Category: Life

Feudal warlord’s European-style rapier was created in Japan:

A European-style rapier owned by a feudal-era warlord was actually forged in Japan, but who commissioned the production and what was used as the model remain unclear, according to a study.

Researchers from the Tokyo National Research Institute for Cultural Properties and the Koka city education board examined the rapier and found that Japanese sword-producing techniques were used in the manufacturing process.

The rapier dates from the first half of the 17th century in the early Edo Period (1603-1867) and was found in the Minakuchi district here.

As a reminder, gentle reader, when I was growing up in the projects, we would admire cars or homes we and our families could ill afford by announcing “That’s my thing.”

This sword reminds me of one I fondled recently at Relics Antique Mall. My beautiful wife gave me gift certificates to the antique mall, and I decided to look at the cabinets in the middle of the mall instead of the booths. And although the TRS-80 for $400 was…. well, it was not tempting–I called the front desk to look at a rapier because I thought the price tag said $70, and I would pay $20 for a nice rapier.

However, the actual price–I had seen a price tag near the rapier but apparently attached to a smaller blade–was $120, and I didn’t want to pay $70 in money. So I guess I’ll have to wait for a gift card of some sort. But it is a nice rapier, albeit a reproduction that looks a little like the Japanese warlord’s rapier.

(Link via Bayou Renaissance Man whose commenters are rightly pointing out how a rapier would quickly poke holes in samurai–when we did sword sparring at my martial arts school back in the day, I, who trained in fencing, ate up the people who learned to fight with katana as though they were slicing through cloth armor.)

Don’t pick a fight with a poet.

Well, actually, I guess picking a fight with poet Brian from 30 years ago would be pretty safe. Poet Brian now weighs almost 200 pounds and has studied martial arts for going on a decade. So picking a fight with current poet Brian is probably only slightly less safe.

What do Aaron Tippen, The Animals, Icehouse, and the Indigo Girls have in common?

I know, they’re all musical acts. But aside from that, I wish I knew. Almost 30 years ago, I listed them on a notepad I carried in my pocket at the time.

I mean, one is country, one is old rock, one is an 80s pop band from Australia, and one are the Indigo Girls. I like music by 3 of the 4.

I have no idea what this meant.

Of course I picked up a local paper or three on vacation in Arkansas. Those, and the highway signs and maps were very confusing.

Alright, alright, alright. To start off, Van Buren is not a county. Van Buren is a city in Carter County, and its newspaper is The Current Local–I subscribe, of course. The hospital in Clinton is Golden Valley Medical Hospital, and Clinton (and the hospital) are on Missouri 13, almost half way to Kansas City, not US 65.

It is, however, still the Ozarks. And the taller mountain part of it.

It was odd to see a lot of familiar names in different places, though.

I know, I know. What are the odds that I will subscribe to the Van Buren County Democrat (and the Stone County [AR] Leader–I already subscribe to the Stone County [MO] Republican and Crane Chronicle)? Pretty good I say as they’re only $50 annually even out of state. Although I will probably not subscribe to the Fairfield Bay News, the volunteer-run newspaper from the resort town where we vacationed as it is only four or five sheets of paper mostly full of coupons for visitors, and it’s $70 annually.

I’m not talking about people who participate in relays, where different people do different legs of a single triathlon. Nor am I talking about people who actually cheat at triathlons. For example, those who know how to swim.

No, I am talking about the official IRONMAN® reading glasses I saw at Walmart.

Come to think of it, most of the serious triathletes I know are getting near 50 years old these days no matter how much the local timing company owner and running enthusiast tries to get kids into the sport, it’s members are aging. Perhaps because one must generally hit a certain level of age and middle class to have time for all the training–which includes, generally, an expensive bike and a membership or daily drop-in fees for a pool that supports lap swimming (or going to a lake, I suppose, for open water swimming). It’s not hockey, by any means, but it is not a sport without cost. Which older people can pay in cash and in time.

I got a postcard from some new retirement company who for some reason thinks I’m thinking of retirement (which I have been, sort of, along the lines of I can never retire as I reach the age where peers who went into government service are retiring with full pension and benefits and are picking up second full-time careers, but I look at the retirement accounts I have gathered from various spots of full-time employment in my career and think, “Man, weren’t these at the same market value fifteen years ago?”)

The slug is “Here’s what financial freedom looks like”.

At a quick glance and given the kind of postcards I tend to get in the mail, I thought it was a picture of AOC pitching financial freedom and retirement products of some sort. And I cannot imagine any sort of freedom in retirement plans the congressional representative from New York would push.

Clearly, if you look longer, it is not AOC. But at a glance….

It’s the sort of thing I would have raised an issue of were I working on the marketing team. But I probably would not have been because 1) It’s direct mail marketing, not part of some technological marketing effort in which I have experience, and 2) most marketing teams these days would not understand how using AOC as a pitch woman would alienate a bunch of Americans, particularly those who plan for personally funded retirement.

Yes, it’s been quieter than normal on MfBJN again as I completed another vacation to Arkansas–the last one was six years ago? What have I been doing all this time? Well, aside from buying books and reading them sometimes? My goodness. Six years is a long time, but it doesn’t seem that long ago.

I digress.

We had originally planned to go to Florida (again), but flights for the whole family ran about $3,000, so we looked for a vacation spot that was a short drive away, and we settled on the Wyndham resort at Fairfield Bay, Arkansas.
Continue reading “Another Arkansas Vacation Recapped” →

My beautiful wife asked me if I wanted to go to so-and-so’s play, which was presented last Friday at the art museum. Sure, I was excited to go. So-and-so was a local theatre teacher who ran a summer drama camp my boys attended, and it’s been a while since I’ve been to a play (it can’t really be five yearsseven years, can it? Well, with the lockdowns and lingering restrictions I guess that’s easy.).

Then I saw on the News-Leader Web site that the art museum was holding a Juneteenth event that night. Oh, I thought, and it turned out to be true. The local NAACP chapter was hosting the “play.” Oh, boy, I thought.

So, yeah. It was not a “play.” Nominally the story of a local slave who won her freedom by suing for it and a later attack on a home where she lived (the history is based on scant court records), instead of a courtroom drama or biographical play with human characters interacting, instead we got a chorus of about 8 actors (and actresses) lightly dramatizing and setting to music the bad things America has done to blacks (well, slaves and their descendants but rolled up into even African and Caribbean immigrants later) and a little side-order of what America has done to women and other racial minorities (glossing over how badly America treated other immigrant groups like the Irish and the Italians). They litanied events in history, lionized some figures who probably could do with less (St. George F., St. Michael B.), glossed over some history (the assassination of Malcolm X is presented in a second or two of stylized violence–left out, of course, it that he was killed by other Nation of Islam members who were black), and otherwise really only existed to convey The Message. Left out of the presentation: George Washington Carver, Langston Hughes, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Susie King Taylor, Booker T. Washington, and many others. Basically, about anyone that could not be used to identify a grievance.

A shame, really, as the story of the slave who won her freedom would make for some compelling theatre as a play. This was not it. It was instead part of a program seeking recognition for the couple-of-incomplete-historical-records figure who only appears a couple of times in a dramatic presentation bearing her name. I am pretty sure they want her to be considered one of the city’s founders. They also seem eager to rename things named after the early residents of the city, including the major thoroughfares and whatnot. It’s been all the rage nationwide for a couple of years now, ainna?

The audience was mostly white people, as you can be expected. Afterwards, the actors had a question-and-answer period/struggle section (one “question” was an elderly former teacher who cried because she did not know the history of the Springfield lynching and wondered how why that single incident was not a centerpiece of education in Springfield). Others were about Springfield history: Were the “founding fathers” of the city who participated in the attack on the house were she lived after freedom punished enough by modern revisionists? Et cetera.

The actors were ill-equipped to handle local history questions, and the basic answer for why the audience members didn’t know was because the audience members lacked intellectual curiosity to learn on their own. Heck’s pecs, I’m only a recent resident of the area, but you know, gentle reader, I have delved into local history. I know that there were more white people hanged for perceived offenses and as a result of the Late Unpleasantness than black people. But, of course, historical perspective, researching for one’s self, and reading actual history harshes The Message.

So I was unimpressed.

I did note that the Art Museum had armed security guards present for the production. I have not been to the art museum recently (sadly) or to other functions at night at the art museum, but I wonder if this was common or if they thought someone might be restive at the production.

At any rate, it got me hungering for drama. It looks like Springfield Contemporary Theatre has lifted its vaccination requirements. What are they running?

Urinetown: The Musical. Well, maybe not.

My brother and his fiancé came over from Poplar Bluff this weekend, and he asked me this question as he stood on my back deck looking at the pasture and the stable in the distance (half of Whitaker’s Folly is again on the market, this time for $725,000 for essentially a really nice stable and no house–it will again be years, likely, until it sells).

Do I sit on the deck and watch the orange light turn to white in the mornings? No.

I’ve been working from home for 18 of the last 19 years, gentle reader, so I don’t really have a morning routine that includes getting ready for work and which might entail the actions before crossing the first threshold of the daily hero’s journey. I get out of bed, I go to the bathroom, I drink the cold cup of coffee I make the night before, I start another cup, and I am at work.

I mean, my morning routine has sometimes included actually making breakfast, getting boys ready for school, or taking the boys to school. The mornings have been busy, not the time to savor the coming day like some actor in a coffee commercial

Not an actor in a coffee commercial, but similar

In my defense, I do sit out on my deck or patio at times at the close of day or as night falls (although not so much this year as mosquitos are terrible this year–I feel like I’m back in Wisconsin or in the North Woods of Michigan this spring and early summer).

But probably not often enough.

I later texted my brother after he’d returned home and asked if he sat on his deck in the mornings.

Sometimes, he replied.

Perhaps that’s the best we can hope for.

I have started getting irritated that inexpensive Rubbermaid and even less expensive garbage cans and laundry baskets are breaking down.

We have had the same garbage cans for years–my beautiful wife has said that the main kitchen garbage can precedes our wedding. It has broken around the top edge from repeating grabbings at the lip to replace the garbage bag or to make it more accessible–let me do the math–several thousand times in five or six different kitchens. Some years ago, when the top first cracked, I wrapped duct tape around the top several times, but the duct tape has broken down by now.

We’ve also got a set of inexpensive laundry baskets where the handles are separate plastic parts from the body of the basket, but the handles are breaking off because apparently we’re grabbing the laundry baskets by the handles instead of the more solid corners of the single-forgedmolded piece of plastic that forms the body (and the corners and lip of the basket are far stronger than the lip of the garbage cans.

I know, they’re basically disposable things designed to last for but a couple of years and not be family heirloom quality (what these days are heirloom quality except seeds?). Now that I am getting to that late youth where I measure “just” and “recently” in decades, I realize just how short of a lifespan these things have.

And as this is a blog, where twee observations lead to profound discoveries, I suppose I could make this a metaphor for the brief lifespan of man, but maybe I will do that later. Like the later where I replace these broken household items.

You know, a current line of Progressive insurance commercials feature a therapist/coach who is trying to help people from becoming their parents, and some of that has resonated with me. As I am entering middle age late youth, I’ve started looking into my behavior to see what repetitive things I do that are only interesting to myself but which I do over and over again.

Like commenting on the price of gas when I pass gas stations.

And it’s not just a matter of muttering about how high gas prices are relative to when I was young.

Oh, no. It is/was commenting on the variance in gas prices from station to station. In the Springfield area, it’s not uncommon to see a thirty-cents-a-gallon or sometimes more swing between gas stations on the east side of Springfield (well, on Glenstone Avenue, which is east of here but I am unsure whether natives consider that east) and stations in southwest Missouri. Republic’s gas prices tend to be a dime or more less than southwest Springfield as well, and sometimes you will see a dime swing between Conoco/Rapid Roberts and Phillips 66/Fast ‘n’ Friendly just blocks away.

So for a while (probably years), I pointed this out to passengers in the car. Of course, nobody else seemed as, what, not incensed, not enthusiastic, maybe interested, as I was in the phenomenon.

So I’ve decided to let it go and to focus on not bringing this up every car ride.

My renewed youth: in progress.

In other news, my oldest, who has been driving for almost a year, has use of a family vehicle, and now has the responsibility of fueling it with the proceeds of his first job, came home and talked about the price difference between the Battlefield gas stations. Well, the Conoco and the White Oak. None of us even consider the Battlefield Eagle Stop, located on the corner of two county highways and with highway prices to match. But he did point out the disparity in gas prices.

Someone is clearly turning into his parents.

My beautiful wife gave me two $25 gift certificates to Relics, so I popped by on Memorial Day to see if I could spend them. After a long weekend that I’d looked forward to that ultimately underwhelmed–I blame the banana bread fiasco–I hoped the trip would cheer me a bit.

Relics gift certificates are problematic. First, they are paper certificates and not gift cards of any sort. They expire six months after issue, and they do not provide change if you do not spend the face amount of it. So you have to spend over the amount or lose it. The combination of these factors has led to certificates expiring in the past as I’ve lost track of the dates or I’ve not wanted to expend a gift certificate of $25 for $11 in value.

Which was the case on Memorial Day.

I hoped to find something over $50 that triggered my fancy. An old computer reasonably priced. Perhaps something for a new or future hobby, like the bass guitar I bought with one set of certificates or the fencing equipment that I did not.

I really only had an hour to wander before I had to leave to make it home for dinner time, and as a result I only got a record and a couple DVDs.

Here’s what I ended up with:

• The Longest Yard, the Adam Sandler remake of the Burt Reynolds film.
• Step Brothers with Will Ferrell and that guy who’s always in Will Ferrell movies (I know, I know, John C. Reilly, and he’s been in movies without Will Ferrell).
• Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow with Angelina Jolie and an eye patch. Also, some other actors and CGI that has probably not aged well.
• The Watch with Ben Stiller, Vince Vaughn, and Jonah Hill. I’d never heard of this film, and I’ve considered myself a bit of a Ben Stiller fan.
• Lost in Translation which I am pretty sure that my wife and I saw in the theater because I consider myself a bit of a Bill Murray fan.
• Bedazzled, the Elizabeth Hurley and Brendan Fraser remake of the Dudley Moore film which I also saw in the theater but without Mike.
• Laine Kazan‘s self-titled album. I’d never heard of her before, but Dean Martin had a blurb on the back, so I gave it a go (and it was a rare one dollar record). Turns out she’s more known as an actress than a singer, that she posed nude in Playboy before I was born, and that she’s still alive. Amazing.

When the hour was up and the total was calculated, it was $11.78.

So I did not spend either of the gift certificates. Which means that I’ll have to go back. Maybe this weekend. And I will turn right at the entrance and work my way westward in the shop as I tend to go left and work eastward, so I see those booths twice for every time I see the eastern half of the store. Perhaps there’s a $52 hobby for me to pick up, or at least $52 worth of clutter for my office or garage.

COVID-19 lockdowns had same effect on memory as serving jail time: study

Last month, the local software developer’s group had a panel discussion on the pros and cons of working from home. One of the very last questions was about how working from home affects your sense of time. I don’t know whether the questioner had seen similar studies, but I have often given this thought over the years and certainly since the developer meetup–I came right home and started drafting a post for the group’s Discord server, but I showed a draft of it to my beautiful wife, but she was not impressed, so I discarded instead of discording.

However, here’s a bit of a related musing:

1. In the short term, your time is integrated.
I found that once I started working from home, my days were no longer bifurcated into the work day spent away at work and the home life, spent at home and everywhere else. I mean, when I would think back on this or that, work time was separate from the rest of my life, and I didn’t correlate last Tuesday at the office with last Tuesday night having dinner with my wife and watching hockey. If I wanted to remember when something happened for work or in real life, I would have to count back using the events at work to remember something from work or using life at home to remember things from home. It was weird.

Once I started working from home, though, all time and experience flowed into a single bucket. My whole timeline was integrated in a way it had not been before. So that was really nice.

2. Over the long term, though, time melts together.

I’ve worked from home for 18 of the last 19 years, and 14 of those have been from my office at Nogglestead. As I have mentioned, we don’t change things up very much at Nogglestead, and my office has not really changed since we moved in–after all, the bookshelves, arcade game, and giant desk with enormous hutch really can only fit together one way (although it should be noted that in our little under 3 years in Old Trees, I did move my office from one place to another as we made room for another baby). I have had numerous clients and a couple of full time jobs, and the look and experience of going to work has been almost exactly the same, day in and day out, for fourteen years. My office with F—-, my office with G—–, and now my office with C—- have all looked the same. A big monitor, a mouse, and a keyboard.

So events of the years have blended together in memory. I rely an awful lot on this blog to help me remember where I was or what I was doing or reading or watching at any given point in time–and if you read my book reports or movie reports, you’ll often find me saying, “I read/watched this related thing …. how many years ago?”

It’s probably exacerbated by the fact that I’m quite a homebody, and my choice of leisure is often sitting at my computer or in the recliner which is very much the same year after year, too.

So, basically, the old saw that “The days are long, but the years are short” becomes “The days are longer, but the years are shorter.”

And now if anyone asks me what it’s like working from home, I’m going to answer that it’s a lot like prison. And the more introverted you are, the worst it is.

Becky, Queen of Carpet; Dirt Cheap; and more: 10 St. Louis TV commercial legends

I can also hear Fred from Dirt Cheap, who did the talking in the commercials, and not just the voice of the bird saying, “Cheap, cheap! Fun, fun!”

Also, to be clear, Brook Dubman is an underwriting sponsor for WSIE, so I actually do hear his voice a couple of times a day even now.

Well, it sounds dramatic, gentle reader, on purpose. To be honest, she was not that old–older than me, but not a crone, and it wasn’t a marketplace, it was an estate sale in Republic last Saturday. And she didn’t mean it as a curse.

As you might know, gentle reader, I have been on a multi-decade quest, well, not so much a quest as something I think of from time to time, to replace the remaining Sauder particle board printer stands used as major pieces of furniture at Nogglestead. These printer stands come right out of the 1990s, with a slit in the top where you can slide the pin-fed paper for your dot matrix printer. Back shortly after the turn of the century, one often found them at garage sales for a couple of dollars, or at least I did, when I was furnishing an apartment and later a house or two. So I picked them up, and they have faithfully served as side tables and entertainment centers for almost a quarter of a century.

So I’ve started stopping at intermittent garage sales and an estate sale or two, maybe one a month, looking for an actual end table. Not just any end table, but an end table that costs about $20.

So I made an outing of it on Saturday, going to breakfast with my oldest son and stopping at a couple of yard sales on the way. On the way back, I told the bored boy (well, almost-man) that the estate sale whose signs we followed deep into a subdivision would be the last one. It was billed as an estate sale, but it was not run by a professional company–it was mostly in a garage. It looked like the man of the house had passed and the mother was downsizing. The garage was full of tools and whatnot, but a sign said “Furniture inside.” So I went inside, and I found what looked to be a serviceable end table, and it was only $20.

As I carried it out, the woman cursed me: “If you’re looking for projects, there’s a cart in the corner. If you like to refinish things.”

I had my hands full, so I could not make a gesture of warding, so I was cursed.

When I got home, I looked at the end table, and it had some dings in it and some of the parts were colored a little differently, so I decided maybe I would refinish it before bringing it in. Instead of bringing it into the house right away, I set it down in the garage.

I had a little time on Saturday afternoon, so I thought I would strip the finish off of it and apply one of my 20-year-old stains (some are younger, only a decade or so old, but I don’t remember which). But my 20-year-old can of stripper was empty, having sublimated sometime in the passed years. So I stopped at Ace Hardware and bought a new can of stripper and a new can of dark stain for $40. Which, if you’re accounting, makes this $20 end table into a $60 end table.

If it makes it out of the garage. I still have a coffee table and two end table set that my brother gave me about 20 years ago, broken down into pieces for easy refinishing (and, more importantly, easy moving from our first rented house to Casinoport to Old Trees to Nogglestead). I also have a little child/doll rocking chair, again broken down for refinishing and it turns out easy moving, that I picked up at a garage sale over 20 years ago. And a desk I bought in 1999 whose metal pulls and accents I removed to refinish, but it got pressed into actual service sometime in those years and has adorned my office, sans pulls and accents, for two decades. Somehow, one of the metal accent pieces has ended up on my workbench in the garage. I’m not sure where the others are, but I presume they’re together.

So the new end table is out in the garage, where projects go to be forgotten or ignored for a long, long time.

Perhaps the woman cursed the end table and not me. But time will tell how soon I get any of this done. After all, playing a couple of turns of an old version of Civilization that turns into a couple hours of an old version of Civilization is far easier, and as we go into summer, cooler.

Whereas I am known for pronouncing wary as war-y because it has the word right in it and because I’ve been known to pronounce vapid and rabid as vay-pid and ray-bid because they come from vapor and rabies,

Let it be known that hereafter, I shall pronounce diplomat as DIPLOMAt because it has the word diploma right in it.

Ah, the things that come to me at 2:30 in the morning instead of sleep.