Them: How is Heather?
Me: I’m sorry, HIPAA regulations prohibit me from sharing medical information about my wife with a third party.
Brian J. Kills the Small Talk
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A Real Estate Challenge The Noggles Share
WHERE do you house 10,000 books? In an apartment with plenty of shelf space, of course.
So that’s what Thomas and Katherine Cole needed when they moved to New York.
Mr. Cole, 71, who retired five years ago as a classics professor at Yale University, likes working from home, which means having on hand the thousands of reference works he might need. (He is writing a literary study of Ovid.)
We can aspire to 10,000 volumes. We’ve got to be at several thousand now. Our next house will need a room dedicated to being the library. Probably not a finished room in the basement which might flood. You see, we’ve thought it over.
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When Scienceocrats Attack!
A new study questions whether conversion of corn into ethanol actually expends more energy than it stores. When confronted with contrary data, modern scienceocrats do the obvious: they attack the study on merits other than scientific:
- Researchers at the National Corn-To-Ethanol Research Center at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville said there are several federal studies that cite the opposite and said the recent study is harming their ability to reduce the United States’ dependence on foreign oil.
“It discourages me,” said Martha Schlicher, director of the research center. “People tend to remember negative news instead of becoming educated in what may not be as interesting. I worry that in a time so critical for energy security and the environment that this detracts from getting accurate information to consumers.”
Forget about the data. How do you feel? The director of the research center nust feel discouraged, because if scientists cannot disprove this data, then something more important than truth lies at stake:
- At a time when businesses, state officials and farmers are investing millions of dollars in ethanol research, researchers at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., and the University of California at Berkeley found it takes 29 percent more energy to turn corn into ethanol than the amount stored in the resulting fuel. [Emphasis mine]
If ethanol proves to as effective as mixing snake oil with banana oil, who’s going to want to pay to maintain research facilities to studying the proper ratios, and more importantly, to keep directors salaried?
Allow me to quickly consolidate the new, revised, and more better
Twenty-First Century Scientific Method
- Observe some aspect of the universe.
- Determine that the aspect of the universe impacts some large corporation, public policy initiative, or both.
- Write grant proposals and get funding for research into the aspect of the universe.
- Organize and attend conferences to confabulate with others who are thinking about the aspect of the universe, or perhaps just related fields, or perhaps unrelated fields–after all, the universe is holistically interrelated.
- When funding is about to run out, invent a tentative description, called a hypothesis. You can make it all up if you want; it only needs to be believeable enough to warrant more funding.
- Use the hypothesis to make predictions and as progress report or new grant proposal fodder.
- Receive more funding.
- Test those predictions by experiments or further observations and conclude you need more funding to conduct further research.
- Repeat steps 6 through 8 until retirement age.
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Book Report: Ring of Truth by Nancy Pickard (2001)
I inherited this book from my aunt, which explains why I’ve read a chickthrilla. That in itself lends itself to some interesting contrasts with the crime fiction I tend to read, where every protagonist has a shot in an equal fight with amateur bad guys. Here, the protagonist is a foot shorter and a hundred pounds lighter than commone adversaries. Weird.
This book revolves around a true crime writer who has put to bed a book on a south Florida crime of passion. A minister who has argued against the death penalty has been convicted of killing his wife to cover up an affair or to be with his lover. Coincidentally, he’s now on death row in the next cell from the inmate whose cause the minister championed. But as she sends the book off, the narrator has some niggling doubts about the crimes, and she investigates a little more.
The book intersperses chapters of the fictional true crime book with current thoughts of the true crime author/sleuth, Marie Lightfoot. It struck me as odd that the chapters of the book are all in third person past tense, but the current investigations are in the first person present. I mean, that’s just weird. I’m sure the author (Pickard, the real author) used the conceit to differentiate the fictional book from the real fictional book, er, story. It’s more jarring than it needs to be, though, and I could have done without it.
Overall, it’s a serviceable book with an interesting plot but with an ending and whodunit resolution that seems sudden, but part of that’s the function of the first part of the book including a higher portion of fictional chapters from the true crime book, which presents the story as it’s thought to be, and the last part of the book includes a higher portion of contemporary investigation of the fictional author. I don’t regret reading it, unlike some books with which I have burdened myself of late, but I won’t actively seek out other works in Pickard’s Marie Lightfoot or Jenny McCain series on the basis of this exposure.
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Dilemma
Brett Favre could easily win election to anything in Wisconsin. But how would I feel if he were to run as a Democrat, like Heath Shuler?
It’s too depressing to speculate.
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Libertarians Tear Hair Out In Missouri
Nudity or lap dances in strip clubs? Now illegal!
Adult entertainment businesses plan to ask a judge to block a new law that would prohibit lap dances and full nudity in Missouri strip clubs.
The Missouri chapter of Adult Club Executives plans to seek an injunction next week against the law, scheduled to take effect Aug. 28, said Kansas City attorney Richard Bryant, who represents the group.
The legislation, signed Wednesday by Gov. Matt Blunt, would prohibit customers and employees younger than 21 at strip clubs. It also would ban nudity and require seminude employees to remain at least 10 feet away from customers and behind a 2-foot-high railing. The bill would prohibit employees from touching customers.
Drinking in public? Now legal!
For revelers in Kansas City’s downtown entertainment district, the party won’t have to end at the door.
A law signed by Gov. Matt Blunt will allow patrons to stroll in and out of restaurants and bars without dumping their alcoholic beverages. Kansas City officials are reworking the city’s alcohol ordinance to make it conform with the state’s law.
We Libertarians would rather not trade one vice for another because we just cannot choose which one we like best.
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Brian J. Does Potter
 Click for full size |
Like everyone else this weekend, Friday night at midnight found me with inked sigils upon my body, attire of coarse robes, and silly-looking glasses. In other words, it was a normal Friday evening. But on Saturday, I too joined America in picking up the latest Potter book, and I read it in one sitting. After which point, I could hardly walk after not having eaten nor napped in the afternoon as is my wont. This one departs from earlier novels and takes the series in a new direction. Harry Potter, having graduated and decided against wizard graduate school or a career in wizard fast food, returns home to Brooklyn to open a new storefront affiliate of Hogwarts. Thus, at Hogwarts High School, he becomes a teacher and mentor to a group of loveable losers called the Sweathogwarts. Although losers in the muggle world, the Sweathogwarts have power in the ways of disco magic and Potter begins to teach them to use their powers for good and not merely peeking into the girls’ locker room. But evil follows Harry across the ocean, and the Sweatwarthogs must confront an evil called the Woodman who’s working for He Must Not Be Named As The Confidential Source. I don’t want to give too much away of the plot, but needless to say the Sweathogwarts work together, with Harry offering guidance, and use the power of their authenticity, ethnicity, magic, and ‘fros to dispatch the Woodman. Rumor had it that someone would die in this book, and the rumor has become fact: Near the end, Malfoy comes into the apartment he has leased in Brooklyn to be evil’s base of operations. He finds a wand on the counter and as he’s looking at it, a nervous Barbarino comes out of the bathroom. Malfoy turns Barbarino into Swiss cheese. To lessen the impact, the book ends with Potter telling his wife Hermy a humorous anecdote about his great uncle’s cousin who owned a fish shop. Perhaps this foreshadowing indicates that the next book deals with evil under the sea? Let the speculation commence! |
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Casting Call for the Plame Scandal
Getting a jump on the movie version of the Plame scandal, which will be as ageless and relevant as All The President’s Men for future generations, we at MfBJN proffer the following suggestion for cast:
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The Operative Word (2006)
Tagline: Love. Politics. Bush=Hitler. Plot Outline: As retaliation for telling the truth about the Bush regime’s illegal war in Iraq, an evil mastermind outs an undercover CIA agent, putting her life in danger as she travels the world’s hotspots and New York’s photo ops to minimize the danger done by the real terrorists, the Republican administration.
Production Notes/Status:
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Scheduled for release in October 2006. Just in time for elections Oscar nominations!
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Poor Form, Peter
A radio station here in St. Louis suspends two morning personalities who had an on-air discussion of how to fight cops effectively. Yes, that’s crass and abominable, but free speech and all that. The radio station has taken steps and public outcry should lead to outright firings and “you’ll never work in this town again!”-esque corporate blacklisting. None of which is censorship because the government isn’t involved.
This, on the other hand, is very, very bad:
But O’Fallon sergeant Tom Otten is far from satisfied by the punishment. “What does a suspension do? It does nothing. That shows a horrible lack of character and moral judgment”[sic]
If the deejays aren’t fired, Otten vows to write and call his fellow officers to have them contact the KATZ advertisers, and urge them to remove their ads.
Law enforcement officials, even if acting unofficially, should not urge businesses to do anything other than obey the law. Because this police-urged boycott does lend itself to censorship.
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Summer of the Pit Bull! Part XIV
A shocking image of a vicious killer about to strike!
BAN THESE MENACES NOW but leave the chows, akitas, dobermans, and dachshunds alone.
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Book Report: The Last Jihad by Joel C. Rosenberg (2002)
The Publishers Weekly blurb that appears on the Amazon page for this book begins, “Timeliness adds considerable juice to Rosenberg’s frenzied political thriller, set a couple of years in the future.” Riiiiiight. The book is set in 2010. Saddam Hussein is behind a plot to assasinate the president who wants to bring peace the Israel, finally, by talking to Chairman Arafat and with the deus ex discovery of oil off the shore of Israel and the Gaza Strip. Or something.
I bought this book for $5.98 off of the discount rack at Barnes and Noble, using gift cards, natch. I picked it because I thought Joel C. Rosenberg was Joel Rosenberg. I started reading it last week because I heard Rush Limbaugh talking about Joel C. Rosenberg. Friends, don’t be fooled. Although Joel C. Rosenberg gleefully blurs the distinction to draw suckers like me in (why else is is Web site JoelRosenberg.com when he’s diligent about putting his middle initial on his book covers, hmmm?), he’s not Joel Rosenberg. He’s not even a decent fiction writer.
All right, so I’ve already mentioned the gripping premise of the book, whose shelf life expired by the end of 2002. Now, I will break down the book’s composition for you:
- 60% meetings
of the cabinet and president or the president and someone or someone and staff. Includes 4 pages spent on a “tension-breaking” anecdote about flatulence and its counter tension-breaking 3-page story of misunderstaken lesbianism. The characters loved these particular stories, breaking up in laughter I, the reader, didn’t share. Most of the rest of these meetings involve various cabinet members debating the stakes of the plot. - 12% character sketches
thrown in simply because the author went through the trouble of creating them. The life story of the minor character of the Chief of Staff? Hey, we’ve got the material, throw it in! - 4% action,
presented in riveting cut scenes of short length and of pointless peril. Whoa, the helicopter of SEALs almost got shot down by an Iraqi MiG! That was close. Considering that they don’t do a fallujin thing in the book, it’s wasted space. - 8% miscellaneous exposition.
Hey! That doesn’t add up to 100%!
Neither does this ordeal of a book. Lord amighty, although I took some snickering amusement from the book (what was it with using rimming BlackBerries all the time, including the middle of a firefight between the Wall Street protagonists and the dreaded uberterrorists in the red shirts? Why do the bad guys send clandestine e-mails to each others’ AOL accounts?), I wouldn’t recommend this book to anyone at any price.
It’s Clancy without the technology. Or suspense. Or any redeeming feature one finds in Clancy.
How many rules of fiction does it break? I just wrote an essay about things fiction writers should avoid, partially inspired by this book. I mean, when he wrote the book in 2001 or early 2002 (that long weekend this book took, three whole days, no doubt), its premise was believeable and compelling, but Rosenberg mistakes the personalities of the enemy (Hussein and Arafat) for systems (the Cold War Soviet Union of countless fiction writers or the WWII Nazis of Alistair MacLean and others). And then he projects their existence almost a decade into the future–probably because they existed for most of his adulthood. Three years later, both Hussein and Arafat are gone, and five years before this book’s setting, the world is a different place. Rosenberg also dips technologically into waters that will change by 2010. BlackBerries? Who’s going to have a BlackBerry in 2010? We could have chip implants by then. Telling us how careful the bad guys are to empty their deleted items folder in Microsoft Outlook? In 2010? Eight years before this book was published, Outlook was a twinkle in Bill Gates’ eye.
This book is the equivalent of a contemporary conservative book attacking Bill Clinton or George W. Bush. They’re designed for quick bucks and quick obscurity. This one, on the discount racks as late as 2005, won’t be on a publisher’s backlist because it’s irrelevant and dated before its action takes place.
(Note: Hi, MLI! You’re the only one who reads these things in their entireties, and I laud you for making it this far even though I told you in person how bad this book sucked even before Joel C. Rosenberg reached his word limit and destroyed Baghdad with a last minute Deus Ex Nuclea. I hope I’ve adequately ruined the ending so you never, ever, bother with this book.)
Maybe this C. Rosenberg guy got better after this, his first fiction book, but I’ll never know because from now on I shall be vigilant in avoiding the C. and in not taking Rush Limbaugh’s advice on fiction. I weep for the portion of my life I sacrificed for this book. I got nothing from it.
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From Your Cold, Dead Hands
Ah, so that’s what Hillary needs 100,000 new troops: Grand Confiscation Video Game.
I am getting my conspiracy theories in place just in case (Heaven forfend!) she wins the presidency in 2008. I don’t want to have to merely parrot the byzantine crackpot gossip of others.
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Family Planning
Surprised by a multiple birth? MfBJN offers handy motifs for naming multiple simultaneous children:
Presidential Theme
Twins:
- Zachary, Taylor
- John, Adam
- Rutherford, Hayes
- Chester, Arthur
- James, Monroe
- James, Garfield
- John, Tyler
- James, Madison
- Jimmy, Carter
- Franklin, Pierce
Triplets:
- William, Henry, Harrison
Musical Theme
Twins:
- Paula, Abdul
- Bryan, Adam
- Rick, Astley
- Lindsey, Buckingham
- Garth, Brooke
- Mariah, Carey
- Alice, Cooper
- Bob, Dylan
- Celine, Dion
- Missy, Elliot
- Aretha, Franklin
- Radney, Foster
- Peter, Gabriel
- Lou, Graham
- Billy, Joel
Triplets:
- Billy, Ray, Cyrus
- Terence, Trent, Darby
Okay, so it ran out of funny before I ran out of names.
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Summer of the Shark!
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Summer of the Pit Bull!
Newspapers make do with the stories they have: Pit bull chases puppy into house.
Meanwhile, here in the Noggle home, Summer of the Tabby continues as one tabby chases the other around the house. Or is it vice versa?
(Link seen on Ravenwood’s Universe.)
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That’s A Big Twinkie
From a story profiling the guy behind Internet Haganah in the Washington Post called “Watchdogs Seek Out the Web’s Bad Side“:
He said he has received thousands of dollars in donations, as well as some ominous death threats. One warning came in a handwritten letter mailed to Weisburd’s house. Another letter on a Web site declared that he should be beheaded and it listed his address. For his protection, Weisburd keeps a loaded 38mm pistol in the house.
That would leave a mark, to be sure.
(Link seen on Free Will.)
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Nontraditional Columnist: Tradition is Inflexibility
Bryan Burwell of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on the move of the Cardinals from KMOX to KTRS in his column today:
This is no frivolous enterprise. There are plenty of legitimate, practical business reasons why the Cards are mulling a change. Yet in this parochial old baseball town that clings to routine like a pit bull gnawing on a bone, change is a strange and scary place. That is a quirky little characteristic of the Midwest, where the insular mood is to keep things just the way they always are.
Tradition, the bedrock loyalists call it. Inflexibility, the mystified outsiders mock it.
Let’s reflect upon how baseball crosses generations. When I moved to St. Louis in the middle 1980s, I listened to Jack Buck and Mike Shannon calling two Cardinals World Series appearances. When I returned to Missouri after college, they were still in the broadcast booth. As a matter of fact, Jack Buck called games for the Cardinals for fifty years up until his recent death. Mike Shannon still calls games.
However, in the last couple of years, the Cardinals (singular corporate entity) has provided a number of other guys in the broadcast booth. That “See! You! Later!” guy and Wayne “When Will A Real Market Call” Hagin.
As the Cardinals has proven its flexibility by breaking its bonds to my youth, I’ve gone to fewer games. Now that the team will play in a new stadium that I don’t associate fondly with growing up and which will bear numerous names in its existence and the games will play on a new, lesser radio station, I’ll probably listen to fewer games, too.
Because the Cardinals is not a hometown team any more; it is a corporate franchise owned and operated by a company based elsewhere with no respect–none–for St. Louis and tradition other than the tradition of taking money from St. Louisans for baseball.
Of course, we insular Midwesterners wouldn’t expect the well-travelled sports columnist to embrace tradition. He’s only here in the local paper because it offered the best check for now.
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Suburban Cred
That’s right, I got my first L.L. Bean catalog today.
You know, it’s really got absolutely nothing to do with Rowan Atkinson. Now I, too, am privileged to share in that information with my other Casinoport, Missouri, brothers.
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Stage Directions
From Bill McClellan’s online presence today:
Click for full size
ITALICIZE BILL’S RESPONSES, please
Unfortunately, someone forgot the Don’t include editor’s formatting remarks, dang it!
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Engaging Discourse
10 Lines To Get Republican Gals — Like Ann Coulter — Into Bed.
Geez, I would add, for Republican gals like Ann Coulter, something along the lines of Hey, I see tax policies soaking the wealthy are starving you. Can I buy you a sandwich?
(Link seen on Dustbury, who is currently travelling the country and performing field research on the efficacy of the study.)
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