Musings from Brian J. Noggle – Page 2 – To be able to say "Noggle," you first must be able to say "Nah."

Five Things On My Desk, And Most Are Related

July 8, 2024 Brian J. Noggle

Another compelling entry in this series, but a glance at what lies on the vast horizontal surface of my office desk.

There was a time, gentle reader, when I was most actively on toddler duty where my desk became piled with things as I only spent intermittent minutes at the desk, and I’d throw things and papers on the desk and they would pile up (sort of like has happened with my work bench in the garage over the last two years, again). But now that I am in the office all day, the desk is tidier; the bills are not lost; but I still have a few things that accumulate for future projects or as the result of other projects, as we shall see.

What do we have?

Supplies and tools to repair my mother’s jewelry box.

It stayed in the store room since we moved to Nogglestead not long after my sainted mother passed away in 2009. Like many of her things, it smelled of cigarette smoke, but in the intervening years, that smell has faded (and had been replaced with cat litter dust). As my beautiful wife’s rather inexpensive jewelry box has fallen apart (and I have been unable to find her a comparable unit–so many jewelry boxes are so small these days), I thought I would restore my mother’s jewelry box. I bought some screws to fix the hinged trays and some anti-tarnish fabric to re-line the drawers and trays, and….

Well. Like so many projects I line up, I gather the materials for them, and then I don’t actually start them because I am afraid I will screw it up. So the tools (not depicted) are on the desk and the supplies are on the desk, but I have yet to actually try to reline a tray.

Maybe sometime after the fence painting.

Two wooden crosses

Also from the store room. After our church remodeled sometime in the past, one of the congregant woodworkers made a number of crosses from the old altar rails, and the church sold them as a fundraiser. I bought one to make into a shadowbox for a visiting pastor who got called to a church out in Republic with whom we were sort of friends at the time. I never got around to that–I wanted to somehow make a background of the church’s sanctuary or exterior, but never did.

I might have gotten the other as a gift for my mother-in-law, or maybe I got three.

Nogglestead does not have any religious iconography decor. No crosses, no praying old men and/or women, no Jesus looking down on you and having his eyes follow you around the room. To be honest, I am not entirely sure what I will do with the crosses. Maybe I’ll make my way to the choir loft to get that good photo for a background. More likely they will ride the ~~pine~~ pressboard of my desk for a while until I put them back into the storeroom (he said, spelling it both ways in this post to improve his chances of finding this post in a search sometime in the future).

An old alarm clock.

An old alarm clock which I have not even dusted yet (a month and a half later). I think this was my wifes, as the one that got me through high school, college, and the first fifteen years of my “career” is still on the bureau in my bedroom. We have no use for this, since we use our phones as alarms now, but I can’t just get rid of it as it is not mine. And I keep forgetting to ask my wife if we can donate it.

Two silver platters.

Or maybe steel platters. I did dust them off after cleaning the store room over Memorial Day weekend, and I’ve thought about polishing them and putting them…. Well, somewhere. We don’t have anywhere to display them, and it’s not like we’re serving crumpets to the king here at Nogglestead.

I suppose I could put them in the anti-tarnish cloth for now.

By the way, the bag of spoons which I first mentioned as being on my desk in 2012 has made a return appearance as I keep meaning to getting around to polishing them and hanging them. But they’re very tarnished. Maybe I should see if I can use the new wire wheels for my drill or rotary tool on them. Most of them are just spoons from different patterns, not souvenir or collectible spoons, so it would not really diminish their value.

A State Street® Electronic Device.

I bought this little device at the Lutherans for Life garage sale in June. I wasn’t sure what it was, and I’m still not: Even though I have replaced the batteries and figured out how to turn it on, the LED screen doesn’t work right. It presents a grid of some sort, but not much else. It comes with a stylus, so maybe it was a cheap PDA type device or mere touchscreen calculator given away by the financial firm whose name is on the front.

I might crack it open to see if the screen would be easy to replace or if I could connect it to some other display peripheral just for fun, but this is the sort of project that I enjoy more in the ideation stage. Likely this will go into the store room or the trash. But not quickly.

Like I said, the desk is mostly clean and tidy, but these things are a bit out of place and will not likely be put into their places, or have their related projects completed, in the near term.

I wonder how the pace of Nogglestead’s change will slow once our children move out. Sometimes, it seems like they’re the only thing changing at all.

And a good prop bet might be “How many of these things will still be on Brian J.’s desk when they’re empty nesters?” I think the over/under is 2.

Buy My Books!

Biden Administration Finds New Way To Raise Prices

July 5, 2024 Brian J. Noggle

Biden administration announces new rule to protect workers from heat-related illnesses:

Senior Biden administration officials announced a proposed rule Tuesday to prevent heat-related illness in the workplace, as climate change brings hotter temperatures around the nation.

In a call to reporters Monday, officials spoke on background about the new rule, which the administration sent to the Federal Register Tuesday for review. Depending on the heat index, the rule would require employers to monitor workers’ heat exposure, provide cool-down areas and take mandatory cool-down breaks.

This new rule comes as extreme temperatures will engulf much of the country at some point during the year. Heat waves occur more frequently now compared to the 1960s, from an average of two per year to six in the 2020s, according to data from the Environmental Protection Agency. Heat waves have also increased in duration and intensity.

You would not believe this, but all of history has occurred within the living memory of young striving activists in government and in “independent” news organizations like the Missouri Independent.

You know what this will do?

Make the cost of building anything higher; make it harder to repair roads; and so on. Springfield Parks have had to establish a rolling schedule for their public pools even amidst the most frightening weather that twenty-three-year-olds from elsewhere can remember because they cannot hire enough life guards to staff the pools. Good thing that this particular initiative will help with people suffering from the heat by further limiting the pools’ hours of operation due to increased staffing requirements.

But nobody could see the downstream effects of this plan except for those who are not experts in public policy and who instead live in the real world.

(Link via the Springfield Business Journal‘s free daily newsletter.)

Buy My Books!

Not the Placement He Wanted

July 5, 2024 Brian J. Noggle

The Branson / Tri-Lake News has started dropping cocked ads in the middle of its news stories above the fold on the front page, which catches one’s eye, I suppose, but it can lead to some unfortunate occurrences if the paper publishes actual news on occasion.

Wherein it almost looks as though the candidate for office has been charged with murder.

I wonder if he got a freebie or two out of the situation.

Buy My Books!

And Some Younger Folk

July 4, 2024 Brian J. Noggle

Facebook showed me this:

And I knew who it was not because I remember the program from my youth, but because we have Emmet Otter’s Jug Band Christmas on VHS, and we’ve watched it maybe twice with our boys when they were young.

You know, the boys never really got into watching the same videos over and over as some people indicate their kids did. They liked their Sesame Street, and they watched a bunch of shows, mostly from a DVR, but they had a rolling set of cartoons they watched: Scooby Doo, G.I. Joe, Spiderman and His Amazing Friends, Transformers…. They never got big into Disney stuff, and they never wanted to watch things over and over again.

But as I am who I am, I accumulated a bunch of videocassettes and whatnot for my children. Actually, I bought a bunch before we even thought of having children when I was doing the Ebay thing around the turn of the century.

So I have a bit of a conundrum now: What to do with the portion of the Nogglestead video library (and book library) which is geared toward children? So I box them up and store them for eventual grandchildren? Try to sell them (who watches old videocassettes these days except me?).

Ah, gentle reader, you probably know better if you’ve read me for any time, you know what I will do: Nothing soon.. I will continue to dust the videos and the children’s books that my aunt gave us in the late 1970s. Eventually, I will remove the children’s books from the bookshelves in their bedrooms and load them with my books.

But in 2013, when writing about The Future Forgotten Half-Empty Bottle of Mr. Bubble, I mentioned their bath toys, and in 2021, I said the bath toys were long gone, but I must have meant that their playing with bath toys was long gone, as the bath toys are still in the bin under the sink in the hall bath.

So, where was I? Oh, yes. Emmet Otter.

Buy My Books!

ALERT: TOP STORY: Opportunity to Slap the Religious, Continue Fantasy Of Militant Religion on the March in United States

July 3, 2024July 3, 2024 Brian J. Noggle

Stop the presses! The St. Louis Post-Dispatch brings us this breaking news!

Ascension parishioner thought Chesterfield ‘militia’ could bring young men to Catholic Church

The man who tried to start “The Legion of the Sancta Lana” at Ascension Catholic Church said he regrets describing the group as a militia.

* * * *

“Seeing the closure of Catholic churches and the dwindling congregations across St. Louis, it was my intention to create an organization for young men to push themselves mentally, physically, and spiritually through the practice of discipline, study, and fitness modeled after the military,” Ray said in a statement provided to the Post-Dispatch. “The use of the term ‘militia’ is regrettable and does not accurately represent the intention of the organization. However, the current state of the Church in The West is equally regrettable and I’m sure we can all agree that we are in desperate times.”

C’mon, man, this is top news? This is a notice in a church bulletin with keywords that cause right-thinking people to clutch their pearls and to help watercolor the picture that Christian Fundamentalists Are Arming Up To From Trump’s Irregular Army or something.

I would say “do better,” but the paper can probably not.

I haven’t seen the St. Louis Post-Dispatch recently, but I did have a dental appointment this week, so I got to glance over the Springfield News-Leader these days. And I kid you not, it was six or eight sheets of newsprint, so twelve or sixteen pages. That is, about the same size as the small town weeklies I take. Which means, what, twenty stories? Fewer? (Maybe I should actually count them the next time I’m at the dentist.) I won’t say the business model is completely failing, but journalist doesn’t seem like it’s a career path to the middle class.

Buy My Books!

Movie Report: Epic Movie (2007)

July 3, 2024July 2, 2024 Brian J. Noggle

Book cover I guess this is the third in this line ([Genre] Movie) that I’ve seen; I saw Date Movie last December and Not Another Teen Movie in the last couple of years (but before movie reports on the blog were a thing). I picked this DVD up this spring and clearly could not wait to get into it. Or, actually, wanted something very, very light to watch one evening.

So: Like the others of its ilk, it piles together elements from other films to parody them. In this film, four orphans (whether or not their parents are still alive) win golden tickets to go to a candy maker’s palace. The candy maker proves to be very creepy, so one of them (and then another, and then all of them eventually) try to hide in a wardrobe which leads them to the land of Gnarnia. The first, a girl, meets a satyr who takes him to his crib (cue the MTV or whatever style intro to where he lives), but he turns her out as the ruler of the land (the White Bitch, played by Jennifer Coolidge) knows that she will be deposed by four humans, so humans are to be turned over to her at once. The second, played by Kal Penn, is found by the White Bitch, whom he calls Stifler’s Mom (from the American Pie movies, get it?), and she offers him sexual favors or the promise therein to betray his friends. But they team up along with Captain Jack Swallow, the Brotherhood of Mutants (from the X-Men movies), and a bunch of other misfits to aid Aslo, a randy lion-man, to free Gnarnia.

So it throws a lot of things in there, mostly to say, did you see what we did here? and so you can feel a little smart when you recognize what they’ve jammed in there, but that’s about the depth of the humor. It’s not particularly raunchy, although there is a little sexual innuendo (the film is PG-13, not R).

Still, I don’t know. I mean, when I was writing parody in high school, I had this series of short stories where a character encountered all sorts of characters from other source material, and I thought it was a hoot. But my sense of humor has changed, I suppose, to something more sophisticated than see what I crammed in here?. Well, maybe it’s not necessarily more sophisticated, but different all the same.

Which is not to say that I won’t buy others in this line when I can get them for a buck or fifty cents. But I’m unlikely to watch them repeatedly like Airplane!, Hot Shots!, or National Lampoon’s Loaded Weapon I. Are those movies that substantially different, or is it that I watched them for the first time at different stages of my life? I dunno.

Buy My Books!

New PPR (Personal Procrastination Record)

July 3, 2024 Brian J. Noggle

Ah, gentle reader. As you might know about me, I tend to put things off, especially home maintenance or repair projects. They will sit for ~~weeks~~ ~~months~~ years, and then I will do them in a short period of time. Instead of a sense of accomplishment, a look what I did triumph, I’ll then recriminate myself for not having done it sooner. And this very week, I have the topper of all stories in that ilk.

In late summer 2009, we had house-shopped in Springfield for a couple of months on intermittent weekends, and we settled on Nogglestead (like our home in Old Trees, we magickally found a house on the very last day we were house-shopping). I made the round trip after the paperwork was in motion for the home inspection and followed Dennis, the home inspector, around the house with my own tools to poke and prod what he was and what he was not (after all, home inspectors adhere to a checklist closely, and they’re paid by the home sellers, so they don’t go off book at risk of their continued employment).

One thing he pointed out was that the insulation around the copper line from the external air conditioner condenser unit to the house, the pipe that brings the cooled, erm, coolant back into the house was breaking down. It was an easy fix: just take it off and replace it with standard pipe insulation. It wasn’t on his checklist, and I didn’t make it part of the nickel-and-dime remediation conditions for purchase. But shortly after we bought Nogglestead, I went to the hardware store and bought two lengths of pipe insulation. And then I put them in the garage, a little out of the way, and….

Almost fifteen years pass.

Gentle reader, I have alluded to the fact that I am in a slow motion process of cleaning up my garage (which includes the slow grind of painting my fence so that I can get the three five gallon buckets of Mission Brown and three smaller buckets of Russet out of the garage). On Monday, I used a cardboard poster tube that originally contained a poster that we framed and gave to my mother-in-law for Christmas probably twenty years ago (when we lived in Casinoport, undoubtedly). It was on the top shelf of a, erm, shelving unit with round things: Rolled up replacement screen material, rolls of kraft paper for landscaping and/or painting, a couple of poster tubes in case I ever got back into the Ebay thing selling movie posters (which I have not for almost a quarter century), and the pipe insulation.

I noticed when running the line trimmer around the house that the line was almost bare copper these days, and it was sweating as much as I was. So it was time.

I got the insulation down, took a scissors and a roll of duct tape, and spent five minutes replacing the insulation. I peeled the remainder of the old insulation off, cut the new insulation down to size, wrapped it around, pulled the tape to the adhesive on the edges, pressed the edges together, and added a couple loops of duct tape, and….

It took almost as long to walk around the house and back as it did to fix the thing.

I probably put it off so long (as with other repairs like it) because I have little experience with HVAC and I was afraid I would somehow damage the unit. The next morning, the fear was almost realized, as the condenser had a weird rattle that it had not had before. However, I discovered that I left the duct tape on the condenser unit, and it was rattling. So, apparently, I have not damaged the unit.

I hate to think how much the delay cost me in energy costs.

But it’s done now, and I don’t think I can even top this procrastination record. And it’s a small step in cleaning my garage as well. So, ultimately, it is a funny (in a sad way) story and a small win anyway.

Buy My Books!

Choose Your Own Grind Adventure

July 2, 2024 Brian J. Noggle

In video games, “grinding” is doing repetitive tasks over and over to increase your in-game scores or for some in-game benefit, such as mining a bunch to get the materials you need to craft a weapon or better tool.

Real life is like a grind. No, scratch that: Real life is a selection of different grinds from which you can choose. And, as a bonus, some grinds do not lead to better outcomes: some grinds are maintenance grinds which are repetitive tasks that you do just to keep even.

Continue reading “Choose Your Own Grind Adventure” →

Buy My Books!

What’d I Say?

July 1, 2024July 1, 2024 Brian J. Noggle

The same thing as a commenter at Diplomad:

We need to dispel the idea that the problem is Biden (or whoever the Democrats choose to nominate). It does not matter whether the executive is Biden, Gavin, or Michelle; the outcome of their polices will be the same. The problem with the Democrats is their Leftist policies, and their willingness to do anything (including disregarding the Constitution) in order to remain in power.

By focusing on Trump vs. Biden, we offer them an easy solution of simply changing their figurehead. We need to disregard the ‘Cult of Personality’ battle, and focus on policy differences. Any debate about Biden’s abilities should begin with, “I know Biden is unfit, but that’s not the problem…”

We were talking about it last evening, and I explained to my beautiful wife how it could work. She didn’t believe it possible, but she is quite the optimist who believes that the elite follow the rules.

You know, I actually heard “What’d I Say?” on WSIE this morning. So thanks for the title, Mr. Charles.

Buy My Books!

Good Book Hunting, Saturday, June 30, 2024: ABC Books

July 1, 2024June 30, 2024 Brian J. Noggle

After a martial arts class on Saturday morning, I decided I was going to do a throwback leisure activity and go to a book signing at ABC Books since I was going to the gun shop anyway, and it was on the way [Ed note: The gun shop is not, in fact, on the way; it is in the opposite direction, as a matter of fact, as this particular gun shop is in Ozark, which is south of Springfield, whereas ABC Books is so far north in Springfield that it is almost north of Springdfield.] Fine, fine. What really happened is that I planned to go to the book signing then the gun shop, but as it happened, the book signing was from 1-3 and not 11-2, so I flipped the order. I also dragged my youngest away from his Magical Fantasy Mirror for a couple of hours. He was more excited than dismissive when I mentioned going to the gun shop and lunch and a book signing–I will leave it to your imagination whether the gun shop or the lunch offered the enticement [Ed note: Probably the lunch].

At any rate, the side quests killed enough time that we arrived at ABC Books a little after 1 when the party was in full swing. I say “party,” because the young author brought some friends, and they were having a great time playing hide and seek or tag in the stacks. But I managed to dodge them as I hit the usual martial arts and poetry sections.

And only got a couple of things.

Including:

Teendyth: On Desecrated Faith and New-Found Religion by Steven-Mark Maine. He described it as a horror book about the son of a preacher who goes to the seminary and meets a different deity, presumably a dark one.
Finding Libre: My Life in the Martial Arts by Scott Babb.
Manual of Throws for Sport Judo and Self Defense by Fred Neff. Formerly property of Sigma 3 Survival School. Jeez, I hope it wasn’t stolen and some survivalists come to Nogglestead to try to take it back.
Houses of Worship, a hardback Ideals book with a lengthy inscription from a woman who “crashed” a party with her husband and had a great time and is giving this as a gift of thanks. I pointed it out to Ms. E., and we talked a little about Ideals magazine. She said that people came in the shop looking for them. I’d hunt them in thrift stores and whatnot to bring them in for profit, but, c’mon, man: Kittens and books: Two things that never leave Nogglestead.

I left two books on Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu on the shelves as that is not my bag, baby (perhaps it will be someday). But, c’mon, man (he said, repeating himself like the populizer of the saying), if I bought two books on Tai Chi walking to clean the section out, the odds are very, very good that I will someday buy these books. But not today.

So now they will disappear into the Nogglestead stacks, likely for a number of years, although perhaps the Houses of Worship and Manual of Throws might emerge sooner rather than later. I’ll certainly think of them. The key is to find them.

And, yes, this now officially means I have bought more books this month than I’ve read all year. It happens less frequently these days, but still sometimes happens.

Buy My Books!

We Do See What You Did Here

June 30, 2024 Brian J. Noggle

No specific callout to Pride month, but, c’mon, man, even we rubes know what you meant by making a rainbow.

The fact that someone didn’t specifically call it out in the social media post might indicate he or she did not want backlash for an overt display. But this is an overt display.

Which does not deserve backlash. It deserves to be recognized and ignored.

Buy My Books!

Book Report: Last of the Breed by Louis L’Amour (1987)

June 27, 2024 Brian J. Noggle

Book cover After reading Songs of Three, the second Bucky and the Lukefahr Ladies book, I considered jumping into the next, but instead, I picked up this Louis L’Amour title that I bought in 2022 after reading A Trail of Memories: The Quotations of Louis L’Amour.

This book is not a Western; instead, it is an 80s-style thriller, sort of. It still has some Western tropes and overtones as befits the particular story.

Major Joe Makatozi is an Air Force pilot testing an experimental aircraft in Alaska when he his forced down in the Soviet Union and is taken prisoner to a camp in Siberia where he will be interrogated about American aircraft. However, Joe Mack is a full-blooded Sioux who grew up in the wilds of Idaho, so when he makes a plan to escape the camp, he has a better-than-usual chance. So he does make a break for it and lives off of the land with a plan to walk across Siberia to the Bering Strait and to cross it somehow as his ancestors did. He uses all the skills he learned in the wild to hunt, trap, and skin animals using mostly bow and arrow. He spends some time near a village of outcasts, falling for the de facto leader, a lovely woman whose father is a disfavored professor, but another of the outcasts betrays them, so he must flee without her to continue his journey alone.

The book cuts from his perspective (all third person perspective) to several others, including the colonel in charge of the camp and the program to kidnap and interrogate Westerners of note; the Yakut (native Siberian) tracker on Joe Mack’s trail; the colonel’s mistress, a woman on her way up in the party; a furrier who bought furs from the village that came to the attention of the colonel’s mistress because Joe Mack’s furs were better than the others; the woman from the village who flees with her father ahead of the Soviet raid; even the betrayer gets a couple of pages for his perspective. I mean, what’s a lengthy thriller without the jump cuts?

At any rate, it does run on a little long, with some of the characters’ introspection repeated (not word for word, but the same sentiments are reiterated several times). And the ending comes pretty abruptly; about page 300 or 310 of 364, I wondered how it would all get wrapped up, and to be honest, a bit quickly and ambiguously. Perhaps L’Amour thought about continuing it in another book but wrapped it up here instead. But although an enjoyable read, a little unsatisfying in the end.

Still, after reading it, I did pick up 11 other L’Amour books. So make of that what you will. An endorsement in action if not in a twee blog post.

Buy My Books!

0 of 10

June 24, 2024 Brian J. Noggle

St. Louis Magazine presents: St. Louis coffee shops that are great places to work

How many have I been to? None.

I am coming up on fifteen years out of the St. Louis area (so long, and yet not), and I stopped spending nights at coffee shops trying to meet girls several years before that.

There’s a reason it’s called Coffee House Memories. Extra emphasis on Memories.

Buy My Books!

Good Book Hunting, Saturday, June 22, 2024: The Friends of the Christian County Library Book Sale, Clever Branch

June 22, 2024 Brian J. Noggle

It has been five years since I’ve been to a Friends of the Christian County Library book sale. In the old days, they were held in Ozark, Missouri, (and Clever had its own little library which also had an annual book sale). In 2019, I found my way to the new Nixa HQ of the library for the book sale. Last month, I was at that branch again as my beautiful wife was participating in a presentation about Artificial Intelligence, and I grabbed a bookmark/flyer that has the four(!) sales in 2024 rotating amongst branches, and so we made our way down to Clever and its new branch of the Christian County Library for a sale this morning.

And it was bag day, so….

My beautiful wife got some cookbooks and a couple of books for my youngest who has an advanced placement class in American government coming up, and I got two bags’ worth, including:

Twelve Louis L’Amour books, four paperbacks and three library bindings. Titles include: Hondo, Silver Canyon, Guns of the Timberlands (two different editions, apparently),How the West Was Won, Son of a Wanted Man, The Man Called Noon, Taggart, Over on the Dry Side, Westward the Tide, Fair Blows the Wind, and The Man From Skibbereen. One of the fellows at the sale said they have a set of his books coming up for sale as a set next time, and I guess I will be there to maybe buy it.
Two Patrick O’Brian novels, Post Captain (which I now see is coming undone at the binding) and The Nutmeg of Consolation. Post Captain is the second title in the Aubrey/Maturin books. It’s been some years (fifteen since I read the first book in the series. Now I can continue my reading of them in order.
Two relatively recent Carl Hiaasen novels, Bad Monkey (2013) and Razor Girl (2016). The cover of the latter says Author of Bad Monkey because apparently people influenced by that kind of blurb in their purchase aren’t the ones who would remember a book from the 20th century in that position.
Dangerous Minds by Janet Evanovich, a Knight and Moon novel. Not part of the Stephanie Plum series.
Voyage of the Armada by David Howarth about the Spanish Armada, perhaps from the Spanish perspective.
Diary by Chuck Palahniuk who was apparently a thing at sometime, but I missed it.
Of Men and War by John Hersey, five true stories from World War II by a war correspondent.
The Carrier War by Edwin P. Hoyt about World War II, natch.
Hornblower and the Crisis by C.S. Forester with a cover blurb by Hemingway.
Dave Barry is from Mars and Venus by Dave Barry. They had several titles, but I am pretty sure I have the others.
Great Flying Stories edited by Frank W. Anderson, Jr. Looks to be short stories.
The Enforcer by “Happy Jack” Burbridge, a thug who found Jesus.
Smirnoff for the Soul by Yakov Smirnoff. Signed, of course, because Yakov has a show in Branson from time-to-time, and if you haven’t gotten your book signed by him, you must be trying to avoid him.
Post Scripts Humor from the Saturday Evening Post, a collection of jokes and cartoons which I will probably read soon if I don’t lose the book in the stacks in a couple of minutes when I put these all up.
This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism by Ashton Applewhite.
All My Best Friends by George Burns with David Fisher. I don’t think I’ve read it.
Vermont is Always with You by Marguerite Hurrey Wolf. The name seemed familiar, but that’s because I just read her book The Sheep’s in the Meadow, the Raccoon’s in the Corn. Where solving for “just” in this case yields a result of 2017.
Live from the Tiki Lounge by Angela Williams. It might have been the only book of poetry in the room.
We’ll Be Back Tomorrow by Patty Chandler.
The Art of W.C. Fields by William K. Everson. Not about painting, but more a biography.
Lies My Teacher Told Me by James W. Loewen. It’s a relatively new book (originally 1995, but the paperback is 2007), so we will have to see what kinds of lies he means exactly.
Scientific Progress Goes “Bonk” by Will Watterson. A collection of Calvin and Hobbes cartoons. I might actually read this before the Saturday Evening Post collection.
The True Story of the Death Railway & The Bridge on the River Kwai. Given that the cover price is 230 B (presumably bahts), this looks to be a Thai book produced for tourists. One wonders if it belonged to a World War II vet. Given the other books I grabbed, one wonders if they came from a single person’s library.

That’s 36 books for about 6 dollars ($3 a bag), so that is quite a steal. And because the sale is not so huge, I was able to browse them all and pick up some fiction which rarely happens at the big sale in Springfield.

So I have until August until the next one. How many of these do you think I will read by then? I say: Two.

Buy My Books!

Good Book Hunting, June 20, 2024: The Lutherans For Life Church Rummage Sale

June 21, 2024June 20, 2024 Brian J. Noggle

Gentle reader, I would like to say that I make it to this annual sale every year, but that might not be the case, as I only have posts for it in 2016 and 2017. But that might mean that the gleanings in other years have not been that good as far as books and later books/records/movies go. I know I bought a couple of TI-99 4/As there one year. But the silence of this blog puzzles and worries me. But looking back at those two dates, I’m pleased to see that I have read a couple of the books listed therein, so they’re not all still waiting on the to-read shelves.

At any rate, I took the opportunity presented between three hours of driving and three hours of lawn mowing to make my way to the Trinity Lutheran Church gym (which was not as hot this year as apparently it was almost a decade ago) and looked through their offerings.

I got some books and whatnot.

Books include:

Calypso by David Sedaris because I confused him with Jason Sudekis and thought, “Oh, he wrote a book?” In my defense, the author might have come to Springfield at some time and did a thing at a venue where a comedian might perform. Or maybe that was the other guy.
The Magic of Thinking Big by David J. Schwartz, a self help book from back in the day which is somewhere between your Norman Vincent Peale and your Robert J. Ringer. The sale had two copies of this side-by-side and maybe another Schwartz title elsewhere.
The First Day of the Blitz by Peter Stansky about London when the German bombing began in World War II. For when I get older and start reading all the World War II books I own.
Edward the Second by Christopher Marlowe. I don’t have many Marlowe plays. And he was the person Chandler named his detective after.
Ancient Mines of Kitchi-Gummi by Roger Jewell. I picked it up on the title alone, as I read fifteen or so years ago a book about copper mining in Michigan by the natives (and a quick search has not yielded the book report for it). But the subtitle is Cypriot/Minoan Trade in North America. Which fits right in with the Bucky and the Lukefahr Ladies books I’ve read this month (Walking the Labyrinth and Songs of Three). I wonder if this book is mentioned in the acknowledgements I skipped. Or if it’s fate telling me I am destined to write something in the extended Buckyverse.
The Decameron by Boccaccio. I might have a copy around here somewhere, but this is a nice, thick heavy former library book from the Springfield Public Schools libraries. Jeez Louise, you mean school libraries used to have books like this? I am not sure my high school library had books like this. But they had books from the Agatha Christie book club, which was good enough for me at the time.
I also picked up an Air Fryer cookbook for my beautiful wife because those things are all the rage now, but in a decade or so, they will read like cookbooks for the microwave oven or the George Foreman Lean Mean Grilling Machine. We have cookbooks for both, although I think we’ve parted with our various grilling machines in favor of actual grilling.

I picked up some DVDs and videocassettes, including:

Fools Rush In
Ghost
Joe Vs the Volcano
A collection of Bob Hope movies
Saving Private Ryan on two videocassettes, which was how they did it in those days with high, high fidelity VHS.
Pearl Harbor on two videocassettes, and I was surprised they were still doing that that late.
The Pink Panther. “The original?” I thought briefly, but, no; it’s the Steve Martin remake which I might already have picked up.
Shanghai Noon. After all, I’ve already seen the sequel (two years ago? Already?).
Ghost. Which I would like to say, I have only seen once, so lay off, man. Although I have seen The Bodyguard like five or more times, including several times in the theater during its original run. So maybe although I was not the target audience for early 1990s romance films, I was in the market for tales of stoics who broke their reserve for the right woman.

I also picked up five LPs from two small boxes of the same:

80’s Ladies by K.T. Oslin. PWoC. Bonus for being a PWoC from the 80s, and the album title even says so.
For the Working Girl by Melissa Manchester. Also a PWoC, but I think my wife likes her. Or liked one of her songs, which has led me to buy all of her records that I find.
Auf Wiedersehn by Ralf Bendix, Germany’s favorite singer. We will see. But it’s a nice cover, with a TWA plane. Ask your grandpa what TWA stood for. Especially if he grew up in St. Louis.
Too Stuffed to Jump by the Amazing Rhythm Aces. I thought I recognized names of band members and thought it was an obscure super band. But apparently not.
Los Favoritos de Todo El Mundo by Trio Los Panchos. Hey, if they recorded with Eydie Gorme, they’re good enough for me.

I also picked up an electonic device for a couple of bucks that I was not sure what it was. After putting in new batteries and pressing the three buttons (On/Off, Light, Reset), I think it’s an early touch screen calculator or calendar, but the touchscreen is no longer good. I’m not sure what to do with it, but I will likely throw it in a box with the thought that I might replace/upgrade the screen, but likely I will discard it in a purge of some sort in a decade.

What I did not really look at: Cheap supplies for any of the handicrafts that I might have thought to do in the past. In sales like this in the past, I’ve picked up wood to burn, things to make into clocks, and sometimes glass to paint, etch, or something else. But I have decided recently to clean the garage a bit and maybe discard some of the unused materials. So my perhaps 90-day resolve is still in effect. Next year, or perhaps the next garage sale I go to (which might be next year), the resolve might be gone (but not likely the junk in my garage).

The total was under $20, but I told them to keep it. I can fit the books on my book shelves. The films are piling up. And, oh, lawdy, the records are still stacked on my parlor desk from the wedding gifts in May. I really, really, need to build additional shelving. Maybe that should be my goal this weekend.

Buy My Books!

Book Report: Songs of Three by Shirley Gilmore (2018)

June 19, 2024June 18, 2024 Brian J. Noggle

Book cover This is the second book in the Bucky and the Lukefahr Ladies series; I read the first, Walking the Labyrinth, immediately before it.

So this book only clocks in at 584 pages before appendices, which is shorter than Walking the Labyrinth, so it’s got that going for it, which is nice. It’s also a little more soap opera than the preceding book.

In it, the people of Turn Back are having dreams of a cave. Secrets emerge as Bucky learns that her father, erm, fathered a child after a drunken encounter while on a book tour, and that the mother sent pictures of the baby until communications stopped when the baby was about a year old. In an amazing coincidence, that is the boy next door–the boy whose parents died when he was only one year old and is being raised by his great-grandmother, and it turns out that since he is Simon, the father’s son, the boy is not actually the great-grandmother’s blood relation. Meanwhile, Bucky, the 10-year-old girl, has dreams about her mother returning and trying to kill her. This comes to a head when the mother actually does show up, eight months pregnant and seemingly unaged since her disappearance. We learn about the two types of others who come from elsewhere and can cross over at mystical springs like the one at the old resort where they live, and they think Simon is a great Hittite who did them a good turn several thousand years ago. After a blow to the head, Simon starts having visions that he is such and that he and his wife and even Bucky have been intertwined through many incarnations. Things with the local fundamentalist preacher who has been harrassing Bucky and Simon come to a head in a sudden climax that should take him out of the picture in future books. And they find a cave with Minoan writing along with some Latin from later Spanish visitors. Oh, and I forgot to mention Ian, the boy next door, gets hurt near the cave and part of the book is his recovery.

I am not sure what to make of the reincarnation themes intertwined with the church-going. I wonder where that will lead.

But the book is thick with details and incidents of everyday life in Turn Back, and the plot events are few and scattered over the book’s length. I mean, the writing is easy to read and the pages fly by, but about page 300 of this book, I realized I was 1000 pages into the ongoing saga and not half done. So I will take a break from this series and read something else (besides poetry) for a while.

I think reading these big series is easier when they come out at a book a year; however, a shelf full of them and thousands of pages daunts me. Not just this series, but I have Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series (complete, I think). I read the first two right after college, but they got thicker as time went on, and I collected the rest, and there they sit behind me, thousands of pages. I’ve probably mentioned this when binge watching episodic comedies recently (Red Dwarf and Sledge Hammer!). They, too, were easier to watch back in the day in weekly installments rather than dedicating weeks of nightly watching to plow through them all. It’s a harsh realization as I have a lot of DVD sets and book series to somehow plow through. Perhaps here and there, a bit at a time, as they were intended.

That said, the books are pleasant and easy to read. I get the sense they’re more cozy fantasies for older ladies, who might be more interested in the geneology that plays heavily in it, the church events, and the cooking. I will get through the rest of the books I have from this author before long, and I’ll buy others in the series when I catch her at ABC Books. So let that be my endorsement.

Buy My Books!

Book Report: Shin Splints by Dorothy Stroud (2012)

June 18, 2024June 17, 2024 Brian J. Noggle

Book cover I got this book at the same time as I got The Way at the Friends of the Library book sale, and it make sense given my shopping habits there the last couple of years: Pore over the dollar records, pore over the dollar videos, pore over the dollar audio books, and then glance at the dollar poetry books and maybe literature section, and only sometimes do I make my way to the Better Books to look at old books, local interest, art monographs, and audio courses. This particular book was sold alone and not part of a tied set of chapbooks and pamphlets, which means I paid a whole fifty cents for the single volume. Was it worth it?

Well… It’s a two sets of poems totalling 57 pages. The first set deals with watching high school track meets, and the second set deals with school. The poet was a teacher, and her husband was a coach, so that’s where she got her ideas from. The poems are short, and the lines are very short–three to five words each most of the time, very action-oriented with a dash of imagery here or there. I mean, not bad, but not the best.

And you would think I would be the audience for this. Or sympathetic at least, as I have satten in bleachers this last spring cheering on my son who decided to do track in high school after a year off. The cover image is a track meet from field level with mountains in the background. Our photos are not as exciting. They’re from the cheap seats, and our perspective on our long-distance runner and a bit of the inner football field, maybe, is less descriptive than the photos of old. We can look back on them and say what school or gym they were in in middle school, but in the tightly focused shots this spring, they all look the same. Perhaps I shall try a wider focus next year. Oh, wait, this is a book report. Back to it….

The author has an acknowledgements page where she tells you that four of the poems had previously appeared in four different magazines/journals/zines/Web sites, and that’s nothing to sneeze at. Coffee House Memories has an acknowledgements section that is only slightly longer, and I was trying to be a poet at that time–and I really have no pub credits for poetry after like 1997, so perhaps I just don’t know what the market will bear.

Someone, though, thought enough of this book to buy it in 2012 from Amazon for $4.99 plus $3.99 shipping plus sales tax according the a paper folded inside the back cover. I cannot count this as a Found Bookmark; even though it’s a sales receipt, it’s not of a particular place or shop. It’s not even like pamphlets/flyers that came with some of the volumes of various mail-order collections which detail the book and so on. I think I’ll feed this into the shredder presently. Let that be a marker of what I think of Amazon packing lists in books I buy secondhand.

Buy My Books!

It Almost Feels Like I’m Giving Up

June 18, 2024 Brian J. Noggle

Ah, gentle reader. The garage at Nogglestead is quite a mess. It’s only mostly my fault. As I mentioned and you might remember from years past on this blog, I dabbled in numerous handicrafts back when the television programs Creative Juice and That’s Clever! were on.

I did some beading, I did some glass painting, I did some glass etching, I did some découpage, I made some clocks out of platters and plates, and a bunch of other things. A week or so back, I might have mentioned that I went digging through completed things for a silent auction at church and destroyed some stained glass painted things.

I have not been terribly active in the crafting realm, and that’s partly because the garage is a mess. And part of the reason that it’s a mess is that I accumulated, over the years, materials for projects that I have not completed or done. For instance, I have the slats from the boys’ old bunk beds–they were little 2″ by 1″ (or smaller) sticks that I replaced with two by fours when I built the beds. I believe I’ll woodburn a large design on them, but not yet. I’ve also saved the old hanging lamp from our front porch when I replaced it; I thought I would clean it up and, what? I dunno.

I also saved a large number of wine bottles, jars, and other glass things for etching, stained glass painting, making candles, or something. But over the years, I’ve moved them around a bit when trying to clean the garage, but I’ve not used them. So I recycled a bunch of them, and it looks like I have another bin to sort through and recycle once I clear a path to it.

I’m also considering discarding the stained glass paints I have. Those projects ultimately did not turn out so well. I have a small toaster oven in the garage for curing polymer clays, but most of the stained glass painting I’ve done has been on vases and whatnot, things too large for the toaster oven. And air curing them, which the bottles indicate is an option, has a limited shelf life as I’ve learned. So maybe I should let them go.

Still, it feels a little like I’m giving up on completing these projects. It’s not like giving away books that I think I will never read, but it’s diminishing some possibilities, and for some reason it makes me feel old.

And, I suppose, I could look at it as a step in cleaning up the garage so I have some room to work. Which is likely true, but it’s not a given that the garage will be cleaned in 2024. Or 2025. Let’s not get all up in a hurry in here.

To be sure, it will not look as good as Cedar Sanderson’s craft space. But we have boys aging to men, and we will have an extra bedroom or two likely before I get the garage into any sense of order or even a workshop. Perhaps I can put a desk in one of them and have a workspace.

The next step, or maybe the first: Overcoming laziness and prioritization that puts twee blog posts before meaningful work.

Buy My Books!

Book Report: The Way by Salesian Missions (1983)

June 17, 2024June 17, 2024 Brian J. Noggle

Book cover I got three of these little Salesian Missions poetry collections a year ago at the Friends of the Library Book Sale, and this is the first of them that I’ve found to read. Actually, I had it on the lamp table beside the sofa upstairs which became a minor book accumulation point after last summer’s vacation, where I carried the habit of lying on the sofa reading a book home. But a couple of collections of poetry (including this one) lingered there since autumn or winter as I’ve started a new tradition of reading a magazine in the chair in the bedroom as the final step-down to bedtime.

This book was a free giveaway to potential supporters in mail campaigns in the 1980s. I remember that one or more of them passed through our household, although I am not sure whether my sainted mother would have given money to them. After all, Salesian Missions is a Catholic charity; perhaps they had my father’s name on the envelope, as he was nominally Catholic.

This volume is 32 pages of grandmother poetry focusing on religious themes, but generic Christian religious themes–you get Jesus and you get God, but no Mary. The small pages are akin to Ideals magazine, with the poems set on pages surrounded by illustrations of homey and old-timey scenes and landscapes. Basically, the target crowd overlapped a lot with people who would subscribe to Ideals. They’re poems, too, not prayers; some are addressed to God, but most of them talk about God instead. Quality varies from meh to okay, but really, this is everyday poetry, the kind that people who were not academic poets or kept by patrons wrote. Normal people. I mean, jeez Louise, my father wrote poetry not unlike this. So it’s not designed to be profound, meaningful, or obscure to differentiate the Poet from the Rubes without advanced degrees in literature. So it was nice, and a quick read, and I suppose it could fit into one’s daily devotions if one were so inclined.

At any rate, it was a quick read, which I needed as I’ve been reading large tomes lately. And I kind of look forward to the little respites (and the incrementing of the annual blog total).

You know, I wish some of the charities wishing to entice me today would send out little books of poems. I get a lot of come-ons from Catholic charities (but not Salesian Missions) as a subscriber to First Things, Touchstones, and maybe The New Oxford Review. I get a lot of address labels, a couple of notepads, a coin from time to time, and a pin once, but no poetry. I guess the middle class of potential donors has moved on from reading for the most part, more’s the pity.

Buy My Books!

Rope-a-Dope

June 17, 2024 Brian J. Noggle

Republicans and conservatives should maybe consider not dwelling so much on Joe Biden’s age and infirmity like this:

And so on, and so on, ad absurdum.

Because the more the message is “We need to get this doddering old man out of the presidency,” the more easily it is defanged by the Democrats switching to another candidate at the last minute.

Policies, guys. Focus on the policies that have led us to this place. Do not confuse the policy with the policymaker, or we’ll end up with a different policymaker with the same policies.

Buy My Books!