To be able to say "Noggle," you first must be able to say "Nah."
I prepared breakfast this morning at Nogglestead:
You know, some years ago I became slightly notoriouser for putting silly things in my kids’ lunches for school.
They soon got wise to me and started checking their lunches before getting into the car in the morning. Then they evolved to preferring hot lunch. Then we all evolved to no school.
So I have to have my food-based fun where I can.
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We’ve only done carry out two times in the time of Corona, and it was only for two orders. The restaurants were a combined 0 of 2 and on their way to a combined 0 of 3.
The first time was a week or so back when my beautiful wife went through the drive-through at Popeye’s and ordered a bucket of chicken, some biscuits, and a chicken sandwich. When she got home, we discovered an emptiness where the sandwich should be. We didn’t go back for a sandwich.
Yesterday, we ordered carryout from Zio’s, a small Italian joint that has kind of gone downhill in the last decade but still has good salad dressing that my wife favors. So she ordered four entries and salads because they had a special going on. They had to make some substitutions based on their stock–a lot of bowtie pasta substitutions. She discovered that they had left a ticket open when taking phone orders and had included someone else’s meal on our ticket, so she cleared that up, or so she thought.
My wife went to pick it up and to see how the apocalypse is coming along, but when she got home, we discovered that they had sent us only two entries, one of which looked incorrect (my sausage, peppers, and penne bow-tie pasta looked like it had white sauce on it instead of marinara). So she called again, and they offered to make it right, so we both went out into the wasteland.
We got there, and a row of cars awaited orders. A single worker came out after a bit, bringing orders, and she brought our corrected order–but as she walked away, we discovered it was still missing an entree. So she brought that out after a couple of minutes, and we could all sit down to dinner an hour later than we’d hoped.
I understand that restaurants are running on skeleton crews right now–the Zio’s employee told me she’d only just been brought back yesterday because of the demand–but their management had better realize that when people are working to support these restaurants through this time of uncertainty. But mistakes in the carry-out might create ill will that will linger longer than the coronavirus. And, unfortunately, on my part, the effect is cumulative. So I’m likely to remember each successive problem as worse than the first.
I feel worst for my poor wife. This rarely happens to me because I always check stuff in the drive through or at the point of pickup. Because I have a couple of picky eaters in my family with special ordering predilections.
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So we’ve been talking about allusion in our poetry studies. I compared allusion to memes which are all the hotness these days, and how that kind of is the same thing: A “new” work refers to an older work with which you are familiar, and you get a zing from knowing what the new work means invoking the old. A little line can include a lot of meaning when you understand the meaning behind those words, the larger experience of having read the work alluded to.
I said it’s kind of like memes because when you see one of the current Smudge the cat memes:
You recognize the context of the meme: The angry woman says something, perhaps incorrectly, and the cat weighs in with the truth, which is sometimes incorrect in its own way. But you get the punchline because you’re already familiar with the joke.
A meme is nothing compared to an allusion, though, in terms of power or the amount of information shared with the reference because poems and other works (such as the Bible, something often alluded to) have a lot more density and meaning to them.
So I explained to my boys, hoping it would stick that alluding to, say, Longfellow poem in a cartoon would have more depth and staying power than a mere mash-up or meme. After all, they’re steeped in the Internet from the last couple of years (since their self-awareness and receiving the school laptops), but they have no idea what I has a bucket means.
At any rate, then I mentioned a little bit about how poems sometimes completely respond to each other. Examples include Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold and the reply The Dover Bitch by Anthony Hecht and The Passionate Shepherd To His Love by Christopher Marlowe and the reply The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd by Sir Walter Raleigh.
Yesterday, we did a poem from Amoretti by Edmund Spenser:
One day I wrote her name upon the strand,
But came the waves and washed it away:
Again I wrote it with a second hand,
But came the tide and made my pains his prey.
Vain man (said she) that dost in vain assay
A mortal thing so to immortalize;
For I myself shall like to this decay,
And eke my name be wiped out likewise.
Not so, quoth I; let baser things devise
To die in dust, but you shall live by fame;
My verse your virtues rare shall eternize,
And in the heavens write your glorious name:
Where, when as Death shall all the world subdue,
Our love shall live, and later life renew.
Not exactly a reply, but more of a humorous update, today we have:
One day I sprayed her name upon the wall,
but then it got erased by blasting sand.
I tried again with neon pink in hand,
but later on they greyed my urban scrawl.
“You dope,” said she, “what are you trying to do?
Each time you paint my name, they’ll cover it,
and take away whatever little wit
you crafted there; your scratching won’t show through.”
“So what?” I said. “When I’ve used up my paint,
and both our names inside their little hearts
are blasted by the city’s cleansing men,
I’ll take some pride in knowing that the taint
of darker paints or sand-scorched building parts
are secret signs of joys that once had been.”
That’s one I wrote; it is, of course, available in Coffee House Memories.
I’m not saying that the Spenser poem influenced me, but I also have another response/update to it entitled “A Carved Tree (I)” which begins:
One day I carved her name into a tree
“A Carved Tree (II)” represents an update to the poem “A Carved Tree (I)” but not a reply or update of the original source.
Clearly, I was into sonnets and sonnet series/cycles when I was younger.
Unfortunately, that means that “O Capitan! My Captain!” will have to wait until tomorrow and not the anniversary of Lincoln’s Death. And I can mention to the boys that it appears in the movie Dead Poets Society. Although with the word Poets right in it, you would have to expect some poetry.
So poems can be a way of talking back to eternity. Memes, though, are merely talking back to today.
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So on Saturday, we had our discussion triggered by the Billy Joel hit “We Didn’t Start The Fire” as we tried to give them a concise history of troubles in Asia in the 20th century as well as boxers Billy Joel followed as a youth.
We got to the lines:
Buddy Holly, Ben-Hur, space monkey, Mafia
Hula hoops, Castro, Edsel is a no-go
And I told them about the film, briefly.
When it came time to watch a movie on Sunday, I found I have a two-videocassette set in its original cellophane wrapper. As it’s a three hour and forty-five minute movie, I guessed rightly that there would never be a time when I wanted to see the film more acutely than then, when we could watch part of it after church and then another part of it after chores.
I’m sure I knew at some point that it was subtitled “A Tale of the Christ”–I think I had a copy of the book pass through my hands in my eBaying days, but as it started with the birth of Jesus, I apologized to my children that it was apparently a Christmas movie instead of an Easter movie. However, the film ends on Good Friday, so it’s a Holy Week movie.
I called it on Facebook “uplifting Easter story of bloody vengeance,” sort of Gladiator but with Jesus, but that’s a little oversimplification, of course. But you can see how the former had its roots in Ben-Hur. Which must have been quite the spectacle in the cinema in 1959.
It was enough to keep my boys pretty rapt in it over both parts. Which is either a testament to the story or the big budget (for 1959) special effects.
One of my boys has a shorter attention span than the other, especially when it comes to old movies. He’s prone to wander in and out and then ask what’s going on instead of, you know, watching. The younger, though, will sit through almost anything with his father, such as National Velvet. Since my beautiful wife only tolerates old movies with me occasionally, I think I’ve found an old movie buddy to watch the to-view shelves at Nogglestead.
Come on, you had to know I have to-view shelves of VHSes and DVDs at Nogglestead that differ from the viewed shelves, ainna?
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Seen in a New York Post video that appears at the top of most of their stories for a while, and that I accidentally played somehow:
I’d say Sign me up except I’ve been a remote QA tester for, what, seventeen years now?
Although I keep my eyes on the job markets, and the listings are a little thinner than they’ve been in the past, and most of the listings are for automated testers and software development engineers in test, which are the magick elixirs to low-cost “quality” to which we’ve all become inured.
Also, note that this home-based worker’s workspace differs from mine in two significant ways: In mine, the pastry and baked goods case is never that full, and the videos reflected therein are heavy metal.
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Yesterday, we did spend about an hour and a half talking about "We Didn’t Start The Fire" and its representation of the middle of the 20th century and how great concerns that lasted for weeks were eventually distilled into a couple of words in a song (my prediction: if someone writes this for the 21st century, they’ll call it the “Wuhan flu” because of how it scans and how it can easily rhyme).
The boys, as is their wont (or won’t) tried to do the bare minimum required, so they often had basic answers for the lyrics that were technically correct but that did not indicate why those places or names were important in the 1950s or 1960s. And only once (Sugar Ray) in three possible did they list a band and not the actual historical figure or event (the other two being Berlin and U2).
But I’m thinking about continuing this with another unit based on “This WIll Be My Year” by Train:
It lists current events from certain years between 1985 and the first decade of the 21st century. It’s not as densely packed, so it should not take them a procrastiluctant two weeks to do it.
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Since I’m busy posting Ziggy cartoons from the book I just read, allow me to meme this one:
I’m reluctant to go out these days not so much because I’m afraid of getting sick, but I’m afraid of getting ticketed for being out without my papers or getting incarcerated when I tell an officer that this is America, Jack.
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Instead of saddling my children with the task of writing a poem to which a movie alludes (such as "Trees"), how about we turn to Ziggy?
The poem is "The Arrow and The Song" by Longfellow:
I shot an arrow into the air,
It fell to earth, I knew not where;
For, so swiftly it flew, the sight
Could not follow it in its flight.I breathed a song into the air,
It fell to earth, I knew not where;
For who has sight so keen and strong,
That it can follow the flight of song?Long, long afterward, in an oak
I found the arrow, still unbroke;
And the song, from beginning to end,
I found again in the heart of a friend.
It’s been a couple of years since I read The Song of Hiawatha. I should read more Longfellow.
And do you remember that distant past of forty years ago when mass-market cartoons would allude to literature for their gags?
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So I’ve planted Elephant Ears by our deck ever since we moved to Nogglestead because my oldest son, as a toddler, liked them when we saw them on our rambles around Old Trees. Traditions come from such humble origins.
At any rate, I bought some of these this year:
Come on, isn’t that redundant? Why would you call them mammoth elephant ears instead of mammoth ears?
Are you afraid people will be disappointed the resulting plants are not wooly?
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British man runs marathon in backyard during lockdown
Not the insanity of running a marathon anywhere, but my exercise has been lacking in the past few weeks. A couple body weight exercises here and there, some basketball with my boys. But not a lot of discipline.
I have, however, discovered that the perimeter of the un-wooded section of Nogglestead is almost exactly one third of a mile.
We’re not doing road running here as my youngest is not ready for running on farm roads with no shoulder and cars passing at fifty or sixty miles an hour. I’m not sure I’m ready for that. Maybe he is ready but I’m holding him back. Regardless, it’s three laps to a mile trail running, so a little over nine laps to a 5k. I’m not ready for that yet–my slow pace on the mile above represents not only me slacking but me recovering from a bout of plantar fasciitis. So I’ll take my eleven minute mile over uneven terrain. And we will see what today brings.
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WIFE: (reading a box label) Cartridges, Small Arms? Are those…
HUSBAND: Yes.
WIFE: Did you buy a lot?
HUSBAND: [laughs in Kim du Toitian] No.
Kim du Toit probably has more rounds in his pockets.
But one of the things at the start of the current unpleasantness was that I was comfortable with our food situation, but I felt we might be a little light on ammunition in the event of a larger breakdown. I mentioned this to my beautiful wife, and she said I should take care of that. So I did.
But do we have enough guns?
[laughs in Kim du Toitian] No.
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Brian J., so how are you spending your new free time during the coronavacation? Are you learning a new skill? Catching up on old projects? Writing that novel whose first pages you most recently pecked out some years ago? Working on your renewed interest in poetry?
Well, of course not. Those would be productive uses of my time.
For the most part, my life has not changed. I’ve been a remote employee for a long time, so my working life has not really changed.
I do have my children home all day, but it’s almost like they’re on spring break or summer vacation. They have some school assignments and Zoom meetings with their classes, but it’s a lot of video game time, arguing that they should have more video game time, and some basketball in the driveway. I have been Coronaschooling them, though, even though they’ve got a handful of assignments from me which mostly serve as an excuse to watch old movies.
The only thing I can really say that I’ve been getting done, really, this coronavacation are:
Although, to be honest, these are little battery operated LED lights, so it’s not like I wired up electricity and switches for them ($11 for two on Amazon). I did, however, not use the big piece of double-stick tape that came with each unit, instead opting for Velcro like I did with the old hand-held games because a two-sided tape solution was going to make for a problem when the batteries died.
Although it gives me another idea for a project: Taking down those old games, replacing the batteries/cleaning out the battery acid/testing those games.
I am not kidding. I tried the iPhone, I tried a digital camera, I tried a lot of things before settling on this one. Man, cats are fast when they’re jumping out of boxes. Also, when trying not to be put back into boxes.
So this is unlike my beautiful wife who is practicing piano, trumpet, and flute and continues with her normal self-improvement programs.
Within the next week or so, I am thinking about organizing the record collection at Nogglestead now that we have received our order of record dividers from Amazon. Perhaps I will paint the fence and deck and will do this in a short amount of time (unlike years past, where the endeavor took weeks or, well, to be honest, I’ve never actually finished painting the fence).
Or I can sit at the keyboard and continue refreshing blogs for the latest news or panicked speculation about the death toll of coronavirus or, more as time passes, the erosion of civil liberties and niceties that the coronareaction has brought.
I will leave it to you, gentle reader, to speculate as to which direction I will go. Or continue.
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Today at Nogglestead, we’re doing some efficient homeschooling. We’re studying both the Spanish language and sex education reviewing the works of Shakira.
Eeesh, just kidding. If I wanted my boys to be educated like that, I’d send them to public school.
Although I own the album She Wolf, I really can’t watch the whole video. I get to a certain point, and I start thinking less about how flexible Shakira is and more about how many adductor muscles I would tear if I tried to do what she’s doing.
You know, a lot of time, I cross-post these gags on Facebook so people I’ve met in real life can see them, but I didn’t post this one as my Facebook friends list contains an awful lot of pastors.
Sorry, Friar, I don’t mean to shock you with some of my more earthy posts.
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So there’s a thing going around Facebook where you are supposed to list ten jobs, nine of which you have done and one of which you have not. Gentle reader, as you know, I have held many, many jobs in my life as I have a degree in English and Philosophy, and that leads one to a vagabond life of chasing an extra quarter an hour until you trip into a career. Or it did for me, anyway.
At any rate, I cannot do a Facebook share-your-personal-information schtick without subverting it, so I posted this:
Let me explain.
These are job declarations in Job Control Language, one of those inscrutable but efficient programming languages that run on Big Iron, that is, mainframes and whatnot.
You know, I’ve never programmed in that language, although there’s probably still plenty of jobs for programming Big Iron around. My rejoinder on Facebook is going to be that it’s the 21st century, man. But the last statement is not a job, it’s the invocation of a job library. Or something.
I know a couple of old programmers who might get the joke. Strangely enough, my sainted mother had to run JCL commands at her last government job, so she might have gotten it. But probably nobody else.
It’s so obscure that it made me laugh out loud, though. Sad!
Also, I want to remind you, gentle reader, why I do not play in these cut-and-paste-games on Facebook:
(Last image courtesy of Glenn Reynolds’ Facebook feed.)
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So on Thursday night, we did not get to the poetry until after 8pm, so I had to pick a short one for the evening.
I selected “Trees” by Joyce (a boy) Kilmer (text here).
I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast;A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;A tree that may in Summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.
Quick, what movie quotes that poem?
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I think I’m going to make my children transcribe and research everything from “We Didn’t Start The Fire”:
When I was in high school, the last couple of days of the Honors Western Civilization class featured a video that covered the 20th century. For extra credit, we could turn in our notes from watching the film. I transcribed the lyrics to this song (because we did not have the Internet, gentle reader, and either had to go by ear or by the tiny liner notes in the cassette case).
Although I did not actually turn these notes in, a friend of mine took them and turned them in. The teacher, of course, had no idea.
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Last night, I was telling my oldest child about how my grandmother used to take my brother and I out of school for a day once a year, and she would take us different places in Milwaukee. She took us to the Milwaukee Art Museum, but she did that more than once and more than on the day with Nana because she managed the gift shop at one point and could get us in without charge. She took us to the Milwaukee Public Museum which had the Streets of Old Milwaukee exhibit. She took us to the downtown library, where you could check out an Atari 2600 and a game cartridge for blocks of an hour (and I foolishly picked Space Invaders, but my brother picked E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, so you can guess that was a long hour for us).
And one time she took us to see the dolphin show at the Public Natatorium. In Milwaukee. Probably in the winter.
We didn’t actually see the dolphin show; as it was a school day and we were the only kids in the audience, the dolphin trainer had us come help with the show. So we held up fish whilst the dolphins leapt and held up the hoops the dolphins darted through. Although after the end of the show, I was feeling comfortable with the dolphins and reached for it, but the dolphin chattered in a way that scared me, so I backed off.
I told my son the story, and then I went to the Internet to back me up on this.
OnMilwaukee has stories about the public natatoria built in Milwaukee in the latter part of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries which include the first indoor pool in the United States. The Old Milwaukee blog has the rest of the story about how entrepreneurs briefly turned the last of the natatoria into a destination restaurant with the dolphin shows.
The dolphin shows. In a restaurant. In Milwaukee.
The past is an unbelievable place.
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Must credit MfBJN!
Fun fact: In the middle 1980s, when I was 13 or 14 years old, I was addicted to the tabloids. Not the National Enquirer which had celebrity news. I spent far too much money on Weekly World News and The Sun which had the crazy, unreal things in them. Like Bat Boy.
I would have better served myself in spending that lawn mowing money on comic books or blowing it on the Rampage machine up the hill at the U-Gas.
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So my mother-in-law gives each member of the family a wall calendar for Christmas, but over the years, I’ve found that although I hanged it on the office wall, I didn’t really write anything on it as appointments go on the family calendar (generally, the one she gives to my beautiful wife) that hangs in the dining room. I often found that I was months behind in turning the pages of it. So last year I reclaimed the wall space (to hang the Hirschfeld print and a Packers-themed wallhanging Christmas gift from my mother-in-law to be named later).
Which is why this year’s calendar is still in its wrap. I have it placed atop the bookshelves near where it would hang were I still to hang it. And as I was performing my biannual (or is it biennial?) office cleaning, I saw it and noted something awry with it.
365 interesting things in a year with 366 days.
Clearly, the cover designer was not paying attention.
I have not cracked it open to see if a day is, in fact, missing its remarkable people, extraordinary events, and/or fascinating facts.
Because clearly this misprint will be a collectors item someday.
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Yesterday, my beautiful wife picked “Fire and Ice” by Robert Frost for our daily poem.
I thought of the perfect film for it:
The Ice Pirates starring Robert Urich between his stints as Gavilan and Spenser.
Yes, it was on Showtime in the middle 1980s. Yes, I did watch it over and over again whilst confined to quarters, which in the middle 1980s was a 12′ by 60′ trailer, and I wasn’t supposed to go outside when my mother wasn’t home during the work week.
Although I have it on DVD, I am not sure when I will watch it with the boys. Mostly because I don’t want to have to explain what a Space Herpe is. Or, worse, not explain it and have to explain to another parent why my child called her child a Space Herpe.
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