To be able to say "Noggle," you first must be able to say "Nah."
A reader of the Ace of Spades HQ blog, which makes him a moron because that’s what the community over there describe themselves as, has reviewed John Donnelly’s Gold and gave it four out of five stars.
So he’s not a real moron; he’s a man of discriminating taste.
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Back in the olden days, when I was young, we had a Dungeons and Dragons campaign where I, the noble Dungeon Master, allowed the players to adopt wolf (or dire wolf–forgive me, this was twenty-seven years ago, so I am a little hazy on this point) cubs and raise them.
So my brother and the two Jimmies eventually suited them up in armor and then mounted a sword on their backs so the wolves could charge opponents in attacks.
In our minds, it looked something like this:
Except that’s armor for cats.
We might need some since we had a new tabby scouting our back door last night for a possible invasion.
(Link via Instapundit.)
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I stopped by an antique mall yesterday. I’m not sure why I stop by antique malls, as I’m not one to decorate my home in antiques (except old books, of course). The only thing I tend to buy at antique malls is LP record albums, and the number of records of particular interest (1940 through 1960s jazz, big band, swing, and easy listening) diminishes as the houses of my grandparents’ generation empty out.
You don’t tend to find the things I like to collect in antique malls, and when you do, well….
I spotted the three Atari cartridges on a shelf with some old toys, so I flipped one over to see how much they were.
$3.00 each.
For Combat, Defender, and RealSports Baseball.
If they’d have been a quarter each, I would have bought them because I’m a hoarder as much as a collector, but $3.00 was a bit too much. That’s pricing for grandparents who think that their grandchildren might like them or for hipsters who want to repurpose (ahem, “upcycle”) them into art work or something. That’s not for collectors, who know these three cartridges are worth pennies each or two copies of Frampton Comes Alive.
I also passed up a couple of Coleco faux arcade tabletop games from the 1980s, Frogger and Ms. Pac Man, because they were priced at $48.50 each. Which is about the original retail price as I recall.
As you probably know, part of what I like in collecting is not just getting the things, but getting the things inexpensively. Which is harder and harder in the Internet age, brothers and sisters, since things tend to rise up to their market values on the Internet and in many garage sales and estate sales.
And beyond in formal antique malls and flea markets.
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This book is a 1949 paperback. Let that sink in for a minute. It’s sixty-five years old. That’s a quality paperback. And it was in pretty good shape before I started sticking it in my pockets and sitting on it for a couple of weeks.
At any rate, this book covers ten painters considered “old masters” in 1949, including:
Each chapter includes a two-page intro by the author that talks about the text selection for each author, and then the text that follows is some writing about the author. I have to say that generally, because some of it is biographical, some of it is interpretive, and some of it is fiction. For example, for the Renaissance Italian fellows, we have some biographical sketches of da Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael. But for Titian, we get a bit of purple prose describing Titian’s works in glowing and abstract terms. For El Greco, we get a section of On Human Bondage, a novel. So it’s unfortunate that the chapters are uneven.
This book also includes a number of black and white reproductions of some of the artists’ work. It’s unfortunate that they’re only in black and white, though, but given this is a little pocket paperback from the immediate post World War II period, it’s understandable. Still, the writers often talk about the artists’ unique use of color and that’s not something the reader can see.
Still, it’s a good quick summary course in these artists and could serve as a stepping stone to further interest. I’m more interested in Vermeer now and have researched him a little on the Internet to see some of his works in actual color.
So it’s an effective book, for sure, and it made me lament contemporary art museums and the elementary school rubbish on the walls there. But that happened because few enough people in the middle of the last century cared to make artistic judgments for themselves and instead let the academics and critics dictate taste.
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This book is really one of the last books I read in 2014, but it’s taken me a while to write it up because I’m a procastinator and because I wanted to nearly-simultaneously write it up for the professional(?) blog. But now that I’m content to recycle most of the content, it’s much easier. It’s always much easier when you just give up.
As its title implies, this book really does contain a set of rules for programmers to follow: The left pages have the rules in large font, and the right pages have the rules explained in a paragraph or two. The book focuses not only on programming best practices, but also on software development best practices, and these are much more applicable to modern programming than the pre-object oriented programming lessons.
For example, first and foremost are the rules about making sure your program answers the users’ needs. Rules like:
Other rules cover interface design, such as Display results with pertinent messages which are just as relevant now as it was when the interface designed displayed only green or amber text.
Even the discussion of loops, variables, and breaking your program into sections has a sort of relevance because it discusses these things philosophically, at a high level, in a way that programming how-to books and online language tutorials do not.
It’s a quick read or browse; although it’s roughly 220 pages (which is still slim by modern, $60 computer book standards), it’s really less than that since the text is not densely packed on the pages as described above, and it’s worth the time for the insights not only into the crystallized rules but also in the recognition of some software development problems and goals predate the Internet, which I am pretty sure some of our younger co-workers don’t know.
But now that I’ve read it, I’m torn. Do I put it on my regular read bookshelves, or do I put it on the computer programming bookshelves along side twenty-year-old hardware primers and introductions to the C programming language (some of which are thirty years old)? Well, the decision is probably less philosophical and more practical in nature: there’s space on the regular shelves, whereas the computer bookshelves are tightly pressed with books I have not read. Also, they’re behind four comic book long boxes containing most of my comic book collection and a couple other boxes of paraphernalia.
So I’m definitely putting it on the regular shelves. Because I’ve read it completely, unlike the other computer books which were for reference, text books, or the hope thirty years ago that I’d be more of a knowledgeable IT professional than I actually am. Not because I’m lazy.
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This book follows closely on the heels of The Violent Streets. I’m not sure Mack Bolan will ever get a full night’s sleep for the next forty years.
In this volume, Bolan is called to protect an Iranian military figure on the run after the revolution who has been hiding in the United States. The night before he is deported from the country, an elite squad of Iranian commandos has been dispatched to take him out. Bolan looks over the compound and finds the security is Mafia, and that the Iranian’s American wife wants out–and the Iranian is not above killing her lover in front of her to teach her a lesson.
So Bolan comes in, finds an unlikely ally in a mafia guard and that someone inside the Iranian’s circle is ultimately behind the whole thing, tipping the Iranian government off.
The pacing of the book is pretty good, mixing action and the Bolan War Journal style drop-ins a little better, but it’s still less than seamless. As these are early books written by the staff writers at Gold Eagle, they’re bound to be less smooth than later editions as the book and myth of Bolan becomes clearer. After all, none of these guys read the first forty books before writing them, and this patch of first entries was written at the same time, so the little tics each author introduces contradicts other ones.
Also, this volume identifies a possible flaw in the way the books are written. On page 91, Bolan gives his silenced pistol to the wife of the Iranian for her protection. On page 111, Bolan shoots a bad guy with the very same weapon he no longer has. Then, later in the book, a bad guy has the gun after having taken it from the wife. I can’t help forensically musing that the author wrote the action set pieces first as though they were identified in the outline most clearly and then filled in the other stuff which lead to this particular gaffe. And no one noticed it. Maybe the author didn’t read the whole book through in its entirety in its order. Perhaps someone else punched it up and added this. But this whacky error made it into the book.
Hey, I’m no saint. In my own novel (Available now!), I had an eight day week and demonstrated the old revolver-for-a-semiautomatic switcheroo. But I read the book over and over again looking for things like this, and I found them.
The Gold Eagle books are probably rife with errata like this and with other inconsistencies as authors not familiar with the character but familiar with the tropes of the genre insert them into Bolan books (as we’ll see next time).
On the whole, the series has its up books and its down books, but overall, the quality might not suffer too much from the Pendleton books, although this is yet an optimistic view in my experience and with the hopes that they straighten out a bit and fly truer. Time will tell.
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For a quick lesson in the subtle differences in the language of wives, one can do as I have done and suggest home furnishings found in this catalog.
“You know, we don’t really watch that television in the living room. If we removed it and moved that beat-up old trunk with the old magazines in it, we would have room for a Big Buck Hunter HD Super Deluxe instead.”
No.
“Honey, how about a Star Wars Battle Pod? They’re only $30,000. That Extultate Justi blog guy would envy us.”
No.
“What about a twin Mario Kart Arcade GP DX? The boys could play together.”
No.
“Did you know there’s an arcade version of Jetpack Joyride? You know the boys pester you all the time to play that on your phone? If we got one of those, they’d leave you alone.”
No.
Did you see the subtle differences in these examples? Maybe not, for Wife is very inflectional language. But rest assured, each of these Nos was subtly different, conveying different shades of meaning. For instance, I am pretty sure the No response to the Big Buck Hunter was, “Maybe, if you paint the living room first and sell enough QA magazine articles.”
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Mental Floss has a list called 22 Movies Roger Ebert Really Hated, so of course I had to use it as a quiz.
Here they are; movies I saw in the theater are in bold, and movies I saw on home video are in italics.
I liked Mannequin and watched it over in over in my college years because one, pre-Sex in the City Kim Cattrall and two, because in my college days I seemed to have more time to watch movies in my small video library over and over again.
I wish I’d done better on this quiz, but it’s not clear what Roger Ebert thought of films like Hell Comes to Frogtown, 9 1/2 Ninjas, and Assault of the Killer Bimbos.
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This book is a souvenir from Monticello. Not my souvenir, as I’ve never been. I probably got this particular book in a collection of thin books for a buck from the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library book sale. I’m sure I’ve mentioned it before, but these little packs remind me of the varied grab bags I’ve gotten in the past where remaindered comic books were bagged at three for a buck, and you could only see the front of one and the back of another, so it was pretty much a crapshoot or where ten packs of record singles fresh from juke boxes were bundled ten for two bucks and you could only, again, see the ones in the front and the back. That’s what you get with the bundles of thin books at the book sale, a bundle of poetry chapbooks, souvenir books, or free pamphlet-sized books for a buck. I buy them and read them because they’re quick, and they count for a whole book on my annual quest for the magical reading century mark (which I’ve missed for a couple years’ running now, but I’m well on my way this year so far.
At any rate, this book has text describing the house, grounds, and gardens of Thomas Jefferson’s home in Virginia accompanied by color photos and diagrams and maps. It’s a tidy little book, something to help guide yourself around the joint and to remember your trip.
Or to make you want to go. Like I do now.
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Pete Fountain, the clarinetist, looked like your IT staff before your IT staff did:
That’s the cover of his 1961 album French Quarter.
Tell me it doesn’t look like three quarters of the developers you know.
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Unsurprisingly, the first 40 Executioner novels do not comprise forty percent of the Amazon 100 Books To Read In A Lifetime.
So I didn’t do too well on the list.
Well, I didn’t do too well on the list primarily because the list is heavily weighted to modern and children’s books. Neither of which I read a lot of.
Here’s the list with items I’ve read in bold:
I’ve even provided links to book reports for books I’ve read in the last ten years.
I’ve got 20 of 103 (The Lord of the Rings, remember, is three books).
But I’m not broken up about it. There aren’t many others on the list that I have on my to-read shelves, and only a few that aren’t that I care about.
But, hey, it’s got bloggers blogging and maybe buying books. So the list schtick worked.
(Link seen on Trey’s Facebook page.)
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This book finds Mack Bolan in St. Paul immediately after returning from Turkey (as described in Double Crossfire, which I read in 2010 before I filled in gaps in the series). One of the Stony Man operative’s sister has been raped, and it’s a like several other rape/killings that have been haunting the Minnesota capital for years, off and on. Bolan investigates and discovers that elements of the police are covering it up because the suspect is the son of an elected official, and they want to use the knowledge and cover up as blackmail on the pol.
Then Bolan shoots most of the bad guys. finis.
Still, it’s a good read, certainly better than The New War, and I can see now how the house, by removing Bolan’s focus solely on the mob, broadens the variety of plots and adventures Bolan can have (and by now has had). This one is a little more vigilantish with the bad guys not being terrorists or external enemies, but domestic crime elements. This will definitely keep the series fresh. Unfortunately, the Bolan War Journal asides that talk philosophically about the nature of Man and the Hobbesian worldview must be mandatory, and in some books they’re not grafted well into the narrative. Instead, whole chapters are dropped in with a couple of nouns changed to reflect the current plot. Also, the books generally contain a roll-up of the overarching storyline from the Bolan books, especially the Mob War of the Pendleton books. These, too, jar expositionally when they’re inserted. They’ll probably move away from them as the number of non-Pendleton books increases, but they don’t aren’t well done in these early books.
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My son goes to a Lutheran school, and twice a week he has to recite a bible verse from memory. Today, he is to recite the Lord’s Prayer.
I shall plead innocence if I’m asked why he thinks this is the Lord’s Prayer:
Oh, Lord, it’s hard to be humble
when you’re perfect in every way.
I can’t wait to look in the mirror;
I get better looking each day.
To know me is to love me.
Well, I must be a hell of a man.
Oh, Lord, it’s hard to be humble,
but I’m doing the best that I can.
Courtesy Rev. Mac Davis:
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I’ve been a bit of a gym rat, off and on, for fifteen years, and although I do just enough to keep myself sorta toned and in better shape than my chair-centric lifestyle would otherwise allow, I tend to think of my self as a, well, gym rat. Regardless of whether this is true or not.
Which is why I’ve begun to use the “And I can’t stop saying ‘bro,’ bro.” line from a recent DirecTV commercial as a personal motto.
I say it after sets at the gym. I say it as a greeting. Frankly, I find myself mumbling it to myself at other seemingly random times.
As an added benefit, when I’m mumbling this to myself at the gym, nobody asks if he or she can work in between my sets.
Also, as a side note, in written communications, I’ve generally used the more Californian “brah” spelling.
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Strategic Fundraising closing Springfield call center:
St. Paul, Minnesota-based Strategic Fundraising is closing its Springfield call center.
Some employees were told Thursday afternoon that they were out of a job, effective immediately. Communications Manager Jeremy Landon told the News-Leader on Friday morning that the office will be fully closed by Feb. 7.
This is a telemarketing fundraising operation: The people who call you up and will exchange decals for some charitable organization or association, and after they collect the proceeds, they give something like 15% to the organization on whose behalf they’re calling.
Believe me. I did this for the space of three weekends when I was twenty-two.
Hopefully, this is an indicator that the business model is collapsing and they’re all going out of business. More likely, though, it probably indicates they’re either moving these calls off shore or going to an automated system, which makes the whole thing even more annoying than it already is.
Still, it sucks for the employees if it was their only job. In my case, it was one of two, soon to be replaced by another job measuring car advertisements in newspapers for marketing research purposes.
And that, friends, is how I knew that my English/Philosophy degree was paying off. I was on my way.
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As some of you know, I have a lot of Herb Alpert LPs that I like to listen to from time to time. I listen to The Lonely Bull a lot, Rise fairly often, South of the Border and What Now My Love? [sic] frequently, and Sounds Like…. and Warm from time to time (but less often than I would if the covers did not look so similar).
You see, I pick the next album to play based on the bit of the cover that I can see in the gap of a couple inches as I flip through them on the shelf of record albums.
So The Beat of the Brass:
gets passed over more often than it should. Why? Because it looks just enough in that gap like Fly on Strangewings by Marianne Segal and Jade Silver:
I guess it’s the color of the trees in the background and the yellow ground that does it. Also, I’m generally not getting that close of a look at the cover as I flip through.
The former I bought because I like Herb Alpert. The latter I got for free twenty some years ago in the free box at Recordhead, a used record store in Milwaukee. I’ve listened to it only a couple of times.
Strangely, according to Discogs, the latter goes for $30 and was rereleased on CD this century. Maybe I should give it another listen after these twenty years.
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This book is a Thomist critique of Existentialism. Ho, boy, let’s get into some weeds.
Thomism is a philosophical system based on the works of St. Thomas Aquinas, a monk from the 13th century who wrote several thousand pages of reasoning including Summa Theologica. The philosophy is the only philosophy taught officially in the Catholic church’s seminaries and whatnot. The university I went to was apparently a hotbed of Thomism in the 1950s, or so I heard, but it did teach other systems of thought to its students. Including Existentialism. At any rate, this book looks like it’s still in print 55 years later, and that’s probably mostly because of its role in teaching Existentialism to bishops and Jesuits. But it could partly be because it’s fairly accessible.
This book is short (88 pages) and collects five separate essays that target some places where Existentialism is systemized. The essays include:
I’m normally a primary source kind of fellow, so I’ve some familiarity with the Sartre mentioned above, and I’ve heard the names Heidegger, Hegel, and Husserl in my college classes. Heck, I might even have read them.
But it’s refreshing to pick up a criticism of the philosophy. It takes one out of the philosophy, so to speak, to see what someone else thinks of it, which can be clarifying. Of course, one must not take the critic’s depiction of the philosophy under study as the definitive representation of the philosophy. It’s another perspective on it.
So if you’re into Existentialist thought or explore it a bit, this book can serve that role for you quite nicely. It’s approachable, but it does get into deeper analysis of cognition, perception, and reality. It’s not too heady for most of it if you’re just a lightweight Existentialist who has read The Stranger and Nauseau and never even tried Being and Nothingness (I did just that: try), and the stuff that is heady does lean a little on you already knowing some terms of philosophy, so it’s not too hard to follow and even understand.
Recommended.
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The New York Times covers the rise of competitive longsword fighting on the East coast:
Outstanding. And practical for the post-apocalyptic world.
(Link via Facebook feed.)
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I recently received a large box of Atari 2600 cartridges from a friend who apparently got the box when a video game shop divested itself of its Atari 2600 stock. So I integrated the cartridges with my existing set, and I can say definitively that I own at least 350 Atari 2600 Cartridges.
I say at least because it’s entirely possible if not probable there are more cartridges scattered among the Ataris in their boxes.
If you’re a complete geek, you’ll want to see the list below. Continue reading “In 1983, This Was Unimaginable Riches”
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This book is the first that Don Pendleton did not write in the Mack Bolan/the Executioner series, and, boy howdy, don’t we know it. Fantastic Fiction says it was written by Saul Wernick, and I’m pleased to see this is the only entry this particular author wrote in the series.
In it, Mack Bolan goes to Columbia or Panama to exfiltrate or eliminate an agent with intimate knowledge of…something. When Bolan gets there just ahead of a hurricane, he finds the jungle lair of Islamic terrorists is a missile base and a base capable of reprogramming satellites. The makers of the satellites have provided a liaison to help the bad guys log into the satellites for some undisclosed reason. The bad guys’ bosses in the middle east want them to launch the missiles, but in the jungle, the terrorists’ plan is far more dramatic: to crash a satellite into the Panama Canal. So it’s up to Bolan to stop the plan, save the day, exfiltrate the agent and an attractive defector from the cause, and the pilots of the first helicopter that arrived to retrieve him.
So, plotwise, it’s an international thriller and not just a mafia hit. But the style of the writing is the real Louisville Slugger to the cranium. It’s less gritty and consistently introspective as the Pendleton books; it’s more florid in descriptions and does the Men’s Adventure thing with the guns, although when someone brings an automatic weapon up to the hip “in firing position,” one has to recognize that fifteen year old video gamers are probably better versed in military operations, practices, and tactics than your average men’s adventure paperback writer in the golden age of the paperback original.
Also, the guy had a thing for exclamation points. In prose. Fiction. A lot! And the plot, although workable, didn’t use much of the supporting players. Only the pilot Grimaldi makes an appearance, dramatically appearing in the hurricane with a gunship. Also, the book lacks tension, as the risk to Bolan is told rather than actually conveyed in the text. He eliminates half the base on one sortie and then worries about the other half on the next sortie. At one point, we’re concerned about all the people Bolan has to protect, then after Grimaldi’s heroic flight through the hurricane, he arrives at Bolan’s camp. And, hey, right behind him is a rescue chopper! How conveniently placed to take care of one plot point.
A subpar outing in the series, I hope. Although I’ve read a couple in the line after Pendleton and they haven’t made much impression on me. They will make more of an impression and get more of a direct comparison here as I read them consecutively and pretty quickly.
You’re not really asking, but I’ll tell you I’m almost done with the Gallic War by Caesar; I’m to Book VIII which was written after Caesar’s death to complete the account. It was written by someone other than Caesar, or so the story goes. Or did Julius Caesar fake his death? This is the Internet. All possibilities are equally valid unless they require contact with the actual physical world.
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