I’ve never been a fan of “Cloud”-based entertainment, whether literature or movies, because it’s always seemed too easy for the “Cloud” to remove stuff that you’ve paid for — Kindle books, Amazon movies, etc. — at their own discretion / whim. I don’t care that my well-filled bookcases take up a great deal of space in my apartment, or that they’d be a pain in the ass to move should I decide to live elsewhere; I bought them, they’re my property forever, and nobody can take them from me. Ditto movies. I have a large number of DVDs of the movies I love and can watch over and over again — not too many modern ones, because today’s movies largely suck — and like my bookcases, my DVDs are eternal. (I have a brand-new-in-the-box multi-format DVD player sitting in a closet in case the existing Philips gives up the ghost at some time in the future, and ALL my computers come with DVD players, just to be on the safe side.)
As you know, gentle reader, I still have videocassettes to watch, so I even have backup videocassette players.
Well, Brian J., did you do something radical in the fitness department this weekend? I mean, last weekend, you did a duathlon that kicked your butt.
Gentle reader, this week and weekend, I took it easy. It’s the first weekend in a month not dictated by a duathlon of any sort, so I took it easy. Next weekend, I have a 5K (that takes me past the Monte Crist subdivision). So perhaps I will take a run some morning or afternoon this week to remember I can do this sort of thing.
To race well, Laughlin tells me, it hurts. The body feels discomfort when demands are made on it mile after mile.
“I have a lot of determination,” she says. “I love competition. My goal every race is to see how much suffering I can endure and still maintain joy. Because if there isn’t any joy in it, I don’t want to do it.
“I think there is a lot of suffering in life — a lot of tough times. Can we find a way to maintain joy in the same space as suffering? If we can do that, life rocks.”
Yeah, I kind of think that’s why I run even though I hate it. At the end of last week’s duathlon, I was not that keen on riding a bike, either.
So what did you do this weekend, Brian J.? you might ask.
Well, I slept poorly, again, both nights. Which means I slept later than I would prefer on Saturday, and I got on the lawn mower at about ten o’clock, and….
Let’s face it, if I don’t have a new certificate or t-shirt at the end of the weekend, I feel as though I’ve wasted my time. So I mowed the lawn for four hours and I went to the grocery and gas station, and then it was dinner time.
Sunday, we went to church for the first time in months, but instead of an 8:00 service, we went at 10:45. So before, I puttered and did light chores, and when we got home a little after 12, I ate, snoozed a bit, did a bit of yard work, wrote some blog posts, and then it was time for dinner and bed time again.
Perhaps I need to treat or think of every day as I do a vacation day: We have one great adventure or destination for the day, and the rest of it I have permission to relax, read, and whatnot. If that’s the case, I’m marking down two days of yard work as the pinnacle of the achievement and activity.
Meh, that probably won’t work long term unless I go about accomplishing actual things.
Which links to a recent bit in the New York Times entitled The Swinging, Jamming Musical Charms of 1940s Soundies that describes Soundies, which were little 16mm reels of music video that played in vending machines. You pay a dime, you see a song.
It was funny to see this on Sunday, as my beautiful wife put a Soundies reel on my desk on Saturday.
As I mentioned, I became the world’s biggest collector of Tommy Reynolds records because my cousin (once removed, by marriage) sang for them in the Soundies era.
I bought this reel and took it to the local transfer shop in December or early January; they told me it would be a couple weeks, but stuff happened. Last week, they called because it was still lying around their shop, although they hadn’t called me to come get it before. So when my wife was out in that part of Springfield on Friday, she picked it up and put the DVD and source reel on my desk on Saturday.
I haven’t looked at my DVD yet, as the computer doesn’t have a native DVD player app in it (what? Is this 1998?). But you don’t have to borrow my DVD; you can find this song on YouTube:
But watching it on YouTube and owning the almost eighty-year-old movie reel yourself are two different things. I, unlike most of Internet-connected humanity in the twenty-first century, am of the latter sort.
Now, to find a Mills Panoram machine to play it on….
On Friday night, the oldest boy stayed at a friend’s house, so the younger, my movie-watching buddy, and I watched a film. He’s always more patient with films; the older boy fidgets, wanders in and out of the room, and offers his commentary track atop what’s happening–but often needing to ask what’s going on because he’s been in and out. The youngest, though, will watch the movie, so it’s a treat to watch a movie with him.
I selected George of the Jungle.
I don’t know when I picked this up at a garage sale; likely almost a decade ago when I was planning on watching movies with my children. Frequent movie nights have not materialized at Nogglestead; instead (no pun intended), we watch a movie every month or so. The last was Tron the end of last month. So I guess they’re picking up as we’ve also watched Ben-Hur and Clash of the Titans since the spring.
At any rate, I have a passel of kids’ movies that we never watched, and the boys are aging out of them. The youngest rankled at the trailers ahead of this film because they’re for Disney cartoons.
And not just any cartoons; this film was on a videocassette released in late 1997, so they’re trailers for Disney cartoons that Disney was only making available on video for a limited time. Do you remember that they did that in the late 90s? You could only get Peter Pan in stores during a 45-day window? They did that to really goose the sales. I’m not sure if it worked, but 23 years ago was a very long time.
When this movie came to video, I had been dating the woman who would become my wife for a matter of months. I surely wasn’t thinking about watching children’s movies from the era with my children in the world that is 2020.
As far as the movie itself goes, it has Brendan Fraser doing the Brendan Fraser thing. You know, like he did in Bio-Dome and Bedazzledwhich I just mentioned seeing in the theatres. I have a certain appreciation if not affection to the types of characters he played in those days. I don’t know how much I actually identify with them, but I had fun watching them. Although it looks as though he has been making movies this whole time, but nothing I’ve seen since, oh, The Mummy Returns.
George of the Jungle was originally a short-lived cartoon from 1967 that made mock of Tarzan (which had a network television series running concurrently with the George of the Jungle cartoon). I knew of the Tarzan television series because it was in syndication in St. Louis in the 1980s. But the George of the Jungle property has punched above its weight, as the theme song was covered by “Weird Al” Yankovic in the 1980s:
George of the Jungle also had a direct-to-video sequel and was rebooted as a Canadian cartoon in 2006 with a second season in 2016. So it’s due for a reboot soon especially if Disney owns its rights or can get a hold of them.
I piped the video directly to my television from the VCR instead of going through out twenty-year-old receiver, and the video was very clear indeed. The receiver has been having some trouble handling sound from the video sources, so I’ve taken to routing them to the television directly. It will be a shame to replace this receiver, as it has old timey connections that can handle our VCRs and old computers. I fear replacing it as I don’t want to lose that connectivity. But I fear I shall have too, soon. But that’s unrelated to what I was talking about. Watching what my boys would call an “old” movie on an “old” media format, and musing on things other than the content of that movie.
The other evening driving out of Nogglestead, we frightened a couple of turkey vultures from their bounty at the end of the driveway. I assumed the hawks had gotten and dropped another bird, but when I went to the mailbox on foot, I saw what they had been picking at.
I wondered if it might be the remains of the famous Ozarkian giant carnivorous, venomous centipedes, but it’s actually a snake skeleton. Given that it’s picked pretty clean, they probably dragged an old skeleton out of the ditch to pick at.
But when presented with a snake skeleton, of course I had to take a picture and put a wry comment on Facebook. But a snake skeleton yields more quips than a single Facebook post could provide.
Think of this as a multiple choice quiz. Try to guess the quip I actually went with on Facebook and post your own in the comments.
Can anyone identify this kind of snake? It kind of looks like a diamond-backed water snake, but I’m not sure.
Does anyone need a snake skeleton? I have an extra.
When snake is served at Nogglestead, not a scrap goes to waste!
For proper snake broth, remember to simmer the snake carcass for two hours or more.
Strangely enough, there’s enough boy in me yet that I have the urge to do something with the skeleton other than toss it in the ditch on the other side of the road. Instead, I will probably ignore it until it gets crushed by passing cars or disappears–possibly due to the intervention of actual boys present in the household. I’ll let you know if I find it in their rooms in a couple years when cleaning them after they move out.
(Not that cousin but rather her sister, who often posts enlightened Buddhist- and Hindu-flavored posts but lately has given over to celebration of the current troubles and their themes.)
At any rate, I am no biblical scholar, but, come on. Let’s look at some whities in the Bible:
I would say Timothy, but he was of a Greek father but Jewish mother, but in the new old one-drop accounting, this means he was not white. Also note that in this ethnography, people of Jewish origin are no longer white, but I think in some accountings, they are still white or not POC. I get so very confused.
Various and sundry Romans and roman soldiers.
I am not a Biblical historian, but I can certainly think of a number of instances I can come up with off the top of my head where the Bible might have included a white people put this twee claim (from a church no less!) into doubt.
I don’t know why this rankled me so much. Perhaps because this kind of “truth” is passed around by people who probably don’t believe in the Christian faith to rebuke those who do and disagree with the meme-passers on current thought.
You could argue that most of the “white” people in the Bible are bad guys, I suppose, but it’s pointedly from the time of Paul onward designed to be a religion for Gentiles who are sinners, so perhaps if you went down that road of argument, you wouldn’t really have a point.
Why do I argue with memes? Don’t I have anything better to do than get outraged on the Internet? To be honest, it’s hard to be on the Internet now and not get incensed. Even on Facebook. Even on LinkedIn, which used to be a professional Web site but which is also currently filled with political content. Eesh, pardon me whilst I close my browser again.
On weekends in May, I did a number of virtual duathlons through the local multisport club that I belong to.
I’ve also posted some glib things on social media in an attempt to win some Ozark Multisport Club swag.
That day, I did a 1 mile run, a 11.64 mile bike ride, and a 3.1 mile run (a 5k).
I mentioned that the four routes out of Nogglestead are:
Hilly.
Very hilly.
Alpine.
Autobahn. Also, hilly.
Which is true: If you leave Nogglestead to the south, you can cut over to the smaller state highway on a farm road, and it’s only hilly. If you continue south to where the farm road intersects with the state highway, it’s very hilly. And kind of like an M.C. Escher drawing. You go up a hill and around a corner and up another hill and up another hill. To be honest, I’m not sure where you actually go downhill in that route. The third route is north out of Nogglestead; in addition to starting out with a couple of rolling hills, they’re followed by a couple of really large hills with a small valley in between them. The valley is more like a gulch. And if you go west out of Nogglestead, you get the farm road leading to Republic, which is narrow, curvy, high-speed, and hilly.
I have mapped out a number of routes, landmarks, and distances for runs. If I run to the farm road to the south and back, it’s a mile; if I run south to the church and back, it’s a very hilly two miles; if I run to the pipeline pumping station in Battlefield and back, it’s two miles and less hilly; if I run to pizza joint in Battlefields and back and once around the yard, it’s a 5k (3.1 miles); if I run north but turn at the road in the bottom of the gulch and around, it’s an alpine 3.1 miles and a very bad idea; once around the block across the street is 4.2 miles; if I run south to the state highway and take it through Battlefield to the gas station and come back around and down the private lane just south of here and out to my driveway, it’s 6.2 miles (a 10k).
The bike routes are a little dicier. I can use any of these loops to add mileage, but I really don’t have any good routes to the farm roads and state highways out west. The alpine route plus a high-speed, little shoulder state highway or the aforementioned hilly autobahn route. So I’ve ridden into town for my routes. Which includes some torturous hills you don’t notice in a car.
At any rate, I did the last of the OMC duathlons the last weekend in May:
I don’t think I take multisport competitions as seriously as some people do, but apparently, I take them too seriously.
So that last weekend of May, I did a 5k on the hilly route, a ride into town and back, and the alpine 5k route listed above (a run/walk situation instead of a true run).
Both of those efforts were about the length of a sprint triathlon’s bike and run component, and the last was the run equivalent of a 10k. So I felt prepared for this past weekend’s activity: An Olympic-length duathlon.
Some of the people I work with put a new discussion group on the in-house collaboration software about running and biking and multisports. Apparently, a number of my co-workers are into it, too. A couple weeks back, a number of them did a 17 mile virtual duathlon. This time, though, it was a “Double Down” with about double the distance. A 6.2 mile run and a 24.8 mile bike ride. No sweat. I was ready, ainna?
Yeah, maybe not.
I didn’t sleep well on Friday night, partially concerned about the event. I didn’t eat well before hand, probably. I did hydrate pretty well, which is often a mistake I make, going a little dry because I don’t want to have to urinate during the race, and I cannot drink while running or biking–if I am breathing hard and swallow air while drinking, it’s a bad, bad thing.
My route out was the very hilly route, and it killed my mindset very early. I got right past the church, about a mile into the run, and I was already walking. And I walked a lot of it. Still, I ended up with a run/walk of about 1:15, which isn’t bad. Then I got on the bike, and I did the same route. It was less bad on the bike, but my route took me well into town, and then through a subdivision to add mileage, and then back. To make up the mileage, I went back down and around the very hilly route again to make my mileage. And I had to walk my bike up a hill.
I almost finished; it turns out, I did 24.73 miles instead of 24.8. I thought I had to do 24.2–I confused the tenths place with the 6.2.
I was one of the first three finishers of the event, and I was in last place for a long time. Watching the results come in on social media, I was an hour or more behind everyone on the bike. Because I went through town, because I’m on a crossover bike instead of a racing/road bike (and this gap will be exposed more with longer distances).
So I did not enjoy the event, and I did not do well. It took almost four hours out of Saturday–but I got an early start, so when I passed the pizza place, I could not stop in to place an order for delivery because it wasn’t even open yet.
Often, a triathlon will knock me out for the day, but this event really killed my energy and mindset for the whole weekend. I didn’t get anything else done but a bunch of reading.
So perhaps I should look back on the weekend and reflect fondly on all the reading I got to do. But reading does not feel like an accomplishment; reading is more akin to recreation and reward.
Ain’t that a pip? I completed an event that a lot of people cannot, but I’m not proud of it. As I’ve said before, I suffer from a mindset that says If I can do it/have done it, it’s easy; if I haven’t done it, it’s impossible.
At any rate with the completion of this event, I might be done with the road running for a while. Except I have a 5k coming up in a couple of weeks, so perhaps I and the boys should run a little before then. And my April triathlon is going to be rescheduled to some point in the near future along with four weeks of the training class ahead of it. And the Tiger Tri is coming up in August, and the boys and I don’t want to miss it.
As Shaman’s Harvest says, “I’m a glutton for punishment; yeah, it makes me feel alive.”
Although they probably didn’t include a semicolon in the actual lyrics.
I might have mentioned that the news lately has me on edge, and some personal changes on the horizon have me a little on edge, and, face it, I’m still not getting the exercise I need.
But one thing calms me: Cleaning my pool. It gives me a chance to get outside, and I can watch the clouds in the sky and the ripples in the water while listening to the sounds of brushing the precipitant chlorine crystals. I think I would do it every day if I could. The first part of the job is backwashing and rinsing the filter, and I empty the skimmer baskets while doing so.
Yesterday, the first one I emptied had the usual leaves, bugs, and a dead frog in it. I dumped it out of the fence and saw something I couldn’t immediately identify. It was kind of round, patterned, and a little bigger than a fifty cent piece (which might not be helpful to you damn kids, but it’s not very big). I studied it, wondering if it was one of the boys’ pool toys that I’d have to go out and retrieve. As I studied it, it rocked a bit and turned over. It was a baby turtle, and it beat tiny feet away from the pool area.
Then, at about five thirty, a doe whitetail dear brought her fawn across our back yard, and the fawn was smaller than a dog. I managed to get my wife to the back windows in time to see it running off into the neighbor’s pasture, which provided her with a bright spot for her day as well.
You know, I’m not an especially cuddly person, but a couple glimpses of the wildlife as well as the time outside serves me better than long days in front of the computer. Unfortunately, they don’t pay as well.
The current troubles, unlike the previous unpleasantness, made me do something that I probably haven’t done in twenty years.
I closed my Web browser yesterday.
I wish I could tell you I was more productive, but mostly I just wrote another letter to my grandmother who apparently delights in them, so I’m writing her every couple of weeks.
Which is more pleasant than either my Facebook feed or the Web currently.
It’s a common question in the St. Louis area, and if you asked Bob Behnken, astronaut aboard the International Space Station, he would answer Pattonville.
That’s in Maryland Heights, about 1 mile walking from our home in Casinoport and where our children would have gone if we hadn’t moved to Old Trees and then Nogglestead. Of course, we moved about a month and a half before we had our first child, so they never lived in the school district. But still, he’s from the old neighborhood. Well, one of the many.
Well, not really. But my youngest was bored and came into my office whilst I was trying to work (and not just write twee things for this blog, gentle reader), so I told him to shred the papers that my beautiful wife had brought in for document destruction.
“Do you have to pay sometimes?” he asked.
The shredder has a little slot where you can put your old credit cards in for destruction, but I don’t tend to use it as I prefer to grind my old credit cards exceedingly fine.
But the lad had only seen that sort of iconography on places where you use a credit card to pay for things.
And in this world of interconnectedness of things and pay-as-you-go models, perhaps it would not be at all surprising to have to pay extra to use something you’ve already bought. As a matter of fact, in this third decade of the millennium, that’s the normal for technology.
Saw this meme on Facebook last week with undoubtedly adulation in all the wrong places:
Neil Ty, Science Guy, says:
I dream of a world where the truth is what shapes people’s politics, rather than politics shaping what people think is true.
Okay, they’re all in caps, but you know some people hear The Truth capitalized. Which leads to some interesting speculation here: What is the truth? After all, science is not the answer to science; it is a process for testing hypotheses against reality via experiment to see what proves repeatable. Science has no answer to the ultimate truth; it only produces our best current approximation. I mean, real science does that. Social science does whatever it wants, however it wants.
Some classes of people, not scientists, often have an idea of Truth which comes through revelation or introspection or some other means of receiving that Truth, and yet I don’t think people who dig Neil Ty or post memes about f-n loving science really want people shaping their polity based on those beliefs, ainna?
And politics are not about truth; they’re about how to live together amongst people of differing opinions and worldviews without slaughtering them. It’s supposed to be about compromise and reaching consensus (someone said, and I forget who said it recently). It works best with a limited, localized government with more space to live and let live.
Because, to be honest, those whose politics dictate what they think is true have had their sway recently, and with decidedly poor results, ainna?
Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery, scattered with people Saturday, remained a symbol of freedom and sacrifice for many laying flags on Memorial Weekend.
Traditionally, the cemetery is full of Boy Scouts before Memorial Day, as hundreds of Scouts from across the area plant a flag at each headstone, leaving a sea of red, white and blue waving in the wind. This year is different.
“Normally, I’m with the Scouts,” said Jerry Grunzinger of Kirkwood. Grunzinger serves as a scoutmaster, leading troops in activities including the Memorial Day Good Turn. Due to COVID-19, the event was canceled this year. Families are encouraged to lay flags on their own, instead.
Grunzinger said he stopped by to pay respects to his wife’s grandfather, Leo Joseph Unruh, who served in the Navy during WWII.
“I get a little emotional,” Grunzinger said through a wave of tears. “They served the country so, whether they lived a long life or they died during the war, they made the greatest sacrifice.
You know, I have mentioned that I did not travel to St. Louis for a couple years before last autumn, and on the first couple of trips to visit my aunt, I stayed in the St. Charles area–which meant that I did not travel to the south side of St. Louis (the metropolitan area, not the city itself) to visit my mother’s grave in Jefferson Barracks. So when I went “to see Janet Evra,” I had some time in the afternoon before the show, and I cruised down 270. I stopped at the Walmart right off the highway which was my home Walmart when I lived in South County, twenty-some years ago to get some flowers. It was a weird experience along with an acute fear that I would not remember where her grave was.
I rather worked myself up over it, that I had not been a dutiful son in leaving her alone for so long, but in the end, I found it despite how the cemetery has filled in in the passed decade and how the stones are all the same. I know the trash can to park by along with the bin of used flower vases and the right direction to go, and I can usually find her within a minute or two.
I never have this trouble with my father, as he is buried in a small church cemetery in Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin, far away from his sons now. But I still visit when I’m in town and leave a duck hunting hat. Strangely enough, up until this last autumn, I had been to my father’s grave twice between visits to my mother’s nearer grave.
And, strangely enough, although I get a touch choked up at my mother’s grave, I just get somber at my father’s grave. Whether that’s the time difference–my father has been dead more than half my life, and he was only an occasional figure for another quarter of it, and I saw my mother at least once a week until she got sick and then daily thereafter. Or I’m just a mama’s boy.
At any rate, neither of them died in the service or of a service-related injury, so perhaps it’s not the post for Memorial Day unless there’s a larger lesson in my fear that I might not remember. But probably not.
Facebook has decided this t-shirt would be good for me:
You know, I’ve been seeing a lot of this sort of thing on my Facebook feed of late. Not just strident demand that I conform to questionable social-media-spread virology, but I get plenty of that. Continue reading “Compare and Contrast”→
Somewhere in the last couple of years, I’ve altered my habit; instead of putting the basket on its base on the bench after emptying the laundry to fold, I’ve started setting it on the floor on its side instead.
So now, to play, Isis jumps onto the bed amidst the laundry to fold and pretends like she wants to be petted. Or that she can be petted. But once the hand comes out, she rolls on her back and it’s on.
Well, I have a black belt in a martial art. I should have no problem with this game. I even established some ground rules.
The main point of the game is for me to try to touch her, and she tries to prevent it.
I am pretty good at this game, although I use the two-handed “Look at this hand–whilst the other pokes you!” method which does not earn me double points.
Not that I get too much of a high score going. That kitty is fast!
So I got an email with an interesting subject line:
Cooking with the Cougars? I haven’t gotten many emails like that lately. So I opened it:
And I thought, Wait a minute, they’re not old enough to be cougars.
Then I looked at the return address: President, Alumni Association .
Somehow, because I’m a supporter of WSIE, I’ve been added to the Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville, home of the Cougars, Alumni Association mailing list.
Oh, well.
I have to say whoever crafted that subject line probably saw a pretty good email-opening response.
(Aside: Does mentioning that I support a public radio station count as showing off all your wealth? Sorry, I am going to spend a lot of time in the next few weeks ruminanting on this–ruminanting, of course, means chewing on the same weed of thought over and over again even though you’re not getting much nourishment from it.)
So a cousin of mine shared a Facebook video called Which ZOOM Caller Are You?, one of which is “The one in front of a bookcase”:
To be honest, I’m actually more of the kind that will avoid including video on these calls. In the past, when the team I was on actually had video calls, I had a slow Internet connection, so I didn’t want to tax it. Now, if possible, I try to avoid it because, if it’s a group call, you end up with tiny boxes which kind of subverts the point. And if I have to, I’ll do a video call, but I end up spending the whole time looking at the camera and not the screen, so it does me no good at all as I cannot but glance at the person with whom I’m speaking.
Which is not to say I don’t look at the video on the Zoom calls. When my current employer had a company-wide meeting a couple weeks back, I completely spent the call scrolling through the hundreds of people looking to see who would have more books in the background than I would (if I shared video). A couple people had a bookshelf or two, and my immediate manager might have been close with a wall of books.
I commented on my cousin’s post with a photo I did for a bit on another blog about framing your video so the bookshelves show but the bladed weapons do not:
To which her sister responded:
Quit showing off all your wealth Brian! Not all of us can have the huge riches that you keep throwing in our faces. All I have is a plain wall
And I was all like, wuh?
Because, gentle reader, I worry that I’ll have forgotten where I come from or that people, generally people I knew when I was younger, will think so. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I won’t let you, gentle reader, forget that I come from down a gravel road via the trailer park and city housing projects. I’m like Everclear without a recording contract and, face it, any musical talent whatsoever.
When I was younger, I was sometimes told that I was arrogant and a bit of a show-off, as I was always ready to tell you I got good grades or was really smart.
I like to think I’ve gotten better about it, especially in person, where I won’t even tell you I’m any good at anything at all.
But here on this blog, and probably on Facebook, I am prone to putting a good face on things. I mention I get a lot of books and some number of CDs. I’ve mentioned some periods where I’ve spent dollars a day on trivial things. I have a gym membership and a martial arts school membership. My boys go to private school. I drive a Lexus (albeit a twelve-year-old Lexus we bought with 100,000 miles on it). So, yeah, we’re doing okay, and I somehow have bumbled into a career that isn’t as satisfying as being a best-selling novelist but that leaves me not exhausted and physically not beaten down at the end of the day.
So am I flaunting wealth? I don’t know. I don’t think so. I hope not. But I would have to leave that for you, gentle reader, and for my cousin to assess. I’m not out here trying to be as artificial as an Instagram model but with a dad bod and flabbier prose. I’m just tapping out bits of my story, mostly for myself in a decade when I’m looking back at 2020. (I hope you like some of it.)
Maybe my cousin was just referring to my posting lots of pictures of books, which is what she meant by wealth. Maybe I’m reading too much into it. But I got a blog post out of it, anyway.
So I’m hoping to write an article that uses Charles Sander Peirce’s “The Fixation of Belief” as a bit of a starting point. So, Sunday, I faced a dilemma: Read it online or spend an hour scouring the Nogglestead library’s to-read shelves for a copy of The Essential Peirce that my beautiful wife gave me for Christmas nearly twenty years ago.
So, of course, I opted to go through my library.
I kind of remembered having seen it on the leftmost shelves in my office, so I started there.
I hoped it would not be on the second set of shelves, which broke eight years ago (!) and that I have not replaced. Instead, another of the shelves has broken to irrepairable levels, and I’ve stacked books on books so that the lowest remaining shelf (not the bottom) is actually held up by the books on the bottom shelf. The stacks on that shelf are the height of two missing shelves, which is to say about three feet. So I saved that bit for last.
I only had one martial arts weapon fall on me as I searched, a practice (wooden) kama. Here’s what it looks like:
I provide this image as a public service so you won’t go performing an Internet search on “kama” only to discover that the kama also means sexual desire and longing in Hindu and Buddhist literature which means a lot of art of scantily clad Indian women. That link goes to Wikipedia, but the entry also is probably not safe for work. Assuming any of you are at work during the current unpleasantness. The research for this part of the post cost me another hour, by the way.
If only I was looking for William James’ work on Pragmatism, I would have found it in no time at all as it’s atop the books stacked on the floor.
If I were looking for The Will to Believe, which I read twenty-ish years ago (and probably six or eight years after it was assigned to me in college), I would have found that pretty easily, too. When we first moved into Nogglestead, I organized the shelves with the books I’ve read pretty well. In the decade since, the organization has fallen off as I’ve moved bookshelves around and later had to jam books wherever they fit. But traces of the organization would probably have made it easy to find. As an experiment, after writing the preceding, I went to my to-read shelves and found it in about four minutes. It was next to Nature Noir which I read in 2006 and just mentioned a week and a half ago comparing it to something else I ordered from ABC Books. On the other side: We Can’t Go Home Again by Clarence E. Walker, the very first book I reported on for this blog in 2003.
If only I were looking for Kant, Sartre, Kierkegaard, Jung, or a Neibuhr, I would have found something much earlier as I have multiple volumes by those hoity-toityish authors. You know, it might be handy to group them together, but I don’t have a lot of room to work with here, and that’s a project for another day or days.
I have a lot of books on how to do software testing, which I could probably read if I want to get into that line of work. I think I have actually read three in total (maybe just two: How to Break Software and How to Break Software Security). I have certainly started and abandoned any number of books on testing. Which are still on the to-read shelves to this day.
I probably own more David Morrell books than anyone else besides David Morrell himself. I read First Blood and First Blood Part II in 2008, and I liked them well enough to pick up other books of his as I’ve come across them. I haven’t read any since then, however.
I found in my office a book called More Book Lust; I was surprised and delighted to find I owned the original, which I found in the book shelves in the hallway. I did not think to group them, although I did put Foxfire 3 between Foxfire 2 and Foxfire 4. I spotted a couple other things that I should have grouped: The Heechee novels that my beautiful wife bought me for Christmas after I read Gateway in 2013 have scattered amongst the book shelves in my office; there’s a Ross Thomas paperback floating around in the hallway where two or three are together in my office; and Alice in Wonderland in the Children’s Classics edition rests in the hallway whilst Black Beauty, Hans Brinker, Heidi, and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea in the same series are on the bottom shelf of the collapsed bookshelves in the office (and are dutifully holding up their brethren).
I have two copies of Lady Chatterley’s Lover: One in an omnibus of Lawrence’s work and one in a paperback that features an essay about the censorship of the novel. So, of course, as they are not the exact same edition, I cannot get rid of one. Although when I read one, I suppose I can move the other to the read shelves so long as I read that essay. If I remember. I might well forget an read the book again, although that’s a greater risk with genre fiction.
I did find, though, that I have made enough gaps in selecting and rearranging books that I was able to get all of my recent purchases from ABC Books onto the shelves. The History of Civilization series and the books atop it, as well as the ones I inherited from my aunt recently, have no home on the shelves yet.
And I did go through the stacks on the collapsed shelf, but I did not find the book I was looking for. So I started again, and as I stood books that had been stacked on the out-facing rank of books onto their edges, I found it.
I had remembered it with a blue cover, which is probably why my eyes skipped over the tan spine the first time. But it was approximately where I thought it was.
And it was an hour later that I found it.
All the time I had allocated in the day for reading “The Fixation of Belief” and starting the thing I wanted to write were lost to the search for the book and this blog post. So I’ll have to take that up another day.
But I’ve rediscovered a lot of cool books that I want to read, so I should spend a little more time actually reading than sitting at the computer here, refreshing my favorite blogs and Facebook and researching kama.
