Musings from Brian J. Noggle – Page 263 – To be able to say "Noggle," you first must be able to say "Nah."

The Most Productive 1:15 of the Day

November 28, 2012 Brian J. Noggle

My most productive hour and fifteen minutes of the whole day comes between 6:15, the time the alarm rings and preparation for school begins, and 7:30, when I load the children up into the truck for school.

In that magical period, I get the following done:

Make breakfast for the children (really, it’s only pouring cereal and milk, but).
Make lunch for the children (sandwiches, fruit, snack in a sack).
Empty the dishwasher (if dishes are clean).
Load dishwasher (if it’s empty and there are dishes to load).
Make bed; sometimes, I’ll change the linens completely.
Shave and dress.
Start a load of laundry.
Fold a load or two of laundry if available.
Clean up children’s breakfast dishes.
Get children dressed, enforce tooth brushing, get their assorted gear sorted and loaded.
Brush teeth.
Sometimes check a blog or two.

That’s a pretty quick moving hour and fifteen minutes, but it’s full of productive tasks, aside from the check a blog or two bit.

Yesterday, my next hour included:

Go to the supermarket.
Change linens on children’s beds.
Make breakfast.
Eat breakfast.
Tap out a couple of blog posts.

Somehow, the day’s list of accomplishments runs downhill from there. I mean, I did some work and I checked some blogs, but sitting at my desks leads to a uniform experience where time just passes and only a few bullet points get done, not all of them salutatory (you checked Instapundit again? You played Civilization again?)

If I had the same focus as I have that, well, not first hour of the day–I’m often awake for an hour before the alarm rings, an hour unfocused because I’m “waking up,” I would be a millionaire. Or I would feel much more content with what I do every day. But.

The reason I’m so efficient in that hour is that I do it six times a week (including Sunday, where “church” replaces “school”), so I’m very efficient at it, having drilled in it for a couple of years now. The remainder of the day is much more fluid and changing, so I can’t have developed that efficiency and productivity that yield the (same daily) bullet points of accomplishment in them.

I guess I need to make a daily set of bullet points of accomplishment each day beyond those seventy-five minutes and then to work earnestly to ensure that they’re meaningful and that I recognize x hours of paying work, a single bullet point or a couple of lines on a time sheet, are valuable, too. Also, I should get some things done away from the computer to break it up and have, if not dramatic impact, at least some visible sign that I did something besides checking LinkedIn or Twitter.

Well, there’s the alarm. Time to get something done.

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Wherein Life Imitates Frank J. Before Frank J.

November 27, 2012November 28, 2012 Brian J. Noggle

Revealed: How the U.S. planned to blow up the MOON with a nuclear bomb to win Cold War bragging rights over Soviet Union:

It may sound like a plot straight out of a science fiction novel, but a U.S. mission to blow up the moon with a nuke was very real in the 1950s.

At the height of the space race, the U.S. considered detonating an atom bomb on the moon as a display of America’s Cold War muscle.

The secret project, innocuously titled ‘A Study of Lunar Research Flights’ and nicknamed ‘Project A119,’ was never carried out.

. . . .

Under the scenario, a missile carrying a small nuclear device was to be launched from an undisclosed location and travel 238,000 miles to the moon, where it would be detonated upon impact.

The headline is a bit misleading, as the plan was to detonate a single atom bomb, not to destroy the moon.

But this secret now revealed makes me wonder how good Frank J.’s sources are, as he wrote the famous essay A Realistic Plan for World Peace a.k.a Nuke the Moon:

Now the world will be pretty convinced that America is frick’n nuts and just looking for a fight, but we need to really ingrain it into everyone’s conscious so that no one will ever even contemplate crossing us. This requires making good use of our nukes. I know, nukes can kill millions of people, but they sure aren’t doing anyone any good just sitting around. I mean, how many years has it been since we last dropped a bomb on someone? No one even thinks we’ll actually use one now. Of course, using nukes shouldn’t be done haphazardly; all uses have to be well planned out because the explosions are so cool looking that we’ll want to give the press plenty of notice so they can get pictures of the mushroom cloud from all sorts of different angles. But what to nuke? Well, usually the idea is populated cities, but, by the beliefs of my morally superior religion, killing is wrong. So why can’t we be more creative than nuking people. My idea is to nuke the moon; just say we thought we saw moon people or something. There is no one actually there to kill (unless we time it poorly) and everyone in the world could see the results. And all the other countries would exclaim, “Holy @$#%! They are nuking the moon! America has gone insane! I better go eat at McDonald’s before they think I don’t like them.”

Yeah, we all thought Frank J. was crazy or just being humorous. It makes you wonder what else Frank J. has the inside dope on. Is or ever was Glenn Reynolds a puppy-blender?

(Link via Ace’s place.)

UPDATE: It looks like fellow old-timer Stephen Green got here first.

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The Only Way I Would Watch The Remake of Red Dawn

November 27, 2012 Brian J. Noggle

So we watched some football on Sunday, and they ran the commercial for the remade Red Dawn (in cinemas now!).

I’m with a wise man who long ago said:

By contrast, the long-stalled remake has become a sick joke. To wit: MGM has taken the extraordinary step of digitally scrubbing the film of all references to Red China as the invading villains — substituting dialogue, removing images of Chinese flags and insignia etc. — because “potential distributors are nervous about becoming associated with the finished film, concerned that doing so would harm their ability to do business with the rising Asian superpower.” All without the PRC even uttering a single word of protest.

And who are the new invaders? North Korea. That’s right, the starving-to-death, massively brainwashed “Hermit Kingdom.” I imagine at this very moment, Hollywood script doctors are working on a revised first act in which Kim Jong Il decides it’s a good idea to let hundreds of thousands of his captive countrymen travel to America.

The invasion would last about until the invading armies discovered the American concept of the supermarket, wherein they would all eat themselves sick or into a nap where even 21st century American high school kids could win against them.

The conceit offends me. Apparently, it did not offend enough people to make it the bomb it deserves to be, but those 21st century American moviegoers might lack enough understanding of logistics, current events, and history to think that North Korea might actually pose a threat to the United States outside of maybe Hawaii.

But you know what would make this film a must-see movie for me?

If, instead of reshooting the scenes referring to China, they dubbed over them. Badly.

I would go to see it if every time the characters referred to the origin of the invaders, the actors’ mouths would say “China,” but a deep male voice in the audio track would say “North Korea.” I’d even nominate it for a People’s Choice award, if I’m eligible as a people to do that sort of thing, if the dubbing would include obvious mistakes such as referring to the capital of the invaders’ country incorrectly. The actors’ mouths would say, “Beijing,” but that deep voice (even if it was a woman speaking) would say, “Seoul” or “Manila.”

That, my friends, would be awesome.

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Lowe’s and the Two Kinds of Fairness

November 26, 2012November 26, 2012 Brian J. Noggle

Lowe’s wants an Internet sales tax. For fairness.

“We lose sales every day — not just on Black Friday — but any time we compete or try to compete on an unfair playing field,” said Scott Mason, vice president of government affairs for Lowe’s, the home improvement chain, which has Black Friday specials on everything from cordless drills to vacuums to artificial Christmas trees. Lowes.com collects sales tax from shoppers in every state that has a sales tax and where the company operates stores and warehouses. “It’s absolutely a position of disadvantage.”

Meanwhile, Lowe’s continues to build in developments within Tax-Increment Financing Districts, where the sales tax is often higher than surrounding areas.

Lowe’s proposed for northwest
A Lowe’s home improvement store apparently will be the centerpiece of a development described in the city’s first official application to create a Tax Increment Financing district here.
Selectman denounces Lowe’s holdup
Town Manager Michael Chammings said he was disappointed with the decision by Lowe’s, after the efforts of Norway and Oxford to support the project. He referenced the approval by Oxford residents of a tax increment financing district for Lowe’s, which aimed to use captured revenue to improve municipal water service to the northern part of the town.
Tulsa Hills adds major retailers to Southwest market of Tulsa County
Under a tax increment district financing plan, about $16.6 million of the property tax revenue from the center will be set aside to pay for infrastructure.

. . . .

The $105 million shopping center will have several anchor tenants, including Lowe’s, Target and Belk.
Green Mount Commons in Belleville, Illinois, which has caused the city to be sued over and over again:
Taken as a group, these ordinances establish a tax increment financing district and a business district to enable a St. Louis development company to develop a Wal-Mart store, a Lowe’s home improvement center, a housing development, and a strip center.

Now, it seems to me that Lowe’s wants its fairness both ways: It wants fair treatment in special set-asides and special tax rates in places where it directly benefits from the unlevel playing field, where tax rates differ based on location within a municipality and where tax benefits accrue to those extra equal businesses helped by the local governments often at the expense of smaller businesses in the area who didn’t get helping hands in their development and who get additional competition from the government-assisted larger stores. Some developments get them, and it’s just not fair if the ones with the Lowe’s in them don’t get them, too.

Lowe’s also wants the Internet fairness of making sure that its algorithms don’t have to calculate myriad tax rates whose myriad actually proliferates when Lowe’s wants to be part of a new development.

In other words, fairness and “level playing field” have multiple meanings depending upon how they impact the corporation. Who has, apparently, an executive in charge of helping to manipulate legislation across the country to the company’s benefit.

Lowe’s isn’t the only retailer playing this game, by the way.

(Link to the Politico piece seen on Hot Air.)

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Emergency Holiday Substitution Hint

November 25, 2012 Brian J. Noggle

Run out of whipped topping before you’ve run out of pumpkin pie? Dill dip makes a convenient and obvious substitute!

In an unrelated rant, what is it with fickle children’s tastes these days? One day they love something and can’t get enough, and the next they’re upset and refuse to eat almost the exact same thing.

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The Christmas Straggler

November 24, 2012November 24, 2012 Brian J. Noggle

We’ve reached a point in our lives where we’re actually decorating for Christmas. For a while, we’ve put up a Christmas tree, since we had a family. But we’ve gone past that now and into putting little Christmasy tchotchkes around the house. Well, the living rooms. We’ve not hit that middle-of-life suburban point where we swap out artwork on the walls–unlike a certain aunt of mine–but we do put up mementos. Mostly it comes from me, of course, with my personal-relicophilia. If my mother put it up on the shelf once when I was young, it represents a Christmas tradition going back throughout the centuries. Now that the number of people with whom I’ve shared actual Christmas traditions from my youth dwindles, I need these silly little memory triggers to make sure I remain increasingly depressed during the Christmas holidays. Now, what was I saying before I was rummaging through the junk drawer for single-edged razor blades?

Ah, yes.

So now that we’re doing the little knick-knackery for Christmas, we spread them out on hearths, on bookshelves, on the piano, and whatnot. We disperse them so that when you look, you might catch a little bit of the spirit or whatnot. However, at the end of the holiday season, when we take down the decorations in early January, we don’t always get all of the bric-a-brac back in the boxes. For a week or two, we’ll find another something here or there. A sleigh. A pine cone. A stuffed Christmas tree. Something that had faded into the background over the course of the month that our eyes skipped right over it when it was time to de-Christmastiate.

If we found it in a couple of weeks, we’d still have the wherewithal to pull the boxes out of the most remote storage location in the house, which we always reserve for Christmas gear (although at Nogglestead, it’s a small closet beneath the steps, where we have to bend and twist to get the things out, but it’s not as bad as the attic at Old Trees). But after enough time has elapsed, we sort of let it go and either tuck the tchotchke into a drawer or just let it hang out for the year.

This year’s Straggler of the Year is a little elf-bearing-gifts on the clock:

My Nana gave me that a couple years ago, sometime after my first son was born. I think it came with a little boy doll that she gave us to decorate his room. For a while, it did, but after we left Old Trees for Nogglestead, the doll moved to the basement and the little elf rightfully became a Christmas decoration. Well, it would have, if we put it away after Christmas.

But atop the clock, it’s outside the normal range of the eye as it travels through the room. I sort of hid it a bit behind the clock’s facade for much of the year, but now that it’s appropriate again, he’s stepped out.

Hopefully, one of you will remind me sometime in January to pack him away this year. Undoubtedly, though, next year we will have a different winner of this annual award.

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Paperback Readers

November 23, 2012 Brian J. Noggle

I’ve added a couple bits to the sidebar for pulp fans like me. Well, it is for me, since I’ll be using them, but they’re good reads for paperback lovers:

John D. MacDonald Covers, a collection of covers from the author’s various paperback editions.
The Trap of Solid Gold, longer reviews of John D. MacDonald’s work.
Glorious Trash, book reviews for paperbacks that are longer and more thoughtful than those you find here.
Fantastic Fiction, a comprehensive bibliography of paperback fiction.

That ought to hold you between my silly little book reports.

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Sisterhood of the Purple Pants

November 23, 2012November 22, 2012 Brian J. Noggle

Good god, man! Have we unlearned so much as to unleash this upon our young again?

Purple pants

Purple pants? Must we repeat everything of the 1970s again?

Allow me to dictate a rule of fashion to you people who aspire to be something like men, except with sore thumbs not from hitting them with a hammer while trying to be something like a man (a real man has evolved to hitting the actual nail) but from playing video games all day (although some real gamers would say they’ve evolved to have strong thumb muscles that no longer get sore, with which I would quibble over the word evolve). At any rate, the rule is:

No purple pants unless you are a clown.

Which is a bit of a tautology. If you’re wearing purple pants, you are a de facto clown. And not a scary, nightmare-fodder clown. A clown like Shakespeare would have wrote about. A buffoon from, well, not the country in the modern case, but rather from some enclave in the city where they have Brooks Brothers stores and where women smile warmly and not in mockery when walking next to someone wearing purple pants. Although I am not 100% sure that the female model in this ad is not laughing at the model in the purple pants.

I’ll not be shopping there, thank you. I’m holding out hope that George Zimmmer hasn’t loaded Men’s Wearhouse with these things so I don’t have to deal with them in the event that I buy a good suit in the near future. I’d hate to have to (and by hate to I mean “would really love to but would be conflicted by the expense of”) go to London to get a real bespoke suit.

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The Misinformation Continues….

November 22, 2012 Brian J. Noggle

So my six-year-old asked me about cannibalism the other day. I’m not sure how it came up; maybe he was talking to Marc or something. More likely, he’d heard something about it at school, since he got the idea that some people practiced it. “What state do they eat their enemies?” he asked.

“They don’t do that in any state; it’s a bad thing, and there are better things to eat then people.” That’s standard Daddy lectures about natural history and whatnot. Then the Brian J. lectures about history kicked in, and the misinformation commenced.

“Did you know that cannibalism and Canada share the same root word?” I asked.

I don’t know why I do that to the poor lad; he trusts me, well, at least as far as possible, and now he’s got the notion that Canadians are cannibals.

On the other hand, there’s not a lot of ways that could go wrong. Certainly, we’ve never had Patch, my Canadian co-pilot from my testing days, over for an actual meal and probably won’t any time soon, so the boy won’t worry about what’s in the pasta’s meat sauce.

And, on the other hand, it could actually benefit the boy if, after the disintegration of civilization, the Manitoban tribe comes raiding out of the frozen steppes. He and his family will fight to the last to avoid that fate worse than mere death.

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Book Report: Winter Has Lasted Too Long by James Kavanaugh (1977)

November 22, 2012November 21, 2012 Brian J. Noggle

Given the tone and type of look of this book, one can’t help but think of Rod McKuen. In tone, both are about aging poets in love with their own poetry and their role as poets, both talk about relationships coming and going and the heady starts of them and the different ways the relationships end, many of them with disappointment.

But, interestingly, Kavanaugh has a different background than McKuen: He was a priest who wrote a 1967 book about how the Church should change in all the ways that they say now that the Republican Party should change. In a speech at Notre Dame, he tore off his clerical collar and stomped on it and became, ten years later, the poet that he is in this book. His interest in marriage didn’t end with one wife, apparently, and one assumes he had other women between them. (According to his bio at the James Kavanaugh Institute.)

At any rate, the tone of the poems, as I said, are of an aging man in the middle of his life, dealing with the knowledge that he’s no longer young but not yet old. The poems have moments where they connect with men of a certain age (and had an audience in the middle 1970s, where the sweaters and the poetry books were an outward sign of coolness even in early middle age), but (as my beautiful wife pointed out), they aren’t very poetic. The verses do not contain a lot of evocative imagery drawing out the theme and conclusions. It’s philosophical musings with line breaks.

So there you go: It’s like McKuenesque poetry with a more dramatic poet backstory. There might be something in it for you, but the moments are just moments amid a whole book of sometimes repetitive sentiments. Which is what you get with any book of work by any single poet, even Edna St. Vincent Millay or Robert Frost.

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Book Report: Monster From Out of Time by Frank Belknap Long (1970)

November 21, 2012 Brian J. Noggle

One of the 1000+ page books I’m working on this year to which I constantly refer is the Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft. Man, I hit “Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath” and bog down every time, which is why I have not ever read that story before and why I keep putting the volume of Lovecraft down. So in the interreadnum, I picked up this book by Frank Belknap Long because I know he’s associated with Lovecraft, it even has the title like something Lovecraft would have written.

The story is about two scientists and their significant others in Mexico, both of whom encounter a strange beast that arises from the Earth, and suddenly they’re transported to an icy plain. They have to learn to deal with their predicament.

And they do, wordily.

The writing style is the worst of Lovecraft, with a lot of verbiage that throws the pacing off. Working against Long, he writes in the contemporary lingo so the discourse lacks some of the delicious archaism that works in Lovecraft, and some of that wordiness lies in philosophical chit-chat that’s preposterously placed. For example, when one couple comes to their senses on a frozen plain, they talk about whether it would be okay to kill the stranger in the distance for his clothing if he turned violent and did not want to help strangers. They discussed this for several minutes before realizing that they were, in fact, dressed for the Mexican jungle on a frozen plain.

So it’s a short book, more akin to the juvie science fiction work of the 1950s than to actual Lovecraftian horror. The scientists team up, a little woman acts intemperately and gets kidnapped by the large-footed natives of the region, the scientists follow the trail and end up in an arena scene, and suddenly they are back to their own times. They speculate on the titular monster, who does not make an appearance after triggering their transport to the past, and the end. The monster is only the catalyst that leads to their ice age adventure, as it were. Which, I guess, is a bit Lovecraftian; it would not be otherwise if it were answered, bested, or understood.

So it’s a quick little read, probably interesting if you’re interested in a cross between juvie sci fi and Lovecraft that’s unbalanced toward the juvie sci-fi. It’s short enough for a one- or two-day read, too, but it does not lend itself well to continuing “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath”.

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The Dole Bandwagon

November 20, 2012 Brian J. Noggle

This advertisement in a local bimonthly newspaper in the Springfield area made me livid:

Half of everyone is doing it, but it's the cool half

This government advertisement seeking to enroll people in government redistribution programs gives up the pretext of appealing to people who might need supplemental assistance for temporary circumstances. Instead, it goes directly to the bandwagon advertising.

It’s about expanding a government program by convincing people who are not already in the program that so many other people already are. It’s not about convincing a new or expectant mother that she needs it; it’s about convincing her that everyone else is already doing it, so she should, too. There’s no stigma. It’s even maybe cool.

Meanwhile, expanding social programs require increased government spending, and the government is manufacturing money to pay for those programs. That created money makes groceries cost more, so more people need the supplemental plans to get the basic necessities. The program gets more clients, which means it gets more budget and probably more people to serve the growing client base. Government programs serve the government first. Always.

Meanwhile, in my isolated bubble, I’m not on WIC (my children aren’t babies, so they might not qualify for this statistic). I used to fill out the checks when I was a cashier at a grocery store twenty years ago, but my only exposure to the program these days is through advertising and through the little lists printed and taped to grocery checkout stands. You know, the ones that explain new limitations on the program and different products that will no longer be available because of the greedy, heartless Republicans who limit the budget. Not because the growing (goal for 2013: 60% of all Greene County babies!) program participants sharing the limited program budget, not because inflated prices of necessities eating that same limited budget, not because of the new hybrid, high-margin food products being created that need clarification, but because of me.

I’m not saying there’s not actual need out there; I’m the sort of Republican who not only pays his taxes but also gives hundreds of pounds of food annually to local food banks. But this ad is not about need. It’s about fitting in. And it’s odious.

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Not 100% Accurate

November 19, 2012 Brian J. Noggle

“Hey, Dad,” my six-year-old son said as I passed by his doorway this weekend. “You know that war we had with the British?”

“We have had two, not counting miscellaneous guerrilla skirmishing amongst them,” I said.

“The one with the fort?” He gestured at something atop his cabinet, formerly known as his changing table. “With the rockets.”

I stepped into the room and looked at what he had created.

Continue reading “Not 100% Accurate” →

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The Things You Learn

November 16, 2012 Brian J. Noggle

So I ordered Eddy Grant’s Killer on the Rampage based on the strength of its thirty-one year old hit “Electric Avenue”:

And I learned the following in my Internet research to find the album the song was from:

Electric Avenue refers to Brixton Avenue in London, which was the first market street to be lit by electric lights in the 1880s.
The song itself refers to the 1981 Brixton Riots, a “confrontation” between residents of Brixton and the police. The Wikipedia entry gives you a full panoply of excuses for the riot, but it’s the usual economically depressed populace of a one race reacts violently to the death of one of their own that they blame on members of the police who are of a different race.
They include ‘1981’ in reference to this riot because there have been others, such as the 1995 Brixton Riot which broke out, in a stunning turn of events, when economically depressed populace of a one race reacts violently to the death of one of their own that they blame on members of the police who are of a different race.

Do I sound a little dismissive of race riots? Well, they are just about the same as people turning cars over and lighting them on fire after a sporting event. Message: Something bad happened to our team. In these cases, and in the cases of race riots in our country, it’s something bad happens to someone on a team who was not exactly a team player.

At any rate, it’s an interesting trail of things to learn from a couple minutes looking for an album title. And this afternoon, the album should arrive (on vinyl, natch). I look forward to it, since I haven’t bought a new album in a while.

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Book Report: The Official Polish Joke Book / The Official Italian Joke Book edited by Larry Wilde (1973, 1980)

November 15, 2012November 12, 2012 Brian J. Noggle

This book is really just one book. It’s got a flip cover, where you look at the front and it’s the Polish side and you look at the back and it’s the Italian side. The pages with the corresponding ethnic jokes align with the cover, so halfway through the book, you get to flip it and start the other side. For the record, I only counted this as one book in my annual list.

Ah, me. Ethnic jokes. I remember when I was a child, during the era when this book was in print and, apparently, selling, hearing them. So I bought this collection this year, and it awaited the middle of the football season.

But the humor? Not really funny. I mean, it’s not that I’m offended (you can get the same joke without the offense by swapping out Italian and Polack with dunce or Goofus or whatever). It’s that the jokes just don’t move me. Of course, most joke books leave me cold (see also here, here, here, here, here. Why not add here? That just doesn’t make any sense.).

Which isn’t to say I won’t keep getting them and flipping through them. Because there might be a talking dog joke somewhere that I have not yet heard.

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Book Report: Star Trek Speaks edited by Susan Sacket, Fred Goldstein, and Stan Goldstein (1979)

November 14, 2012November 12, 2012 Brian J. Noggle

This book comes from that great Star Trek dark age, a dark age that was about to lift: The time between the original series end and the motion pictures. I’ve remarked on that dark age before, but I can’t help but notice that we’re about to embark on another one, what with the last series ending in 2005 (that’s seven years already, old man) and the motion pictures probably thinning.

At any rate, this book collects a number of quotes from the original series categorized around a number of topics, from War and Peace to Love to Life and Death. Each section of quotes has a little intro pre-interpreting and hagiographatating the quotes for you, and there are many black and white stills from the series to hold you until the next time the show airs on a UHF station on Saturday afternoon. Or you can scrape together enough money to see them on the big screen. Your 1979 self probably cannot conceive of an 18-year span of television with new Star Trek every week (sorta) nor, probably, the end of manned space exploration. But how time will surprise you.

A cool bit of Star Trekiana. Something to browse during football. You probably won’t see much along the lines of this in print for the latter series, but that’s what the Internet (kinda imagined, but not acutely in 1979).

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Book Report: Open Air Designs by John Drieman (1988)

November 13, 2012November 12, 2012 Brian J. Noggle

This book stems from what seems like the early days of decks. Maybe it marks a shift in my socioeconomic movement in the middle class, but I don’t remember many decks before the middle 1980s. Patios, sure, but not wood structures above it all. Well, some of the mobile homes in Siesta Manor Mobile Home Park had, instead of a simple set of steps leading to the doors, a couple of square feet with railing around them and storage underneath. Were these decks?

I digress. This book is a picture book for people who are thinking of renovating their yards at the end of the Reagan administration. It talks about considerations with construction, landscaping, and whatnot. It includes a couple of lightweight step-by-step guides. It’s not a guide to how to do the things within, like building a deck or a patio or a shed or installing outdoor lighting, but the guide provides high-level design considerations, photos, material choices, and such and just enough how-to information that you can get a bit of an inkling of what you might be getting into if you decide to do it yourself.

In addition to the deck revolution, the publishing industry might have moved away from books of this stripe–less detailed than your average Sunset book–and into more detailed how-to sorts of things, leaving the magazine market to the design inspiration ideas. Or maybe I don’t know because those books haven’t made their ways to the book fairs yet.

At any rate, a quick enough browse, but no source of inspiration for Nogglestead. Yet.

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Book Report: Flashfire by Richard Stark (2000)

November 12, 2012 Brian J. Noggle

Sure, read a Parker book earlier this year and another one this year, and suddenly I fancy myself some sort of Parker expert, capable of passing judgment on Parker books and the series or making sweeping statements about it. But it’s my blog, and I’m going to anyway.

This Parker seems a little less cold-blooded than the old ones.

The earlier book I read, The Handle, was published in the 1960s, and the series started then and ran until 1974. After that, it lay fallow until resuming in 1997, 25 years later, around the time the film Payback went into production. In the big screen film treatment, Parker has a relationship with a woman (not just a woman, but a woman who looks like Maria Bello), so maybe this book plays off of that, since Parker has a woman in it, too. Of course, I’ve read two Parker books from 36 years apart. Maybe at some point in the earlier novels he began his change and I’m late to the party.

At any rate, Parker gets stiffed in a job and tracks down the guys who took his money as seed money for a heist. This one takes place in Florida, so it brought to mind some of the John D. MacDonald work along with the Carl Hiaasen and the other Florida partisans. It occurs to me that Florida, as a location, matches LA, San Francisco, and New York City as far as the place that is consistently presented as a sort of character. Stark gets this one mostly right, although he talks about West Palm Beach as a lesser light than Palm Beach, and from what I remember in my visits, West Palm is kinda nice, too, relative to everything else. But I might be mistaken.

I almost started the second paragraph in a row with “At any rate….”, but I’m going to break that off. The book doesn’t hang together as a whole very well–some parts are episodic and detached from the main plot a bit, and Stark shifts viewpoints a bit to no great meaning to the story. He was dashing these books off against his other prodigious output. It’s still good enough reading. I’ll continue to keep my eye out for cheap Stark books.

Oh, and apparently this book has been turned into a Jason Statham movie, Parker, scheduled for release in January. Perhaps I’ll go see that. The fact that the film has the name Parker in it might indicate that sequels will be forthcoming. Donald Westlake (Richard Stark) had allowed film treatments of the books, but only if they changed the names unless they were going to make a film series. The fact that the movie is named Parker might mean sequels, or it just might be because Westlake passed away and his heirs are not so demanding.

Books mentioned in this review:

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Kill My Subscription With Fire

November 12, 2012 Brian J. Noggle

I am trying to cancel my subscription to the Springfield News-Leader.

I have taken this paper since I moved the Springfield area three years ago. I was hopeful that I could get a local newspaper that would not irritate the hell out of me as the St. Louis Post-Dispatch did with its slanted news coverage.

I enjoyed it for a while, but recently Gannett has cheesed me off.

For starters, they spruced up the Internet site a little bit and added 20% monthly to my subscription for access to it (it’s mandatory, natch). So now it’s $20 a month. And the Web site has the additional benefit of not having any more content than the regular paper, but I can comment, I think. I don’t visit the Web site, and when I do, it’s to look for events I’ve seen in the calendar section. Which, of course, is separate from the calendar app, you see: If you search for events by day on the Web site, it’s not what was in the paper; to find those, you have to browse articles until you find the complete article from Thursday’s paper and read through that.

That pushes the annual subscription price for the Springfield News-Leader over the annual subscription for the Wall Street Journal, by the way.

The content has been slimming ever since I got here, too; the paper is now down to like 20 pages on Mondays, 10 news, 4 sports, 1 opinion, 1 business, 1 classified, and 3 comics and lifestyles. Most of that content is AP or Gannett content, with the remainder of the local news (that which is not Gannett material, I mean–they rely on Gannett people for local news, but that’s probably an accounting thing) is written by kids fresh out of journalism school who are in the Springfield area for a year until they get a better job elsewhere, and then it’s another 22-year-old pounding the pavement.

Did I say “pounding the pavement”? I meant “putting allegations about Republican candidates above the fold on page one”. This election, we’ve had a great fill of Todd Akin loves rapists more than women stories. We had an allegation about the Republican candidate for Secretary of State whose provenance and only “investigation” was quoting the opponent of that Republican candidate. I mean, by the Secretary of State Elect and incoming Chief Ghostwriter for the Democratic Party. Today’s above the fold story: Blunt Caught in Akin Storm, an “analysis” piece about how a Republican tried to help another Republican get elected. Mostly, though, it’s a continuing effort to try to tie Roy Blunt to Todd Akin’s ill-advised and widely misconstrued turn of phrase “legitimate rape.”

Blunt headline in News-Leader

Because nothing else happened in the city of Springfield or Southwest Missouri all weekend.

So I’m trying to cancel my subscription. They don’t make it easy, you know. You can’t stop it on the Internet; you can only delay it for your vacation. I’ve called and got the phone tree, and the wait to cancel my subscription is 27 to 41 minutes. The machine offered me the chance to call back, and I’m waiting for its call now.

In some portion of my mind, I’m hoping this does not work so I can write them a letter for them to bollix my cancellation and I’ll get to dispute the ongoing charges with my credit card company. I have grown that incensed, not just because the newspaper is behaving like a newspaper, but because the customer service for the newspaper is so lacking.

A couple months ago, one of the stock advisors in Forbes magazine recommended that people buy Gannett stock because it owns a lot of small local newspapers and it “gets” that market. No, Gannett does not. Not at all.

So where will I get my local news? I already carry a subscription to another local weekly, the Republic Monitor. I pick up the bimonthly Community Free Press which has a better news organization than most free pickups. I listen to the radio in the car and will catch some news stories that way. Maybe I’ll start hitting the Web sites of the television stations and the radio stations in the area. Maybe I’ll scan the headlines on the News-Leader‘s Web site.

I don’t know how much down I’ll be in the local news consumption area, but it won’t be as much as one would expect. And I won’t be wasting $250 a year on it.

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Another Thing Noggle Has That Trog Lacks

November 12, 2012 Brian J. Noggle

An awesome poster of Danica Patrick with an encouraging sentiment aimed at elementary school children:

Word of advice, though, Trog: Sometimes persistence in pursuit of your dream just gets you a snootful of pepper spray from a deputy enforcing a court order.

Or so I heard.

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