Category: Life

We were scheduled to stay at Big Cedar Lodge for a week. But after three nights and two days, we decided to leave. Why? Well it wasn’t just one thing but a collection. Continue reading “Brian J.: Vacation Quitter” →

Wilder writes about AI in Robot Brains and Breakouts and burnishes my job prospects:

Computer Science majors now have the highest unemployment rates of recent grads. English poetry majors have better job prospects. I guess “learn to code” can be replaced with “learn to think about an ode”.

I’d feel better about that if writing poetry paid money (that one science fiction poem aside). I actually have a couple pieces appearing next month, but they paid nothing, not even contributors’ copies since it’s an online journal.

But I’ll be helping to train the next generation of LLMs, so I’ve got that going for me, which is nice. If only the poems weren’t about having a death wish.

So whilst the pastor was delivering a sermon about city and country mindsets based on a reading in Revelation, my mind wandered afield instead of hanging on every word, and….

Hey, that’s my godson as the acolyte. We don’t actually see him that often these days–they are a split Lutheran/Baptist family, and although the kids are going through the Lutheran confirmation program, they mostly attend the Baptist church. I hope he’s doing well in his moral instruction as our souls are linked in the accounting, or so I think. Maybe that’s only Catholics or something.

At any rate, he needs some direction from the pastor; he looks like he wants to take the candle lighter back to the rectory instead of putting it in the holder so he can snuff the candles after service. And ever since reading a treatise on knife fighting last month, I’ve been giving thought to what things would be handy in the event of a bad guy with a knife. And the candle holder, assuming it’s solid brass, would be handy.

But how would you wield it? It’s maybe 36″ long, so it’s a bit long for a kama:

And it’s a little short for a halberd:

Maybe like a gaffing hook?

Of course, all of these have a point instead of a snuffing bell.

To be honest, I’d probably flip it and grip it by that and for a better grip and just treat it like a stick since my dojo trains stickfighting a lot. It used to teach gun and knife defense, but the best defense against a knife is distance (run away). Or I would use it like a short halberd, poking with the lighting end and trying to grab at the knife hand with the curve.

It’s all academic, though, since I’m never on the altar, and, fortunately, nobody shows up at service brandishing a knife.

But I am thinking about affecting a jaunty walking stick with a heavy handle.

My cousin posted this on Facebook, an invitation to an event where she teaches yoga:

The philosophy of the Gita is that it’s your duty to go out there and slaughter your friends and family in war.

Man, if the yoga moms are gearing themselves up, something’s coming.

Likely because every time my beautiful wife puts Garlic Powder on the list, I mistakenly grab another jar of Garlic Salt.

The grocery store is not helping.

Garlic Powder is on sale, but both rows in its slot are faced with Garlic Salt. And the one (1) jar of Garlic Powder is slotted where the Garlic Salt goes.

Ah, well. The three jars of Garlic Salt in the spice cabinet at home means it easier to find one when cooking. As I’ve started roasting potatoes with a variety of spices, I’ve picked up some more exotic flavorings (rosemary, dill, marjoram) that I didn’t think we had, but my wife has said we do. Oh, now I find them.

So I’m seeding my spice cabinet with duplicates to make sure I can locate one when I need it.

Now, the next trick is to use them before they lose their flavor.

A couple of years ago, when I was still driving my youngest to youth group (before he could drive himself), I would get to the church to pick him up a little early (as is my wont for all things). This particular summer evening, I had the windows down, and I was listening to the birds and the wind in the trees and just soaking in the ambience of the quiet Sunday evening in the neighborhood. When the youth group came out, one of the young ladies in the cohort said, “What is he doing?” referring to me, just sitting there with my automobile off and no device in my hand.

The New York Post reprints a Fortune piece based on a podcast at the 31 Flavors last night, so I guess it’s pretty serious: The new rawdogging? Workers are ‘barebacking’ on their way to the office — and fellow commuters are furious:

Curiously dubbed “barebacking,” the NSFW-sounding practice involves forgoing all tech and either gazing into space or — even worse — making repeated, awkward eye contact with other passengers like some kind of subterranean serial killer, Fortune reported.

Podcaster Curtis Morton, who coined the term, recently slammed straphangers who engage in the questionable practice in a TikTok video with 100,000 views.

“You’ve commuted enough times,” the Brit, who cohosts the “Behind The Screens” podcast, ranted in the clip. “Why are you sitting there without a phone, without a book, just looking at me, looking at what’s going on? Just do something!”

As I’m able to sit and enjoy my rich interior monologue without reading a book or scrolling through meaningless Internet drivel (like this blog post!) for long periods of time, I’m a bit of an outlier even amongst these Gen-Z-Discoverers. And since that night, I’ve wondered if it indeed makes people uncomfortable.

I guess so, for Gen-Z people who need something to rant about on obscure TikToks anyway.

But when I commuted on mass transit for hours a day, in my college years, I didn’t have devices, and I did not focus on books, especially college textbooks. The neighborhoods I went through required that you keep your attention on your surroundings.

I got a new computer over the weekend.

My old PC was only five years old, and it is probably adequate, but it’s had a whine somewhere within, and I was reluctant to tear it apart to find it. I actually did at the beginning of 2024; my employer provided an annual $200 stipend for office supplies, so I opened it up and gave it a listen and thought it was the power supply fan, so I replaced the power supply. But that was not it. Audio playback was starting to fade in and out as well, and it was laden with cruft–basically, in the five years I’d had it, I had installed all sorts of frameworks, servers, and databases that left behind detritus when uninstalled–so it was taking 30 minutes to come to the desktop after a reboot. So I decided it was time.

I am about to disappoint you, gentle reader, but I did not build my own rig. Continue reading “A Big Iron On My Desk” →

After picking up a number of DVDs at an estate sale recently, I popped this film in first because it’s been in the news recently (last November I posted because some media outlets call retard/retarded “the R-word”).

You know, I think my beautiful wife and I saw this film in the theater, but that would have had to have been on a date night since we had two very young children when this film came out, so maybe we saw it on cable? More likely the theater. There was a time when we would go to a new Ben Stiller film as a matter of course, but this might have been the turning point in that. Not only because we stopped going to movies as frequently once we had kids, but also because Stiller and his crew lost a little something. Or we aged out.

This film is about a group of five actors making a Vietnam War movie: Stiller plays an action movie star who is losing his box-office appeal; Robert Downey, Jr., plays an Australian method actor who undergoes John Howard Griffith treatment so he can play a black man; Jack Black plays an drug addict known for low-brow comedies; some geeky-looking guy plays the actor playing the geeky-looking guy; and some guy plays a rap/hip hop artist trying to break into movies whilst promoting his energy drink and snacks. The shoot, on location, is in trouble, so the author of the book upon which the film is based suggests some cinéma vérité by dropping the actors in the jungle with a vague plan of the goals in the script and to really get into character. After a speech about the goals, the director steps on a landmine and is vaporized. So the actors try to get to point A and then rendezvous with the chopper on their own. Unbeknownst to them, they’re in the area of a drug processing camp with real bad guys afoot.

So the main gags are Ben Stiller is earnest but not too bright; Downey is too enmeshed in his role, leading to conflict with the hip-hop artist; Jack Black is Jack Black; the efforts of Stiller’s shallow agent to get him a Tivo on location as specified in his contract; and Tom Cruise not looking like Tom Cruise as the profane studio head.

So too much of the humor is a bit of inside baseball in the movie making business to really make the film funny. It’s amusing in spots, but not Stiller and his group in their primes. Still, er, I have the film on DVD now and can watch it again in 20 years if the mood again strikes me (and the DVDs don’t decay–so far, so good).

in my post this weekend about the potential for buying CDs, DVDs, and VHSes for a buck and selling them at a profit: VHS, cassettes find new life at NYC event as hundreds of analogue enthusiasts are ‘fed up with streaming services’

Cassette sales have surged 440% in the last decade, per NPR, and VHS stores are on the rise — from Blockbuster’s return in the UK to the opening of VHS stores from Maryland to California.

“I think it’s a lot more appealing to the people to do that now than ever before,” said Aaron Hamel, co-owner of Night Owl Video, a VHS and DVD store that opened in Williamsburg this year. “I saw the record resurgence, and I feel like physical media for movies is sort of the same environment [vinyl] was 20 years ago.”

At the NYC Tape Fair, Night Owl Video’s VHS sales included a copy of David Lynch’s “The Elephant Man” and “Love Camp 7,” which Hamel describes as a “Nazi exploitation movie from the 70s.”

Stores selling physical media will last at least as long as self-serve frozen yogurt shops.

The church at the end of our farm road was having its annual(?) sale, and since I scored a couple records up there two years ago, I wanted to go. So I shanghaied my youngest, who became excited at the thought of maybe finding some collectible coins or trading cards cheap, and thought we would hit that sale and an estate sale whose sign I’d seen on Friday.

As it turns out, he was eager to stop at other sales, and a subdivision close to the estate sale was having its annual(?) subdivision sale which promised a number of sales in close proximity, and so we hit a number.

I mostly got videos.

I picked up two books at the church sale and one at the estate sale:

• You Can Teach Yourself Country Guitar since I’m collecting these books but am not using them to learn the guitar I bought seven years ago.
• Feasting: A Celebration of Food In Art, an art monograph centered on still lives with food.
• Business French: An Intermediate Course for my beautiful wife who has been taking Duolingo lessons for, what, two years now?

I also picked up three CDs. Well, four, as one is a two disc set:

• Christmas Party by She and Him wherein “She” is Zoey Deschanel. I’ll raise a glass to Charles Hill when I listen to it which will be before Christmas.
• Jazz for the Quiet Times, a two disc (as I mentioned) compilation of lesser-known (or unknown) jazz artists.
• The Great American Soundbook II: As TIme Goes By by Rod Stewart. And the time has indeed gone by since this CD was new.

And, oh, the videos. The estate sale, which was really a downsizing sale (so I heard), had enough of a set spread across three different rooms that I wondered if the homeowner had not owned a video store. I got a number of titles that I’ve been looking for elsewhere, such as Vintage Stock in February.

• A couple of older Jackie Chan titles: Shaolin Wooden Men and Who Am I?
• The second, third, and fourth Rambo titles.
• Major League, which I sought specifically in February.
• The Cowboy Way with Woody Harrelson and Kiefer Sutherland; I might have seen part of this at some point as I might remember the end of it, but I don’t think I’ve seen the whole thing.
• VisionQuest whose name I remembered anyway.
• The Crow, which I’ve seen a time or two but did not have on physical media–it’s one that my beautiful wife has said “We don’t have that?” Now we do.
• Tropic Thunder which we saw in the theaters but have not seen since.
• A couple of old monster movies, Godzilla versus Mothra and Rodan. To go with the one already on the top of the cabinet which I’ve avoided since I bought it a couple years ago.
• The Expendables 2 since I just watched the first one two years ago.
• Kung Pow: The Legend of the Fist which we watched a long time ago. I am pretty sure I have seen it since that 2016 post–hopefully, I rented it and did not get a second copy.

At the rate I’m going, that’s movie watching for a decade to come.

But the whole stack set me back about twenty-five dollars.

Which makes me wonder if I could make a go of hoovering up old DVDs, videos, and CDs for a dollar or less per and getting a booth at an antique mall and listing them for a couple of dollars each. I might have mentioned that some of the booths devoted to DVDs are charging five dollars and up for DVDs. So if I got them for a dollar each + cleaned the libraries out on bag day….

Well, I will perhaps leave that to my son. Who was eager to go to garage sales, but did not find anything for himself. We stopped at a Walmart Neightborhood Market, and he bought a $40 Pokemon box, and he was ready to be done for the day. But he has not ruled out doing them in the future, so maybe I am back to being a peddler like I was 25 years ago.

UPDATE: Originally, I said I’d bought the first three Rambo movies because I thought maybe they’d retitled First Blood into Rambo to retcon the numbering (First Blood is the first, First Blood II: Rambo is the second, and Rambo III being the third). However, I’d forgotten that the much later fourth was simply Rambo which is the one I picked up here. So I’ll have to think about picking up First Blood if I want to binge them in order.

Brian J. !=

But I do have a little callus on the inside of my right thumb’s knuckle from holding the safety switch on power tools.

Not circular saws, though. Mostly the little battery-powered weed trimmer which got its first work of the season today.

The callus made it through the winter, though, without subsiding so the little bit of sawing that I might have done might have helped.

Black-headed vultures have been moving into Missouri for some time; I’ve seen coverage of them in the local papers, magazines, and probably Larry Dablemont’s columns for a couple of years now. And I know the problem is getting serious as the Missouri Department of Conservation has been running ads in the aforementioned sources (minus Dablemont) saying that if you black vultures are a problem on your property (they’re known to attack living livestock), you can get a permit to kill them (the vultures). I’m under the impression that livestock producers think that step is optional, but if the state is saying maybe it’s a problem, then it’s a bad problem already.

At any rate, I did not get a photo of them, but I did see a trio of them in a field along the farm road that becomes Miller Road in Republic while I was headed to the gym this morning.

And when I got home, I saw this pygmy emu:

I bet this is the same turkey (not turkey vulture, which is the native vulture known for its bald head like a turkey) who crossed my farm road ahead of me the other day.

It’s good to see a turkey as they’re fairly infrequent in my back yard. But it’s odd to see one by itself; usually, when we see them in the valley by the creek down the road aways, you see more than one at a time. Perhaps this is a tom. Larry Dablemont would know, and he would then tell you that their numbers are in fact decreasing and that the state of Missouri doesn’t care since it makes money from turkey hunting permits and they, the government people, tend to work from computer models about populations rather than actually spending a lot of time in the icky woods.

At any rate, just a couple of bird sightings here that are atypical.

Ah, gentle reader. I am reaching a point where I’m starting to think Do I need to buy any more books? or Do I want to buy any more books?. The stacks of Nogglestead are crammed full with little room for further additions. And at the rate at which I’m reading small paperbacks now that the 2025 Winter Reading Challenge is complete…. I mean, I’m starting to think I might not be able to read the thousands of books I already own in my lifetime. Do I really want to add more to the backlog?

Fortunately, though, a twee challenge for myself exists. Last year, I went to three of the four Friends of the Christian County Library book sales (Clever, Nixa, and Sparta). But I missed the one in Ozark, the original location when the Friends of the Christian County Library only had two sales a year in Ozark, because it fell in April, before the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library’s spring sale. As I often have recently.

But this year, I was a little more attentive, and when I discovered it was this weekend, I ditched a computer conference in Arkansas to attend (and I ditched for other reasons as well, but as a side effect, I was able to attend).

It was not at the library but instead was at a building in the park right across the street.

It was $3 bag day, but I only got two small bags’ worth.

I got a couple of books:

• Gunships #4: Sky Fire which looks to be part of a men’s adventure series.
• Diagnosis Murder: The Silent Partner just in case I didn’t have it. Turns out I do, and I’ve already read it. Something to sneak onto the free book cart at church, I guess.
• Angles of Attack: An A-6 Intruder Pilot’s War by Peter Hunt about a pilot in Desert Storm.
• Pindar: The Complete Odes in case I don’t already have them. If I do, this doubles my chances of finding it. Not that I’m likely to go looking for it; more likely, it doubles my chances of just picking it up sometime.
• Sharpe’s Enemy by Bernard Cornwell. I didn’t have this already, I can honestly say didn’t have this already as I have all the Sharpe’s books together, and this one was not there.
• Revolt in the Desert by T.E. Lawrence. I have one or two by or about Lawrence of Arabia; not sure if I have his book or not. I do now.
• Love in Ancient Greece by Rpbert Flacelière translated by James Cleugh. Looks to be a scholarly work.
• What If? 2 by Robert Crowley (not the Randall Munroe version. I knew I’d seen and maybe bought a copy of the first one in the distant past. Apparently, I have already read this one, too. The people at church are making out pretty well from this haul.
• The Stingaree by Max Brand. Apparently, I’m into Westerns now so why not try some of the other big authors? No Louis L’Amour books in evidence today.
• Learn to Play the Guitar by Nick Freeth. It might be a children’s book which might be just what I need since the other books haven’t done me any good.
• Gus Shafer’s West with a forward by Dr. John M. Christlieb. An artist and sculptor. To help me envision the scenes in the westerns I read (as though Frederic Remington and Charles Russell could not. Sooner or later I’ll read the Time-Life set, too, maybe.
• Sweden: The Land of Today with text by William Mead. Given that it’s from 1985, it’s the Land of Back Then by now.

Since I had some room, I stuffed a copy of Dating for Dummies to put on one of my boys’ bedrooms as a joke. I put it into the older son’s (who has no trouble dating) under some papers, but he spotted it immediately, so he’s putting it into his brother’s room. Which might hurt the younger as he is just now getting to the dating age but has not yet gone on a date.

I also picked up some DVDs because they were basically free:

• The Transporter 3; I am pretty sure I have seen the first two (and just bought a copy of the first in 2023).
• The Black Dahlia. Not the Blue Dahlia, which is the Raymond Chandler movie.
• The Replacements
• Ocean’s Twelve; I think I’ve seen it back in the movie-going days.
• The Bourne Supremacy; I might have seen it in the movie-going days.
• Basic Instinct; I think I DVRed it at one point.
• The Quick and the Dead; some Substacker just mentioned the film, so now I have it. And apparently I’m set if I want to go onto a Sharon Stone kick, I’m set.

All told, $6. But I did have a ten spot on me as well, so I re-upped my membership in the Friends of the Christian County Library. I’m only in two such groups now. Well, one, maybe; I think my membership in the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library membership has lapsed until our income stabilizes.

For a brief moment, let me enjoy my tsundoku.

A week or so every spring, the setting sun in the afternoon is aligned just right that it comes in through the lower-level patio doors and travels behind the bookshelves in the hall between our offices–a gap of no more than an inch at the widest–and strikes the wall just to the left of the curtained doorway that leads to our store room:

We call the store room “The Cat Litter Room” as most of our litter boxes are in there.

But it also holds a store of old Texas Instruments and Commodore computers as well as forty- or fifty-year-old video gaming systems.

So maybe it really is pointing the way to some ancient treasures.

Actually, we might not see it daily every year as a cloudy evening will block it.

It’s kind of like our pew at church in early service. In spring, the rising sun can come in through the stained glass and strafe us in the back pew. In fall, it can happen twice: Once before the time change and once after switching to Standard Time. We can watch the sun get closer over the course of a month, and then once it’s done with us, its rise is too early to bother anyone else. Come to think of it, the light in the pew and the light in the hall coincide.

Nothing important like NOTICING YOUR HAIR IS ON FIRE FROM TARIFFS OR TODAY’S OTHER NEWS, but something I’ve noticed over time that the other residents of Nogglestead or the back pew have not.

A couple of weeks ago, I got a couple of calls on my cellular phone which I ignored. The computer-voiced, and not even AI-voiced, message indicated I was in heapum trouble:

Oh, noes! A agarbagemalgation of legal terms, no indication of who or what or an actual phone number, and an immediate need for me to act UNDER PENALTY OF LAW!

If you cannot trust that, what can you trust?

I blocked the number and then got the same crap from a different number which I then blocked.

But unknown number, unnamed legal team, and disembodied voice IS NOT GIVING UP.

Oh, morenoes! ESCALATION! They will send me more robocalls HARDER!

I kind of feel bad for the scammers in a couple of years, when the old people will have grown up with the Internet and will trust no one or no bodiless notification from the ether.

But, you know what? 1) How can you feel bad about those people, and 2) People will still have mush for brains in a couple of years and will fall for anything. Perhaps even I, should I reach geriatricity, might with a wavering and warbling voice, believe. But that last is most unlikely in either clause.

I noticed the fire alarms at church have arrows pointing up.

Most fire alarms–if not all of them–are designed for the alarmant to pull down. I looked at the side of the alarm, and it is indeed hinged at the bottom.

The arrows indicate where you’re supposed to pull, not which direction you’re supposed to pull.

I’m not entirely sure on the design. I’d hate for someone to hesitate and cogitate on this in an emergency, where that person might be overcome by smoke whilst trying to tug up.

But maybe I’m the only one who worries about those possibilities.

Facebook helpfully reminds me to vote today.

On the plus side, I did live in one of those counties for a year and a half forty years ago, before I was of an age to vote.

Don’t worry, gentle reader. I am going from from Brookline Station to Brookline today to cast my “No” vote(s).

Because I do not rely on Facebook as any source of truth whatsoever.