Musings from Brian J. Noggle – Page 269 – To be able to say "Noggle," you first must be able to say "Nah."

Now I’m Seeing Like A Painter

June 27, 2012 Brian J. Noggle

I like to think that I’m noticing the world around me more now that I live in the country. I notice the different locations on the horizon where the sun rises and sets in the different seasons, mostly because I can see the horizons. I can see the topography of the land quite a bit more now that I can see for miles and to larger hills over the tops of smaller hills. Of course, this doesn’t necessarily mean that I’ve gotten to be more observant, but that I’m noticing different things now. Maybe in the city, I looked at architecture and at the people moving about.

At any rate, one of the things that has struck me recently is the windbreak at the southwest corner of my property. It looks very different in the morning light than in the afternoon light. I think I’m beginning to see it like a painter would. Continue reading “Now I’m Seeing Like A Painter” →

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Book Report: Parkinson’s Law by C. Northcote Parkinson (1957)

June 27, 2012 Brian J. Noggle

This book was a pretty fun little read for a British midcentury version of Dilbert with slightly less absurdity.

The author was a naval historian who also dabbled in the study of organizations, and this book collects some of his essays that examine elements of bureaucracy and poke some fun at them. The schtick is that of a very serious scientific study, but the tone is tongue in cheek. The author’s “law,” sometimes quoted, is that work expands to fill the time and effort available to do it, but Parkinson also takes a look at perfect buildings, hiring practices, the proper time and method of conferring retirement on the elderly, and other things.

As with Dilbert, a certain amount of truth rings through the humor, and it’s funny and educational because it’s true. And note that I brought up yesterday’s post because Parkinson also recommended checking out the bathrooms of places when considering a position there, but he did it fifty years before I did, when bathrooms were all steampunk by nature.

I got the book via ILL because of the Instapundit post linked above, ultimately, and I’m glad I did. Although I seem to have hit a bit of a library book period interspersed amongst my longer reads (I’m currently working on a couple of books over 1000 pages and a 700 page collection of short stories), so I’m not knocking off any of the books on my to-read shelves these days. In my defense, the accummulation has slowed quite a bit, too.

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Niche Work If You Can Get It, And You Can Get It If You Try

June 26, 2012 Brian J. Noggle

Some people want to be the lead singer for a rock band. Others want to write and play the licks and hooks that catch and reel you into the lyrics of the rock anthems. Still others want to play the drums because they like to bang things. But not me.

No, I want to play the careening cars for the band. Continue reading “Niche Work If You Can Get It, And You Can Get It If You Try” →

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The Governor Only Does Good Things

June 26, 2012 Brian J. Noggle

Two headlines this morning jumped out at me:

Fascinating, isn’t it, how when laws are made, the Republicans in the legislature do the bad things about making cuts and balancing the budget against the valiant efforts of the Democratic governor, but when it’s time to sign the things that the media likes, the Democratic governor is responsible for the good things?

Well, not fascinating, but too typical.

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Another Retread

June 26, 2012 Brian J. Noggle

Given how many years of Web logging I have going on here, it’s only fair that I mine it for material now and then. That’s spread to QAHatesYou.com, where I’ve reposted an essay called “Morale Spy” that first appeared on MfBJN five years ago.

I only mention this because it’s a good piece, and I know that even my “long time readers” only go back two years or so.

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Some City of St. Louis Smokers Are More Equal Than Others

June 22, 2012 Brian J. Noggle

When can you smoke in a public place in the city of St. Louis? When you’re a politician, attorney, or judge going to an invitation-only public venue, of course!

The 109-year-old downtown Missouri Athletic Club may wriggle free from the city’s smoking ban.

City officials have prepared an agreement which exempts the private, invitation-only establishment — long frequented by judges, attorneys and politicians — from the municipal no-smoking ordinance.

The club, known as the MAC, has flouted the law since it was enacted Jan. 1, 2011, openly leaving ashtrays in the lounge, hosting hazy boxing matches and allowing men in suits to gather weekly at the bar with tumblers in one hand, cigars in the other.

The city cited and fined the club twice. The citations ended up in municipal court, where attorneys began working out a deal.

On Thursday, city Health Director Pam Walker presented a draft agreement to her advisory commission, the Joint Boards of Health and Hospitals, arguing that the nonprofit MAC is a unique entity, governed neither by rules for private clubs nor by those for businesses.

Remember, public smoking bans are all about protecting the poor little children who are the employees from the health impact of working in a smoky environment, since those “adults” can’t rationally decide the personal risk versus the paycheck reward.

So the employees get to inhale the politicos smoke where the politicos can smoke, but:

If approved, the agreement would bar smoking in the employees’ lounge, but allow club members to continue to smoke in four locations: The Art Lounge, in the first floor lobby; The Jack Buck Grille, inside the club’s first-floor restaurant, after 2 p.m.; the private dining rooms next to the Sportsman’s Club, after 2 p.m.; and in the Missouri Room, three times a year for special events.

The employees can only have secondhand smoke on the job.

So, to recap:

The city of St. Louis has a smoking ban.
City “leaders” have flouted the ban, so now…
city leaders are exempting themselves from the ban.

But you, citizen, must obey the law, or the city leaders and their delegates will punish you.

UPDATE: Thanks for the link, Professor R.. Gentle reader, if you work in software development, you might like my blog QA Hates You. And don’t forget my IT heist novel John Donnelly’s Gold is available for the Kindle for 99 cents and also in paperback.

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A Rousing Anthem Extolling Cannibalism

June 21, 2012 Brian J. Noggle

“Eye of the Tiger” by Survivor.

Let’s go to the tape: Continue reading “A Rousing Anthem Extolling Cannibalism” →

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Personal Relics: My Father’s Bat

June 21, 2012 Brian J. Noggle

You don’t hear much about my father on this blog, mostly because my parents divorced when I was a lad and I ended up in Missouri with my mother and her family instead of Wisconsin. I don’t have many mementos from my father, as he remarried, so when he passed away, I didn’t receive any of his effects.

But before he passed away, even before my parents divorced, when I was a boy, he gave me his childhood baseball bat.

Continue reading “Personal Relics: My Father’s Bat” →

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A Man and Someone Else’s Music

June 20, 2012 Brian J. Noggle

Conversation this morning as I passed my beautiful wife’s office:

Me, hearing a snippet of music: Is that Phantom of the Opera?
My beautiful wife: No, that’s Aladdin.
Me: Good. No man should recognize Phantom of the Opera.
MBW: That’s not true.
Me: All right, Andrew Lloyd Weber should recognize Phantom of the Opera.

Make a hasty generalization, and there’s one exception to puncture the rule immediately.

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Quick Thoughts on Automobiles in the News

June 20, 2012 Brian J. Noggle

Stick shift puzzles St. Louis robber

I’ve always known my manual transmission protects my truck from thieves. And my wife.
Feds expand Toyota fire probe to 1.4 million autos

In a stunning turn of events, the chief competitor to a government crony enterprise is under investigation. Again. And maybe it’s not politically calculated, but in this modern brave new world, who doesn’t have a full bank of cynicism?

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To Some, It Would Be Something To Brag About

June 18, 2012 Brian J. Noggle

The elected city council of the city of Springfield are unpaid, and the mayor draws a token salary. Of course, this needs to change:

No Springfield City Council member has drawn a public paycheck for more than half a century, but one current member thinks the topic is due for a discussion.

“What I want to do with it is open up that discussion, is that something we need to consider? We are one of the largest cities in the country that doesn’t have a paid (council).”

At Bieker’s request, tonight’s City Council agenda includes an action item referring the issue to council’s Plans and Policies Committee for review.

The City Charter adopted by voters in 1953 grants the mayor a $200 monthly salary and up to $100 a month for expenses.

The charter specifically forbids a salary for council members, although it does allow them to be “reimbursed for any necessary specific expenses incurred in connection with their duties …”

Of course, they’re going to compare the council and mayor to other cities of the size. Cities whose fiscal house might be in terrible shape, but that’s neither here nor there.

Personally, I prefer a community where the leadership is unpaid and therefore doesn’t feel the need to put in a full forty hours a week in making and enforcing an ever-growing set of constricting laws and ordinances.

But Springfield wants to be a big city, dammit! So it’s ladling out tax incentives to big corporations and developers and everything else.

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The Other Other White Meat

June 17, 2012 Brian J. Noggle

You know the first thing that runs through my head when I read something like “Uncommon white deer seen near Murphysboro“?

That makes it easier for the Murphysboro Monster to see.

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Book Report: St. Louis 365 by Joe Sonderman (2002)

June 15, 2012November 26, 2016 Brian J. Noggle

First of all, let’s log the defect. The book is called St. Louis 365, but it includes February 29, so it should be St. Louis 366.

That said, it take each day of the year and relates a set of things that happened on it in St. Louis history. Sonderman and his assistants scoured newspaper archives, apparently, to come up with this list. It includes a lot of one-off tidbits that give you neat little origins for street names and whatnot throughout the city and county, but also provide some narrative in identifying events in a series for larger stories, such as the Greenlease kidnapping and the World’s Fair in 1904.

It took me a while to get through it, since it’s not a book that drags you along. It is, however, a good book for stop and start, pick it up for a couple minutes in a doctor’s waiting room, sort of reading. I started reading it last year when I was going through browseable books during ballgames and only finished it in January.

But a good idea book and something that will give me odd bits of trivia to throw out randomly in conversations where the trivia don’t exactly fit and will meet a sort of stunned silence as people puzzle out the irrelevance. But that’s why I read.

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Those Responses That Could Put Me In The Hoosegow

June 15, 2012 Brian J. Noggle

I’ve got a package I’m going to mail, so I’m preparing myself for the inevitable question from the postal clerk:

– (BOOL)textFieldShouldReturn:(UITextField *)theTextField {
if (theTextField == self.textField) {
[theTextField resignFirstResponder];
}
return YES;
}

Oops, sorry, wrong thing on the clipboard. Silly Macintosh! CTRL+C means copy that text.

Nadine, the postal clerk in the little cinderblock post office that serves my zip code, will actually ask:

Does this parcel contain anything fragile, liquid, perishable, or potentially hazardous?

Of course, I spend mental clock cycles coming up with smart alec responses:

Potentially hazardous? If it’s caught in hurricane-force winds, it can go right through a tree.
Perishable? In a millenium, it will be reduced to its component molecules. All except the bubble-wrap.
Liquid? It’s $640,000,000 in negotiable bearer bonds!
Fragile? Depends on how hard you hit it.
It’s very flammable; it burns if you put it in a fire.

I’m lucky that Nadine has a good sense of humor. I’m also smart enough to never, ever joke with a government employee I’m not related to through blood and am on very good terms with. Because one quip could get you on a no-fly list or put on the ground, brotha.

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Book Report: A Children’s Garden of Misinformation harvested by Art Linkletter (1965)

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

This book collects the same sort of thing that Art Linkletter made a living on: children saying or writing funny things. In the 1960s, he made a living pitching these things to our grandparents and great-grandparents. And they must have eaten it up. How wholesome were they? Very.

By now, of course, this sort of thing has been eclipsed, sadly, by some of us making light of the stupid, silly, and uninformed things teenagers and adults say. It was sort of cute when children said it. But a couple episodes of the Tonight Show’s Jaywalking segments, and suddenly it’s not funny any more.

I think the book made me smile once. So why did I read it? Because I finish books I start, mostly, and because it hearkens back to a more innocent time.

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Old 880

June 14, 2012 Brian J. Noggle

For a decade, from 1938 to 1948, the United States Secret Service conducted one of its most intensive searches for a counterfeiter. The elusive fraudster’s funny money appeared throughout New York City and across the United States but was concentrated on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, in a small area centered on Broadway and 96th Street. Although the counterfeiter passed off thousands of bills in a relatively small area over a long time frame, the authorities could not catch the unknown subject. To make matters more embarrassing for the feds, the secretive mastermind who kept them at bay—the man they called Old 880 after his case file number—was counterfeiting one dollar bills. Poorly. Continue reading “Old 880” →

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Book Report: Poems by Julia E. Maclay (~1960)

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

Book cover This book is a collection of poems by a religious housewife written in 1959 and 1960 in the Ozarks. It’s a regional book with probably no national distribution, but the woman (or her family) thought enough of them to publish them in hardback. The book includes some penciled or penned corrections and some poems cut and pasted onto blank pages at the end. It’s signed by the author, of course, but not inscribed, which means she might have given the book to someone she didn’t know. How odd.

At any rate, the poems are of the quality you might expect. Maclay had a good sense of rhythm, but she forced twee end rhymes where another poet would have been more subtle.

Still, I admire the chutzpah involved in self-publishing a hardback collection of one’s poems. In 1960 or 1961, no less. So I’m not sorry I read the book.

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Silent Films I Have Seen

June 13, 2012 Brian J. Noggle

Last night, I watched Metropolis, Fritz Lang’s 1920 silent film about a dystopian society. I’ve not soaked in the moisturizing dish liquid of Cinema, but I have watched a couple of silent films in my time, which puts me ahead of most people. These films include:

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. When I was young, I dated a girl who took a film appreciation class, which meant that we got to watch important films. This particular item was a high example of German surrealism or expressionism or something like that. Marinated cinematistes (I just made that word up. Like it?) could better explain its importance. I remember quite a bit from the film, though, which means it made more of an impression on me than most films with Jason Statham and/or Matt Damon in them. And, friends, we watched this film before Netflix existed, which probably meant we had to go to the old Bijou movie rental place up in University City or reserve it through Blockbuster or something.
Juno and the Paycock (where paycock is British for peacock–couldn’t they just have put an extraneous U in it and left it at that?). An old Alfred Hitchcock film, but without crime in it. I bought a boxed set of Hitchcock films about ten years ago and started watching them. You know what boxed set means, don’t you? It means old films we couldn’t sell standing alone.
The Lodger, a film sort of loosely based on Jack the Ripper, wherein there’s a serial killer terrorizing London (in 1927). A strange lodger moves into a boarding house and might be the killer. This film is most notable because it starred June Tripp.
The Ring, a boxing picture, also in the Alfred Hitchcock boxed set. Notable because it gave me a nickname I used to use on my second child. You know, I think I watched these last two films when he was a newborn because I could watch them with the television on mute. Huh, I just remembered that as I was typing.
Metropolis. You don’t have to be a cinematiste to recognize that this film was seminal in framing science fiction films for decades after it. Or at least see that certain tropes you see in modern films existed eighty years ago. The text frames refer to robots, a term that was only seven years old at that time, but it must have gained enough currency to be in the popular mind by then. As I watched, it occurred to me that this was filmed at the time when H.P. Lovecraft was writing, and I can see shared elements–descending staircases, catacombs, and so on. An interesting enough film.

So that’s three British silent films and two German ones. I don’t know if I’ve seen an American one. I suppose I should sit down and watch some Charlie Chaplin or something to round out my silent film bona fides, but I’m a modern man, and I really need to be in the right mood for a silent film. I don’t get that many film-length stretches of time, and when I do, I’m inclined to watch something I’ve seen a million times before and love or a comedy or action flick I own and have yet to watch before I’m inclined to broaden my mind.

But if I happen upon one at a garage sale, I’ll pick it up and have it on hand in case the mood strikes me again sometime in 2015.

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Book Report: So What’s the Difference by Fritz Ridenour (1967)

June 12, 2012 Brian J. Noggle

This book is a basic survey of religions other than Protestant Christianity and how their tenets relate to the Bible and Christianity. As a Protestant-centered book, each chapter gives a brief overview of the other religion and identifies where the other religion differs from the Protestant Christian worldview and with the Bible. It’s written for a Christian audience to give them insight into why the other religions fall short.

Strangely enough (or maybe not), the book spends three chapters on Catholicism, probably because the similarity to Protestantism is so much relative to the other religions that the inquiring Protestant might not think the differences are a big deal. Au contraire, this book argues. The book includes a history of the church, a bit of the divergent beliefs that led to Martin Luther’s theses, and a whole chapter on why you would not want to marry a Catholic (basically because there used to be a contract at some point that practicing Catholics had to present to non-Catholics ensuring that all religious training in the house had to be Catholic under the penalty of excommunication and worse). I think the book focuses a little too much on this and tying American Catholics to the yoke of Rome, but it takes its faith more seriously than most churchgoers and Catholics.

It’s by no means a collection of Christian apologetics, but instead operates a priori from there to provide a summary and comparison. Interesting and educational in the sense both of an overview of what the other religions think and what evangelical Christians are to make of them according to Fritz Ridenour.

I understand the later edition has 20 different religions, cults, or chapters in it. The world of religion in the United States has diversified quite a bit since 1967.

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The Eric Clapton / Bob Marley Answer to the Prisoner’s Dilemma

June 12, 2012June 12, 2012 Brian J. Noggle

The Prisoners’ Dilemma:

Two men are arrested, but the police do not possess enough information for a conviction. Following the separation of the two men, the police offer both a similar deal—if one testifies against his partner (defects/betrays), and the other remains silent (cooperates/assists), the betrayer goes free and the cooperator receives the full one-year sentence. If both remain silent, both are sentenced to only one month in jail for a minor charge. If each ‘rats out’ the other, each receives a three-month sentence. Each prisoner must choose either to betray or remain silent; the decision of each is kept quiet. What should they do?

Their solution after the fold.
Continue reading “The Eric Clapton / Bob Marley Answer to the Prisoner’s Dilemma” →

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