Brian J. Noggle, Treasure Hunter

As you might have gleaned from my recent purchase of Lost Treasure magazine, I’m a little interested in metal detecting. As you might know, Nogglestead abuts the old Wire Road that ran between Springfield and Fayetteville, Arkansas (actually, the whole thing ran from Jefferson Barracks in St. Louis to Fort Smith, Arkansas), which means Cherokee marched on it during the Trail of Tears and Civil War armies on both sides walked up and down it.

So I hope to find something neat on the edge of my property.

And last year, a pin fell out of my rototiller, so I went to Bass Pro Shops and picked up a metal detector to find it after panning and sifting my partially tilled vegetable garden for an hour (and found the pin in seconds where the tiller kicked it under some untilled sod).

I noodled with the metal detector a bit in the yard after finishing the tilling. When I found a signal that produced a long, straight line, I decided to have the utility companies mark my yard, since I assumed I was finding buried utility lines of some sort. They did not, but that still could have meant it was a buried propane line or a buried electrical line from my house or something else. But I know think differently.

I bought a book on metal detecting (which I’m still reading) and a magazine (more recently, which I finished reading). And today, I took my metal detector out and found my first treasure: Continue reading “Brian J. Noggle, Treasure Hunter”

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How Rapidly My Birthday Gift Became Obsolete

For my birthday, my beautiful wife gave me this:

The Complete Red Dwarf series on DVD. I watched these back when I recorded them off of KETC, the PBS station in St. Louis, when they came on after Doctor Who on Sunday nights, so when I was reminded of them for some reason or another, I put it on my Amazon wish list.

Now, the news is that this set will be incomplete very soon.

In November this year we start to record a new series of 6 episodes, presently titled Red Dwarf X. I’m not sure of the Broadcast dates but we finish recording them in early February 2012.

This rather complements the Christmas gift I received in the middle 1990s of the More Than Complete Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy before Douglas Adams was actually done milking the series.

Lesson learned: If you buy a collection of British humor marked “complete,” it is probably not.

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I Suffer From SMLS

I have recently discovered that I suffer from Sudden Music Liking Syndrome.

This struck me today, as I heard the second song by The Who on the radio in two days (“Teenage Wasteland” today, “Won’t Get Fooled Again” yesterday) and decided, hey, maybe I ought to get an album by these guys.

I mean, for forty years almost, The Who has been part of the background soundscape. I’ve been listening to “classic rock” since it was called album-oriented rock and pretty much thought “meh” about The Who until sometime yesterday. I mean, these guys are so old they played during the Super Bowl halftime show in the 21st century, hey?

So where does the sudden “I like that” come from if not some psychological disorder that will be covered in DSM-VI?

Frankly, I lie awake in my own sweat that another outbreak will drive me to like Led Zeppelin.

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Racism, No Doubt, The Cause

AP offers a bit about “brain waste.” What is brain waste?

Montenegro [the Colombian-educated obstetrician who has not found work as a doctor from the Touching Anecdote Lede] is hardly unique, given the high U.S. unemployment rate these days. Her situation reflects a trend that some researchers call “brain waste” — a term applied to immigrants who were skilled professionals in their home countries, yet are stymied in their efforts to find work in the U.S. that makes full use of their education or training.

What contributes to brain drain? I mean, aside from the obvious xenophobia Americans-as-depicted-by-coastal-betters often imply (but this article does not inherently)?

Most of these immigrants wind up underemployed because of barriers like language, lack of access to job networks, or credentialing requirements that are different from those in other countries. Some are held back even further because they’re also in the U.S. illegally.

All right, then. If you don’t like the thought of a doctor who didn’t pass the United States credentialing system, who can’t speak English, and who entered or remains in the country illegally….

Well, you’re probably a racist.

Do I think some people in this country are underemployed. Yes. Do I think some credentialing systems are rent-seeking by the credentialed? Hell, yes. Do I think it’s a special problem for immigrants? No.

Welcome to the country. Now suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous connectionalism like the rest of us, and if it bothers you, help us work to change it.

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Things I Learned From St. Louis Magazine

Trivium about Jerry Berger, former gossip columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and St. Louis Globe-Democrat:

He bought a Sig Sauer semiautomatic pistol and began target shooting at the Bull’s Eye range on Manchester Road, taking aim at paper targets he imagined to be intruders or “a contemptible editor.” He fired straight into their hearts.

He bought a gun as a pick-me-up to fight depression after cancer.

As you might remember, I have been to Bull’s Eye. Has it been that long ago?

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Revisiting Cologne

Now that I am all Going Grant, I’ve also decided upon a personal scenting strategy. Well, no, that makes me sound more metrosexual than a man named Cary could stand. I’ve not started using body washes or gels; it’s still simple cake soaps sold at 36 for $5 at the warehouse store and $1 shampoo for me. I have started dabbing on a little cologne, though, since I have quite a chemistry lab of little vials of it as I recently discovered as I unpacked a little bin underneath the sink. And I wonder: has any man ever used a complete bottle of cologne?
Continue reading “Revisiting Cologne”

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The Other Seven Islands Are Safe

The man on the radio says the island of Hawaii is about to get hit by a tsunami.

Wow, how is it going to hit the Big Island and miss Molokai, Maui, Oahu, Lanai, Kaiau, Niihua, and Kahoolawe?

In other news, just yesterday, I learned the names of the major islands of the state of Hawaii to bolster my trivia knowledge. Just in time for this quip.

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Going Grant

I know it’s all the rage among conservatives and libertarian types these days to “Go Galt,” that is, to not work as much as you can since the more you work, the more the government takes from you in taxes and basic humanity. It’s too late for that: a couple years back, even before the election of the current president, I absented myself from the work force mostly as I became a consultant and, as time elapsed, more of a stay-at-home Dad than a consultant. So I’m not in the employment numbers anyway, and if I went Galt, our house would be two-boy-induced-rubble in a matter of hours.

But I wanted to go somewhere alliterative. If not Galt, where? I decided to Go Grant.
Continue reading “Going Grant”

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Scared Straights

I sometimes make other people uncomfortable, and by uncomfortable, I mean I creep them the hell out. I don’t know why, but I suspect it’s because of incidents like this:

Today, I’m watching my child play with the train set in the church-run preschool corridor when one little boy tells one of the teachers/attendants about his twin brother’s cast for his broken finger, which covers the urchin’s complete hand.

Then she turns to me, the only adult in sight, and relates the story of how when she was a child, her sister was goofing off when their parents were gone and managed to knock her thumb out of its socket and jam it up into the hand itself. I agreed that it sounded painful, but the first chit-chat, small-talk comment that came to mind as I stood there, leaning against the cinderblock wall in my beaten old black trenchcoat and holding my black fedora, was:

With a thumb you can dislocate on command, you can slip out of handcuffs easily.

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Andrew Hicks LIVES!

I don’t know why Andrew Hicks’s name popped into my mind tonight. But there it was.

Back in the late 1997s, I encountered his “A Year in the Life of a Nerd” series of posts where he talked about being a teenager in a western St. Louis suburb and then going to Mizzou. As fast as a 14,400 BPS modem and an AOL account would let me, I ran through the whole set to that point.

So once his name popped into my head, I did an Internet search, and lo! The Andrew Hicks World Wide Web Extravaganza, those years in the life of a nerd, have been republished as a blog, by a fan no less. Frankly, I don’t think any of you would do the same for me.

Meanwhile, now over 30, Andrew Hicks is a daddy blogger in Springfield…. Illinois.

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My Stepladder Was On National Television

Last night, the HGTV television program House Hunter featured our home in Old Trees, Missouri (Still available! Cheap!).

We haven’t lived there in a year and a half (sellers ready to make a deal!). Right after we moved out, we had the entire top floor painted. Then, when we changed realtors, we had the house staged, so it’s full of furniture that’s nicer than ours (and which is not charged monthly, thankfully). The porch swing, mounted on a frame instead of hanging from the porch roof, is in the backyard now. My garden, which I tore out of an asphalt driveway with a sledgehammer, a pick, and a shovel, is gone; it’s a patch of grass now.

So it’s our house, but it’s different enough and distant enough that it’s not acute. The only things distinctly ours are the stepladder tucked into the main floor laundry (along with a large supply of light bulbs and 9-volt batteries to keep the rooms lit and the smoke detectors from beeping–one thing that made an unused home seem more unused when we were looking was the unrespiting bleating of abandoned smoke detectors) and the cherry tree in the front yard which should produce a pretty nice crop this year.

I do miss a couple things from the house. The next-door neighbor was often available for a hey,-how-are-you that would turn into a 40 minute chat. We could walk out the front door and walk everywhere. We could sit on our front porch and watch the neighbors walk or drive by (we could even talk, no matter what the “highway noise” complainers, and there have been many) say (loudly).

If it would have aired earlier in the winter, I might have been more wistful. But now that the spring is tipping its hand, the benefits of this house in the mountains are tugging at my sleeve. I spent part of yesterday morning cleaning out our inherited burn pile for an eventual rose garden and in building up a raspberry patch with peat and soil. Later today, I might pick up a couple of fruit trees for the orchard. Also, even though the Springfield murder rate more than doubled last year, it rose to 7. Total. In St. Louis, that’s called a weekend.

It was a strange experience, and a bit exciting, and ultimately the couple who were “considering” our house said mostly nice things about the house. Maybe it will spur some interest in that house so we can finally unload it and get to saving money and thinking about the future.

Also, I’ll need to remember that stepladder.

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Home Improvement With Brian J.

My wife has never really liked the kitchen sink at Nogglestead.  An off-white acrylic two-bowl with just room for a bead of caulk between the edge of the sink and the back splash, she never felt it got clean.  So when our faucet began dripping constantly, I knew I had to act with the alacrity to which I respond to most household repairs and/or improvements that reach the “project” level: I acknowledged I’d replace the faucet, and I would replace the sink at the same time.  After all, one set of water connections would be disconnected anyway.

So after enough time elapsed (one cannot say alacrity without first saying alack!), I actually went to the home supply store to see what was available.  I hemmed, I hawed, I slept on it for weeks on end.  Then I decided I wanted a four-hole sink and a faucet that had two valves for the hot and cold.  Then I decided I wanted the standard cartridge type faucet after all, so we could make due with two holes.

My wife knew she wanted stainless steel, so at least I didn’t have that to Handymanlet over for two acts of the drama.

Continue reading “Home Improvement With Brian J.”

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Some Things Cannot Be Unheard

On Saturday mornings, I listen to KMOX radio on the Internet, and heard the following advertisement. I thought it was bad enough hearing it, but I see the company has its own YouTube channel and includes the radio spot along with the bouncing ball to help you sing the jingle.

Oh, my, word.

I don’t know if it was put on the Internet stream only or if KMOX is running this ad, but….

But….

I think I’ve ruined some small part of life for you, too, now.

Also, you might get the privilege of explaining to your wife why she heard that coming from your computer.

(Thanks for the link, Tam.)

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