Category: Life

You know, in the past, I’ve done checklists for my trips (Things to Do in Wisconsin If You’re Brian J., Five Things To Do In Michigan If You’re Brian J., Things Done In Branson If You’re Brian J.). However, I’m not currently feeling that clever, so I’ll just do a brain dump recap of my recent visit to Wisconsin.
Continue reading “Wisconsin Vacation Recap” →

Ace posted this meme last week:

It’s a simple four punch set, but.

1. Jab.
2. Cross.
3. Rear uppercut.
4. Front hook.

A proper sequence, especially for training, would be jab-cross-front hook-uppercut. You want strikes to alternate sides so you can twist your hips. In a sparring situation, you might want to go same side consecutively to maybe catch your opponent off guard, but for training purposes, alternate sides.

Oh, look who thinks he’s a punchin’ expert now. I am just back from Wisconsin, gentle reader, so you should read that line in Frances McDormand’s voice and Fargo accent because that’s a little like what I sound when talking right now.

At any rate, I have seen the image without text on Pinterest where it’s explanations of individual punches, not a punch combination. Apparently, someone who does not know any martial art, including boxing, replaced the text with something amusing but that implies a sequence. Still. It’s wrong as a combo. But I guess the person who made the meme, should he (c’mon, man, it’s punching humor, so it’s a he) be able to write complete sentences (or maybe not in 2022), he is primed for men’s adventure fiction, where rudimentary understanding of anatomy, guns and light arms, physics, and martial arts is not only tolerated, but rewarded!

For the first time in a while, I encountered the adjective bourgeois. Five times.

Once in one book introduction (The Second Treatise of Government by John Locke). The introduction was actually a Marxist/socialist critique of the treatise, not just a straight summary, as proven (that it was a critique instead of an introduction; the arguments in the critique remain unproven) by the magic word of the early 1990s.

Later, I was reading an old (2014) issue of First Things that had been tucked away in the drawer where magazines go to await my estate sale (or perhaps the infrequent magazine purges), and I encountered the word in one article once and another article three times.

Wow, that word brings me back. Back when I was at the university, this was the young student’s arch criticism of everything normal.

I guess it got supplanted by racist and misogynist (which I was called even then) because too many students attending private universities either recognized things they had and liked as members of the bourgeoisie, or they recognized that they wanted the things the bourgeoisie had to offer.

With immutable attributes like race and gender (well, mostly immutable barring major medical procedures), the new words lack the target that many would aspire to (again, barring some like Ward Churchill, Rachel Dolezal, and Shaun King). Which might explain why bourgeois has fallen out of favor.

Also, in this day and age, circumstances and the elites seem to be pressuring the bourgeoisie into collapse, so maybe bourgeois is a word not really due a resurgence.

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.

ABC Books had another book signing, which certainly must make it the destination for authors looking to promote their work in Springfield. As my beautiful wife convinced me that I need not buy Wendy’s or Starbucks gift cards for the Republic High School teacher thank-you cards and that ABC Books is not that far from Republic (no farther than it is from Nogglestead), so I had gift cards to buy as well as a signed book.

I did not get that much, but I was just there two weeks ago.

I got:

• Official Targuek Poomse Series. This looks to be a set of forms which are required for becoming a black belt in the U.S. West Coast Taekwondo Association. Our school did forms for a couple of cycles a couple years ago, but the students did not take to it, so we dropped it. Which is just as well–I was one of the students who did not grok it. To get good at forms, you have to practice them a lot.
• Volume III of The Westminster Tanner-McMurrin Lectures on the History and Philosophy of Religion. This has two lectures by Jaroslav Pelikan, “Jesus, Not Caesar: The Religious World View of Thomas Garrigue Masaryk” and “The Spiritual Foundations of Czech and Slovak Culture”. As you know, gentle reader, I read some individual lecture books from time to time to feel smart. They’re short and they’re heady, but not generally more than you would find in the New Oxford Review or First Things.
• The Grieving Light: Finding the Light in your Darkness of Grief by the signing author Randi Knight. It’s a thin volume which I expect I will compare to Stephanie Dalla Rosa’s Love’s Legacy when I read it between children’s books, men’s adventure books, and science fiction short stories this summer.

As I brought my oldest along, bribed with the promise of lunch, he, too, sought some books. He has become interested in politics and sought copies of Common Sense and Second Treatise on Government by Locke, but these are hard to come by in used book stores. So he bought a collection of tales called The Shore Ghosts and Other Stories of New Jersey by Larona Homer and Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky. A couple of weeks ago, I bought the lad a copy of Confess, Fletch because he liked the film enough to re-watch it, but he has not picked up that book. But he wants to try a Russian novel? We will see how far he gets. I mean, I need a real running start at the thick ones. Given my recent reading discipline, you should not expect to see The Brothers Karamazov reviewed here any time soon.

Katie Berry of Housewife How-Tos posted this meme on Facebook:

Which may be true, but one profession is not represented on the meme: Produce clerk.

I frustrate my beautiful wife because I can always open produce bags on the first try because I have lots of experience.

As I have probably mentioned, working as a produce clerk in college is also where I learned to juggle using the bruised fruits, from apples to cantaloupes, that we’d culled from the shelf and were planning to sell in marked down packages. I’ve noticed that produce departments don’t tend to have the little cello-wrapped trays with marked down produce any more. Perhaps I’m shopping in higher-end stores than I worked in. Come to think of it, that is likely the case.

On LinkedIn, I posted:

So what’s the oldest email you can open up right now?

Something not necessarily in your inbox, but rather in a folder somewhere in your email clients but not in an archive or backup somewhere?

My oldest is apparently December 16, 2002, a response to a query pitching a play to a theatre company in St. Louis.

Which is weird, because I am pretty sure I had the email account before the turn of the century; although an Older label appears, I can’t click it to see emails from before then.

Related: When did you send your first email on the Internet?

It was probably a query for The Courtship of Barbara Holt, and the theatre (in Florissant, not St. Louis proper) was ultimately rejected, of course.

But it got me to thinking of the email addresses I’ve had over the years.

My first “Internet” email address would have been an AOL account. I just tried to log into it, and it fails with an error on AOL’s part, so no digging up emails from the early 1990s. Although I guess I had a Prodigy account in 1990, so perhaps that would count. But I don’t remember sending a lot of emails to that account. And when I was a kid with a modem, the Color Graphics 64 Bulletin Board Systems (BBSes) offered messages between users of the board, but not really the Internet–although I think a plug-in came along later that helped with that. Boards hosted on IBM compatible computers, such as WWIV (World War IV), had the ability to read newsgroups and send email over the Internet, but I don’t know if I ever did. So my first email on the Internet could have come as early as the 1980s, but I can really only pinpoint sending emails in the mid-to-late 1990s, including the ones starting in 1997 I sent to the woman whom I would marry. Via the aforementioned AOL account.

Somewhere around 1998 or 1999, I got a Hotmail account, and it’s in that account that one finds the 2002 email. I am pretty sure I got a Hotmail account because it was more sophisticated than an AOL account at the time. But it has been useful over the decades as an email address to use when ordering things and whatnot where marketing emails are going to come.

When I moved into my first apartment, I switched to a real Internet Service Provider, in this case the one run by the local newspaper, and I had that email address for a couple of years, including the first years in the house at Casinoport. But when I formed my consulting company in 2004, I bought the domain name, set up a Web site, and set up email for the company, and it has been my primary email address since. The archives only go back to summer of 2007, though, as a Thunderbird update or computer change cut off the emails from before.

I dunno what got me to thinking about this last night. But it’s kind of funny. Emails have been a fixture for most of my adult life, and if you count the BBS messages, it goes back to most of my life indeed. And judging from comments on the LinkedIn, some other adults have emails going back decades. Our kids will likely not have that continuity; they have email addresses for school, but their peer communication goes through Discord, WhatsApp, and other ephemeral conduits.

So much informal, and formal, communication is getting lost. One wonders if this will be referred to as a Dark Ages sometime in the future.

James Lileks recently went into a Macy’s, looking for a belt, and….

I could go to Target, but it’s jammed up and jelly tight on Saturdays. (Note: jelly is not, in fact, tight. Ever.) Macy’s, then. I hadn’t been there since they reconfigured the place. The new look is more “open,” which gives you a full appreciation of the paucity of the merchandise. Perhaps they’re just being more selective. Yes. that’s the idea. Go for that Apple Store look; we know how well it worked out for JCPenney.

I knew where the belts were – Men’s Furnishings, I believe it’s called – so I went there. No belts. A lot of athletic gear. In fact half the men’s department now appears to be sweatpants.

You know, gentle reader, I like to dress like an adult if not entirely the whole Cary Grant. I have often bought George apparel at Walmart, but it doesn’t tend to last very long before the points of the collars show wear from machine washing or the waistline of trousers gets a little banged up. I’ve had pretty good luck with clothing I’ve bought at Target or Kohl’s, but I’ve not tended to go to those department stores frequently. I recently (recently being the last two years) have bought shirts off of Amazon, but they often arrive with loose stitching and popped threads right out of the bag–and even if they don’t, they have the longevity of the George apparel with the price of the upscale department store.

So I went into a Target a couple of weeks ago to pick up some things, and I thought I’d look for shirts whilst I was there. The store is being remodeled (but at least they weren’t jacking up and moving aisles whilst I was shopping). After I dodged closed sections to get to the men’s wear section in the back, I wandered through the diminished stock several times, and the store had no dress clothing whatsoever. No slacks. No button-up (or button-down) shirts. Polo shirts and hoodies and athletic gear, but nothing for an adult to wear.

I have not been in since, and I have not tried Kohl’s to see what its stock is like lately, but I, too, have to wonder if it’s going to be specialty shops and online orders in the future.

When I was reading this week’s Houston Herald, I kind of glanced at the “Years Ago” corner of the paper.

All of them have it: A page or part of a page where they reprint pictures or summaries of articles from the newspaper in years past so that the old people, aside from me, the old people who’ve lived there their whole lives can revisit some things they might remember. They might see their friends, or their family friends, in the pictures and stories kind of like they want to see their friends and family friends in print in the modern paper for good things, but not for the meth busts. The “remember when” features tend to look more toward the positives unless something really notorious is recounted.

So I kind of glance at these things because I’m a carpetbagger in these parts, which is often different from the parts from which I take the newspaper, such as the Houston Herald. I have driven through Houston twice: once out and back on a trip to De Soto, Missouri, from Nogglestead. That trip yielded me subscriptions to the Houston Herald and the paper I sought ought to begin my subscription adventure, The Licking News.

So I only glanced at the family portrait at first. Then I looked again.

It’s not actually a family photo; it is a picture of winners of the electrical co-operative’s essay winners.

Which probably means that they’re in high school.

The photo is undated, but I’m guessing early 1960s.

I’ve mentioned before how kids from the 1960s and earlier looked older (see They Don’t Look So Young, But…. and Scandinavian Teens Circa 1965).

I don’t think I ever hit that middle-aged look, the responsible father–in old family photos we have with my beautiful wife and young boys, I still looked young. Kind of how I still think I look young in the mirror, but in the photos–I certainly look older than I think that high school kid above looks. Which is a bit of a change for me.

In a story Etsy sellers strike back: Creators fed up with fee hike, we have this bit of business ignorance:

During the month of November 2020, McGrath made $44, however, Etsy took $28 from that profit. She stated she sees no logical reason for the company to be taking so much of a seller’s profit.

It’s not a profit until you’ve accounted for all the costs of the business, such as transaction fees by the marketplace.

As you might know, gentle reader, around the turn of the century, I was a very active Ebay seller. I would spend Saturday mornings at estate sales and garage sales picking up books, old games, computer things, electronics, and music to list throughout the week.

However, I left the service because fees were going up, Ebay bought PayPal and wanted you to accept payment through it (with additional fees), and basically it went from being a seller’s market to a buyer’s market.

I’ve been kicking around the idea of getting a booth at the antique mall to put some of the various bric-a-brac that I’ve gathered and some of the crafts I’ve done and put in boxes in the garage. It seems more straightforward than messing around with the online services again. But I’m not entirely convinced that I would make enough in sales every month to warrant it–or to keep it going long term–and, to be honest, if I did sell a bunch of things, whether I could find/make enough to keep it going.

I guess I will find out sometime if I get around to actually doing it.