To be able to say "Noggle," you first must be able to say "Nah."
Stephen Green, the Vodkapundit, lists his concept of the Your VodkaPundit Christmas Movie Guide where he picks five good Christmas movies.
Friends, I re-iterate my list, first posted ten years ago today:
Thank you, that is still all.
Buy My Books!
Five-year-old child: “Daddy, how do they make paper?”
Daddy: “Like mashed potatoes, except with wood chips and glue instead of boiled potatoes and milk.”
Buy My Books!
The Springfield News-Leader offers a story about visiting the horse park in winter:
The wreath caught my eye, but the horses made me stop to take a picture. They looked so peaceful on a quiet morning at Valley Water Mill Equestrian Center.
. . . .
If you’re looking for a break from the holiday hustle, I suggest visiting the horses. The Christmas decorations at the facility are handmade by employees and each year they add a few more.
The equestrian center is open through the winter, weather permitting.
You know what I do when I want to see horses in the snow? I walk to my mailbox.
The new neighbors to our south have two new horses and have cleared the brush on the east side of their lot so the horses can graze. Further down the farm road, the neighbor across the street has a number of pintos. The house just south of us (and our new neighbors) had a number of horses, but they’ve been gone a season or two, so their big barn must be empty now. Beyond their house is a little hollow, but cattle often graze on the next hill. And to our west, although the Double Diamond Bar ranch has been broken up, the homeowner on one of its parcels has a couple of cattle and horses just because he can.
Funny how I’ve come to take these things for granted after living out in the country for four (!) years now. Strangely, I’m the old timer on the block all of a sudden. The new neighbors to the south and west. Only the house on the north has owners who predate us, and as they’re getting older, it won’t be long until they move on to something smaller. The next house north has just turned over, too, and I haven’t seen the new owners yet.
Also, given that Springfield is a small city of a touch over 100,000 located smack dab in the middle of not much extended suburbs–you pass through rural areas to get to the nearest bedroom towns–it’s strange to think that there are some people who live their entire daily lives within the confines of that city and rarely take an excursion outside it through the rolling hills and back country roads.
And they vote.
Buy My Books!
Apparently, I am trending science fiction this year, as this book is the second by Pohl I have read this autumn interspersed with some Philip K. Dick and whatnot. I must feel like I need an escape from the real world and crime.
This book revolves around an ancient alien artifact, an outpost on an asteroid off of the solar system elliptical that has about a thousand alien ships with autopilot programmed into them. Man has not yet figured much about these ships; only that they seem programmed to return to the asteroid, called Gateway by man, and they have a lander. So volunteers risk their lives hoping to strike it rich with discoveries at the ships’ destinations, even though many of them do not return from the journeys.
The book focuses on one fellow who won a lottery on earth and bought a ticket to Gateway. Once there, though, he forestalled his eventual trip until he was running out of money.
The narrative is twin-pronged: one timeline is his experience on Gateway, and the second is the future of his trip to Gateway, when he is fabulously wealthy but is seeing an analyst. It turns out something traumatic happened, and he eventually comes to terms with it as it is revealed in the earlier timeline.
I didn’t see where it was going; I thought it would have a more epic resolution, but a lot of these early science fiction stories described big changes to individuals, but not epic wins at the end. So I was pleased that the book did not resolve as I thought, and I think it resolved better than Black Star Rising. The story is also spaced out, filled out, by advertisements, reports, news articles, and other sidebar material that adds to the whole conceit.
As I researched this book report, I learned that this is part of a series that Pohl continued. I’ll keep my eyes open for other titles in the series, as I’m interested in learning what happens to some of the characters after this book ends. So let THAT be my final rating on it.
Books mentioned in this review:
Buy My Books!
And who would have guessed it from the accusatory headline, What’s an Olivette man doing running pro-gun website?:
Sitting inside a Starbucks, sipping black coffee, joking with the baristas, Dan Zimmerman doesn’t look like a gun guy.
He looks like a guy who might work in accounts receivable, which is what this Olivette resident did for years. He is 53, balding, wearing tortoise shell glasses, carrying a little extra weight and dressed in the beige tones of business casual. He smiles easily. He is working on a laptop at a back table.
He also might be packing heat. Could be his .38 snubby. Maybe his Kahr 9 mm. He won’t say.
“I really don’t talk about that,” he says.
No word on whether the journalist asked to see it or hold it.
No word on what the journalist thinks a gun guy looks like, but I suspect its informed by the film version of Winter’s Bone.
Buy My Books!
I picked up this book at the library on Tuesday, the third snow day in a row for my children, when we needed to get out of the house. I wanted something to flip through for a bit while they played on the computers at the library. This book is a good little flip through book.
It is a collection of reminisciences from a Branson-area emcee and radio personality who’s lived in Branson for a couple of decades and has talked with a number of the artists who perform on the strip. So he captures their stories in a bit of history in the area in a book that promotes Branson just a touch as he talks about it.
As you know, I’m not against that sort of thing; I prefer some enthusiasm about the subjects I’m reading about. So when he’s talking about the Presleys and how they opened their theatre or about how some of the acts have moved around from venue to venue, I enjoy it even though I’m not paying that close of attention.
The book runs only 97 pages, so it’s a couple hours long. It’s an AuthorHouse self-published book, so it has a couple of typos, but not enough to distract you from the vignettes. Worth a read if you’re into local history or flavor of the Ozarks.
It’s a nice counterpoint or antidote to Jeanette Cooperman’s piece in the October 2013 issue of St. Louis magazine, “Branson Between the Centuries“, wherein a hip big city woman comes to Branson to diminish it for a slick.
Books mentioned in this review:
Buy My Books!
Truly the logic in this story is dizzying: Local officials decry feds ‘voluntary’ sobriety checkpoints
Some St. Louis-area police and elected officials are questioning the effectiveness and propriety of federal roadside impaired driving checkpoints at which motorists were asked to voluntarily submit blood and saliva samples in exchange for cash.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said it conducted the tests as part of a nationwide survey designed to reduce drunken and drugged driving. The tests were conducted over the weekend in St. Charles County and in September in south St. Louis County.
However:
“I don’t think it’s proper use of law enforcement authority to flag people to the side of road for the voluntary testing of anything,” Fitch said.
He said such stops should be confined to regulated sobriety checkpoints.
Please, understand, it’s okay when the local law enforcement stops everyone in an involuntary checkpoint to write a handful of citations, but it’s bad when a Federally funded research outfit conducts research and gathers DNA.
Citizens, is it matter of degree or a matter of kind?
Buy My Books!
This book is set in the Parker universe, but its main character is a sometime associate of Parker, Alan Grofield. Grofield participates in jobs to fund his summer stock theater in the boonies.
So when an associate tells him about a payroll job, he attends the initial meeting; however, the plan involves a lot of killing, which ain’t his bag, baby, so Grofield opts out, as do the other professionals in attendance. The guy organizing the job then robs one of Grofields friends after attacking Grofield, which leads to a bloody revenge and counter-revenge tail that includes an unrelated grocery store heist.
It’s a quick read, good enough that Hard Case Books republished it 35 years after its appearance. Grofield is a warmer character than Parker, so there’s a twist of sorts in the writing and reading of it, but it’s obviously in line with the Parker books.
I liked it, and I’ll continue to pick up Richard Stark books when I can. Yes, I know, it’s really Donald Westlake.
Books mentioned in this review:
Buy My Books!
This book describes how to make wire jewelry. As you might now, in my youth, I dabbled into beadcraft. But wire jewelry isn’t beads.
Instead, it uses a variety of stitches to weave the wire and then requires you to draw the finished knit through a series of smaller holes to tighten it into a rope.
It’s a particularly complex bit of engineering with a lot of points of failure, and it works with silver wire throughout. It looks to be a bit expensive to pick up and wrought with opportunities to fail just a little but just enough to render the whole thing ruined.
One does not simply dabble into the wire jewelry. Insert your own Internet meme here with Sean Bean.
So I don’t think I’ll pursue this particular craft. Nor even try it. But the end results look interesting.
Books mentioned in this review:
Buy My Books!
There’s nothing like a Philip K. Dick book to pick you up when you’re feeling down. Personally, I picked this book up at a book sale sometime recently, as it’s an ex-library book with Christian County Library stamps on it. I’m always happy to grab a used book from this master, as you don’t see many of them out in the wild. Because they don’t want you to have them.
A popular television personality with a weekly audience of millions finds himself a victim of attempted murder by one of his lovers; the next morning, instead of dead, he finds himself in a seedy residential hotel with his roll of money but no papers, and nobody from his previous life knows who he is. He has to rely on his wits to survive, and it’s fortunate that he’s a Six–the product of a genetic experiment of some sort that makes him smarter and more charismatic than normal man. He hooks up with a document forger since he lacks papers in a totalitarian society, but the forger is an insane police informant. He then hooks up with the sister of a police detective who winds up dead while he’s drugged. Naturally, he falls under suspicion and might be used as a patsy by The Powers to spare political discomfort. And he might or might not have been given a weird drug that dilates time or warps the perceptions of space.
So, yeah, it’s got some plot holes in it. Like, many. But it’s a Philip K. Dick story, which is always fun to read because the rules don’t apply. They’re fantasy stories more than science fiction, you know. So you suspend enough disbelief that only at the end do you think, “That point doesn’t make sense.” And you don’t even mind.
Books mentioned in this review:
Buy My Books!
I don’t mean to go on about things one finds in the Forbes Life holiday gift giving guide (see also), but they’ve got $300 velvet slippers that you can get:
Today’s slippers announce you in a fashion far livelier than a flat-footed monogram. Go heraldic if you must, or sport the logo of dear alma mater, or your outlaw biker gang.
But the ones they choose to picture are crass. Continue reading “A Touch of Classlessness”
Buy My Books!
Spotted in the Wall Street Journal, a friendly message from IBM:
Friends, if you don’t think some junior-level creative was snickering in his or her sleeve when he or she came up with this design, you have not worked with junior-level creatives.
I mean, it’s supposed to be a bar chart showing that IBM Cloud hosts 30% more of something. One could have designed an ad where the bars were of differing heights because IBM hosts 30% more than its nearest competitor (not all competitors who are tied). They could have put the IBM bar at the end. They could have made the IBM bar be, you know, 30% taller than the others (the bars extend some distance below the fold, which means the middle finger bar is not actually proportionate to the numbers claimed in the copy).
Which is why, in the olden days when I worked at an interactive agency, I had to keep my mind in the gutter.
Buy My Books!
What, did someone hack the mainframe with a dial-up computer and a barbie doll attached? No, that’s forgiveable.
Not understanding foosball, on the other hand:
THE OPTIONS IN HOME FOOSBALL games typically range from chunky, cartoonish commercial models to lightweight versions so skittish your killer slap shot sends the whole apparatus hopping.
The Jesus and Mary Chain, but slap shot is something you do in hockey (and cannot do in tabletop or “bubble” hockey).
Your basic shots in foosball are push shot, pull shot, and snake shot depending on what you do with the rod, for Pete’s sake.
The kids they get to write marketing fluff in lifestyle sections these days.
Buy My Books!
So my beautiful, athletic, and culinary wife said in the course of the conversation, “Obviously, I can cook.”
To which I reparted, much like William Powell, I thought: “That’s what Comte said.”
And she didn’t get it.
Of course she did not. As I am twenty-some years beyond my intro to Sociology course, I confused Auguste Comte, founder of sociology and positivism, with Cesare Lombroso, founder of anthropological criminology, whose doctrines implied that criminality is inherited and that you can tell a criminal by the way he looks.
Hence, “That’s what Comte said,” makes no sense, but “That’s what Lombroso said,” now that’s quality sociologist humor. Because she said “Obviously, I am a good cook,” as though one could tell by the spacing of her eyes or the curve of her cheeks that she was a good cook.
I mean, it’s not as though she’s Cunégonde because:
As though cracking jokes about Italian criminologists and French sociologists weren’t enough, I have to go bringing the works of Voltaire into it.
Truly, I have a dizzying sense of humor.
I’m just getting started!
Buy My Books!
This book is not only a collection of Peanuts cartoons, but it’s a subset of a larger collection entitled Dogs Don’t Eat Dessert (1987).
It’s the story of Charlie Brown and his dog and his friends. Things you’ve seen and read before, especially if you’re old enough to have had fresh Peanuts when you were young. Which, strangely enough, means you’re older than high school.
But Schulz was pretty good at timelessness, I think, which is why, according to Forbes, his estate ranks highly amongst earnings from people who have passed away and why there’s still a major motion picture forthcoming.
I have nothing more to say except that I’ll read more Peanuts in the future. I like them.
If you’re interested in serious discussion about the themes within, see this book report from 2005: What’s It All About, Charlie Brown? by Jeffrey H. Lorria (1968). Accompanied by comments posted two years later to my old Blogspot blog by detractors of Jeffrey H. Loria.
Books mentioned in this review:
Buy My Books!
Yesterday, my beautiful wife participated in the running portion of the Turkey Trot and ran five kilometers, which are Canadian miles, and she did this without stopping, sobbing, or being chased.
Whereas I cross-trained the five kilAH!meters with a five-year-old and a seven-year-old. How do you cross-train a 5K, you ask? Well, I:
I ask you, gentle reader, who got the better workout?
Buy My Books!
I bought these books, along with a couple aged literary magazines, at the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library book sale this autumn and I read them pretty quickly during football games and whatnot. After all, they’re short little chapbooks in the vernacular.
In the olden days, back when I was doing poetry at open mic nights and fresh out of college steeped in the classics and, as you would expect, the snobbishness of loving the classics and lambasting modern poetry (not just poetry in the vernacular, but tenured modern poets as well), I was a bit unforgiving in my contempt of lesser poems.
Now, I’m twenty (almost) years older than that. I’ve read more poetry, including continuing attempts to read the (as of the book’s publishing) Complete Works of Emily Dickinson. I realize that most of the poetry that is out there is not the best poetry out there, even from the classic artists. Some poems really capture something and speak to you, and some do not. And the sum of the some varies from person to person.
Is that a disclaimer, leading to the pronouncement that these poems are not good? Well, sort of, but these poems are not bad. Amidst my readings of friends’ work (sorry, Doug) and after my editorship of a fledgling literary journal in the mid-Clinton era, I’ve read some bad poetry. These are not bad poetry.
Patchwork of Poetry and Verse is the better of the two volumes. There are a lot of good moments in them. I’m not driven to own or memorize any of the poems, but I recognized and appreciated some of the sentiments within and turns of phrase spoke to me. Down Home Doggerel is more observational and does not take itself seriously–note the title itself calls it doggerel. But it’s a woman of some years expressing herself and her world around her in verse. Good for her.
I mean, twenty years from now, are you even going to be tempted to read a Twitter stream from 2013? I think not. But twenty- and thirty-year-old chapbooks? I’m all on that. They took not only the drive to put their thoughts to paper, but the drive to lay them out (in the days before Microsoft Publisher or with a crude version of Pagemaker), and the drive to spend one’s own money on publishing them. Take it from someone whose chapbooks are twenty years old these days. So I respect it, and I can enjoy it.
Buy My Books!
This book reads like someone’s Twilight 2000 campaign. Back in 1992, when I was playing Twilight 2000, the idea of a conventional and nuclear war in Europe was at least not written out of possibility by actual events. Of course, they’re not now, but the timeline developed by Game Developers’ Workshop was proven to be inaccurate (fortunately), so thinking about the Warsaw Pact in 2013 requires a bigger suspension of belief now than then and perhaps a bit of historical perspective to remember what that was like.
Similarly, military thrillers from the early 1990s. In this book, the United States has seen the Soviet Union fall and has cut its military budget after the end of the Cold War (this actually happened, public school kids). BUT the Japan of the 1980s continued rising, and although it was not a military power on its own, it provided very advanced weapons to the Arab Alliance (this has not happened). I guess analysts missed the whole Japanese economic stagnation thing that prevented it from being a real global power (see also Debt of Honor)–however, although it has not come to pass yet, the future remains TBD.
After a worldwide pandemic, partial societal collapse in the United States, a bit of related reconquista, and some hemispheric excursions, a survivor of the first exposure to the Japanese super helicopters (who had to walk out of war-ravaged Africa, hence the early association in my mind with Twilight 2000) is the colonel in charge of a squadron of new super US weapons is staged in Russia (our erstwhile allies in this case) to stop an offensive by the Islamic Republics backed by the Japanese. They have a new weapon–The Scramblers–which disrupt human neural function, kind of a neutron bomb that leaves its victims alive and helpless. But the United States has an ace up its sleeve, too.
So it’s alt history now, and if you can read it that way, you might get something out of it. Peters is not as good as Clancy–there are too many characters just put out there in detail and then cast off–but it’s not a bad read.
It does offer a bit of optimism, though: Peters is a shrewd analyst, but he got these predictions wrong (and, in his defense, in an afterward he says he has played a lot of things up for narrative effect that were not realistic or probable). But the last 25 years have not gone this way. And whatever the shrewd and not-so-shrewd analysts in the papers and on the Internet say about our immediate future, that has yet to happen, too, and far better students of human nature have missed the mark. By that, I mean that Peters does grasp certain elemental truths about man and his relationship to other man–and power structures and tribalism that result. Unlike some who prognosticate and politic with misconceptions in mind. But the future will probably look different from all the things we see published as probable.
Books mentioned in this review:
Buy My Books!
This book is a strange mixture of English cottage mystery and American police procedural. Which sort of makes sense, given that it is a Canadian mystery novel.
The plot revolves around a man found dead in the cabin of a retired Toronto detective. Is it someone who wanted the former hired man, a simple man who thought he was heir to his brother’s successful farm? Or was it someone looking for the detective for revenge?
This particular plot is spread among a couple of subplots, including a convoluted story about the detective’s allegedly illegitimate son coming from England to meet his ‘father’–convoluting the story and warranting the quotation marks is the fact that the detective, as a young man in World War II, claimed to have impregnated the English girl to take the fall as the bad guy who returned to Canada and did not cause trouble for the actual father, a man of some repute in the town. So when the not-really grand daughter visited Canada and her grandfather for a couple weeks, he enjoyed having her around. Now, he’s got to wonder whether he should come clean with anyone, including his new wife.
As a newlywed in his sixties, the detective and his wife have to deal with the disposition of their duplicate properties: His cabin in the woods that he has leased or lent to the former former hired man and her house in town. In addition, he has to deal with whether to tell her his convoluted story about his granddaughter. And he keeps his investigations into the death under wraps, lying to her as to his purpose for repeated visits to see his old friends on the force in Toronto.
Do you think my descriptions of the subplots overshadow the plot? Then I’m giving you an accurate flavor of the book. The author has at least one other series under his belt, and this particular book, the second in its series, exaggerates the flaws of a series book–too much series business, not enough book business.
Another flaw with the book, I think, might be a bit of city bias: that is, the detective comes up from the city to the back country, so I can too easily see the author doing the same. The up country characters are a bit simple (except for the cops, of course: those guys are multi-layered with their own backstories that also detract from the plot). The detective’s cabin sits on five acres along with a mobile home–and this is a lot of land. That’s city scale. Here in the country, five acres is a yard and a hundred acres is about enough room.
So, hey, maybe this blend of chatty British tea mystery / character drama with police procedural (police are involved) is your bag. It’s not mine. I grabbed the book at the Friends of the Christian County book fair sale a while back to experiment with something new, so give me just a little credit for it. But I probably won’t go back for a second helping.
Books mentioned in this review:
Buy My Books!
In addition to the normal collection of relatively recent celebrity magazines, the local doctor’s office affords a bit of heavier reading:
Some people would be offended, no doubt, much like many people who would take umbrage when grocery store clerks or garage sale purveyors ask strangers if they have a “church home.”
But for the most part, those people do not yet live in Springfield or its environs.
As a wise man once quoted, “If you don’t give a heck about the man with the Bible in his hand, just get out the way and let the gentleman do his thing.”
Buy My Books!