Category: Life

From The 27 Rules of Conquering the Gym:

No one in the history of gyms has ever lost a pound while reading “The New Yorker” and slowly pedaling a recumbent bicycle. No one.

Which is why I read Forbes, The National Review, St. Louis Magazine, and 417 when slowly pedaling a recumbent bike. They’re more intense.

This, on the other hand, sounds a lot like my workout:

There’s also the Strange Guy Who is Always at the Gym. Just when you think he isn’t here today…there he is, lurking by the barbells.

Something I’ve never noticed before: Expiration dates on distilled water.

I guess I’ll have to pour it out on December 1, 2012.

If the EPA allows one to pour out expired distilled water without taking it through some expensive, certified reclamation process.

In the holiday spirit of Electric Venom, I must offer a gloss on a “Christmas” carol.

I hate this song. If I hear this song on the radio, I turn it at once, and sometimes I even turn the radio off for a half hour to punish the radio station that played it.

I mean, not only is it a bunch of wealthy secularists trying to shame the less fortunate into pouring money into the coffers of large organizations with large overhead to send pink jeeps and swag with cool logos to Africa, but it has fundamental flaws.

It’s Christmas time, there’s no need to be afraid
At christmas time, we let in light and we banish shade

Christmas comes on one of the shortest days of the year in the northern hemisphere, you pinheads.

it’s hard, but when you’re having fun
There’s a world outside your window
And it’s a world of dreaded fear
Where the only water flowing is a bitter sting of tears

This just in: It can’t be the only water, since if you’re dehydrated, your tears don’t flow.

And the christmas bells that ring there are the clanging chimes of doom
Well tonight thank God it’s them instead of you

Oh, really, now. Who expresses this sentiment at Christmas time except for Bono?

And there won’t be snow in Africa this Christmas time

Any fool knows that Africa is all jungle or desert, and this particular fool songwriter fails to account for the fact that Africa is a big continent with varied topography and, yes, snow.

But most of the continent lies in the southern hemisphere, where Christmas falls in the summertime. So the lack of snow is not because of the lack of giving by first world peoples.

Where nothing ever grows
No rain or rivers flow

That’s a pretty hasty generalization of Africa. They probably only mean the hungry parts of Africa, where nothing ever grows and it lacks water. You know what you should send peoples who live in those regions? Not food, U-Haul trucks.

Do they know it’s Christmas time at all?

Given the fact that 40% of Africans are Christian, I would expect they do. Come on, remember this guy?

That’s Archbishop Desmond Tutu. You know?

Here’s to you
Raise your glass for everyone
Here’s to them
Underneath that burning sun

Let’s raise a toast to the starving? Really? We salute you!

Then they go into that idiotic Feed the world chant.

Now, I’m a giving guy, maybe even a little more giving around Christmas. But I’m not into feeding the world; I am not like the gods nor am I full of hubris. I contribute food to the local food bank, support the church, drop a couple bucks into the red kettles, and participate in various YMCA fundraisers and charitable programs. I don’t remember if I’ve done my charitable giving manifesto or not, but I can tell you right now that doing what Bono tells me or having my consciousness briefly raised for a sawbuck’s worth of Western guilt-assauging when stimulated by a celebrity stunt ain’t one of them. I’m not trying to feed the world. I’m trying to make life a little better for my neighbors.

I can’t stand this hectoring song that somehow warrants heavy radio rotation amid the secular winter holiday classics that play when they go to all “Christmas” music. I mean, seriously, the radio stations go to Wilson Phillips singing “Hey, Santa”, Eartha Kitt mewling about being Santa’s kept woman, Band Aid hectoring, hippopotamus-wishing, and plying-reluctant-women-with-liquor-while-it’s-cold-outside. What’s the matter with a little Bing Crosby?

Is it any wonder I go to the record player and the vinyl still bearing my mother’s MCAS El Toro address label in December?

I’ve been receiving letters like this from my insurance carrier this autumn:

In effect, Anthem’s vendor Express Scripts is playing contractual hardball with Walgreens over some fiscal aspects of their relationship.

Because Walgreens won’t meet my insurance carrier vendor’s demands, my insurance carrier is coming to me. Ostensibly so I can make other plans, but also so I can complain to Walgreens if I want.

It’s not as blatant as that. Maybe they are trying to keep me informed. But we’re awash in pleas from companies these days to advocate on their behalf when they’re in contract negotiations with another corporation. The classic example is when it comes time for a media company to negotiate with a content delivery company. This fall, Fox Sports channels ran endless commercials about how DirecTV was going to drop the Fox Channels, and maybe Fox Sports channel followers should drop that provider right now and sign up with a DirecTCompetitor.

You know what? To the devil with all of you. I’m your customer, you provide a service to me, I don’t provide one to you. Anthem, you pressure St. Louis-based-and-employer-of-some-my-readers Express Scripts and make them re-sign with Walgreens.

And as for the Fox Sports situation, I knew enough to ignore that because at the last minute they generally sign an agreement (or a day or so after the last minute).

Seriously, I am a consumer. You meet my needs, not the other way around.

On January 1, 2012, I will receive my first spam email about purchasing imported Canadian 100-watt incandescent light bulbs.

Lileks:

another year on the right side of the dirt. Everything else is gravy.

The pitch for the “One Gift” program kinda sounds like “Nice mailbox you got there. Be a shame if we were to continue sending pitches to it with pictures of children with cleft palates.”

I think the schtick is that if you send them a one-time “gift,” they’ll stop sending you the envelopes full of deformed children.

That doesn’t stop those same disturbing photos from appearing in the back of every national magazine (at whose cost?). Also, according to this American Institute of Philanthropy report, the donation doesn’t stop the solicitations.

When I cook something on the grill and enter the house smelling of smoke and charred meat, my wife sometimes says with the undertone of a growl, “You smell good.”

When I emerge from poorly ventilated bathrooms and smell of chemical solvents, my wife says nothing.

Bear that in mind the next time a women’s magazine poll, designed to be shown to men by their mates, proves that women who read women’s magazines and show their poll results to their mates find housecleaning sexy.

If there’s anyone left memeing on blogs, or at least memeing on blogs that read MfBJN, I demand, er, ask you to consider what you’ve been looking at on Wikipedia.

Consider this A PERSONAL REQUEST FROM BRIAN J. NOGGLE.

Go to your browser’s address bar and start typing en.wikipedia and report the five top results.

If you care, mine are:

• Carthago_delenda_est
• Nero_Wolfe
• Maximillian_I
• Jefferson_Starship
• Wade_Flaherty

I’d count that as being a Renaissance man. Especially since I’m counting from my Tower machine. Were I recounting from my laptop, no doubt Sinistar would reign supreme.

So what have you been looking at on Wikipedia?

In addition to all the various fauna that comes around Nogglestead, including but not limited to armadillos, skunks, raccoons, opossums, and whatnot, we have some reptilian friends about, too, mostly skinks and snakes, who sometimes find their way through holes in the foundation to roam our family room. Briefly. Until our elderly cat gets them.

Well, he doesn’t always get them. One night recently, I was watching a Steven Seagal movie when I heard some hissing from behind me. My two cats were facing off on a very agitated snake on my family room floor. You know, the one we routinely cross barefooted. I called my wife, not so much to handle the snake but to keep the cats back while I…. what? Lopped its head off on the carpeting? That’s SOP, but it would have involved a lot of mess, so I sought an alternative form of treatment, and my poor wife couldn’t see the spectacle, since she was on the phone working at 8pm on a Friday night (!).

So I grabbed an empty clear bin and its lid and managed to snatch the agitated snake half in the bin. This did not calm the snake, but I did get a chance to look closely for fangs. Nothing. So we got that going for us. I opened the back door and threw the snake into the night.

Yeah, I know, I could have been more manly by grabbing the snake by its tail all Steve Irwin-like or even by watching a more appropriate Escape from New York when the incident occurred. However.

At any rate, the other day, my beautiful wife spotted the fellow or its ilk on the deck in the sun:

So it gave me a chance to try to identify the snake. It looks to be a hatchling black rat snake, according to the Missouri Department of Conservation Web site:

Well, all right, this guy goes on the list with all the garter snakes and striped snakes I’ve seen around here. But copperheads are native to the region, too:

The Missouri DoC even offers a pamphlet entitled Missouri Copperheads: They’re Your Friend. They Love You. Please, Put Down The Hoe (PDF). All right, I might have funnin’ed on that subtitle, but not by much. The real subtitle is “They Are Vital To The Natural Scene. They Rarely Bite. They Never Kill”.

It has a nice section about living with the little pit viper, like it’s an episode of Friends and you and this poisonous creature are going to share repartee about personal relationships in the coffee shop. Well, no, it’s tips about leaving them alone.

You know what the Nogglestead policy on deadly creatures is? Hoe, hut! I’ve got children wandering around here, and I can’t chance letting that little rascal slither out of my sight to pop up later with its feline-shaped pupils staring at one of them. Particularly if it’s near the house.

Does that make me a bad, bad man? Copperheads have a lot of acreage out there to roam about happily having a collective negative impact on wildlife in many areas, killing ground-nesting birds, fledgling songbirds and small mammals. I don’t want them on mine.

The MO DoC explains that they rarely bite. Be that as it may, I know someone who has been bitten by a copperhead in the last year (while camping). Just for fun, find out how much antivenom costs and whether your insurance company fully covers it. I’d recommend you do it just for fun and not based on need, or you might walk into an antivenom shortage.

A question for newspaper vet Dr. Fox begins with an attack on the pet owner:

Dear Dr. Fox • My cat has developed a worrying habit. She is 12 years old and is very fit — she catches at least two animals a week. But recently, she has been panting heavily after any small amount of exercise. A friend suggested she might have diabetes. — R.E.O., Winston-Salem, N.C.

Dear R.E.O. • It disturbs me that you allow your cat outdoors to kill wild creatures on a regular basis. Cats like yours have a collective negative impact on wildlife in many areas, killing ground-nesting birds, fledgling songbirds and small mammals.

Forget your peace of mind and the health of your cat. Who will speak for the vermin?

Memo to Dr. Fox: Cats don’t have to go outside to catch prey. Our oldest cat, 15, lived for a year outside, but since he’s come back into the house, he’s caught lizards that somehow sneak in and even had a confrontation with a snake in the middle of our family room one evening.

Still, I like animals, but I seem to be the last animal liker who realizes that animals are just, you know, animals. They shouldn’t have the right to vote, and their potential liberators do not have the right to harangue. Jeez.

Here I am, stepping all over Charles’ schtick by blogging about shoes, but here is one of my current, relatively new, and very soon to be former shoes:

I bought these shoes for $20 recently at Target. Or Walmart. Wherever, I don’t pay more than $25 a pair for daily walking around shoes because I have a tendency to step in or drop things that are not white. Of course, I have always worn white shoes (except for my two year hitch as a printer, where I wore a lot of black and reflect blue) because, as a child, I liked running and looking down at the blurring white streaks that were my feet (I was that fast, but no more).

Notice the text on the bottom of my left shoe. It says “Air Comfort System.” For the purpose of separating this particular Starter shoe from other $20 offerings, the company has put air bladders in the bottom of the shoes. They make it out like it’s a comfort thing, but I think it’s probably just cheaper than solid rubber or synthetics.

In my basement recently, I heard a little tweeting like a bird was in the basement, but I couldn’t find the source. It didn’t make me question my sanity immediately, as we’ve had a bird nest at the top of our chimney this year, and you could hear the birds pretty clearly at the end of either flue. But I heard this particular tweeting in the hall downstairs and later in the hall upstairs, far from the chimney. Maybe it’s the hallucinations, I thought to comfort myself.

Oh, but no.

Apparently, the air bladder on the bottom of my left shoe developed a small hole. Randomly, when I lifted my left shoe, the air sneaking back into the bladder made the tweet sound. I finally isolated the source of the sound, which is why I can recount the story (the other strange sounds and voices I’m keeping to myself).

Oh, but that was a couple days ago, and this is now. Now, the hole has opened wider so every step has the effect to a greater degree. I sound like I’m walking in a room full of dog toys constantly. Heavens to betsy lou, but I’m going to have to double my annual shoe expenditures in the very near term and will have learned enough to avoid anything with air in the bottom.

(Other cheap shoe blogging here.)

So I got two texts to my cellular phone, which still bears the St. Louis area code. The texts were in Spanish, and the content was essentially If someone calls for me, don’t give them this number. I assume that “this number” was the cellular phone from which the texts originated.

Friends, I’m no D.C. Collins, but I have on occasion fancied myself the potential plotter of thrillers, and often those suspense novels begin by drawing a normal person into a dangerous shadow world through some seemingly innocuous event.

So I’d be lying if I said I didn’t briefly consider whether an errant text message from a terrorist cell based in St. Louis set a van full of Gunwalker guns on its way southwest to rub out the recipient before the convoluted scheme unraveled.

You might call it insanity; I prefer to think of it as a rich interior life.

You know, I’m sure it seems like a good idea to some people to make automotive fuel out of corn, a food source not only for people but also for food animals that people will then eat.

But we start them young on the using food for things other than feeding:

I look at those and I see wasted calories, brother. I don’t think potato stamps are a good idea, either.

Monday night, I’m reading the auld laddie a book when the telephone rings. I’m uplifted a bit, since my wife was traveling on business, and both the boy and I thought it was her calling to wish him good night. But it’s not.

Me: This is Brian.
Woman’s slightly garbled voice: Mommy?
Me: This is not your mommy.
Woman: Mommy, where are you? We can’t find you.
Me: She’s not here.
Woman: We can’t find her.
Me: She’s not here.
Woman: Can you help me?
Me: No.

I hung up. At first, I didn’t know if the woman (not a girl) was on drugs or what, but I think she was distraught. The boy was agitated; he heard the whole exchange because I answered the phone on speaker as is my wont. When I didn’t hear the my wife’s voice, I immediately became curt and guarded. I didn’t know if this was some sort of prank or what. Maybe it was some distraught daughter calling her mother’s cell phone and distraughtedly reaching my home phone at 7:10. I dunno.

So I was an ass, I suppose. I don’t know how I could have helped her over the phone except to tell her to call the police. And maybe have been a little more polite. But I’m the suspicious sort and guarded, so my default setting is “ass.”

The whole thing confounded me. I feel like Clarence Day’s father, but with a fouler mouth.