Musings from Brian J. Noggle

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)” →

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.

I ordered this book when I saw Cernovich’s name mentioned on two blogs on the same day. Sorry, I forget which blogs they were, but they were likely ones from the blogroll.

So this book is all about shifting your mindset, a self-help title focusing a little on how you frame things/alter your perspective, that you should be in the moment, and that you should drink vegetable juices using the juicer that sponsors his podcast.

I’ve read a number of self-help books over the last couple of years, including The Power of Positive Thinking and Eat the Cookie, Buy the Shoes in late 2020. The first is from 1952; the second is from 2010, but from an author a generation or two up from mine (probably closer to one, since I apparently have reached the age of lower auto insurance rates). This book, the one under review, comes from someone of my generationish (he’s five years younger than I am), and much of the book seems adapted from quick hit blog posts and podcast transcripts. If you read the books in chronological order, you see a definite decline in the depth of the prose. One wonders if we are still printing and reading books in ten or twenty years if self-help books will be but collections of memes and inspirational quotes on images or more akin to Dav Pilkey books, lightweight prose broken up by rudimentary cartoons. It could go either way.

At any rate, a little actionable information in the book, I suppose. I mean, there’s a bit on recognizing negative self talk, and I took action on it, thinking That’s negative self talk when I did it, which dropped my negative self talk down to fifty percent of my interior dialog with the introduction of 50% thinking That’s negative self talk. I did realize how grousy my mother’s family was, in total, grousing as a large part of their other-to-other talk. But I have not completely reframed my perspective with that knowledge or that book.

A quick read, not very deep as I mentioned, and akin to the stuff you might find in popular Buddhist philosphy/mindfulness books and whatnot.

Perhaps it is best to read Cernovich in blog form or listen to him on his podcast to hear him in his native enviroment rather than in book length chunks.

He’s had a lot of success with the podcast and notoriety from his blog, so he’s doing well for himself. Good on him, I guess, but I don’t know if I need to read more of his work. And it might be another year or so until I try another self-help book (aside from philosophy or whatnot, which is university-grade self-help) for another year or more. I mean, it’s not telling me much that I don’t already know.

I already reported on this book in 2005, which probably makes it one of the earliest book reports on the blog. Well, certainly early in the almost 1,800 on the blog. I basically said then what I’ve said in a lot of the more recent reports on the Star Trek books: They’re short story recreations of episodes from the original Star Trek series by a British science fiction author who had not seen the show–so it lead to some early blunders like calling Vulcans Vulcanians and whatnot. The books came out in the years when the show was off the air (which was before VCRs, so book form was the only way to catch it if you weren’t sitting in front of the television when the syndicated repeats aired). I also mentioned, as I always do, that I originally read these books in the middle 1980s, so the books were fairly new and although the motion pictures had begun, Star Trek: The Next Generation had not.

So, as I mentioned previously, Blish is not working in airdate order or stardate order–he’s basically writing up the episodes that fans say they want to see next.

At any rate, this book contains:

• “Whom Gods Destroy”, the one where a shapeshifter takes the form of Kirk to try to hijack the Enterprise. I don’t know if I remembered this one, but it’s a lot like “The Dagger of the Mind” (in Star Trek) and “Turnabout Intruder” below.
• “The Tholian Web”, the one where the alien spaceships build a stellar net and the one where Kirk gets trapped between dimensions in his space suit. I remembered both from the episode, but not that they were the same episode.
• “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield”, the one with the heavy-handed race relations metaphor where a guy with one side of his face black and the other white is rescued from a damaged, stolen star cruiser, and he has been pursued by a guy with the opposite coloration for a thousand years. One wonders how the writers would feel about disintegrated race relations fifty years later.
• “This Side of Paradise”, the one where the spores make everyone, even Spock, happy. A similar story would later be included in the film Star Trek: Insurrection.
• “Turnabout Intruder”, the one where a jealous ex-flame of Kirk uses an alien technology to swap bodies with him and try to hijack the Enterprise.
• “Requiem for Methuseleh”, where the Enterprise meets a strange genius on an out-of-the-way planet, and Kirk tries to steal his girl.
• “The Way to Eden”, where a bunch of hippies led by the carrier of a deadly plague try to hijack the Enterprise to go to a planet names Eden.

One thing that’s becoming clearer is how much the stories kind of mirror each other. We have four stories in this book where someone tries to hijack the Enterprise. We’ve got two stories with dopplegangers of one sort or another. Other books have had the time travel stories that kind of mirror one another.

Which is probably why when I watch or read about The Twilight Zone, I’m inspired to write speculative fiction, but I don’t get that same impulse from Star Trek.

Still, a bit of enjoyable nostalgia. And perhaps I should space these books out a little more, but they’re so quick to read, and I’m only at 19 books this year, so I need to pad the accounts.

The Lutheran Church Missouri Synod church that I attend has been working its way through this book over the course of the last year. It is a further simplification of the Bible, trying to tell more narratively some of the denser or less readable sections, particularly of the Old Testament, and making the history of Israel into a set of narratives or stories focusing on different parts of history. Zondervan, the big Bible publishing company, put it out, and it includes excerpts from the New International Version of the Bible.

So every week for the last year, church service focused on a chapter of this book, so the readings might be related to the period covered in the chapter. A brief video preceded the sermon, but it was just clip art Flash with intense cellos or violas, a quote, and the trademarked logo displaying with a dramatic chord. Then the pastor would preach a sermon perhaps touching on the themes in the chapter, but often not. The single Bible study class that restarted after the 2020 empausening and the Sunday School classes used supporting materials to keep the whole church focused on the chapter for the week.

You know, the whole Protestant and especially Lutheran thing is Sola deo, sola scriptura, and so on, which makes me often wonder how that’s squared with the Lutheran catechisms and teaching from this book. But once you’re not reading the Bible in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, I guess it’s all a matter of the liberties and interpretations made in translation.

If you’re looking for a 500-page-long Cliff’s Notes version of the Bible, you could do worse, I suppose. It didn’t do much for me, but it did only tell the history of Israel once, which was nice. When I’m reading early in the Old Testament, I often get bogged down in the repeats.

As I mentioned when I recently went over Star Trek 3 that Blish, in his introduction, talks about how they decide which Star Trek episodes to include in each volume–basically, they’re going on fan requests, volume thereof. By the time this book comes out (1971), Star Trek has been off the air for a couple of years–by the time this printing occurs, it’s longer still (and man is about to or has just landed on another piece of the solar system for the last time). So they must have known or thought this might be a phenomenon. Whether they could even conceive then that it would lead to multiple television series and movie reboots fifty years later…. You know, probably not. That’s a long time in the future from 1971.

At any rate, this book collects some more episodes I remember. Previously, I called these iconic, but basically, it’s episodes I remember. Perhaps they’re iconic. Perhaps I just watched Star Trek a lot. I mean, I remember watching it on the little color television in my mother’s bedroom in the house down the gravel road in 1988 or so. Why was I watching it there? The 25″ television was in the living room. Perhaps the smaller television had better antennae, or perhaps I was grounded.

The episodes within include:

• “All Our Yesterdays”, the one where they go back in time. Well, separately–Kirk, Spock, and McCoy get beamed to a planet where the population has all beamed into the past to avoid a catastrophe. A “librarian” still manning the device thinks the Enterprise team are stragglers, and he beams them into two different eras of the past separately–so the Enterprise crew needs to get themselves back to the present time.
• “The Devil in the Dark”, the one with the Horta, with which Spock mind-melds and cries, “Pain! Pain!”
• “Journey to Babel”, the one with Spock’s parents. Also, a plot, and Spock has to save Sarek.
• “The Menagerie”, the one with Captain Pike. Originally shot as the show’s pilot, it was later aired with a framing story–the retelling here leaves out the framing story of Spock mutining to take the disabled Captain Pike back to the planet of the illusionists.
• “The Enterprise Incident”, the one where the Enterprise enters Romulan space, and Kirk goes on trial for espionage.
• “A Piece of the Action”, the one where Kirk and the Enterprise crew act like mobsters. Not a time travel episode as one would expect–they just visit a planet whose cultural development was based on a mob history from an Earth ship’s crash.

So I’m not remembering these episodes quite as clearly, but it’s been thirty years since I have watched Star Trek.

The books have made me want to acquire Star Trek on physical media. I know I’ve seen videocassettes of the series at a local thrift store. Last week, I hit the local antique mall with my Christmas gift certificates (which I can only use until June since they have six month expiration dates), and one of the things I had my eyes out for was such videocassettes. I thought I hit pay dirt at one booth with a shelf of 20 or 30 videocassettes, but they were Star Trek: The Next Generation. As I have the first two seasons on DVD, I was surprised to see that Paramount sold TNG two episodes to a VHS tape–it must have been early in the show’s run. So no Star Trek for my video shelves at this time, which is just as well as I have only watched a couple episodes of the first season of The Twilight Zone on the DVD set that I got not long after reading The Twilight Zone Encyclopedia.

Also, I should note that the next couple of books–Star Trek 5-7, Star Trek 9-10–I have read relatively recently (2005), so my remembering the episodes might just as well be my remembering reading the stories. Although, as I mentioned, I read a great number of these books in middle school or high school, so one cannot expect any of them to be truly green field. Although they are quick enough reads.