To be able to say "Noggle," you first must be able to say "Nah."
Michele at A Small Victory has her Vic 20 skin up.
I saw it, and I had a flashback.
In the immortal words of Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones:
10 POKE(53280,0)
20 POKE(53281,0)
You damn kids won’t get it, but you old school geeks will.
Except you Apple II geeks, but we’ll be talking to you in the playground after school.
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MSN’s dating expert offers some advice for dating a celebrity.
Hey, my beautiful wife is becoming rather popular in the cool blogging cliques, so perhaps I can pick up some tips. Here’s the points:
Man, that’s depressing. All pessimism and exploitation.
Perhaps I should wait for the advice for marrying an immortal goddess of beauty, baking, and bicyclery column.
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So last weekend we got our first real snow of the season here. I like snow and all — it’s real pretty and covers my questionable lawn quite nicely — but snow has serious drawbacks as well.
Dude, autumn already takes care of that with leaves. I mean, I had to snatch some from the brown lawn bags at the end of the neighbor’s driveway since I don’t have any trees in my front yard, and then I had to manually spread them on the lawn much more evenly than Nature would have, but it covered the weird desert camoflauge colors that Soysia takes on in August when you properly scalp the lawn to two inches in the summer drought.
So my lawn still looks good even now that the good old fashioned Wisconsin Snow has been replaced by the Missouri Snow, which is what Wisconsonites call “rain.”
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I absolutely love the Trivial Pursuit DVD Pop Culture Edition that you got me for Christmas or for my birthday next year, or maybe Christmas next year.
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Well I’m gonna be forgiven
If I wanna spend my living
With a long cool woman in a black dress
Just a 5-9 beautiful tall
With just one look I was a bad mess
‘Cause that long cool woman had it all
Had it all, had it all, had it all…
Day two thousand, four hundred, and seventy-nine two. Surviving on beer, popcorn, and cherry flavored Craisins.
Hurry home, honey. I miss you.
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Neil Steinberg relates wisdom in his latest column:
Elias wrote an excruciating book about surviving Auschwitz. I heard her five years ago, so can’t quote her, directly, but she ended her speech by saying something like this:
I have this dream. I dream I am walking up to my family’s home in Czechoslovakia. The windows are all lit up, and I know that everybody is well, and there, home, waiting for me. And then I awaken, and it’s so sweet, because they were all there, clearly, and so sad, because it was only a dream. And that is what I’d like to tell you today — if you are lucky enough to be going home later, and the lights of your house are bright, and your family is all there, waiting, you should stop and savor it as the precious gift it is, because someday it too will be just a dream.
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On Sunday, while frantically scanning the AM band for the Packers game, I uncovered Real Oldies 1430. Ahhhh.
Friends, the FM band in the St. Louis area has consolidated into a half dozen “Greatest Hits of the 70s, 80s, 90s, and Now!” station, each of which distinguishes itself by playing the eighteen song nationalized playlist in a different order! The Great Oldies Shift has stripped fifties and early sixties music from the dial, instead focusing on the decade popularized by That 70s Show and the “retro” Reagan era.
So I’m happy to see a station still playing the older stuff, and on AM radio. That’s how this was supposed to sound, with a hint of static. Man, I hear it and I hearken back to my youth, back in 1964, cruising for girls with Bob Greene. No, wait, that’s a little before I was born, but rest assured, you damn kids, AM radio was not.
So pardon me while I dabble in some of my own nostalgia and some borrowed. You kids wouldn’t appreciate the subtle hiss of a groove either. Get offa my lawn, or I’ll beat you with the frozen hose.
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The holidays present a quick and convenient way to donate to charitable causes, particularly the Salvation Army. Outside every retail outlet, it seems, a volunteer has set up shop with a bell and a kettle. I usually pitch the change from my transaction into the kettle (as if you didn’t know I use cash!) when I encounter one of these bell ringers. I know it’s a little bit, but cumulatively a lot of little bits add up.
However, I don’t care to put the money in an unattended kettle. I don’t know where the bell ringers go, but I find a lot of kettles that had previously featured the melody of unenthusiastic and sometimes almost-frostbitten bellringing accompanied by a rousing rendition of John Cage’s 4’33”. I don’t know what NLRB regulations dictate for professional bell ringers, or what union benefits they enjoy, but they get a lot of warm-up, cigarette, coffee, and/or lunch breaks.
Now, it’s not that I want to be any less a nice guy when this happens, but I don’t want to throw change into an unguarded repository. Partly, it’s because I don’t want it to get stolen. Also, partly it’s because I don’t want to just be a Pavlovian dog. I refuse to respond to the stimulus of the red kettle unless I hear the bell ringing.
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Let me count the reasons:
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This weekend, I didn’t get to post because I went home (Wisconsin, that beautiful northern state that’s also home to Harvey, Owen, and DC) to help my brother move from Milwaukee to LaCrosse. It’s the other side of the state, but fortunately the short way.
It was good to be home. It’s easy to forget the experience of being in Milwaukee during winter football season, wherein a full fifteen percent of the population wears apparel bearing the Green Bay Packers logo. I am not kidding. It’s one thing to remember it abstractly, but to see it firsthand is always somewhat shocking.
And they think they have football fans in St. Louis.
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I saw children standing on the corner waiting for the bus. By themselves. In 20 degree weather.
Here in tropical Casinoport, Missouri, children don’t wait on the corner for the bus. They wait in running SUVs that crowd about the corner. When it’s sixty degrees.
Must be the small town life, or hardy Northern stock.
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On the way home from LaCrosse, I passed through Madison, Wisconsin, and I had the urge to stop to Ann Packer’s house. It would be the proper way to express my appreciation for her book, and if she had her Christmas lights up already, it might lend a spooky ethereal effect if they blinked through streamers of Charmin.
Silly me! I remembered then that she lives in Northern California and only writes “authentic” novels about Wisconsinites who only come alive when they leave Wisconsin for cosmopolitan locales. Maybe I could have thrown a perfect Brett Favre spiral and one-hopped a roll to northern California if I bounced it just right in Colorado, but odds were it’d hit the eastern side of the Rockies and flutter hopelessly down, leaving her home unscathed.
It was a long drive home. I had a lot of time to think.
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Honey, I just want to apologize in advance for the coming time when the Department of Homeland Security kicks in our doors with drawn weapons, when they put a couple of nine millimeter slugs into our nine pound tabby because they feared for their safety, they haul off our myriad computers, and interrogate us for hours on end to prompt us to admit our non-existent guilt or plead guilty to unspecified charges because of what I did today. I didn’t mean for it to turn out this way.
You see, honey, I went to the opthamologist’s office today, and when they called me by my name, I followed the technician into an examination room. She hit me with the requisite salvo of eye drops that rendered me a nocturnal creature in the middle of the afternoon, and then she input my information directly into a workstation. Wow! What an advanced place! A workstation in every exam room! Then the technician told me that the doctor would be in shortly, and then she left the room. Without locking the workstation.
After the doctor saw me and assured me I would not need an eyepatch just yet, he asked if there was anything else. So of course I told him the lax security his enterprise offered, leaving patients alone with access to his computer network and his patient records was a very bad thing. He said that restarting the computer would take too long, and he’d have to cut the number of patients he saw in half–not explicitly stating his perceived dilemma of patient information security versus his bank account. He also said that sooner or later you have to trust people, and he trusts his patients wouldn’t do anything like that. Hell, I trust people, but we lock the doors here in la casa Noggle even when we’re home.
So I am sorry, baby. Because when some hacker, cracker, or whatever the bad man terms himself finds himself sitting in that chair while the doctor politely answers all of another patient’s questions, this bad man will see what he can do. And if the bad man’s not careful, someone will know that someone’s been hacking the good doctor’s computers, and the good doctor will remember one name was concerned with his security: Noggle.
So this will be the thanks I get for trying to spread a little cheerful-but-relevant paranoia into the non-technology fields. Maybe I’ll get the lucky double whammy of having my personal information stolen, too. Of course, it’s not clear what a bad man would do with my cornea thickness, and I surely didn’t share my SSN with anyone unless I’m getting money from them.
Honey, I hope you can forgive me. And remember to do some off-site backup of your critical documents because we won’t see those PCs again.
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Want to know what to get me for Christmas? Any of the stuff at Napping.com, of course.
(Link seen on some poor Caps fan’s site.)
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Brought to you by Harvey of Bad Money:
Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm.
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Although this guy doesn’t care much for winter, I have to tell you, I would trade what he’s got for what I have.
Eighty degrees in November. I have the windows open and the ceiling fan on. Cripes! It’s November, the ninth eleventh month.
I don’t even have weight in the back of the pickup truck (sans stars-n-bars, Howie). What’s the point? It will just get wet when it rains for Christmas.
What’s a Wisconsinite to do?
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Okay, it’s not a quizilla thing, but while I was hanging around on MSN, checking Bill Gates’s sofa for hundred thousand dollar bills that might have fallen out of his pockets or from the books in which he uses them as bookmarks, I came across an important headline: Are you among the 19 million depressed? I just had to know! Come along with me, then, as I take the test.
| 17 million! That’s a more exclusive bunch than lottery winners, if you factor in dollar and ticket winners. I want to join! |
| Most of the time? No one told me this was going to be a math test.
Let’s see, I spend a third of my time sleeping, so that means if I spend half my waking time sad, that’s only 33% and not most. Let’s see, I spend 14% of my waking time angry at the crazy other drivers, and 32% furious at thoughtless cretins in the government or who want to get into the government who would dictate my life better than I do, 10% in alcohol-fueled mellowness, 2% in alcohol-fueled blackouts (wherein I could be sad, to be honest, but this is only 2% against the total), and 18.5% of the time in vague meloncholy (is that sadness? What are the parameters for sad?). Is that 100% of the 67%….aw, just put down No and then click Submit. Interesting button choice. Submit! |
| Do I have trouble doing or enjoying the things I used to do? I’ve always been a lazy sack of crap, and it just gets easier.
Man, this question must certainly suck for former athletes or people who peaked early. Never make it to the crest, and you never have to go down hill, I say, so I click No. |
| That about covers my life. Sometimes, I stay up until midnight writing even though I get up at five to go to work, and then when I am on vacation, it’s arise at ten, nap from noon until one, nap from five till six, and then go to bed at one or two. The Good Life.
Kinda funny that if I don’t get exactly the right amount of sleep might be a sign of depression. Might also be a sign of ambition or a life. At any rate, I must click Yes. |
| Losing or gaining weight? Once again, the only way to not be depressed is to be status quo.
Personally, I like to attribute my weight gain to any or all of the following:
Of course, it could be the depression. Also, my appetites have changed; I prefer dark beers to pilsners. Why oh why do I go on?? Oh, because it’s only question 4. Click Yes. |
| I can’t make decisions (Yes/No)
Sometimes the jokes write themselves. I struggle to not get too lost in double negatives and click No. |
| This question’s all about feelings. Damn feminine crap.
I know I am hopeless and worthless, so who cares about how I feel about it? I feel fine about it; feeling bad about not having any hope or value outside a couple bucks worth of chemical compounds comprising this hunk of reflective meat won’t change a thing about it. So I click No. |
| Tired for no reason? Probably not. Usually I get tired because I’ve been working hard, or I get tired because I’m depressed, but never for no reason. Click No. |
| Hmmm. If we rephrase this question to “I, myself, think about killing,” then we’d have a ooooh boy and how, or its closest equivalent, Yes.
However, since I think they mean suicide, I had to click No. If I considered suicide, my wife would kill me. |
| The result?
I am not depressed, so I cannot join that exclusive fraternity, and of course I’m bummed. But was I honest with myself? Did I lie? What if I lied and I didn’t know about it? Was I trying to hide something from this anonymous test? Was it really anonymous, or was Microsoft really storing the results so they could cross-reference my answers and my MAC address to provide a psychiatric profile they could sell to insurers and pop-under ad companies? Perhaps depression would be the least of my mental health worries. |
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Whereas a cat named John Galt led me to my soulmate, other Objectivists out there won’t be so lucky.
Fortunately, there’s now a dating service for Ayn Rand fans.
(Link seen on VodkaPundit.)
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Kim du Toit has posted a letter from an Englishman who’s becoming an American and wants to buy his first gun.
Here’s a note to Ozaukee County Sheriff Maury Straub, who is doesn’t know anyone who’s ever had to protect his or her life with deadly force:
Violent crime in the UK is about 4 times higher than in the US. The conclusion I have come to is that’s because of guns (I really, really, kept an open mind about the good/bad things about guns). In the adult years I was in England, (18 to 27, a total of 9 years):
- my house was burgled 3 times (the third time, my room mate was severely beaten, because he was home)
- my car was broken into twice
- car stolen once
- and I was assaulted twice.
The writer of this letter never had to protect himself with a gun either because it wasn’t an option. Hopefully, soon, in Wisconsin and Missouri it will be.
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I posted last Saturday about the guy who was selling the Beanie Babies for tools and beer. Well, it’s turned into a he-said, she-said, wherein he might have been selling counterfeits. The winning bidder has taken action on Trader List which is apparently some sort of Internet enclave of people who buy and sell a lot of meaningless stuff through the Internet.
But while perusing this complaint, I couldn’t help note:
using my primary ID, alerting him to the fact that it was rather unlikely that the five hard-to-find beanies would turn out to be genuine and suggesting that he should pull the auction, relist the common ones, and send the others for authentication.
There is no need to explain my message further because he printed the message, without the “disclaimer” and “counterfeit” eBay rules I had included , and INCLUDED MY ID. He posted also that he had blocked me from bidding. I had also alerted eBay that the auction should be pulled because it was fraught with disclaimers. eBay paid no attention to its own rule and did nothing. I also alerted eBay that he had posted my ID, which is against eBay rules, and again, nothing was done.
From the tenor of the listing, I believed the seller to be an angry person, upset by his wife leaving him, but did question that if she was such an avid collector why she would leave behind the rare and valuable beanies. I checked his feedback with over 500 positives and no negatives, his “ME” posting, and later his name and address which checked out. Based on this I bid using my glorybeeto ID. I learned later that two friends asked him questions about the beanies and he did not respond. I did not question him with my bidding ID because I felt, in light of his obvious anger, he would block that ID as well. (Emphasis mine)
Man, what drama unfolds. Counterfeit beanies! Multiple eBay IDs! Cabals of Beanie Believers! The FBI!
We all want to be heroes in some sweeping epic, but some people settle for children’s books.
(Link seen on Best of the Web Today.)
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