Category: Life

Jeez, I must bore people telling everyone the same thing over and over again.

Instapundit posts:

SO MANY DRAMATIC WEATHER TERMS THESE DAYS: Expert: ‘Bomb Cyclone’ Pounding The US Will Be Strong And Unpredictable.

We used to just call them winter storms, or blizzards.

Man, I’ve posted:

• The 21st Century, Where All Weather Is Above Average (2019)
• Sounds Better Than A Bomb Cyclone, Anyway (2020)
• Come On, We Need To Call It Something Scarier (2021)
• ‘Bomb Cyclone’ Is So 2019 (2022)

What, I didn’t harp on it last year? Was the weather really that mild? I dunno. That was all the way last year, and this year has been a long one.

But, unlike weather personalities, maybe I should learn a new schtick.

When I watched Shanghai Knights two years ago, I mentioned that I had not watched this film. So when I came across it at a church rummage sale this summer, I picked it up. And as I’ve been working evenings on my part-time contract of late, I haven’t had much chance to watch films. But I thought I’d watch one last weekend, and so I did.

So: The high-level plot of the film is that Chan’s Chon Wang is an imperial guard for the Chinese emperor with his eyes on the princess Pei Pei (Lucy Liu) who does not want to marry the man selected for her. She runs away with her tutor, who leaves behind a ransom note–instead of actually running away, she is being kidnapped–and she is delivered to an exiled former imperial guard running a set of Chinese laborers in slave conditions in Nevada. Three current members of the imperial guard are sent to America with a ransom, and Chon Wang gets sent along with them–the higher ups hope the foreign barbarians will relieve them of Wang.

When he gets to America, Wilson’s Roy O’Bannon leads a band of outlaws to rob a train. The new guy in the gang kills Wang’s uncle, the interpreter for the imperial guards and who let Wang come along. It leads to a train-borne Jackie Chan fight and to a couple of encounters between the characters where each is at an advantage to the other, but they eventually team up after another Jackie Chan barroom brawl. They team up to find the princess (and maybe to get the gold), and then a couple of set pieces involving a native American woman that Wang married by mistake who rescues them from several predicaments, and they get the girls and the gold. finis!

An amusing film. I cannot help but note that in the film, the bad guys are not Westerners trying to steal China’s heritage and treasures (which is so many Chinese-influenced or Chinese-financed East Meets West films of the last, what, forty years?). So that was nice. And it did have Lucy Liu in it.

Continue reading “Movie Report: Shanghai Noon (2000)” →

On Monday night, my beautiful wife and I were talking about an upcoming Christmas-themed trivia night, and I was not enthusiastic about it as my Christmas trivia is probably wanting. After all, at the Thanksgiving potluck last Sunday, they offered Thanksgiving-themed trivia, and I/we only got 70% of the questions right (the other couple from the North Side Mindflayers were on their own and did better, but they do carry the team in actual trivia nights).

So Monday night, I said that the best that I could hope for was to be asked in what films now-standard Christmas songs appeared, and I mentioned that “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” appeared in Meet Me In St. Louis (which I watched last year).

And suddenly, Facebook was all like….

Because of course it was. But then St. Louis Magazine was all like….

St. Louis Magazine is listening to me, too?

So I briefly thought maybe it was just a news story that Facebook thought I would be interested in because Facebook reads my blog and knows I just saw the film and is maybe not listening to the keystrokes forming this post even now.

But that’s just what they want me to think.

Coincidence starts with the same letters as COINTELPRO. C’mon, wake up!

At Powerline, the post is entitled The high cost of low-heeled joy.

I know, gentle reader, you get the allusion, but I will quote the post for those who reach this site via Internet search. I need all the Traffic I can get:

Someone may want to rewrite Traffic’s look at the dark side of the music business (I think) in “The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys” to cover Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign. Something like “The High Cost of Low-Heeled Joy” might work.

Ah, c’mon, man, are you even a blogger? You could have gone with The High Cost of Round-Heeled Joy to get the Shakespearean-era allusion in there and to cast aspersions on the political candidate’s alleged sordid sexual history. Shakespeare + Traffic in the same blog post? The ticket to mad hits and .000000018 cents in ad revenue, baby!

Ay, me.

You know, I was too young to know Traffic in its heyday, but when I was a bagger…. Oh, I’ve told that story before, the last time someone on the Internet alluded to it (probably).

After 21 years in blogging, gentle reader, I am bound to repeat myself in my dotage. You are very polite to keep coming back and listening politely or perhaps scrolling past grampa telling the same story again.

So on my way to market today, I heard “You Keep Me Hanging On” on the radio, the local robostation that places the greatest hits of 80s, 90s, and whatever from its home computer office in a shack somewhere in Iowa or something, and I tried to remember who sang it.

“Kim Wilde,” I thought. “No, wait, Kim Wilde did ‘Bette Davis Eyes’. Who was it?”

That’s a warm up for my self-doubting dithering that has become a hallmark of my Trivia Night answers. The moment where I confused myself and changed my answer from “Unchained Melody” to “Unchained Medley” and tried to convince my team to change the team answer in the exaggerated earnestness of the truly, pathetically mistaken and prepared to be only a little smug when we got it wrong and to have lost by only a point thwarted by the sound-minded team members, and we ended up winning by a couple of points….

Anyway, it is Kim Wilde who sang “You Keep Me Hanging On” forty years ago:

And you probably already know it was Kim Carnes who sang “Bette Davis Eyes”:

Which is why the North Side Mind Flayers would like to contact you to replace me.

But that’s neither here nor there.

What is important, forty years later: Kim Wilde or Kim Carnes?

Ah, gentle reader, as you might know–as my analyst would, should I ever get an analyst to pick an answer from all the things which I conceive could be wrong with me from my earliest days–I do not favor blondes with long faces probably because they remind me of my sainted mother. So I’ll have to go Kim Wilde here.

Gentle reader, only minutes elapsed between my post yesterday when I said my cat Foot grunted like a (pet) rabbit and the appearance of rabbit-themed posts on my Facebook feed.

The eyes of Truth are always watching you.

And so are the eyes of Facebook, apparently.

On this day in 2014, I posted:

Some of my behavior leaves my cats absolutely meowless.

Although the current crop does not actually meow anyway. Chimera cries and makes this weird gasping sound like he can’t even; Isis trills; Nico squeaks; Muad’Dib trills a little and raaars; well, I guess Cisco does sort of meow. And two of our relatively recent departures, Foot and Athena, did not meow either. Foot grunted like a rabbit, and Athena made this hideous sound like the pterodactyl in the video game Joust.

What are we doing to these poor cats to make them unable to speak the language ascribed to them by cartoons?

Was it only last year where I bought and placed a little resin Santa on the upstairs mantel to see if anyone noticed? Man, it has been a long year. I guess that’s why I feel as though I have aged so much, although partly that has been not hitting the gym or the dojo often enough.

At any rate, I decided that I would keep the tradition alive (although I honestly thought I’d skipped a year–I mean, this year has gone on forever–in 2024, the days were long, but the year was also long), and I looked for a cheap tchotchke at the Walmart. I found one that was under $2 which is good because I no longer have a fulltime job and am not sure if when I’ll get another.

Behold, the 2024 Christmas Pre-Straggler:

A little snow-covered church. A part of what looks like could be a little tealight-fitting village set which means I can collect them all over the course of years.

As with last year, I have just quietly placed it on the mantel, and we will see if anyone notices.

I might keep the tradition alive next year, but the year after that, the only anyone who might reside here to notice besides me might be my beautiful wife. Unlikely, but possible.

Also, “pre-straggler” is probably not the word I am looking for. I should probably think of something else. But I do have a whole year to mull that over.

I’m a cleaning expert — you’ve been using too much laundry detergent

Ignoring, again, from the self-proclaimed expert voices on the Tik-Tok clamoring from attention, I know, gentle reader, that I’m not using too much. To be honest, I’ve never felt the need to use a whole capful. Maybe when I first started doing my laundry in college, but not in a long time. I’ve recognized that the overage was just rinsed down the drain.

Same with toothpaste. Wait, no: I’m a toothbrushing expert: You’re using too much toothpaste. I just put a button, a small dop on the toothbrush, just enough to see I’ve put something on the toothbrush. It helps I have an electric toothbrush with a small head that only holds a drop that’s about the size of the toothpaste tube aperature. Even then, as I start brushing, most of it falls intact into the sink but I have enough froth to get my teeth clean. People shouldn’t rely on advertising, which feature great big gouts of toothpaste on toothbrushes, as instructions or suggestions for use.

And unlike other dental experts who are on the Tik-Tok who say flossing is worthless, all I have to say is if you’ve knocked something out of the recesses between your teeth while flossing after brushing, you’re more of an expert than they are. Maybe you need a Tik-Tok.

I might have alluded to my precarious job situation throughout the year. The company I worked for was the subsidiary of a larger company, and for a long time, I expected that the parent company would assume the subsidiary into it and probably lay off everyone. So for most of 2023, I was kind of applying for jobs.

Then, in January, it happened: My employer joined the mothership. All non-engineering people were let go (with six weeks notice plus severance, so it was pretty generous). Engineers were assimilated into the big mess that was the parent company (which was integrating three or four companies and their tech stacks at the same time).

Except: The parent company does not have QA Engineers. So they kept the two of us on and kept the whole engineering team on tenterhooks as the parent company was not very clear about the onboarding and expectations for our company’s remaining team members. Over time, it became clear that everyone on our team would have to become full stack engineers as that’s all the parent company had. The two front-end engineers were not excited. Neither was I.

So I quit.

The actual thought process was more agonizing than that. The job market is trash. I broadened my job search this year, and I’ve had only a few interviews. And the only offer I got was for a part-time contract in the evenings. And that, gentle reader, was enough for me to take the leap back to consulting.

So I’ve been a little quiet here as I deal with the fallout from it. We’re going to have to retrench a bit here at Nogglestead, which means tightening our belts even more. But don’t cry for us, Argentina. We’ve got plenty to fall before we bounce. No GoFundMes or Patreon pitches for you. But if you know someone who wants a little QA work done, you know a guy.

You know, gentle reader, it is the simple joys of life. On Monday, I mentioned how I thwart my own contentment.

But I do experience some simple joys, albeit they’re seemingly few and far between, and they’re not only recognized and their passage mourned while they’re happening, but I seem to forget them once they’re done.

Case in point: One day a couple of weeks ago, my youngest and I walked out to look at the garden and around the property.

He is finishing the cross country season, and he’s started applying for jobs. Which means that he, like his brother, will spend more time outside the home than in it, and these simple, unscripted, and ad hoc times together are coming close to an end. Not that we have a lot of them now; it’s only because he was grounded from electronic devices that directed him from his room and online games. So he was eager to be entertained.

I’d planted some cabbage, cauliflower, and radishes in September as I expected we’d have a couple of months before it got cold. After all, it was cool a couple of months later in the year this year, with it only getting warm in late June. So I figured it would be warm a couple of months later than normal and we could sneak in a late autumn crop. Well, we had a surprise freeze one night which ended the cabbage and cauliflower dreams, but it only seems to have slowed the radishes down. Which is fine; I like radishes more than cauliflower or cabbage.

We looked in on the garden, and then we wandered to the opposite side of the property by the wind break. I don’t even remember why. But the Osage orange trees were dropping the hedge balls, their softball-sized inedible (unless things are really bad) fruits. So we spent a couple of minutes picking them up and throwing them at a tree some yards off. We had about the same arm strength and accuracy, I’m proud to say, mostly because I’m pleased with my performance.

A nice little moment which I enjoyed even as I knew they were coming too soon to an end.

And I probably won’t personally remember that day too clearly on my own in a couple of years. Like I don’t remember watching them in the now-long-departed sandbox. I kind of remember running around in the enclosed back yards with them when they were toddlers. But once they were in school and I was back to fulltime work, time has been a runaway escalator to our soon-to-be (in a couple of years, which is the future tense of recently or was just).

I just read something that says that when you remember something, you actually re-write the memory with some modifications, so the more you remember something, the less accurate the memory can become.

Still, hopefully the next book on Buddhism or mindfulness will be the one that silences the double-effect narrator in my head who very vocally mourns each passing moment before it passes.

In the time between now and then, we have had the windy days that have denuded the windbreak, but the hedge balls remain visible through the leaves. Something must eat them or they break down very well, as we never remove them but they’re always gone by spring.

When filling out my address, I sometimes get Brookline Station pre-populated in the city field.

As I have mentioned (most extensively twelve years ago), my post office is up in Brookline, which was a small railroad town on the Frisco line. So I always assumed that the Station referred to the train station up in Brookline.

For some reason, I was looking at a map recently and noticed that it had another entry called Brookline Station far distant from Brookline:

Brookline Station is actually closer to Nogglestead proper.

This history gives an account of the history of Brookline Township (from 1883, so a recent historical account) which indicates that the town of Brookline, which is in the upper corner of Brookline Township, was indeed a railroad town. It does not mention Brookline Station at all.

However, Brookline Station might have been a part of the Butterfield Mail Stage Route.

Fifteen years on, and I’m still learning about the area. Not that my neighbors have deep historical ties; only two or three families in the immediate area precede us in residency.

Simple one-legged balancing test determines your biological age – so how old are YOU really?

Researchers from the Mayo Clinic found the amount of time you are able to balance on one foot indicates how strong your bones, muscles and nerves are, which are the signs of frailty.

Being frail makes people more vulnerable to health problems because it reduces the body’s ability to cope with stressors and recover from falls and illnesses.

The average 50 year old was able to balance for roughly nine seconds, whereas an 80 year old is only able to manage three seconds.

As you might know, gentle reader, I’ve been studying martial arts for a decade or so (what? already?), and before each class begins, I stand on the mat and work on my balance by lifting one leg and holding or going performing a series of kicks without dropping my kicking leg. I’ve even recently started closing my eyes, spinning, and hopping foot to foot while changing directions of the spins.

So, yeah, I guess it makes sense that I would do better than average on this particular test.

For all the good that will do me in the real world. Apparently, the prognosis is that I will live until I die.

I posted “The Gift Schtick” in 2007; it’s an essay about how you can come into a gift-giving theme for a person based on a particular brand, icon, or image that the recipient likes. For example, my friend the Elvis impersonator gets some Elvis kitsch whenever I send him a gift. My one aunt got chicken things (although the essay says she liked geese, and prior to that she’d liked flamingoes, so maybe I was never that close to her and got her more random than thematic gifts every year).

For a while about ten years ago, I bought Duck Dynasty things for my aunt who passed away in 2019. She’d mentioned she hated the show, so I gave her obnoxious things I came across such as a beach towel and a shotglass set to supplement sincere gifts.

On Sunday, I came across this on the free book cart at church:

The Duck Commander Devotional. It made me think of my aunt.

You know, when I’m wandering antique malls, I’m often drawn to eagle or owl tchotchkes as my mother collected them, so they were safe gifting. I only have a couple such items from her as inheritances–a single owl and a single eagle piece of wall décor.

I didn’t pick up the devotional, and I don’t buy the eagles or owls, but the gift schtick association helps me to remember people with whom the individual motifs are associated. Whenever I see a Father Christmas Santa, I think of a family friend we see infrequently and for whom we are not supposed to buy Christmas gifts (but we do).

It makes me wish I actually had more gift shticks. They’re like abstract personal relics for loved ones.

At any rate, I did not take the devotional as they are not really my thing.

Also, note the scorecard for the borrowed words in the blog:

Yiddish: 2 (schtick, tchotchke)
German: 1 (kitsch)
French: 2 (décor, motif)

I checked it out because I thought kitsch might be a third Yiddish borrowing, but it was not. Then I threw in the French borrowed words just to have a third language to list. Because blogging is about the game inside the game.

This summer, I read a couple of small collections of poetry that were given away by the Salesian Missions in the 20th century (The Way and Priceless Gifts). Late last week, I learned that I myself was on a Salesian Mission fundraising list:

I’m on a lot of Catholic charity fundraising lists since I subscribe to First Things (which is turning more into what the National Review used to be back in the old days rather than a Catholic magazine per se–it even has a lot of writers that used to or still write for the National Review and is getting into the habit of reviewing their books), Touchstone (which I will let lapse as I have not found it particularly engaging), and The New Oxford Review.

It’s possible that I’ve gotten Salesian Missions pitches for years and have not paid attention. They have not, however, had little poetry collections to my sadness.

I mean, I open all the pitches and harvest anything useful. Most of the time I collect the address labels which are so popular now (one day, the return address labels will stop coming, and I don’t want to have to buy my own like it’s the Reagan-Bush years, for crying out loud). Sometimes I get a notepad (I have not only a drawer full of them with my name on it, but many with my sainted mother’s name on them–I should probably make more to-do lists or something). I get little feet medallions, angel coins, and a rosary once. But no collections of poetry from Salesian Missions.

Maybe that’s reserved for the donor lists. Maybe I should send them $5 sometime and see what I get.

I did get a couple of Christmas cards out of this envelope. Perfect for second-strike Christmas card capability. Or for if we find we have enough leftovers from years past so that we do not need to buy a box this year. Especially the ones with glitter on them.

I mentioned to my ha’brother when I visited this weekend that I used to live just down the road. Which is true for some values of “road” and “just.”

I mean, US 67 runs through Oconomowoc.

In the St. Louis area, US67 runs up Lemay Ferry Road and turns at Lindbergh where it runs around the city and crosses to Illinois at Alton, Illinois. I lived in Lemay, before this blog. Was there ever such at time? Yes, but it was last century. And Lemay is not far from that corner where it turns.

This photo is not the corner where it turns; sharp-eyed readers from St. Louis will note that Highway 21 is Tesson Ferry Road, not Lemay Ferry Road–St. Louis has a lot of roads named for the ferries which were replaced by bridges, of course (and St. Louis also has a lot of roads named for bridges). But the light at Lemay Ferry Road changed before we could get the photo.

Also, note the town of Oconomowoc is close to Okauchee and Okauchee Lake. Which means that I was near two locations specifically mentioned in my poetry: “Okauchee Light” and on the highway (I39 six miles south of Tonica) from “Central Illinois Solo”. I was not far from Bee Tree Park in South St. Louis County, but we did not swing that far south in our travels (Jefferson Barracks to lunch to I44). It made me think of specific places I have named in my poetry, and that might be two of three (although some further review might be needed for an accurate accounting). At any rate, I thought about places named in my poetry for a bit during my drive home. You can conduct your own review of named places in Coffee House Memories.

Sorry, I digress.

So in addition to my home in Lemay being “just down the road” from Nogglestead (the Old Wire Road which runs through Battlefield, Missouri, and used to run through my neighbor’s pasture was a part of Telegraph Road in St. Louis County–both followed the telegraph line from Jefferson Barracks to Fort Smith, Arkansas), it’s just down the road from my ha’brother’s house. Of course, my brother in Missouri wins here, too: He lived in my sainted mother’s old house in Lemay after she passed, and he also later lived in Poplar Bluff, Missouri, so he has lived just down the road from my ha’brother twice.