To be able to say "Noggle," you first must be able to say "Nah."
Overheard at Nogglestead:
Five-year-old, attempting to rally his army of a three-year-old brother: Let’s hustle, boys, let’s hustle!
Father: Let’s Husserl, boys, let’s Husserl! Nothing like a bit of German idealism to perk up the afternoon!
You didn’t think I saved all my esoteric material for adults to not get, did you?
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I’ve been cleaning my office again, which means I’ve been dumping things on my desk. Actually, I don’t know what I’ve emptied onto my desk. Apparently, some bin of mementos, because I cleaned some old files off of my desk and found a number of things in the strata below, which includes:
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This book is a short British painting project book that shows some quick things you can do to get started painting with oil paints. I believe it’s distributed by an art supply company. I remember back counting these out of boxes when I was a shipping receiving clerk at an art supply store. I read the book because I read anything, not because I’m taking up painting.
The book presents five paintings to try from a variety of painting types. There are a couple landscapes, an interior painting, and a still life. There are also samples for sketches made before drawing and basic information about equipment that you use and whatnot, which is typical for a hobby book like this.
The individual projects include five steps and then five pictures to illustrate the step, but for some reason, the book was laid out so that the steps are together and the pictures are together, but on different, often non-facing pages, so if you want to see the result of each step after you read the text, you’re going to do a lot of page flipping.
The artist’s style is somewhere between impressionism and realism, with blocky shape outlines. He works from the back to the front, which I guess is standard. It’s been a long time since I took an art class, but I watch a lot of Bob Ross’s The Joy of Painting, which I prefer and is much closer to inspiring me than this book is. I wonder how The Joy of Painting translated to print, as there are undoubtedly many books in the line.
Come to think of it, when I was in high school, The Joy of Painting did inspire me to try some painting using cheap watercolors from the department store and the cut-out tops of fresh doughnut boxes as canvases. It wasn’t half bad. It was more bad than that. Which is why I continued on my path to becoming a not half bad writer on the Internet.
At any rate, the book is a short primer on the art, so it shouldn’t be a major investment like a $30, 200 page hardback craft book would be. Especially if you buy it at a book fair bag day like I undoubtedly did.
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Asked by the Hollywood Reporter if someone would hire fired Current TV commentator Keith Olbermann, Fox News head Roger Ailes said:
You talk about burning bridges. This guy really burns ‘em. Now, I feel sorry for anybody who’s out of work, so I don’t want to trash him or say anything negative about him. He was great at sports, I thought. And everybody has some redeeming quality, so people find a job again. But it’ll be, you know. A pet show in St. Louis, or something.
What, has Detroit fallen below the minimum threshold to be the punchline these days?
Frankly, I’ll talk down the city of St. Louis as a pit any day of the week, but when Ailes is speaking, he’s speaking as someone on the coast referring to a backwater, and the entirety of the St. Louis area is not that at all.
Alternate quip: If only St. Louis spent millions of dollars procuring/keeping a professional sports team of some sort. Then it would be considered a big league city by people who matter to people who think people on the coasts matter.
(Link via Hot Air. I wonder what Breitbart’s Dana Loesch thinks about Roger Ailes trashing her hometown.)
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In the second of a series, over at Missouri Insight, I wander around the urban cluster that is Aurora, Missouri.
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As we previously mentioned, the United State Census Bureau has declared 81% of Americans live in urban areas, and the Census Bureau considers for statistical inflation purposes any town greater than 2,500 to be “urban.”
So we recently sent a photojournalist, or at least some guy with a digital camera (not a smartphone–that’s what separates the photojournalist wannabes from mere consumers) to urban Aurora, Missouri, to document life in this hardcore urban enclave of Aurora, Missouri.
Warning: Viewer discretion is advised. Continue reading “A Photojournalism Study of Urban Aurora”
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Ladies and gentlemen, I present the first screenshot of the forthcoming get-rich-quick idea, I mean iPhone App, Plants vs. Brontës.
You always forget the last one.
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I forget where I saw this link, but the Business Insider’s story is entitled Wisconsin Republican: Women Are Paid Less Because ‘Money Is More Important For Men’, and it’s about how the state of Wisconsin no longer has an equal pay law.
According to the Business Insider, this is Scott Walker’s doing:
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker opened up a new front in the GOP’s war against women last week when he overturned his state’s equal pay law, which made it easier for workers to sue their employers for wage discrimination.
Business Insider links to its earlier piece, entitled The Governor Of Wisconsin May Have Just Blown The Election For Mitt Romney, which puts the repeal on the governor of Wisconsin again:
The Democrats “GOP War On Women” rallying cry got a major lift from Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker today, with the news that the Republican darling repealed a Wisconsin law that made it easier for women to fight wage discrimination.
The Huffington Post reports that Walker quietly overturned Wisconsin’s Equal Pay Enforcement Act last night, bowing to pressure from the state’s Republican lawmakers. The equal pay law was designed to deter wage discrimination by making it easier for workers to press charges against their employers.
Got that? Walker overturned the law, and Walker quietly overturned the law. How did he do this? Fiat? Diktat? Executive order? We have to go to the Huffington Post story linked in the second story to learn how Walker acted unilaterally:
A Wisconsin law that made it easier for victims of wage discrimination to have their day in court was repealed on Thursday, after Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) quietly signed the bill.
The 2009 Equal Pay Enforcement Act was meant to deter employers from discriminating against certain groups by giving workers more avenues via which to press charges. Among other provisions, it allows individuals to plead their cases in the less costly, more accessible state circuit court system, rather than just in federal court.
In November, the state Senate approved SB 202, which rolled back this provision. On February, the Assembly did the same. Both were party-line votes in Republican-controlled chambers.
SB 202 was sent to Walker on March 29. He had, according to the state constitution, six days to act on the bill. The deadline was 5:00 p.m. on Thursday. The governor quietly signed the bill into law on Thursday, according to the Legislative Reference Bureau, and it is now called Act 219.
Wait a minute: The executive branch of government did not act unilaterally, but merely signed a bill passed by both houses of Wisconsin’s legislature? That is, the elected representatives of Wisconsin debated and passed a bill, Scott Walker unilaterally declared war on Women by performing his duty and signing it?
Although the body of the article gets it right, the Huffington Post still pins it on Scott Walker in the headline, “Scott Walker Quietly Repeals Wisconsin Equal Pay Law”.
I realize that, with a Federal executive who ignores the legislature and the courts, that is, the co-equal branches of government, the whole Constitutional civics thing gets purposefully murky.
But can’t “journalists” bother to know the difference between signing a bill and an executive acting like a lone wolf? Or would that threaten the new order, where executives are more than figureheads and have sweeping powers that they should only use for good, or what passes for good in Democrat minds?
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I’ve probably read this book before, but it’s been twenty years since I ran through most of the old, pre-90s 87th Precinct series. They’re getting kind of hard to come by, the old ones, although you can generally find the 21st century hardbacks at book fairs. I found this one somewhere in a 1981 paperback.
The book only has one central mystery, unlike the later volumes. A model is murdered in her apartment while her five-year-old daughter in an adjoining bedroom reassures her dolly that everything will be all right. There’s some pre-existing friction on the squad, and the lieutenant is going to transfer Kling, but Carella speaks up for him and partners with him on the case. Carella goes missing and a body turns up in a fiery wreck in his automobile, and Kling gets suspended but continues to pursue the case. They find the model has a secret, and only when the detectives from the 87th can figure that out can they find the killer and rescue Carella.
It’s a hard-hitting plot, maybe, for the 1960s, but in the 21st century, it’s as deep as the episode of a television crime drama. Then again, one of the joys of the mass market paperback is that they really were fast moving, singular sorts of plots with good prose attached. Well, sometimes with good prose. McBain’s, though, is some of the best.
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Here’s a good Wookiee Suit test. When you’re stopped by a train carrying things like this:
What do you think?
I admit my dark thoughts run toward the darker side, wherein I can imagine another civil war coming, but when I see a train of military equipment moving through Brookline, my immediate reaction is still Wow, I’m proud of my country and its military and not They’re moving into position to encircle the cities in the upcoming troubles.
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I know what you’re thinking: He’s really following up a book of jokes with a book of cartoons? No, even better: this book is actually a subset of Snoopy cartoons from a larger volume, Snoopy Come Home. So it’s like a Readers Digest Condensed Book of cartoons.
These Peanuts cartoons come from the late 1950s and 1960s and center on Snoopy, of course. They deal with his love for dinner and his relationships with Charlie and whatnot. No Red Baron at this time, and Woodstock does not look fully formed within the cartoons themselves (although he looks like we know him on the cover).
The Peanuts cartoons are timeless if you’re of a certain age who grew up with new ones in the paper and television specials frequently. But I can’t think what a younger crowd would think of them.
Worth it for a certain nostalgic value and some amusement, but no real laugh out loud things.
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April is the cruelest month.
Last April, we lost the first of our quintet when our cat Ajax died. Last night, our oldest cat John Galt died. He was my wife’s cat before he was our cat, and he brought us together, sort of. Continue reading “Gone Galt”
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This book is a little pulp bit from the era of the early Don Pendleton “The Executioner” series. It’s not published by Gold Eagle or Pinnacle, though: it’s some off-brand called Modern Promotions/Unibook.
And it’s a pleasant surprise.
The main character of the book is a former NYPD detective now serving as a deputy in a small town in Maine after leaving New York in disgrace for having taken some money from some non-Mafia bookmakers. When the chief of police is in a coma and the main character acts as chief, a known mobster moves into town. The incapacitated chief of police, a good man by all accounts, looks to have taken some money. The chief’s wife, a sexpot, has designs on everyone in town, including the main character. As Maine becomes an open territory for mob homesteading, with the New York outfit hoping to beat the Montreal outfit to the new rackets, can one tarnished hero keep the mob out of his town at least?
A short pulp read, pretty dark and noir, but it moves well and keeps you rooting for the main character even as he admits some mistakes, pays for them in his own ways, and tries to do somewhat right.
Recommended.
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This book is the second book published by Xerox that I know I’ve read. It’s not the first photocopied book I’ve read; that would be Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s Where Do We Go From Here? Chaos or Community, which I pirated from the Marquette Memorial Library back before the Internet made it available for $10. What was I talking about before admitting I’m a book pirate? Oh, yes.
Back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Xerox had a publishing arm that pumped out at least books for young adults. I read The Day The World Went Away some years ago when I bought the book during my Ebaying days. Spoiler alert: It was the hippies.
This book, Moontoons Jokes & Riddles, is a collection of jokes about landing on the moon and aliens and whatnot. This must have been rushed out pretty quickly after the moon landing to capitalize on it. Sadly, the schoolchildren who were of the age to read this book when it was fresh–me included–might have thought space exploration would continue apace. How wrong they would have been.
The book includes a number of cartoons and gags that kids find funny. I only laughed at one thing, but I forget what it was. A couple of things predicted the modern sensibilities better than the then-future of space travel: there’s a cartoon where moon creatures complain about air pollution from the lander’s retrorockets, and there’s a cartoon where a moon dweller tells astronauts he hopes they don’t treat them like the American Indian. These were jokes in 1970, but a way of life for some people in 2012.
I’ll have to try some of these jokes on my children. I suspect they, as the target audience, will enjoy them more than I do, even if they don’t tend to include the words “bananahead” or “diaper.” At least, not until my children retell them.
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Well, probably not, but what other conclusion can I draw from this?
I get this whenever I run into the library to look for the new Sandford titles. Because the name is on the top, the catalog labels go over the titles:
So I’ve got to pull every last book out to find that the new title isn’t in yet, or I can’t tell the books apart based on title since they’re franchise titles with essentially meaningless words preceding the word Prey
This isn’t because the publishers hate us freeloaders. It’s because when your author becomes a franchise, it’s what people are looking for in the bookstore. Fans will buy it regardless of title. But when the authors are unknowns, you have to hope an interesting title hooks them in and makes them pick up the book.
No publisher has hanged the franchise tag on me. Yet.
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At Missouri Insight, I bring you exclusive photos of the gritty urban cluster that is Republic, Missouri.
A preview below the fold, possibly not safe for work because of its raw portrayal of what the Census Bureau calls an urban area in the 21st century: Continue reading “See Also”
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The sensational Census story proclaims Census: 8 of 10 Americans now urbanites:
Move over, New York City. Nine of the 10 most densely populated areas in the U.S. are out West, and eight out of 10 Americans are now urbanites, a U.S. Census Bureau report released Monday shows.
However, like the recently trumpeted “Chocolate leads to weight loss” study that’s gotten a lot of brief mentions by radio personalities in between their shallow playlists and brief Internet mentions, looking behind the headlines will reveal something that pretty much contradicts the headline.
In the chocolate study, it was the fact that everyone in the study was exercising 3.6 times a week (more than I do, certainly).
In the Census Bureau study, it’s the definition of urban:
The census data identifies two types of urban areas: “urbanized areas” of 50,000 or more people and “urban clusters” of at least 2,500 and less than 50,000 people. There are 486 urbanized areas and 3,087 urban clusters nationwide.[Emphasis added.]
You know what we call an urban area of 2,500 people in the real world? A small town.
But going by the Census Bureau’s definition, ladies and gentlemen, here is the gritty urban world of Republic, Missouri. Continue reading “Gritty Urban Scenes from Southwest Missouri”
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As some of you might know, I’ve been having a little trouble with my DSL connection starting sometime last winter. AT&T operators and technicians have been very polite, for the most part, but they didn’t fix the problem yet.
Additionally, I needed a static IP address to make connections to client networks easier, and this did not go well, either, since most AT&T phone representatives only want to sell U-Verse and transfer you to tech support if you even mention static IPs. I finally got it, but at a bill rate three times what they sell it to business customers.
I sent a letter to the head of AT&T Business and Home Solutions: Continue reading “Letter to Andy Geiss, Sr. Exec. V.P. AT&T Business and Home Solutions”
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As you might have noticed, suddenly everyone is all about civility. There are national media calls for it, and the city of Springfield has some sort of ten tenets of civility that it’s wasting government time and treasure on.
The local YMCA even has a banner for it with a logo that I think captures the essence of the modern call for civility:
Notice the arrow in it, just as awesome as in the FedEx logo, but to worse effect.
The circle on the left is perhaps being civil to the circle on the right, denoted by the arrow. But this civility is one-sided, and the right circle is poised to eat, Pac Man style, the circle on the left.
Doesn’t that really capture it as a modern one-sided, “You must be civil according to my rules of behavior, even as I pursue your destruction” “civility” of the 21st century?
Or maybe it’s just Atari 2600 Pac Man and Discolored Arcade Pac Man exchanging ideas and I’m reading too much into it.
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Yesterday, as I mentioned, we hit a book fair at a Methodist church just outside the MSU campus. It wasn’t very large, and its selection of fiction was essentially romance novels and a pile of James Patterson books. It did, however, have some old record albums, so I was able to stock up on some easy listening for my hi-fi.
I got:
My beautiful wife got a couple books and cookbooks. The children got four books, not depicted because they couldn’t wait until we got home to have them out and paged through.
It’s the gearing up phase: The Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library and the Friends of the Christian County Library will hold their book fairs later this month.
Soon, we will need to move or put an addition onto our house to house the continuing (!) growth of the library.
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