Musings from Brian J. Noggle

Sorry for the light posting the last couple of days, but I am sick like the dog, again. Having children is like managing a medieval urban rat rodeo with accompanying exotic coughing flea chorus. I’ve been sick more times this year than I have been in the past decade.

Now pardon me while I wrap a blanket around myself again and watch yet another piece of children’s programming.

Back in the olden days of the early 1990s, I used to spend a lot of time and a lot of my disposable income at the local Mainstream Records because I could walk to it and because I could afford a couple of cheap audiocassettes for our weekend late night cruising expeditions. I gathered a reputation for finding old hits–old being from the middle 1980s–for us to ride to nowhere while learning to sing along. Back in those days, they offered cassette singles that featured, instead of a current song and a piece of filler from the album or a soundtrack, two hits by the same artist. On one of those excursions, I found “Electric Blue” by Icehouse, the best Australian band whose name was not just letters ever. The back side featured “Crazy”, which was pretty much all of their hits on one single since the paean to Australia required of all Australian bands who chart in the United States by an actual Australian law “Great Southern Land” sort of killed their charting in the United States.

The Mainstream Records only had one in stock, and I snapped it up to share with Deb and Chris in the comfort of Chris’s old Cutlass Sierra. Of course, by “old,” I mean it was only as old as the songs, but when you’re <20, there's a lot of things that are "old." During our rides through the Wisconsin dark, I convinced Deb I was singing to her, and she thought I sounded an awful lot like Iva Davies although in retrospect, of course I know I did not. So when an employee came along with the stone tablets that they used for ordering in those days, children, and noticed that Icehouse had sold, Mainstream ordered another copy. When that other copy arrived, I bought it immediately, and by immediately, I mean within a day or so of its shelving. As I said, I spent a lot of time there. I probably gave that copy directly to Deb. So when the Mainstream employee came along the next time with the tablet and chisel, he or she noticed that Icehouse had sold out, again. So they hammered a bigger number into the stone. Within short order, two copies of the Icehouse single arrived. Of course, I bought them immediately as well. One for Chris and one for my brother. Perfect! Then the Mainstream employee came along and thought he was seeing some revival of Icehouse or some strange musical fad blip, but this proactive Mainstream employee ordered four copies.

Which sat on the Mainstream shelf probably until the record store went out of business in the middle 1990s. They had no way of knowing that I was only a small-time taste maker and that the sudden surge in Icehouse’s popularity in the northwest corner of Milwaukee was very limited in scope indeed.

I would like to have arm-wrestled Robert Heinein and lost.

If you don’t understand that sentiment, you don’t understand what it means to have heroes.

I noticed pretty quickly that the Directv piped in music changed today from SiriusXM to SonicTap.

On one hand, as a SiriusXM investor, I’m saddened by the news since this indicates I am probably going to lose the last sleeve from the shirt I’ve been losing in that investment (I should have sold when they signed Stern and the stock zoomed to like $17 a share briefly).

On the other hand, SonicTap will probably have playlists that include more than only 24 hours of songs for each music channel, unlike SiriusXM. Even if not, I can hope it is at least a different 24 hours of songs to give me enough novelty to get through the week.

On the third, mutant hand, I can take pride that I am probably one of a mutant handful of people attentive enough to notice the change.

So I received a free gift print from Ducks Unlimited to induce me to renew or as a reward for renewing. I don’t know which, or maybe it’s both, since I received another one in the mail a week later.

In most cases, I throw these things into the recycling right away, I put them aside and wait until a later time when I’m cleaning up years later to put them into the recycling, or I throw them into a box for a yard sale and then, after the yard sale passes and they don’t sell, I throw them into the recycling bin.

This time, though, I took the reward and framed it for my children’s rooms, since their larger rooms have blank wall space these days:

Those pictures will hang on the boys’ bedroom walls until they’re old enough to replace them with something more to their tastes. Some days, in the far future, they might come across one of them in a box and recollect it fondly, wondering why they had duck hunting pictures in their rooms when their father wasn’t a duck hunter (assuming, probably safely, that I don’t become one between now and then).

Maybe they’ll know that I joined Ducks Unlimited after my father passed away to keep his contributions alive and so I could order the camouflaged hats that I leave on my father’s grave in lieu of flowers. Maybe I won’t get the chance to tell them that. Maybe they’ll only have the mystery.