To be able to say "Noggle," you first must be able to say "Nah."
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:
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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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Stunning finding reported in Reader’s Digest:
A February report in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that taking antioxidant vitamins actually increased a person’s risk of dying by up to 16 percent.
. . . . But in 47 randomized trials involving almost 181,000 adults, researchers found that taking vitamins A, beta carotene and E, alone or in combination, actually increased a person’s risk of dying by up to 16 percent.
Personally, I find my odds daunting, but at least they’re not 116% chance of dying.
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This week, we stopped at only 3 sales because we had prior commitments. However, I found something.
You’ll notice the single John D. Fitzgerald book to the right for the boy. Just like his daddy, he acquired without really knowing what’s on his shelves, and Me and My Little Brain is the only one of the Great Brain series he owns. Now, temporarily, he owns two.
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Last Saturday, I did not go book hunting per se; I went to my mother’s yard sale and spent all day down there, talking to the little old ladies (and my mother) and whatnot.
However, I did get a handful of material that I bought from others, received as gifts, or reclaimed instead of donating:
The stack to the left represents some children’s books for the boy; the center stack, which I will not enumerate here, includes the aforementioned magazines, craft books, and home improvement materials I’ve reclaimed. Since they’ve been mine since the early part of the century when I was an eBay seller, I’m not trying to convince you they’re new. They haven’t been in the household for a couple of years, though.
New material includes:
So the weekend wasn’t a total loss as far as acquisitions are concerned.
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Today’s mail contained 2 Bank of America World Points credit card offers with the same nonprofit group branding:
The only difference is the free gift offered.
The next step, of course, is five credit card offers in a day with no difference whatsoever! Since I’m not interested, perhaps someone who’d steal my identity by stealing my mail or taking advantage of a misdelivery will!
This even beats my last batch of credit card offers.
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A phish disguising itself as a warning about phishing scams. Brilliant!
Although this phising scam warns the recipients that Citizens Bank Money Manager GPS users have been the target of phishing scams containing misspelled words, it obviously does not note that phishing e-mails often contain weird capitalization or lack punctuation, but then again, valid e-mails often contain these problems.
To be really helpful, it would include a tip about checking your status bar (that bottom line of text in some e-mail clients) or the mouseover text (in some e-mail clients) to make sure that the target of the link is the same as the link text, or it would explain that subdomains with legitimate-looking text are irrelevant if the actual domain, that is, the last thing before the .com, is not what it’s supposed to be (such as vbv75.com).
But that would sort of spoil the phishing exercise, wouldn’t it?
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