Category: Life

I’m sitting in my sainted mother’s living room, and I flip through one of the innumerable catalogs she gets. It’s the Carol Wright gifts catalog, from which I and she have ordered many Christmas presents and trinkets for loved ones in years past. An innocuous piece of cataloguery, or so I thought.

Until I hit the page that had the personal massagers, male enhancement products, and Naked Aerobics/Naked Yoga and Tai Chi DVDs.

Crikey, Carol Wright–Carol Wright!–has a sexual aids section (NSFW, probably).

I mean, I’m not shocked on account that these things are available, but I am shocked that I found them amongst the throw blankets, quilted air conditioner covers, and magnetic windshield covers.

What’s next? A Vibrating Touch of Class?

A bit of perspective from tonight’s IM conversation with gimlet:

gimlet: so are you busy hoping for audacious change?
Brian Noggle: Dude, I’m stuck in the eighties. I want bodacious change.
gimlet: that’s pretty rad
Brian Noggle: But I’d settle for gnarly.

I lost several moments of Sarah Palin’s speech last night and didn’t catch the next paragraph after the John McCain uses his career to promote change because the cutaway shot went to a camera focused on a woman’s bosom:

Which the cameraman widened as quickly as he could, but ultimately too late to save me from near hysterical laughter:

You can enjoy it for yourself:

It occurs with about 8:30 to go.

I bet that cameraman got a talking to. Or a promotion to the CCTV security team.

Let’s just say that it probably didn’t actually say:

Hot sex with Adobe products

But since I deleted them whole stack very quickly, I cannot say for sure, and it’s not actually impossible.

Courtesy of Life Magazine. Unfortunately, the article is entitled "The 10 Machines You Must Avoid at Your Gym".

(Link seen on Master of None.)

Let’s look at today’s calendar:

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Is today a national holiday or something?

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It is! It’s Wyland’s birthday! Happy birthday to that great, erm, American, I assume. Who is Wyland, you ask?

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Why, it’s the artist behind the calendar. If you’ve been living under a rock or, well, anywhere where you’ve got a life, you probably don’t know that Wyland is one of the more popular artists in America now and the official artist of the US Olympic team. To be honest, I had no idea until I googled him and reached his corporation’s site.

But the company puts his birthday on its calendars, and I’ll be honest, I have to respect that. If my company made calendars, I’d do something similar, except that I’d have them mark my wife and kids’ birthdays and my anniversary. Just so I’d be unable to forget to put them on the calendar.

I just got my first Ace Rewards gift card, which means I’ve spent too much enough at Ace Hardware to warrant them giving me five dollars in merchandise because they know I’ll buy thirty dollars worth of stuff when I come in.

The restrictions on the back make me wonder if I’m going to the wrong Ace, though.

Prohibiting me from using this towards alcohol, tobacco, or firearms at Ace would seem to indicate that somewhere there’s an Ace Hardware that stocks these things. I’d like to know which one(s) because I’d like to shop there instead of my boring old hardware store.

Back when I was a shipping/receiving clerk for a local art supply store, I always wanted to recite the Porter scene from MacBeth whenever a delivery driver rang the bell on the loading dock:

Macbeth, Act II, Scene III

	Knocking within. Enter a Porter
Porter:	Here’s a knocking indeed! If a man were porter of hell-gate, he should have old turning the key. [Knocking within.] Knock, knock, knock! Who’s there, i’ the name of Beelzebub? Here’s a farmer, that hanged himself on the expectation of plenty: come in time; have napkins enow about you; here you’ll sweat for’t. [Knocking within.] Knock, knock! Who’s there, in th’other devil’s name? Faith, here’s an equivocator, that could swear in both the scales against either scale; who committed treason enough for God’s sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven: O, come in, equivocator. [Knocking within.] Knock, knock, knock! Who’s there? Faith, here’s an English tailor come hither, for stealing out of a French hose: come in, tailor; here you may roast your goose. [Knocking within.] Knock, knock; never at quiet! What are you? But this place is too cold for hell. I’ll devil-porter it no further: I had thought to have let in some of all professions that go the primrose way to the everlasting bonfire. [Knocking within.] Anon, anon! I pray you, remember the porter. [Opens the gate.]

Of course, by the time I would have gotten that out, the truck driver would have come in the front door looking for me and swearing. Also, it would have weirded out a commercial sales guy if he was in the warehouse pulling and order or prepping it for the courier, but that would have been a bonus.

Unfortunately, those were busy days. It wasn’t until I was a printer, operating a two color offset printing press for hours on end, that I got the chance to spend days memorizing pieces, like “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock“. My recitation of which (or the appreciation of my recitation of which by an English teacher mother-in-law-to-be) and a timely hard drive replacement secured me permission to marry my beautiful wife. The porter scene might have worked in that situation, too, but I’m glad I didn’t take the chance.

Ever find yourself wandering down the street, unable to name the three members of Exposé?

I mean, I got Gioia and Jeanette Jurado, but I forgot Ann Curless’s last name. For Pete’s sake, I used to have a poster of them on my wall, and I bought the special cassette single version of “What You Don’t Know” just for that poster.

I must be getting senile.

I’ll leave it to you to determine whether my lapse in memory is evidence or the fact that I freaking care 20 years later.

Instead of making off with the rings and with the cash used to pay off the peripheral wedding personnel, I stayed and made this toast as best man:

To B—- and H—-. One a dreamer, one practical. Jane Austen would have called this a good match. Fortunately, we didn’t have to suffer through 300 pages of Victorian prose to celebrate with them today. Yesterday was the first day of summer, but today is the first day of their spring. May they have many seasons, many fruitful seasons, together.

Yeah, I know, Jane Austen was pre-Victorian. Nobody in the back of the bar in the middle of Wisconsin called me on it. Probably didn’t want to start an argument about Jane Austen on the big day.

So I’m out in the backyard the other day, and I come across a strange sight that almost indicated I was suddenly in an alternate universe. I’ve lived in this house for over two years and have mowed the back yard at least twice in addition to various child play activities, gardening bits, and whatnot. So how come I never noticed this six foot strand of wire sticking up before?

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Fortunately, it was not live, since I do have kids wandering around back there. But,seriously, where did that come from?

The back corner of the yard used to have a garage or workshop at one time; there’s still a bit of a gas pipe sticking up from heat or whatnot and I’m always digging stuff out of the ground nearby. But I can’t have not seen this six foot strip of wire in two years, can I?

The one end of it was firmly buried, and the other was kind of bent up and hanging out; it wasn’t there last Saturday when I mowed the lawn, and the sod is not chewed up as though it had recently been dug up. I mow it short, too, so I would have seen it if it was lying on the ground for two years.

So how does six feet of wire spout out of a hole in the ground all at once? Is it like a volcanic thing? Or was it really not an electric wire leading to the old garage, but a phone line, and if I’d hooked in a phone, I would have been the first to communicate with the great Underworld Land Of The Eternal Sun?

‘Cause, brother, these things mess with you.

What chardonnay goes with a Charter Arms Pink Lady? Now you don’t have to guess!

Just head on over to the NRA Wine Club and find out! Every wine purchase helps fund the NRA and helps to protect the second amendment.

I, on the other hand, will pass, thank you very much. I’m holding out for the NRA Whiskey Club.

This is not the bookshelf you just brought into the house to spread out your library.

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This is a cat play toy.

Move along.

Even if you haven’t seen this cat, you’re going to get educated:

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Here, allow me to help: "Picture of Dorian Grey"

Eventually, the author gets to the point about how and when his cat was lost and what to do about it.

When the sportscaster starts talking to a woman about the latest baseball phenom, and you think, “Hey, she’s kinda cute,” and it’s the ballplayer’s mother.

I have no problem drinking a warm glass of water. Not even a lukewarm glass; I can drink a relatively hot glass of water. Which comes in handy here, because the tap in our kitchen has some sort of taste running through the cold water when you first turn it on. So when I’m thirsty, I don’t have to wait for the cold line to clear. I’ll just drink a glass of hot water if we’ve just been washing dishes or whatnot.

Some people, like my beautiful wife, cannot abide by anything but the coldest of water. I don’t know if that makes me odd, or her.

Born. Good. Good.