Musings from Brian J. Noggle – Page 267 – To be able to say "Noggle," you first must be able to say "Nah."

Book Report: Winning through Intimidation by Robert J. Ringer (1974)

August 27, 2012 Brian J. Noggle

This book is a 1970s-era business book designed to help you understand the cut-throat world of business where everyone you do business with is out to get you, and how you can adopt a strong posture to defend yourself against these tactics and intimidate them into honoring their commitments. Ringer was a business real-estate salesman in the era where the Dirty Harry movies were contemporary commentaries and the apartment buildings he sold were bedecked in shag carpeting, avocado appliances, and bead curtains.

That said, it’s a worthwhile book once you re-orient the book’s focus to a more realistic worldview (where not all businesspeople are sharks). It has valuable lessons in attitude focus and sustenance (Theory of Sustenance of a Positive Attitude through the Assumption of a Negative Result) and a number of good lessons in professional image presentation and management. So you can still find something in the book worth remembering almost 30 years later. As a matter of fact, Ringer refocused and rereleased the book this century as To Be or Not To Be Intimidated.

It’s a quick enough read, engaging in prose and laden with a couple of life lessons and the philosophy interspersed with real-life stories of deals that Ringer closed and how they proved his pudding.

Additionally, he invokes Ayn Rand in the first sentence. Turns out, he’s still alive and an active advocate of laissez-faire capitalism with a very nice looking Web site and everything.

I’m glad to have read it, and I’m a bit amazed to find out how collectible this mass market paperback is.

(Oh, yeah, and I did a parallel review for IT industry folks over at QA Hates You if you’re so inclined.)

Books mentioned in this review:

Buy My Books!

Book Report: The Barrabas Creed by Jack Hild (1988)

August 26, 2012 Brian J. Noggle

This book is definitely not one of the stronger entries in the series (contrast with Red Hammer Down, Point Blank, and Gulag War). Actually, I think I liked Gulag War the best and have been hopeful that these books would recapture some of its pulp glory, but for the most part, after it they’ve all been hackish.

This one, too, suffers from more problems than good parts. The books spends a good portion of the first half with the set-up, which is before the title characters appear. Apparently, there are some elements of the Bolivian armed forces double-crossing US anti-drug military forces and Bolivian military members in the field; the Swedish prime minister is assassinated; there’s a coup in Bolivia where a crooked general with the backing of a Swedish chemist who can make artificial cocaine throws out a democratic reformer. Then we have a chapter of the Washington contact for the SOBs being pulled away from a glorious dinner to tend to the problem. Then we have a long chapter of the team members on their own after their recent most adventure getting restless and awaiting the call from Barrabas. Then, some sixty percent of the way through the book, they get to Bolivia, split up into teams, and then we get some jump cuts between the teams, even the team that is essentially sitting around and doing nothing, and more not much exciting happens, until we reach a simplistic climax that is a bit deus ex maquina. Most of the team doesn’t get a lot of action, but they get a lot of pages.

Again, the book does have the feel of an eighties action film baked right into it, but it’s more akin to a straight-to-VHS action film than something that would star Chuck Norris.

Books mentioned in this review:

Buy My Books!

My Library Is Deep, As Are My Archives

August 25, 2012August 25, 2012 Brian J. Noggle

Brian J., you ask, why do you keep everything like you do, especially books, pamphlets, and some ephemera (but not as much as Lileks)?

Because someday I might need it. For research.

Of course, when I was young, I imagined it would be for important works of literature that would speak to readers about the journey of man from life to death and the struggle for meaning along the way. But that was back in the 20th century. Now I know better, of course, and my 21st century sights are set more along the lines of After civilization collapses, my physical books will be the things that brings Man out of his new Dark Age, and by that I mean the bastard that shoots me down will warm himself for several days by burning my tomes.

Aside from that, though, I do go to the books now and then. Continue reading “My Library Is Deep, As Are My Archives” →

Buy My Books!

Book Report: The Dumbest Moments in Business History edited by Adam Horowitz and the editors of Business 2.0 (2001)

August 25, 2012 Brian J. Noggle

I had hoped that this book would be akin to Dear Customer: You Are A Loser so I could get double duty out of it and to post a blog entry on QAHY about it (such as this, which apparently actually sold a copy of the title to my benefit).

Oh, but no.

Instead, this book is a collection of short anecdotes about bad business ideas throughout history (this just in: Tulip futures in Holland hundreds of years ago–what up with that?) and out-of-context quotes from luminaries and businessmen (hey, it’s 2001: let’s throw something in from Bill Gates! Hah! I didn’t get it, and neither will most people who weren’t at the Microsoft convention!). Worse, in a lot of cases, the anecdotes seem anti-capitalist (Martha Stewart got hers for insider trading on the ImClone thing! Neener neener neener! Although in truth she was convicted for conspiracy and obstruction of justice). I mean, what sort of magazine is Business 2.0 to revel in that?

Oh, a failed magazine. Right.

(Full disclosure: I was a subscriber there at the end, when they killed it and sent me Fortune magazine to fill the subscription instead.)

At any rate, it’s a brief read for an idea book, but not something worth spending a lot of review time on, and not something I enjoyed all that much, really.

Books mentioned in this review:

Buy My Books!

Things I Remember When I Remember To

August 24, 2012 Brian J. Noggle

A couple things that have just disappeared, and their disappearance has gone unnoticed for the most part until someone points it out.

When police used the word “suspect.” Now, of course, no one is ever a suspect. They are a “person of interest” until the time they are arrested. I don’t get it. Was the term “suspect” sexist or racist?
Rusty cars on the road. When I was growing up, it wasn’t uncommon to see cars with rust on them. A lot of rust on them. Partly that’s my cohort of the era, but also it’s because fiberglass and plastic have replaced metals in vehicle exteriors, so there’s nothing to rust except the three pins holding the cars together. Of course, one might say that one does not see as many old cars as one used to, but you know what? Old cars look a lot like the new cars. Sometime in 1993 or 1994, the design of cars changed forever to accommodate CAFE standards, and they’re all wind-tunnelled-to-death blobs of fuel efficiency, and Tauruses from 1998 look a lot like Camrys from 2012. And then the car starts to get to that breakdown point, it fails expensively from the inside, and in the course of a year or two, there’s a great Automobile Rapture that calls all instances of a model home. Remember Neons? Remember Saturns? The roads were lousy with them, and now they’re just….gone. Without rusting first.
Tags on shirts. Remember those? They used to itch, sometimes, but most importantly, they allowed you to dress in the dark since you could feel the tag and orient the shirt. Now, I spend many morning hours walking around in shirts that are inside out and backwards because the shirt manufacturers want to save a couple ha’ pennies’ worth of paper and a couple stitches.

If I were Andy Rooney, I could probably get 600 words out of each cantankerous thought. But Andy Rooney was a professional, and he got paid for it. If I were getting paid for it, I could stretch that out, too. But since you’re a freeloader, you get the steno version, gentle reader.

Buy My Books!

Who Really Destroyed the Death Star?

August 21, 2012 Brian J. Noggle

George Lucas started messing with the real story of Star Wars even before the whole “Greedo shot first” revision of history and the attempt to market Darth Vader: The Early Years as some sort of heroic epic.

No, Lucas altered the story of Star Wars even before it reached the cinema:

Luke Skywalker did not destroy the Death Star.

Come on, reason it out: Skywalker was a seventeen-year-old moisture farm boy suffering from post-concussion syndrome whose experience piloting a small attack craft was cruising along the surface of Tatooine in a hovercraft and a couple of hours riding on the Millennium Falcon. Lucas wants you to believe he just suited up, hopped into a short range attack fighter, fought dogfights in the three-dimensional and zero gravity environment of space, and blew up an attack station?

Banta crap. You want to know who really blew up the Death Star? Continue reading “Who Really Destroyed the Death Star?” →

Buy My Books!

Don’t Blame Me; I Voted For Steelman

August 19, 2012 Brian J. Noggle

McCaskill got the opponent she wanted, and Todd Akin is showing why she wanted him.

This is a political blunder of the highest order. Regardless of how he prefaces it that it’s based on his knowledge (not revealed truth or expertise), regardless of whether his main point that abortion punishes the fetus for the crimes of a father, look at how bad it sounds on its face and then imagine how bad it will sound in McCaskill’s ads.

Todd Akin has been in Washington a long time, and it shows.

A lot of people have jumped on the terms “legitimate rape,” as though this is the most stupid or the most evil concept ever; however, it is not. Some claims of rape are not legitimate, such as the famous Duke La Crosse case. I’m no expert on these things, but I can imagine circumstances and have read claims of instances where a drunken hook-up or some other factor makes a woman reconsider a tryst and later claim it was rape. If that’s the case, it’s an actual rape. Ergo, there is legitimate rape, and there are illegitimate claims of rape. I can see what Akin might have been meaning to differentiate amid his scientific ignorance.

The condemnation is flowing from the social media (see the vigorous venom and condemnation for this blunder on PJMedia, Hot Air Headlines, and Mediaite). Soon, the nationwide money will flow copiously into McCaskill’s coffers, and some Republicans–me included–will wonder whether it’s better to write in Sarah Steelman than to vote for a man who’s already been in Washington long enough that he sometimes forgets where he “lives” in Missouri.

Buy My Books!

I Can Bring Home the Sizzlean

August 19, 2012 Brian J. Noggle

So the older child announces fifteen minutes before we leave for school that he has show and tell, and he needs something that begins with M. Although only six, the boy immediately comes up with “Money!” because he hopes that either I’ll give him some American money, and he will get to keep it, or that I’ll let him take some out of his piggy bank, and he’ll get to spend it.

Oh, but no.

Fortunately, my desk is a veritable Hammerspace (the term I discovered when trying to remember the source of the phrase Trenchcoat Schtick which I remembered from a single gaming session at Gencon in the late 1990s–apparently, I was playing a demo session of Tales from the Floating Vagabond).

As such, I was able to immediately lay my hands on a couple pieces of money for him to show and tell:

Foreign money for show and tell

The top is a 500 Afghanis note, and the bottom is a single Trinidad and Tobago dollar.

Where did I get these? They were on my desk.

Seriously, though, I don’t know where I got them. I used to have a little sack of foreign money that I’d acquired from traveling relatives and whatnot, but I sold that sometime in college or immediately post-college to raise some capital to invest in driving my little car to the Central West End for some coffee or some such. These new bills I have acquired sometime in the last two decades then.

They got onto my desk because they’d resided in the drawer of my office’s second desk, and I had recently (within the last six months) scoured those drawers for something else and came up with the bills, which I’d hoped to put into a more displayable form or something.

But now they’ve been to school and back to save the day, and they’re back on the desk in the sea of rubble which includes a single card from The Worst Case Scenario Game, an extraneous copy of Robert B. Parker’s Rough Weather (which I find a lot at yard sales and think I’ll fill out my collection with the books I’ve read from the library, only to discover it’s always Rough Weather for sale at garage sales), empty coin folders for Lincoln Cents 1959 to Present and Jefferson Nickels from 1962 to Present, and a copy of Dallas: The Television Role Playing Game.

My desk is, indeed, a wonderland.

Buy My Books!

A Nogglean Law

August 18, 2012 Brian J. Noggle

So, all spring and summer we watched them work one of the horses at the public stable at the end of our farm road, and I took to calling the horse Boots because its legs were black.

One day recently, I saw a woman riding the horse down the farm road, and I asked her what its name is. “Cheyenne,” she said, and I explained that I’d called it Boots and now I’d call it by its right name from now on. Later, I realized I hadn’t asked her name nor given her my name as she rode along, but who cares about the people, hey?

At any rate, it proves a data point that supports the Nogglean law that Cities in Wyoming make good names for horses.

Compare and contrast the potential horse names from cities in Wyoming and Illinois:

Wyoming city	Illinois city
Cheyenne	Chicago
Cody	Carbondale
Laramie	Sauget
Sheridan	Rock Island
Casper	Joilet
Baggs	Moline

Q.E.D.

Today’s fun fact: There are almost as many incorporated municipalities in St. Louis County, Missouri (91) as there are in the entire state of Wyoming (99). How many are there in the state of Illinois? Too many.

Buy My Books!

Wherein Brian J. Ruins His Child’s Geography Scores For Life

August 17, 2012 Brian J. Noggle

This morning, I told my child there are only 49 states.

Why did I say that?

Buy My Books!

Some Sort of Miracle or Sign

August 14, 2012 Brian J. Noggle

This morning, I saw the Millennium Falcon in a pancake.

The Millennium Falcon pancake

I’m not sure what it means. Does it portend the relative worth of a good blaster at your side, or a hokey religions and ancient weapons?

Buy My Books!

I Only Scored 2 of 13

August 13, 2012 Brian J. Noggle

Chris Lawrence of Signifying Nothing, posted a link to The 13 Most Useless Majors.

Frankly, I took it to be a quiz, and I only scored 2.

I need to get cracking on that History degree to improve my uselessness.

Buy My Books!

It’s Like The Transporter On A Bike In New York City

August 10, 2012August 13, 2012 Brian J. Noggle

Allow me to prognosticate: Premium Rush is going to bomb.

It’s like The Transporter, but it’s about awesome bicycle riding. And you know who likes awesome bike riding? Hipsters. And do you know what kind of movies hipsters like? Foreign language films screened in shabby little single screen cinemas.

This film has too much English in it and, judging by the fact that they’re advertising it during preseason football on ESPN, too much advertising budget and too wide of a release to garner the support of the sort of people who wear their Spanx® on the outside and crush their testicles against hard plastic for hours at a stretch.

(Isn’t that a lot of smack talk from someone who has seen enough of the film Breaking Away to be able to call it to mind instantly? Shaddup.)

What, no attempt at Die Hard on a Bike? C’mon, a tandem bike where the back seat has a terrorist in it and the front seat has Don MacLivane in it? Hey, how about you throw a little Speed in it and they can’t go less than 22 mph or a bomb will blow? And maybe a little Collateral in it where they have to stop every once in a while and kill someone, except that would ruin the Speed bit of it? C’mon, the screenplay writes itself.

UPDATE Thanks for the link, hipcarryster.

Buy My Books!

Visiting the Air and Military Museum of the Ozarks in Springfield, Missouri

August 7, 2012December 18, 2018 Brian J. Noggle

It’s easier to remember the name of the Air and Military Museum of the Ozarks once you realize the acronym is AMMO. It didn’t help that the Web site calls it Ozark’s Air & Military Museum. But I figured it out, and I know what to call it, and I even know how to find it.

The museum occupies several store fronts in a strip mall on the north side of Kearney Street in Springfield between Glenstone and Highway 65. Its unassuming exterior belies the size of the interior, as the building is quite deep and it has a garage on the back that we’ll get to in a moment.

It costs something like $5 for adults and $3 for children, which makes it an affordable destination for a couple of hours and certainly less expensive than more tourist-flavored attractions. For the most part, AMMO is self-funding and volunteer-run, so you can throw a couple more bucks in the box. I did.

The main thrust of the museum is collections of souvenirs and artifacts donated from private collections. As with many of the smaller museums, a large number of items are crammed into a small space, so you really have to linger to see it all. The organization features displays of uniforms for each branch of service:

Other exhibits include dioramas, weapons, tools and basic kit for different soldiers in different eras, and whatnot.

But enough about that.

As I mentioned, there’s a garage at the back, and within the garage, the museum has a number of military vehicles, including a couple of jeeps:

And an AH-1S Cobra helicopter:

Now, in most museums, you can look, but you’re not supposed to touch. But at AMMO, visitors, especially children, are encouraged to climb into the drivers’ seats or cockpits to see what it’s like. And, frankly, given the size of that Cobra gunner’s seat, I’m not sure how adults could have fit in them.

The museum has a couple of other hands-on experiences, and the garage has a number of other piece of equipment to view up close, including a jet fighter trainer and some ambulance show pieces.

At any rate, it’s a couple bucks for an hour or more’s worth of education and entertainment, so it’s well worth a visit. Also, since it’s lesser known, it’s probably not going to be overcrowded and jostly.

Buy My Books!

Claire McCaskill Wants To Run Against Todd Akin

August 6, 2012 Brian J. Noggle

Claire McCaskill has been running ads that single out Todd Akin by name:

television ad shows U.S. Rep. Todd Akin sitting in front of an American flag, talking with constituents and generally looking serious, as a narrator declares him “Missouri’s true conservative.”

Akin is “the most conservative congressman in Missouri,” says the recent spot. He’s “a crusader against bigger government” and has a “pro-family agenda.”

The commercial sounds as if it came from the Akin campaign. But it didn’t. And it isn’t from any of his conservative supporters, either.

In fact, it was paid for by Sen. Claire McCaskill — the incumbent Democrat and the ultimate opponent of whoever wins the Republican primary.

Apparently, that’s giving Akin some traction in the polls:

A new poll shows U.S. Rep. Todd Akin surging in the final days of Missouri’s three-way U.S. Senate Republican primary.

North Carolina-based Public Policy Polling shows businessman John Brunner still in the lead with 35 percent, Akin at 30 percent, and former Missouri Treasurer Sarah Steelman at 25 percent. About ten percent said they were either undecided or would choose someone else.

This last story also points out results from a different poll:

The Post-Dispatch poll suggested that Akin would offer the least threat to Democrat Claire McCaskill in a one-on-one contest.

Why would McCaskill mention Akin by name? Why would she prefer to run against him?

Akin is not an outsider to Washington. As a long-term Congressman, he cannot attack her for being an insider siding with Obama and voting for unpopular party agenda items as he’s done the same thing. Also, Akin is such a creature of Washington that he’s had problems keeping his residence in Missouri straight.

I know McCaskill’s ads are having an actual effect instead of just a effect on the polls. I’ve spoken with a voter who’s thinking seriously about Akin based on McCaskill’s ads.

I looked through the raw polling data (PDF), and I didn’t see a breakdown of regions for the respondents. I wonder if the poll skews urban (read: St. Louis and Kansas City) and whether that particular fact significantly impacts the numbers. Brunner is a St. Louis-based businessman and Akin is a St. Louis area legislator. If they’re calling only the 314 area code, that might impact the numbers. I dunno.

Buy My Books!

Origin of That Thing Daddy Always Says

August 5, 2012July 26, 2022 Brian J. Noggle

When it comes time to apply sunscreen to my children in the summer, I’m prone to saying to the children, “Everybody’s free to wear sunscreen.”

That’s the title of a song by Baz Luhrmann from 1999.

I remember it because 1999 was a pivotal year in my life: I got married, moved from an apartment into a rental house that would be my first home with my beautiful wife, and I remember hearing that song on the radio in my office in that new house. The song charted and reached #10.

I remember when I heard the song that I recognized it; not because I’d seen it in an email forward that said Kurt Vonnegut had written it. No, my friends, I’d seen the original column by Mary Schmich. I’d gotten my first office desk job as a technical writer in the explosion of the Internet but before the rise of blogs, so I spent a lot of time in those days reading the Web sites of major city dailies, like the Chicago Tribune (along with the Chicago Sun-Times, Washington Post, New York Times, New York Daily News, New York Post, Washington Times, San Francisco Chronicle, and so on and so on). When I found I liked a columnist, like Mary Schmich (and Bob Greene and John Kass), I read their complete archives. So I was familiar with the column before the song came out.

But the song, too, sticks with me even now. You don’t hear it on the radio any more and probably won’t find it on any K-Tel collections of music from the 1990s (although I hear Grunge Rock is going to be huge–well, turn it up, man!).

The only place you’d hear it any more is the backwater corners of the Internet. Or, if you’re my children, almost every day, every summer.

Buy My Books!

Book Report: Modern Jewelry from Modular Parts by Martha Le Van (2007)

August 5, 2012 Brian J. Noggle

This book is pretty much what it says. It uses a lot of hardware store equipment, including thin rods, pipes, washers, and stamped metal to create necklaces, rings, brooches, and ear rings. It’s very similar to Kilobyte Couture in that regard. However, the projects in this book are more targeted to serious designers and very artistic pursuits indeed. One of the project includes small balls made of gold, which in this day and age would make for a very pricey piece of jewelry.

42 pages of the book are given over to tools and to techniques, which includes a lot of metalworking material, including a brief primer on soldering. It’s been a while since I’ve watched an episode of That’s Clever which often featured metal working, but it was a review for me because of that. Not that I’ve ever soldered anything, although I do own two soldering irons. Just in case, you know. Back to my point: This ain’t beading, Grandma. This is Jewelry Design. And Fabrication.

The rest of the book is given to some projects, and in addition to the projects, the book presents photos of other pieces throughout the text, so you can really get a maximum of ideas from the book. But the style of jewelry is too industrial for my taste. So I probably won’t try anything out from within the book. Because I wouldn’t want to ruin the collectibility and resale value of my soldering irons.

Books mentioned in this review:

Buy My Books!

You’re Just Like Mitt Romney

August 4, 2012 Brian J. Noggle

Here in Missouri, it’s a Sales Tax Holiday weekend:

By state law, the sales tax holiday begins on the first Friday in August and continues through the following Sunday. In 2012, the three-day holiday begins at 12:01 a.m. on Friday, Aug. 3, and runs through Sunday, Aug. 5. Certain back-to-school purchases, such as clothing, school supplies, computers, and other items as defined by the statute, are exempt from sales tax for this time period only.

Now, as you Missourians head out to the shops to get school supplies this weekend to save a couple percentage points on your purchases, you’re engaging in strategic thinking and behavior to minimize your tax liability, to increase your personal cash flow, and to use your capital as you want instead of maximizing your contribution to the collective good as ministered through the various levels of government entities that collect and disburse that revenue.

In short, you’re just like Mitt Romney.

And Harry Reid, and Nancy Pelosi, and Barack Obama, and George Soros, and Charles Schumer, and the dreaded Wall Street cartoon villains, the Koch brothers, Sheldon Adelson, and so on and so forth.

The difference is that this rational behavior is somehow portrayed as bad when Republicans or businesspeople do it. But a lot of people do the same thing every day and, in Missouri, every first weekend in August.

Buy My Books!

Book Report: Ozark Caves: The Unofficial Guide by Kevin V. Bright (2008)

August 4, 2012September 10, 2018 Brian J. Noggle

When I wrote about my visit to Smallin Civil War Cave last month, I mentioned this book, which is a book about Ozark caves that the Smallin Civil War Cave’s proprietor wrote about caves in the Ozarks. He wrote this book before he bought and ran the cave.

The book is more of a memoir than any sort of actual field guide, since it doesn’t talk much about actual caves per se. It talks about the author’s experiences in amateur spelunking as well as some experience of being a cave guide (from which I drew much of my glibness about cave guides from the book). As a personal memoir, it interested me than a more stilted book would. Bright recounts stories about chasing goats and discovering caves, finding abandoned home sights in caves (and the attendant story therein), and a host of other folklore and geology filtered through his experience and explorations. The book also contains a large section of pictures from the author’s collection. As such, it clocks in at 128 pages, which makes it a very easy, quick, and pleasant read.

Books mentioned in this review:

Buy My Books!