Book Report: A Pound of Paper by John Baxter (2003)

Book coverIf I had found this book in time for the 2024 Winter Reading Challenge, perhaps I would have stretched the Library/Bookstore Setting category enough to include this book. Although it is not specifically set in a book store, it’s a book that is part biography of the author, but it does center an awful lot on his book collecting.

When I opened the book, it smelled as though it was a new book, and I thought I might have bought it at Barnes and Noble as part of gift card spending at one point, but as it turns out, I ordered it from ABC Books in March 2020 when the government prohibited my going in person. Almost four years ago. The book is in cherry shape, though, so one wonders if I am the first person to have read it. Probably so.

So who is John Baxter? He is an Australian who grew up in Australia in the middle part of the 20th century. He grew up liking science fiction and attended some science fiction meetups of the time, started a fan newsletter (the zine of its time, although “zine” is a pretty dated word itself in the 21st century), worked for the railroad, and when he discovered he could write things that would get published, took his ten-year bonus from the railroad and quit to become a writer.

He wrote some screenplays and some biographies, I think, but most importantly, he lived in London, and he lived in the U.S., and he eventually lived in France, and everywhere he went, he collected books. So we get lots of stories about street book fairs in London, about visiting estates as they’re being sold but not estate sales, and various elements of book collecting, not just book accumulation.

A fascinating book that takes one to different times and places–Australia in the early 1960s, London in the late 1970s, and Paris in the 21st Century–and it splits time between being an autobiography and being a book collector. Of course, I recognized some elements of my own activities in his anecdotes. Browsing through a seedy room of adult magazines to get a copy of Gallery magazine with Robert B. Parker’s “The Surrogate” in it for $1 (I went through the room clockwise, and the magazine was on one of the shelves near the door to the right–is that why I have ever since done estate sales going to the right first?). He also worked as a runner, finding books to sell later, and that, too resonated with me. Finding a first edition of Dune (not a first printing) at a garage sale for $1. Buying a Playboy collection for $300 and selling it in pieces on Playboy.com’s custom auction site for, what, $3000?–not to mention vintage ads on Ebay after. And so on.

You know, I don’t really collect books–up until soon after the turn of the century, I did collect Robert B. Parker books, mostly from Ebay, but not so much these days. I do pick up late 19th century collections of poetry when I can find them inexpensively, but I’m not a collector in that regard….

At any rate, a nice read both as a memoir of a writer from an odd corner of the world and of a book collector.

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You Could Put It That Way, But….

Professional opinionator, liberal (natch): Messenger: Missouri judges allow lawmakers to stay under a shroud of secrecy:

Last week, the Missouri Court of Appeals lifted its metaphorical middle finger to government transparency.

In a 2-1 opinion, judges Janet Sutton and Mark Pfeiffer allowed the Missouri House to keep secret information about who is sending its members emails to influence public policy.

The ruling was badly timed. Starting Sunday, the nation celebrates Sunshine Week, dedicated to shining a light on government transparency laws and the importance of citizens keeping an eye on elected officials.

That’s what Clayton attorney Mark Pedroli was doing back in April 2019, when he emailed certain House members, asking for correspondence from them. Several lawmakers responded to his requests, but they redacted the names and addresses of the constituents who emailed them. The House had passed a rule that allowed them to do so.

Although if one were not eager to bash the Republicans in the Missouri state legislature (and Republicans generally) with any cudgel at hand, one might say Legislature/Judge Protects Privacy of Private Citizens Who Want To Write To Their Representatives Without Getting Doxxed By Activists and Newspapermen Who Disagree With Them.

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We at MfBJN Know The Rest of the Story

Pardon me for Paul-Harveying this, but Stuff Nobody Cares About posted a picture of 1937 St. Louis Cardinals catchers at spring training.

Including Mickey Owen:

Of the three catchers Mickey Owen had the most successful career. In 1937 the 21-year-old rookie played in 80 games for the Cardinals. Owen would become the Cardinals starting catcher in 1938 playing with the team until 1940.

Mickey Owen would eventually play five seasons with the Brooklyn Dodgers making the All-Star team four times. Owen played in the major leagues until 1954 and had a career .255 batting average. Owen died at age 89 in 2005.

As we here at MfBJN have mentioned, Owens moved to Greene County, Missouri, after his playing days. He opened a baseball school a little west of here that we passed taking my boy to a basketball game out in Avila (it’s still open), and he later ran for Greene County sheriff and served several terms. I know all this because I bought one of his re-election giveaways for a dime at a church garage sale a decade ago.

It’s just a little notepad. No telling what it’s worth, but given that he played almost a century ago, probably as much as a modern giveaway notepad. So less than the dime I paid for it likely.

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Movie Report: Ma and Pa Kettle Back On The Farm (1951)

Book coverAfter discoursing, briefly, on films that piss on Missouri, I popped this film in right away as I thought it was set in Missouri because Ma and Pa Kettle are yokels, and the Ozarks hillbilly was entering the popular culture about this time. But I was mistaken; apparently, the films are set in Washington state for the most part (although one later entry is The Kettles in the Ozarks). So this is not a piss on Missouri movie at all. And it’s funny, the passage of time; I would have sworn I just bought this film, but it was almost six months ago. Man, I am not watching movies as fast as I’m buying them.

At any rate, this is the first Ma and Pa Kettle movie I watched on purpose and all the way through. I say this because, gentle reader, well… pull up a chair and hear about the Olden Days. When I was a kid, before cable, the UHF stations on the dial and sometimes the VHF stations, would play two or three movies on Saturday and Sunday afternoons. These tended to include old black-and-white war movies and comedies from series, including the Ma and Pa Kettle movies and Francis the Talking Mule (a couple of series I remember). As a pre-teen boy, I tended to only get into monster movies on the creature feature show. So although I would have had the chance to watch probably everything in this series, I didn’t.

So: This is the third film in which Ma and Pa Kettle and their kin appear. In The Egg and I, they’re secondary characters to the main characters who move from the big city to the farm (and for which Marjorie Main was nominated for Best Supporting Actress). Then the films focus on them with various vagaries (my rigorous research indicates). In this film, the Kettles are living in a modern house with their son who graduated from college and invented an improved chicken egg incubator (the premise of Ma and Pa Kettle). Their son and his eastern wife are about to have a baby, and the in-laws show up, and the domineering mother-in-law takes over, driving the Kettles back to their farm which lacks the modern conveniences they’ve come to appreciate. Prospectors think they’ve found a vein of uranium on the Kettles’ land leading to their presumed chance at wealth. And the mother-in-law eventually drives the new parents apart.

In a series of humorous set pieces, everything is set aright.

I chuckled at a couple of the things. But I don’t know if I’ll order other films in the series. If I see them, I might pick them up–odds are better to find them here than elsewhere, perhaps. Especially for a buck or fifty cents at the book sale or antique mall.

And I don’t even think this would count as a pissing on kind of movie because it’s light-hearted comedic poking at archetypes. I count pissing on movies as earnest, this is how those lesser people really are kinds of films. Or perhaps I just slap the term around arbitrarily and without being informed about what I’m talking about. This is a blog, after all, and hot takes are often also spit takes.

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Movie Report: Highlander: The Final Dimension (1994)

Book coverIt seems like I just watched the first two films in this series, gentle reader, but I watched Highlander last January and Highlander II: The Quickening last May. And I watched the series of them in recent memory, recent being within the last decade. Seems I see them priced to move somewhere together and I buy another set of them, and I put them in my unwatched cabinet (or on it). You know, of all the media libraries, the VHS and DVD library is the smallest, so it has a slightly greater chance of being organized some day rather than the LPs, CDs, or books do, and I might learn how many copies of each of these films I own.

At any rate, this film ignores the contents of the second, rightfully so. In it, Connor MacLeod has traveled after his first wife dies in Scotland to Japan to study with another immortal, a Japanese sorceror played by Mako. The sorceror helps the Highlander to fashion his katana and to learn to fight with it. But Kane, a Mongolish looking immortal played by Mario Van Peebles arrives and kills the sorceror who tells MacLeod to run. Because he has booby trapped his lair so that when his head is taken, presumably by Kane, that it collapses, burying Kane and his fellow bad guy immortals.

In 1994, an industrial dig of some sort–the set is, of course, a generic industrial set–unearths the legendary cave of the sorceror and frees Kane. Of course, a beautiful archeologist played by Deborah Kara Unger is on hand to be a love interest after discovering the secret of MacLeod’s past. In northern Africa, the Highlander senses that another immortal is afoot and returns to New York, where Kane heads himself for the renewed Gathering. A couple of set pieces and cinematic sword fights later, Kane and MacLeod face off on another conveniently located generic industrial set of steam pipes and metal stairs and catwalks. Well, the last piece is set in New Jersey, so maybe it’s all like that.

So it’s a grand fun film to watch, especially Mario Van Peebles having the time of his life chewing up the scenery as the bad guy. The budget for these films must have been pretty low, as they didn’t spend a whole lot on set lighting or custom sets, but they’re still more fun to watch than modern action films costing hundreds of millions of dollars.

And in the Highlander film, I mentioned how both Roxanne Hart, as the then-modern Brenda, and Beatie Edney, as MacLeod’s first wife, were pretty. But, boy howdy, Deborah Kara Unger.

Continue reading “Movie Report: Highlander: The Final Dimension (1994)”

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Important Measures

Legislation to fight trafficking in Missouri passes House with nearly unanimous vote

I know, you’re asking me, gentle reader, how did the preening legislators make the illegal illegaller?

Why, by taking the monumental steps of:

  • Making a committee. With diverse stakeholders!

    The Committee on Sex and Human Trafficking Training would be created and would include diverse stakeholders. The group would meet each year to establish guidelines for mandatory training.

  • Also make a council.

    Additionally, legislative leaders said the bills would establish the Statewide Council Against Adult Trafficking and Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children to coordinate statewide efforts to fight these issues.

  • Mandate training.

    House officials indicated that the legislation would require training on sex and human trafficking for professionals such as emergency medical technicians, nurses, prosecutors, juvenile officers, social workers and peace officers. The move is meant to equip frontline workers with the knowledge and tools necessary to identify and respond to instances of these crimes efficiently.

  • Create a slush fund.

    They would also impose restitution fees for those convicted of specific sexual offenses with funds directed to support anti-trafficking efforts statewide.

So, basically, these bills are giveaways to non-profits and NGOs that make a living advocating, training, and holding meetings about human trafficking.

I’m sorry, but I did not see anything in the article (which uses advocacy terms like protecting the vulnerable over and over again) about funding police.

I used to be so cynical when I was young. Now I have broken through cynicism to what lies beyond.

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On Lost Worlds of South America by Dr. Edwin Barnhart (2012)

Book coverAfter watching the Indiana Jones movies last month, I opted to watch the remainder of this video series.

I started listening to this course last June on our way to vacation in Fairfield Bay, Arkansas, but when we passed Harrison, the lanes on the state highways narrowed, and I needed all my concentration to navigate the roads, so I didn’t end up listening to it. And once we returned, well, I spend, what, an hour to an hour and a half in the car each week nowadays? It’s hard to maintain the thread of a lecture over a week. So the discs remained in the car until last month, when I pulled them out and brought them downstairs to watch.

And, gentle reader, as I discovered when listening to Unqualified is that listening to audiobooks is a bit of a pain for me these days since I’m not in the car and I’m not often doing mindless things where I can kind of listen and follow something while doing something else. In this case, watching a Great Courses lecture series means dedicating hours across many evenings. This lecture series is 24 lectures, which would be the upwards of 20 evenings given that I would sometimes watch two episodes. It seems like a big commitment–I haven’t completed seasons of television shows, for example, because of the commitment. So time will tell how often I complete these series until such time as maybe I commute again.

But I started watching the lectures in the middle, trying to remember where I had been when I last stopped listening in the car last year. I think I overlapped with a lecture or two, but the first couple of lectures–the first couple of nations/civilizations/worlds were very similar, although in different places.

The lectures include:

  1. South America’s Cradle of Civilization
  2. Discovering Peru’s Earliest Cities
  3. South America’s First People
  4. Ceramics, Textiles, and Organized States
  5. Chavín and the Rise of Religious Authority
  6. Cupisnique to Salinar–Elite Rulers and War
  7. Paracas–Mummies, Shamans, and Severed Heads
  8. The Nazca Lines and Underground Channels
  9. The Moche–Pyramids, Gold, and Warriors
  10. The Moche–Richest Tombs in the New World
  11. The Moche–Drugs, Sex, Music, and Puppies
  12. Enigmatic Tiwanaku by Lake Titicaca
  13. The Amazon–Civilization Lost in the Jungle
  14. The Wari–Foundations of the Inca Empire?
  15. The Chimu–Empire of the Northern Coast
  16. The Sican–Goldsmiths of the Northern Coast
  17. The Inca Origins–Mythology v. Archeology
  18. Cuzco and the Tawantinsuyu Empire
  19. The Inca–From Raiders to Empire
  20. The Inca–Gifts of the Empire
  21. The Khipu–Language Hidden in Knots
  22. Machu Picchu and the Sacred Valley
  23. Spanish Contact–Pizarro Conquers the Inca
  24. Remnants of the Past–Andean Culture Today

I say that the lectures were a bit repetitive, and some of that might be because I was listening and not watching the earlier lectures. The professor spoke of the earlier civilizations having similar architecture, but in different locations, and he focused a lot on the common elements–the similar architectural styles/city layouts, the prevalence of the Fanged Deity/Decapitator Deity, and so on–although he did mention the differences–seafood diets versus agriculture based on location and the importance in El Niño cycle in ending some of these civilizations.

But watching the lectures added some depth. One could see the art he was describing, view the maps showing relative locations, and observe the ruins as they are today (Brian J. stopped the series because he was running out of synonyms for see). It proved a little distracting in part, though, as one notices that the shifts from one camera to another were not cut, so when he changes between the two, he pauses, his head turns to pick up the teleprompter or cue cards, he turns his body, and then he starts walking again and speaking. One wonders, is he on a set or is it a green screen behind him? He picks up a stirrup vessel from a table, but was that table always there or was it set before a green screen? Has he always had the remote or controller in his right hand? How many lectures does he wear the same clothes? And so on. Maybe it’s not so much a distraction but just something else to observe and think about while learning the material. So it’s more like the actual college experience.

At any rate, the lectures focus on Andean civilizations mainly because the Amazon has not been explored properly even now–the professor mentions that archeologists don’t generally want to dig in really remote areas–they want to spend years in urban areas where they can drive out to a dig not far away. Which led me to look up the number of uncontacted tribes in the Amazon, and it’s dozens of tribes (I saw a table on one Web site, but cannot find it now). Fascinating. So although Raiders of the Lost Ark was set in the 1930s, one could throw in a couple of drones and set something very similar today.

And although I am briefly able to talk about some of the greater pre-Inca civilizations like the Chavín, the Moche, the Wari, The Chimo, and the Sican–I made a gag at a trivia night a couple weeks ago that if we had such a category, I would be dialed in. But as time passes between now and the future, the details will start to fade, and I’ll only remember a couple of things. Like that the people of the Incan civilization had endured a Civil War prior to Spanish contact, and smallpox had already done maybe the opposite of decimate (whatever the latinate for kill 9 of 10 is) the population. But the civilization was not a utopia, and it expanded by military force (a conscript army of 100,000 showed up and asked if you would like to join the empire). So the lecture series plays it pretty straight in laying out that everything was not rosy, even if the professor argues that the civilizations might not have been as bloody-thirsty and head-hunting as thought. It gives you room to think for yourself and to research further if you can.

So I enjoyed the course, and I am briefly interested in reading some of the primary source material I have here–I have some stories of the Aztec conquest written near the actual events, and I was kind of tempted to seek out some of the primary texts that Barnhart mentions, especially chronicles written by the Spanish. But this will likely pass. And I have recently been researching raising alpacas as the Inca did, and I’m already planning to plant some potatoes this spring. So the course might have influenced me more than most (especially if I end up with alpacas and a couple llamas). At the very least, it triggered passing enthusiasm.

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A Voter’s Guide Showing Whom To Vote Against

Two groups endorse candidates in Springfield school board race:

Two groups, one that represents Springfield teachers and another that advocates for voting rights, made endorsements in the 2024 race for Springfield Board of Education.

Seven candidates seek three open seats on the board. Incumbents Danielle Kincaid, Scott Crise and Maryam Mohammadkhani are running against challengers Landon McCarter, Susan Provance, Kyler Sherman-Wilkins and Chad Rollins. Each voter who marks a ballot on April 2 will be asked to vote for three of the seven candidates.

Kincaid and Provance earned endorsements from both groups: Vote 417 and the Springfield chapter of the Missouri State Teachers Association (MSTA). The Springfield MSTA also chose Sherman-Wilkins, while Vote 417 picked Crise.

A union representing “hero” teachers and a political group with left leanings are a good indicator how I would not want to vote.

But I’m not in the Springfield school district, so I can only watch with amusement. And some horror that it is happening here in southwest Missouri, too.

By the way, I was going to use bellwether which is a word you only tend to see in political articles, but it did not exactly fit, and I looked it up to see if it fit (not exactly). But the origin of the word is that it is the lead sheep with the bell around its neck. So bear that in mind when you see it in print or pixels.

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Movie Report: Collateral (2004)

Book coverThis film came out back when we still went to films in the theater–we were still in Casinoport. I had just started working as a consultant for the digital agency, starting my own consulting company and working from home for the first time. Basically, I’ve worked from home ever since except for a year or so when the agency hired me and had an office downtown. Perhaps that was not a film-filled summer–I was not only working full time for the agency, but I’d picked up short contracts with previous employers for in-office night work and white paper writing. So I had knowledge of the film when it came out and since–Foxx was something then, ainna? His Oscar winning turn as Ray Charles would come out a couple months later–and Cruise was in the mid-career doldrums, although his doldrums tended to move better than actual doldrums.

At any rate, the plot: Foxx plays a cab driver who picks up a blond Cruise at a courthouse after dropping off a prosecutor planning for a big case. Cruise has a couple of stops to have people sign papers for a real estate deal, so he engages the cab driver to drive him to all the stops. But, at the first stop, a body flies out the window and lands on the cab, and Max (the cab driver) learns Vincent (Cruise) is an assassin on a mission to… well, it develops, take out witnesses and the prosecutor in a case targeting one of his clients, or related organized crime figures.

Along the way, Max and Vincent develop a bit of a rapport. Vincent shakes Max out of a bit of a habitual, rote existence dreaming of better things (owning a limo company) and gets him to man up and demonstrate some confidence–one scene has Max going into a nightclub, pretending to be Vincent. But, in the end, the rapport is false, and Max has to protect his mother (whom he visited in the hospital with Vincent) and the pretty prosecutor who rode in Vincent’s cab earlier.

So the film has some depth in exploring the relationship between the men and how it evolves, mostly in Max drawing strength and confidence from the psychopath’s influence and ultimate his testing.

However, some of the plot turns are just that, plot turns, and not actual evolution of the situation. I mean, Max could have gotten away on several occasions before Vincent knew about his mother, but did not. And they’re driving around in a damaged cab with a body in the trunk as though they have nothing to worry about–although they are stopped by police at one point, saved only by the coincidence that the police are just then called to the scene of one of Vincent’s earlier crimes. So the plot as played out detracts a bit from it.

The film also features a young Mark Ruffalo as a police detective on their trail and Jada Pinkett Smith as the pretty prosecutor. Wow, she was pretty back in those days. Now, not so much. Not so much because she has aged–everyone has except my beautiful wife–but because her (Jada Pinkett Smith’s) character has been revealed to be reviled.

So an okay film. Not one I will watch over and over again, and not something that entered the cultural zeitgeist to be remembered or quoted much twenty years later.

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Good Album Hunting, March 2, 2023: Stick It In Your Ear Records

Yesterday, my beautiful wife and I went to a record shop in downtown Springfield where I had permission to buy up to $100 of highly priced records.

You see, gentle reader, I suffered a birthday last month, and my wife often gets me a gift certificate or something for the event. But when she got to Relics the day before my birthday, she found a line winding up the aisle to check out, meaning it would have taken her an inordinate amount of time to purchase the gift certificates. And, as you might have read here, the Relics gift certificate is not the best gift, as it has a six month life span, and it is a gift certificate where you must spend all of the value of it, as no change is given. Instead, she allocated $100 for me to spend on fun stuff, which is kind of funny as I tend to buy what I want anyway.

So I decided to make an excursion of it: She and I, together, would go to the record store, and I could spend $100, and I would pick out a record for her, and she would pick out a record for me.

To be honest, I hoped to fill out my Billy Joel collection. When I was visiting Recordhead over on Hampton in Milwaukee in 1990, Billy Joel records were easy to come by as people were replacing their vinyl collections with cassettes or CDs, so I bought a bunch of them. But, oh, gentle reader, what a fool I was a couple of years later when I sold those very records at garage sales for a couple of needed dollars. I recounted all this when I bought (another copy of) 52nd Street last November. But I thought this would be a good opportunity and excuse to splurge on other Billy Joel records.

Oh, but, gentle reader!

The Billy Joel section was but a couple of copies of 52nd Street and a copy of The Bridge. No Piano Man. No The Stranger. No Glass Houses. No Greatest Hits Volume 1 and 2. Oh, the empires I have lost!

I did get The Bridge, though, which I had not owned previously.

I went through the jazz section, looking for Hiroshima, or Keiko Matsui, or Najee, but nothing. I flipped through the Herbie Mann section, and I said Not today. Well, it was more like let’s see what else I can find, but it turned into not today.

My wife pointed out they had $.99 records in boxes along the wall, so I started pawing through them, but the deleterious effects of a martial arts class arose: I could not crouch at the boxes long, and I really had to pee. So I called a lid on it so we could find a restaurant that offered a restroom after our purchases.

We got:

  • The Bridge by Billy Joel.
  • Send It by Ashford and Simpson. I have their earlier album Is It Still Good To Ya? (purchased May 2021). Like previously mentioned artists, Ashford and Simpson had a career spanning 40 years, and I only learned about them by buying their albums and then, today, reading Wikipedia.
  • Fever! by Doc Severinsen. Maybe this can count as the record I picked out for my wife. It was in the dollar section, and although we have numerous Doc Severinsen albums, I was not certain we had this one. And as I grew uncomfortable, I threw the original terms of the trip out the window. Perhaps this should count as the one I picked out for my wife, as I had expected I would pick out a trumpet album for her.
  • Alternating Currents by Spyro Gyra. Since learning that they are not, in fact, zydeco, I have been picking up this fusion jazz band when I can.
  • M.F. Horn 3 by Maynard Gerguson. My wife found this record. I know we have MF Horn 2, and I am pretty sure we did not have this one. We do now.
  • Walk On by Karen Brooks. A Pretty Woman On Cover (PWoC) record. Going by the titles, I’m not sure if it’s pop, 70s folk, country, gospel, or what. The first song is “Country Girl”, but who can tell? (Research indicates: country.
  • Lets’ Dance with the Three Suns by, well, The Three Suns.
  • Super Girls. I didn’t actually buy this one; they have a couple of boxes of “Free with Purchase” up front, and I found the fortitude to paw through them, grabbing this sleeve containing three records. I figured this would be some trashy exploitation band with a couple of extra platters thrown in, but it turns out this is a compilation of girl band hits. With a trashy exploitation cover.

So we didn’t end up spending $100. The records I bought were priced kind of like what you see in antique malls–between $.99 and $10, but the platters themselves were in very good shape, whereas at the antique malls and book sales, they tend to be a little marred.

I did shy away from records close to $20, which means, of course, known and popular acts. Earlier in the week, I rediscovered The Shaft soundtrack in our music library, and I recounted to my beautiful wife how I bought a number of blaxploitation soundtracks about ten years ago and the R&B stars’ other records, such as Isaac Hayes and Bobby Womack, and how I picked them up on vinyl sometimes later. And although I saw Curtis Mayfield’s Superfly soundtrack. For $50. I passed.

Still, I am thinking about going back and checking out the rest of the dollar records later. Well, when I get downtown again, which is fairly rare.

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Potentially Creepy, But Likely Random

Facebook hit me with this suggested post the other day:

I recognized the album, as I bought it in 2021, and since it’s on the Internet, I assume the AIlgorithms know it.

But Facebook feeds me a diet of hockey players, 80s and 90s nostalgia, and jazz musicians, the last probably because I follow KCSM and WSIE and Herb Alpert on the radio. So it was inevitable that I’d get a record that I own sometime. I’m a little surprised that I haven’t gotten more given how I acquire randomish easy listening and smooth jazz on vinyl.

Speaking of that trip to the library book sale in 2021, I also picked up Najee’s Najee’s Theme, his debut album, that trip, and I just spun that record earlier in the week, mentioning that I liked it an he might be a one-hit wonder.

He is not, and neither is Al di Meola. They’ve both been active for decades, but I guess I’m not that aware of them because the jazz radio stations I listen to do not play a lot of their work. So I keep thinking I’ve discovered something obscure, but it’s really just that I’ve found something new to me.

Perhaps I should watch out for more records by these artists and research them a little deeper when I buy their records. But given that I buy those dollar (or fifty cent) records sometimes sixty at a time, I don’t get to look that closely at each one when I make the Good Album Hunting posts. And when I am listening to records, I am not at the computer.

But what I should really do is use the warming weather to build some new record shelves.

P.S. That’s not a typo beneath the photo. I thought I might portmanteau AI and algorithm in a feat of cleverness, but it looks like a typo. Also I see that it’s already been coined and claimed for a tech company. So let us never speak of it again.

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I Cannot Help But Notice My Grocery Store Is Downsizing

One of the things about living in one place for a while–coming up on fifteen years at Nogglestead this year–is that you get perspective in seeing the changes and variations in the same place over time. We have seen fifteen winters and are about to have seen fifteen springs, so we get a sense of how wide the seasons can individually vary. Warm winter? Cold winter? We’ve seen both. So the exclamation-point-driven media definitely has a harder sell to convince us that IT’S NEVER BEEN AS HOT (or COLD) AS THIS ON THIS DATE! Well, except for the record set in 1930. Or a couple times that show up in my Facebook memories where I cracked wise about having my window open on this date or pictures of my driveway shoveled on this same date in history.

So I remember the evolution of the Pricecutter where we shop. Well, the big Pricecutter. It’s a relatively new store (but it was there when we got here). A little further west on Republic Road, a smaller, older Pricecutter held on for a couple of years, but it closed, sending Ron, a bagger some decade and change in his second career, to the new(er) Pricecutter. Which has been our go-to grocery after we turned our driving habits Springfield-wise. Even after the Walmart Neighborhood Market opened closer.

About ten years ago, they remodeled the store, freshening its look and, more importantly, expanding its produce section to include more variety. They added a salad bar and increased deli options as well, including a lot of ready-to-eat meals. They have this little isolated cul-de-sac they stuffed with health foods and organic options. They built a classroom for cooking classes. In short, they tarted up the place and filled it with more profitable offerings, but those offerings were parishable.

Althought they did cut the pharmacy a couple years later, the store has been relatively unchanged for that time. But within the last month, they started another remodel. But this time, they’re cutting the perishables.

I first noticed a missing bunker right when you walk into the doors. Between the produce section and the deli, they used to offer a variety of…. well, I think it was dressings, cut fruit trays, and some ready-to-eat things. But that bunker is gone. Bunkers by the cheese and lunchmeat and in the meat section have been replaced with smaller bunkers, and a large section of the meat case has been replaced with closed-door cases that hold longer-shelf-stable items. The meat racks have also been downsized so that they don’t have as many types of cuts prepackaged and fewer of each cut available. They’ve cut down the organic section and replaced it with sodas. In other words, they’re stocking less of the higher profit but perishable items, instead focusing on lower profit items.

The store has gone into a defensive crouch, expecting consumers to spend less on fresh meat, fresh vegetables, and convenience foods from the deli. Because we are.

Also, I cannot help but notice eggs are $5 a dozen again. But I haven’t seen this on the news Web sites I frequent.

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Retiring a Personal Relic

When I was working for my first startup right around the turn of the century (he said, hanging an onion on his belt, which was the style at the time), I was also doing the garage sale and estate sale thing on the weekends and posting the gleanings on Ebay on weeknights, and I guess that’s how I came up with this glass candy jar which I brought into the office and put a TIPS sign on.

I brought it with me to, what, two office jobs after that? Maybe only the one, as the second started as work from home, and it’s possible I did not bring it into the office downtown. But that itself was 20 years ago, and I can only remember certain elements of the cubicle there, where the major design elements were old Purina swag that my sainted aunt had accrued from her time with the company before I worked for a digital agency serving the Nestle Purina PetCare company twenty years later.

Since then, it has been in one of the cubbies of my desk in my home office. It looks as though I must have spilled some coffee on it at one time as the TIPS paper is stained.

For a long time, I would empty change from my pocket into the jar. This probably happened more in the Old Trees days, where I would walk around with a baby in a stroller and maybe buy a coffee or a pastry with a bit of cash. Then, when we moved to Nogglestead, the walking around ceased, and the dropping carrying money pretty much ended. For the last decade or so, any change I’ve accrued over the day has gone into the Lutheran Women’s Missionary League mite box in the kitchen, between the garage door and emptying my pockets, and not to the basement.

So this last weekend, I emptied the jar of its remaining change, keeping the single fifty cent piece and the single president dollar coin for myself. I spent some of the coins as “votes” in a chili cook-off on Sunday and put the rest in the church’s big mite box on Sunday.

And now… Well, I guess I will take off the paper and put the candy jar in the garage with the other glass and whatnot that I fully mean to etch or paint with stained glass paint one of these days, where it will likely languish for a decade until my estate sale or until I actually grind a little evergreen tree onto it and fill it with candle wax before putting it into a craft sale where someone knowledgeable about glass will discover it and recognize that it was an expensive piece of glassware that I marred.

I mean, the thing has spent half of antiquehood with old pennies and dimes with it on my various desks already. But its time has passed. Or, perhaps, this will be in a Five Things On My Desk, Shamefully post in 2026. Life is full of possibilities in different stagnations.

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Book Report: Dirty Jokes and Beer by Drew Carey (1997)

Book coverWow, this book is almost thirty years old. I bought it at some point since then–the historical records (the blog here) are incomplete as to when, but the copy I have is a hardback without the dustjacket and has only the price marked in pencil on the frontspiece. The book, he acknowledges a with a smirk, is a bit of a money grab based on the popularity of his television show The Drew Carey Show during the Clinton administration.

Carey had been a standup comic from the middle eighties, and this show which ran for nine years in the 1990s into the 21st century. He concurrently appeared in an American version of Whose Line Is It Anyway? for about the same time, and he took over for Bob Barker on The Price Is Right seventeen years ago. I say this, amazed, because although I would have known him by site these almost three decades, I have never really seen much of his work whether the scripted sitcom, improv work, or standup routine. I had a picture of him as a bit of a schlub, a maybe smart everyman, but that’s not exactly been his schtick as far as I can tell.

This book has a tripartite structure. It has three sections: Dirty Jokes, which is sort of humorous essays/anecdotes/memoir; Beer, which is talking about The Drew Carey Show with some behind-the-scenes looks, responses to critics, working to thwart the will of the people in charge of standards and get dirty words and jokes onto the air; and Stories of the Unrefined, which are fictional (mostly) short stories based on Carey’s life and experiences in Cleveland and Las Vegas with a character named Drew Carey at the center. Dirty Jokes and Beer start each chapter with a dirty joke; as you might know, gentle reader, I do not get the vapors with dirty jokes (which began with “borrowing” my mother’s copy of the Frank O’Pinion dirty joke book and become sort of popular at North Jefferson Middle School for my vast store of off-color humor in 1985 to 21st century readings such as The World’s Best Dirty Jokes and Lecherous Limericks to watching and enjoying National Lampoon’s Dirty Movie). So a couple of the dirty jokes made me chuckle in my head.

However, the book is kinda meh aside from that. It offers some insights into the making of television, a la Jeopardy! or Star Trek Memories, but those books cover the material in greater depth. It’s got just a little biography, not enough to be compelling. And the fiction is the kind of material that I’d read by other college students when at the university in the writing program. Better than some of the self-published books by local authors that I read in writing style and quality, but the slice-of-life incidents leave me with a bit of “So what?”

Probably best if you’re a Drew Carey fan, but not if you’re a little old lady watching The Price Is Right and want to learn more about that nice young man (current age: 65). Because part of the character, schtick, or person of Drew Carey is that he was from a working class background, went into the Marine Corps Reserve, and became a comic, and when he became famous/successful, he got to do what he wanted, which included dating strippers and living a libertine lifestyle. Hopefully it was more character than real person, but who knows? Maybe I am just jealous, although I would like the world to know that I started out looking like a dork and got better looking, whereas Carey started out all right and then got dorky looking and wore the dorky glasses after getting his vision corrected when he was “on.” So…. character?

I would also be remiss in missing comparing this book to Unqualified by Anna Faris which I listened to this winter. Carey’s book is less earnest, a bit smirking, and it was far better to read a book than to spend hours dedicated to listening to the book (as I mentioned, I’m not spending an hour a day in a car, so listening to an audiobook requires sitting in a darkened room and just listening instead of listening while driving). An unfair comparison, but they are similar in that the books don’t really focus on humorous observations from the author, and they’re less pure comedy than the thoughts of a comic actor/actress. Well, better luck to me next time, although I’m not sure how many other comedian/comedienne/comic actor books I have in the unread stacks.

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A Quiz, Sort Of

The Web site of the Springfield News-Leader has a tile that presents it as a quiz:

However, the title gets more to the point: These 16 television shows, movies are set in Missouri — but were they filmed here?

The majority of the series [Ozark] is set in the dark, ominous Ozarks, but critics didn’t hesitate to point out that hardly any of the episodes were filmed in Missouri. The majority of the series was filmed in Georgia, according to IMDb. As for the lake scenes, most of these were filmed at Lake Allatoona, a reservoir similarly shaped to the Lake of the Ozarks about 45 minutes northwest of Atlanta.

In recent years, “Ozark” may have been at the top of people’s minds when it came to how Missouri was showcased by Hollywood, but there have been several other award-winning television shows and movies set in the Show Me State — some of which, like “Ozark” weren’t actually filmed here.

Perhaps the journalist is disappointed that she does not have the opportunity to see stars on location, but the article points out that Georgia ladles tax breaks and incentives on production companies. One wonders if this is supposed to serve as a call to action for Missouri to also ladle out tax money so Shia LeBeouf can fly in and film for a couple of days before flying out.

However, since it was presented as a quiz, I must ask myself: How did I do? The sixteen from the article are:

  • The Act
  • Sharp Objects
  • Three Billboards Outside Ebbings, Missouri
  • American Honey
  • Gone Girl
  • Switched at Birth
  • Winter’s Bone
  • Up in the Air
  • Waiting for Guffman
  • Road House
  • Planes, Trains, and Automobiles
  • National Lampoon’s Vacation
  • Paper Moon
  • Meet Me In St. Louis

I’ve seen five of sixteen.

The list skews to recent and to piss-on-Missouri stories and includes a number of entries where a scene nominally appears in Missouri in a larger travel film. Coincidentally, the latter overlap a lot with the films on the list I’ve seen.

The journalist does disclaim:

Note: There have been countless television shows and movies set and filmed in Missouri. This list is not exhaustive.

However, if one goes to the AUTHORITY (the Wikipedia entry Films set in Missouri), one sees this pretty much is the pattern: Piss on Missouri or just passing through. Guardians of the Galaxy? Deep Impact? I have seen these films, and they might have a scene in Missouri, but to say they’re set in Missouri is a stretch.

I am glad to see One Night At McCool’s is listed. But Larger than Life is not. The latter falls in the “Passing through” category, with a scene in Kansas City, and something that was filmed in St. Louis–Mike and Todd, both veteran actors of The Courtship of Barbara Holt, were extras in a scene that did not make the final feature.

At any rate, I’m not much into movies, books, or articles that piss on the heartland or where the writer is from (after the writer has moved to the big time). So I probably won’t watch Winter’s Bone (although I did just check movie accumulation posts to make sure I hadn’t already bought the DVD somewhere) but I do have the book in the stacks somewhere (I ordered it from ABC Books during the LOCKDOWN).

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Book Report: Doctor Who and the Day of the Daleks by Terrence Dicks (1979)

Book coverI got this book in 2015, which was far after any semblance I had of Doctor Who fandom.

As I might have mentioned (briefly, in in 2011, before I bought this book), Doctor Who played on Sunday nights at 10:30 on the St. Louis PBS station (followed by Red Dwarf, which I was talking about in 2011). Of course, my bedtime in the trailer days was 9:00, so I didn’t watch it live, but I did record them on videocassettes. Initially, I think that I only started recording them when we lived down the gravel road, but I have a lot of videocassettes (of course I still do) from that era, and when I was in the creative writing class probably my sophomore year of high school I wrote a series of short stories wherein the main character steals the TARDIS, so I was already familiar with the program in 1987 or so. I haven’t rewatched the videocassettes in a long time–I tried watching a program when my boys were children, but the first episode featured a plot where people were getting attacked by people in the sewers, which meant that they did not hardly see Colin Baker on the screen before someone went into (grainy videocassette recording) darkness and screamed, and that was all they could take–the oldest had an imagination full of darknesses which he might have outgrown (even as his father has not). Perhaps I’ll use this as an excuse to rewatch some of those old videocassettes. And perhaps the Red Dwarf box set I got in 2011.

One more Doctor Who memory, gentle reader, if you will indulge me. When I was at the university, I was not watching the show because it was not available in Milwaukee as I was aware (nor St. Louis when I returned). I made the acquaintance of Doctor Comic Book when we were in the English program at the University, he a year behind me. We got to be…. Acquaintances, I suppose, but close enough that he let me stay at his apartment on the East side one night my senior year when I attended a party that ended after the buses stopped running. And in the months (years) after college, when I was travelling to Milwaukee monthly (and later a couple times a year, but quite often), he let me stay with him for the weekend. One night, alone in his apartment (well, there with my college crush, who was not at all interested in me, of course), I opened one of his closets to discover a stack of old Doctor Who paperbacks, with this one probably on top (as it is the first in the American paperbacks). I teased him about it, saying, “That explains it!” as he favored long coats and a long scarf. He chuckled guiltily. He would later really get a doctorate and teach courses in comic book rhetoric when we reconnected on Facebook, as happened in the early years of this century, and then parted in political acrimony, as happened in later years of the century. Still, this paperback makes me think of the fellow as well as being young once.

So this is the first American paperback in the line, although Britain had seen numerous Doctor Who tie-ins before then, but I guess in the late 1970s, the show had made some appearances in America (given that, what, six or seven years later I saw it). This book tells a story from the third Doctor, played by John Pertwee (years as the Doctor: 1970-1974). That’s back when the Doctor was in England for an extended period as he tried to work on the TARDIS and helped the Brigadier and UNIT (United Nations Intelligence Taskforce).

An aging diplomat is to chair a conference to avert a war as tensions between the West, the Soviet Union, and China are boiling over. He leaves his estate for China, and when he does, a group of rebels from a future where the Daleks have taken over the Earth return, certain that their goal is to kill the diplomat whose actions lead to their dystopian future. The Doctor is less certain about what triggers the war that diminishes humanity and leads to the Dalek dominion–what if their success caused it? So we have (one can tell low budget even from the prose) scenes in the dystopian future and (one can tell low budget even from the prose) scenes on the estate as the Doctor tries to rescue his companion, taken to the future, and to avert a Dalek assault on the compound when the diplomat returns with dignitaries of the hostile nations.

Terrence Dicks was a writer for the show, so he was working with actual scripts, so the story probably pretty well matches what one would have seen on the BBC when I was lying nude on rugs for photographs (gentle reader, I assure you, this was when I was young, before I turned fifty). Rumor has it (and by “rumor,” I mean some Doctor Who fan site I read after reading this book but which I didn’t save in a tab until I wrote this, and I am too lazy to post it for you, oh, all right, it might have been this one or something that scraped it) that Pertwee didn’t like the episode that much at first, but, c’mon, man: it was 1970s television. In Britain. Nobody expected much more until Thatcher came to power, and to be honest, not much more after that. And by “nobody,” I mean “Americans.”

At any rate, it’s a quick 139 page read which, like all other paperbacks of the era, talked about other series the publishers had going at the time. Instead of Deadlands books, though, this one promotes a series called Blade, which was like a Deadlands with a timelord in it.

Man, if I put some effort into it (and, you know, had good guaranteed employment in the future whose base pay could keep up with base Biden-economy expenditures), I would like to be a serious collector of these old paperbacks. But I am not likely to find myself much in the paperback sections of the big book sales. Although one never knows what the future or the possible future saved by the intervention of a British television science fiction series might lead to. Who knows? I might even reconcile with Doctor Comic Book when I and my clan are driven north by the invading hordes and we take refuge on the shores of Lake Superior and reluctantly have to liberate the fortified campus from what they voted for.

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It’s Not A Twist If You Follow Emu News

Pulaski County Emu chase ends with a twist:

The deputies tried to keep the Emu out of the road and catch him again, but he ran off into the woods, evading capture.

The Pulaski County Sheriff’s Office said that residents should not approach the Emu if they see him. They said he hisses and may try to kick a person.

The Sheriff’s Office admitted defeat, for now, saying: EMU 2 Deputies 0.

We here at MfBJN have long been monitoring the emu rebellion, so we know the emus emus always win.

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If He Were Older, He Would Have Said, “Again”

Column at Outkick: Change Is Coming: It’s Not A Question Of If Big Tech Buys Media Companies, It’s When.

But the author says:

When I started working in sports media 20 years ago way back in 2004 — that’s when I wrote my first articles online — big tech was just emerging on the scene. When I first started writing online, the best way for a story to go viral was via email. Or to get picked up on listicle sites inside of big company websites. ESPN’s Page 2, SI’s Hot Clicks, College Humor, Fark — remember those? — there was no real social media. Back in those days people had the decency to tell me to kill myself via an actual email, as opposed to via Twitter.

Well, the young man can be forgiven for his ignorance of the words AOL Time Warner.

No, just kidding. As an old man, I cannot forgive him for his lack of perspective and authoritative take without mentioning or maybe knowing what occurred back in the 20th century.

Although perhaps I should not be so proud that I am so old that I used America Online before it was America Online.

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You’re Not From Around Here, Are You?

On the front page of a local television site’s news:

As any person from the state of Missouri knows, Missouri (Mizzou) is in Columbia, and they’re the Tigers.

Missouri State, formerly Southwest Missouri State University, formerly Southwest Missouri State Teacher’s College (and research indicates was Fourth District Normal School before that), is the home of the Bears.

I will leave it to you, gentle reader, whether this headline blunder was made by a young journalist who doesn’t know better (and doesn’t know that’s so) or by an AI trained on the works of young journalists who didn’t know better (and didn’t know that was so).

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