Musings from Brian J. Noggle – Page 4 – To be able to say "Noggle," you first must be able to say "Nah."

Have A Little Salami

May 8, 2026May 7, 2026 Brian J. Noggle

So I got this email from Amazon:

I guess by law they’re required to send me this notice that they’re going to just keep the, what, dollar? 30 cents? in that account.

But: It offers me no way to log in, and if I try, it indicates the account is closed. So I can’t log in and say, hey, I want my two dimes.

As you might recall, gentle reader, I made some money (not a lot; maybe a meal’s worth in 2006 dollars) from the Amazon Associates program when it first started, but they booted me when Missouri started wanting online retailers to collect tax, which Amazon resisted until it was ready and such a requirement worked against its competitors. Years later, I joined again when revamping this blog–one year, I went through all the archives imported from Blogspot/Blogger and updated the internal links to point to this blog instead of that one. At the same time, I updated all the affiliate links, hoping that some of the traffic to the old book reports might click through, but Amazon kicked me out again because the cost of administering my account by keeping it in a database somewhere was too expensive. So not only did they kick me out, but they’re keeping the last pennies I have in the account instead of turning them over to the state as unclaimed property, where I can roll them up in a claim sometime.

You know I’m on a bit of an Amazon tweehad, and this just reinforces it. If I need new record sleeves after my most recent record purchase or the next, I’ll go to Stick It In Your Ear Records. I will drive downtown and pay more (probably) just so I don’t order from Amazon.

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Book Report: Loft Style by Dominic Bradbury (2000)

May 7, 2026May 6, 2026 Brian J. Noggle

Book cover I got this book in Sparta in 2024 with a couple of other loft interior design books. I read the others, Small Lofts and Minimalist Lofts, not long after I got them. This one, however, languished partially complete beside the reading chair for quite some time before I recently finished it as part of my drive to finish up (or reshelve) books that have been there for a long time.

It’s because it has a high copy-to-photo ratio. It has these chapters:

the loft look
space
light
materials
color
styling
outside in

Yeah, not capitalized, because that’s stylish.

Each two-page spread has three photos, generally a larger one and two smaller ones, but a lot of gushy, purple, catalog-style prose. Each chapter has a “case study” which is slightly more specific, more of the same. Although the book did not depend upon the word liminal quite as much as the others.

So, to underline (as this book does), the loft style of the early 21st century (and maybe beyond) is to create open floor plan condos that look like Scandinavian museums with their light and neutral colors and simplistic furniture and art presentation (a limited number of things per room), objects chosen for how well they conform to the contempraneous concepts of style and nothing else. Architectural elements like floating steps which look like they might last a decade, but don’t most loft dwellers, especially those buying bespoke lofts like those depicted in books, make me wonder what they’ll be like in five or six years. To say nothing of twenty. But, again, I imagine lofts turn over a lot, and everyone who’s buying a pied-à-terre is going to pay designers and architects to redo it in their vision anyway.

You know, I prefer craftsman to almost lodge design, so for me, a loft has exposed brick and industrial elements but also thick wood accents and tend toward the dark colors. And as for décor, the chapter “styling” opens with:

The key to styling urban spaces is balance. Balance between personal treasures and cohesive, clear and contemporary home style. With our choice in furniture, fabrics, and a hundred other details, we stamp our personality upon a room, we make it ours.

I mean, if you cannot trust a philosophy described with a missing serial comma and a comma splice, what can you trust?

So much of interior design, it seems to me, is self-referential and artificial within the industry itself. Making spaces look like other spaces, with external indicators substituting appearance for meaning. Of course, when I look around Nogglestead, I see things and decorative items with meaning. Going along the mantel on the oversized brick fireplace in our family room, for example, we have a needlepoint girl which was a gift to my beautiful wife; a pair of replica dueling pistols which belonged to her uncle; her acryllic plaque for being on the park board; a shadowbox containing duck and goose calls belonging to her father; a time/thermometer/barometer bit which was a gift; the flag from my mother’s casket; the little crystal lamp I bought in 2018; the cartridges from the salute fired at my father-in-law’s funeral in a triangle flag shadow box; a scale that belonged to my sainted mother; a shadow box containing three garrison caps from my mother’s veterans organizations; a mirror which belonged to my favorite aunt; a marble chessboard that belonged to my grandfather and then my mother; a tin cat garden decoration I bought for my wife; two cat sculptures that belonged to my godmother aunt, including one I bought for her; a fireplace tool set which was decorative at my mother-in-law’s house but is functional (some times) at Nogglestead; and a porcelain cat sculpture I’ve named Darla which belonged to my favorite aunt. I look around the rooms, and I can tell you why the things are here. Some elements do not scream Brian J. did this–mostly gifts consumer art from my godmother aunt or chosen by my beautiful wife (although we have one set, down from two, of cheap consumer art I bought in my Ebaying days). So no balance between personal treasures. All personal treasures.

Should I someday have a loft, it will not look like this. It will look like Nogglestead but probably with a more open floor plan. And I will invent industrial lodge cluttercore.

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Good Timing For Us

May 6, 2026 Brian J. Noggle

When we went to St. Louis last month, we stayed right here: Man shot near The Dome at America’s Center, 1 in custody

3:50 in the morning, so we would not have been out of the hotel. But.

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Like Father, Like Son

May 6, 2026 Brian J. Noggle

So, I have mentioned that my friend Dave sold me a nice stereo somewhere early in my college years, and I listened to it through college. But when I returned to my sainted mother’s house in House Springs after I graduated it, I didn’t need it because I wasn’t home that much to listen to music, and we had a console stereo inherited from my grandmother in the house. So I put the stereo in my mother’s annual garage sale, and it sold–to our family friend Pixie. Who reached out to me because I left the record Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd on the turntable while it sold. Did I want it back? Nah, I told her I should get the CD anyway, and I gave her the sleeve when I next saw her.

It took me probably twenty-five years to actually get the CD, but whatever. Fast forward to 2026.

Some years ago, when we were burning through Crosley/Victrola/Chinesium’s Choice all-in-one units with turntables we wore out, we wore out one such unit and let my oldest put it into his bedroom–he could still use the tape player, the CD player, Bluetooth, and radio. And he did for a while. But when he rearranged his room last year, he took the unit out and put it onto the donations stack in the garage.

This weekend, I was sorting the donations and tidying them up–we can actually, you know, donate them to a church fundraiser soon. And I came across this unit and thought, hey, some of the units we “burned out” might have been because I made that determination on Sunday mornings when spinning the Swedish Gospel Singers and thinking the first song sounded slow. Well, when playing it on a new and better turntable, it still sounded slow. So maybe I was getting rid of functional units.

So I repatriated this unit into my office and turned it on.

In a moment, I started hearing something from it, and I checked. The button was set to CD, and I ejected it to discover…. My son had left the CD of Dark Side of the Moon in it. I’m not sure if it’s the replacement I bought or if we had bought him his own copy, but….

Like father, like son.

Note: Not like mother, like son. I gather this crap up and donate it instead of having a garage sale because:

It’s a bother.
It would not net much.
I would not like to see how little other people value the things I divest myself of.
Donating it to the church yard sales means if we have second thoughts, we can buy back our stuff, cheap. This has happened. More than once.

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Now Available on the Microsoft Store

May 5, 2026 Brian J. Noggle

I’ve successfully ushered Feline Fly Assassin to the Microsoft Store so it’s available to download and play on Windows.

Getting an app on the Microsoft Store is slightly more difficult than the Apple App Store because Microsoft has a Byzantine set of rules around accounts:

You have to be a Microsoft Partner, which means you have to have a parent account which Microsoft expects to be a major systems integrator or Azure Cloud player.
They expect your Partner account to be a corporation with a DUNS number.
Jeracor Group does not have a DUNS number.
Also, it cannot find Jeracor Group’s registration in the State of Missouri (it is).
If you somehow get through the Partner process (on a second try, I did), you need to use a personal account to upload apps.
Of course, my corporate account (Jeracor Group) was burned when I uninstalled the Microsoft Authenticator app from my phone.
So I created another one using an old Gmail testing account, but not a new Gmail account because the steps involved to create a Gmail account are crazy. What, I need to scan a QR code on a phone and then let it send a text message from my phone? How to make your security tighter: make it look suspicious.
Follow processes not unlike the Apple App Store to add details.
?
Success!

Seriously, the crap aligning the accounts took me several days. And I wasn’t sure that it worked until this morning–the app was stuck in the certification step even though it said it could take a few hours to three business days. It was almost three business days.

So, maybe I’ve got another avenue of revenue which might yield more than the almost $10 I’ve sold on the App Store.

You can download it here. Just 99 cents. Wotta deal!

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As I Told My Dentist Around The Turn Of The Century….

May 3, 2026 Brian J. Noggle

So when I got a real job (as a printer), I started thinking about getting my teeth fixed after neglecting them for much of my youth. It really wasn’t a thing in our family, and my immediate family was all in dentures by their forties. But I didn’t want that, and I ended up with a couple of appointments with Dr. Gilliam, but his treatment plan was several years in length–well, maybe not so, but a tooth at a time, it seemed. After a couple appointments with him, I got a tech job and moved to the northwestern reaches of St. Louis County–my first residence in Casinoport, actually–and I went to a sedation dentist which was the hotness at the time. They give you some valium and do a bunch of work at once. Smilin’ Jimmy scheduled me for two appointments and did the right side of my mouth at the first. He put a filling on a nerve, though, which left me in quite a bit of pain for a week or two until I got a recommendation for Dr. Dean. I scheduled an appointment with him, and although he did not have time to do a root canal that day, he sent me to an emergency dentist who did. And Dr. Dean took over the dentistry for my beautiful wife and I until we moved to Nogglestead.

I remember telling him that the plan was to keep the crooked teeth I have until we can grow new ones. “Not in our lifetime,” he said.

But I see this story on Instapundit: Humans May Be Able to Grow New Teeth Within Just 4 Years:

If all goes well, Kitano Hospital will administer the treatment to patients between the ages of 2 to 7 who are missing at least four teeth, with the end goal of having a tooth-regrowing medicine available by the year 2030. While these treatments are currently focused on patients with congenital tooth deficiency, Takahashi hopes the treatment will be available for anyone who’s lost a tooth.

Did Dr. Dean predict I would die before 2030?

Come to think of it, I would have, too. But with the help of Dr. Dean, the recently retired Dr. D., and “the big guy,” my oral surgeon, I’ve kept these teeth relatively healthy and clean for a quarter century now. I hope that counts for something.

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Good Album Hunting, May 2, 2026: Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library Book Sale

May 2, 2026 Brian J. Noggle

Ah, gentle reader. This weekend offers many temptations for Brian J. to spend more money than he should. Springfield is hosting a festival celebrating 100 years of Route 66 downtown. Walnut Street has its annual Artsfest, which we’ve gone to on occasion. It’s Free Comic Book day. ABC Books had a book signing. And it was half price day at the Friends of the Library book sale. Which is where I went.

We got there at a little after 10am, and volunteers were helping people to park, which made it seem like it should have been busier than it was–however, I guess there were other events going on at the fairgrounds, so although the lots were full, the book sale itself was not crowded at all.

I really only browsed the dollar (half off: Fifty cents) records and got 25.

I got:

Jarreau by Al Jarreau. I have a copy already, but I think it skips.
The Love Hours, a Jackie Gleason record. I already have it, I’m pretty sure, but this cover is in very nice condition.
The Hollywood Musicals by Henry Mancini and Johnny Mathis.
Desiderata by Les Crane. A collection of poetry, perhaps. With a poster intact.
Standards in Silhouette by Stan Kenton.
Here Where There Is Love by Dionne Warwick.
Solid by Ashford & Simpson. Did I already have it? Apparently not; I got Is It Still Good To Ya? in 2021 and Send It in 2023. So I am pleased to discover I did not.
The King of Swing Volume 1 by Benny Goodman.
Friends in Love by Dionne Warwick.
Eddie Haywood at the Piano.
Capitol Jazz Classics Volume 2: Stan Kenton and His Orchestra: Artistry in Jazz.
Dionne! by Dionne Warwick.
The In Crowd by the Ramsey Lewis Trio. I just picked up Reunion in March.
Let the Music Play by Shannon [Brenda Greene].
The Three Suns Play Midnight Time. A bunch of fox trots, it seems. Presumably with squeeze box somewhere in them.
Bobby Hackett Plays the Great Music of Henry Mancini. I thought it was a team-up like The Hollywood Musicals (above), but I see now the smaller text says Hackett is playing the music and Mancini was just cashing the check.
Warm and Tender by the Three Suns. Looking at their Discogs entry, I see that accordion is one of their primary instruments. I am not crazy to mention it.
Dancing on a Cloud by the Three Suns.
The Best of Jackie Gleason.
Four Centuries of Music for the Harp, a Nonesuch Records title. I will buy all the fifty cent Nonesuch records I find.
Born to Love by Peabo Bryson and Roberta Flack.
Melba by Melba Moore.
Brotherly Love by Daniel Williams.
For the Young at Heart by Perry Como.
All I Want For Christmas by Jackie Gleason. A two record set. And because I play all platters before shelving them, we’ll be listening to some Christmas music here presently.

Cost of records: $12.50. Total spend: $75, roughly, if you add in the lunch at Five Guys, a tradition that the boys favor–they both came along and were pleasantly surprised that I only browsed the cheap records and did not look through videos, audio books, or actual books–and I didn’t even go into the Better Books section. I have enough to read, ainna? Enough to listen to as well, so only the one stop and only a little more than a sawbuck.

Hopefully, I have room for them in the shelving.

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Twenty Years On, Let Me Give It A Listen

May 1, 2026 Brian J. Noggle

So my beautiful wife is at a conference in Wichita, Kansas, to close out the week, and every time she mentioned it, I would lay down the line dun dun dundun dun dun dun:

For a long time, I thought the song was called “Wichita”.

You know, about that era, I had print subscriptions to Spin, Maxim, FHM, GQ, and even Playboy for a year or two . I was staring down the barrel of turning thirty, and I was probably still steeped in both kinds of music (country and western) at the time. So I desperately sought information on what kids those days (which is to say, people who were just a couple years younger than I was) were listening to and, I guess, wearing, although I really never have been a fashion plate. But I remember the White Stripes were on the cover of Spin. As were the Black Keys, I’m sure, and I didn’t pay enough attention to be able to tell them apart.

At any rate, now that their music is “oldies,” not that music is allowed to be oldies these days, I’ll give them some consideration. Because whenever I let YouTube run on and present me new music, I am beginning to wonder if it’s a real band or if it’s AI. And by plumbing the past with actual bands I heard of back then, maybe I’ll find something else new to me.

But I’m not going to like Pearl Jam or Green Day. That’s out of the question.

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It’s Always “For Your Convenience”

April 30, 2026 Brian J. Noggle

Walmart axes self-checkouts and switches back to traditional lanes – but not because they care about customer service:

Walmart is showing self-checkout machines the door at additional supercenters as the retail giant’s automation experiment continues to unravel.

The world’s biggest retailer removed the machines from its South Philadelphia store in March, and brought back traditional cashier lanes.

It’s only the latest location to ax self-checkout. A Walmart store in Missouri removed all self-checkout machines after the kiosks led to 509 police calls in just five months.

In 2024, the retailer brought back staffed checkout lanes for Shrewsbury, Missouri, and Cleveland, Ohio storefronts, in an effort to give customers a more ‘efficient’ checkout experience.

Bosses insist the shift is about service. ‘These changes are guided by feedback from associates and customers, local shopping patterns, and the needs of the business in each community,’ the company said.

The change was aimed to ‘improve the checkout experience and enable associates to provide more personalized customer service.’

Sure, sure. Like the aisle widths, which narrowed a couple years ago to the point where it was damned difficult to navigate with a cart when other shoppers were present, widened guided by feedback and customers again, coincidentally the same time that associates wheeling giant online order carts started needing to get through it.

You know, I’ve written some marketing copy and press releases/communications from time to time, but we’ve definitely gone from putting the best face on something to tincturating down one’s lats and expressing precipitation, ainna?

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Movie Report: Fantasy Mission Force (1983)

April 29, 2026April 29, 2026 Brian J. Noggle

Book cover I got this film three years ago, and since I have been watching films with and/or about Bruce Lee, I popped this film in and…. what did I just watch?

This is a direct-to-video or direct-to-cable kind of movie, something that might have appeared on USA Network’s Up All Night program where they played outlandish films like Hell Comes to Frogtown or Surf Nazis Must Die. Heck, maybe they did play it at some point.

So, the plot: In World War 11 II, four allied generals are captured by the Japanese. A, erm, Chinese military man puts together a band of misfits to attempt a rescue, including a varmint, a con man, a guy who is dressed like Elvis, a couple of gay-coded, kilt-wearing members of the British Indian forces (I presume), a woman whom I thought was actually the hero, and a couple other interchangeable pieces, none of whom is Jackie (or Jacky) Chan. The first part of this film is the assembly of this group, after nixing James Bond, Snake Plissken, Rocky (I guess Rambo: First Blood Part 11 II was not yet the phenomenon)–no fooling, they’re offered as possible rescuers but are rejected–the first part, then is the, what, Allied authorities capturing these brigands to carry out the raid. Jackie Chan and a partner appear as grifters as well, but they’re not part of the main group–they just want to recoup the money they lost in a grift-within-a-grift, so they’re following the group. After assembly, the group travels toward the place where they think the generals are being held, and they visit–and destroy–a village of cannibalistic martial arts women and then a haunted house, where each individual is tempted in his or her own way by undead creatures, and then they get to the final destination to find a bunch of dead Japanese, and then they’re attacked by Japanese Nazis in 70s muscle cars festooned with Nazi swastikas, and then they’re all slaughtered except for Jackie Chan and his partner, who learn that it was all a double-cross from the beginning.

The film was dubbed from the original Chinese, and I do so wonder what might have changed in the translation. Perhaps not much, as outlandish as it was in English.

I invited my boys to watch the film because, hey, Jacky Chan, but I’m glad they demurred (as they always do, now). Because they were not steeped in the direct-to-cable schlock in the 1980s and they would not have been acutely amused to watch something like it. Will I watch it again? Probably not, but one never knows.

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Book Report: Kendo for Beginners by Masahiro Imafuji (2017)

April 28, 2026April 27, 2026 Brian J. Noggle

Book cover Ah, gentle reader. I have picked this short book to be a mild distraction whilst I work through That Hideous Strength, The Complete Works of Shakespeare, Pamela, and the second book in the Story of Civilization set by the Durants. Well, mostly, That Hideous Strength right now, which I thought might go better/go faster after reading the Gothickish mess of The Unloved, but, oh, no. Still slow going there–a couple of segments of a chapter or a chapter of it a night. So: This book, which I acquired at ABC Books in 2023 (along with two books on how to play guitar, strangely enough–clearly this is a sign that I need to learn to play guitar).

So: It is a rather recent book as the books I acquire goes. It is a basic instruction book on Kendo, Japanese swordfighting techniques for a hand-and-a-half sword, focusing on fighting armored opponents. It has a list of exercises and drills and a couple of illustrations, but mostly it directs the user to YouTube videos for actual demonstrations. Which is atypical for the books I read on martial arts–most of them are old enough that they precede YouTube. I haven’t watched the videos, though, as I’m still a fencer more than a kendo guy, and that will be all right until people start wearing armor again. Good enough for duels, anyway.

And, as I mentioned, or meant to, it’s a slash and chop martial art, designed to cut through samurai armor. Try this on full plate, and you’re probably in a world of hurt. So some stepping and chopping from overhead strikes. I wonder how well I could pick it up from some of the diamond footwork drills I’ve learned (and included in Boxing Drill Companion, available on the Apple App Store!). Simple research indicates there are three kendo dojos in Missouri, none in Springfield, and my dojo only trains sticks these days (in the past, we did some sword work, other weapons, and other styles, but that was a long, long time ago).

I’m thinking about going through some of the thinner martial arts books I’ve got to continue with the breaks from the homeworkish reading. It makes me feel like a martial artist in a period where I’ve gone through a little lull in my studies due to many circumstances, only one of which is that I’m lazy and feeling old at the same time.

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Columnist Forgives Springfield

April 27, 2026 Brian J. Noggle

Opinion: The convention center: We aren’t there – yet:

At the same time, I really believe in the people of Springfield. I’ve seen what we can do when we come together. We know how to collaborate, solve problems and do great things together.

He forgives you, Springfield. Please try do do better next time. Soon.

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You Don’t Have To Explain; We Remember

April 25, 2026 Brian J. Noggle

From Sarah Hoyt’s meme dump today:

Say his name: Ira Einhorn.

The Unicorn Killer who killed his girlfriend, stored her body in a trunk, and when caught, fled to France and lived there for decades.

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Book Report: The Unloved by John Saul (1988)

April 24, 2026April 23, 2026 Brian J. Noggle

Book cover I don’t know where I got this Book Club edition; as it does not show up on any Good Book Hunting reports, I’ll assume that I inherited from my aunt who passed away 20 years ago whose few bookshelves were packed with 70s and 80s horror and thrillers. You know, in my Ebay peddling days, she came along to estate sales a time or two and tried the Ebay thing for a while as well–at least, she listed, sold, and shipped a few things from what she picked up, mostly the collectible statuary of the era. She did better than Pixie, who more frequently accompanied me, who collected items but didn’t generally get around to listing them on Ebay.

At any rate, I read Creature in 2019, and I thought it was okay. But this book? Absurd. Absurd. I did not like it.

So: A prodigal son is called back to his childhood home, Sea Oaks, as his mother is dying. So he brings his nuclear family to the island and its antebellum mansion off the coast of the southern United States. His mother is a harridan who has been hard on his sister who wanted to be a dancer but fell down the stairs and broke a hip which put off her dreams, which to be honest were as much her mother’s dreams. The old woman dies, and then the daughter goes crazy (again) and begins to kill everyone one-by-one. The wife. Her dance students. Her housekeeper. Her brother. And so on. Somehow, the fact that these deaths are piling up on Sea Oaks in a relatively short time (like a couple weeks) doesn’t draw any attention, and somehow, this middle-aged woman with a pronounced limp can get the drop on a whole bunch of people and can handle corpses like a professional coroner, and….

Oh, for Pete’s sake. I have recently dinged authors for having their plots too informed by video games; this book’s plotting seems ripped from contemporary (then) direct-to-video slasher films. Eesh, one of the first video cassettes we owned in 1985 was Alice, Sweet Alice, and this book is right on par with it.

I mean, Saul is an adequate writer. He spends a little too much time, perhaps, setting up the tropish Southern Gothic setting (the first hundred pages of the 300 page book are setting the scene, it seems). But.

Yeah, you know, I’ve often, at least in person, commented on how some writers of the past who are wildly successful in their time are forgotten now. When I was hitting the estate sales around the turn of the century, as the, what, Silent Generation and maybe Greatest Generation were cleaning out, I saw a hella lotta Frank Yerby novels. A lot of Harold Robbins novels. Probably my share of John Saul novels. But you don’t hear much about them now, and reading this book written and published in my lifetime, I can kind of see how it happens. Wildly popular, a product of its time, but not timeless in any sense.

I don’t know how many other Saul novels I might have floating around here; however, I can say that it will probably be another seven years before I get to one. Unless I decide I must read all the John Saul books right now like I sometimes do. But I hope not.

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So Why Can’t I Play Guitar?

April 24, 2026 Brian J. Noggle

Ah, gentle reader. I have mentioned that when my contracts get thin, I have extra time, and I often squander it (that post was a full-time position ago). I left that aforementioned full-time position sixteen months ago, and I’ve been cruising on a couple of contracts–one that I’ve worked on intermittently since that post in 2020 and one that engages me half time for six or seven week stretches. Well, the first has gone into remission for a bit, and the other went down to ten hours a week max billed for a role that really requires closer to the 20. So I have sent some finalish bills, and in the interim in this year and almost a half…..

I guess I have squandered a lot of time, again.

I guess I have been doing something–developing and releasing a number of apps which have sold in the double digits now (combined). But over the winter, I fell into the doomscrolling again–I would hit the job boards, read some blogs, and then after lunch I would refresh certain selected things and launch a game of Civ in the background.

So it occurred to me in the middle of the night one day last week that I could have learned to play guitar by now. As you might remember, gentle reader, I bought a guitar some years ago and took some lessons, but in those busier times, I didn’t have a lot of time to practice. So it sits in the corner of the office, gathering dust with a bass guitar I bought some years later some years ago now. If I had spent an hour or even a half hour on weekdays plucking at them, I probably could have learned to play something by now.

So as the spring begins, I’m resolved to tackle some things. I’ve started cleaning out the garage a bit. I’ve added some projects to Goal-Task-Chore, the app I developed for just such a purpose. And look at this:

My brother gave me that coffee table and end chairs in 1999 because I was into wood refinishing. Which means about that time I refinished something or other and wanted to do others–including a desk whose hardware I removed but never got to refinishing but instead have used as a desk in my office in all of the homes I’ve lived in since then without the hardware attached (and, as a matter of fact, I found one of the pieces of metal trim on the floor of the garage before my workbench when I was cleaning up over the weekend–no idea where the rest of it is). When I received this living room furniture, which he got tired of moving while he was in the Marine Corps, I broke it into individual pieces so I could stain them individually. And I broke one of the pieces when knocking the pieces with a rubber mallet.

And, gentle reader, I then moved those pieces from Sycamore Hills to Casinoport to Old Trees to Nogglestead, and they were on the bottom shelf of one of the plastic shelving units in the garage for fifteen years until last year when I started cleaning the garage and determined I would refinish them finally. Ah! But they remained unassembled and unrefinished because I could not find two of the cross-braces.

However, I found them as part of this weekend’s cleaning, and I glued the broken piece since I’m suddenly gluing a lot of furniture (and have many furniture/bar clamps all of a sudden). Today, I put them together for the first time in thirty years, and this weekend I shall begin stripping and sanding them, and….

Well, I’m not sure what I’ll do with them when I’m done. I’d thought about actually putting them in the living room, but now that I see them again, the end tables might be a little short. But, we will see.

And when they’re done or drying, maybe I’ll pick up the guitar.

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On Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition Part V with Professor Susan Sage Heinzelman (2004)

April 23, 2026April 22, 2026 Brian J. Noggle

Book cover Wow, I’m relatively tearing through this set. I “just” finished up the previous binder, a 6 disc/12 lecture set, last month. And, with each as we get later into the canon, which spreads and broadens after antiquity, I think, “Man, I don’t think I will have read or will want to read many I’m about to hear about.” But in this set, I am wrong.

This set is taught by Dr. Heinzelman, an Englishwoman whose accent was almost somnulent at the beginning, is subtitled “Neoclassical Literature and the 18th Century”.

Individual lectures include:

Molière
Jean Racine
Sister Juana Inés de la Cruz
Daniel Defoe
Alexander Pope
Jonathan Swift
Voltaire
Jean-Jacques Rosseau
Samuel Johnson
Denis Diderot
William Blake
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Sorry, I guess with a book quiz, I would have highlighted what I have read and would have posted links to what I have read in the last 20 years, but I didn’t. Allow me to say I just read Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels in 2016. I thought I’d reviewed some Blake on the blog, but maybe I was thinking about Drawings of William Blake in 2016 (also) or hearing a lecture on Blake in The Lives and Works of the English Romantic Poets last year (a recurring theme, as the next set kicks off with Wordsworth). I listened to Voltaire and the Triumph of the Enlightenment in 2021, and my beautiful girlfriend (now wife) and I read Candide to each other while courting (although she identified with Cunegonde, but my wife is beautiful and baked me little rhubarb pies to take to work when I was going to work in the 1900s). I read Robinson Crusoe on my own in high school. I read Sor Juana de la Cruz…. In high school? In college? But en español (so, of all the things we will cover/will have covered in this lecture series, this will be the only non-native English writer I will have read in the original, although I remember only a bit/concept). Also, no, no Molière, but to contrast Wisconsin with Missouri, at least we pronounce Racine correctly (even though many or most people up north do not know who Racine was). Also, although I did not read Faust in the original (I read Dr. Faustus by Marlowe in 2020 and saw the opera form of it at Loretto-Hilton Center in St. Louis with that same beautiful girlfriend who would become my beautiful wife), I am almost there in pronouncing Goethe with the invisible R like an educated person.

So: I’ve read a bunch. I might need to look into my Classics Club editions to see what I can read from these authors (and authors from previous binders in this series). Hopefully, some Diderot. But I listened to this, and I came home from St. Louis, and I found a substack from Jack Baruth quoting Samuel Johnson. So maybe I should pick up that volume, should I have it in the stacks, first. After all the other things, cheap and/or deep, I have stacked up beside the chair.

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He’s Talking About The Last Chase, Isn’t He?

April 23, 2026 Brian J. Noggle

Adaptive Curmudgeon yesterday:

In 1981 the nerdiest Canadian rock band to ever exist released Red Barchetta. I loved it. I still do.

It’s the story of a young man who lives in a dystopian future. His uncle possess a glorious little sports car but “motor laws” have outlawed(?) such things. As any true rock protagonist should, he ignores this and goes tearing through the countryside in the beautiful mechanical delight. Shortly a “gleaming alloy aircar” appears, then a second, both intent of destroying him and his little car. The antique sportscar enthusiast outdrives the behemoth machines and flits back to safety at his uncle’s farm.

Being Gen X I’d been hammered about environment since I was born. I assumed “motor laws” were an environmental thing. Later I read the sci fi story that was the song’s inspiration.

He’s talking about a Rush song. But he’s also talking about the Lee Majors film The Last Chase, ainna? It also came out in 1981, and I saw it several times at the home of the family friends who had HBO.

Interesting: I thought I’d mentioned seeing this movie before because it was set way in the (then) future of 2011 and because they were taking the red car to “free California” which was the opposite of the totalitarian state they were fleeing (which followed a viral pandemic). But a quick search of the archives indicates I have not yet mentioned it. Or that my blog does not want me to find it.

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To Coin A Phrase

April 21, 2026 Brian J. Noggle

I used Äi! Äi! Cthulhu fhtagn! in a LinkedIn post today, which spins Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn! from the Cthulhu mythos and uses it to poke fun at the cult of LLMs.

Sometimes, I think I’m clever.

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The Slow Burning Poems of Brian J.

April 21, 2026 Brian J. Noggle

Ah, gentle reader. I might have mentioned that I have been dabbling in poetry again for, what, the last six years? (I completed a poem six years ago which had taken me years to write it, they were the best years of my life; it was a beautiful song, but it ran too long–if you’re gonna have a hit, you gotta make it fit, so they cut it down to 3:05-wait, no, that wasn’t me, except that I finished that poem after having parts of it on a legal pad for years, unfinished.)

Anyway, so: I’ve been working on a poem about estate sales. Basically, it tells about how I used to haunt estate sales at old, dated houses (back around the turn of the century, I would spend Saturday mornings at estate sales and the other weeknights listing books, games, et cetera, that I bought on Ebay. But, now, after 16 years at Nogglestead with little change, I can understand why someone might have found their 1960s or 1970s home comfortable.

So I thought it would be two stanzas. But then I thought maybe a hinge stanza about my aunt who died in 2019, parceling out furniture while she was still alive. And I thought about it for a long time without really putting pen to paper, but considering it a bit, you know.

Well, a couple of weeks ago, I got the opportunity to go to the coffee shop for a little bit and put pen to paper. And, after another coffee shop visit a couple of days later, I had the hinge stanza. And when I got to the computer to add it to the official Word document, I discovered that I’d finished(ish) the first stanza last October. Jeez Louise, given this pacing, I’ll be lucky to finish the poem this year.

Ay, me. I am not breaking any land-speed records with these poems, and I’m certainly not a professional. But that’s okay; I’ve been reading a lot of The Complete Works of books, and even the best poets have a lot of chaff with their wheat (apologies to Leah Lathrom Wallace for stealing her chapbooks’ metaphor). Maybe I’ll just focus on the wheat. Which might well be just chaff.

I will be glad to exorcise this particular poem, however. Between a comment my wife made sometime ago (along the lines of her hoping to die before me so she doesn’t have to deal with all my stuff), the slow-motion end of Lileks’ marriage, including a downsizing sale (this weekend, in fact), and suddenly, I have been walking trhough my house like I was walking through my own estate sale. I mean, I have a lot of books, and my boys no longer like to read. The personal relics which were things my family members owned will mean little to them–they did not know much of my family. I have no urge to go to the book sales this year. I’m starting to get rid of the reified potential in my garage–I will donate some of the things to the new Lutheran High School thrift store if it gets off the ground. I brought in some wine glasses I’d bought to–I guess paint with stained glass paint, since three of them had masking tape around the lip line.

Hopefully, a combination of finishing this particular poem and maybe cleaning my garage a bit so I can do some project work in it will help fight the old ennui.

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The Magic of Jim Manley

April 20, 2026 Brian J. Noggle

Ah, gentle reader. As you might have gleaned from the tone of the blog lately, I’ve been fighting vainly the old ennui. But last week, I had a magical moment which might have set things aright, or at least made things a little better.

My beautiful wife had submitted, almost off-handedly, a talk for the cybersecurity day in St. Louis’s Tech Week, and it was accepted. So we decided to make a little trip of it–instead of driving up early on the day of the conference, we went up the night before and stayed two nights. We ended up stationed about two blocks from where I worked when I was an executive at a marketing agency, so I spent a little time while she was in a woman’s event in the early evening walking around, trying to remember where things were. Was it this corner where Carlos with the grill sold me lunch (two brats, plain)? Is this coffee shop where the Starbucks used to be, our daily destination for work breaks? And so on. A lot has changed in the 20 years since I left that office. I walked back to the women’s tech event to escort my wife back to our hotel (“Did you walk with me just for safety?” she asked on the drive back home. Yes.)

The room was nice; I sent a picture to my oldest, and he wanted to know about the foot traffic. Not a lot–a pedestrian every block or so. The hotel is right by the convention center. There are some offices and residences down there, I guess, but the big office towers are a little to the north and the well-known loft district is a little to the west. So the foot traffic is less than what we encounter in Springfield in its more compact and destination downtown. Not too many homeless around–no tent cities, just a couple people wandering around, one guy sprawled outside the venue where her women in tech event was held–and an associate who was trying to rouse him. The pocket park outside the Old Post Office was packed with the indigent, and I picked up the cap from a nip bottle on the bottom of a shoe like a single tap for a couple dozen yards–but I didn’t feel unsafe, just wary.

And our hotel room: Ah, I don’t know whether it was developed as a hotel or was originally a loft building chopped into a hotel. Our room had high ceilings–12 or more feet–and floor to ceiling windows as two walls. Nice, but the southern exposure meant the room warmed up. No problem: Blackout drapes for the win. But it was really nice, although I often punched the wrong button at the elevator because the restaurant, fitness center, and pool were on the upper floors of the five-story building.

At any rate, what about Jim Manley?

Well, gentle reader, as you might not be aware, Jim Manley is a St. Louis trumpet player who gets played plenty on WSIE, which I stream on my computer most days. When I decided to tag along to this conference, I started checking the calendars of the local jazz artists, and–well, I didn’t get far because Manley plays weekly on Wednesday nights at Sasha’s Wine Bar in Clayton. As my wife plays trumpet, I thought this would be the right choice, and it was.

We took a rideshare from another Tech Week event to Clayton, arriving two hours early, and we told the waitress we were in no hurry as we were there for Jim Manley. So we had a leisurely dinner, and our server told us she’d reserved one of her tables where he would play. Sasha’s is a charming little shop, a jumble of rooms carved out of two buildings on Demun, and Manley played in a barroom with, I guess, a retractable roof, which came in handy. His first set started at 8:30.

It was a low-key thing; he was just the guy in the corner with a trio (he started without his drummer, who arrived fifteen minutes late and maybe intoxicated). The other people in the room continued their conversations; we had a large table of a ladies night out beside us. But we were front and center, with chairs the server had turned to face Jim Manley. Nobody else knew it was a Jim Manley concert..

As he played, storms started rolling in from the west; when I turned to glance at my wife, she was framed by flashes of sheet lightning behind her. In the middle of his set, a downpour provided its own percussion. God didn’t know it was a Jim Manley concert.

After his first set, my wife went to talk to him, and he was very gracious as they talked trumpets and then came over to talk to me was well. Because I knew it was a Jim Manley concert.

We took advantage of a brief interlude in the storm to head back to our hotel; as we began, the tornado sirens went off with a tornado warning. As St. Louis had a bad tornado rip through last year, no doubt they’re pushing that button a lot this year–it was the same after the Joplin tornado down here, where the weather people lit it up many times the next year or so, reverting to the mean (one or two a year, maybe) in more recent years.

And after a chapel service at the Lutheran seminary just a couple blocks form Sasha’s, we returned home.

And, you know what? I will remember this trip with more pleasure than recent trips, such as Branson this January, Florida in December, or Big Cedar last May.

I mean, people in Clayton can go see Jim Manley every Wednesday. But would I? I dunno. When we lived in Old Trees, we lived two blocks from the theater where the opera theater group and the St. Louis Rep play, but I haven’t been there in…. Almost thirty years? I guess we were in a different place then, with very young children, but…. Eh, who knows? Before children, I/we got around a little more. But now it’s fairly rare, although maybe we’ll get around the Springfield area more often. Or maybe (and probably more likely), this trip, like my “trip to see Janet Evra” in 2019, will just underline how I enjoy these little concerts. More than I did when I lived in St. Louis and could see a corner musician in a coffee shop all the time. Perhaps these experiences are more meaningful because they are excursions, expeditions, and not just part of the background noise of everyday life.

Ah, well. Jim Manley didn’t have an CDs for sale, so I didn’t get any autographed, and it looks like his most recent releases are download-only. So when I get a couple bucks, I’ll order a couple of older releases on CD. Until then, I’ll hear him on WSIE almost daily.

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