Musings from Brian J. Noggle – To be able to say "Noggle," you first must be able to say "Nah."

Book Report: Story of the First Crusade by Nellie Bartlett Mead (1911)

August 19, 2026August 19, 2026 Brian J. Noggle

Book cover Well, I said in my report on The Builders of the World that, now that I have found this little collection of Instructor Literature Series pamphlets from the beginning of the century that I would probably tear through them in a hurry to pad my annual book total numbers since I’m in the middle of some longer works which will take a while to finish (okay, mostly The Life of Greece)–and I am also watching some training for people who are planning to take the Network+ certification exam in the evenings with my beautiful wife who is collecting certifications because unless your name wraps into three lines on LinkedIn, are you even a person? That’s not why she’s watching them with me–it’s a bit for self-improvement, the continual (professional) learning beloved of the corporate world. Will I take that exam and maybe re-A+ certify (my A+ certification is over 25 years old, so that doesn’t exist in the former COMP-TIA world)? Depends upon how exactly bored I get–I’m working on certifying a new rank in my martial arts.

At any rate, where was I? Oh, yes. This is a little pre-Soviet era bit of educational material. I say pre-Soviet for two reasons: One, it’s from 1911, so it was before the Russian Revolution. And it’s also before educational materials became more, erm, Sovietsticated. So the Christians are the good guys in this book, although the different personalities of the four main army leaders differ in their goals and motivations. Some seem to be acting out of Christian piety (or at least the papal promise that previous sins would be forgiven), some were looking for glory, and some were looking for loot. Which led to disagreements in strategy and even in whether to go onto Jerusalem (the stated goal) or get fat in Antioch.

A brief primer on the topic, ending with the capture of Jerusalem and the establishment of a couple of Christian kingdoms in the area. It was not to last, though, as we know. But perhaps that comes in a sequel to this volume which I probably don’t have.

When I said I was going to tear through them, though…. The pamphlets are in varying degrees of completeness. Some might lack covers. Some have covers that are separated from the volumes in the stack. So I really am going to have to buy some poly bags to protect them. I guess I’ll be stopping by Hobby Lobby one day soon rather than order them from a big online seller who’ll algorythmically overcharge me for them. This particular pamphlet was in lesser shape than The Builders of the World with some tearing, staining, and cover loosening. I might end up reading them not in stack order or interest order but in order of their condition, best to worst. Time will tell. But I am almost onto 60 books this year, so I should be in good shape to hit 70, the minimum, but pressed to hit 100, the stretch goal.

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It Probably Wouldn’t Have Helped

August 19, 2026 Brian J. Noggle

So I had a job interview yesterday, the first in…. Well, I would say “months,” but I did have a “record yourself talking to an ‘AI'” thing last week which was almost like a job interview, but not really. One of the things on the job posting was “Comfortable pushing back, including with senior engineers, when a process or PR isn’t ready to ship.”

The best story I have for this comes from my days at the digital marketing agency almost 20 years ago. The client’s product, secondnature™ brand dog litter, was going to be featured on Good Morning America, so the agency hired a consultant to optimize the Flash presentation/video. The consultant was auto-didacting Flash as she went, or she was trying to, but it came down to an all-nighter the night before the product appeared on a network television news show. My role was basically waiting all night for something to test, and her role was to say, “I’ve almost got it now, it’ll be ready soon.” So I undoubtedly watched a couple episodes of the early The Simpsons seasons on the eMac and stretched out on the floor for a nap with the volume turned up on the PC speakers so I would hopefully hear the instant messanger ding. Around daybreak, before air time, she delivered…. Something. Something not better than we already had. So I vetoed it. And the agency, presumably, ate the cost of that failed effort (the agency, as it happened, ate a lot of costs of failed efforts both while I was there and after).

It’s a good story, but: I would have probably had to explain what Flash was.

I mean, HTML 5 did not come around until 2008. Before that, it was Macromedia (later Adobe) Flash, a browser plugin that handled video and rich applications. Because neither Microsoft Silverlight (a johnny-come-lately) nor Java applets (write once, run anywhere, riiiiiight) did it quite as well. It eventually became a rich attack vector, though, and HTML 5 with its new tags killed it.

Ah, gentle reader. I said yesterday:

But too often the ATSes and other parts of the over-the-transom job application/hiring process these days, again, winnow on arbitrary measures and don’t allow for perspective and context. And, boy, mister, after almost thirty years in computers (more if you count programming Commodores and Apples), do I have context and perspective.

I’ve been around long enough that I know the problems that newer technologies and processes are trying to solve. Git and distributed version control systems? Developers were tired of finding files locked in Visual Source Safe–so, have pull requests and merge conflicts actually made things better? Dunno–that’s just how we do it now and come up with ever more creative and time-consuming ways to fix the new problems. (Aside: You know, some job postings still mention that the applicant should be familiar with source control systems and include Subversion aka SVN which was a 20-year-old proto Git. I cannot imagine anyone is still using Subversion, but I guess one never knows.) People tired of frames and table-based layouts created Cascading Style Sheets and now the widget-based responsive design front-ends which rely on hard-to-nest blocks of code whose methods change seemingly every release of the framework, and…. Okay, frontend stuff is not my passion.

But that perspective is not valued, old man. What companies want is for employees to do it the current way the bestest.

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The Two Biggest Lies I Tell On Job Applications

August 18, 2026August 18, 2026 Brian J. Noggle

I know, I know; when I complete a job application in an Application Tracking System (ATS), I click a checkbox that says “The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth so help me, God” or the slightly less enforceable equivalent that indicates the company will discard my application if its employees discover a falsehood. Ha! I am ahead of the curve, as they discard my applications far before anyone actually looks at them.

But I must confess to you, gentle reader, I sometimes (often) select values that are not truthful, often very early in the process.

Workday, one ATS, makes you create an account with a password (do I save the password? Hell, no; otherwise, I would have several hundred saved Workday passwords in my password manager for accounts into which I will never log in again–and if I do find myself applying, a year or two later, to the same company, I will use the Forgot Password feature and set another strong password I will not seek to remember naturally or artificially). On the second step, your “Profile,” it asks for phone number, address, and whatnot.

And: It often asks “How did you hear about this job?” followed by a drop-down list or nested selector control that has social media sites, job boards, in-person events, and so on. And often not an “Other” to select.

I conduct Google searches on several job boards every day, so I often find jobs hosted in the Workday ATS this way. But it doesn’t let me explain this. So I have to select another value for this required field. I often select Indeed, LinkedIn, or the Corporate Website (which, I guess, is the closest to it). The field is required, and it does not let me select or enter the true answer.

It’s the same with Greenhouse, which has a type-ahead selector for Location (city).

Ah, gentle reader, I live in unincorporated Greene County. I do not live in a city or a town. The zip code resolves to Brookline (or Brookline Station). But the city of Battlefield ends at my farm road, so I am right across the street from Battlefield, Missouri, so I select that one. And if I type my full address, I use Brookline as the city/town (although the zip code covers Battlefield, so one could get mail addressed to Battlefield, MO 65619). So immediately, they can see that difference and think, “Is this guy for real or is he a North Korean who doesn’t know United States geography?”

Not to mention that the Locate me link will probably resolve to Kansas City, Jackson County, or wherever Starlink says I am today.

But too often the ATSes and other parts of the over-the-transom job application/hiring process these days, again, winnow on arbitrary measures and don’t allow for perspective and context. And, boy, mister, after almost thirty years in computers (more if you count programming Commodores and Apples), do I have context and perspective.

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Wherein The Nogglestead Library Disappoints

August 18, 2026 Brian J. Noggle

I might have mentioned a time or two that the Nogglestead library stacks are deep and wide (and unorganized except for the difference between the shelves where I put read books and where I put books I have yet to read, although those are commingling now on one shelf at least).

When my youngest was in the Lutheran elementary school, he asked if we had a copy of something they were going to read in his fourth grade class–I forget the exact title. Farmer Boy by Laura Ingalls Wilder? He read that in fourth grade, and I read it in 2018. Whatever he was looking for, I provided it, and he said that any book Ms. Cole wanted them to read, we already had a copy at home, so he could read ahead (ah, back when he read!). Of course, when he left Lutheran school and went to public high school, that was no longer the case since we don’t have much of recent, and topical, vintage.

Fast forward to 2026 (and, boy howdy, does it seem like fast forward in retrospect). My oldest is now getting interested in philosophy; as part of our 2020 supplemental stay-at-home coursework, I got the boys copies of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, and the oldest has talked about Locke and Hobbes. A week or so ago, he asked if we had a copy of Summa Theologiae, and of course we do (but I don’t think he will read it before I do; it’s in my queue sometime after The Story of Civilization).

But last week, the Nogglestead library let him down.

He was looking for a book by Evola, of whom I’d never even heard. Actually, I think he was looking for anything by the author, not a specific book. But, no, I don’t think (I can never be sure what one will find amongst the shelves here, something I bought on a box day in 2008).

When I saw the name in some Substack or another, where Evola was lumped in as a “real warrior” with Teddy Roosevelt and Junger, I looked him up, and:

Giulio Cesare Andrea Evola (Italian: [ˈɛːvola];[1] 19 May 1898 – 11 June 1974), better known as Julius Evola, was an Italian far-right philosopher and writer. Evola regarded his values as traditionalist, aristocratic, martial and imperialist. An esoteric thinker in Fascist Italy,[2] he also had ties to Nazi Germany.[3][4] In the post-war era, he was an ideological mentor of the Italian neo-fascist and militant right.[5]

An obscure Italian thinker having his moment in the sun of dissident right videos and Substacks as our society retribalizes.

Not the sort of thing one finds at library book fairs or garage sales in the middle of Missouri. Well, not yet, anyway.

Not sure that the oldest would actually read it, though. He tends to cycle through summary thoughts presented to him via the Internet and to get interested in books but not to actually read or finish them.

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Book Report: The Builders of the World by Carrie P. Herndon (1913)

August 17, 2026August 16, 2026 Brian J. Noggle

Book cover So I’m a little bogged in my disciplined reading these days–I try to do a section or chapter of The Life of Greece, a couple or twenty things in the giant listicle 1001 Ways to Be Romantic, and a chapter in The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Karate (somehow, trying to clear books from my chairside table has in fact added these last two books to the pile). So I thought I would prowl my stacks for some of the pamphlet-sized single short stories like “The Yellow Wallpaper“, some short fiction that I could use to break up the current stream of nonfiction without committing myself to a full book and which I could count as a “book” for the annual total. But I came across a stack of “Instructor Literature Series” booklets from the early part of the 20th century. And this book was on the top, so I grabbed it.

It’s a 29 page (including a quiz at the end) treatment of geology at the macro scale. The book talks about the then-contemporary understanding of the formation of the earth and its processes. I say then-contemporary because it only mentions igneous and sedimentary rock types, and although it does talk about slate and whatnot, it does not break these rock types into metamorphic rock like we do today. And, the book has, if not overtly Christian, then certainly a Deist perspective as it mentions that God put this all into motion.

I looked a little into the history of this series, and it was a New York (state) guy who made, eventually, 350 of these titles available for school teachers. Inexpensive, compact, and a ready-made lesson (of various difficulty levels). Remember, in the days when these were published, one-room schoolhouses were still common and Horace Mann’s acolytes had not destroyed schooling. I imagine those hard-pressed teachers treasured these little books, and the search engine AI tells me they’re sought after by collectors, but Ebay indicates they’re not that rare.

So I’ll probably work my way through the stack so that I can refresh myself to 1910s-era knowledge as a break from The Story of Greece which is 1940s-era knowledge (although history has not advanced as science might have). As a break from my little early 20th century hardback textbooks like the Riverside Literature Series and MacMillan’s Pocket Classics which I’m also using as a break from other things, although in the case of Alexander Pope’s longer poems, I’m taking a break from them by reading thousand page eighty-year-old history books.

But I assure you that the stack of books on the side table is slowly diminishing. Glacially slowly.

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Gift Card Detrita

August 16, 2026 Brian J. Noggle

You know, in the olden days of the last century, when you were hard-pressed to give someone a gift, you might get them a gift certificate which was a piece of paper with a dollar value on it. The gift giver paid that amount, and the gift recipient could present the gift certificate at the establishment in place of cash. Because the gift certificate was a static thing, the retailer generally gave you change in cash. This was a boon to me in college, as I would buy the cheapest possible thing so I could get the cash because I was putting myself through college (having sacrificed scholarships and grants on the altar of auto-didacticism and skipping classes to read whatever struck my fancy in the college library–it only took one midterm D to scare me straight, but the scholarships were gone anyway). Even McDonald’s had them in books with $1 certificates. Back when $1 would buy you a meal at McDonalds.

At any rate, in the 21st century, as you know, the gift certificate gave way to the gift card which had the amount on it, and when you presented it, the amount you actually spent is taken off of the gift card. That way, retailers are not dishing out that change in cash. In the olden days, the issuers (sometimes the same as the retailers, sometimes not) would then start nibbling at the balance every month to drain some extra profit for themselves. But the government started making noise and might have even legislated or regulated a stop to that. But: They have a new solution.

In those olden days, you could sometimes run a partially or mostly used gift card, and the remaining balance on the card would be applied to your purchase, and you could pay the rest–and let’s be honest, from the time of gift certificates immemorial, they hoped you’d buy more than the amount you were given. But point of sales systems (seemed to) be able to easily drain that balance for you. That’s how I remember it. As so much of what I “remember,” maybe it’s not so.

However, now, the point of sale systems at the shops where I do my marketing don’t do that automatically. You can run gift cards for a certain amount, and if the card has that much, it is debited/applied to your purchase. After a couple of purchases, though, if you’re sort of mindful (the gift card is for $100; this purchase is $67.95; this purchase is $14.07), you end up with a gift card with a balance of a couple dollars and change. Not enough to buy a meal at McDonalds. So you end up with a purse wallet (in my beautiful wife’s case) or a desk basket (in my case) with several (dozen) gift cards with minimal value to them. If you don’t use them, they’re still pure profit to the issuer.

So I check the balance on the cards and write the amount on the card. And then when I hit the grocery store, mostly in the middle of the day when there’s no line, I make Sam or Ashton or the new guys other Sam and Chuck run bunches of gift cards: This one is $2.90. This one is $14.23. And so on.

I mean, we’re not skint, but I do like to not to be part of the laziness profit margin that’s padding Visa and Mastercard executive’s quarterly results. However that value is eventually lost (you cannot nibble at the balance, but I do see the cards have expiration dates like real credit and debit cards; real ones get replaced, but I expect that the gift ones just get applied to quarterly spreadsheets and dashboards somewhere).

Sorry, Sams. Sorry, Ashton. Sorry, Chuck. But when I get into a high dudgeon, sometimes others must suffer peripherally whilst I stick it to some Man.

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Book Report: That Dunbar Boy by Jean Gould (1958)

August 16, 2026August 16, 2026 Brian J. Noggle

Book cover Huh. I thought I’d mentioned it, but The Complete Works of Paul Laurence Dunbar, which I read in June, mentioned this book on the back flap or back of the dust jacket. I had the urge to read it, expecting it to be more than the Wikipedia entry which I have had in my browser’s bookmark since time immemorial (which is a short period of time these days, sometimes). I spotted a copy on Ebay, “signed,” and I wanted it. So for a long time (only a couple of months, I guess), I demurred, but I guess I was in the mood for some shopping therapy recently, and I bought it. It’s actually an incribed copy with a little message to John and George Bohnert–the inscription seems to indicate that they’re young brothers at the time of the inscription and not old friends of the author. Ay, me–I spent $25 on this book. I need to get some mylar to wrap it before I shelve it, or take it to ABC Books for them to wrap it (although Pam is gone, and I think she was the pro), or…. Never mind, I’ve lost it in the read stacks, which are almost as disorganized as the unread shelves, now.

So: As a juvenile narrative biography from the middle of the 20th century, the book is designed to appeal to younger readers to give them a model to emulate. And, brother, Paul Laurence Dunbar is a good one. Born to a freed slave and the youngest of several children that a single mother kept together, Dunbar was a bookish and sickly young man with a facility for academics and wordcraft. He worked hard, attended high school (a rarity), but had to repeat his last year because he was not so good at mathematics. His young friends included Orville and Wilbur Wright, and they helped to publish his first book with their print shop before they went into bicycle repair and aviation. Dunbar met a lot of helpful people along the way, and he sold copies of his first self-published book and worked at a variety of jobs before landing steady work as an elevator boy which allowed him a lot of time to read, study, and craft poems. He had sort-of successful runs in London (before being abandoned there by his manager’s daughter who was supposed to be his shepherd on his English trip but apparently lived it up and left him in meager accomodations when she went on to the continent) and in New York, and then, bam, his sickliness is revealed to include tuberculosis, and he dies at 32, leaving several volumes of poetry and several hundred pages of mostly good poems.

The book does confirm a couple of things: First, his vernacular poems were wildly popular in his day, even amongst black people and freed slaves who might have been pleased to see not only poetry written like they spoke but also capturing some of the stories and traditions they knew. Although he did not meet James Whitcomb Riley, they did correspond (I mention this in this paragraph because Riley also wrote in vernacular, that is, in misspelled and accented English, albeit different vernaculars for the most part).

A bit of a ding on the book is that its school days take up the bulk of the book, and when we get to Dunbar as an adult, it gets a little more terse and a little more “six months later.” One does notice, however, that when being at about the poverty line, one can easily pick up and go to Chicago for months to attend the World’s Fair or move around a little more easily. You know, I’ve known this from some of the vagabonds I’ve known in my life. Couch surf for years at a time, rotating amongst friends, or just being able to pick up and move to chase a slightly better job with but a truck full of stuff (or less, probably, in Dunbar’s case). Being an early collector of books definitely has made this lifestyle impossible for me (I hope, but one never knows). But: To get back to the thesis sentence, the book is targeted at school kids, so perhaps that’s why the book is weighted to the school days.

At any rate, an interesting read. And, an unfortunate one: Because now I’m perusing Ebay for old and/or original editions of Paul Laurence Dunbar books which I cannot afford. At least, not until one of my damned apps goes viral or sells at least more than one copy.

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Good Media Hunting, Saturday, 15, 2026: Thunder Thrift

August 15, 2026 Brian J. Noggle

Springfield finally fielded a Lutheran High School, after at least two attempts while my boys were in the Lutheran elementary and middle school, and it has opened a thrift store to raise funds. So we visited at the end of its first week to provide funds since we’re not paying tuition. It’s a really nicely appointed space, more boutique-looking than most thrift stores, but the prices, at least for media, were pretty good.

Here’s what we got:

I got two albums, Evie Again by Evie (I told my beautiful wife that I am the biggest Evie fan in Springfield, and it might be true, and I’m not that big of an Evie fan) and Crystal Illusions by Sergio Mendes and Brasil ’66. I got one DVD, The Bourne Identity, since I got The Bourne Supremacy last year–the thrift store had all three, but I was not sure which I was missing, so I can go back and get The Bourne Ultimatum if I happen to finish these two films sometime soon (unlikely). And I got two books: The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Tae Kwon Do, which is timely because I am currently reading The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Karate which I bought in 2022 and because next week, in our BJJ school’s striking class, the instructor is going to show some spin kicks which he said the tae kwon do kids were going to like, and I need to brush up on the spin heel/spin wheel and spin hook kicks to not look silly, and I also got Living the Martial Way which is a former USAF guy writing about something something the ancient Eastern martial arts. I picked it up ’cause it was a buck or two, and it would be far more expensive at ABC Books.

My wife got a puzzle and some cook books, and we also came away with a throw blanket and a skirt (for her), and we spent $29 total. Apparently, they have more records (and other merchandise) than they can display, so I’ll probably visit every once in a while to see what’s new. Of course, even with but these two new records, I’m finding that I am about out of storage space, so I’d better pick up some 2x4s when the heat breaks before the autumn Friends of the Library book sale.

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Corporate Communications Are Killing Trust

August 14, 2026 Brian J. Noggle

I thought I’d lamented this before, but Microsoft is killing Microsoft Publisher, and because nowadays it’s all by subscription, when they kill it, it will go away and you won’t be able to access your desktop publishing files.

As you might recall, gentle reader, I have been a Microsoft Publisher user for over thirty years. I first ran it on a Windows 3.11 desktop and the St. Louis Artesian transitioned from rubber-cement-at-Kinko’s layout to desktop publishing (remember, briefly, how that was a business type and/or career possibility for about five years in the 1990s until those meddling kids in Illinois built Netscape Navigator?). I also laid out my second chapbook, Deep Blue Shadows on that old Packard Bell. When I was working on a government contract in about 2019 (just or recently in my recounting), I was working with a bunch of ex-military types on a group project in some training exercise or another, and when it came time to build some visual thing, I cracked open Microsoft Publisher instead of PowerPoint–how gauche and unprofessional! And although I’ve only used it for Christmas letters and Winter Reading Challenge forms in recent years, they’re taking away my ability to use something for which I’ve paid, many times, and sorta orphaning decades’ worth of work.

But I’m not here specifically to lament this particular loss or to reiterate that I’m about one Microsoft Account debacle away from quitting Microsoft for good (after over 35 years starting with MS-DOS)–a recent Windows update, probably designed to “improve” my experience by hoovering up more of my information for Microsoft’s purposes, required me to sign into my Office subscription–which, fortunately, worked (and I’m ignoring the email about my Microsoft Entra account needing a new something something different form of multifactor authentication?–I’ll get locked out of that bridge when I get there and onto my Linux box ricky-tick).

No, I am here to wordily say that professional communications are eroding trust in companies and institutions.

“Microsoft is committed to improving your Microsoft 365 subscription.” No, it is not. It is dedicated to increasing profitability in indulging my usage. That’s why we went from building software I could install and use, paying for it once unless you put more features into it and improved it so I would want to buy a newer version or so I would stick with it and buy a later version on later computers. No, instead, Microsoft forced me into a recurring revenue “subscription” model (coming soon, mayhap, to the OS itself, if Microsoft thought it could get away with it). And now it’s “improving” my subscription by taking something away and orphaning my data. No, Microsoft, we know that the improvement is all for you, none for me.

Like when Sam’s Club removed most of the checkout stands “for your convenience.”

The constant drive of the professional communicators and business people to couch the changing terms of their existence to improve their profitability and to meet internal metrics in language of “we’re doing this for you” is really cheesing me off to behavior-altering and not just blog-posting levels. I lose faith in any company and institution that starts taking the “I’m hurting you for your own good” language of an abuser. I know modern business practices, especially at large levels, are all about optimizing and spreadsheeting trendlines going up on daily/monthly/annual reports and real-time dashboards regardless of whether they’re providing value to customer (and I am paying for this, you know, so it should not should not be a matter of “If you’re not paying for it, you’re the product”–too damned much of modern business best practices are “You’re paying for it, and you’re the product”)–hang on, I got up a head of ranting steam there and forgot the first part of the sentence was going–never mind, I think I hit both sentence and predicate before getting lost in the parentheticals and asides; have the period here:.

(Note I watermark my writing in such a fashion to indicate it’s not AI-generated, and, brother, if you trust any content based on this blog as training material, you’re lucky with whatever result you get. You deserve it.)

I mean, I have done some marketing writing where I tried to put the best shine on something. I’ve written technical documentation where the steps and procedures route users around bugs. But I don’t know that I’ve ever told the reader/customer that it was all for his or her benefit (how long ago was I writing like this? In the before days where we used “his or her” to be inclusive). Maybe I did. But now that it’s omnipresent and obvious, I am running out of tolerance.

And, gentle reader, have you noted that I’ve posted some business-related posts here lately (and recycled a post from Microsoft’s LinkedIn). That’s because Microsoft’s LinkedIn is improving my user experience by throttling things I post there. So why provide that outlet with free content when I can post it here and get a slightly smaller audience? For whom do I work anyway? For you, gentle reader, for you. And my own narcissism.

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The Deviled Egg Debacle

August 13, 2026 Brian J. Noggle

Okay, maybe debacle is overstating it for a clickbaity alliterative headline. But.

So the church has been throwing more potlucks of late, which means a couple per year. And I’ve started to notice that some staples of potlucks have started to get a little thin. Not hotdish; we’re a little south for that, and I’ve not seen that much ever. Things like deviled eggs and creamy potato salad. I guess the old German and Polish Lutherans are passing away and taking these delicacies with them. So I guess I have to be the old German lady now.

Our church was having a potluck this spring, and a couple of weeks ahead of it, I bought two dozen eggs to try some recipes. I went to the Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook, the one with the red gingham cover for the basics. I’ve hard-cooked eggs in the oven on various Whole 30 months in the past, and I’ve done it to have a quick peel-and-eat meal other times as well, so I loaded up a mini-muffin tray and cooked them. I had boughten several different types of mustards (yellow, Dijon, horseradish) to try out–the recipe size uses six eggs, so I could try three different types of mustard and an alternative recipe which uses creamy Italian dressing and Parmesan cheese.

So I mixed up four different sets of six eggs/12 halves with each formula and sampled them, inviting my family to do the same. I rather favored the Italian deviled eggs–maybe it’s the cheese.

But: I was taken ill that week. The eggs. I thought. I somehow made bad eggs. Maybe they were too old. Maybe I didn’t cook them long enough. Maybe I overloaded them with red pepper. But I could not subject the aging population of the church to this. I could kill someone. (Which is why I have a spoonful or slice of whatever I bring to the potluck–so if anyone gets ill from what I’ve made, I get ill too.)

But: My beautiful wife was also taken ill that week. And she does not like eggs. Or mayonnaise. Or mustard. I think the only parts of the deviled eggs she likes are the vinegar and red pepper (and the Italian dressing and Parmesan, although that’s odd–creamy Italian dressing is almost mustard, but a little thinner I guess). So maybe it wasn’t the eggs.

Church had another potluck last weekend, and I had almost three dozen eggs in the refrigerator (I’ve been rolling through them, hard cooking them mostly, because one day, someday, I swore I would make deviled eggs for the potluck). But I chickened out and went with the standby apple pie, and I cut up a couple of cantaloupes from the garden (which represents the bulk of the harvest at Nogglestead in 2026).

But earlier this week, I hard cooked the oldest of the eggs and deviled them. I was low on mayonnaise (the accursed squeeze bottles let you trade the convenience of the squeeze bottle at the cost of not being able to get the last couple of ounces from within it because the neck is not big enough for a knife), so I mixed in some ranch dressing, and…. they were all right.

So today, I’ve hard-cooked the other two dozen (jumbo, because I hope they’d prove sturdier throughout the bedeviling process). I’ll bedevil a dozen and probably just eat the other as-are.

But, someday, I’ll feel comfortable enough and get good enough to bring some to church. Or I will get really good at them and not want to share.

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I’ve Seen That Movie

August 12, 2026 Brian J. Noggle

The movie? There’s Something About Mary. The bit in the movie? That 7-Minute Abs was going to trounce 8-Minute Abs:

Inspired by the headline: 10 Fitness gym to close Springfield location

The gag? I was going to say that 9Round Fitness won out.

Except: It looks as though the 9Round in Springfield is no more (“Temporarily Closed” it says on Google Maps, but the 9Round Web site no longer lists a location in Springfield.

Maybe F45, which was almost across the street from 9Round, ate their lunches as it seems to be open. When it opened in like 2018, I thought F45 meant something political. Kind of like the new and always busy Burn Boot Camp by the Sam’s Club, the first thing in The Ridge development by the realtor who pulled his six-year-old from my little league team in a huff because he had big baseball plans for the lad and the four-year-olds on the team would keep the boy from The Show–sorry, I was not going on a list of all the successful realtors and real estate developers I know in Springfield cannot stand me, I was talking about Burn Boot Camp, and I was going to say: When I drove by signs pointing to it in the back of the empty lots, I thought it said “Bum Boot Camp.”

Given that the area had a couple of homeless encampments nearby, I wondered exactly what that was. Poor kerning is the answer.

At any rate, well, that’s a long way to go for a gag. But here at MfBJN, we go that extra mile for you.

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Companies Seeking Continual Learning

August 12, 2026 Brian J. Noggle

Maybe I’m just cynical, but whenever I see that a job posting seeks people who are “continually learning,” I think that the companies are looking for candidates/employees who strive not for learning but for ways to make themselves more valuable to the company.

When I was working for a government contracting company, the company had an initiative for people to learn a no-code/low-code tool called Pega. The company set up working/study groups for employees who wanted to get the certification. BUT: You could not go through any of the learning modules on company time. That’s billing time, employee, and if you’re not making billable hours for the company, you’re worthless. Many people were excited to get certified in Pega, which is one of those technologies which solely exist because different departments in the government have bought it at some point. So Pega certification is mostly irrelevant in the real world, and it’s most likely becoming less relevant as time passes and the new hotness (AI!) comes along to soak up all the government contracting money. I started a bit of the program, and then I realized how daft the technology was, and I tailed off on it.

Ah, gentle reader: You might know I am a continual learner. I just finished a course on Ancient Egypt. I’ve started an audio course on Ancient Greek Philosophy. I’ve picked up the Durants’ The Life of Greece again (and I’ve actually reached the spot covered by the audio course for a little reinforcement and seeing how the names are spelled). I read poetry, philosophy, biographies of poets, and oh so many pieces of genre fiction. And although this might make me more interesting (but probably not) and it might give me broader perspective to apply to business problems (it does), that’s not what they meant.

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I Might As Well Recycle Some LinkedIn Content Here

August 11, 2026 Brian J. Noggle

I dunno why I post on LinkedIn these days. It has limited my reach to a few and then doesn’t bother to tell me if people respond. Maybe that will increase my ~~desperation for algorithmic approval~~ engagement.

At any rate, I recently wrote a bit about an experience I had with a recent job application which required a thoughtful, non-boilerplate cover letter answering questions posted in the job application–only to autoreject me because I failed on one of the “knockout” questions. These delightful things are ways to automatically reject resumes for ~~arbitrary~~ job-based reasons.

At any rate, here it is:

Career coaches often encourage job seekers to customize their resumes and to write focused cover letters even when an application doesn’t require it. I don’t think so.

I recently applied to an ecommerce QA Lead job for an ecommerce company which had a strange ask: Create a single cover letter+resume file, answer a series of questions, and explain your experience testing ecommerce Web sites. Do you have ecommerce experience? Oh, boy, mister, do I!

I went on at length, more than 2-3 sentences, about experience I have with ecommerce sites. I’ve handled tourist attractions which not only offered tickets and t-shirts but allowed room bookings with catering options (but the site did not have a sandbox, so testing stopped at the checkout step). I’ve handled user-posting storefronts where users post items and both pay and get paid. I’ve handled sites where content writers get paid affiliate fees on purchases, so you not only test the checkout through the process with the payment handler but that content writers get the appropriate fees credited to their account.

One of the questions was “What are the last three books you read?” Aw, yeah, right in my wheelhouse. At the time, the three were The Space Trilogy by C.S. Lewis, The Law of Gun Barrel City by O.C. Marler, and River City P.I. by James R. Wilder. Since then, I’ve also completed The Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi, A Hereditary Book on the Art of War by Yagyū Munenori, and That Dunbar Boy by Jean Gould.

I didn’t spend two hours on the cover letter–probably just over an hour writing two pages answering the eight questions thoughtfully. I uploaded it into the application tracking system, and the next page had a series of questions, including The Knockout Question.

All of them were, probably, but this one had a yes or no answer to a presumed requirement which was not mentioned on the job board posting nor the job posting on the ATS. I answered honestly, and I was rejected in less time than I took in crafting the letter.

It makes sense to write personal cover letters for jobs for which your network connections recommend you and sometimes if the job is really for you, but job seekers have to balance the time required for each against the very real probability that the effort will be futile and the extra work will be unread.

Mostly, I just wanted to create a meme.

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On The History of Ancient Egypt by Professor Bob Brier (2003)

August 8, 2026August 7, 2026 Brian J. Noggle

Book cover This has been atop the boxes of audio courses that I have in my office closet since I bought it in 2024 at the Friends of the Christian County Library sale at the Nixa branch (which is this month, come to think of it). I have been a little reluctant to delve into it because it is four binders/48 lectures/24 hours. But a couple months ago, I loaded the DVDs into the main auto and went for it. And I’m glad I did.

The lectures include:

Introduction
Prehistoric Egypt
Ancient Egyptian Thought
Napoleon and the Beginnings of Egyptology
The Rosetta Stone, and Much More
The First Nation in History
The Rise of the Old Kingdom
Sneferu, the Pyramid Builder
The Great Pyramid of Giza
The End of the Old Kingdom
The First Intermediate Period
The Middle Kingdom–Dynasty XI
The Middle Kingdom–Dynasty XII
The Second Intermediate Period
Joseph in Egypt
The Beginning of the New Kingdom–the Fabulous XVIII^th Dynasty
Queen Hatshepsut
Obelisks
Tuthmosis III-King At Last
The Fabulous XVIII^th Dynasty Rolls On
Akhenaten the Heretic Pharoah
The Discovery of Tutankhamen’s Tomb
The Murder of Tutankhamen–A Theory
Medicine–The Necessary Art
The End of Dynasty XVIII
Mummification–How We Know What We Know
What Mummies Tell Us
Making a Modern Mummy
Dynasty XIX Begins
Ramses the Great–The Early Years
Ramses the Great–The Later Years
The Exodus–Did It Happen?
The Decline of Dynasty XIX
Dynasty XX–The Decline Continues
Ancient Egyptian Magic
Dynasty XXI–Egypt Divided
Dynasty XXII–Egypt United
Dynasty XXV–The Nubians Have Their Day
Dynasty XXVI–The Saite Period
Dynasty XXVII–The Persians
Dynasties XXVIII to XXXI–The Beginning of the End
Alexander the Great
The First Ptolemies
The Middle Ptolemies–The Decline
Animal Mummies
Cleopatra’s Family
Cleopatra–The Last Ptolemy
The Grand Finale

The series is, for the most part, chronological but with some topical asides. It is a very high level survey, though, as it deals with 70,000 years (including the prehistory) and 3,000 years of history (written language supplemented by archeological finds), and it boggles the mind: The series ends in the years BC, and as the meme says, the Pyramids were older to Cleopatra (VII, the seventh with that name but the only one who can go without a number to us in the modern world) than Cleopatra is to us (3,000 years versus 2000 years, give or take). Breathtaking.

The professor is definitely a homer/enthusiastic on the topic, and he has this way of repeating words to emphasize or underline his thoughts. It sounds like it would have been annoying, but it was not, actually. And I watched the last two lectures, and I can say that he was better to listen to than to watch. Part of that is that it’s an older series, even older than 2003–not only does the voiceover stock narrator talk about these tapes, but the lecturer himself calls them tapes. And it’s of the cinematography of pretending he’s lecturing to a crowd, which means he’s standing at a lectern and looking at students who are not there, only occasionally looking at the camera. Other ones I’ve seen, including Lost Worlds of South America and a set on watching movies that I’ve not finished because I was watching them–those were made with the DVD viewer in mind. But: I don’t mind because I’m fortunate enough to have an old vehicle which accepts DVDs and will play the audio from them without bothering me with the video. Man, I’m going to miss that when I’m gone.

It reinforced a bit from what I gleaned from Origins of Great Ancient Civilizations and even Our Oriental Heritage (which remaind the only volume of the Story of Civilization which I’ve actually read, although I’m going to revisit the partially read second volume real soon, I hope). Egypt got an early start with its civilization and the benefit of the regular overflowing of the Nile, but that early opulence didn’t help it in the long run when the hungrier groups from less providential environments started showing up. But, man, it did quite blossom in those early days, and Professor Brier is just the man to tell you about it.

Unlike some English literature courses that I’ve listened to, I’m not ready to rush out and buy primary texts or join the societies mentioned in the conclusion lecture. But if I stumble upon them in the wild, I might pick them up. And, briefly, until the knowledge is overwritten by nothing at all, I know some basics and can talk about Hatshepsut, Akhenaten, Nefertiti, Tutankhamen, and Ramses a bit, and I know the differences between who was buried in pyramids and who was buried in the Valley of the Kings, and I can tell the difference between some of the relative dynasties. However, since there’s not going to be a test, I’m afraid that most of this will be forgotten by the time the next trivia night rolls around. Not that history questions come up in trivia nights these days.

It’s funny, or sad, about how quickly these things roll out of my mind. I guess repeated exposure over time will help cement things–such as reading Our Oriental Heritage in 2023 and listening to Origins of Great Ancient Civilizations in 2019 and now this course. And if you linger on LinkedIn as any hustler or underemployed tech person is wont to do, you see lots of messages about continuing to learn, continuing to educate yourself, etc. But it’s always in practical and artificial professional things. Chasing certifications, and so on. I get the sense that being able to kinda talk about the Old Kingdom, Middle Kingdom, and New Kingdom and to talk about the fact that The Valley of Kings has no pyramids in it doesn’t count. Too bad it’s what I find interesting. Too bad for me, perhaps.

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Now On The Microsoft Store

August 6, 2026 Brian J. Noggle

Bandit’s Naughty Dog Adventure.

I mentioned Bandit last year; he was a puppy with too much energy to be left in a trailer all day whilst we were at school and when my sainted mother was at work.

But the inspiration for this game came from a casino commercial that came on in our hockey-watching days: A little terrier mix is walking down the street, getting into trouble, and when the dog catcher throws him into the back of the animal control van, there are two poodles there, and the message is that the dog, like casino attendees, would be lucky?

At any rate, at some point, I started jotting down a treatment for a television series based on the concept of a naughty dog called The Naughty Dog Show. I didn’t get beyond a couple pages of notes on it, but here, decades later, is a little LLM-developed game.

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Book Report: The Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi (1997)

August 5, 2026August 5, 2026 Brian J. Noggle

Book cover As I mentioned when I bought this book two weeks ago that I had already read this book in 2021, but this pretty edition (only $8) was tempting. So I bought it, and I’ve read the book again. Note that this “pretty” edition is a Barnes & Noble edition from thirty years ago. You know, when they took books out of copyright and packaged them into discounted hardbacks not unlike Dover Publications did with paperbacks basically printed on newsprint. What a time to have been alive–this was seen as a profitable endeavor! I’ve been in Barnes & Noble recently, and I’m not sure any brick and mortar new book store has any profitablity path. Ai, what a time to be alive.

At any rate, as with the paperback edition, this book collects not only The Book of the Five Rings, a book of five “scrolls” dealing with the lessons of Musashi’s martial arts school training in sword combat but also A Hereditary Book on the Art of War by Yagyū Munenori which is a similar book but more steeped in Buddhist and Confucian thought (I said in my previous review that it was more Confucian, but it’s really more Buddhist).

So, what did I take away from this reading?

Well, Musashi favors fighting with two swords; I can visualize this better since I acquired the wakizashi and tachi pair in 2025 (and I can sort of see them behind all the other clutter on my desks).

In retrospect, the books are kind of like modern martial arts books in that they’re better understood if you have trained in the martial art described. You’re not going to learn swordsmanship from either of these books as you’re not going to learn karate from reading Complete Karate, tae kwon do from reading Tae Kwon Do Basics, or boxing from Boxer’s Start-Up. The Book of Five Rings and A Hereditary Book on the Art of War don’t even have photos or illustrations to capture a single point in motion, a strike, or a drill. They’re maybe most helpful with some pointers if you’ve already studied the art just a little bit. And these books (the ones I’m reporting on) don’t even go into strikes but more philosophy.

That said, in this reading, I got more out of the back-of-the-book filler book (A Hereditary Book on the Art of War) than The Book of the Five Rings. Its Buddhist mindsets and metaphors–probably the first half of the book deals in these metaphors for how the martial art should eventually flow through you without thought, and how thinking while martial arting will trip you up. Gee, mister, does it! I speak from experience. I think too much while I should be stick fighting.

At any rate, it might be worth re-reading every once and again since it’s a short book. I’m not sure why it was in the philosophy section as it is more martial arts than Buddhist or Zen (and I think those would be in a different section altogether at ABC Books anyway). But I will likely not re-read it any time soon, although in five years, who knows what kind of edition I might find.

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I Had A Father Like That

August 3, 2026 Brian J. Noggle

From Lileks today recounting a previous communal living arrangement:

One night my roommate, a very normal fellow who was also an absolute weed fiend and once put the phone books in a trash can, put a target on the can, and stood in his closet at the far end of the dorm room and fired his rifle at the target, was making tea, and put one of those immerser coils into water.

Not the weed fiend part, but:

One summer weekend when we were visiting from Missouri, my father wanted to take us shooting, probably down at the quarry where we would some other time go. But: His wife had taken the checkbook, perhaps to thwart his plans. This was in the days before ATMs were common (in Milwaukee, they were called Tyme machines, and to have access to one cost a touch of money itself). The way to get cash on the weekends would be to go to a store where they knew you, in his case West Side Liquor, and write a check to CASH, and they would give you money out of the till. But you had to be a really good customer, and my father was.

So: He took an old cardboard Tide laundry detergent box, stuffed it with newspaper, and got out an old .22 rifle–the bent one? Perhaps. Perhaps it was not bent yet. At any rate, he moved some furniture from the wall in the room in the refinished basement which would later become my bedroom during my college years, took position at the bar all the short way across the small house, and told us we would aim for the dot over the i in the brand name. He fired one round and then went to look at the Tide box. He’d hit that tittle, all right, and the bullet had passed through the Tide box completely and embedded in the wood paneling of the wall behind. It was the only round fired that day.

Man, the past was a different place, ainna? Growing up in the working class and with a father who was rather fond of his beer. I mean, I was there, and I can hardly recount it because…. Who does that? Well, not me, not now.

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My Doc Was Not Suspicious Of Similar Updates To Blood Pressure Standards

August 2, 2026 Brian J. Noggle

Instapundit:

MY DOC IS SUSPICIOUS OF THIS CHANGE: Considering statins? New US cholesterol guidelines may change your decision. An estimated 21.5 million additional adults in the United States may now be eligible for statins under updated cholesterol treatment guidelines, according to a new study.

I read borderline high until they changed blood pressure guidelines, which meant I “needed” a prescription or two. Given that I’m going to visit a new doctor because my old new doctor was in the other health care system in town and my new Obamacare plan is with the other other system, I’ll get a new doctor who will likely want to put me onto cholesterol prescriptions, too. The healthy choice, if you’re considering the health of pharmaceutical company stock prices.

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Book Report: River City P.I. by James R. Wilder (2026)

August 1, 2026July 31, 2026 Brian J. Noggle

Book cover Well, of course, I bought this book after finishing To Rise Again at a Decent Hour and jumped right into it. And, as I mentioned, I finished it a week ago but am just now getting around to reviewing it. Which, if you’re sussing things out, means I have not finished a book in the interim as I mentioned it was still on the scanner. Hopefully, soon, I will have something else on the scanner, or I am not going to make 100 books this year. I guess I have only done this seven times in the last fifteen years, so it’s not that common, and the “goal” listed on the inherited spreadsheet is to finish 70 books a year, which I am better at.

ANYWAY, this book is part of the Harbison series, but only in a cousinary way. The first seven books, ending with The Killing at Cottage Farm, which I finished in January, deals with Chet Harbison in northwestern Jefferson County where I grew up (albeit seventy and more years before the Noggle boys ever hit Murphy or House Springs). This book is set several decades later in Cape Girardeau and features Reese “Red” Harbison, who was mentioned in the previous book as a boy who moves with his family when their farm fell on hard times. Now grown up, he’s a World War II veteran coming home for his mother’s funeral and to take over the auto body paint and supply company where he used to work. After he finds a stolen car using the tag from an abandoned and neglected dog, he decides to also be a private investigator. But he’s accused of a murder which harms his business, and he discovers that one of the high school teachers has short eyes and has been drugging and taking advantage of high school students, and he resolves to take care of the latter while kind of investigating the former.

Wilder shifts from the third-person perspective to the first-person with this book, and between that and his greater experience with novels make for a bit better of a read. The book still focuses a lot on setting the stage, talking about the characters, and capturing the sense of southeast Missouri in 1961 which makes the resolution of the plots a little quick and pat. And, boy howdy, I might have mentioned previously that the books could have used another set of eyes on them, and this goes doubly true for this book. In addition to frequent problems with quotation marks, such as breaking in quotations at nouns of direct address, the last chapter misspells two of the main characters’ names. I offered in 2024 to act as a proofreader for him. I need to reach out to him again with the same offer, making clear I’m not looking to charge him corporate rates.

Our conversation at the book signing led me to a couple insights about publishing. He mentioned that his covers and typesetting cost him about $400 a book (I hope that was not a trade secret). Boy, howdy. The cover of John Donnelly’s Gold cost me $300, and I ordered 50 print copies to send to bloggers, papers, and magazines when I first published it. I will never make that out no matter how many authors I sell them to when I’m ostensibly at ABC Books to buy their books–and Wilder, I believe, bought a copy of John Donnelly’s Gold (or so he said he would–I guess I will see when I go to buy the copy of the Frankl book I couldn’t find at Barnes & Noble).

But, despite its typos and seeming occasional anachronisms, I like the Harbison series and will pick up the next. In December, maybe?

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Pages Torn From Ideals Magazine

August 1, 2026 Brian J. Noggle

As I might have mentioned, I am working through a stack of old Ideals magazines which I have accrued from book sales or have rediscovered in my chairside magazine rack as my liminal before-bed reading. It has often, but not always, been my habit to read just a little bit in my bedroom here at Nogglestead for a little bit before turning in. For a while, I had a large lamp on the bedside table, and I read the Bible, part of the Book of Mormon, and some nonfiction there. That was years ago; since, we have moved things around, and I can’t actually think which lamp it would have been–certainly not the blocker project lamp, which is actually on my to-do list for finally finishing up after a decade, although I might have to repaint it from scratch. But this time, I’ll know that acrylic paints dry in hours, not days, so I will move faster on it. When I get around to it. Someday.

At any rate, after the bedroom makeover or remakeover or whatever happened to that lamp, we’ve moved a chair in the corner, we received a lamp with a bad switch when my mother-in-law moved one of her recentish moves; in 2023, probably, Nico swapped out the switch to a kind that she would not have wanted, so it ended up by that red spinning chair.

So I’ve been reading poetry there at night, chapbooks, college literary magazines, complete collections, and so on. I winnowed the stack of literary magazines to just Ideals, though, as I was not looking for a lot of prose right before bed. Just light verse where I could read a couple and leave off.

These particular issues are from the 1980s mostly, and I have a preponderance of Mother’s Day issues because they made great gifts apparently. They stretch from their final years in Milwaukee and beyond to the first couple of years in Nashville. We see some editorial shifts over the years; some issues have recipes, prose, travel items, and “reader submissions” where readers submitted poetry, and those published got $10 (which is more than most poets make today on publication). But, sometimes, they feature something else: Pages torn from the magazine.

Ah, gentle reader, do you remember an era when people would tear poems out of their magazines or their newspapers and put them on their refrigerator or on their bedroom mirrors? I think I came at the end of that era–it was something the preceding generation(s) did, and although I might have done it once or twice, it’s not a regular thing. Of course, I suppose that could be partially because newspapers and magazines do not regularly publish poetry these days. The same people who regularly interacted with nice, serviceable, lightweight poetry probably also dabbled in it.

But not me. Although I can discard a lot of magazines which I’d rather keep from current subscriptions (First Things and New Oxford Review come to mind), I cannot mar a copy of a literary magazine or Ideals. I have a lot of former textbooks with highlighting, underlining, and marginalia, but my “dialoguing with the text” days did not extend past college where the professors really insisted on it. I received an embossing tool for Christmas a couple years ago (maybe a decade, but not so long ago when you’ve gathered several decades in memory), but I have not stamped my monogram into any books. Nacho cheese dust is a different matter, I admit.

I have always kind of thought that I was just a caretaker for these books and magazine, that I was holding onto them for the next generation. I’m not sure that my boys will want them, although the oldest is starting to read again. He recently asked if we had a copy of Summa Theologiae–of course I do (on the to-read shelves). When the youngest was in fourth grade, he boasted that whatever book his teacher mentioned reading we already had (although this was no longer true when they went to public high school and some of their reading became more current topically). Wouldn’t it be nice if they retained some or all of this library to have that same opportunity for their children? If they have children. If they read.

Ah, but likely not. I won’t be marking, discarding, or donating my books during my lifetime (unlike some reified potential in the garage and maybe, soon, my closet). Well, except for those duplicates I find and put on the free book cart at church.

As to my poems, I suppose it would be pretty to think someone would tear my work out of a magazine for their mirror, but that’s…. Unlikely. My latest ~~publication~~ appearance was in an online university literary magazine (still up in 2026 but maybe not in 2027). Not a peppy little uplifting poem to brighten one’s every morning. Well, maybe one of the two is. But. I guess the best I can hope for is that someone reads them at all.

I guess I need to make a checklist of Ideals magazines that I can use out in the wild to see if I’m buying the same ones over and over again (which happens). Maybe something to mark whether an issue is missing pages so I can look for a more complete copy. That would require two things: One, organizing my collection (not too bad now since it’s only a stack about 12 inches tall, the equivalent of a modern branch library’s philosophy section when you strip out the Buddhism. Two, I need to finish my upcoming game and build an app for just such a thing. Maybe next week.

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