Musings from Brian J. Noggle – Page 441 – To be able to say "Noggle," you first must be able to say "Nah."

Okauchee Light

November 24, 2004February 18, 2018 Brian J. Noggle

Wandering into the dark kitchen, I saw that a neighbor had left its back porch light on, and it reminded me of a poem I had written when I was younger:

Okauchee Light

Across the dark Okauchee lake, a light,
the marker for the end of someone’s dock,
is strangely lit at nearly twelve o’clock
and breaks the solid black that is the night.
From here, across the chilling April lake,
through busy bar room glass I see that glow,
but life or rooms beyond I’ll never know.
One light does not a utopia make.
Quite like your smile, that single man-made star:
Up there, on stage, you flash a smile at me,
and crinkle eyes to give the gesture weight,
but like the dock-end light, you are too far;
your glow is there for someone else to see,
and now, for me at least, it is too late.

I wrote about the keyboardist in the band my friends and I followed around Milwaukee as they played the fairs and bars. Acourse, as an English major, I felt damn proud to mirror The Great Gatsby with the whole bit. Man, I was the little sonnet slut then, casting off fourteen liners at the slightest provocation.

Buy My Books!

Demographically, It Makes Sense

November 23, 2004July 30, 2018 Brian J. Noggle

The headline, Report: Birth Rates for Older Women Rising, really just makes sense, especially when you consider the gist of the story:

U.S. women in their 30s and early 40s had higher birth rates in 2003, while births among teenagers fell for the 12th straight year, federal health officials said on Tuesday.

Well, of course they’re having higher birthrates. Come on, hasn’t anyone else noticed that women in their 30s and 40s have become smoking hotter in the last ten or fifteen years? I mean, when I was a young man, they looked okay, but now, dayumm. They look mighty appetizing for procreative activities and all drills thereof.

The fact that I am in my 30s or 40s is merely coincidental.

Buy My Books!

More Useless Than an English Degree

November 23, 2004July 30, 2018 Brian J. Noggle

Important quote from this article about the author of Fast Food Nation‘s week performance at University of Wisconsin:

“I was looking for more of a venue for action,” said Kirsten Jordan, a UW-Madison student majoring in geography.

A major in geography? Ha-ha! That will prepare you for anything for any number of years until the Bush administration rewrites world maps and alters world climate. Also, clear-cuts and strip mines to alter topography. So in the next four years, about the time this kid is graduating, all that book-learning will be useless.

Hope she’s smart, like me, and picked up a useful second major like philosophy.

(Link seen on Ann Althouse. Well, not on Ann Althouse, but on her blog.)

Buy My Books!

Open Sourcers Hate Technical Writers

November 22, 2004July 30, 2018 Brian J. Noggle

There, I’ve said it: those whack job developers in the open source movement absolutely hate technical writers and seek, in their passive aggressive ways, to make communications professionals look stupid. My proof? Recursive abbreviations.

Look, when a technical writer puts an abbreviation into a document, he or she should spell it out the first time, like this: Java Server Pages (JSP).

But these damn silly recursive abbreviations look really silly when presented this way: PHP Hypertext Protocol (PHP) or GNUs Not UNIX (GNU).

It’s designed so that technical writers cannot sound intelligent while trying to explain the esoteric and eldritch secrets of the divine open-source technology technotheocracy and so that the rabble–that is, the users, cannot fathom the depths of their geniuses.

Pathetic, that’s what it is. And I call it.

Buy My Books!

Non-Iraqis Voting Against Election

November 22, 2004July 30, 2018 Brian J. Noggle

In a move that reminds me of extranationals talking about the American election this month, apparently ministers from other Arabic states are squawking about the Iraqi elections due this January:

Violence and boycotts could yet stop promised Iraqi elections going ahead on time, Arab ministers said, despite Baghdad’s confident assertion the landmark vote would be held on January 30.

Iraq had somewhat upstaged a major international conference in Egypt on its future by announcing the date for the first post-Saddam Hussein elections a day before the meeting opened.

But not everyone was impressed by its confidence.

So let’s run down the list. Doubters include:

Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Abul Gheit
Jordanian Foreign Minister Hani Mulki
an Arab delegate to the conference, speaking on condition of anonymity
Jordanian government spokeswoman Asma Khodr

Hey, here’s a hearty cup of butt the hell out for those representatives of undemocratic societies who have sound bites about sacred democracy. You know what happens if the Sunnis boycott? They don’t vote. Choosing not to participate does not render the decision of the participants invalid. It just means you have to wait until the next election to choose again whether or not to participate.

Buy My Books!

James Lileks Goes Too Far!!!!

November 22, 2004July 30, 2018 Brian J. Noggle

In today’s Bleat, he begins:

I watched the first episode of Battlestar Galactica’s new season. Not something I ever thought I would look forward to, given how much I loathed the original.

And then follows up a few paragraphs later with:

I can only hope that the people behind the 80s version of “Buck Rogers” watch it and soil themselves in shame. If Twiki ever went up against Jar-Jar I’d root for the Binks. Which says a lot. To be exact, it says “bidi bidi bidi.” Meesa hate that.

The man knows no shame and his little “We in the Blue States are soooo much more sophisticated than those silly red staters” division schtick makes me want to cede Minnesota to Canada to spite him.

Also, the Vikings in the CFL would be good for the Packers. But I digress.

Buy My Books!

Everybody Needs A

November 22, 2004August 24, 2022 Brian J. Noggle

Crikey, one femibar, and suddenly I’m drinking coffee from a Holly Hobbie mug:

(Click for full size)

Thank goodness for that one remaining Buck Rogers costume, or I could have had to have been Holly Hobbie.

Buy My Books!

Emasculation

November 22, 2004July 30, 2018 Brian J. Noggle

I suffered a mid-morning hunger pang, so I grabbed one of Heather’s femibars. You know, a Luna bar, the Whole Nutrition Bar for Women, strong enough for a man, Ph balanced to empower a woman, blah blah blah.

So I opened the package and started on it before I noticed the flavor. Toasted Nuts and Berries.

Has a food item ever given you a stern sense of You don’t belong?

Buy My Books!

No Pit Bull Xs for Us

November 22, 2004July 30, 2018 Brian J. Noggle

As some of you know, we have several rules in our house when it comes to selecting a dog:

No Pit Bull mixes.
No Rottweiler mixes.
No Chow mixes.
Should leave most of our cat corps intact.

This story in Slate examines how the animal rights movement and extreme rescue measures are causing an increase in dog attacksDog Bites Man: Not a story—a national crisis.

(Link seen on Professor Bainbridge.)

If only people would adhere to my arbitrary rules.

Buy My Books!

Thank Goodness, a Mass Shooting

November 22, 2004July 30, 2018 Brian J. Noggle

In Wisconsin, a nutbar in the woods, instead of hunting deer, shot five other hunters in whose tree stand he was trespassing. Story.

Uh oh, and wouldn’t you know it, he had an assault rifle:

Five deer hunters were shot to death and three were wounded Sunday by a man who was hunting from someone else’s tree stand in northern Wisconsin, authorities said.

Chai Soua Vang, 36, of St. Paul, Minn., was arrested by a Department of Natural Resources warden just before dark.

The bizarre attack happened on private land in this Sawyer County town about noon on the second day of the gun deer season, a time when hundreds of thousands of deer hunters are in the woods throughout Wisconsin.

Sawyer County Chief Deputy Tim Zeigle said Chai Soua Vang, 36, of St. Paul, Minn., was arrested by a Department of Natural Resources warden just before dark about 4 p.m. on a road about one mile from the scene, just across the Sawyer County border in Rusk County.

Vang was armed with an SKS semiautomatic assault rifle, a weapon that’s similar to a 30.06 but seldom used by deer hunters, Zeigle said.

Let the call for a renewed ban begin! Oh, wait, somewhere out there it already has.

Personally, I think there’s more to the story–like the relationship between the shooter and the dead and wounded–that will not be included in follow-up stories after the nationwide gun banning crowd crows about the dangers of guns.

Buy My Books!

I Am Buck Rogers

November 21, 2004October 31, 2016 Brian J. Noggle

A small anecdote, to celebrate the release of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century – The Complete Epic Series on DVD and this household’s purchase thereof:

Halloween 1984

We, being my mother, brother, and I, lived with my aunt and uncle in St. Charles, Missouri; I don’t know if my mother was working her job at the onion ring factory where she separated onion rings amid the immigrants or whether she had started in government service in the clerical pool at $12,000 a year, but she didn’t have a pile of money to spend on Halloween costumes, nor did she have the time to whip up some of the cardboard costumes for which she had become legend in the housing projects of Milwaukee. So when she got a couple of extra bucks, it was immediately before Halloween, and we hit the Walgreens off of Fifth Street on what must have been October 30.

The costume section had been picked over to the extent that only two costumes for young boys remained, so we got them. The next night, my brother and I tossed coins, drew lots, or perhaps did the traditional simple fight for who would wear which costume. Now, I don’t know if you damn kids even know what passed for costumes in 1984, particularly costumes you could buy at Walgreens. They consisted of a thin plastic mask which covered only your face, secured to the back of your head with a rubber band, and a trashbag-like smock depicting a motif to augment what you were. Not an authentic costume by any means. My brother, the little punk, got Spiderman, so he got red and blue trashbag and a Spiderman-mask red-colored plastic face piece with two dots for the eyes, a slit for the mouth, and two nostril holes located nowhere near his nose.

“Oooh,” said the people who answered the door when trick-or-treating, “It’s Spiderman. And….”

For there I was wearing a trash bag with a guy with a laser pistol and a mask depicting the front 20% of a white helmet with orange bolts and a generic pink male face over my generic pink male face. “I’m Buck Rogers,” I said.

Because, friends, bloggers, and countrymen, it was 1984 and the television show ran in 1979.

It would be the equivalent of dressing like Capt. Malcolm ‘Mal’ Reynolds from television’s Firefly—in 2007. Sure, one sci-fi junkie at one house recognized the outfit–out of an entire subdivision–but that’s before these things were available on DVD and even before the Sci-Fi channel.

I think I was traumatized from the experience, and I can only talk about it now. And now that I have the DVD, I’ve had to relive the experience.

But my kind and beautiful wife, who has agreed to watch the series on DVD with me, is offering her support, and together we will overcome my childhood pain which still haunts my intrapersonal relationships.

Buy My Books!

Heather’s Low Geek Threshold

November 21, 2004September 19, 2017 Brian J. Noggle

On the other hand, my beautiful wife has a low geek threshold.

Although she’s a software developer who has affinities for gaming systems, Samus Aran, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Lord of the Rings, does reach her geek threshold early.

For example, although “Hey, let’s watch all 32 episodes of Buck Rogers starting right now and not stopping until we’re finished tomorrow” sounds like a good geek idea, she doesn’t think so!

Sorry, honey, I had to warn the other geeks in the audience. I hope we can still have the next Atari Party, though and please don’t throw my full size arcade games out now….

Buy My Books!

Book Review: The Balcony by Jean Genet (1958)

November 21, 2004July 30, 2018 Brian J. Noggle

I bought a copy of this book at a yard sale a year or so back because I thought I didn’t read enough serious drama. Do you know how much serious drama is enough serious drama? Enough to remember that any serious drama is too much serious drama.

This play takes place in a brothel, where people dress as authority figures such as The Bishop, The Judge, and The General to get their rocks off on the trappings of power. When the revolution comes, the madame of the brothel must act as the Queen and these people must impersonate the actual offices they impersonate–and they like it. Those wacky post-WWII French.

Unfortunately, when drama’s built too heavily on Concept, with bunches of archetypes crowding a sparse stage and spitting out philosophy, I find myself lamenting the hard seat I’m in, and I’m in a recliner. That’s something my old drama professor taught me–that your play has to drag the audience along, and if the audience starts noticing the theatre and its accommodations, you’ve written a bad play. Unfortunately, most modernist and intellectual drama suffers from this when the playwright focuses too much on communicating his ideas and not enough on creating drama.

Give me an Ibsen, a Jonson, or a Shakespeare; a play where something happens to people, and later on, if you want to think about it, you can find some comment on the human condition. Reading this piece by Genet, on the other hand, is like reading an Existentialist op-ed on authority. Sure, I can see the message, but not the entertainment.

Buy My Books!

The Fark Headline That Wasn’t

November 19, 2004September 19, 2017 Brian J. Noggle

Disabled dolphin jumping again with world’s first artificial fin, seeking Sarah Connor.

Buy My Books!

Benefits of Increased Incarceration

November 19, 2004May 2, 2010 Brian J. Noggle

CNN reports Library offenders could go to jail:

Keeping library books too long could soon land some readers in jail.

Frustrated librarians want the worst offenders to face criminal charges and up to 90 days behind bars.

“We want to go after some of the people who owe us a lot of money,” said Frederick J. Paffhausen, the library’s system director. “We want to set an example.”

Paffhausen, who took over as director in October, is asking the Bay County Library Board for permission to seek arrest warrants for offenders who ignore repeated notices.

Now, I know that some of you would expect that I would think this sort of thing is overkill, and that it’s foolish to criminalize more behavior and to make more things punishable by actualy time in jail. Au contraire, but I understand the nuance of the situation. This benefits society by:

Making some mousy librarian types feel like Johnny Law, with the power to put those who offend them in the big house.
Punishing those who don’t add to the library’s coffers through overdue fines with hard time.
Frightening people from actually borrowing books from libraries and perhaps reading them, however slowly; this will free up library resources to do the library’s primary function in the 21st century: to be a publicly-funded Internet cafe that not many people use.
Helps balance the incarcerated population, as it’s not going to be 18-24 year old black males that this law throws in the slam.
Freeing library resources from fiscal collections, allowing them to focus more on their primary activities: protesting the overweaning government when it makes requests on libraries or on funds it allocates to libraries.

This, of course, these only represent the beginning of the bonanza! There will undoubtedly be conferences and communiques that emphasize the efficacy of this solution which many librarian and library administration will have to attend on the taxpayer dime to wine, dine, and discuss the pogroms.

Also, libtarians, who represent the most impotent and looked-down upon of the academic mindset, will finally have a status-bearing power that professors don’t. You can flunk or expel a student who cheats or plagiarizes, but you cannot sic the police on them with visions of the miscreants face down on cement and roughly cuffed, can you?

It’s a win/win situation. If you’re measuring by the librarian/statist standard.

Buy My Books!

The Macintosh Conspiracy

November 18, 2004September 19, 2017 Brian J. Noggle

I prefer PCs to Macs because I’ve been weaned on them since I was a whelp, through which as a mangled metaphor you can understand I prefer going to the store for a steak to animal husbandry. So pardon me while I extrapolate on the little things that I’ve uncovered that are undoubtedly some part of an insidious plot to annoy people who try to use both Macintoshes and PCs on a daily basis.

In default message boxes, the OK and Cancel buttons are transposed.
In Windows, the OK button is on the left; in Macintosh, it’s on the right. Crikey, now I have to read the buttons before I just click.
The bottom row keys are different.
On Windows keyboards, it’s CTRL, Windows Key, ALT, Spacebar; on Macintosh, it’s CTRL, ALT, Open Apple (oops, perhaps I have experience on older pre-Macs), Spacebar. It’s just a simple transposition, but for those of us who like to do things like use keyboard shortcuts, it means we hit the wrong keys for the shortcuts 90% of the time on our non-dominant platform (Macintosh for me).

I would wager that someone on one side of the idealogical divide did this consciously. Also, I thank goodness the Linux set doesn’t have its own keyboard yet.

Sure, they’re small things, but when you’re at the keys for ten or more hours a day, it’s a little fleck of sand under your contact lens.

Buy My Books!

Book Review: The Lost Coast by Roger L. Simon (1997)

November 18, 2004July 30, 2018 Brian J. Noggle

Curses! Although I bought five of Roger L. Simon’s Moses Wine novels in iBooks editions, the release order of the books got me. This book was released as a trade paperback by iBooks second after The Big Fix, so I picked it up second. Ha ha, you guys got me! This is actually a later book, 25 years after the first. Moses Wine is almost fifty, and one of those young children is in college and is accused of murder.

I guess that 25 years is the reason the author got a basic fact wrong regarding the plot of The Big Fix: that the politician was running for the Democrat nomination for President, not for re-election to the Senate. But I digress.

I like this Moses Wine better than his youthful counterpart. He’s no longer smoking hashish every couple of pages. Instead, he starts bawling every couple of pages. Sorry, wailing or sobbing, but same thing. Once again, it’s not someone I want to emulate, because I strive to remain emotionally stunted and repressed.

As I mentioned, the son has been accused of eco-terrorism which resulted in the death of a logger. Moses Wine goes to northern California and finds himself embroiled in a long running battle between eco-terrorists and eco-vigilantes, between Republicans in Congress and those who don’t want to rape Mother Nature on a pool table.

It’s a pretty good book, a quick and engaging read. In his introduction, Simon says he’s going for a more novelistic approach instead of a mystery novel. Well, he’s not as transcendent of genre as Chandler, but he’s not Elizabeth Linington.

Buy My Books!

Book Review: The Probability Broach by L. Neil Smith (1980)

November 18, 2004July 30, 2018 Brian J. Noggle

I bought this book for six bucks, new, during my recent Springfield binge. Its cover announced that it’s the quintessential libertarian science fiction adventure. Hey, I’m a libertarian sort of fellow!

I fully expected this to be an Ayn Rand novel with some sci-fi verve, and that’s what it was. Basically, a cop from the dystopian future of 1987 (this book was originally published in 1980, so it’s an extrapolation of Jimmy Carter’s America) breaks on through to the other side–where the other side is a Libertarian paradise where George Washington didn’t put down the Whiskey Rebellion under his statist jackboot and the Hamiltonians were run out of the country. Unfortunately, the cop’s statist pursuers, well, pursue him and join up with the Hamiltonians in America and bring gasp! nuclear weapons.

So we don’t have the bounty of Galt’s speech with its pages of long paragraphs, but we do get a lot of shorter lectures from the enlightened libertarians. At the beginning of the book, it’s okay because the action isn’t overwhelmed, but at the end, when the book should be reaching climax, it cuts right to the talking. So, ultimately the book drags, but it’s another interesting dystopian future piece written twenty years ago (much like A Death of Honor).

Still, it was an enjoyable and easy read, fortunately for me; I also bought the sequel, The American Zone and would really hate to let it slip into the pile of books I’ve owned, but haven’t read, for over a decade. Unfortunately, that segment of my library is growing every year. Honest, Dr. Block, one day I will read that textbook I was required for my Literary Criticism class.

Buy My Books!

Toronto Star Misses Hockey

November 17, 2004September 19, 2017 Brian J. Noggle

What the (obscenity deleted) is the Toronto Star thinking to entertain the question Should Canada indict Bush?

When U.S. President George W. Bush arrives in Ottawa — probably later this year — should he be welcomed? Or should he be charged with war crimes?

It’s an interesting question. On the face of it, Bush seems a perfect candidate for prosecution under Canada’s Crimes against Humanity and War Crimes Act.

This act was passed in 2000 to bring Canada’s ineffectual laws in line with the rules of the new International Criminal Court. While never tested, it lays out sweeping categories under which a foreign leader like Bush could face arrest.

In particular, it holds that anyone who commits a war crime, even outside Canada, may be prosecuted by our courts. What is a war crime? According to the statute, it is any conduct defined as such by “customary international law” or by conventions that Canada has adopted.

Holy faltering hockey league, but I’m volunteering for the invasion force to liberate Bush should some Canadian try to make a statement by doing this. Crikey on a cracker, but doesn’t this Walkom fellow understand that the local bar’s softball team in the J’s summer social league could successfully trump the entire Canadian military? I mean, no matter how well the six Canadians remaining in the Canadian military can fight, they’re still outnumbered because, remember, in softball there are ten players on the field. Even if the Canadian military calls up the reserves composed of out-of-work NHL players, we’ll call up the gas station’s softball team!

Canadian winter be damned! I’m from Wisconsin. Bring it.

It’s amazing that anyone would take these sorts of sentiments seriously. I don’t, otherwise I wouldn’t be so glib.

But Thomas Hokkum is no Gordon Sinclair.

(Link seen on Little Green Footballs.)

Buy My Books!