the guy at Knuckledraggin likes it, it must be good!
UPDATE: One moment: I have just been handed a note. This is probably not the Wirecutter they meant. But what other Wirecutter is there?
A Rousing Endorsement; I’ll Take Two
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Category: Blogging
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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Metal Is Life
Wilder writes about how he discovered Judas Priest.
Not in the talent scout way, but how he came to like the band and, by extension, metal.
Warning: Link contains NSFW animated ASCII art. The kind we would spend hours to download back in the 2400 baud days.
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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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Prescient
Someone recently visited this 2010 post: Brian College Mindset List for the Class of 2034
I have to say we’re already halfway there, right on schedule. Although I said:
They have never seen a political ad or an actual political candidate; the National Parliament has always been dissolved and His Excellency has always ruled.
Clearly, I missed the whole pronoun thing that came along.
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What the Squirrels Taught Me
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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Kim du Toit Hardest Hit
For those of you not African-American with a girl’s name, Kelly Brook is an English model that appears in the tabs an awful lot for no other reason that she appears in the tabs an awful lot.
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We At MfBJN Would Never Stoop So Low
Seen on Facebook:
Rest assured, gentle reader, we will not resort to blogging with intelligence, artificial or otherwise, at Musings from Brian J. Noggle.
Thank you, that is all.
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Again, Brian Knows Wilder’s Source Material
Wilder begins a cheery post entitled The Coming American Dictatorship, Part I with a quote from Star Trek:
“Well, Captain, the Klingons called you a tin-plated overbearing, swaggering dictator with delusions of godhood.” – Star Trek
Oooh, oooh, Mr. Kahtter. I know which episode that comes from. Not only did I read the short story version of “The Trouble with Tribbles” in Star Trek 3, I actually caught the episode on a DVD I bought a couple weeks ago.
But that’s a story for another post.
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Weird, How I Know The Source
So yesterday, I found myself watching Steven Wright’s first appearance on The Tonight Show:
I don’t even know how I got to that. Did I go to YouTube for something else and see that on the front page? Did a blog post it? I couldn’t tell you.
What I can tell you is that Wilder borrowed a joke from that routine yesterday:
The world is a really big place. Oh, sure, sometimes people say (when they run into a coincidence) that it’s a small world, but my standard response to that is, “let’s see you paint it.”
That alignment is interesting.
Does Google know I read Wilder every day, so it presented me with the source of the joke? Does Wilder read the same blogs I do and see the same post with the embedded video? Did everyone on YouTube get Steven Wright presented yesterday? Or is it just a little mind trying to detect patterns in mere coincidence?
When conspiracy theories become fact, print the conspiracy theories!
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I Know How They Feel
Sarah Hoyt sez
However, around the edges, I actually found out what makes people bond with you personally. I found it out both by reading a lot of blogs and running one: People want to know you. As a person. They want to know the funny little things in your life. They want to feel you’re one of their friends, and they could drop by the kitchen for a cup of coffee. (To be fair, my fans who know where I live are welcome to.)
So I’ll riff off of a couple of other posts I came across today with a personal flair. Continue reading “I Know How They Feel”
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We’re Getting To An Age
OregonMuse, the poster of the hoity-toity Ace of Spades HQ book thread on Sunday mornings, has passed away.
You know, we longtime bloggers are getting to that age, are we not?
I am going to miss his book threads and his morning rants.
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Ace of Spades HQ Finds The Real Killer
Hidden in plain sight at Ace of Spades HQ, in the sidebar, the identity of Betty White’s real killer:
And he would have gotten away with it if it weren’t for those meddling morons!
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On Kim du Toit’s Christmas List
IT’S NO YOLK Model Kelly Brook serves up cheeky poses to launch cookery calendar with SlimFast
I would say, “Mine, too,” but my mother-in-law gives each of us a calendar every year for Christmas, and I have run out of wall space in my office to hang one, so I am topped up on calendars annually.
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Need Help? Just Ask!
If you happen to find yourself looking for pictures of Kathy Ireland, our professional service team is ready to help!
She appears in the posts We’re Not Far From A Forbes Swimsuit Edition and Film Watching: National Lampoon’s Loaded Weapon I (1993).
If you need anything else, do not be afraid to ask!
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On My Watch List, I Guess
I guess the world wants me to look for Pete Metheny records at book sales.
- A couple weeks ago (I thought, but actually a month and a half ago), Jack Baruth posted about his relationship with the artist:
My relationship with Pat Metheny is about as complicated as an entirely one-way thing can be; obviously Pat has no idea of who I am or what I might be thinking about him at any given time. I bought Letter From Home in 1989 and was a compulsive customer of his from then till 2019 or thereabouts. I have pretty much everything he has ever recorded, in multiple formats. Bought all the sheet music. The practice-exercise book. T-shirts, guitar picks. Hell, I bought Zero Tolerance For Silence, a repulsive cacophony of noise that was meant to be a final middle finger towards David Geffen. Have seen him in concert more than a dozen times, including three separate episodes when I caught the same gig twice in a week, at different places. You get the idea.
- One of the marching bands I’ve seen in competition recently based part of their program on some piece or another from the artist; he was mentioned by name in the introduction. It’s not like I could tell Metheny’s music from any other bit of marching band music.
- Today, Lileks mentioned him:
If you call the number, you are warned that we are experiencing high call volume, and have not adjusted staffing levels at all; why would we? At least that’s what they should say. I was on hold longer than the actual length of the flight I was calling to change, it seemed. At least the hold music was unobtrusive. Meandering jazz. It made me wonder how much demand there is these days for smooth jazz – you know, the stuff secretaries put on the stereo in 1983 when someone was coming over for dinner for the third date. I was listening to some Pat Metheny the other day, and wondered: is this stuff just over?
I mean, it seems to be over for Pat Metheny, inasmuch as I don’t hear him doing this type of music any more, so perhaps that’s a clue.
So I’ll watch for some of the early work of the artist on records when I hit the book sales and whatnot.
Of course, the mentions of the artist accumulating in my subconscious would have made me pick up something even if I didn’t say on my blog like a blood vow to the unheeding Internet that I would be looking for the artist in the future.
I’m not convinced to pay full freight for it, though, unlike that hard rock album Lileks told me to get.
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The Ace of Spades HQ Sidebar Agrees With MfBJN
Today’s sidebar at Ace of Spades HQ:
C’mon, man, I don’t even have to click to know what you’re talking about.
I did, though, and discovered the sidebar’s ranking matches what I said in 2019.
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Old; Also, Busted
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.
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From the Imagination of Brian J., I Hope
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.
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Sparkly Vampire Fan Fiction Apparently Allowed
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.
Yes.
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.
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