To be able to say "Noggle," you first must be able to say "Nah."
‘I will win’: Eric Greitens undeterred in Missouri Senate race
You know, I have not seen any polling information in the race, but I bet Greitens is right there with the St. Louis lawyer known for defending his house with a gun from a BLM mob and being prosecuted for it by a Soros-backed district attorney.
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Speaking of artists who try to cross types of art, Severian sez:
Indeed it seems the only “artists” who won’t stay in their lanes are actors. I can’t even count the number of actors who have released shitty albums (and no actors who have released good ones).
C’mon, man, I know William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, and most of the other actors who appeared on Golden Throats compilations (full disclosure: I own three of the four) fit this description, some actors/actresses did release records that did not suck.
It might not be high art, but Bruce Willis’s The Return of Bruno was fun:
I like it so much I am disappointed there was never a follow-up.
I am not sure I ever saw an episode of E.R. in its entirety, but Gloria Rueben had a role in it somewhere, at sometime, before she started releasing jazz recordings:
Of which I have two so far, and they’re pretty good.
And, as you might recall, I ordered Pier Angeli’s record, which is not half bad:
She was a movie actress in the fifties and sixties linked romantically to James Dean and Kirk Douglas. She, too, looks to only have released this single album.
And Chris Jericho’s band Fozzy rocks:
Alright, alright, alright, so he’s a professional wrestler, but you know that’s not real, right?
So, most actors recording music (and a lot of contemporary “musicians” recording music which is their voices, corrected, dubbed over computer renderings) are vanity projects of dubious quality. However, using the logical square, or rectangle, or quadratic equation (it’s been decades since I’ve formally studied logic, so I’m a little fuzzy on the particular geometrology of it), to disprove Severian’s All assertion, I need only to prove One is not, which I most certainly have.
But one must have sympathy for Severian, who apparently thinks the Lenny Kravitz version of “American Woman” is superior to the original by The Guess Who. Clearly, this marks him as a closeted fan of 1990s music.
UPDATE:I was talking this over with my beautiful wife this evening, and I said, “You know, there are some actors who fronted bands, like Gary Sinese and Kevin Bacon. And…wait…. Jared Leto’s band, Thirty Seconds to Mars…”
Which doesn’t suck, although I haven’t listened to a lot of them. Here’s a recent track:
Jared Leto strikes me as a moonbat. Which is better for a rock star than an actor anyway.
So maybe this will evolve into a series of posts over time.
By the way, my beautiful wife suggested Jennifer Lopez, but I demurred, saying she was a dancer, so she was in music first. But her timeline on Wikipedia indicates she was an actress first and a singer second. However, gentle reader, I cannot in good conscience put her forward as an example as I am unconvinced as to the merit of her music. Strangely enough, for a guy who owns a bunch of Paulina Rubio and Shakira CDs, not to mention jazz artists like Rocio Durcal, Rocio Jurado, The Triplets, and, yes, even Selina (for whom Jennifer Lopez got noticed when she acted in a movie about the young songbird), I don’t know much of Jennifer Lopez’s music.
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James Lileks recently went into a Macy’s, looking for a belt, and….
I could go to Target, but it’s jammed up and jelly tight on Saturdays. (Note: jelly is not, in fact, tight. Ever.) Macy’s, then. I hadn’t been there since they reconfigured the place. The new look is more “open,” which gives you a full appreciation of the paucity of the merchandise. Perhaps they’re just being more selective. Yes. that’s the idea. Go for that Apple Store look; we know how well it worked out for JCPenney.
I knew where the belts were – Men’s Furnishings, I believe it’s called – so I went there. No belts. A lot of athletic gear. In fact half the men’s department now appears to be sweatpants.
You know, gentle reader, I like to dress like an adult if not entirely the whole Cary Grant. I have often bought George apparel at Walmart, but it doesn’t tend to last very long before the points of the collars show wear from machine washing or the waistline of trousers gets a little banged up. I’ve had pretty good luck with clothing I’ve bought at Target or Kohl’s, but I’ve not tended to go to those department stores frequently. I recently (recently being the last two years) have bought shirts off of Amazon, but they often arrive with loose stitching and popped threads right out of the bag–and even if they don’t, they have the longevity of the George apparel with the price of the upscale department store.
So I went into a Target a couple of weeks ago to pick up some things, and I thought I’d look for shirts whilst I was there. The store is being remodeled (but at least they weren’t jacking up and moving aisles whilst I was shopping). After I dodged closed sections to get to the men’s wear section in the back, I wandered through the diminished stock several times, and the store had no dress clothing whatsoever. No slacks. No button-up (or button-down) shirts. Polo shirts and hoodies and athletic gear, but nothing for an adult to wear.
I have not been in since, and I have not tried Kohl’s to see what its stock is like lately, but I, too, have to wonder if it’s going to be specialty shops and online orders in the future.
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Ladies and gentlemen, we at MfBJN have conclusively proven that Lethal Weapon is a Christmas movie, and we have admitted that Lethal Weapon 2 is not a Christmas movie. But hear me now and believe me later:
Lethal Weapon 2 is an Easter movie.
Now, it is not set during the Easter season that I can tell; however, review the following:’
You see: It was The Passion of the Christ before Gibson had enough clout to make the movie he really wanted to make.
Follow me for more insight into how the Lethal Weapon movies all deal with important events on the church calendar, and how Bird on a Wire is a documentary.
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When I was reading this week’s Houston Herald, I kind of glanced at the “Years Ago” corner of the paper.
All of them have it: A page or part of a page where they reprint pictures or summaries of articles from the newspaper in years past so that the old people, aside from me, the old people who’ve lived there their whole lives can revisit some things they might remember. They might see their friends, or their family friends, in the pictures and stories kind of like they want to see their friends and family friends in print in the modern paper for good things, but not for the meth busts. The “remember when” features tend to look more toward the positives unless something really notorious is recounted.
So I kind of glance at these things because I’m a carpetbagger in these parts, which is often different from the parts from which I take the newspaper, such as the Houston Herald. I have driven through Houston twice: once out and back on a trip to De Soto, Missouri, from Nogglestead. That trip yielded me subscriptions to the Houston Herald and the paper I sought ought to begin my subscription adventure, The Licking News.
So I only glanced at the family portrait at first. Then I looked again.
It’s not actually a family photo; it is a picture of winners of the electrical co-operative’s essay winners.
Which probably means that they’re in high school.
The photo is undated, but I’m guessing early 1960s.
I’ve mentioned before how kids from the 1960s and earlier looked older (see They Don’t Look So Young, But…. and Scandinavian Teens Circa 1965).
I don’t think I ever hit that middle-aged look, the responsible father–in old family photos we have with my beautiful wife and young boys, I still looked young. Kind of how I still think I look young in the mirror, but in the photos–I certainly look older than I think that high school kid above looks. Which is a bit of a change for me.
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Last night, on the way home from Maundy Thursday service, my oldest in the back seat said, “‘Learning to Fly’ is a pretty dope song.”
“Coming down is the hardest thing,” my beautiful wife said, quoting Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.
“He doesn’t mean Tom Petty,” I said. I know the young man. He did not mean the Foo Fighters either.
No, the young man, my son, meant Pink Floyd’s “Learning to Fly”:
You know, it’s the oldest of the three; it came out in 1987 on A Momentary Lapse of Reason which I first got on audiocassette early in college. Tom Petty and the Heartbreaker’s version came off of their 1991 album Into the Great Wide Open; I am pretty sure that I bought the song on a cassette single, but not the whole album. The baby of the bunch, the Foo Fighters song, came out in 1998; I bought the CD for There Is Nothing Left To Lose based on this song. They all came out within, what, eleven years of each other, each an aspirational sort of song about trying and succeeding.
Do they even make pop songs about that any more? Don’t ask me; I don’t listen to pop, and Brazilian death metal is not quite so aspirational.
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As I have mentioned, I have been known to click crime stories in Milwaukee or St. Louis to see if I knew any of the participants, and once in a while, I would. Well, I have been out of those cities for over a decade or two these days, and most of the guys from the projects or the trailer parks who had gotten on the wrong side of the law have probably died by now.
But here in Springfield, if I click through a story, if I know someone, it’s probably on a positive story. Like Gyms in the Ozarks returning to normal as pandemic restrictions end. I clicked through to see if it was a gym I’d recognize (basically, Planet Fitness on Republic Road, the parks’ Chesterfield or Kinney Family Center, or the downtown or Pat Jones YMCA).
And so it was–it was the Pat Jones YMCA, where I work out. So then I watched to see if I knew anyone there. Or see if I made an appearance, although I would not immediately recognize the old man I am in photographs but not the mirror.
I didn’t recognize anyone working out–the bit was not filmed at my normal time, 8am to 9am on weekdays, or I would have recognized many of the older people who have been working out there for years in the mornings. Like me–almost a decade now, off and on, at roughly the same time in the mornings (although I am probably going to switch to afternoons soon, as I will not make a daily run into Springfield to drop a child off at the Lutheran school there).
I didn’t recognize any of the staff–the CEO of the YMCA was interviewed, not any of the front desk people or trainers that I see around.
However, I did recognize the young man they interviewed. Well, no, I recognized the name and then the young man.
He and his mother and father studied at my dojo; they were a couple of months ahead of us. When they reached their black belts, the mother dropped, and then the father and son came sparingly, and then the son dropped, and then the father came on his own a couple of times before dropping. It’s a common pattern amongst families, one I’m trying to avoid.
Of course, I did not recognize the guy because it’s been five years, and he’s grown up a bit in the interim and grew some facial hair. But working off the name, I recognized him.
Between my martial arts classes and the church, I end up recognizing a far better class of people in the news these days.
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Well, it only took me a week to read this book–I bought it at ABC Books a week ago Saturday, and it was a nice book to intersperse with my reading of The Red Badge of Courage.
The book is a series of very short stories–most of them are only a couple of paragraphs long, but they’re not broken into individual chapters–dealing with animals and zookeeping and talking a bit about the evolution of zookeepery over the last fifty years, from the concrete cages of the 1970s–heaven help me, but I kind of remember those kinds of exhibits at the Milwaukee Public Zoo when I was but a kid and Chandar, the white tiger, was there–to the more lavish and proper habitat that you see these days.
Crocker specialized in snakes, so a lot of the stories deal with the slithering fellows, but many of the anecdotes that do not feature snakes indicate how dangerous it is to work at a zoo.
I did flag a bit in the book:
One weekend day in the early ’80s, I got a phone call about a lion loose on North Glenstone in Springfield. I think people had called 911 to report spotting a lion. At that time, I lived not far from the location, perhaps a two-minute drive. By coincidence, another zookeeper, Terry Letterman, was at my house.
Terry and I jumped into a vehicle and headed to the location, which was a motel just south of the intersection of Glenstone and Kearney, on the west side of the road. By the time we got there, animal control had already caught the cat and had it in one of the holding units in their truck. It was an African lion, about one-third grown by my estimate, and weighed perhaps seventy-five to one hundred pounds.
The animal was not aggressive. Animal control drove to the zoo with Terry and me following behind. Once we arrived, animal control let the cat out. I straddled the lion, grabbed it by the scruff of the neck, and walked it into a stall in a building located in the southwest corner of the zoo property.
It didn’t take long to locate the owners. They were traveling through Springfield with the cat and had stopped at a motel at the corner of Glenstone and Kearney. They left to eat, and while they were gone the lion got out of its crate and wandered into the swimming pool next door. I’m sure this caused a bit of panic as the people evacuated the pool area.
That motel has been in the news recently as it was closed, and the corner slated for redevelopment, but squatters on the property had caught bits of it on fire in March, and it was torn down while I was reading this book.
I passed the property several times recently as it’s just north of ABC Books.
Also, I could have stopped the quote with the mention of the motel, but I finished out the story to give you a sense of how long the individual anecdotes are. Not especially detailed; more spoken history written down than anything else.
So a quick and amusing read. As I mentioned, this is the second copy of the book that we have at Nogglestead–my beautiful wife got a copy first, and she read bits of it to me, so when I saw that the author was going to be at ABC Books, I made sure to go up there and get my own signed copy.
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Spotted at the YMCA:
Well, okay, spotted and improved.
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I became aware of this film sometime around the turn of the century when colleagues at work talked about it. One of them is of Irish heritage, so he probably felt some affinity for this film, which is a story of Irish brother vigilantes in Boston taking on various mobs in their amateur fashion while being pursued, and then aided, by an FBI agent played by Willem Dafoe. But then the local capo arranges the parole of an extreme hit man to track down and eliminate the boys.
The story is told in a variety of flashbacks and whatnot, where the police come to a crime scene, and the FBI guy figures out what happened, and then the film flashes back to the actual happening. Sometimes the agent is correct, but sometimes he just misses because the brothers are not as professional as he assumes.
For some reason, I’d gotten the impression that this was an ultraviolent production, but it’s really not that bad. Although I am not sure if that’s because it really isn’t that bad, or my impression of that bad has evolved over the last 20 years.
So, not a bad film. Not the touchstone for me as it was for my co-workers. And I’m not sure why they put the word Boondock in the title. The group calls themselves the Saints, but they aren’t out in the sticks–they’re in Boston. So, I dunno.
Normally, I would include pictures of an actress in the film, but the movie doesn’t really have any female leads. It does have Willem Defoe in a dress and make-up, but I will spare you that.
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Apparently, the museum hosting Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère has slapped a trigger warning on it:
The Courtauld Gallery has been criticised for introducing a ‘woke’ new label on the Manet masterpiece A Bar at the Folies-Bergère. It warns viewers of the ‘unsettling’ presence of a man
As I mentioned when I read a book on Manet, this is my favorite Manet painting.
Also, I think “The unsettling presence of a man” is going to be my slug/lede on my resume and LinkedIn profile from now on.
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In a story Etsy sellers strike back: Creators fed up with fee hike, we have this bit of business ignorance:
During the month of November 2020, McGrath made $44, however, Etsy took $28 from that profit. She stated she sees no logical reason for the company to be taking so much of a seller’s profit.
It’s not a profit until you’ve accounted for all the costs of the business, such as transaction fees by the marketplace.
As you might know, gentle reader, around the turn of the century, I was a very active Ebay seller. I would spend Saturday mornings at estate sales and garage sales picking up books, old games, computer things, electronics, and music to list throughout the week.
However, I left the service because fees were going up, Ebay bought PayPal and wanted you to accept payment through it (with additional fees), and basically it went from being a seller’s market to a buyer’s market.
I’ve been kicking around the idea of getting a booth at the antique mall to put some of the various bric-a-brac that I’ve gathered and some of the crafts I’ve done and put in boxes in the garage. It seems more straightforward than messing around with the online services again. But I’m not entirely convinced that I would make enough in sales every month to warrant it–or to keep it going long term–and, to be honest, if I did sell a bunch of things, whether I could find/make enough to keep it going.
I guess I will find out sometime if I get around to actually doing it.
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I am going to go out on a limb here and say that the text comes from the 1895 publication of this book; in 1982, Norton came out with a longer version based on Crane’s “original manuscript,” and I doubt they would have shared that copyright with Reader’s Digest the same year (the Reader’s Digest The World’s Best Readers edition came out in 1982, and mine is a second printing from 1983). Not that it matters except for purists. But I am throwing it out there because I read the Wikipedia article.
At any rate, this was my first reading of this book. I understand, or at least my beautiful wife told me, that some people read this book in elementary school, or perhaps their mothers’ wombs, but I came to it late, and I am pretty sure that I have mentioned once or twice that I confused this book with Where The Red Fern Grows because they both have the word Red in the title. So, alright: Even though I came from an era where they read novels in school, the schools I attended did not read either of the red books. Nor The Little Red Book, which they might teach in TikTok form to modern students, but that’s neither here nor there. Also, that might remind me of a story, although I don’t need much reminding as it’s recent, but perhaps I will tell it someday.
Where was I? Oh, yes. This is a Civil War book about a young man who goes to the war over the objections of his mother, who does a bunch of marching and bivouacking and thinking, and when he encounters battle for the first time, he gets caught up in a disorderly retreat, and he runs away. He spends a couple of days out of the fray, running then meeting up with a rearward march of the wounded, and he gets a bang on the head which he presents as his war wound to have taken him out of battle. Then, he returns to his unit, and they have a battle, and then they’re ordered to a charge he knows is a distraction which is expected to lead to many casualties, he performs well, and he does not die.
Um, spoiler alert retroactively.
I had a bit of trouble with this book because I’m from the 21st century (well, I am from the 20th century, but I’ve been here in the 21st a long time now). As I read it, I kind of expected that the main character would die and/or the book would veer into anti-war or anti-patriotism, but it doesn’t take a more modern turn. Instead, it tries to re-create what it was like in the Civil War even though it was written twenty years later by a man born after the war.
The prose is a bit purple. And red. And yellow. You don’t go more than a few sentences in dry spots where a color is not mentioned, and the prose is measured for its own sake, not the service of the plot. So it was a bit denser of a read than a thriller or genre book, but not as dense as Georgian prose or self-indulgent high literature.
So not one of my favorite books, but I’m glad to have read it as it offers some light classical literature amid this year’s children books and Star Trek short storification collections.
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One of my Christmas gifts was a gift card to Vintage Stock, a retailer in used movies, video games, CDs, movies, and records. So sometime right around the turn of the year, I went over to Vintage Stock to spend it, and I amassed a number of movies and DVDs, including this one. It was my lucky day, too, as I made my first (and only) stop to the new comic book shop on Campbell, right across the city from the now-closed Nameless City Games. And although Nameless City did not have the first issue of the Sarah Hoyt Barbarella last July, the new comic book shop had one copy of the first issue six months later. So I got the original movie and the latest pop cultural incarnation on the same day. Spoiler alert: I read the comic first.
So. The plot is that Barbarella, an interstellar agent in the future, has to go to Tau Ceti to find a scientist named Durand Durand who has created a positronic ray that might be used as a weapon. So she goes to Tau Ceti, meets some different people and different species including murderous children, blind angels, and a planet whose energy source is a flowing substance below the ground that feeds off of negative thoughts and emotions–Ghostbusters 2‘s slime sorta. She has sex with a couple of people, and eventually finds Durand Durand who wants to use his ray to take power. But he overreaches and dies.
This is an early Dino De Laurentis film, and the look-and-feel of it, along with some of the pacing, feels a lot like Flash Gordon from 1980 (although this film is obviously earlier). The protagonist in this film, though, is a bit more passive than Flash Gordon–other characters and natives of the planets she visits lead her around to different venues, and sometimes she has sex with them, but most of the time, Barbarella is not leading the action.
Oh, and about the sex: Although my beautiful wife had heard that this was a soft core porn film, it really wasn’t. Although I am glad I did not share the film with my boys, the sex in it was relatively tame and not depicted graphically. I mean, it’s essentially a French film, directed by Renoir’s grandson and co-starring Marcel Marceau, but it doesn’t have the ooh la la that you get in some French and Scandinavian films of the period. The opening sequence of Barbarella removing a spacesuit in zero gravity was pretty, erm, compelling, though.
At any rate, I’m glad to have watched it for its, what, cultural value? To have seen something that was influential and that continues to be a bit of a touchstone today–I mean, aside from the comic series, there was a musical in 2004, and the band Duran Duran took its name from the name of the scientist, for crying out loud–but as a story and a film, meh (which is quite different from mwah! which is the chef’s kiss, which this film is not).
Below the fold, Jane Fonda as Barbarella in her many outfits.
Continue reading “On Barbarella (1968)”
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From this date in 2011:
Brian J. Noggle tried the starmaster machine at the gym today. Suddenly, he’s Emperor of the Four Galaxies and has to manage a war with the Tribini Consortium.
I would say it was funnier in the past, but it probably was not.
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I bought this little chapbook at ABC Books a couple weeks ago, and when I went back earlier this month and bought a book by Gregory McDonald, I mentioned that Gregory McDonald was one of the big three MacDonald/McDonalds–the other were Ross MacDonald and John D. MacDonald (I said, gesturing to a Travis McGee novel stacked and ready for pricing behind the register). I then told Mrs. E. that I had recently bought a price guide for John D. MacDonald books, this very book–and then I realized I had bought it at ABC Books a couple of weeks earlier, albeit when she was not there.
So. This is a 32-page, saddle-stitched, typeset with a typewriter booklet from 1987, probably not long after MacDonald’s death (at a different hospital in Milwaukee than the hospital where Heather Graham and I were born–he is buried in Milwaukee, and I never visited even though I have been a fan since he was interred). It lists first editions, including first foreign editions in some cases, and prices circa 1987.
How do the prices stack up to modern prices? The Brass Cupcake, his first novel in paperback from 1950, is listed in the book at $40 including notes on a recent sale. You can find it on Ebay from between $30 to $250, and there’s a hardcover edition at $1250 (which is a hardback reprinting of the paperback). So your mileage may vary.
As I have mentioned, gentle reader, I’m a bit afraid of eventually running out of John D. MacDonald books to read. So this book gave me an opprortunity to audit my collection using the Wikipedia entry for John D. MacDonald’s bibliography, the archives of this blog, and my seriously overburdened inexpensive, turn-of-the-century book library software. The shocking results are below the fold.
Continue reading “Book Report: John D. MacDonald: A Checklist of Collectible Editions & Translations by David G. MacLean (1987)”
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I bought this book new on Amazon when a local tech group mentioned it. I kind of thought that CX (customer experience) would be something akin to UX (User Experience) which deals with UI (User Interface) which is the parts of the computer program that users actually tap, type, and click on. Each step up the chain is a bit of an abstraction that allows the consultants to sell it a bit more to audiences who are further up in the management chain. Pardon me, do I sound a little cynical? Or maybe envious of the cool consultants?
So CX is actually customer/client experience, which blends marketing, sales, and customer support into a single concept about which one can draw some lessons. He breaks the failures into two categories: Goal friction, where the problem prevents the customer from achieving a goal, and Social Friction, which makes the customer feel bad or socially diminished.
The book uses the Russian term priyome, which is a term for a pattern and an action leading to advantage from recognizing the pattern. He gives them cute names like “Pass the Parcel” and “Without a Paddle,” explains the pattern/archetype a bit, and then how to solve or avoid the problem.
A lot of this seems like common sense, especially if you’ve had any retail or customer service experience, but this is 2022, man. What was common sense in 1990 might be the lost wisdom of the ancients by now.
The book is kind of structured like The Gorilla Mindset in that it interrupts its main flow–in this case the priyomes–with interviews with experts and digressions on company culture (but nothing on juice products advertised on the podcast!).
So it made for a quick, light read that really doesn’t offer much I can apply directly to my day-to-day, but it’s something to go into the hopper for future recombination with my ideas.
And I felt a little gratified by an invitation to a forthcoming webinar that confuses CX with UX:
Improving the Mobile Customer Experience Through Scriptless Automation
Let’s face it, mobile automation is difficult. You can’t rely solely on coordinates or xpaths to make it work. Yet so many automation products do, resulting in flaky test scripts and a maintenance nightmare. If a test script fails, it can lead to reduced customer satisfaction and retention, or worse—it can be seen as a reflection of your brand. This need to keep users happy while maintaining app performance can seem impossible, but there is a solution: scriptless test automation.
This is testing the user interface, not the end-to-end customer experience Bartlett envisions. I wonder whether this term and abbreviation are not tightly locked down yet.
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I might not be a smart man, Jenny, but I know who Janet Yellen is.
And that’s not her.
So Microsoft is throwing up random ads in the home page of the Microsoft Edge Web browser these days, and one of them is clickbait enough to combine a powerful financial figure, a buzzword, and a stock photo of a woman.
But not enough to make me click. Only enough to make me mock.
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The Licking News, small a paper as it is, has numerous columns worth reading along with a comic page with puzzles.
On of the comics is R.F.D. by Mike Marland.
Last week, the cartoon dealt with local sourcing of foods:
We at Nogglestead are not that country. Although there are many beef operations in the area, including one run by the realtor who helped us find Nogglestead, we do not frequent farmer’s markets to get to know small producers nor do we really home in on local producers whose names we might recognize from Ozarks Farm and Neighbor. Mostly, we grab what is least expensive at the grocery or the warehouse club store.
I am, however, reminded of the time I went back to Kansas with a girlfriend to visit her grandparents, and on Sunday morning, the grandmother or aunt served bacon from Uncle Rick’s pig–and she said she did not like store boughten bacon at all. Although she probably did not say “boughten,” given how much of a throwback to the old ways both families of farmers were in the 1990s, she probably meant it.
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Not by me, mind you. Something that fills me with dread: Justin Fields Must Recruit Former Teammate To Chicago:
Still, it doesn’t mean Fields can’t find a way to bring in at least one of his former teammates. He’ll do some extra legwork to lure Chris Booker to Chicago if he is smart. Don’t feel bad if you’re unfamiliar with the name. The senior spent two years for the Buckeyes as a backup. He made only two catches during that time—both of them in the year after Fields left.
So why in the world should the QB even bother?
Namely, because Booker has untapped potential. He’s 6’3 with understated speed and surprisingly polished as a route-runner. After dropping out of football at Dayton in 2018, he transferred to Ohio State with no intention of playing again. However, he was convinced to join the school’s club football team. In his first game, he scored touchdowns on a reception, an interception, and a kick return. His head coach knew he had way too much talent for that level right away. So he pestered the school’s varsity program to give Booker a shot.
They finally did after a year. He became a regular on their scout team and would catch passes from Fields in practice.
So the two know each other well. Teammates and coaches alike grew surprised by his progress. That included receivers coach Brian Hartline, a former NFL standout. While he never cracked the offensive starting lineup, Booker became arguably the best special teams player in the entire program and one of the best in college football. Every time somebody was making a play on kick coverage or blocking units, #86 was in the frame. Sadly the ascent came too late in his career to drum up draft interest.
My beautiful wife, who shared this story with me as she’s friends with the lad’s mother, said, “It would be the one way to get a Bears jersey in our house.”
“The hell it would,” I countered thoughtfully. “However, if he were to sign with the Green Bay Packers, everyone in the house would have a Chris Booker jersey. Even the cats.”
What followed was an attempt to edit a listing from the Packer Pro Shop for pet jerseys to include the name and number of the young man in question. An effort abandoned when I determined it would require a couple hours of work for a couple of chuckles at best.
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