Category: Life

So I’ve done my business and washed my hands like a good fellow, and I’m standing before the paper towel dispenser. It’s an automatic one. With the manual paper towel dispensers with the spring-loaded rollers where, if you can’t just pull the exposed paper towel to get it, you can push the bar or turn the reel on the side to get one. But not automatic ones. You have to discover, like in a video game, the angle at which the sensor points and the distance that the sensor can detect.

I’m all like:

But no paper towel presents itself. I spent what seemed to be twenty minutes pleading with SkyNet to give me a couple square inches of paper. In truth, it was probably only a minute. Either I lacked the proper thieves’ hand signals to steal something to rip off a towel or the device was not functional.

I left with wet hands.

Again.

When finishing your slam-bang sonnet up with a couplet that rhymes Josephus with Bocephus, remember you have to add another syllable at the end, as the stress on each is on the middle syllable (JoeSEEfus, BoSEEfus).

Although, to be honest, I probably won’t use this particular tip myself, as I’m not comfortable or natively familiar with the pronunciation of either. I mean, although it’s spelled Joseph-us, apparently it’s not pronounced that way (my beautiful wife and Wikipedia agree), and the only time I’ve heard Bocephus spoken aloud was in the song “Redneck Woman”.

Given that the song is entitled “Redneck Woman”, the pronunciation is suspect.

So it’s back to rhyming “love” with “dove” for me.

I’ve got this going for me, which is nice.

As long as I get to pick the Superman, we’re golden. I’m not quite to the Christopher Reeve level, much less the 21st century equivalents.

As some of you know, I have a cat named Isis.

As a cat owner normally does, I flatter my cat, ascribing all sorts of super powers to the cat and whatnot.

The other night, I said to my beautiful wife, “You know, there used to be a superhero Isis. She was on with Shazam!, I think.”

So, today, I go to the library so my urchins can get some books (I have enough for now, thanks), and I see this DVD facing out from the children’s videos:

So, of course, I checked it out.

The cover is not very flattering to Joanna Cameron, who stars as the young science teacher Andrea Thoma who uses a magical amulet to summon the powers of Isis.

Somehow, the Internet is not full of Joanna Cameron vs. Lynda Carter debates. Maybe there are on the DC Comics portions of the Internet. But I’m a Marvel fan, so I don’t frequent those. Funny, I don’t tend to frequent the Marvel sites much, either. But I digress.

I watched the first couple of episodes with my children, who were stunningly unimpressed with the forty-year-old Saturday morning live action children’s program special effects, and they kept shouting their own solutions to the screen, most of which involved artillery and explosives.

I, on the other hand, was swept away with nostalgia; somehow, I remembered the program from when I was five years old.

At any rate, the 1970s must have seemed like the dawn of geek culture for a while: In the middle part of the decade, there was this show, and as I remembered it bundled with the Shazam program (1975-1977); there were live action television versions of Wonder Woman (starring the aforementioned Lynda Carter), Dr. Strange, and Spider-Man; television also featured the bank-busting Battlestar Galactica; the movies had Star Wars. But the ball never really got going until the next generation came of age around 1999 or so.

Suddenly, I have the urge to watch all those old 70s superhero shows (starting with this one). We own some of the Incredible Hulk and Wonder Woman, and the rest I’d probably have to order since they’re unlikely to be available at the video store or the library (although I did get ten episodes of The Secrets of Isis, so who knows?).

Before I start raiding Amazon, I’d best sit down for a bit. If I wait, these rushes of nostalgia pass as my short attention span moves onto something else, like an urge to read all the history books about the Near East that I can lay my hands on.

From a recent set of full color mailers, which I’m plumbing far too much for blogfodder these days, we have two presumably competing dining options.

First up, we have a pizza designed to taste like a burger:

Then, in the same collection of advertisements, we come to an ad for a burger designed to taste like a pizza:

My lord, all I want is fast food that tastes better than the cardboard box it comes in. I would, however, prefer that you not get your chocolate in my peanut butter.

I am pretty sure I was a curmudgeon at fourteen years old.

When I saw this ad in last week’s full color insert for J.C. Penney’s, I thought the woman had a knife:

I guess it’s actually the Nike swoosh, but given her hand position and the color of the swoosh….

Also, my instinctive pattern-matching spots a lot of danger that does not actually exist.

This weekend, I took a trip to Kansas City, Missouri. Although I’d been there before and kinda new the route, I wanted to be sure, so I got turn by turn directions.

The man’s way.

You got that?

It’s easy to pick up and see without having to find your place on a crowded page and it’s better than having an untrustworthy voice on the phone telling me where to go.

Although, I confess, I printed a map of the neighborhood where I was going.

Because I want to know the layout of nearby streets so I know where to look for my turns and what to do if I missed them without waiting for a satellite to help my mobile device recalculating.

I may not have been a scout, but I can read a road map. Which will serve me post-apocalypse, maybe.

Today, we received our weekly or bi-monthly (I’m not sure which) full color advertising mailer. For some reason, I paid attention, and I am sorry I did, for it is evidence that the world has gone mad.

On the cover, a Papa John’s advertisement for a pizza that is like a burger:

Inside, an Arby’s advertisement for a burger that is like a pizza:

You know what? I may be an old man, but when I want one, I order it and not the other.

Don’t you like taco pizza? Shut up, he explained. Also, I might be prejudiced against the particular combination of pizza and burger because about forty years ago, I awakened at 2 am vomiting copiously after having eaten frozen pizza burgers.

Still, this is not the singularity I was promised in the 21st century.

So, I’ve done something I haven’t done in almost twenty years: I got a membership at a video store.

Now, gentle reader, you might remember my December rant on the limited catalogs of streaming services (What I Want To Watch, When I Want To Watch It). I still feel that way, but I’m pretending to be frugal now. I had to watch Johnny Mnemonic for a writing assignment (which I read back in 2006), and of course, Amazon Prime and Netflix don’t offer it. My beautiful and sultry wife has a membership at the local video store, Family Video, so we went there to get a film for the boys and to see if the shop had Johnny Mnemonic. They did.

So the boys and I had a little time one morning last week, so we returned the films we’d rented, and I signed up myself to be a member.

It reminds me very much of when I was young. Right after I moved out of my mother’s basement (at twenty-six, because I was a millenial before being a millenial was cool), I lived in an apartment just down the way from a Blockbuster video. I didn’t get a cable package, as I didn’t watch that much television, but I did have a couple evenings that I wasn’t spending with my sultry girlfriend/fiancée. So I’d go down to the Blockbuster and pick up a couple of movies to watch.

I like to browse; I like to go to book stores/music stores/movie stores to look at the covers, to pick them up and read the backs, to weigh my options–Waterworld or The Postman? (Just kidding–that night, I rented both and had a Kevin Costner post-apocalyptic marathon.)

After I converted my beautiful and sultry girlfriend/fiancée into a beautiful and sultry wife, we had a little more money to spare, so I often spent Friday nights or thereabouts at the local Best Buy nearest our home in Casinoport browsing DVDs to buy. When my beautiful and sultry wife was traveling for business, I’d plan a night in with two to three films.

But it was the same thing: Wandering amongst the cultural commodities, picking and choosing and weighing what I wanted to watch very soon. You don’t get the same thing with choosing films from a menu.

So I’m reliving my younger days in these holdouts from the past, again.

What have I rented so far?

Johnny Mnemonic; The Medallion with Jackie Chan; and Frontera, a Western with Ed Harris. To be honest, rentals are like 2 films for $1 for 5 days, and given my current lifestyle, it’s a bit challenging to watch two whole films in five days. The last film I watched before Johnny Mnemonic was XXX with Vin Diesel, and it took me like three weeks to watch the whole thing in two parts.

But I’m a little hopeful that the video rental thing will get me watching a few more movies, which will be a nice change from all the reading I tend to do (and get myself a little in a rut and a little bored doing). Perhaps it will help me with the Jeopardy! online test this year (but given that the online test is later this week, probably not!).

Wait a minute, Brian J.! Don’t you have a cabinet full of videos that you’ve picked up over the years from garage sales and whatnot that you have yet to watch?

Well, yes, I do. But I also have bookcases full of books I have yet to read, and I still go to the library from time to time (every week, sometimes several times a week). Sometimes the video store (and the library) offer me a bit of novelty that I don’t get from my own shelves when I have to pick something out to watch (or read). I’ll get to the things I own, too, I hope.

At any rate, it’s already given me two bits to relate: One amusing, and one of hope:

First, the day my boys and I went in, I sent them (old enough now to be out of my sight in a store) to pick out a couple films while I leisurely browsed for my two films (for a dollar). I circled behind them somehow, and I caught up with my eight nine-year-old striding for the back corner of the store. “Oh,” he said, “I thought I’d find you in the Adult section.” I looked up, and high on the wall, indeed, is the word Adult, and there’s a labyrinth leading to a section cut off from the main selection by high walls and a corridor. He didn’t know what he was saying. I think.

Secondly, now that both my beautiful and sultry wife and I are members, we’ve provisionally planned to go to the video store to pick out a film to watch together. My heart flutters, not only because she’s beautiful (and sultry when she wants to be), but because this is what young people did when we were young: A half hour at a video store, the choosing leading to the culmination in watching the film itself. It was more of an event than simply selecting something from a menu.

I guess I’m old-fashioned because I’m 1990s-fashioned.

Hey, what’s with the whole “and sultry” thing? Mr. Hill, in another forum, said “Brian J. used to toss around the word “sultry” in those days, and he wasn’t kidding.” Clearly, I have been remiss and am looking to bring the universe and my compliments of my wife back into balance.

Nigerian archbishop Filibus elected head of Lutheran church:

A Nigerian archbishop has become president of the Lutheran church.

Archbishop Musa Panti Filibus was elected as head of the Lutheran World Federation on Saturday at an assembly held in Windhoek, the capital of Namibia.

I was all like, wait, what? I attend a church in the Missouri Synod, and I know there are state leaders and whatnot, but an international president? I’d never heard of such a thing.

Because this fellow is the head of an umbrella organization, not a “church” but a collection of churches. In the United States, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America is part of the Lutheran World Federation, but the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod and the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod (yes, both places I have lived have their own synods). These last are more conservative denominations.

So it’s like calling António Guterres, the Secretary General of the United Nations the Secretary General of the world.

But calling this fellow the head of THE Lutheran Church is good enough for journalism work. Which is below the level set by the government these days.

When the Gospel of Minimalism Collides With Daily Life:

She recalls how, inspired by the virtuously clean-looking homes she saw pictured in Dwell magazine, she thought: “This is it. I am a minimalist. This is how it’s going to be, everything calm from now on.” And within two weeks, she had gotten rid of almost everything she owned and painted the whole place Decorator’s White, a life reboot. She went full-on Dwell, even building a chicken coop, the de rigueur symbol of suburban simplicity, in the backyard. A year after what she calls “the incident,” she wrote her first post on her blog, The Art of Doing Stuff, about the day she realized that she just “hated every inch of her house” — and how she came to view white as “the Botox of paint colors”: She and her home “look younger and fresher for it.”

But fairly quickly, Ms. Bertelsen fell off the wagon, sneaking items here and there — a pair of flea market midcentury lamps, an Empire chandelier — back to her 1,200-square-foot home. Even more, her venture into minimalism made her realize how much she enjoyed viewing the physical manifestations of memories, reliving moments through concrete reminders. “I want to see the drumsticks from the last Ramones show I went to in 1994, or the rock I picked up climbing a mountain in Vancouver,” she said. “I want to see the titles of all the books I’ve read.”

Some people just have to try so many things out before finding what works with them, including self-renouncing behavior.

A woman I knew once said to me, after we met again after not having seen each other for something like a year and a half–apparently, a long time when one is in their early twenties–“You haven’t changed a bit!” “I got it right the first time,” I said.

My beautiful wife has these minimalist urges from time to time, but so far I’ve forestalled divesting ourselves of the personal relics I relish so. Including a VHS for an inflatable fitness ball that our unwatched videocassette and DVD cabinet regurgitated for some reason recently. I thought, “We’re never going to watch that,” so I set it aside to ask her whether I could dispose of it or not. Several days later, I did, and she assented, but then I said, “Maybe we should make the boys watch it,” as they play with the fitness ball as though it were a ball and not a piece of fitness equipment. Enamored with that idea, the videocassette is slowly migrating itself ten feet from the table beside the sofa where I put it down because that was the closest surface when the thought of showing it to the boys occurred to me as I was taking it to the trash.

No, I shall never know the collision of minimalism with anything.

UPDATE: I should note I saw this on Instapundit’s Facebook today. Yes, I am friends with Instapundit, and sometimes he likes my statuses.

As some of you might know, I sometimes have to deal with cheap particleboard bookshelves collapsing when the weight of fifty pounds of books causes the shelf pin holes to erode. At which time I have to move the pins and reorganize the shelves so the contents fit on the resized shelves. Or I have to deal with a shelf that bows so much that it can no longer rest on the shelf pins, at which time I’ve turned the shelf over so that it unbows for a while and then bows in the opposite direction. So, you see, I have some experience with the bookshelves failing.

But the record shelves that I painted in 2012 (five years ago? REALLY?) collapsing? That’s another thing entirely.

Well. What to do.

Since the records were already off of the shelves, it was easy to take a look at the cause of the collapse. It wasn’t so much a collapse, though. The bookshelf has adjustable shelves, but instead of pins, the middle shelf rests on oblong pieces of wood the entire width of the shelf.

What happened is that the records weighing on the shelf and the process of taking records off of the shelf made the oblong shelf holder slant forward.

I could have cut some new oblong holders that fit the cutouts to hold the shelves; instead, I solved it by taking some Popsicle-style craft sticks that one of my children had acquired for some project or another (and that I’ve since purloined for the warrens of my workbench for just this sort of thing) to shim the shelf in the front so it tips back and will keep the records from spilling.

It’s not a great story of a LIFE HACK or anything. It’s not even that great of a story.

But it is, to the point, a way to obliquely brag about my growing record collection. ADMIRE IT!

Also, note that this is a temporary solution, as I have been promising my beautiful wife for a while now that I would construct a better set of shelves. And I supposed I’d better now that I’ve mentioned it on the Internet.

So, I was doing my annual vacuuming under the couch in the family room, and I found this dark talisman:

Can anyone help me identify it and give me a hint as to how to reverse the effects of any dark magic it might entail?

Also, can anyone please tell me whether it was my children, my cats, or something more sinister that deployed this demonic bit of obeah upon us?

So we had a good Spring thunderstorm a few nights ago at Nogglestead, and after about thirty minutes of a driving rain against the west side of the house, my beautiful wife’s office window started leaking. And by “leaking,” I mean it was as though Thor himself was urinating on her electronics. She scrambled to move and cover her equipment, and I scrambled to find what was going on. In a driving rain. Lit occasionally by lightning. This is kind of old hat for me.

Back in our Casinoport days, water got into the house by every sort of way. The walkout basement was really a dugout sliding glass doorway that looked uphill and had a single drain to relieve the rainwater. It also had two crab apple trees above it. I had to sweep that out every day to ensure the crab apples, shaped and sized perfectly to fit into the holes on the drain cover. I learned this the hard way; once, when I did not, I looked out the door during a heavy rain, and it looked like an aquarium with a really low water level. Which lead me to an evening spent in the pouring rain, bailing my walkout basement’s landing and clearing the drain every minute or so. Then there was another time when the gutter pulled away from the end of the house during a thunderstorm, allowing the water to stream off the roof into the runner of the sliding window in the kitchen, which led to the water rolling out of the runner into the dining room. I was able to prop the gutter into place with a propitious two-by-four and reaffix the gutter in the light of day.

But I had no such luck that recent night at Nogglestead: We don’t have any trees to block the gutters, and they were half-empty or half-full (I’m not sure which I should insert here to self-identify as a pessimist). Nothing was collected on the deck above the window. I didn’t see anything, but I did know that the lintels above the window could use a caulking and a painting, which I couldn’t do in the rain.

When we first moved in, the home inspector had shown us where the window and door frame below our deck could use a caulking, and right after we’d moved in, I did so, but that was eight years ago almost. So it looks as though it’s time to revisit that, and I’d put it on my list of chores for the summer that I’d get to right after reading yet another book I’m likely to not remember anyway.

So I bought a couple tubes of exterior caulk and took a look above the window instead of at the lintels. Oh, my.

Above the windows were some end-facing bricks with some broken-down mortar and some splotches of caulk. Some of the holes in the brick had been filled with caulk, and there were some splotches of brown caulk here and there where the mortar had started to break down.

That looks like something I might do. Did I do that? I don’t think so. I’ve never bought brown caulk in my life.

So I chiseled out the old mortar and pulled the old caulk out.

And I took steps to ensure that this never happens again.

Now, back to that book I am reading. What is it again? I’ve forgotten already.

Continue reading “A Very Noggle Repair” →

So this year, I’ve started putting strange things in my children’s lunches for school.

I know, the customary thing to do to make a big deal of it on the Internet is to put a little love note or drawing into the lunch boxes and then to produce ready-for-viral listicles of images. But I’m not a mommy and I’m not artistic. So the lads get some strange foodstuffs indeed.

It started when, as a lark, I put a tin of Fancy Feast cat food in their boxes.

Then, a couple weeks later, I thought about putting some brownie mix, unprepared, in the Pokemon and Sonic the Hedgehog comestible containment devices. I was at the store at the time, but I could not find inexpensive (sub-buck) brownie mix, so I picked up three boxes of Jiffy Yellow Cake mix. The next day, they each got one, and I baked the third so they could actually have cake when they got home. One of the lads, good boy, opened the cake mix and ate some of it at school.

I considered giving each pack of microwave popcorn two weeks ago, but I demurred. Because I wasn’t sure that one of them would open it, and that would be a waste of my beautiful wife’s preferred snack of late.

Today, I gave each an ice cream cone. No ice cream; just a cone.

Someday, perhaps when I am gone, they will get to talking and say, “Do you remember when Dad put something in our lunch?” And they’ll think of me.

Or perhaps they’ll mention it to their therapists. Regardless, it’s building my immortality, one little bit of remembered silliness at a time.

While I was doing a photo shoot for a cover of an upcoming book, my cat jumped onto the table and tried to bury the coffee:

Clearly, he does not understand that this photo shoot does not require a model, and I couldn’t use him anyway, since he didn’t sign a release.

Or perhaps he’s commenting on the photo’s composition.