To be able to say "Noggle," you first must be able to say "Nah."
Missouri Job Center to host healthcare hiring event on Tuesday, nine employers expected to attend
They’ve certainly made room for new hires with all the firings for not being vaccinated even though the former employees worked through the worst pandemic EVER!!!! without dying.
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Jim Treacher, a RINO who probably wanted Hillary to win, said:
Yesterday I joked about Marvel giving Paste-Pot Pete his own movie because they’re running out of decades-old comics characters to exploit. Well, the joke’s on me, because Marvel just announced a 2022 Halloween special for Disney Plus that will feature… Werewolf By Night. If the character’s name confuses you, he’s a werewolf. Who comes out by night. Which is redundant if you’re at all familiar with the werewolf legends, but whatever.
C’mon, man, he preferred to be called The Trapster.
But if when it comes to Z-level Marvel characters who I’d like to see, it would be The Fabulous Frog-Man or Speedball.
Of course, they would probably be on Disney+, which I won’t subscribe to, or released in theaters, and I’ve been over super hero movies for some time now. So it wouldn’t matter much to me. And given the things I’ve recently picked up in the dollar comic boxes at Nameless City, I might be over comics too.
Which leaves me more time for men’s adventure paperbacks, I guess.
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MoDOT hosts public hearing on interchange upgrade on U.S. 60 in Rogersville
C’mon, man, we know what that means in 2021.
Roundabouts. Two, in fact.
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The Very Intersectional Caterpillar: Lefty children’s literature is coming to a library near you.:
Recently, I perused three emails from bookstores offering children’s book recommendations from a national “Indie Next” program organized by the American Booksellers Association (ABA). Amid 93 new books, all published since May, I couldn’t find one that would appeal to my boys. The choices included a “feel-good contemporary romance” about a young trans athlete fighting against a “discriminatory law targeting trans athletes”; a book about a young lesbian with pansexual and nonbinary friends who denounced her white privilege; a “queer coming of age story” about a young lesbian who joins the boy’s football team; a young-adult novel about genderfluidity by a non-binary writer who is the mother of a transgender child; a “tale of self-discovery” about a bisexual love triangle; a book about a transgender witch named Wyatt; and a “fabulously joyful” novel about “drag, prom, and embracing your inner queen” that featured “a fat, openly gay boy stuck in a small West Texas town.” Other titles included the tale of a Puerto Rican eighth-grader who “navigates . . . the systemic pressures of toxic masculinity and housing insecurity in a rapidly gentrifying Brooklyn”; a young-adult thriller with a bisexual protagonist that explores the “politics of systemic racism”; and Don’t Hate the Player, a novel about gamers I thought would appeal to the boys until I realized it was about a young feminist battling misogyny from the “male-dominated gaming community.”
My son, a sophomore now (WHAT? He’s only five, ainna?), and for an English project, he was allowed to choose from a menu of books to read, with wide ranging topics from all cops are bastards to all soldiers are war criminals to coming of age and coming out. When I was in high school, I read Last of the Mohicans as a sophomore and A Tale of Two Cities as a freshman–among other things.
The good news is that he and a number of his classmates see it for what it is and aren’t especially duped by it.
They’re not becoming readers, either, though.
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A number of places I’ve seen have reported former president Bill Clinton’s recent hospital stay thusly:
Bill Clinton was released from the hospital for an infection that was not COVID.
It was, however, sepsis (mentioned in this Daily Mail article, but not the New York Post article linked above).
Sepsis kills eleven million people every year. But at least it wasn’t COVID.
But it’s important that the headlines and reporting mention that it was not Wuhan Flu.
Because it’s important that we we not doubt that Clinton is part of the sophisticated, vaccinated crowd.
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Parson says Missouri is pursuing prosecution after St. Louis reporter finds state data flaw:
Gov. Mike Parson said he was pursuing criminal prosecution against the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and its reporters Thursday after the newspaper discovered a data vulnerability in a state website.
Sections of the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education’s website allowed someone visiting the site to search through teacher credentials and certifications, revealing Social Security numbers within the HTML source code of the pages, the Post-Dispatch reported. That source code is available to anyone visiting a website on a web browser.
Yeah, pumping out the social security numbers in hidden fields is bad juju, and it does not require any manner of hacking to get to it.
I wonder why Parson has gone nuclear over this? To shore up his support with educational professionals? C’mon, man.
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Trading For Treasure: the pandemic creates a trading card boom:
Get out the old dusty shoeboxes from the attic because a historic trading card boom is underway. One company is cashing in by helping thousands around the world buy and sell little cardboard versions of their beloved sports icons.
Once a beacon of childhood memories for generations, trading cards are now a booming business for the Camann family in Richmond, Virginia.
Wild cards: Spree has police wondering if bistate gaming thefts are linked:
The thief who shattered the glass door and display cases at Realms of Gaming here Monday, swiping thousands of dollars’ worth of collectible trading cards, also may be behind similar break-ins in St. Louis County.
Police in the bistate region will be sharing notes Wednesday to see if the burglaries are the work of the same people, said Troy police Chief Brent Shownes.
“We’re learning of more and more of these,” Shownes said, estimating a half-dozen such burglaries in recent days.
They include break-ins at two game stores on Watson Road. Game Nite at 8380 Watson Road in Marlborough and Yeti Gaming at 8920 Watson Road in Crestwood were burglarized late Sunday night and early Monday.
I still don’t plan on retiring based on the value of my middle 1980s baseball cards. But perhaps I should plan on having to defend them with deadly force.
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Headbanger Recall? Parents ask to boot principal over Iron Maiden fandom:
Some Canadian parents want a heavy metal-loving high school principal to headbang her way to another job.
Parents at Eden High School in St. Catharines, Ontario launched a petition to remove Principal Sharon Burns because she is an unabashed fan of the legendary British band Iron Maiden.
Fortunately, the church has re-organized its Sunday School program over the last two years, so my beautiful wife does not face ouster from her only child-related instructional role over her notorious Iron Maiden fandom, and decades of uploads have knocked her from a high position on Google image searches for legs. Come to think of it, she is a scandal in a skirt.
At any rate, I think it’s just another instance of only looking at the iconography and metaphor and not looking through it to the substance. Iron Maiden’s music might have satanic themes, although not as much as some, but so does Dr. Faustus. But one should not confuse the appearance with the meaning, ainna?
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It’s so unlike me to do a link dump, but I’ve got a number of interesting bits open in tabs and not enough time to write a post about each. Not that I spend hours writing intelligent, well thought out, and cohesive/comprehensive gloss on what others write anyway.
Suddenly, living in trailers is a hipster paradise: Micro House On Wheels Built For Off-Grid Living.
Yeah, no, I lived in a trailer because we couldn’t afford anything else. I’m not going to do it because it’s cool. Although kids today live in the new subscription economy, where monthly payments for lots more this-n-thats, cell phones, streaming services, and food delivery and whatnot have more line items in the budget than the utilities of old.
Although sometimes I think life would be simpler if I downsized to a single wide somewhere, I know it would not solve the restlessnesses that vex me from time to time because it’s not the sky, it’s myself. Or what Horace said.
A Study of Action-Adventure Fiction: The Executioner and Mack Bolan
Joe at Glorious Trash, whom I linked yesterday, also pointed me to this scholarly work on the early Mack Bolan books. However, a quick online search reveals that it runs $300 or so, so I’ll have to wait until after I get my copy of Summa Theologica, if ever–I have scheduled to forget I want this for next Tuesday.. Unless I find it for a buck at a book sale.
At the Imaginative Conservative Poetry and Holding the Center talks lauds memorizing poetry and how what you’ve just read tends to appear in the real world:
In an article for First Things in May of this year, the British writer Dan Hitchens reflected on what it meant to have poetry memorized, to have it “by heart,” as the old expression goes. He quotes a number of poems that have had a personal meaning to him or to others; as he puts it, they often don’t produce an epiphany, but rather “make sense of a feeling.”
What he means is a little different from the way that literature illuminates experience by making us see the real world more perceptively. The other afternoon, my daughter Julia was reading to me from the The Little Town on the Prairie, the seventh in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s series, and in this scene, Laura tries to teach a young calf to drink milk rather than to suck it from her mother. She has to counter the calf’s instinct to butt the cow’s milk bag because the calf would knock over the bucket. After Julia finished reading, we went inside to dinner, and through the glass door we could see a fawn and a doe (mule deer are everywhere in Wyoming) close by in the adjoining pasture. The fawn repeatedly butted its mother’s milk bag, swinging its head up violently as it tried to nurse, obviously with the same instinct as the calf. It was like an illustration. Would we have noticed it in the same way if we had not just read Wilder’s description?
(Bob Belvedere of The Camp of the Saints turned me onto The Imaginative Conservative through Facebook postings–I am thinking about adding them to my blogroll but have not yet.)
An almost two month old article came to my attention via a Facebook feed: Some white-collar workers are secretly balancing 2 full-time jobs and earning up to $600,000, a report says. They drop in and out of multiple meetings to avoid getting caught.
I have known some operators like this, and double-dippers like this have made for awkward moments when interviewers ask me if their companies hire me whether I’d continue to consult. The answer is, yes, a little, from time to time, to keep my company active and to continue to support local causes who might have come to depend a little on my company for support. But not two full time positions at once, brah–I’m not going to burn myself out like that. But I am sure many of the interviewers have not believed me. If I were unscrupulous, though, I would just lie.
After reading John Kass’s recent As the Idiocracy takes the country to the dogs, who wins the Golden Moutza of the Month?, I wanted to learn to do a proper moutza. So here’s Kass himself explaining it:
I still need to learn to properly pronounce feesah etho, though.
Okay, I think that’s it; I can close all those tabs now.
Now, in a Paul Harvey voice, Good day!
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A local lawmaker has made an official request for Springfield Public Schools to search three years worth of email and other documents for any reference to critical race theory and 21 other “trigger” words or phrases.
State Rep. Craig Fishel filed the far-reaching Sunshine Law request in early September. The district responded to provide the cost for searching, copying and redacting an untold number of public records.
The district requested a deposit of at least $170,000 to start searching different servers. The final cost, including any copying and redaction, was expected to be higher, although the exact amount was unknown.
Fishel, a Republican from Springfield, alleged the district used “worst case scenarios to inflate the cost of fulfilling the request,” according to a press release sent Sept. 28 by the Missouri House.
Remember, gentle reader, SPS was just sued by employees over equity training and revised its public comment policy at its school board meetings.
Nothing to see here, move along.
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Jogger hit by a car on U.S. 65 near Fair Grove, Mo.
The woman kept on running after the car hit her. She eventually returned to the scene with minor injuries.
You know, running out of Nogglestead takes you on a number of two-lane farm roads with high rates of speed and a state highway, but I’ve only had to dodge a car once (as it turns out, one of the fellows with whom I’ve studied martial arts and who built our new pool fence nine years ago was driving right behind the car I dodged and saw the whole thing).
One more reason for me to not run. Because if I got hit by a car, I would take the opportunity to lie down for a little while. Unlike some Gladyses of the world.
Also, the question arises, How out of date is “man card”? Seven years? Ten? Or more?
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One of the British tabs had a guessing game headline:
GUESS WHO Hunky actor is unrecognisable after he’s transformed into an OAP for new film
C’mon, man, it’s Benedict Cumberbatch. Even less difficult than guessing Simon LeBon.
And as for a bit of a behind-the-scenes note here at MfBJN: In composing this post, I fact-checked myself and did not publish two things I thought to be true but which are not.
First, I asserted in a throw-away line that Benedict Cumberbatch had two doctorates, one in Who and one in Strange. However, I looked to make sure he did play Doctor Who, but guess what? He’s one of the British actors who appeared in American media around the same time, so I just assume that they all played the new Doctor Who at some point. However, neither he nor Tom Hiddleston actually played Doctor Who, which I shall have to remember to avoid making this mistake, perhaps in haste, in the future.
The second one was that I was going to make light of this other article from The Sun the same day:
I was going to say, Haw, Haw, dumb journalist! That’s not a spade, that’s a shovel! However, apparently in Britain, according to this Web site, and perhaps everywhere in the world except Nogglestead, the spade does not look like the playing card suit with a pointed tip; what we call a spade at Nogglestead is merely a digging shovel, and the spade has a flat edge after all.
So journalists and headline writers in the U.K. might be smarter than me. Or perhaps I need to work in the garden more instead of spending a lot of time writing and researching a blog post to be seen by a handful of people.
But rest assured, I have lairs and lairs of fact checkers.
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A local religious university, under pressure from some vocal but numerically small group or another, changed its mascot from the Crusaders…
to Valor.
Um, yeah, no. Try again. Maybe the Robins.
Or they could go with Golden Eagles, which is what the university I graduated from changed its mascot to to get out from the naked racism of…
the Warriors.
The countdown begins until some vocal but numerically small group starts saying that valor is a white European thing that offends someone.
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Forget Netflix, some movie fans rewind to VHS tapes:
That hasn’t stopped die-hards. A small community of VHS fanatics has sprung up around the country, trading tapes and tips on how to watch. Much of it is organized around small boxes where people can drop off or pick up tapes. The “Free Blockbuster ” boxes started in Los Angeles and spread. There are VHS tape trading events and auctions.
In the late 1990s, Hollywood studios began selling films on DVDs and VHS rentals lost their grip on home viewings. Blu-ray took over in the early 2000s. By 2010 Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy protection.
Mis. Hum. at the Ace of Spades HQ overnight thread says:
Vinyl went by the wayside, but has made a return.
Lordy, I hope not. I’ve seen what has happened to the price of records in the wild, and now that I’m actively accumulating VHS and DVDs, I’d hate for the prices also to quintuple.
But, wait, the article is actually about a silly Little Free Videocassette Sharing fad:
To try to re-create a bit of the video-store experience, Brian Morrison started Free Blockbuster in 2019. The group turns former newspaper boxes into free little libraries of movies. VHS die-hards hope the effort encourages the exchange of home entertainment with strangers in their neighborhood.
Yeah, never mind. Nothing to worry about yet.
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Jobless Americans will have few options as benefits expire
Workers are seeing higher wages as Springfield businesses struggle to hire amid labor shortage
Few options. As few as all the Now Hiring signs that are on every freaking business in the area.
But one fewer option for free government money, though.
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I saw this on the front page of some British tabloid:
And I didn’t have to guess who he played on Doctor Who. He played Sabalom Glitz in the “Trial of a Time Lord” multi-parter.
I haven’t mentioned the character here on the blog in six months.
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What happened to the The Handmaid’s Tale references? Not fresh enough thirty-five years after the book originally appeared and four Republican presidents that did not lead to a theocracy later?
Sultan: What will we tell our daughters?
Imagine the mothers in Afghanistan.
The ones who were able to attend school as children and were forced to keep their daughters at home when the Taliban took over.
Consider how much it must hurt for your daughter to have fewer rights and opportunities than you had because religious extremists forced their beliefs on an entire country.
Imagine the mothers in Texas.
The ones who knew that if they experienced an unwanted pregnancy that could have ruined their lives, they had the right to make their own medical decisions. The ones whose daughters will not have that same right.
Maybe you should tell your daughters to save themselves for marriage or at least limit themselves to serious partners, to use birth control to limit the chance of pregnancy, to consider carrying the child to term and offering him or her for adoption.
Nah, just tell your daughter that the potential life within her is not life at all, and that her political enemies are evil. Because that’s worked swimmingly so far.
Man, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch mommy blogging has really gone off the cliff since Dana Loesch left, ainna?
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On its front page, the Milwaukee Daily Dammit, Gannett, refers to a person as a “Governor wannabe”:
Also, because the story is embarrassing.
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Just suppose you wanted to drive all the good people out of law enforcement and patriots out of the military, leaving only those who believed that white people and Trump supporters are evil and deserve to have the guns of government turned on them. What would you do differently from what is going on now?
(See also Kim du Toit on one such likely to remain.)
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Two employees file lawsuit against Springfield Public Schools over equity training:
A spokesman for the school district called the lawsuit a misinformation campaign, designed to undermine the district’s efforts to provide equity for everyone.
That’s what stakeholders, that is, parents and taxpayers, want to talk about but the school district doesn’t want to hear. Or maybe it’s just the school board doesn’t want to hear it because they don’t have any power over the administrators of the district.
Anyone want to wager whether the Daily Dammit, Gannett! finds something on social media to get the word Trump into its headline?
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