To be able to say "Noggle," you first must be able to say "Nah."
I’ve been on this blog for almost half a decade, and sometimes that’s brought back more vividly.
Like when I was doing a bit of research for the post that appears, chronologically, above this one, and I came across a joke I relayed.
A joke that was originally told to me by the aunt from whom I’ve inherited the pile of books whose reports I’ve been meting out. She’s been gone almost 3 years now; she would have told me that joke right before she’d learn about the cancer.
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I removed Andrew Sullivan from my blogroll a couple years ago, probably about the time he was advocating that the Federal government overtax the rubes in the big states who need gas to travel between points on the vast maps, unlike our betters on the East Coast who trip on a coffee table leg in Connecticut and their elbows strike the floor in New York.
However, the intern in charge of putting together the Kansas City Star‘s Blog Bits section has us together in Friday’s edition.
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Girl falls off bike while riding in the road, parents sue road builders:
The mother of a girl severely injured in a bicycle crash in 2005 is suing the people who designed and built the road where she was injured, saying her medical expenses are likely to exceed $25 million.
Only fitting because:
a combination of a road that was too steep, and dangerous wooden posts
Combined with, I don’t know, an accident.
The face that an attorney has found a large number of defendants (6) for the maximum number of out of court settlements is now matter of course. It’s not even sad on its own any more, just one more pixel in a sad portrait of personal irresponsibility in modern America.
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This book is what one would expect. Culled from a larger work (Encyclopedia of Hoaxes), this book presents a Reader’s Digest kind of sumamry of a selection of hoaxes from history. It is what it is, which is shorter and more whitespaced than an actual Reader’s Digest anthology, but worth a couple bits if you can find it cheaply.
I don’t know that I gleaned any real new knowledge from this, but it certainly reinforced some trivia I knew. Well, maybe the story of Dupont’s painting will make it into a historical essay one day.
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When I imagined this book report, I was going to make some cracks about how Mr. du Toit once called me a wanker, way back in the old days. I thought perhaps I would make a comment about how polite the book reports are when you know that the author is better armed than you are. But a funny thing happened on the way to that facile line celebrating my own cleverness: I liked the book too much to fall into the normal patter.
The man has an admitted fetish for Thomas Hardy, and it’s easy to see the influence of the English writer and the sweep and scope of old literature in this book, and as it clocks in at 300 pages of modern English, it’s a better read.
It’s set in 1890ish Vienna and deals with a lawyer-turned-artist who has it all: a beautiful fiancee, a promising career, and all the trappings of youth and wealth. But he’s not happy because he’s an artist at heart, an existentialist one who sees beneath the veneer of bourgeous sentiments to the rotting core of humanity. So he loses the job, loses the fiancee, and pursues a detached, unreachable woman. He then ascends to a cartoonist career, gets the girl, and throws it all away.
I have a lot of sympathy for the character, but he’s a complete cad who wastes what he’s given and then wastes what he earns. He’s got a sort of intellectual hubris common of artists and intellectuals: that he and a few others can see the true meaning of the human condition, which is squalor. Whereas some of the insight into the artifice of interhuman contact is correct, ultimately it sees beyond to nothingness which doesn’t offer a much better alternative.
So I liked the book, and I am considering buying du Toit’s other book, Family Fortunes as well.
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Funny, I don’t see any of your grandparents’ Sioux-City-Suean lifestyles banned (unlike Gor-simulation lifestyles) from Web hosting services, but this song from 1945 is not unlike the Kajira:
‘Cause I come from Nebraska to find Sioux City Sue
I’m gonna rope and tie her up, I’ll use my old lasso
I’m gonna put my brand on my sweet Sioux City Sue
Dudes, that’s Gene Autry singing the most maligned elements of John Norman’s books right there.
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I have to wonder if perhaps the adjective realistic is applied incorrectly in this advertisement:
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What, don’t these guys even care anymore? Perhaps they’re not reflected in the paper itself, but here are two egregious errors today:
Click for full size
Man accussed of 29 counts of child sex abuse in custody
Aggrevation? Accussed? Can’t they even afford spell-checkers down there on Tucker?
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The cover of this book compares the author to Dave Barry on speed; if that’s the case, that explains why this author outran the funny.
The book is a collection of humor pieces that depend upon continual tropes of drug use, sexual situations, bashing conservatives, and….well, that’s about it. If you cannot buy into the voice, you don’t get into the mirth. I didn’t buy into the voice, so I didn’t really care for the book.
The less said about it, the better, I guess.
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You know, this is the same fellow that was the contemporary of Lovecraft and whose representation was slain in the Lovecraft story of “The Haunter of the Dark.” I picked the book up because I recognized the name. It’s also the fellow who wrote “That Hell-Bound Train”, which I read as part of some anthology or another in the past.
However, this book is nothing to write home about.
It’s a quick enough read, but it’s because I skimmed some of it and read some of it while watching a hockey game (!). So that tells you something about how engaged I was with the language and the plotting.
It probably would have made a decent short story, but it’s inflated to novel proportions with digressions and time wasting. Let’s see: Lori’s having bad dreams. And some voices. Her parents are killed on the day she graduated from college. She has what appear to be memories/dreams/visions of a medical facility. And people are dying when they become involve in the mystery.
Ultimately, the resolution is a head slapper. Not unpredicted, but without some resolution and without the certainty that the author wanted you to think about some of the things and wonder. More like the sense that stuff just got dropped thoughtlessly.
There’s better Bloch out there. From my current point of view, it’s all better.
Hey, look, a link where you can buy it:
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Bad:
SWAT officers expected to find a victim shot to death, drugs and a belligerent armed suspect when they surrounded the home of an unsuspecting couple, but found they were only a part of a false emergency call caused by a teenager who hacked into the county’s emergency response system, authorities said.
As officers swarmed the home with assault rifles, dogs and a helicopter, a Lake Forest couple and their two toddlers inside their home slept unsuspectingly.
On March 29 at 11:30 p.m., authorities allege, Randall Ellis, a 19-year-old from Mukilteo, Wash., hacked into the county’s 911 system from his home and placed a false emergency call, prompting a fully armed response to the home of an unsuspecting couple that could have ended tragically.
Couple that with the fact that in the next twenty years we’ll have SWAT teams with robots on them:
The National Defence Force is probing whether a software glitch led to an antiaircraft cannon malfunction that killed nine soldiers and seriously injured 14 others during a shooting exercise on Friday.
Jeez, who’s going to need Terminators when you’re going to have defective software and pinheaded hackers playing potentially deadly pranks?
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Study: Parents avoid vaccinating young children.
Like most, I, too, avoid vaccinating my young child, preferring instead to have the pediatrician do it.
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In this case, one suspect lacked motive, so we could eliminate them from the whodunit:
Authorities had no motive for the shooting.
Well, we’ll have to look elsewhere for our perpetrator, then, Hercule.
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Police, teens split on need for them
The need for police or the need for teens? Silly reader, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch headline writer is relying on the often overlooked grammatical precept of the implied antecedent, in this case, “curfew.”
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Sunset Hills project wants tax break:
The Sansone Group has proposed constructing an office-retail complex to replace the 35-year-old Holiday Inn motel-Viking banquet center on the northwest corner of Lindbergh Boulevard and Watson Road in Sunset Hills.
The developer is seeking $12 million in government assistance for the $48.2 million project. The aid would be via tax increment financing and transportation development and community improvement districts. Each district would levy one-cent sales taxes.
This is already not newsworthy, ainna? As the contracts are written in English, so they come with hands extended for money from the citizens of the “growing” or “revitalizing” area.
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Story: Alorton police chief grazed in shooting.
Hedge:
Police chief Robert Cummings was grazed in his arm by a bullet apparently fired by another man during a drug stop, Illinois state police said today.
The Post-Dispatch does not completely eliminate the possibility of a self-inflicted wound.
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It’s a stretch to claim I read this book, since most of its contents are postage-stamp sized (almost) representations of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art, but it has some introductory text that explains the background of the movement and its exhibitions in Paris in the 1880s. So I gleaned that bit of knowledge as well as determining that my second favorite Impressionist, far behind Renoir but still second, is Mary Cassatt.
So if you’re into Impressionism, it’s a good little book to show some of what’s included in the National Gallery of Art’s collection.
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In this blog’s very first post, I warned about the provisions in rescue group contracts that you signed to take a pet from them:
When my wife and I wanted to adopt a rescue dog, we had a hound visit our house, mainly to see if it wanted to eat our cats. The rescue volunteer provided a packet of information about dogs and a contract we would have to sign to take possession of the pooch. The contract included house inspections at will of the rescue group. It could also take the dog back at any time if it found our conditions “unsuitable, which includes but not limited to…” a non-exclusive litany. If we lost the dog; we’d pay the rescue group a thousand dollars, even if we “lost” the dog ten years hence when it died and we did not notify the rescue group in 1 (one) week.
Obviously, Ellen DeGeneres is not an avid MfBJNer:
Ellen DeGeneres is in the doghouse with a pet rescue agency after giving a pooch away to her hairdresser because it didn’t get along with her cats.
The talk show hostess and her partner Portia de Rossi adopted Iggy, a Brussels Griffon mix, on Sept. 20. But when things didn’t work out, DeGeneres gave the dog to her hairdresser.
In doing so, DeGeneres violated an agreement with the Mutts and Moms dog rescue agency by not informing them of the handoff.
When the agency called DeGeneres to ask about Iggy, she said she found another home for the dog. The agency sent a representative to the hairdresser’s home Sunday and took the dog away.
The entertainment industry takes note:
DeGeneres went public about the situation Monday while taping an episode of her show to air Tuesday. She admitted she didn’t read all the paperwork involving the adoption.
Ellen DeGeneres does not read her contracts.
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This is the sixth book in the Chronicles of Counter-Earth series, and if you’ve been reading the blog for the last year, you’ll know that I’ve read the first five somewhat out of order. Also, if you’ve been paying attention, you’ll have noticed that I have read 51 books since the last Gor book I read (Outlaw of Gor, May).
I enjoy these books because Norman puts a rich tapestry into them; I don’t know if he’s keeping the details correct from book to book, but he has layers and layers so that sometimes the books trend into the academic about Gor. But these digressions make the fantasy world a tapestry upon which the action takes place. And, oh, the action. Plots move forward, the pacing keeps one reading one more chapter even after the sane have gone to bed.
In this book, Tarl Cabot becomes a slave while headed to Port Kar where he’s supposed to meet a slaver there who serves the Priest-Kings. The slavery experience causes him to question himself as a Warrior, and he forsakes his honor to become a pirate captain. Then Gorean things happen, slave girls dance, and war occurs.
Really, the books seem to fall into Tarl going somewhere in the guise of another caste so he can view the world differently and Norman can show us different aspects of it. But they seem to work.
This book has some passages that are notably the same as earlier passages; that is, a couple sentences of exposition here and there reappear. Also, the book alludes quite a bit to people and characters from earlier books. Personally, I’m having trouble keeping up, what, with reading a pile between the books; I can’t imagine what it was for someone reading these as they came out some year or so apart.
But I’ll continue reading; I have 4 more to go in the first 10.
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Hit the kids who are bigger than you from behind with a Six Million Dollar Man lunchbox full of dirt.
A tactic that I employ often to this day.
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