Musings from Brian J. Noggle

This is a simple book of one liners from famous comedians (circa 1996). The quotations are presented one to a page, and the book itself is comb-bound. So this is not Bartlett’s by any stretch.

The book chooses one liners from great comedians, and the selection has held up. You got your Carson, you got your Carlin, you got your…. Richard Lewis? Well, it is a book from 1996. Some of us in the Jeopardy! contestant pool remember Anything But Love.

I tweeted one of the quotes in the book by Steve Martin:

When you study philosophy in school, you remember just enough to screw you up for the rest of your life.

With any such book, I think that’s the measure of its worth.

So definitely worth a browse.

When I mentioned this book when I bought it last week, I said it was trying to piggyback on Dilbert’s success. That’s not accurate, actually. Although Dilbert might have made a book of business cartoons palatable in the middle 1990s (see also The Complete Geek (An Owner’s Manual)), this book is more akin to the photocopied-to-death cartoons passed around the office in the era before the Internet. The cartoons are single-panel and usually revolve around a gag wherein a corporate buzzword or situation is expressed humorously with the punchline written in strange fonts. Clearly, the things were designed to be tacked onto cubicle walls.

As such, it’s rather dated and has not held up too well in the intervening 17 years since its publication, whereas Dilberts from the era have. There’s a fascinating study in that.

Apropos of nothing, the last book I reviewed was written by someone named Ripley about an artist, and now I’m reporting on a book by named for a cartoonist named Ripley. Believe it! Or, you know, not.

Some of you might even remember the Ripley comics in the Sunday papers, or some of you might remember the television series with Jack Palance. If you do, you know what kinds of things you’ll find in here: just nuggets of human oddity. This being a 21st century representation of the franchise, you get pictures and captions instead of line drawings. I browsed it while watching a ball game, but I’m not sure I remember anything from it, so this isn’t helping me with Jeopardy! much.

Although I did get a firm appreciation for how Ripley parlayed a sports cartoon into a multimedia empire and museum chain that continues 52 years after his death.

Unlike the first biography of Gainsborough I read, this books pages are all separated, so I got a better sense of Gainsborough, the man, and his rise amid the world of British painters, his preference for painting landscapes and common folk instead of the portraits that paid his bills and kept his family in the good life, eventually. So I have more respect and understanding for the artist this time around.

Unfortunately, the reproductions of his work herein are all in black and white, so it creates a bit of a chasm between the vivid descriptions of the paintings and the images themselves.

I posted the review of the first book a week and a couple days before my mother died. Oh, the new normalcy into which we’d found ourselves with her sickness and her daily treatments, but where I still had time to sit in my reading spot in my home in Old Trees and read every night. Now, some years later, a new new normalcy, maybe even a couple normalcies beyond that one. I mention this in a book report about a single volume just to emphasize that a book and its reading experience can resonate in one’s memory. Can a Kindle representation do that for you? Given how much I remember about reading things online on the computer, I’d have to think not.

This book is a collection of photographs from the Reagan administration and grouped around events or topics in his presidency like the inaugurations, the attack on Libya, the firing of the PATCO air traffic controllers, Iran-Contra, and so on. Each section/chapter runs 2-4 pages and has a couple paragraphs from each event or period.

It’s a nice trip back to the 1980s. I was but a boy then, of course, so my growing awareness of the political world was rising quickly. I don’t remember many of the things from his first administration, but by the second, I’m familiar with the themes and the events. The photos show Reagan, of course, but they are also photos of the period, with the fashion, blocky glasses, big hair, and whatnot.

I have to say, aside from the weird stuff in the urban areas, the 1980s fashions that trickled down to Missouri weren’t hideous enough to scar us, unlike the things that Boomers did to themselves. I mean, plaid pants? Really?

I inherited this book from my aunt Dale, I deduce, because it was sent out to her beau in 1994 and has a letter from some Republican fundraising organization or another in it and a certificate of authenticity that says this is a numbered copy of the deluxe edition that was limited to 125,000. I’m pretty sure that that must have been the whole initial press run of this book.

The book is worth a browse for the nostalgia and for its mood lifting potential: 8 years of Reagan lifted the national mood quite a bit and ushered in several decades of positive growth and national mood. These times we’re in, they too will pass, and the end result might be a better world instead of Mad Maxville.

Well, if you cracked open this book and expected to see a bunch of Flemish women in revealing clothing patterned upon the traditional garb of the region, you would be disappointed as I was. The “beauties” of the title are, in fact, the old buildings, art work, and religious artifacts in this Belgian town that dates back to the early Middle Ages.

The photos are beautiful and the things in the beautiful photos are beautiful, but the most interesting things in the book are the captions, which tell of the city’s history as it was a commercial center and its position under the various dukes and kings that had dominion over what later became Belgium. The poor country gets short shrift in European history, and sometimes these low-level focused photo books are great gateways to knowledge about overlooked regions.

So I liked the book.

The title pretty much says it all: it’s a collection of easy crafts you can do with your children or your children should be able to do themselves, assuming they’re old enough to handle glue and scissors without inventing any new hair styles or gluing scissors to the light fixtures. That is to say, if you have boys, when they’re old enough to think crafts are for girls, but girls and girl things are icky.

Sixteen projects range from light woodworking in making a keyhanger to simple painting things and glued felt. The project materials don’t look to be too expensive and could probably be assembled from scraps if you’re a crafty person. However, if you’re a crafty person, you have ideas and craft books you can use to think up your own crafts for kids.

I guess the market is people who want to come up with something to do to occupy their little girls for an hour at a time. Not exactly me. But, hey, the Packers won the game during which I browsed this book.

It’s hard to know what I expected when I picked this book up; probably a collection of poems in a chapbook sort of thing. It definitely carries that vibe, as Armbruster talks about Christianity, humility, and taking care of your fellow man in poems and bullet-pointed type musings.

However, the book has an essay on creativity, wherein the truly creative person thinks far ahead of others. The creative person sees the problem, sees that he is the one to solve it, sees the solution, and only then fills in the blanks to make that solution possible. 1, 2, 5, 3, 5, Armbruster calls it. In a recent piece, James Lileks describes Steve Jobs in those terms, although he doesn’t mention that he got it from Armbruster. He probably didn’t, but two pieces I’ve read ran in parallel.

The book itself came with two local papers’ obituaries for Armbruster from the middle 1990s clipped and tucked into them. I’ve noticed that’s a trend: putting authors’ obits in the authors’ books. I wonder where that started and why so many people do it.

At any rate, this book is worth a quick read. It’s an hour or so of realtime sports or a magazine-browse length of dedicated time, and the essay on creativity is worthwhile if you don’t get much out of the rest.