To be able to say "Noggle," you first must be able to say "Nah."
Facebook has decided this t-shirt would be good for me:
You know, I’ve been seeing a lot of this sort of thing on my Facebook feed of late. Not just strident demand that I conform to questionable social-media-spread virology, but I get plenty of that. Continue reading “Compare and Contrast”
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I got this book in my first ABC Books online order during the past-but-sorta-current unpleasantness, and after I finished the Agatha Christie omnibus, I fully expected to jump immediately into the ordered books because last in, first out. After all, I was excited to receive them in the mail, so I should jump on them as soon as I could while I was still sort of excited about them. Also, these books will be atop and in front of other books, so they’ll be the ones closest at hand.
Si, a member of the Duck Dynasty clan and a popular part of the show, recounts his life through stories from his youth and his army days peppered with tall tales and old jokes recounted as though they actually happened to him. It’s a pleasant enough read; it’s 230 pages, but lightweight prose that moves quickly.
I do have one quibble, though. When he’s talking about a military posting in Massachusetts, he talks about the crazy accents they have, and he says:
The first time I walked into my barrack, I asked a sergeant where I could find some water to drink.
“The bubbler is down the hall,” he said.
“The what?” I asked him.
It took me a few minutes to realize he was talking about a water fountain.
That sergeant isn’t from Massachussetts. He’s from Wisconsin, Jack!
I have never seen the program, but Duck Dynasty had been a gift schtick for my recently passed aunt. She’d mentioned something about the show at some point, probably tut-tutting it, so for most of the last decade she got at least one Duck Dynasty branded product (but not the wine) as a Christmas gift. So reading the book kind of reminded me of her. Strangely enough, my other aunt (who once lived in Texas) spent a great deal of the decade living down the road from the Robertsons in Louisiana. Well, as down the road as Mickey Gilley’s anyway. That other aunt, my only remaining one from that side of the family, was and is a vagabond and is probably due to move soon.
Having read the book, I’m interested in seeing a bit of the program to see what prompted the interest in Si–it’s claimed that fans of their outdoor program and later Duck Dynasty wanted to see more of him telling stories like those in this book. I would, too. He is a couple of years older than my father was, and an outdoorsman, so he could serve as some middle-aged proxy of sorts. Well, not that psychologically deep, but still.
At the end of the book, there’s a page marketing the other books in the Duck Dynasty series, including a cookbook and a book by/about the head of the clan/company. Which leads me to believe that someone believed that fans of this show could read, which probably differs from what the friends Facebook shows you would believe. Maybe I’ll pick some of them up at the book sales to pair with my Duck Commander wine if they even make that any more.
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MSHP urges caution as Missouri traffic deaths up 7% from last year
If it saves just one life.
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I have previously mentioned that Isis liked to get into the laundry basket to play her game after I emptied it of laundry to fold.
Somewhere in the last couple of years, I’ve altered my habit; instead of putting the basket on its base on the bench after emptying the laundry to fold, I’ve started setting it on the floor on its side instead.
So now, to play, Isis jumps onto the bed amidst the laundry to fold and pretends like she wants to be petted. Or that she can be petted. But once the hand comes out, she rolls on her back and it’s on.
Well, I have a black belt in a martial art. I should have no problem with this game. I even established some ground rules.
The main point of the game is for me to try to touch her, and she tries to prevent it.
I am pretty good at this game, although I use the two-handed “Look at this hand–whilst the other pokes you!” method which does not earn me double points.
Not that I get too much of a high score going. That kitty is fast!
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Wirecutter posted a set of Tanya Tucker songs, including “Texas”:
My mother had this song on a cassette. Not a Tanya Tucker cassette; instead it was a Reader’s Digest collection of country hits, where two cassettes were packaged into an oversized binder that perhaps some people displayed on their shelves. This collection had a bunch of hits from the 1950s to the 1970s or perhaps the early 1980s–I remember it from 1984, but the Tanya Tucker song is from 1978.
My brother and I, when we shared the guest bedroom of my aunt’s house in St. Charles (before we moved into the basement), we would listen to those cassettes on a simple tape recorder. Not a radio/cassette combination–this was one of the type associated with recording things in an office, and it had an earphone. Not headphones: A single earbud before earbuds were the thing, which was just as well as it was not a stereo tape player–it only had a single speaker. We would lie on the floor in that bedroom, marveling in the cool of the air conditioning (whole house air conditioning, not the window kind we’d been used to).
As you know, this was not long after we might have moved to Texas, and the song mentions Milwaukee (“The beer stays cold in old Milwaukee”), further evidence we cited when we urchins tried to convince our uncle of the superiority of Milwaukee over St. Louis. Which I continue to assert to this day although I moved in the opposite direction when I had the chance.
When I hear the song (not so much watch the video above), I can almost catch the remembered experiential flavor of those afternoons that summer, listening to “Tall Oak Tree” by Dorsey Burnette, “Haunted House” by Jumpin’ Gene Simmons, “Bottle of Wine” by the Fireballs, and “Texas” by Tanya Tucker.
By the time my mother passed away, the binders were long gone, and the cassettes were in little plastic boxes instead. I think I might have let my brother have the cassettes along with most of my sainted mother’s bric-a-brac after she passed away. But I’ll go looking for them now as my weekend project.
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Postal Service to review package delivery fees as Trump influence grows:
Weeks before a Republican donor and top White House ally becomes postmaster general, the U.S. Postal Service has begun a review of its package delivery contracts and lost its second-highest executive, which will leave its board of governors without any officials who predate President Trump.
The moves, confirmed by six people with knowledge of the Postal Service’s inner workings but not authorized to speak publicly, underscore how Trump is moving closer to reshaping an independent agency he has dubbed “a joke.”
The Postal Service in recent weeks has sought bids from consulting firms to reassess what it charges companies such as Amazon, UPS and FedEx to deliver products on their behalf — often in the “last mile” between a post office and a customer’s home. Higher package rates would cost shippers and online retailers billions of dollars, potentially spurring them to invest in their own distribution networks instead of relying on the Postal Service.
I heard a radio spot on Thursday telling people to call Congress to stop this sanity. At the very end, it says it’s paid for by the Package Coalition, and I said aloud to the radio, “You mean Amazon.”
Which is true:
“While we are on the subject, it is reported that the US Post Office will lose US$1.50 on average for each package it delivers for Amazon. That amounts to Billions of Dollars. The Failing NY Times reports that ‘the size of the company’s lobbying staff has ballooned,’” he [President Trump] had said in a tweet.
In reaction, Amazon teamed up with retailers like Walmart, Target, and other small businesses to form The Package Coalition, a lobbying group aimed at ensuring they continue to get the cheapest possible rates for shipping their products through the USPS.
So, basically, profitable companies derive some of that profit shipping through the taxpayer-subsidized USPS, which is losing money and, apparently, should continue to do so to keep profits high.
I’m kind of glad I am the last person in the country who listens to radio.
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I bought this book at LibraryCon last year (is it showing off my riches to link to posts that illustrate how profligate I am in buying independent artists’ and writers’ work at fantasy conventions?). After reading the long Agatha Christie omnibus, I wanted something shorter to pad out my annual to-read collection. So I essentially read this on Wednesday night after finishing the Agatha Christie.
I told my beautiful wife that Cullen Bunn was a horror writer, but that’s not exactly true. He’s a comic book writer, and this is an independent collection of some of his stories that he’s turned over to other comic book artists (aside from his normal co-workers at the big publishing houses) to draw up and whatnot.
We’ve got eleven stories set in the horror milieu with different drawing styles. Unfortunately, the depth of the stories is a little thin–at least from a textual perspective. As you know, gentle reader, this is a peccadillo of mine: That modern comics have thinner stories to make more room for the art work, which someone decided is the whole reason for comics in the first place and should be paramount.
The stories themselves are of the type you’d find in D.C.’s Secrets of the Haunted House (although how would I know? I was a Marvel kid), albeit a little thinner. Perhaps those old stories were padded to stretch two into a comic, or maybe they had ads in them to make them seem longer.
At any rate, a quick enough read (look). It didn’t inspire me to try my hand at more fiction like The Twilight Zone Encyclopedia did, but, on the other hand, this represents eleven story set-ups that Bunn came up with that turned into a finished product. Which is a far better track record than I have over the last decade, which is basically two completed poems and maybe a short story nope, that was completed in the first decade of the century, not the second. So maybe I should get to work and get into the game before I tut-tut someone else’s comic book stories too much.
Also, when I went looking for the book of Charles Sander Peirce last weekend, I turned up a lot of books I wished I could read right now but I had to finish the Agatha Christie omnibus. Now that I’m done, though, I’ve forgotten which books I was so hot about, so I’ll probably pick up another graphic novel I bought at LibraryCon or an Executioner novel instead.
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So I got an email with an interesting subject line:
Cooking with the Cougars? I haven’t gotten many emails like that lately. So I opened it:
And I thought, Wait a minute, they’re not old enough to be cougars.
Then I looked at the return address: President, Alumni Association
Somehow, because I’m a supporter of WSIE, I’ve been added to the Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville, home of the Cougars, Alumni Association mailing list.
Oh, well.
I have to say whoever crafted that subject line probably saw a pretty good email-opening response.
(Aside: Does mentioning that I support a public radio station count as showing off all your wealth? Sorry, I am going to spend a lot of time in the next few weeks ruminanting on this–ruminanting, of course, means chewing on the same weed of thought over and over again even though you’re not getting much nourishment from it.)
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So a cousin of mine shared a Facebook video called Which ZOOM Caller Are You?, one of which is “The one in front of a bookcase”:
To be honest, I’m actually more of the kind that will avoid including video on these calls. In the past, when the team I was on actually had video calls, I had a slow Internet connection, so I didn’t want to tax it. Now, if possible, I try to avoid it because, if it’s a group call, you end up with tiny boxes which kind of subverts the point. And if I have to, I’ll do a video call, but I end up spending the whole time looking at the camera and not the screen, so it does me no good at all as I cannot but glance at the person with whom I’m speaking.
Which is not to say I don’t look at the video on the Zoom calls. When my current employer had a company-wide meeting a couple weeks back, I completely spent the call scrolling through the hundreds of people looking to see who would have more books in the background than I would (if I shared video). A couple people had a bookshelf or two, and my immediate manager might have been close with a wall of books.
I commented on my cousin’s post with a photo I did for a bit on another blog about framing your video so the bookshelves show but the bladed weapons do not:
To which her sister responded:
Quit showing off all your wealth Brian! Not all of us can have the huge riches that you keep throwing in our faces. All I have is a plain wall
And I was all like, wuh?
Because, gentle reader, I worry that I’ll have forgotten where I come from or that people, generally people I knew when I was younger, will think so. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I won’t let you, gentle reader, forget that I come from down a gravel road via the trailer park and city housing projects. I’m like Everclear without a recording contract and, face it, any musical talent whatsoever.
When I was younger, I was sometimes told that I was arrogant and a bit of a show-off, as I was always ready to tell you I got good grades or was really smart.
I like to think I’ve gotten better about it, especially in person, where I won’t even tell you I’m any good at anything at all.
But here on this blog, and probably on Facebook, I am prone to putting a good face on things. I mention I get a lot of books and some number of CDs. I’ve mentioned some periods where I’ve spent dollars a day on trivial things. I have a gym membership and a martial arts school membership. My boys go to private school. I drive a Lexus (albeit a twelve-year-old Lexus we bought with 100,000 miles on it). So, yeah, we’re doing okay, and I somehow have bumbled into a career that isn’t as satisfying as being a best-selling novelist but that leaves me not exhausted and physically not beaten down at the end of the day.
So am I flaunting wealth? I don’t know. I don’t think so. I hope not. But I would have to leave that for you, gentle reader, and for my cousin to assess. I’m not out here trying to be as artificial as an Instagram model but with a dad bod and flabbier prose. I’m just tapping out bits of my story, mostly for myself in a decade when I’m looking back at 2020. (I hope you like some of it.)
Maybe my cousin was just referring to my posting lots of pictures of books, which is what she meant by wealth. Maybe I’m reading too much into it. But I got a blog post out of it, anyway.
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Baby ‘Murder’: One month-old baby dies as man, 26, and woman, 24, arrested for murder.
Body in Bag: Man & woman ‘caught with human torso in case as other body parts found nearby’
Well, I guess these really aren’t jobs for Miss Marple.
Also:
Tube Squeezed: Sadiq Khan ‘blackmails’ Boris with threat to cut Tube unless he gets £2bn
You can tell the ‘crisis’ is coming to a close when the elected officials greatest concern is getting more money. See also Port Authority asks for $3B bailout amid COVID-19 crisis.
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This is the famous five-novel omnibus that my grandmother sent me earlier this year. It includes the following novels:
So, Brian J., did you figure out the murderers? You know, I knew by page 70, about halfway through The Mirror Crack’d, but I might have read that book before. I also remember Mrs. McGillicuddy seeing the murder from when I read that book in high school, but I didn’t remember whodunit. So I was one for five, ish, as I knew in what direction the murderer lie in What Mrs. McGillicuddy Saw!. But perhaps I kind of remembered it. Also, I knew kind of something in Nemesis, but not exactly.
My beautiful wife asked me which was my favorite, but to be honest, that’s like asking what your favorite Executioner book is. They’re formulaic, but of a different formula than men’s adventure paperbacks. Someone Miss Marple knows or somewhere Miss Marple goes has a murder on her/its hands, and she acts all dithery but listens to people and compares them to a list of people she’s known to ferret out the killer. The books often feature common tropes, such as:
Reading five relatively close together means I can spot these tropes. I imagine if I read a bunch of them, I would get better at figuring out whodunit. I think I was better at them when I was reading a bunch of them at the beginning of high school, but in the interim, I’ve gotten a little more used to hard boiled or modern thrillers which are less clue-driven whodunits.
Also, the body in the library thing. The last novel is entitled The Body in the Library, as a matter of fact. You know, in reading these old English mysteries, libraries aren’t good for much except killing people or stashing bodies. You know, I have often dreamed of having a home with a proper library, but English mysteries might be killing that urge in me.
So it was a nice way to pass some time. Although I’m not sure I am in the frame of mind, really, to get the most out of English or modern cozy mysteries, although I will read them from time to time when I find them on the to-read shelves. Or when my grandmother sends them to me.
This is a pretty nice edition, too, with Genuine Bonded Leather cover and gold paint atop. Probably archival paper, too. Chatham River Press must be akin to Easton Press in publishing nice editions of books, but it looks like they’re no longer in business. Still, although Nogglestead does not smell of mahogany, it’s nice to have as many leather-bound books as possible.
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Coronavirus: California prepared to enact martial law if its a ‘necessity’, governor says
Don’t blame me. I voted for Clinton. George Clinton:
I am pretty sure that the Constitution says that American citizens, not just the government, can have Atomic Dogs.
But maybe that’s not true in California.
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So my boys were in the living room, dancing to “Astronomia”, and the oldest said, “Google Funeral Dancers.”
“I know what funeral dancers are,” I said.
The boy was taken a bit aback, but come on.
You know the kids these days have been on the Web since they were born, but
I have been on the Web since it was born.
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Like The First Four Years, this book was not published in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s lifetime and is based on a loose diary she had of her trip with Almanzo (Manly), Rose, and another family from South Dakota to the land they eventually bought near Mansfield, Missouri, which became Rocky Ridge Farm and their forever home. The diary entries are leavened with Rose Wilder Lane’s recollections and some photographs not only of the family but also of the places they passed through, although many are historical photos of the time when the Wilders passed through and are not of or by the Wilders themselves.
That said, the book does not have a great narrative structure and does not characterize the people in it much. The trip occurs after repeated crop failures and both Laura and Almanzo suffer from bad cases of diptheria. I read Willa Cather’s O, Pioneers! after I started reading the Little House books, and this one reminds me most of the Cather book. Whereas the other Little House books (except, perhaps, the aforementioned The First Four Years) emphasize the technical skills and mindset in being a pioneer, but the diary entries in this book catalog not only how pretty the land is that they visit but also the price of land per acre and the expected yield in bushels per acre.
The other stunning metric from the book is that she reports the daily high temperature on their trip until she loses the thermometer sometime along the way. Many or most of the days of their trip through South Dakota and Nebraska the temperature was 100 degrees in July and August. In 1894. Don’t the models predicting our imminent demise from the boiling seas take data from after that to make their predictions? All I know is that we’ve had two cool springs in a row here in southwest Missouri, this one with a late freeze that killed my peach blossoms (again), so I’m inclined to believe that temperature has varied and continues to vary. But I am no scientist, just someone who takes his lived experience and tries to make sense of it.
I have two other books of Little Houseiana here: A biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder and a collection of her “discovered” writings in pompous hardback that I suspect will be more unpolished bits that she didn’t plan to publish but that the Trust put out on her behalf eventually. I was going to power through them, but I’ve decided to power through the last novel in the Agatha Christie omnibus instead. Because, despite all the cool books I’ve recently found and want to read right now, this is a situation that calls for powering through books I’m not excited about. But soon: fun!
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So I’m hoping to write an article that uses Charles Sander Peirce’s “The Fixation of Belief” as a bit of a starting point. So, Sunday, I faced a dilemma: Read it online or spend an hour scouring the Nogglestead library’s to-read shelves for a copy of The Essential Peirce that my beautiful wife gave me for Christmas nearly twenty years ago.
So, of course, I opted to go through my library.
I kind of remembered having seen it on the leftmost shelves in my office, so I started there.
I hoped it would not be on the second set of shelves, which broke eight years ago (!) and that I have not replaced. Instead, another of the shelves has broken to irrepairable levels, and I’ve stacked books on books so that the lowest remaining shelf (not the bottom) is actually held up by the books on the bottom shelf. The stacks on that shelf are the height of two missing shelves, which is to say about three feet. So I saved that bit for last.
I only had one martial arts weapon fall on me as I searched, a practice (wooden) kama. Here’s what it looks like:
I provide this image as a public service so you won’t go performing an Internet search on “kama” only to discover that the kama also means sexual desire and longing in Hindu and Buddhist literature which means a lot of art of scantily clad Indian women. That link goes to Wikipedia, but the entry also is probably not safe for work. Assuming any of you are at work during the current unpleasantness. The research for this part of the post cost me another hour, by the way.
If only I was looking for William James’ work on Pragmatism, I would have found it in no time at all as it’s atop the books stacked on the floor.
If I were looking for The Will to Believe, which I read twenty-ish years ago (and probably six or eight years after it was assigned to me in college), I would have found that pretty easily, too. When we first moved into Nogglestead, I organized the shelves with the books I’ve read pretty well. In the decade since, the organization has fallen off as I’ve moved bookshelves around and later had to jam books wherever they fit. But traces of the organization would probably have made it easy to find. As an experiment, after writing the preceding, I went to my to-read shelves and found it in about four minutes. It was next to Nature Noir which I read in 2006 and just mentioned a week and a half ago comparing it to something else I ordered from ABC Books. On the other side: We Can’t Go Home Again by Clarence E. Walker, the very first book I reported on for this blog in 2003.
If only I were looking for Kant, Sartre, Kierkegaard, Jung, or a Neibuhr, I would have found something much earlier as I have multiple volumes by those hoity-toityish authors. You know, it might be handy to group them together, but I don’t have a lot of room to work with here, and that’s a project for another day or days.
I have a lot of books on how to do software testing, which I could probably read if I want to get into that line of work. I think I have actually read three in total (maybe just two: How to Break Software and How to Break Software Security). I have certainly started and abandoned any number of books on testing. Which are still on the to-read shelves to this day.
I probably own more David Morrell books than anyone else besides David Morrell himself. I read First Blood and First Blood Part II in 2008, and I liked them well enough to pick up other books of his as I’ve come across them. I haven’t read any since then, however.
I found in my office a book called More Book Lust; I was surprised and delighted to find I owned the original, which I found in the book shelves in the hallway. I did not think to group them, although I did put Foxfire 3 between Foxfire 2 and Foxfire 4. I spotted a couple other things that I should have grouped: The Heechee novels that my beautiful wife bought me for Christmas after I read Gateway in 2013 have scattered amongst the book shelves in my office; there’s a Ross Thomas paperback floating around in the hallway where two or three are together in my office; and Alice in Wonderland in the Children’s Classics edition rests in the hallway whilst Black Beauty, Hans Brinker, Heidi, and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea in the same series are on the bottom shelf of the collapsed bookshelves in the office (and are dutifully holding up their brethren).
I have two copies of Lady Chatterley’s Lover: One in an omnibus of Lawrence’s work and one in a paperback that features an essay about the censorship of the novel. So, of course, as they are not the exact same edition, I cannot get rid of one. Although when I read one, I suppose I can move the other to the read shelves so long as I read that essay. If I remember. I might well forget an read the book again, although that’s a greater risk with genre fiction.
I did find, though, that I have made enough gaps in selecting and rearranging books that I was able to get all of my recent purchases from ABC Books onto the shelves. The History of Civilization series and the books atop it, as well as the ones I inherited from my aunt recently, have no home on the shelves yet.
And I did go through the stacks on the collapsed shelf, but I did not find the book I was looking for. So I started again, and as I stood books that had been stacked on the out-facing rank of books onto their edges, I found it.
I had remembered it with a blue cover, which is probably why my eyes skipped over the tan spine the first time. But it was approximately where I thought it was.
And it was an hour later that I found it.
All the time I had allocated in the day for reading “The Fixation of Belief” and starting the thing I wanted to write were lost to the search for the book and this blog post. So I’ll have to take that up another day.
But I’ve rediscovered a lot of cool books that I want to read, so I should spend a little more time actually reading than sitting at the computer here, refreshing my favorite blogs and Facebook and researching kama.
So if you’ll excuse me.
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As I might have mentioned, I have assigned each of my boys a book to read, an adult book with few pictures and no comic drawings like you find and they unfortunately find too often in the works of Jeff Kinney and Dav Pilkey. The oldest got The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin and the younger got Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave. They’re both going to write essays about five lessons they learned from their assigned books; then they will swap books and write an essay on the other book.
As I’ve been posting the last couple of weeks, I’ve mentioned when other bloggers have posted poems that inspired me to include those poems in daily poetry writing. But today I cam across Jack Baruth’s weekly roll-up from last week where he quotes Frederick Douglass because:
The beauty of proper English is that it can be mastered by anyone with the will and capacity to do so. It does not discriminate. It is a tool available to all who might wield it in confidence. Frederick Douglass was one such man. He used the discipline of language to effect major change — in his life, in the life of others. In a Newspeak world, he could never have persuaded as he did, could never have accomplished what he did. In this way, the leveling of English won’t serve to erase oppression or discrimination: it will serve to make it permanent. We will have two official languages: English for the people who make the rules, and Newspeak for those who must follow them. The speakers of the latter will live in the eternal sunshine of a spotless present, never troubled by Shakespeare or Douglass in “the original”, never given the chance to express or consume a contrary opinion. O brave new world, that has such people in it!
Which is why I’ve gotten a little more hands-on in pushing my children. They’ve gotten too accustomed to doing the minimum to get by in elementary school, and it’s about time they started to work with real literature and to become fluent in the language they’ve inherited.
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So on Friday, we watched the flyover of the B2 bombers that honored….well, we have the planes, why shouldn’t we get to see them once in a while?
To be honest, it looked like a hawk.
Well, that is a hawk. We went outside about 6:18 to watch for the 6:22 flyover, and a little before the plane appeared, this hawk dove at something in the front yard of Nogglestead. It must have not liked what it saw or missed, as it flew south of Nogglestead looking for something else.
As the hawks often hunt and circle in pairs, my beautiful wife thought the B2 was the second hawk when it appeared and told the boys, no, it was a hawk.
It was the plane, the plane:
It flew east to west and banked wide to the west and south; given how high it was, it might have gone over Mount Vernon and Marshfield or Aurora as it banked.
It then flew south to north on its way home to base, probably over Springfield, Bolivar, Clinton, and maybe Sedalia.
You know, some would say that it’s a twee bit of money wastery to have military planes fly over as a salute to, what, health care providers? First responders? Grocery store stockers who haven’t had a day off in months?
But there’s little uniting in this country even amid an overhyped national emergency (see how I said “overhyped”? Clearly I am on one side). One of the few things might be, for many people yet, the sight of our military materiel and the perhaps-dormant patriotism they stir.
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The last couple of weeks, I’ve been getting a lot of traffic from Korea. The Good Korea:
I don’t know what to make of it; it looks like the IP address from Kakao is actually owned by Kakao and hasn’t been reassigned to something like Google with an old entry showing up in my stats.
I assume this means that I’ve suddenly been indexed by a South Korean search engine or that somehow elevated in its rankings.
But, of course, I don’t wonder if it’s not something more sinister like some kind of hacking attempt or probe.
Still, welcome to the blog, Mr., Mrs., and/or Miss Park.
Is that racist, to use a popular Korean surname, one held by 8.4% of the population, in that statement? No more than saying “Keeping up with the Joneses” is somehow classist, denigrating social climbers who don’t know their place in society (or yours, peasant, so don’t try to spend your way to success and fulfillment). However, I am pretty sure saying Park is a common Korean last name is racist if you want to call someone who uses it racist.
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The blog received a visitor from someone in Katy, Texas, the other day:
Which led me to a little reminiscience. The spellchecker assures me reminiscience is not how you spell it, but I feel the narcissistic review of one’s life in “What If?” models is at least as scientifically valid as most social “sciences” taught in the universities and, seemingly, more scientifically valid than a lot of computer models designed to guide public policy and citizen compulsion.
At any rate, back in the early 1980s, my sainted mother was newly separated and soon-to-be newly divorced and was seemingly in retrospect eager to vacate Milwaukee. She had numerous friends there, mostly neighbors or friends of my father’s or ex-wives of my father’s friends that my mother got custody of in the divorce. But her family was mainly in the St. Louis area, where we eventually ended up (eventually being a couple summers after the separation). But my mother briefly, it seemed, considered moving to Katy, Texas, where her youngest sister lived with her then-husband as his work took him there.
As my third grade year ended, I had just finished up my beginning music class learning the saxette (a little whistle later replaced by the new-fangled technology or better marketing program of the recorder which replaced it as the beginning musical instrument). I wanted to sign up for the public-school-offered piano class in fourth grade, but my mother wouldn’t let me sign up for one of the limited spots because she thought we wouldn’t be there for the beginning of the year–we would be in Texas, right down the road from Mickey Gilley’s place (research indicates that “right down the road” means on the other side of Houston in Pasadena but not any more–Gilley moved to Branson at some point, so by my mother’s logic, I live just down the road from it now).
However, that did not actually come to pass. We did another two years at Carleton before moving to St. Charles.
Still, the visit from Katy brought fourth some speculation (a couple minutes’ worth, anyway). How would I be different today had I started the fourth grade outside of Houston, Texas, and graduated from high school down there? Would I have developed an affection for my adopted home state which I really haven’t for Missouri? My aunt shortly decamped for Missouri after a couple of years in Katy; would we also have moved back, or would my mother have gotten a job that compelled her to stay in Houston? Would I have a Texas accent and wear a cowboy hat instead of a fedora? Would I have read Westerns instead of mysteries? Would I actually like bro country in the 21st century?
It’s fun to briefly speculate. Except for the last bit, which is horrifying.
Still, what might have been? This seems appropriate:
Sweet Christmas, that song itself came out, what, ten years after the events I’m talking about, which is to say twenty-five years ago.
I asked my aunt about this to verify whether she was indeed in Katy, or if it was Tyler, Texas–about that time, a Texan girl came to Carleton and said she was the great(x)-granddaughter of John Tyler, so perhaps I was conflating the memories. I say great(x) because in the almost forty years since, I don’t recall how many greats were lined up. Four? Five? At any rate, over almost forty years, I am not sure how many of these memories of mine to trust, and I told my aunt that there aren’t many people left you could set me straight.
My aunt set me straight: she was surprised to hear that my mother considered moving to Texas to be near her. She thought we were already in the St. Louis area when she moved to Texas. In my mind, though, it was more serious than that, but perhaps it was from a child’s perspective, as I at the time wondered how desert-like that part of Texas was, and I worried about facing Gila monsters in the yard. So whatever my mother might have said, even in passing, I took it seriously in my even-then neurotic way, enumerating an unlikely bundle of worries. And a likely one: saying goodbye to friends.
Well, maybe we were in St. Louis before my aunt moved to Texas; perhaps my sainted mother talked about it when living in my other aunt’s basement and when she was separating onion rings on an assembly line aside immigrants and was considering anything an improvement. Maybe I’m mixing the timeline up because we moved several times in those years, from Milwaukee to the basement a modest house in a well-to-do suburb to the trailer park to the gravel road. Perhaps my mother only dreamed of this in Wisconsin, perhaps she talked about it with her mother or my aunts in St. Louis, all of whom have passed away. Who knows? I’ve reached out to my brother to see if he remembers any of it or if I am just making up fancies in my mind about my youth.
Next up: I shall speculate what would have become of my had I learned to play piano in the fourth grade. Certainly, it would have prevented me from the current mental and neurotic roadblocks I have to learning a musical instrument in my forties (the guitar experiment ended shortly after this rather sanguine update a year and a half ago). Would I have been in band? My beautiful wife ensures me that is an unalloyed good in high school and hopes our oldest does it should he go to public school next year, even though he’s not that enthusiastic about it. My youngest, though, started piano lessons in third grade and really swings on the trumpet already. Would I have been like that?
I look forward to the full resumption of normal activities so I can fill my days with normal busyness and not this nonsense.
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I don’t normally buy the smaller bottles of HE Tide at the Sam’s Club, but our normal larger bottles of Tide were out of stock, and in the current unpleasantness, one must hoard what is available, not what one wants.
But wait a minute: This Tide leaves clothes smelling like Clean Linen:
By implication and inference, then, should we assume that all other Tides leave clothes smelling dirty?
Well, no. As you might know, gentle reader, Clean Linen with capital letters is a patented scent and is like Grape Soda. It’s not exactly what clean linen dried on a clothesline smells like, but it’s an attempt to artificially replicate it, and it’s consistent across all olfactory delivery platforms (like plug-in scented oils, which I guess are really Glade® PlugIns® Scented Oils from my experience testing S.C. Johnson online programs) and various sprays.
We will keep this between us, gentle reader, as my beautiful wife does not like this Patented Scent (as we’ve learned from other platforms), and I didn’t see it when I bought the soap. Hopefully she won’t notice that she cannot stand the smell of her clothes. Although if this causes her to take her clothes off, well, I’ll count that as a win.
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