Category: Life

Well, not in the gangsta sense, but on our recent trip to Wisconsin, I brought along four audiocassette comedy albums to break up the audio courses that we listened to for much of the ride.

Back when I was young, right after college, I drove back to Milwaukee from St. Louis probably once a month, and I had two audiocassettes I took with me: What Am I Doing in New Jersey? by George Carlin and No Cure for Cancer by Denis Leary. I didn’t take the latter with us I thought my beautiful wife would balk at its profanity and its nonchalance at the prospect of cancer (she being a, what, almost thirty year survivor? How is that possible as she is not yet thirty years old?).

So I brought these:

They include:

• What Am I Doing In New Jersey? by George Carlin; as I said, this 1988 recording accompanied me many, many times on those trips to Wisconsin. In 1994(ish), the recording was only six years old, so it probably did not seem as dated then as it does now. It heavily savages the Reagan administration, which would have been winding down when it was recorded, and its political takes are often out-of-date (although abortion jokes could fit right in 34 years later, as they’re on the proper side of the political aisle). My wife had noise canceling headphones that she put on early in the tape, which means I could have brought the Denis Leary along.
   
• The 2nd Best of Dave and Carole (not actually titled Some Kids Never Grow Up by Dave Luczak and Carole Caine, two morning show personalities in Milwaukee during my college years. This cassette, which came out during my college years (probably, but find it on the Internet, I dare ya), captures bits from their morning show (proceeds from the sale went to charity). I popped this in once I reclaimed the steering wheel after a snooze and after we hit the Wisconsin line. It’s disparate bits from their morning show, which includes some silly songs based on hits and concerns of the day (“Wake Up Or Eat Sushi” is based on “Wake Up, Little Suzie” and concerns that the Japanese were buying the country). We have recurring bits from “Mr. Angry,” a recurring character with brief bits. We get interviews with comedians stopping in town, including the guy who played Skippy on Family Ties and a probably twelve-year-old Darrell Hammond. So dated, too, but unlike the Carlin, it’s not political humor but more topical generally. So the venomous laugh-at-the-out-group stuff isn’t there, so it’s aged better.

  And, you know what? It’s a good reminder of how the concerns of the day did not bear out–remember how in the 1980s, Americans were worried that the Japanese would eat our economic lunch? Yeah, to what Eastern economic power could that apply today?
   

• Carlin on Campus by George Carlin; I picked this up later, after my college years, and have not listened to it quite as much. Although this is an earlier (1984) recording, I thought it recycled a bunch from the earlier (to me) What Am I Doing In New Jersey?. It’s about 40% the same, but that 40% is not the political bits, so it has aged better, strangely. Although the last piece is a couple of minutes on a bit called “An Incomplete List of Impolite Words” which is Carlin running through slang for parts of the human anatomy and whatnot. I mean, I was listening with the family–although my wife had her headphones on. Oh, well, I guess it made my youngest better prepared for the transition to public school.
   
• You Might Be A Redneck If…. by Jeff Foxworthy. This is the youngest of the comedy cassettes on the trip, as it’s only 29 years old (1993, old man). You know, I have reported on the book in 2006, but I am not sure when I picked up this cassette. Long ago enough that my wife ripped it from the cassette to MP3s back when she went through a phase of digitizing our audio tapes around the turn of the century. The humor on the album is topical, and the “You might be a redneck” thing propelled Foxworthy to fame and fortune in the 1990s. Of course, in that time, I have moved to the country, so I better understand the kernels of truth in the gags. I don’t care where you’re from, that there’s funny. Sorry, that’s the wrong guy. But, still, it has held up better than the Carlin material.

Well, they served their purpose in passing the time. The boys in the back seat, especially the oldest, enjoyed some of the topical Carlin bits, especially about driving–he’s learning to drive, so he relates very viscerally to the humor.

These cassettes will go back in the box, maybe for the last time, although I guess it’s possible we will take another road trip as a family (but our as a family time is winding down). If we do, the Denis Leary cassette is coming along.

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.