To be able to say "Noggle," you first must be able to say "Nah."
Full disclosure: I sort of know the author as she has volunteered with my beautiful wife in a local entrepreneur’s group (well, she was there before my wife, so perhaps I should say “My beautiful wife volunteered with this author.”) So when I saw that she, the author, was having a book signing downtown (not […]
This is a “new” translation of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, and as the slightly altered title indicates, it wants to extend the lessons of the master to situations other than war. The author/translator, as a matter of fact, breaks The Art of War into sections and then adds introductions before each section with […]
This would turn out to be the last of the books I read for the 2023 Winter Reading Challenge, 14 of 15 categories completed. This one fit into the “Cozy” category, which means generally a little old lady solves a bit of a cottage mystery akin to an old English novel rather than a hard-boiled […]
Michael Williams has a story about how Hasbro/Wizards of the Coast/TSR is trying to screw people over with copyrights, leading to Williams’ rant about IP. I, on the other hand, remember what TSR did to Game Designers’ Workshop and Gary Gygax over Dangerous Journeys (Gygax talks about it way down in this interview. Mike, another […]
So I called our portly cat The Big Kahuna this morning, and I got to thinking: Is that from the Annette Funicello/Frankie Avalon beach movies such as Bikini Beach or the 1960s television show Gidget starring Sally Fields? I’ve never actually seen any of the former, and although the latter was in syndication on channel […]
Time for a novel-gazing “What junk has landed on my desk, and why?” post. I don’t know if you get anything out of them, gentle reader, but my best reader, me in a couple of years, will find it interesting. So here’s what is on my desk. A dreamGEAR MyArcade DGUN-2561 from 2013. Back in […]
I hope you all had a good Thanksgiving. Ours was a bit subdued as my beautiful wife and I came down with raging colds at the beginning of the week, so our guest list and our menu was curtailed, but we had turkey, cranberries, and stuffing (and will for days to come, as we bought […]
I bought this book fourteen years ago during an especially gluttonous trip to a book sale not long after my youngest was born. It would have been the autumn after my mother’s diagnosis and but, what, four months before her death? Eleven months before our move to Springfield? A long time ago, to be sure, […]
I guess he’s not a toddler any more. But he got his driver’s license today, and although he did not like the chauffeur cap we got him for the occasion, I suspect he will wear it sometime. But probably not on nights when my beautiful wife and I ask him to ferry us to dinner […]
This book was in the poetry section at ABC Books, but that’s a bit of a misnomer. The author’s bio calls him a social media influencer, and the book reads like a bunch of Instagram posts. Some are a couple paragraphs of prose, and some are “poetry,” although they’re just prose with line breaks. Thematically, […]
From this date in 2015: Although it’s not explicitly stated, apparently robotic exoskeletons are not allowed in martial arts sparring, either. Which is unfortunate, as Asian tech-arms dealers have notoriously restrictive return policies. Jeez, I have been studying martial arts for a long time, but not frequently enough to master them.
From this date in 2010: Brian J. Noggle sees the light at the end of the tunnel. But Tangina said not to go into the light. Mike commented: “All are welcome, all are welcome. there is peace and safety, in the light.” Before he unfriended me, before he died.
I bought this little chapbook at ABC Books a couple weeks ago, and when I went back earlier this month and bought a book by Gregory McDonald, I mentioned that Gregory McDonald was one of the big three MacDonald/McDonalds–the other were Ross MacDonald and John D. MacDonald (I said, gesturing to a Travis McGee novel […]
You know, I have already read and reviewed my own play in 2016, but the 2022 Winter Reading Challenge has a category Makes You Laugh, and now as it did then (in 2016) and when I wrote it (in 1993 or 1994), it makes me laugh out loud at some joke I’d written thirty years […]
Sarah Hoyt sez However, around the edges, I actually found out what makes people bond with you personally. I found it out both by reading a lot of blogs and running one: People want to know you. As a person. They want to know the funny little things in your life. They want to feel […]
I saw this film in the theaters with my beautiful wife back in the heady days of the Stillerverse and back when we went to the theater a couple of times a year. This film is a lesser entry in the set starring Stiller, Vince Vaughn, and/or Owen and/or Luke Wilson–Zoolander, Dodgeball, and Mystery Men […]
The headline/title is full of uncertainty, including the word friend, clearly.
I had seen The Godfather before–my mother-in-law bought it for me one Christmas, probably hoping it would butch me up to be worthy of her beautiful daughter, and I got around to watching it some years ago. But I recently came upon the whole Godfather collection in a VHS box set with the two cassette […]
You know, gentle reader, I am so old now that I think of things from long ago as recent–so I think of this as a recent Clint Eastwood movie, perhaps because it’s from the 21st century, and Eastwood’s filmography goes way back. But he has been making and acting in films up to the present […]
Well, I finished this book, finally. As you might recall, gentle reader, I have been reading it for some time. I started it before I began the library’s winter reading challenge (which I finished on or around February 22), so it was the book I picked up after Wuthering Heights). I read the sixteen books […]