Category: Life

Upon my counter, I have a wealth that emperors and kings from centuries and dynasties past (and some present) could not imagine:

I have apples from Washington, USA; I have oranges from Florida or California, USA; and I have bananas from Costa Rica. Fresh (relatively, since the apples are from last autumn’s harvest, but they’re not dried) delicacies from the far reaches of the continent, from over 3000 miles. Genghis Khan could not have unthinkingly stocked his larder like this. Not Caesar, not Victoria, not Montezuma, and most certainly not Peter the Great. They could not have put together this collection of delicacies even for the most sumptuous feast.

Yet I can do it for a couple hours’ worth of work at a minimum wage job that does not kill a measurable percentage of its participants. Because a civilization of specialized workers exist to plant, harvest, transport, store, and sell those goods to me as commodities. Although that civilization has existed for all of my life and for the preceding generation’s, it is not a natural phenomenon and it is highly dependent upon civilized people working to their own ends.

I hope this does not become a wealth only remembered.

A sign on the window to the tiny balcony at our hotel in Kansas City:

Perhaps I’m a little unclear on the concept of door, but it seems to me that a door in use is closed since the function of a door is to partition space with a variable setting of partitioning space or allowing passage. To me, the “on” setting actively partitions the space, whereas the inactive or “off” setting, that is the setting that would exist if the door was not even there, allows passage.

Ergo, I would not think you could lock a door when it is not in use, since a door not in use is open.

Of course, it is possible I overthink things.

who looks at the Dole banana UPC sticker and sees a skull?

Or do I more obviously need therapy?

You thought surreptitious Apple iPhone location tracking was bad?

Wait until you discover automated urinal flushers are doing.

Let’s just say that not everyone gets emails about improving their manhood, Chester.

I have taken the Jeopardy! online contestant tests for a number of years now, awaiting that one night a year where I get the chance to type one or two word answers into a Flash application as fast as I can, hoping to get enough right for the phone to ring or whatever. Every time, I walked away feeling kinda dumb and doubting my own trivia mastery. When I learned that they actually provided categories above the answers (you respond with a question on Jeopardy!, remember), I thought I did marginally better. This year, when I completed the test, I upgraded my self-assessment of my performance to ambivalent.

Then I got the email.

On June 14, I will venture to Kansas City for an actual audition for the program. If you’ve read up on it, you’ll know that this involves another test, a personality interview, and maybe a mock Jeopardy! game. If I pass muster, I get thrown into the smaller pool of people who might get the chance to play on the program.

So I have a little over a month to prepare. I did, briefly, think about “preparing,” as though some program of trivia immersion would somehow make me a better contestant or a more competitive player. However, there’s just as much chance, I think, that I’d stress myself and not enjoy the coming month, so I think I’ll take it in my normal stride: I’ll alter my reading program slightly to include brushing up on some subjects, but I’m not going to study much but maybe the presidents. And hope my native trivia intelligence is enough to carry me.

Tam on compulsory government-centric compassion:

“We” are not a wealthy “society”. You and I live in a place that has some rich people and some poor people and some in-between people. “We” don’t “just have to” do anything. There may be things you need to do or things I want to do, but we aren’t part of some borg-like collective with collective responsibilities, wants and needs.

If you want to be compassionate, go be compassionate. I know that’s usually what I do when I’m feeling compassionate, not expect some entity called “the government” to go be compassionate for me. Mailing a check to the government to help the poor because you’re feeling compassionate is like handing the local crackhead a twenty to fetch you a pizza because you’re feeling hungry.

If you think something needs to be done, you should do it. You should not assume everybody else thinks the same way or that somebody else will take care of it for you.

I had a very similar conversation in a bar with a friend of mine some years back; he didn’t give to charity because he paid taxes, and that was the government’s job. Except I would expect he did not have a big Federal tax footprint based on his income when he is employed, and he’s not buying bonds.

So I expect it is with many people who favor government taking care of the needy. They want government to take care of the needy (and keep their benefits, including promised benefits intact) with someone else’s money. They want the warm-fuzzies without expenditures of their own and without having to give up any television time to work at the foodbank.

A lot of people are that way. Some people worried about the less fortunate or less responsible put their money where their mouth is and their time where the work is. But if everyone who felt compassion did, we would not need government handling it.

Unfortunately, the charities themselves spend a lot of time and effort working to get government grants, so that they can take that government money to do their good. It diminishes the charity to me if it has a large number of grant writers on staff instead of ladle bearers.

I lack a snappy conclusion. I’ll go with “a pox on them.”

That said, I do support a number of small local charities with goods donations and some with time (just a couple hours last year, unfortunately, but I have chillen). Last year, we gave about 10% of our gross income (not adjusted gross income). And we’re the heartless Republicans.

In the email box:

I’m waiting for the FTL phones anyway.

1. Don’t wear a thimble. No pain, no gain.
2. Tie threads with knots that would make Jack Aubrey proud.
3. Don’t tell anyone or allude to the fact that you’re doing mending. Dammit, you’re an American! Pretend you buy another Chinese-made article of clothing like everyone else.

Sissy.

I buried my buddy Ajax today.
Continue reading “You Get Some Cat Pictures, Damn It” →

Remember, boys and girls: Marvel Comics = Greek mythology and DC Comics=Roman mythology.

one discordant suggested sell:

Click for full size

Steaks and Disney Princess decorations.

I know what my nightmares will contain tonight.

My house in Old Trees appeared on HGTV’s House Hunters:

See if you can spot my old office.

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” →

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.

Sorry for the light posting this week, but I had to replace an aerator.

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.

I responded to a friend’s comment on a Facebook posting by coining the Latin term for loss of man points:

Demeritus masulina

Yeah, I know, I don’t know Latin. It doesn’t declensiate. But it makes you sound smart unless someone knows Latin.

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?

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” →