Photocopies of Photocopies

In the Friday mailbag today at Founding Questions, someone asked:

Re: The meme (for lack of a better term): “The world stopped in 1999, and this is a simulation (or whatever).” Question: In your opinion: How much of the slowdown in culture, etc, is due to the Boomers losing their juice? Be it personally, physically, socially, and so on? How much of the meme is simply trolling people wth fuzzy memories? And how much is Religion (big R) going away, and the search for meaning spilling over to any nook or cranny?

I have given this some thought, gentle reader, and I attribute it to the decline of the educational establishments in the country, whether it’s the consolidation of school districts to solve problems Horace Mann identified in 19th century (spoiler alert: they did not, in fact, solve the problems, but they sure made room for a lot of administrators) or the change in the nature of colleges (now universities). Heck, maybe it was the electrification of the country, where culture shifted to radio and later television (and, in some places, but not all, movies).

So the depth of the source material from which creators and writers decreased. Instead of imaginative books or even radio, writers and whatnot started taking their main inputs from visual media, and you can see it in their outputs.

Now, we’ve reached a point where young creators and writers have taken their inputs mostly from movies. For example, this PJ Media column alludes:

Enter the Donkey version of Loki, the deeply duplicitous trickster-villain from the Marvel Cinematic Universe….

Not the Norse god of lies. Not the comic book villain for almost 70 years now. No, the Loki from a contemporary series of movies (no, man, Thor was 2011, which is like fifteen years ago–it’s an old movie).

If you read widely, historically speaking, you’ll find that even pulp (the best of it) from the early 20th century has depth that a lot of contemporary mass culture (movies, mostly, but also television) lacks. Classical allusions, retelling of stories, maybe just hitting most of the Hero’s Journey, for crying out loud. But the new films are trying to retell the older (not necessarily old) films. Why do later Star Wars movies merely thinly retell the original Star Wars movies? Because the filmmakers’ inputs were not classical serials but the original Star Wars movies (a thinner source from which to draw). You can apply this to other “franchises” which just retread and message-swap the stories.

Now, this might apply less to writers, who tend to start out readers and who might have some depth in their inputs, but I assure you this does not necessarily apply to poets as some of my book reports suggest.

Where are we going to be in twenty years when the prime creators grew up on Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok? Me, I’ll be reading old books, same as ever. As a culture: Can it really get any worse?

So what is to be done? I dunno. Read a book? Write something more than twee blog posts? Probably more advice to me than many of you.

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Movie Report: Shopgirl (2005)

Book coverAfter watching The Man With Two Brains, I thought I would pick up this relatively recent (two springs ago) addition to the Nogglestead media library. A while ago, I started, tastefully (I hope) placing films and television shows atop the to-watch and video game cabinets; most of them have their spines/titles facing up, but at the end, I have a box (from that same trip in April 2023)where the boxes face out, and this film was often at the front, actually facing out. So on my current Steve Martin kick (a well-spaced out binge), I thought I would roll with it.

I read the novella almost 20 years ago (2006), and I summarized its plot there, and I thought it was, not meh, but eh. It works a little better as a movie.

In it, the titular shopgirl sells women’s gloves in an upscale department store in Beverly Hills. Well, she stands behind the glove counter–even then, gloves were an archaic affectation. The filmography really sets up her isolation and loneliness. She is a depressed artist from Vermont who hasn’t really made connections in California. She does meet a slacker at a laundromat, played by Jason Schwartzman, whom she dates and sleeps with because there’s nobody else, and she wants to feel a connection. An older, wealthy guy played by Steve Martin visits LA sometimes and starts a relationship with her. However, they have different ideas of what the relationship is. He thinks it’s more casual, but he develops feelings for her. She thinks it’s more serious. However, events test and then break the relationship, and it ends with a coda where she ends up with the slacker, who has gone on to make something of himself because of what she said to him, and Martin’s character regrets how it turned out. Basically, he kept something of himself from her even though she shared everything of herself, or something.

It’s kind of a downer of a film if you take Martin’s character to be the main character and protagonist, and it stuck with me for a couple of days. Probably because I’m a little older these days, and I could probably be a better husband.

Still, it shows that Steve Martin is a pretty insightful writer and is unafraid to take a chance making films, although unfortunately he has had more success with silly comedies and old intellectual properties.

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Whither My Bang Or Whimper?

Wirecutter has announced he’s retiring from blogging after 18 years.

As you know, gentle reader, this blog is coming up on 22 years old now. We’ve hit one of those periodic spots where I’m not as loquacious as normal–mostly just book reports and movie reports and lists of books and movies I’ve recently bought.

I mean, I’m not interested in writing long hot takes on the news these days. All the other bigger bloggers are covering that waterfront, and their daily writings are ephemeral. I’m not banging out essay-length investigations into culture or substack-length musings on anything. Just a couple bon mots which are probably not all that bon but most assuredly are pronounced with the t at the end because this is America, Jack. But I’m even not rising to much snark these days.

So I muse on the mortality of this blog: Will I announce a retirement and get one or two comments on the post? Will I just die? Will I get the diagnosis and then ask for money or write poignantly on enjoying the life I might have mostly wasted refreshing Instapundit or Ace of Spades HQ over and over? Or will I just tail off?

Stay tuned! It’s like a cliffhanger, but with less at stake and less interest!

But I’m going to miss Wirecutter’s blog. I’ve been reading it for a couple of years and have found it amusing and have enjoyed his stories and vignettes of life in Tennessee among the GIFs and memes.

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They’re The Rules; I Didn’t Make Them (Except I Did)

At Nogglestead, I have promulgated a simple rule about the common areas: If an article of clothing is horizontal, it’s going into the laundry basket atop the dryer to be washed.

For example, in this tableau from December, the black sweatshirt is going into the laundry, but the jacket and oversized sweater are not:

This mostly applies to my beautiful wife these days, as she is prone to putting on and taking off overclothing in the house and laying it aside, leaving sweatshirts and the like in various rooms. My boys no longer take their pants off immediately upon entering the home, leaving them in the living room. And I mostly ignore their rooms–the oldest does his own laundry, eventually, and I only step in to take wet towels off of the younger man’s floor these days and exhort him to pick up his dirty clothes in all other circumstances.

As for me, the only occasion where I might leave clothing horizontal occurs when I put on my gi for a martial arts class and will put my blue jeans back on after the class. I leave my jeans on the bench so I can put them back on after class. They’re in no real danger of being put into the laundry because 1) I’m the one who picks up stuff in the household and does the laundry and 2) I pay a local tough guy to protect them while I’m away.

So, anyways, now you know a little more (than you ever wanted to know) about the daily life at Nogglestead and the arbitrary protocols therein.

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Book Report: iWoz by Steve Wozniak and Gina Smith (2006)

Book coverI mentioned Woz in a Bizbook post a couple weeks ago, so it seemed a good time to pick this book up. Where did I buy it? Ah, gentle reader, I know you wait with bated breath for me to reveal exactly from what book sale or book store I bought a particular book in some particular year recounted in a Good Book Hunting post, but I don’t have any such information for you on this book (which is several this year where I haven’t had a referent). I don’t think I got it new in 2006. It doesn’t have an ABC Books sticker on it nor a penciled price inside the front cover. Perhaps I got it as a gift. Who knows?

At any rate, here’s what I said on FacedIn:

What was the name of your first software company?

I put the name Foowoz (Friends of Old Woz) on the BASIC programs I wrote on the Apple IIs in the middle school and high school computer labs circa 1984.

Jeez, he would not have been that old in 1984. Maybe he seemed it to me. He wrote this book almost 20 years ago, when he was about my age. And he had something to write about. Me? Fifteen years at this same desk for a variety of contracts and employers who are all dead, Dave. But enough of my self-pity.

I consider the book to have two parts. The first deals with his youth in what would become Silicon Valley, where his father was an engineer. His father quietly encourage young Woz when he was building things or exploring electricity or rudimentary computers using large logic gates. Woz won all his science fairs, well, practically, and became possibly the youngest licensed HAM operator in the country in the sixth grade. He then went on to make a variety of electronic gadgets in his early college years, often for pranks, and his amusement or interest. This led to him making the Apple I kit and essentially open-sourcing it, a job at Hewlitt-Packard designing calculators, and eventually building the Apple II. Which was a huge success.

The first part is enthusiastic, exuberant, and made me want to go out to buy a basic electronics kit so I could play around with the electrical components. Which I don’t have to do, I remind myself–I have a bunch of electronics here I could learn by repairing and, yes, Rob, even soldering–since I’ve been reading this book and once searched Amazon for electronics kits, Facebook has started showing me suggested posts with best practices for soldering and electrical repair. And a lot of general Do-It-Yourself stuff–I guess YouTube is sharing my searches with Facebook as well? But I digress. I loved this first part of the book.

Then, of course, he becomes rich from his work at Apple. His relationship with Steve Jobs is colored rosedly–he mentioned Jobs deceiving him about how much Jobs was getting paid for the Atari game Breakout, which he promised to split with Woz but, according to Woz, did not. If you read his Wikipedia entry, Woz slags on Jobs more after this book came out. So it was not a smooth relationship. And Woz did not really fit in with the Apple corporate ethos as it evolved under Jobs and investors. I can understand that a bunch having worked with big corporations and big contracts myself.

After he leaves Apple, he founds a company to sell a universal remote control he built, but the company does not go far. And the book kind of changes then into a bit of dilettantism. He funds and partially runs a giant music festival which ran a couple of years in the 1980s; he gets a chance to teach for a while; and so on. He then caps the book with some life lessons, and finis! This last part of the book is a little scattered, maybe like his life after the Apple II, and it’s not as inspirational as the first part, although one of the lessons at the end is that if you’re a builder, inventor, or engineer, a large corporation is probably not the place for you to do your best work. Preach it!

At any rate, I really liked the book and found it inspirational and aspirational. Woz built hardware and wrote the software to run the hardware in a variety of low-level languages–he talks about writing programs to run on ROMs with only a limited number of bytes in it, which is amazing. I mean, I know that’s how it was done in the old days–even some of the Commodore programs I typed in were basically loaders for values to put into machine language in specific memory locations coupled with those values and locations–but today’s world is more about grafting on extensive, unknown, and probably untested megabytes’ worth of libraries to make your application do simple things (or ask AI to do it for you). So I have nothing but the utmost respect and admiration for Woz’s technical abilities.

The book only tangentally mentions his personal life–it’s not the focus of interest–but I see via Wikipedia that he’s on his fourth wife. I pray for him, his health, and his family, and I can take the lessons learned in this particularly homer auto-biography–he goes on about how he was the first or the best or the youngest in a variety of contexts, and I believe him for what it’s worth. It’s enthusiasm more than chest-thumping, and I suppose I could check if it were important to me that all the assertions were absolutely 100% factual. Whether or not they are, the enthusiasm makes for a fun, entertaining, and informative read.

Recommended. Even though it’s older than the iPhone which was about to drop and make Apple the resurgent juggernaut it is twenty years later.

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Movie Report: Against All Odds (1984)

Book coverWell, as I mentioned when I bought the DVD, I was familiar with the Phil Collins song “Against All Odds” from this film (spoiler alert: it’s over the end credits), but I’d never seen the film. Well, now I have.

In it, Jeff Bridges (not to be confused with William Hurt, although they were both that everyman, sensitive hunk in the early 1980s) plays an older wide receiver for the Los Angeles Outlaws who has been playing hurt but gets cut. So an old friend who is now a big bookie in the town–and who has goods on Bridges’ character–asks him to go to Mexico to look for a girl whom he says has stolen money from him. The woman is the daughter of the football team owner, also, which complicates things. Bridges goes to Mexico, finds the girl, and they fall in love and spend time together. He decided he’ll run away with her, but a football coach also under the thrall of the bookie finds them, and bloodshed occurs. Something something, real estate deal, bloodshed, and finis!

A bit slower paced than many things–one can see that they’re working hard on a modern noir, probably hoping to have another Chinatown or something (as in a later, more modern, but now fifty-years-old noir). But it just doesn’t make it. The sunny beaches of Mexico do not have the proper look and feel for it, and it just misses.

Also, I must admit that during a particularly steamy scene set at Chichen Itza, where action jump cut between entwined bodies and the carvings on the walls, that I was looking for an image of the fanged deity, but I guess that was too far south for Chichen Itza (although I could have looked at this tour guide from the same year, 1984, and see if I could spot locations in the guide). But no.

At any rate, James Woods plays the bookie and Rachel Ward, an Englishwoman, plays the girl. Continue reading “Movie Report: Against All Odds (1984)”

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I, Too, Like Games

It was a struggle this morning to pay my propane bill as I apparently have the wrong password stored in my password manager and the forgot password functionality did not work. And one either the Register, Sign In, or Forgot Password pages (I forget which, but I hit them all), the CAPTCHA was all like:

They go through an awful lot of trouble to make sure the right person is paying the bill.

I’ve said at my electric co-op, where I’ve made a recent habit of visiting in person to pay my bill, if someone wants to pay my bill, let them. You don’t have to be to strict making sure it’s me.

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Beholding the Swath of Destruction in My Wake

The job application asked for a URL to a site to which I’d made a significant contribution to in quality assurance. And I played an exchange from the first episode of the British comedy Red Dwarf played in my head:

Holly: They’re all dead. Everybody’s dead, Dave.
Lister: Peterson isn’t, is he?
Holly: Everybody’s dead, Dave!
Lister: Not Chen!
Holly: Gordon Bennett! Yes, Chen. Everyone. Everybody’s dead, Dave!
Lister: Rimmer?
Holly: He’s dead, Dave. Everybody is dead. Everybody is dead, Dave.
Lister: Wait. Are you trying to tell me everybody’s dead?

It makes my resume sound like a litany of carnage, but many of the companies I’ve worked for full time with products of their own have been acquired by other companies or rolled into parent companies, and the products I worked on might remain in bits and pieces deep within the tech debt of legacy code somewhere, but they’re not readily available, and my contributions are no longer readily apparent. Or the startup shuttered after a couple years or was bought by another company no one has heard of. Or the consulting company rolled off a contract I worked on, a contract with 250 people, most of whom would have forgotten my name if they ever learned it once I was no longer on the list of meeting attendees.

  • The Enterprise Information Integration solution? Rolled into the bowels of a RedHat offering somewhere, maybe.
  • The pharmaceutical modeling company? Changed names, maybe still does the same thing, but I was working on a special project for a German client that was not public facing and might not have ever seen the light of day.
  • The digital marketing agency? Acquired by another and probably no longer serving the brands that kept us up late into the night.
  • The library software company? Bought by a larger firm, its desktop offerings thrown overboard for cloud solutions most likely.
  • The online marketplace we launched defect-free? Shuttered after a couple years of obscurity.
  • The major apparel retailer where I was a subcontractor to a subcontractor on a small upgrade project? Still around, but the bits I worked on, briefly, have probably been replaced by now.
  • The government contracts? The first was a contract looking for something to do; the second was not actually a development contract but a managing contract, so it was not clear what to do with the testers on it. The government contracting company itself has gone through one of the periodic pupae stages where it goes into the chrysalis as a company with hundreds of millions of dollars of contracts and then emerges again as a small, probably service-disabled woman owned company available for contracts preferring small companies.
  • The Jumbo mortage servicing company where I worked for only equity? Apparently, it still has a Web site, but it’s not clear if it’s doing anything.
  • The company I just left? Merged into its parent company and its product was shut down about this time last year. I worked for a while at the parent company while they tried to think of what to do with the engineers from our company, but I left as they did not actually have QA engineers in the parent company, and the automated test suite I wrote for what our engineers was working on probably didn’t end up in use.

Et cetera, et cetera.

The worst is applications that want contact information for your supervisors. I mean, some of them are retired by now, if I could find them. And the minute I stepped out of the government contract, I was forgotten.

I brought this subject to my beautiful wife, and she pointed out that the two contracts I currently have are up and running, and I guess that’s correct. But one is a team lead position for a test suite that is not publicly available although the product is (it’s complicated) and an edtech that is members-only.

Jeez, Louise. It’s bad enough that long-term remote work can be very isolating and kills your professional network (distant work colleagues are not like people you see in the office every day, no matter how many Zoom happy hours you throw), but I look at my resume full of workplaces and offices I actually visited, and it looks almost like something made up. No big companies (not many tech companies came out of St. Louis and retained their identity).

But, man, what have I been doing here?

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Movie Report: Deadpool (2016)

Book coverDeadpool, as a character, came at the end of my new comic buying period (that is, I went to college and stopped buying them whenever I came up with a buck and they had new titles at the drugstores as they did in those days). I know, I know; I’ve been known to go to the comic book shop in the last decade and pick up a run or two of Dynamite titles, mostly revamped old properties like Conan or Red Sonja or whatever. Also, he came out in the mutant books, the X-Men and all their spinoffs, and those were not my first choice amongst the new titles–I preferred Spider-Man, Captain America, Wonder-Man, Quasar, and the Avengers over the X-everythings which I found to be too soap-opery.

According to whatever Wikipedia is quoting, the character’s creator says this about Deadpool:

Liefeld spoke on how the character was influenced by Spider-Man: “The simplicity of the mask was my absolute jealousy over Spider-Man and the fact that both of my buddies, [fellow Marvel artists] Erik Larsen and Todd McFarlane, would tell me, ‘I love drawing Spider-Man. You just do an oval and two big eyes. You’re in, you’re out.’ … The Spider-Man I grew up with would make fun of you or punch you in the face and make small cracks. That was the entire intent with Deadpool. … I specifically told Marvel, ‘He’s Spider-Man, except with guns and swords.’ The idea was, he’s a jackass.” Other inspirations were Wolverine and Snake Eyes. Liefeld states: “Wolverine and Spider-Man were the two properties I was competing with at all times. I didn’t have those, I didn’t have access to those. I had to make my own Spider-Man and Wolverine. That’s what Cable and Deadpool were meant to be, my own Spider-Man and my own Wolverine.”

You know, I described him to my beautiful wife the same way: He’s got the wisecracks of Spider-Man, but crass. Also, he’s an anti-hero. He’s definitely of the age that was dawning in the 1990s and in this 21st century.

So the film is his origin story: A thug-for-hire falls in love with a beautiful woman as crazy as he is (played by Morena Baccarin), but learns he has advanced cancer. So he goes to a black market mutant factory where they promise to cure him, but the torturous process, which is actual torture, is designed to stress people to trigger mutagenic change, but the ultimate goal is to create mutants and sell them as slaves or soldiers. Deadpool gets away and then goes hunting for the people who did this to him–made him practically immortal but with scarred to the point that people shun him on the street. They find out who he was and kidnap Marena Baccarin, and a great fight ensues, and Deadpool gets help from Colossus and Negasonic who are familiar with Deadpool whom they want to join the X-forces. Bam, zang, crass, and finis!

I mean, it was all right. I’m growing a little more tolerance for the crass these days, and it did have the comic book movie thing going for it. Apparently the comics also had Deadpool breaking the fourth wall, kind of like She-Hulk in her late 1980s series. Which means it wasn’t as groundbreaking as they might have thought–other comics were doing the Deadpool schticks, but I guess something about this particular character caught on enough that they were making movies about him thirty-some years later. So Marvel has that going for them, which is nice.

My youngest, who watched it with me, was eager to watch the next one if we had it. Oh, but no, gentle reader; when my beautiful wife bought the film for me indirectly for Valentine’s Day, she did not get the second. And one suspects that the latest, Deadpool and Wolverine, might not make an appearance on physical media at all.

And although the film does feature Morena Baccarin who is, what, fifteen years older than she was in Firefly when this film came out? You would have to probably draw a variety of charts and tables with lots of science in them to prove it to me–even though it has Morena Baccarin in it, it is also the first film I’ve seen with Gina Carano in it. So Gina Carano it is. Continue reading “Movie Report: Deadpool (2016)”

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Good Album Hunting, Saturday, March 15, 2025: Relics Antique Mall

Ah, gentle reader. Yesterday, I cleaned the main level of the house and then hit the gym with my beautiful wife for some cardio training since I will probably do one or two more triathlons at the end of the summer and don’t want to suck or don’t want any of my family to beat me in them. After a snooze, I was not sure what to do with the afternoon, so I thought I’d spend an hour or so at Relics, ostensibly looking for presents for birthdays, the wedding anniversary, and/or Christmas. Nothing in that regard leaped out to me, but I did find a couple of records to bring home.

I got:

  • Heads by Bob James. It features David Sanborn, Eric Gale, and Grover T. Washington on it, and it was at the low end of what records go for these days at antique malls ($3.95). Still, my musical tastes are going to fly under the radar–the youngsters who put records in the big antique malls–they won’t recognize Bob James. Or maybe people just won’t buy it, so they’re properly pricing it.
  • Jeffery Osborne’s debut album. I got a later album, Emotional, last fall (I was pleased to see this was not a duplicate). It was priced $1.00, but it was in a bin that said fifty cents. Either way, it was worth it.
  • Sincerely Yours by Sweet Sensation, a female trio a la Expose from the late 1980s. This is a 12″ single with four different mixes of the same song, so I won’t really spin it that often. But, Brian J., you didn’t buy it to listen to it, you might accuse. At which point I might look away and admit I paid $2.00 for this record because of the pretty women on the cover. Which not enough people did in the 1980s, or the group would be remembered.
  • Down Two Then Left by Boz Scaggs who gets some rotation on WSIE (I just said that in 2022 when I got my first Boz Scaggs record, Silk).

I paid for it with the cash in my wallet, so it really wasn’t like spending money at all. And I got change to use in the offering plate for a doughnut and cup of coffee since I’m not tossing twenties in there these days because I’m even now the kind of fellow who will go for some retail therapy now and then, even if it’s only eleven dollars’ worth.

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Book Report: Naked Came the Manatee by Carl Hiaasen, et al (1995)

Book coverYou know, I suppose I could have read this book last year, when I was on a bit of a Hiaasen-clearing mood (when I read The Downhill Lie, Bad Monkey, and Razor Girl in October and November), but I did not. This book has been on my shelves since 2018, but I’ve not been inclined to pick it up until now. Probably because of the list of authors all working on one novel.

And it was a good judgment call on my part, actually. You know, when I was a sophomore in high school, one of the exercises, the class wrote a story in the round. We were divided into groups based on our columns of desks, and we each started a story and then passed it off to the next column to add to it. We made up a character and inserted him into every story (I know, I know: I just mentioned this story 21 years ago, but that’s back when the blog was on Blogspot, so I can understand if you don’t remember it–and I did mention it more recently in the book report for Samurai Cat Goes To The Movies in 2023).

This book is similar–and apparently it originally appeared as a serial in Miami Herald Tropic. So each of them, it looks like, picked up the thread or from the cliffhanger of the previous writer left off. And we whipsaw a bit between stylistic changes and even some plotish and characterization elements. One of the authors kills off a sympathetic character in the middle. Another makes the title manatee, nicknamed Booger, almost sentient in sentiment only to have Hiaasen de-retcon that when he wrapped it up.

So, the plot, as it starts: The manatee, naked, gets tangled in some cargo being smuggled in a special metal container after a boat collision sends it into the bay. An elderly defender of nature whom the manatee knows helps untangle him from the netting into which the contraband was caught discovers It’s Castro’s frozen head! (remember, The Day After Tomorrow was a best seller the year before). Except another cannister turns up with another Castro head in it. And Castro wants to come to the United States to visit an old paramour from the days of the revolution. Or he’s already here receiving advanced cancer treatment. Given that they’re just riffing off of previous chapters and putting their own spins on it, the authors kind of do what they want, and Hiaasen writes the final chapter to try to make sense of it all, but….

What I read was more of a concept than a novel, and it doesn’t hold together very well. I’m not even sure who most of the characters are–they have names, and relationships established in various chapters, but they differ just enough chapter-to-chapter that I didn’t really remember who was who or what they wanted to do. And I’m not really sure I could tell you the actual resolution except that the manatee, human-intelligent in one chapter but not at the end, never does get clothing and remains naked at the end.

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Book Report: The Senior by Mike Flynt with Don Yaeger (2008)

Book coverI can’t actually tell you when I bought this book from ABC Books, as it does not show up in a Good Book Hunting post via a quick search, but it would have been shelved right above the martial arts section when they had one (the last time I was in, they did not have a martial arts section, which was empty most of the time anyway). They must have thought a lot about this book, as it is wrapped in a mylar cover, but one of the things I noticed about it very early was the poor paper quality. It’s yellowed and its luminosity has dimmed–I would have thought I was reading a 1960s paperback instead of a hardback that’s under 20 years old.

At any rate, it tells the story of a man who attended and played football for a remote Texas state university in the late 1960s who left college after his junior year. Well, left is a euphemism. He was thrown out because he was a brawler, raised by a brawler to fight from a young age. The book starts out describing how he got back together for a reunion with some of his team mates from the old team when they were all older, and he wondered if he could still play. He had a year of eligibility left, so he went out to Aspen, Texas, to find out if they were open to letting him try out for the team, and they were. So he comes down, enrolls in grad school, and….

The book shifts to a bit of an autobiography, talking about how he was raised by a hard father, how he got into a lot of fights in his youth, including the one with a team mate that got him thrown out of school, and then about how he got started as a weight and strength training coach for different universities culminating in a position at Texas A&M and how he fought and bested an NFL player who was ignoring him when he was trying to close the weight room down for the night. He talks about finding Jesus, he talks a little about getting involved with a friend’s pyramid scheme in collecting money to invest in selling American clothes overseas but eventually after they’re both indicted, his charges are dismissed. Then…. there’s a gap of about 20 years, and then we’re back in the present.

He tries out and makes the team as a special teams player, and he spends much of the season hurt with a groin pull (not fun; I had one almost a decade ago, and it took me eight or ten weeks to return to semi-normal activity and maybe a couple of years before it stopped hurting sometimes), herniated disks, and other things. He gets hurt in practice, and cannot actually play, although the media comes to town to do stories on him and the crowds chant for him to go in, and eventually, at the end, the he gets to play in the last game of the season and makes a couple of blocks.

And then, in the last chapter (“Afterword: Is There A Fountain of Youth?”), he talks about the missing 20 years: He apparently came up with a simple apparatus for exercising which he sold via infomercials and then to the government in wholesale lots and made big bank on it. The last chapter is almost a pitch for the device. And, to be honest, it brings the whole thing into question. Was the whole thing a publicity stunt to sell the devices (and a book and, eventually, a movie in 2023)? Did he really earn a roster spot or was he merely a wealthy alum humored by the university? The coach seems ambivalent to say the least, and the authors claim his distraction was because his family had moved to Wisconsin and he was stuck in Texas, but is that really it?

So I was looking for inspiration in being athletic even when one is getting up there–I mean, I’m still lumbering through triathlons and doing martial arts even as various aches and pains arise with no seeming reason nor triggering event, so I could use that sort of thing. But this was not it. Also, my experience of the book is probably colored by the fact that I attended a manufacturer’s conference a week ago where “Rudy” Ruettiger whose story was the basis of the movie Rudy about an undersized player who attends the university later than other students (only a couple years in Rudy’s story), walks on to the football team, and gets to play at the end (and was later indicted for financial shenanigans). But at least Rudy got a sack.

So not to slag on the guy, who is 77 now and can probably still kick my can, but not inspirational to me.

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Brian J. Aces Lileks’ Quiz

Well, not a quiz per se, but yesterday Lileks posted a screen grab from the original Taking of Pelham 123:

Ooops, sorry, that’s something else, and Travolta was in the remake, not the original.

Here is what Lileks posted:

And I thought: “Hey, I’ve been in a physical book store in my life!” Wait, no, I thought: “I have that book.”

Later book club editions that I bought in 2008 and will read…. someday. Undoubtedly, they’re way out of date for modern things but are still appropriate for things that still actually work.

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AKA A Walk Through Webster Groves

Neo posted this video, 10 Old House Styles No Longer Built Today, on her open thread today:

As you might remember, gentle reader, when we lived in Old Trees, we took our baby-at-the-time out walking for sometimes four hours a day, so we covered a large portion of the area. And of the ten styles included in the video, there are only three that I cannot remember seeing: Atomic Ranch, Brutalist, and Shotgun Shack.

Which is not to say that you cannot find them; it just means that I cannot remember seeing them, although the area had several smaller houses which might have been Atomic Ranch or Shotgun Shacks, they might have been torn down for bigger houses by now.

You might think that all-steel Lustron houses would be hard to come by, but we had one across the street and two around the corner from our house just off the highway. Not as many as Brentwood, another suburb of St. Louis, but enough that I recognize them.

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Book Report: Wine of the Dreamers by John D. MacDonald (1950, 1968?)

Book coverThis is one of John D. MacDonald’s science fantasy books–The Ballroom of the Skies being the other, which I just read almost 20 years ago. I just picked this book up ten years ago, and I’ve been kind of pacing myself on new (to me) MacDonald books because one day I will run out. Although there are so many, and I’ve paced them out so, that I can probably re-read them.

So: On Earth, a brilliant scientist is working on a discredited project for interstellar travel that the military wants to kill. A technician, in a moment of “madness,” damages the project, but Bard, the project leader, wants him back. The team is monitored by a psychologist for signs of this madness, this loss of control. Meanwhile, a dissipated and dying race on another planet has forgotten its history and only lives to play and to “dream” in special machines that show them worlds that they think don’t exist where they can play violent and destructive games. An outcast of this race who has gone to forbidden levels of the world, a large building on a desolate planet, to learn, and he wonders if the worlds and the people are real–and he hopes to establish contact with the scientist and to help him to reach their planet–or to take one of the remaining rockets on his planet to visit Earth.

So it’s very close thematically to Ballroom of the Skies in that psi-aliens are responsible for the burgeoning violence on the planet. In both cases, Fawcett reprinted some of MacDonald’s earliest works given his later success, particularly with the Travis McGee series. It’s early in his career–and with a bit more imagination, perhaps he would have become a successful science fiction writer rather than crime fiction. But this book is a little uneven–it tackles bureaucracy well, but it flags in the middle and limps to a happy ending. Maybe that’s characteristic of MacDonald’s early work, the interesting setup, a tailed-off middle, and an abrupt end–I seem to remember thinking that about some of his other early paperback originals–the checklist in the book report for John D. MacDonald: A Checklist of Collectible Editions & Translations links to my book reports on some of his work from the 1950s, and it does seem to be the case that he’s still finding his footing and his formula that will be successful in the 1960s and beyond.

So definitely a book for a MacDonald fan. But for a general science fiction fan: you could probably do better. And worse, as the book reports on this blog indicate: paperback original science fiction from the mid-century period was a mixed bag.

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Movie Report: The Man With Two Brains (1983)

Book coverIt’s funny: I have several Steve Martin movies atop my fresh media cabinet, including The Pink Panther, Bringing Down The House, The Shop Girl, and probably a couple of others (although not The Out-of-Towners which I watched late last year), but I passed over them for this film early in his ouevre which I just bought with my Valentine’s Day gift card.

In it, Steve Martin plays a neurosurgeon, the best in the world, who has recently lost his wife. As he is driving, he hits a cruel golddigger, played by Kathleen Turner, who has just given her current husband a heart attack, but he has written her out of his will. Martin’s neurosurgeon, Dr. Hfuhruhurr, performs emergency surgery on her and saves her life and falls for her–and she gets her hooks into him, denying him his marital due, and is on the verge of leaving him during a European trip until she learns he stands to inherit fifty million dollars. Dr. Hfuhruhurr learns her true nature and becomes sympatico with the brain of a young victim of The Elevator Killer, a serial killer stalking the streets or elevators of Vienna. So it becomes a wacky love triangle, and Dr. Hfuhruhurr tries to figure out how he can be with the brain of the woman he loves.

So, yeah, it’s a bit odd, but it’s full of Steve Martin’s type of humor which is dry and absurd, but not especially slapstick. I think his best work comes in his original films, like this and Dead Men Wear Plaid and Bowfinger rather than the other things where he does remakes or reboots. Of course, I haven’t seen The Pink Panther yet, so maybe it will wow me.

I’m thinking about actually going back to Vintage Stock to look for Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid and The Jerk–they would have come out about the beginning of the home video revolution, so they should be available in DVD or VHS (Vintage Stock is not vintage enough to stock VHS–but maybe I could find them at antique malls for a buck or so). So let that be your endorsement: I’m tempted to pay more than a buck on other works by the same actor based on the viewing of this movie.

Although the other films won’t have Kathleen Turner in them. Continue reading “Movie Report: The Man With Two Brains (1983)”

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Swing and a Miss

I mentioned that a poet whom I knew decades ago is now atop my Facebook feed every day, not because she posts photos of she and her husband in the cockpit of a plane where they’re flying rescue animals hither and yon nor photos of her most recent trip to Europe–I have gotten those intermittently since we reconnected right after Mike died–wow, five years ago already? I guess that tracks as I was just telling my brother that my aunt in St. Charles died five years ago Thanksgiving. At any rate, the poet now appears at the top of my Facebook feed about every time I log in because she’s posting about politics every damned day with the attitude “I am a reasonable person, and I’m trying to make sense of this madness that is opposing viewpoints….”

Like this:

Mmm-hmm. David French.So she has found a “conservative” who has been slagging on Donald Trump and the people who would vote for him for, what, ten years running? Maybe try some Kevin Williamson, too, if you can find him nowadays.

You know, I was off Facebook for, what, a year or so a couple of years back. I get the sense that logging in to see my memories is not going to be enough to keep me interested in it here shortly. Not when posts I put up remain unacknowledged (probably unseen) by friends, and when the posts I see are AI- or foreign-generated sludge and political posts from tangental acquaintances designed to sway me because all my friends, apparently, think one way.

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Book Report: The Big Empty by Robert Crais (2024)

Book coverSo I got this book in a roundabout fashion: As part of the stocking stuffers for Christmas 2023, I bought the family Barnes and Noble gift cards, which I failed to stuff in their stockings in 2023 (they were full enough anyway), so I put them in the stockings for Christmas 2024 (where the stockings were less stuffed, so the deferred giving worked out better than it might have). My beautiful wife knew that this book was coming out this year (although the copyright date is 2024, it was not in book stores until February 2025). She read it right away–ah, gentle reader, I remember a time when I would buy a book by an author the day it came out and read it that night, but we are too far in the 21st century for me to do that much any more. After she read it, she put it into my office, and I put it in my unread stacks until after the 2025 Winter Reading Challenge. And, amazingly, I found it again shortly thereafter, so I picked it up.

This is an Elvis Cole / Joe Pike novel–it seems that Crais has abandoned writing other non-series books–and it’s definitely a throwback to late 20th century suspense writing. The style balances paragraphs of decription with dialog, which means good pacing with actual description in it and not just a script in a hardback. It’s almost 400 pages, but it doesn’t feel like it.

So, the plot: A young woman famous and rich from her online baking videos and growing media and baking empire contacts Elvis Cole to look for her father who disappeared ten years ago. He was declared dead after five years missing and a search by an investigation firm that Cole knows and respects. So he starts his investigation and discovers that someone in Rancha, the last place the father was seen, doesn’t want him investigating. Which leads to a brutal beatdown of Cole by multiple attackers (when he doesn’t give up) which allows multiple characters to say, “It looks like you got your ass kicked,” which was probably funnier to the author when he was writing the book than to me reading it.

The plot is a little convoluted–well, no more so than a Raymond Chandler book–and I don’t know that it hangs together seamlessly or without wrinkles–I thought a particular twist was coming which did not, and it ended up a little disappointing, but the execution and writing was refreshing enough that I’ll probably get the next Crais book for my wife right when it comes out, should another be forthcoming (it’s taking him several years to crank them out these days, so one of these will be the last, but hopefully not soon).

Which leads me to think maybe I should read all the Cole and then Cole/Pike books again. I’ve read Robert B. Parker’s early works several times, including some binge reads where I tore through all the works to a certain point in rapid succession, but that’s been twenty or twenty-five years–and I’m not especially inclined to do it again with the Spenser novels as they got longer and more hardback scripts having gained length but losing depth somewhere around that time. But Crais? I suspect I’d find they are pretty much quality throughout. But I have so many other books to read that I’m not eager to run through them again unless they accidentally end up on my to-read shelves again.

So: Recommended.

And I would be remiss if I did not mention that I own two copies of what might be Crais’s first published work–which is not The Monkey’s Raincoat. Which was expensive in paperback when we tried to find it twenty years ago.

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