Category: Life

May 7: Free Comic Book Day

You know, I don’t normally play chess because most knowledgeable opponents recognize the Noggle Blitz for what it really is–a shortsighted attempt to take as many of the opponent’s pieces as fast as possible while sowing confusion with those inexplicable queen-for-knight swaps.

Of course, I don’t normally drink hard liquor either. But this Shot Glass Chess Set might make me take up both. Take a piece, do a shot!

I wonder what the blogosphere’s resident chessophile would think?

UPDATE: Pejman says what he thinks.

Imagine my horror this morning when I discovered that I opened my new toothbrush from the wrong end:

Jeez, I should have read all instructions carefully. By removing the toothbrush from the box handle first, I’ve not only violated the warranty, which means that if this toothbrush fails to clean my teeth effectively, I cannot return it to the manufacturer for repair, but also that I have actually diminished the effectiveness of the toothbrush whose toothcleaning power was actually activated by the upward motion of the toothbrush head through the OPEN THIS END side.

Not to mention this very blog entry will be used as evidence against me at the next hearing, making it harder for me to acquire and receive a license for toothbrushes in the future.

What a sucky way to start my day.

Save Toby.

Toby is the cutest little bunny on the planet. Unfortunately, he will DIE on June 30th, 2005 if you don’t help. I rescued him several months ago. I found him under my porch, soaking wet, injured from what appeared to be an attack from an alley cat. I took him in, thinking he had no chance to live from his injuries, but miraculously, he recovered. I have since spent several months nursing him to health. Toby is a fighter, that’s for sure.

Unfortunately, on June 30th, 2005, Toby will die. I am going to eat him. I am going to take Toby to a butcher to have him slaughter this cute bunny. I will then prepare Toby for a midsummer feast. I have several recipes under consideration, which can be seen, with some pretty graphic images, under the recipe section.

As a poor young man in Milwaukee in the middle 1970s, I ate a lot of rabbit. My father had a string of traps in the city parks and sometimes shot rabbits right out of his car. We ate so much rabbit my father called it “Fuzzy Chicken.” Say what you will, but we never went too hungry when my father was between jobs.

Does using the word bollix in an office e-mail create a hostile work environment, or is it merely tacky?

Because I can handle tacky.

Sure, Cagey throws me a bone and reminds me that the Atari 2600 was only # 9 in MobilePC’s The Top 100 Gadgets of All Time, but come on, it’s a magazine entitled Mobile PC–who could have foreseen that laptops and PDAs would weigh heavily?

As a retaliatory strike, I say to him: How many of these classic games do you recognize by their screenshots? It should be easy, old timer, since you’ve probably played at least one of them at an Atari Party sometime and you’ve played the close sibling of another.

(Link seen on A Small Victory.)

JC T-Shirts: They could be hot sellers in Nigeria!

That’s what I assume from this e-mail I received:

Hello,
We want to order some product from your store to our store in lagos,Nigeria.First of all,we will like to know maybe you shipp via (USPS GLOBAL EXPRESS 4-5 DAYS DELIVERY SERVICE).And the method of payment will be made by major credit card. Kindly respond to this enquiry as soon as possible.Looking forward to hearing from you soon.
Best regards.

Accept a credit card payment and drop ship to Nigeria? What could possibly go wrong?

But you, gentle reader, can still order any of these snazzy designs through Cafe Press:

Visualize World Hegemony

Cog in the Machine

Tao Sharks

Here’s your future trivia question answer for the week. Remember it and you’ll be the hero of your trivia night in five years:

Flash mob

I first saw this new form of apostrophe abuse on a late night car dealer’s ad (Yes, George Weber, you’re the offender). However, I see that even CNN is doing it now:

The new abuse: putting 05′ to indicate 2005. You schnucking cretins, don’t you understand the apostrophe represents what was removed? It ought to be ’05, to signify that you, like John Donne and William Shakespeare, have removed something where the apostrophe is.

Oh, but no. Now, in addition to being the tick mark to indicate feet instead of inches, according to the new rules, you can sprinkle an apostrophe any where you want to indicate something in the expression has been truncated. Because readers love puzzles, and maybe they’ll click the link or go to the automobile showroom to find out just what the illiterate meant.

We here in the Noggle Household recycle a lot. But instead of paying several dollars a month to have the locally-contracted waste removal company take a select number of items, categorized just so and following these said rules so that the uncaring garbagemen can dump the recycleables into a single truck and drive it to the dump, we separate a our goods and sneak them to another municipality’s recycling center. We can recycle a greater number of items this way, for the same cost in gas, and we’re further abstracted from the corner-cutting that will bury our recycleables in a landfill.

But Ann Althouse speaks the real reason we don’t put our recycling at the curb:

Good thing we drank a lot of milk this week so there are plenty of bulky milk containers to cover up all the wine and beer bottles that conveniently sink to the bottom — otherwise the locals might think ill of us — but then they’d probably think ill of us if we had a lot of diet soda cans — or even soda cans, period.

I had to buy a pickup truck to ferry my empties to the recycling facility. Even so, I don’t expect that the neighbors think the clinking in the opaque black bags is milk bottles.

Attention other husbands out there: Les Miserables is not an up-and-coming blues band. Your wife is tricking you to see a singing play. Don’t fall for it, or you, too, might find yourself having nightmares about living in a world where everyone communicates by singing, and you only understand one word in four.

Or so I heard.

UPDATE: Another band geek weighs in.

I’m involved in some personal study on Visual Basic.NET and have picked out an appropriate text, but sometimes it’s hard to sit down and actually read and study. So last night, I developed the Noggle Method of education:

1. Open a beer.
2. Read a chapter or two of the book.
3. Watch an episode of The Simpsons.

Repeat.

Last night, I read almost a hundred pages. Sure, I can’t remember much of what I read, but that’s another feature of the Noggle Method–apparently, not only is the learning quicker, but so is the forgetting.

Also, my self-esteem is pretty high.

I took Pell Grant money from the Federal Government as part of my college financing package.

You, gentle reader, should then assume that all words on this blog and all independent thoughts and ideas I have are duly vetted and approved by the administration of President George H.W. Bush, by whose largesse I could afford a private university.

Update: Read my longer take on the Maggie Gallagher artifiscandal here.

At the local recycling facility this afternoon, I say the following bumper sticker:

Support Organic Farmers

I assume that person will be one of the last to welcome our new robot farmer overlords.

I just returned from one of those January holiday parties, and I admit that I, too, was finally offended by the overtly PC sensitivity people who insist on calling it a holiday party instead of naming it properly to pay homage to the reason for the season.

The people throwing the party should have called it a Martin Luther King, Jr., Day Party along with any company throwing parties for their employees in January and calling them “Holiday Parties.”

Over at Boots and Sabers, Owen is covering the proposals to increase minimum wage in Wisconsin using a lot of insightful commentary, meaningful statistics and projections. We here at MfBJN won’t rise to that level of discourse, preferring to build consensus on anecdotal evidence about the negative impact of minimum wage increases on the morale of the brighter and harder working mambers of the lower end of the wage scale. Who am I kidding? It’s all about me.

I got my first job in the summer of 1990 in Milwaukee at a grocery store. I worked as a bagger and accepted minumum wage, $3.85 an hour, as a matter of course. All the teenage boys and infrequent twentysomething bagger started at minimum wage. Gold’s Shop Rite wasn’t a union shop, so the raises weren’t planned nor mandated. Still, my exemplary nature as an employee shone through as I learned the facets of the business and could be called upon to not only man the checkout lanes, but also to handle the other sundry duties involved in grocery stores without goading from managers. To reward me, they gave me a $.20 or a $.25 raise, so I was making about $4.00 an hour. Then they trained me to run a cash register, one of a few baggers ever entrusted to do so, so they raised me to the checker’s starting wage as a reward. As such, I received two merit raises in under a year, and by March of 1991, I was making $4.20 an hour. It’s a pittance, I know, but it wasn’t brain surgery. I was very pleased to be recognized and rewarded by earning more than people who’d started the job before me.

When I opened my check in the first week of April, I noticed my wage had increased $.05. Without prompting. That’s an odd raise, I thought, and my first instinct was to draw the error to the attention of the store manager. Then I remembered something about the minimum wage going up.

Of course my employer couldn’t raise my salary respective to the minimum wage, as it already had to contend with increased labor costs in a low margin business. The federal government and my duly elected legislators had deemed me as equal to the freshest, least productive employee hired off the street even though my employer had thought otherwise. Thank you, Uncle Sam, for returning me to my place as poor cog in the machine, getting uppity and increasing my earning power without the help of my betters in bureaucracy. Thank you, comrades, for ensuring that other people who didn’t bust their hump were rewarded the same as I was.

See, to this day it rankles me. I was working hard in a low paying job, and I went from a cut above everyone else to earning just as much as anyone else. I know how much a little bit more matters–I spent almost three years after college switching jobs for an extra quarter an hour–but on that April day, the minimum wage increase forced me to trade a point of pride–my heightened salary–for two dollars a week more in income. Pre-tax.

You know, I always put the outgoing mail in the mailbox with the stamp to the left. It’s not a conscious thing, but it just seems right to have the addresses rotated counterclockwise. Isn’t that weird?

6. Health Information

D) Do you, or any family member listed in Section 5, take any medicine(s), drugs, pills or herbs, or require shots? X Yes _ No

If you checked any itesm in Question C or answered “yes” to Question D, please complete the following (use additional application form, if necessary):

Name of Person	Condition	Dates Diagnosed and Treated	Type of Treatment/ Names of Medications	Current or Further Treatment?
Brian J.			Basil
Brian J.			Sage

Well, they asked what herbs I was on.