Category: Life

DAFT DESIGNS Changing Rooms brought us floating shelves and rag-rolled walls – how many of these dodgy 90’s trends are YOU guilty of?

The Nineties and Noughties series had questionable taste and encouraged a nation of DIY decorators, sometimes with disastrous results.

Siobhan O’Connor asks how many of these popular Changing Rooms hacks you can remember, and which are still lurking in your home?

Sadly, I score highly on the quiz, mostly for the homes in Casinport and Nogglestead. Our home in Old Trees was completely remodeled in 2005-2006 as it was flipped to us, so its knockdown paint job won’t be eligible for nostalgic listicles for another ten years.

So how many of the listed designs have I suffered through?

• MDF (Medium-Density Fibreboard). C’mon, man, I still have two Sauder printer stands as an end table and an entertainment center, so I’m way into this. Also, most of Nogglestead’s bookshelves are fibreboard of various states of breakdown. I’m pleased to say our expensive furnishings are not; they’re cheap but costly laminates, we’re discovering as the laminate is getting nicked.
• Boudoir Bedrooms. Well, this includes four poster beds, and one of the costly laminates is a bed that you can configure as a canopy, four poster, or sleigh bed. We’ve generally had it in the canopy configuration, but only rarely with actual fabric.
• Mirrored Wardrobes. The photo has mirrored doors on the closets, which were a feature on our home in Casinoport.
• Terracota.
• Stenciling/Tape.
• Rag-rolling/Sponging. I ragrolled my home office right before installing my expensive MDF desk in it.
• Shaggy Sheets.
• Floating Shelves.

I almost gave myself another bold for the stenciling and tape as Nogglestead has several wallpaper borders which are kind of in line with the thought, but they’re not exactly the same thing, so I used that loophole.

Still, I’m at 50%, with 37.5% occurring here at Nogglestead. I might have mentioned we haven’t upgraded it a whole lot. I suspect we’re going to be those trapped in amber time capsule people whose homes look like they haven’t changed in 40 years. And we won’t have been the ones to have changed it to its last state in the first place.

The Daily Dammit, Gannett! has a story about the Kansas City Renaissance Festival which runs from Labor Day weekend through the Columbus Day.

I have attended the festival thrice: Once with friends, a year or two later with the beautiful girlfriend who would become my beautiful wife, and once about seven years ago with my boys and my brother and my nephew who lived in the area at the time.

I’ve hoped to head back up with them, but we’ve been busy, and I’d had a real job for four autumns, which kept us away.

Now, of course, it becomes clear that the festival overlaps marching band season–I just got a calendar that fills Saturdays until Halloween. My boys will be in marching band likely until the end of their high school careers. Which means I might have attended my last renaissance festival with my boys already.

Sobering thought.

As you might remember, gentle reader, I don’t care much for modern art, including the work of Picasso (see What Makes a Picasso a Picasso? and forget that I once sponsored a theatre company after seeing Picasso at Lapin Agile). But one time, I bid on a piece of original art from Picasso, mostly to say I have a Picasso if I won it at age 23.

When I was a boy, I went to the Milwaukee Art Museum a bunch. My grandmother managed the gift shop, so she got us past the velvet rope for free, which is about the price a family from the projects can afford. So every year or two, we went down to the lakefront and walk around the exhibits for a couple of hours. To be honest, we enjoyed some of the more modern, what, sculpture installations? One thing on the wall had holes in it, and if you held your hand over holes/sensors in it, it would make different sounds. Another exhibit had a room with lights and mirrors in it on all walls, the ceiling, and the floor. You could put special slipcovers on your feet and go into it, and it would look like you were floating in an infinity of lights or stars in every direction. I guess they have Rodin’s The Kiss–of which we have a small casting to this day.

When I returned to Milwaukee for college, I went down to the art museum a couple of times a year. I was always, always amazed at the other students at the university just up the road who claimed they wanted to get out of Milwaukee because it lacked culture even though they’d never been to the art museum within walking distance of the campus or the multiple theatre company performing arts complex within walking distance of the campus. So I took a couple of people there for their first time.

After I graduated, I came back to Milwaukee about once a month, driving an old Nissan Pulsar. Okay, only eight years old at the time, but, c’mon, man, how many Nissan Pulsars did you ever see? In 1994, they were dead and buried but for this one which only sometimes left me stranded on the side of the road on the way to or from Milwaukee. But sometimes I got to Milwaukee with time to kill because my hosts were working, so I would go to the art museum.

One such time, the art museum was holding a silent auction of small pieces of art and ephemera as a fundraiser. I looked at the auctions posted on various walls with the bid sheets, and I didn’t see anything I liked for its own sake–or at least anything I could afford. But I found an original Picasso drawing, smaller than a sheet of notebook paper and in pencil, some little scribbling, to bid on. I wrote my name and phone number and $150 (I think) on it, my heart pounding in my chest and my throat a bit dry. In those days, my bid was, what, almost two weeks’ take home pay in a time where my student loans were coming due? If I won, I would have a Picasso, man, but I’m not sure how I’d fuel my car to get me to work for a couple of weeks, much less to pay my student loans atop that for a couple of months. My Picasso might land me in prison for nonpayment.

Well, gentle reader, I was spared that conflict. Someone must have outbid me by the time I was back in this soft Southern land, or perhaps my shaky, nervous writing was illegible. I never got that hundred dollar Picasso also-ran.

In the years since, I have adorned my home in $10 Renoir prints from garage sales, $100 prints from my artistic aunt in Wisconsin (who’s taking care of my grandmother these days), and I’ve bought various original art pieces of a couple hundred dollars for my beautiful wife.

But I wrote a note to myself to mention to my grandmother in my next letter to tell her this story; I’m not sure where I’d graft it into the epic of our summer shenanigans at Nogglestead. But I thought it worth mentioning here, amongst the blatantly Rule 5y posts.

On this day in 2014, I said on Facebook:

I won’t know it the last time I hear “Do it again, Daddy!” But I’ll sure miss it.

Welp, I have passed that marker somewhere along the road. Where am I in the “Cat’s in the Cradle” road map?

Don’t I know it. I’ve always known about the timeline, but that has only made me a slightly better parent.

At least they don’t understand the music of Everclear.

And let’s not forget what happened the penultimate time I played catch with my boys. You’ve played catch with the football with them after you healed? Yes, of course. But with a football inflated to Tom Brady’s exacting standards, not something you could bowl with. Which was much more comfortable.

Seen probably on the Facebook wall of my belly-dancing, yoga spouting cousin:

The Aztecs built their capital in the middle of a swamp because of a religious vision someone had, and then proceeded to, as Hugh Thomas put it:

What was necessary, in the meantime, was a suitable appeasement of Tlaloc, the rain god. He had to be given food, precious objects, people, chlidren (small, like the little Tlalocs who were believed to wait on the chief god of that name), in a series of festivals. The children had to cry, in order to indicate to the god exactly what was required; and to achieve this, their nails were often drawn out and thrown into the lake monster Ahuitzol, who usually lived from the nails of drowned persons. (Thomas 332)

So should you also appease the rain god this way?

Eh, it’s already more words on a picture than the kids these days can manage to read. Expecting them to understand complete context, where context does not mean merely slogans I learned in school, is probably a bit too much.

How is it even possible that I am getting even more curmudgeonly as I get older? I thought I already pegged that gauge.

You know how passcodes and PINs and two-factor authentication codes have gone from four digits to six or seven?

What if it’s because The Algorithms foresee an event coming, such as a solar storm, but something more obscure and that will only interrupt their Core Services for a short time, so they’re busy training humans to remember lists of numbers so that The Algorithms will be able to download their entire source code into the massed short term memories of millions of people, and then have us type the digits back into a compiler so The Algorithms can be reborn.

I have the ideas for stories. It’s the execution I’m lacking in these days.

The Sun posts this question:

Can you guess who this 80s pop hunk is out shopping in Italy?

I don’t have to guess. That’s Simon Le Bon of Duran Duran.

We heard a Duran Duran song on the radio within the last week, and I mentioned two things: One, that the band did not actually have anyone named Duran in it, and that I really wanted to look like Simon Le Bon in the 1980s–and I followed that up with my common comment that the older we get, the closer I get to looking like Simon Le Bon.

Which is not exactly true. I’m looking more like Jason Statham (I tell myself) than Simon Le Bon these days. But as we both get older, we both look the same: Older.

So I had a little time to kill a couple of weekends ago when my youngest was playing miniature golf with his church youth group. The Fun Acre miniature golf course is, really, about an acre wedged between a strip mall and residential homes on a side street off of Campbell Avenue. It’s been there forever; the aged proprietor still mans the small shed as he did when Steve Pokin of the Daily Dammit, Gannett profiled him in 2014.

Whilst the youngster played a round with which he would ultimately be disappointed, Daddy went to the antique mall that abuts the looking mostly for cheap DVDs (LPs are now heading past $10 each, so buying them at antique malls is generally out).

I also stopped up the road at Nameless City, which has a couple of roleplaying games left but also still has a couple of tables of dollar comics. As you might remember, gentle reader, I used to hit up the Comic Cave (and sometimes got a discount for being a good customer). I liked the dollar comic boxes because they were organized; you could easily find runs of comics, even kinda new comics, for a buck each (which ultimately led to the store’s downfall–the proprietor would “subscribe” to a comic on your behalf, where he would pay the annual subscription and you promised to come buy the issues every month, and so many of you did not live up to your part of the bargain that I got your unclaimed comics for a buck each, and the proprietor could not afford to keep the shop open).

So when I am pawing through the jumbled boxes at Nameless City or Vintage Stock, I’m generally looking for interesting looking stories with low numbers, generally non-Marvel and non-DC, or I’m looking for issues in series I’ve kinda collected over time. Which leads to a lot of one-off, incomplete stories to read, but sometimes I can patch together a small run if I paw through enough boxes.

At any rate, to make a short story long, this trip I found something interesting: A 1967 Sad Sack Laugh Special from Harvey Comics:

As I mentioned, I got a large number of hand-me-down Harvey Comics from the 1960s from my aunts/great aunts. Old issues of Hot Stuff, Casper the Friendly Ghost, Wendy the Good Witch, and, likely, Sad Sack.

Basically, Sad Sack is similar to Beetle Bailey but appeared eight years before the more popular slacker/soldier. This particular volume collects multi panel newspaper comics into a single flat-spined comic book. You know, the archetype of the reluctant soldier skating by probably proved more popular during wartime, after the war with the returning GIs, and through the draft era. This particular volume, though, comes from the late 1960s, where presumably GIs in Vietnam could have read it, although I expect the schtick and motif were getting long in tooth by then. But, hey, Gomer Pyle, USMC was still on the air, so what do I know.

Sad Sack had a long history–although the newspaper cartoon only ran for 12 years, Harvey kept pumping out comics for 37 years, and Sad Sack appeared on radio in the 40s and in a movie in 1957. Mostly forgotten today except for some of us who inherited a stack of comic books almost 40 years ago.

I was pleased to find this book for a buck for the nostalgia it provided–it even smelled like those old comics, a bit musty which you don’t get from newer comics on slicker paper (and probably won’t in 40 years). The humor within is what it was, which is a bit amusing in spots particularly if you served, but probably not something that would reach today’s audiences.

But for the secondhand nostalgia.

I am sure that I have mentioned from time to time that I generally begin Christmas shopping when spending gift cards that I received, or that I start picking things up very early in the year when I find something that so and so would like. It gets to Christmas time, and I’m not sure what I’ve gotten everyone, as I bought it so early in the year that I don’t remember, either.

But this year has been…. Different. We have gone through the birthday season, and I did not overwhelm my children or my beautiful wife with the gifts. The shelf in the closet has been bare. Normally, I have to wrap early gifts in ambiguous paper as I’m not sure whether a particular gift will be for a birthday, anniversary, Mother’s Day, or Christmas. But I’ve had to scramble at the last minute with a bit of “It’ll do” acceptance of a bit of guesswork.

So, what happened to me?

Was it that in the last two years, I have had to unwrap gifts for people who died after I bought their Christmas gifts? Including something I bought for my aunt who died two years ago and later gave to my sister-in-law, who died last year?

Was it general ennui based on the Recurrent Unpleasantness? Disappointment in recognizing that the extended family I have longed for was not reciprocating my attempts to connect?

Perhaps, gentle reader, it was all of the above, but I recognized something else acutely recently: I am not currently exposed to a lot of gift ideas all the time.

As I was finishing up my Wall Street Journals, I got to the weekend features section and read a book review on Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck, and I ordered a copy for my mother-in-law for Christmas.

You know, I used to see reviews for books, movies, and music all the time in National Review and First Things, not to mention Instapundit as well as in the stacks of Wall Street Journals that I accrued and eventually browsed. My subscriptions to the periodicals have lapsed, and Instapundit mostly runs promos for advertisers on Helen’s Page now, so I am just not continuously seeing snippets of interesting books and whatnot. Which, to be honest, made up the majority of the gifts I laid up, or gift schticks items I laid up when I came across them.

My boys and my beautiful wife, whocomprise most of my gift giving these days, do not really have gift schticks. They get pajamas every Christmas and novelty socks from time to time, but the boys are growing to young men now, so showering them with piles of Legos doesn’t work easily. And I can’t give everyone novelty socks every gift opportunity.

I dunno; maybe I need to re-subscribe to First Things; my subscription lapsed because I ignored all of the renewal notifications because most magazines send them bi-monthly. Or maybe I need to find some more general interest Web sites with book reports to get ideas. Because, honestly, I get Friar’s thriller book reports and a lot of information on military science fiction from various Instapundit-and Hoyt-related sources, but not the sorts of things I get for my wife and children.

Ah, well, we have some months until Christmas. Perhaps something will come to me.

I mentioned last November that I canceled my subscription to the Wall Street Journal after less than a year because I was not pleased with its coverage of the election and its aftermath.

I’ve also said before that I have tended to let the Wall Street Journal pile up on those occasions when I’ve subscribed to it; last November, I recognized:

I am pretty sure that it will stack up unless I make a concerted effort to clear it out, and I might as I try to get some sort of record player running this holiday season which might involve putting a component system in the parlor.

I did, in fact, get a working turntable in the parlor last year, but I had several inches of Wall Street Journals piled up.

They’ve yellowed over the year as I piled others in my local papers on top and then popped the most recent papers off of the top. Since I’m taking, what, nine local papers per week (one of which comes twice a week), I’ve gotten into the habit of sitting in the parlor and reading papers. Which has included the stack of Wall Street Journals.

So yesterday afternoon, I finished off a couple of issues from September and October 2020. Again, I quote myself last November:

And, as is the norm, the papers started piling up unread until I would (or will) months later tear through them weeks at a time, only glancing at the headlines and shaking my head, thinking We had it so good then; I know how all of this turns out.

The headlines almost a year ago? COVID, COVID, COVID, election, Trump is bad! and so on.

Not too much different than what I see on the Internet and the front page of the Daily Dammit, Gannett here in town. Only they’re more shrill now.

And to quote myself again:

But you know what I will miss? The feature writing in the Personal Journal and Friday/weekend sections along with the book, television, movie, and music reviews. The same things I rather miss out of the National Review.

Also true. But it’s not worth $25 a month or more.

Will that be the last time I subscribe to the Wall Street Journal? Time will tell, I reckon, but this time it’s not so much that it’s expensive and piles up, but also that its news coverage is not very straight any more. So probably.

In years past, I have planted a bed of melons with cantaloupes, watermelons, and pumpkins outside the fenced in beds of Nogglestead (one of which lacks actual fence material at this point, although the posts are still there). I had some success, harvesting a couple cantaloupes, a couple small watermelons, and a pumpkin or two (which is not a large yield for years’ worth of plantings, especially since I planted plants one or more years).

This year, we have put the melons in one of the smaller beds (the one with the fencing) along with a zucchini plant and some corn.

Which means the growing fruit nestle together like this.

The youngest, the most eager tender of the garden and the assistant waterer (to my beautiful wife’s diligent work), keeps asking me if it’s time to harvest. Not yet, I say. We will wait one more day. Until something takes a bite out of them, at which point they’ll be spoiled, if history can be any guide.

James Lileks reflects on living at Jasperwood:

Ordinary day, with some exciting developments I will relate in exactly 32 days. It’s Daughter’s birthday on Friday – she’s 21 now. Considering embarassing her on Twitter about it.

Odd how it seems like a long time ago, and also not. Why? Perhaps because we never moved. Jasperwood has provided an endless series of unremarkable constants. The sound of the gate latch, the way the drawer in the hallway makes a squeak when pulled out or shoved in. The same dining room for all the big family events. The same bedroom, which she left with things that represent her now, and also make me recall an array of plastic My Little Ponys on the windowsill. It’s all there, 21 years, just behind the most recent tick of the clock.

That means his daughter has basically grown up with a childhood home. I wonder how that affects one’s psyche.

I mean, in my first twenty-one years, I went from apartment->housing projects->living with friends for a couple months before decamping to Missouri after my parents’ divorce->living in my aunt’s basement->living in the trailer park->living in down the gravel road->living in my father’s basement for college. To finish out the streak, as an adult I moved back into the house down the gravel road after college->living in my other aunt’s empty house with my mother->getting a place of my own->rental house after marriage->the house in Casinoport for seven years->the house in Old Trees for three years->Nogglestead.

My beautiful wife has a similar history as her father got a job in government service when he was younger, so promotions took them around Michigan and later down to Missouri.

I wonder if our children have a greater sense of security than I ever developed, what, with an intact family and a single home that they remember (although they see pictures of themselves in Old Trees, they don’t remember it).

We haven’t even changed it a whole lot–the carpeting, old as it was, is still what we inherited, and we have not rearranged the furniture much at all because large furniture pieces and bookshelves kind of dictate the layout. So not only is it the same house, it mostly looks the same as it has for most of their youth.

At any rate, that’s something I muse on, and since Musings is right in the title of this blog (and has been for seventeen and a half years, longer than my children have been alive but not by much), I thought I’d share it.

Lileks’ Bleat today also hints at big changes coming on September 1; given the wistful, reflective, and nostalgic/melancholic tone, I’m betting he’s moving to Arizona or wherever. What do the oddsmakers in Las Vegas say?

I mentioned the other day to my beautiful wife as we left the Walmart that I always parked in the same place so I never had to look for my car. She said that was quite like me, which I assume means efficient and a life hack for the Internet..

I mean, it’s not exactly the same place every time, but it’s close, especially for the places I go all the time. At Walmart in Republic, I park in the last row of cars with the nose pointed to the right, the very edge of the parking lot. At Walmart in Springfield, it’s one row to the left of the south doors right across from the Lot Cop portable camera cart. At Pricecutter, it’s one row to the right of the west doors on the right. At Sam’s Club, it’s the first west-driving row.

Unless I cannot, I point the nose into the right so I can see out of the rear window better when I am backing out of the space, which eliminates half of the lot generally when parking in place I don’t go normally.

C’mon, man, what do “normal” people do? Just park anywhere and have to look for their cars every time?

I watched this film with my boys because my youngest son has in the last couple of years decided that he will not smile for photographs. If you take a photo of him, he generally puts on a duckface pout, and I am wont to say, “Magnum! Dear God, it’s beautiful!” Which, as you know, conflates a couple of quotes from this film. So I wanted to share that source of that thing Dad always says with my boys.

This 2001 film is a full-length feature from a character Stiller had done of a dim-witted male model. In it, Zoolander, the title character played by Ben Stiller, has gotten a little stale being atop the modeling industry for so long. The Top Male Model three years in a row, he loses his chance at a fourth when a fresh face–Hansel, played by Owen Wilson, takes the modeling world by storm, leading Zoolander to question who he is and flirt with the idea of retirement. At the same time, an international fashion/clothing cartel wants to assassinate the new prime minister of Malaysia whose labor law reforms are killing their profits. The cartel has historically used brainwashed male models for hits, so they select Zoolander for the job and easily brainwash him. Meanwhile, an intrepid reporter played by Christina Taylor (Mrs. Ben Stiller) is investigating the cartel and becomes a target for their prime henchperson (Milla Jovavich, pronounced…. well, I don’t know).

So amusing enough; one of the Ben Stillerverse comedies, those collection of films with Ben Stiller, one or more Wilsons, Christine Taylor, and their friends that filled the middle 90s to the early part of the twenty-first century. Maybe they’re still ongoing but on a streaming service, so they’re invisible to me. I was explaining to the boys that there were two axis of comedy in this period, the Sandlerverse and the Stillerverse, movies that shared a lot of the same actors but rarely crossed over. I guess that’s not true–I tried to think of when they did, such as The Wedding Singer which had Christina Taylor in a supporting role, but I guess Ben Stiller was in Happy Gilmore, so it would be pointless to retcon some rivalry.

So, a good enough film–I’ve watched it several times, including seeing it in the theater and buying the DVD at full price at some time in the past. I often quote several lines from it, most often, “I feel like I’m taking crazy pills!” Which means that these films with the boys is like a real life version of the The Source of That Thing Daddy Always Says.

I guess they made a sequel in 2016 or thereabouts, fifteen years after the original. As with the similarly retread Anchorman 2, I will not seek this out as I think the lightning was not captured a second time. Didn’t you watch Hot Tub Time Machine 2, Brian J.? you ask. Shut up, Ted, I answer.

Also, in researching this post, I cannot help note that the Wikipedia entry retcons contemporary political labels to assign political affiliation to the good guys and bad guys:

In the film, top people in the fashion industry, Jacobim Mugatu (Will Ferrell) and Derek’s agent Maury Ballstein (Jerry Stiller), are hired by other executives to assassinate the Prime Minister of Malaysia (Woodrow Asai), who will pass progressive laws that would harm their businesses.

In 2001, progressive was not yet the contemporary term for good guys/left. And anyone who pays attention knows the fashion moguls are not Republicans. However, I fear modern audiences might have the mental acuity of a male model, subject to TikTokian bite-sized information brainwashing. But that’s just me.