To be able to say "Noggle," you first must be able to say "Nah."
SPOILERS IN THIS REVIEW
So I’ve tucked it under the fold for your protection. Unless you come from a social media site or feed directly to this page, in which case there is no fold. TURN BACK NOW, YOU FOOL.
Continue reading “Book Report: Under the Dome by Stephen King (2009)”
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This book did not have Iron Man in it. I guess Robert Downey, Jr., wanted too much to do it.
I guess not; this is the wrong The Avengers. This set is the 1960s British Secret Agents, mod 60s woman Emma Peel and staid John Steed. I’ve never seen the series, and I even missed the almost twenty year old film starring Uma Thurman and Ralph Fiennes, so I didn’t really know what to expect.
It’s a slightly silly, disjointed book. A biotech company can raise the dead, and there’s a priest, and zombie American servicemen who can remember how to fly a stolen plane to the Pentagon. Or to New York.
I don’t know what to make of the story, how it relates to the others in the series, or to the television program. The book has a lot of interior Steed attracted to Peel but unable to say, and I don’t know if this is something that showed up in the program or if it’s a bit of the author’s own invention, thinking that Steed would because what man is not hot for Diana Rigg in a cat suit? I’ve seen that sort of thing before in books, although I cannot recall in which television series or movie novelization book report I remarked on it.
At any rate, of the two period television shows whose tie-in books I’ve read recently, the Kung Fu books (here and here) are better.
But I’ve got a couple more from The Avengers; maybe they’ll grow on me since I’m not going into them cold.
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I opened the most recent copy of Garden & Gun magazine, and I laughed out loud. Not at the Roy Blount, Jr., humor piece it contained. Not at a joke or intentionally humorous piece, actually. At the ensemble in the Table of Contents:
Go ahead, if you dare, and click for full size. Then, note in the lower left corner, this text:
Crop top, $3,990, and skirt, $9,700, by Zuhair Murad, at zuhairmurad.com.
That yellow outfit costs as much as a car.
I wonder how much more expensive if the top had sleeves and covered the belly completely.
I can’t talk, of course, as I’m a bit of a clothes horse myself these days. Why, just two weeks ago, I bought a new shirt at Walmart for $9 because the shirts I’ve received as inheritances from my father-in-law (fifteen years ago), uncle-in-law (seven years ago), and mother (six years ago) are starting to show some wear. And I’m outgrowing them as I continue to triumph over being underweight.
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This book is a tedious, wordy little side-scroller of a men’s adventure novel.
The plot is exceedingly similar to Paramilitary Plot mashed up with Terrorist Summit: An ex-CIA agent is looking to put together a super-network of extra-national intelligence professionals and arms smugglers to help fund terrorists. Bolan has to find him and to rescue a prisoner–in this case, Toby Ranger, a recurring character from the War on the Mafia days.
Unfortunately, in the worst entries in the series, the writing does little to mask how similar these plots were to one another. This entry is particularly week, as entire chapters are chewed up in the musings of Mack Bolan. Where Pendleton would thicken/leaven his stories with a bit of philosophy, later authors simply rehash what Pendleton did and use it as padding to hit word count. This book often features a chapter or two of the musing/exposition, a chapter of Stony Brook team members getting information and thinking about it and the danger Mack Bolan is in, and then a chapter (maybe) that’s an action set piece. Then it repeats. Sometimes, we get a couple extra chapters of philosophy thrown in.
Not worth a read unless you’re compelled to read books on your to-read shelf as I am.
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As a bonus, This Was Cicero included a blow-in card for the Classics Club:
Click for full size
As you might know, gentle reader, I collect Classics Club editions (and a variety of other series published by Walter J. Black).
And although I’ve already invited the three fellows (Plato, Aristotle, and Marcus Aurelius) mentioned in the flyer into my home, I’ve only so far spent time with Marcus Aurelius.
Also, note in the flyer that the spines only say the name of the author; in reality, the spines also contain the titles. At least in the ones I’ve seen they do.
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This book is nominally a biography of Marcus Tullius Cicero, but in reality, it’s a history of the fall of the Roman republic wherein Cicero sometimes makes appearances. I guess the author was working from a lot of Cicero’s letters (as do so many historians from Plutarch on), so he focused on Cicero. But there are huge stretches of the book where Cicero is not mentioned at all, including the first couple of chapters.
The author is a Marxist, of course. He refers often to the proletariat in Rome; he defends Catiline because Catiline was in favor of redistributing the wealth; he name-checks the poor oppressed Sacco and Vanzetti; he touches upon themes and books mentioned in Books That Changed America (namely, conservative opposition to public schools and The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 by Alfred T. Mahan referring to either Pompey or Caesar’s understanding of naval transport of armies); and he often equates good with progressivism/Marxism and bad/corruption/know-nothing aristocracy with “conservatives.” But he’s an early twentieth century Marxist, so it’s lacking in the invective you get in later works.
As I mentioned, the author spends a lot of time talking about things other than Cicero, and he spends a lot of time equating the lives of Roman citizens in Cicero’s lifetime to different periods in history, including seventeenth century England and modern (~1940) America. The comparisons are probably too facile, especially when trying to equate the political groups of the period to modern equivalents (which boils down mostly to Tories/Republicans/Old Senate Factions = bad, Democrats/Redistributionists/Caesar and anyone shaking up the order to make it fairer for the proletariat = good). However:
This is still a pretty good book to read. It is pretty in-depth coverage of Roman history during Cicero’s lifetime, which includes the First Triumvirate and the Second Triumvirate and the Civil War from a different perspective than Julius Caesar. It’s the story of one man with hopes of a restoration of the Constitution that never comes and the slow, continued dissolution of the ideal of the Roman Republic from an ideal state that probably never existed to the seeds of empire based on strong, charismatic men with armies ruling.
It also provides a good deal of context for Cicero’s orations and his other works, including the historical details of why and when the pieces were written. Reading a collection of Cicero’s words will get you a little context, but this book fills in all the gaps.
The author does not paint a flattering picture of Cicero, though. The subject of the book, when he appears, is presented as vacillating, vain, vainglorious, and too much in love with his own oratory. Also, Cicero, in this book, seems to think his words alone could counter armed insurrections of various stripes. A tale with modern parallels.
I enjoyed the book and learned a bunch from it. It’s not without its flaws–politics aside, it does give the subject a bit of short shrift and it has a tendency to draw back from a point in time to provide historical context which gives the reader a bit of whiplash–but informative none the less.
Recommended.
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Boy, musicians really like the learning to fly metaphor for self-actualization, don’t they?
Continue reading “A Common Metaphor”
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Here is the official Brian J. Noggle scale of a workout’s intensity:
Decent: You mutter to yourself.
Good: You mutter to yourself in a voice from out of The Exorcist.
Very Good: You mutter to yourself in a voice from out of The Exorcist in Latin.
Excellent Workout: You mutter to yourself in a voice from The Exorist in Latin and invoke curses from the dark tome Bellicis Artibus Idoneitatem et Veneficia.
Last night, I had an excellent workout, and I want to apologize to any instructor who is afflicted with painful boils or whose vehicle is destroyed by a hail of toads.
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Epictetus, Discourses Book IV Chapter 7, “On Freedom From Fear”
And, for this reason, if he thinks that his good and his interest be in these things only which are free from hindrance and in his own power, he will be free, prosperous, happy, free from harm, magnanimous pious, thankful to God for all things; in no matter finding fault with any of the things which have not been put in his power, nor blaming any of them. But if he thinks that his good and his interest are in externals and in things which are not in the power of his will, he must of necessity be hindered, be impeded, be a slave to those who have the power over things which he admires and fears; and he must of necessity be impious because he thinks that he is harmed by God, and he must be unjust because he always claims more than belongs to him; and he must of necessity be abject and mean.
What hinders a man, who has clearly separated these things, from living with a light heart and bearing easily the reins, quietly expecting everything which can happen, and enduring that which has already happened? “Would you have me to bear poverty?” Come and you will know what poverty is when it has found one who can act well the part of a poor man. “Would you have me to possess power?” Let me have power, and also the trouble of it. “Well, banishment?” Wherever I shall go, there it will be well with me; for here also where I am, it was not because of the place that it was well with me, but because of my opinions which I shall carry off with me: for neither can any man deprive me of them; but my opinions alone are mine and they cannot he taken from me, and I am satisfied while I have them, wherever I may be and whatever I am doing. “But now it is time to die.” Why do you say “to die”? Make no tragedy show of the thing, but speak of it as it is: it is now time for the matter to be resolved into the things out of which it was composed. And what is the formidable thing here? what is going to perish of the things which are in the universe? what new thing or wondrous is going to happen? Is it for this reason that a tyrant is formidable? Is it for this reason that the guards appear to have swords which are large and sharp? Say this to others; but I have considered about all these thins; no man has power over me. I have been made free; I know His commands, no man can now lead me as a slave. I have a proper person to assert my freedom; I have proper judges. Are you not the master of my body? What, then, is that to me? Are you not the master of my property? What, then, is that to me? Are you not the master of my exile or of my chains? Well, from all these things and all the poor body itself I depart at your bidding, when you please. Make trial of your power, and you will know how far it reaches.
Whom then can I still fear?
Dave Grohl counters:
Although Grohl counters that the philosophy of Stoicism could easily crumble when actually confronted with the events in life, Epictetus would not disagree. Throughout his Discourses, he laments the students who come to study Stoic thought to learn it, but not to live it, and he acknowledges that it is difficult and requires discipline and training.
So I think Epictetus and Mr. Grohl are actually in agreement here.
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At OregonMuse’s prompting, I took the Christian Science Monitor‘s Famous Literary Detective Skills Quiz.
When I went through it the first time on my phone, I got a 73%, but when I went through it on my computer preparing this blog post, I got:
77%.
This indicates I guessed one better on the English detective novels on the computer. Note the mobile version of the quiz does not show you the right answers as you go along, which explains why I only did one better guessing the second time around instead of getting them all right to impress you, gentle reader.
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So I went about an hour early before my volunteer shift started at the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library book sale. When I went on Wednesday, I thought I’d bought a copy of Olivia Newton-John’s Olivia, but the platter inside the cover is If You Love Me, Let Me Know. So I’d hoped the donor had just misfiled them, and that I could find the cover for If You Love Me, Let Me Know with Olivia inside.
Alas, no.
I did buy additional albums, including Newton-John’s Come On Over. Eleven additional albums, which puts me at 42 for the week.
Here’s what I got:
Books include:
I got three films:
Additionally, I got three sets of university courses on CD, including The Teaching Company’s Origins of Great Civilizations and Greece and Rome as well as The Modern Scholar’s A History of Ancient Israel. The Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library book sale often has these courses pretty cheap, but the key is to pay attention to what each binder contains. This time out, they marked each binder $10, but some courses are in library binders, where only two discs of a course are in the binder and a whole course might have seven binders. That would be $70 versus $10.
So I’ve got a few things to read, a few things to watch, and a whole lot more to listen to. And I’ve avoided the siren song of half price day today and expect I’ll evade the siren song of bag day on Sunday.
Because, believe it or not, I am running out of places to put books here at Nogglestead. Until I build my stand-alone library building.
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Whenever we go to the hardware store, I tell the boys, in my best Jack Nicholson impression, “Ace is the place with the helpful hardware, man.”
Why do I inflict this upon my children?
The old Ace jingle:
combines with an old television commercial for a Milwaukee radio station that had a Jack Nicholson impersonator say, “Like, fa la la la la, man.”
So I did a mashup of two obscure things my children will probably never experience. And I do it over and over again upon those poor fellows.
One would think over the years that my Jack Nicholson impression would improve. But one would be wrong.
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This book should fit right into my wheelhouse: An abandoned city of an advanced civilization lies on a planet inhabited by intelligent, but primitive, ape-like beings. A shipping magnate and his off and on again rival shipping company magnate wife arrive on the planet to steal into the restricted area to visit the city. On planet, they find a mostly impotent governor tending a native garden while members of the corporation running mining operations on the planet run most of the show. The corporation members look at the tourists as though they were agents trying to figure out the illegal scheme the corporation is running. The tourists get permission from the apes to visit the forbidden city, and as they hitch a ride on a transport car between the only two bases on the planet, they avoid an attack from the corporate killers and flee with the apes who are migrating north toward the forbidden city. The wife seems to be going native and the husband wonders if his obsession with viewing the city, sparked by a talk he saw when he was younger, is worth the cost.
The story uses multiple points of view shifting intrachapter (but with clear demarcations via heading–this is Toyon’s Journal, this is Alin’s journal, and so on), and it has a pretty slow buildup. The world is interesting and alien, but the reveals at the end are kinda blurted out by principals to the main characters, and then the climactic action takes place. It could have been handled better, but I was afraid the ending and the mysteries would disappoint me, but they did not–only the execution of the story did.
It really brings to the fore the theme of humans coming into a world and observing it for a limited time and how much of that world throughout the ages they might miss, creating a flawed understanding. A good theme for sure.
So give it a look if you get the chance to do so inexpensively.
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What part of the chicken is the nuggets?
Its back
Otherwise, you would have to think that the sign person misspelled “it’s” when using a pronoun that does not agree with the related plural noun “nuggets.”
Why do you always think the worst of people, unlike me?
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Today, I visited the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library Spring Book Sale for the first time. Over the last couple of years, I’ve adopted a staged approach to the book sale. First, I go for the albums, and then I go back and look over the books, preferably on half price or bag day.
So today I bought 31 record albums (at $1 each). I also got a couple books as I passed by the History and Poetry tables in the Value Books section.
Here they are:
I got:
This year, the Rat Pack and Herb Alpert were poorly represented; only The Dean Martin Show and a copy of What Now My Love were present. A lot of Olivia Newton-John, though, and a lot of Barbra Streisand.
I also got a couple of packs of poetry chapbooks (bundled together for a buck each), A History of Rome to 565 AD, and a collection of musings called Ginger Snaps.
So my bookshelves are not bulging much more from the purchase, but my record storage is now sadly lacking. I’ll have to invest in a nice record cabinet sometime to store them properly.
And I’ve discovered that I get a more acute sense of anticipation buying record albums than books. When I bring the records home and put them by the record player, I find myself inventing reasons to be in the parlor just so I can listen to another of the new platters. When I bring the books home, I’m often interested in reading them, but I no longer really get a I can’t wait! feeling. Because, as the years have proven, I often do wait.
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This book finds Mack Bolan in Europe, where he is looking into the disappearance of a number of Olympic-caliber athletes, including a martial arts expert, a skier, a gymnast, and a fencer. Bolan infilitrate a West German terrorist splinter group to stop whatever plot is afoot and to rescue the hostages if they’re still alive.
The book was written less than ten years after the Munich attack in Germany, so its plot was almost based on real life events. The book runs smoothly from set piece to set piece, including the disruption of an arms deal and Bolan posing as a fugitive United States Army pilferer and dealer of stolen goods to infiltrate the terrorist organization. Unfortunately, its plot ultimately is too ripped from the headlines and the pacing again turns abrupt as the word count nears novel length.
Still, by pacing the books out a little more (although this is the thirteen Mack Bolan book I’ve read this year, it’s the only one in a month’s time), I enjoy them a little better as time smooths the disparities between the different authors. And I am reading these for enjoyment, not some project to educatedly discourse on men’s adventure fiction. Well, okay, I do have a goal of someday reading the set I received for my birthday a couple years back, but they’re enmeshed in the larger collection I’ve picked up since then. So they’re a Quixotic quest involved. But it’s still 80% enjoyment.
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Headline: Missouri Republicans inch forward on Medicaid ‘reforms’
Are these changes to the Medicaid program in Missouri? Yes.
Are the Medicaid expansion favored by proponents of Medicaid expansion and headline writers? No.
Hence, they are not real reforms. They are ‘reforms.’
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Just keep your clothes on, dude. Nobody wants to see that.
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Yesterday, a baby bunny ran over me.
I’m not making that up, although when I recounted the story to my six-year-old, he did not believe me. There are some drawbacks to being a fatherly fabulist: When something crazy happens, the children don’t believe it.
So.
It’s been four years since I last mentioned my children’s sandbox on this blog. Maybe it’s not; maybe that’s just the last memorable mention of it. But in that intervening time, my children have grown up, started shaving, and are being recruited by several prestigious universities for their athletic and mental prowess. Or, fatherly fabulism aside, they’ve grown too old to be terribly interested in the sandbox (although the youngest remains six and might still be interested in it on his own, he’s often drafted into his older brother’s adventures and doesn’t have the time to enjoy the sandbox aside from dumping the sand out of it and filling it instead with landscaping stones). Last year, bermuda grass choked out the square amusement center, and the beach toys faded and became brittle in the sun. So this year, I decided to remove it.
On Friday, before I could get around to doing my normal amount of nothing, I went into the back yard with a hammer, a rake, some gloves, and determination borne of just doing something before thinking about the more fun alternatives to work, such as nothing. I checked to directions in which the boards were nailed together and struck the first side board to separate it from its fellow.
As I banged on it, I felt something on my foot. “A field mouse,” I thought, and I looked down just as the something leapt into the sandbox. It turned, and in its profile, I saw it was a young rabbit that had emerged from a small hole next to the side of the sandbox. It fled through the fence, and when I whacked the board again, its little brother bounded out of the hole and out of the fence as well. The second was courteous enough to not jump on my foot as it went by.
So I really did get run over by a baby bunny yesterday.
If I were a better writer and less lazy, I’d write this up into a full personal memoir essay juxtaposing melancholy about my children growing older with the eternal youth turnover of the small wild animals around Nogglestead. But this is a blog, and I’m just a fatherly fabulist and not Joan Didion.
Look, I can tell, you still don’t believe me. Fine. I’ve got some footage from our security cameras below the fold so you can see how something landed on my foot, and how I startled, screamed like a little girl (although the security camera footage has no sound, you can almost hear the shriek from the way I act), and fled from the icky beast faster than the beast fled from me.
Continue reading “A Baby Bunny Ran Over Me: The Shocking True Story”
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