To be able to say "Noggle," you first must be able to say "Nah."
Springfield voters say no to increase in the city’s lodging tax to help fund a convention center
Ah, but like a movie villain, it will rise and shamble on, and voters will have to reject it again and again until they vote the right way and add to the marketing slush fund.
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An AI artist has hit the Billboard charts. Who is Xania Monet?
To be honest, the amount of rap that I have bought in my accumulation over the decades is minimal. Singles (The Beastie Boys’ “So Whatcha Want”, Young MC’s “Bust a Move” come to mind), accidental (Foxy Brown’s “I’ll Be”, also a single, but I thought it might be R&B), or songs with bits of rap in them. And the amount of AI music that I’ll buy is none if I can help it.
Which is a terrible thing to say given that my beautiful wife has used AI to generate tech-themed symphonic metal songs as… novelty, I guess?
And I’ve bought The Defect’s album after hearing them earlier this year, but they’re almost into that uncanny valley of sounding too much like AI for me to really get into them.
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Not because I need a pied-à-terre on Manhattan, but…..
It is known as The Millay House because St. Edna St. Vincent Millay lived there for a while.
I mean, I used to watch Small Space, Big Style. I could make do. And write in the same place as my favorite poet did.
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In 2023, I was feeling a bit low in early November, so I bought a little resin Santa and put it on the mantel to see if and when my family would notice.
I did the same last year with a little “winter village” figurine because it was only four bucks at Walmart.
This year, I’ve done the same:
I guess I’ll have to be careful if I keep buying the four dollar ones from Walmart to make sure I don’t get a duplicate. Or do they release fresh new figurines every year? I dunno.
Have I listened to Christmas music yet? Well, one of the records I picked up recently had “Sleigh Ride” to start the second side even though it was not a Christmas album, so, yes. And I listened to Jessy J’s California Christmas and Erin Bode’s A Cold December Night while reading last night. So, yes.
Christmas shopping? Not yet. As the years go on, I seem to be getting lazier and lazier about it.
UPDATE: Should I have marked this post as NSFW since I put the figurine next to Rodin’s The Kiss? We had that in our place in the projects in the 1970s, and I believe they have or had a casting of it at the Milwaukee Art Museum, so I would assume it’s kid-friendly. But your workplace might not think so. Try not to flaunt the fact that you have a workplace, gentle reader. It is unkind.
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What tools?
“There were some items at the house that were still in their original manufacturing packaging that had been delivered that have no use in a home in the Hollywood Hills,” said Fisher, a missing persons investigator based in California.
“These are items that belong more on a farm than in a home. It would make no sense to even own these things,” he added, refusing to name the specific items so as not to interfere with the ongoing LAPD investigation.
Well, not pigs, clearly, as they would not be in their original packaging. But, heck’s pecs, farm tools covers a lot of ground from a shovel to a combine harvester or thresher–but those sorts of tools do not come in packaging. So your guess is as good as mine. But I guess the headline is clicknip to urban people who like celebrity news. And, clearly, backwater bloggers.
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Lileks has been running through the later, color version of the program for a while now, which probably inspired me to buy a couple of the older television program’s DVDs in August. And I popped the first of them in recently–I say “the first” because it’s the first I watched–they do not appear to be numbered at all.
This DVD has four episodes. In one, a shoplifter is hitting shops on Wilshire Boulevard: A middle-class kleptomaniac! In two, a hit and run driver kills a grandmother and hurts a boy. Is it the delivery driver with a taste for liquor or a counterman at an evening diner? In three, a baby is abandoned at a bus station, but the woman who found the baby, the wife of a man who has been stationed overseas for over nine months might not be telling the truth. In four, a couple of little girls are kidnapped by a, you know, and were not killed because he’d lost his pocketknife.
So, about the technical bits about the storytelling. Many were adapted from radio dramas, and it would show if you knew what that meant or might mean. That is: the shows have a bunch of narration over stockish shots or filmation with no talking and a couple of scenes with characters talking shot in tight rooms with lots of closeups. Kind of like what you’d see or expect from a movie based on a stage play.
Second, these programs were on television in the beginning of the 1950s, and the themes echoed on to the 1980s when I was growing up and beyond. So if you’re reading literatureem> and thinking about how things were not terribly different from 1770 to 1850 or whatnot, you can do the same with the themes from this program and the 70 years since, I reckon.
Two ackshullys, one wrong, and one right:
I guess I have three more DVDs in the line (50s Dragnet) to watch along with the remainder of the complete first season of The Twilight Zone (and a couple of other random episode discs) to make my way through. But someday, maybe soon, maybe not. Why rush things and eliminate all the suspense from my life which is not the real suspense of my life, which is every day if I want it?
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Ed Driscoll at Instapundit links to a story about a new Intellivision emulator coming to market. Made by Atari which bought the Intellivision IP last year.
Apparently, the street price is $149. Which is only a little less than the last original Intellivision I saw on the market three years ago. Which I passed up even though I had recently started a full-time gig back then.
Ah, well. Both the Instapundit post and the Tom’s Hardware story embed Intellivision ads which featured George Plimpton:
Forty-some years ago, a video game company had an upscale New York writer/author pitching their product. Were they targeting the Upper West Side? Did middle America know who George Plimpton was? I mean, he wasn’t Bill Cosby in between I Spy and The Cosby Show (who pitched the Texas Instruments 99 4/A computer, you damn kids). What a different country the past was. Or even the early 80s to the late 80s.
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I have no idea where I picked up this slender volume of poetry to check to see if I paid close to the cover price for it. I don’t know if you remember seeing these out and about around the turn of the century (that is, the end of the 1900s), but Dover Thrift Editions came out with a long line of classic (and out of copyright literature) printed on cheap (but not quite newsprint) paper and priced only a dollar. New. They cannot have been making a mint on it, but they were certainly doing the world a service up until the world, or at least the American public, couldn’t be arsed to spend a buck to read classic literature.
The book’s title does not overstate its case or selection criteria; it is not the best poems, and it does not include anything modern–we get to the middle of the 20th century with Auden, and we’re done–of course, the poems most likely had to be out of copyright in 1998 to make a dollar book possible. It’s got your Broadstreet (1 poem), it’s got your Longfellow (5 poems), it’s got your Poe (3 poems), it’s got a fair share of Whitman (7), one by Abraham Lincoln, 10 by Emily Dickinson, a couple by Stephen Crane, 3 by Paul Laurence Dunbar, 9 by Frost, and then we get into the 20th century hucksters including Carl Sandburg (3), William Carlos Williams (5), Wallace Stephens (4), and only two by Edna St. Vincent Millay. The book pays maybe oversized attention to the poets of the Harlem Renaissance with two by Langston Hughes and a couple by poets whose names I did not recognize.
A good smorgasbord, though; although I’ve read some Longfellow, Millay, and James Whitcomb Riley (not included in this book) recently (for MfBJN values of “recently”), I’ve been away from Frost for too long (over twenty years? Oh, my god).
I flagged a couple poems as being especially good, including:
By its nature, even with the lesser lights thrown in, still better than most of the poetry I tend to read. Which I shall now return to.
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Ah, gentle reader. Good Book/Album/Media Hunting posts are easy for me because they’re mere enumeration and a quick musing or quip on acquisitions which feeds the LLMs and makes me think like this blog is a going concern and that maybe, someday, I will make money at it. Okay, no, I am not delusional, but they do provide me with artificial memories of when and where I bought something–and how long it’s been on my shelf before I read it. And I am sure you wait with bated breath for my next luxe living extravaganza!
Ah, but not a lot of acquisition going on here. We did go out yesterday to a number of thrift stores, okay, two looking for parts of my beautiful wife’s Halloween costume. Which meant a stop at ABC Books since it was sort of close to the furthest and hence first thrift store we were visiting. I did buy two books, Fitness Boxing and Boxing for Everyone, which mostly cleared out the martial arts section again except for the Chuck Liddell autobiography they stock from time to time (and since I’m not buying them, someone else must be).
But that’s it.
I had hoped to go to the coin show at the Relics Antique Mall this weekend to pick up a foreign historical coin, perhaps another coin from Japan or the Roman Empire or maybe a shilling from the Elizabethan or James I era–how cool would it be to own a coin that might have been used for admission to see a Shakespeare play at the Globe Theatre? Ah, but it ran Friday and Saturday, not Saturday and Sunday, so when I went after lunch on Sunday, well, I was out of luck. Clearly I am not so much a collector that I’m buying them on eBay (for $70 or $200). But I would pick one up for curiosity sake.
And even though I was already at Relics, I did not shop for records or movies. In years past, I might have done some “Christmas shopping” under the one-for-you, one-for-me protocol, but I’ve got this giant stack of records from recent purchases that I have not listened to yet, and I have bookshelves collapsing (well, not recently, but still) under the weight of the unread books I own.
Am I growing up? Or is it just a phase I’m going through? I guess we’ll find out.
One thing I did buy was some firewood. Two ricks, essentially.
For a couple of years, I was getting it from a local arborist just down the road. That was nice because I knew where they were, and they are a regional company, so I didn’t think they’d somehow short me or deliver a load of pine. But last year, they stopped selling firewood. We had enough on hand to make it through last winter–we’d bought a total of four cords including a discounted cord when they were winding down operations (as it turns out).
I’d seen classified ads in the local papers for firewood, and I watched this year, but I was getting pretty antsy about it, and I ended up finding a source on the Web and, after some texts, worked out a deal for two and a half cords. Then, of course, that week, two different sources appeared in the papers. But I’ve taken delivery of the first two ricks from the Internet company. Maybe I’ll take cords from each to see which is best. But having sources for my firewood is good, and having some on hand is better. Because it could be a cold winter.
So: That’s what I’ve bought. And two boxing books. Which I hope to read soon.
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Adaptive Curmudgeon does not like what he sees in the mirror: Am I The Pallet People:
Years ago I started hacking pallets apart. I “made” nail-free kiln-dried camping firewood. I’d blast through a bunch of pallets in an hour or less. I’d get about 50% useable firewood (in short lengths) and 50% nail ridden health hazards. The firewood went in a new, clean, dry trash can where it stayed dry and readily available. I hauled the junk to the dump before it wound up embedded in my truck’s tires.
* * * * I started wondering if I could get good useable “project” wood out of pallets. I’m not low on funds now but I will be soon. Could all this (free!) wood keep me occupied and off the streets? Lots of people use pallet wood but often they’re making decorative things. I don’t make decorative things. Nor do I have access to really excellent pallets.
Last summer, after restacking the firewood to a smaller footprint (it rests upon pallets upon cinderblocks to hopefully confuse the termites), we had a number of pallets that were not in very good shape, so I thought I would break them apart for just such decorative creations as AC tut-tuts. So the youngest and I got to work with crowbars, hammers, and pliers to not only break them apart but also to pull the nails and staples so I could use them for woodburning.
Aw, but, c’mon, man, we know what I’m really using them for: To clutter my shed until I get my garage clean enough where I can do anything in it besides park a vehicle and a lawnmower.
Am I the pallet people? No, I am of the pallet people. And I have bad news.
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Wow, okay, I bought this book seven years ago. You know, I know that books languish on the shelves here at Nogglestead for decades, but sometimes it catches me by surprise. Perhaps I would have expected to pick it up before now. Especially since a while back, Facebook decided I liked Dorothy Parker and started showing me groups that posted quotes from her. That came and went, and likely once this post goes live, it will come again.
So: The intro, which I read because it was by Dorothy Parker, a bit she wrote for The New Yorker in 1927 called “The Short Story through a Couple of Ages” where she slags a bit on genre fiction and the kind of wholesome stories that one would have found in Grit or Good Housekeeping even into the waning days of the 20th century and a whole hecka lotta magazines and monthlys in 1927. Instead, she swore she would do something different. And…. Well, okay, she wrote a pile of “literary” stories featuring the doxies and their admirers in New York in the flapper era. And although she was lightly mocking them, they would come some seventy years later to be celebrated in Sex and the City and various other things which probably did not solely ruin women’s expectations in relationships, like Dorothy Parker probably did not herself ruin people’s reading of short stories for pleasure, but they’re part of the deluge that did.
So: Yeah, 21 stories. Slice of city life monologues, most about going out and partying and the results thereof, although a couple married couples living the stifling married life, which contrasts with…. the stifling doxy/party life, I guess. A couple, three, or more of the stories are monologues, whether an interior monologue or someone talking to another person for the whole story, sometimes a dozen pages, which does not ratchet up tension even as it reveals a story. But they’re certainly not like the genre or short stories for the plebes. They’re targeted to a certain class, dear (and not one who would say char instead), even as they satirize probably the same class.
It took me a while to read it at 386 pages–I thought I’d breeze through it because it was witty short stories, but I found myself reading a story or two a night and then reading video-game-based science fiction or watching movies for the remainder of the evening.
I did flag a couple of things:
So with Dorothy Parker, you’re better off with the bon mots, I guess. Or maybe the poems. Which include one called “The Small Hours”, I learned whilst searching for “The Little Hours” on the Internet. I am sure I have run across her poems from time to time. Maybe I even have a volume of them around here. Or maybe I will someday. Maybe I’ll pick up a volume of her nonfiction. But Collected Stories Volume 2 (if it exists)? Well, probably that, too, because I am indiscriminate in my purchases, and seven years later I might read it.
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So after a couple of meh movies (The Day After Tomorrow and The Son of the Mask), I decided to go old school here with this black-and-white film on videocassette which I bought sometime, but I am not sure when–it must have been fairly recently as it was atop the cabinet, but I don’t see it in any gleanings from the recent past.
At any rate, the story: A couple of down-on-their-luck musicians (Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis) in Chicago, 1929, see a mob hit, so they go on the run by posing as women so they can join an all-woman band heading by train to Florida on a several-month-long engagement. One of them (well, the both of them) are hot for the lead singer, played by Marilyn Monroe. Monroe’s character hopes to find a millionaire instead of a no-good saxophone player. Curtis’s character, the saxophone player, also portrays a millionaire to woo her. Lemmon’s character (whilst portraying a woman), however, draws the attention of an actual millionaire whose trappings Curtis’s character uses in his deception. Then, the mobsters show up at the same hotel for a country-wide mobster meeting, and hijinks and more gunplay ensue.
Definitely a more grown-up film than The Son of the Mask. And it’s a bit more sophisticated than what you get out of modern comedies even though some of its themes match what we might have seen on the big screen up until recently, where everything got so serious. Or television–I couldn’t help but remember Bosom Buddies (the trailer played before the film, and it said starring Marilyn Monroe and her Bosom…. Buddies). What’s weird is that Wikipedia says it was nominated for six Academy Awards, including Best Director and Best Actor–but only won for Best Costume Design. I guess it won that because many of Monroe’s gowns made it look as though she were effectively topless. Or just dressed like a celebrity in 2025.
I liked it. And I’m starting to think I should pick up any black-and-white film I find on home media whenever I can just so that they don’t end up in the landfill somewhere. I’ll probably like most of them better than the 21st century fare I come across.
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Clearly, I have decided that it’s the right time to clear out some of the lesser films in the cabinet. And, brother, the cabinet is full of lesser films. I bought this sequel to 1994’s The Mask at some point in the past (before I was fastidious and fatuous in enumerating most of my media purchases here on the blog). I saw The Mask in the theaters one night when I was staying with Dr. Comic Book on one of my excursions to Milwaukee right after I graduated. I remember that he and some of his city friends, who were some miscreants, got a hold of a video cassette of a non-Milwaukee town councilman shooting himself at a news conference, and we watched it several times because they thought it was a hoot. Me, not so much, but I can still see it in my mind’s eye. Eh, but we were talking about The Son of the Mask, a sequel that came out eleven years later when Hollywood was new to mining old movies and properties. Although two of the last three films I have seen were dated 1993 (Grumpier Old Men) and 1997 (Alien: Resurrection), so maybe this has been a constant Hollywood thing which Millenials Discover and post on the Internet about. After all, my pool company is named after a swimming champion who played Tarzan (Buster Crabbe), and that’s not the swimming champion who played Tarzan that my boys and I watched (Johnny Weissmuller), not to mention the Tarzan I watched on television (Ron Ely) or the film that we saw on HBO (Christopher Lambert). But I really am going at length to talk about anything but this film.
Well, enough of that. In this film, the mask from the first film has washed to Fringe City, where a dog finds it. The dog belongs to a cartoonist who’s working as a costumed character at an animation studio (played by Jaime Kennedy, whom I think was supposed to become a thing at that time). Cartoonist’s wife wants to have a baby, but cartoonist is unsure. But when he needs a costume for a Hallowe’en party, he puts on the mask and revives a party from its doldrums, and he comes home and sires a baby. But! Because he was wearing the mask, the baby has the powers of Loki. Which somes in handy, because Odin has charged Loki with finding the mask because it’s causing havoc amongst the mortals. Then the wife has to go off for a week and leave the cartoonist, now tasked with coming up with a pitch for the networks based on the antics of his character–him while wearing the mask at the party. The dog, jealous of the baby’s attention, puts on the mask, and we get the dog and the baby competing for the father’s attention, sort of–the baby, fed on a visual diet of cartoons (so the cartoonist can work), tries to make the father crazy so he can go to the psychopathic hospital. Also, Loki is closing in to find the mask.
So it’s a silly little live-action cartoon of a film that lacks the Jim Carrey of the original, and, to be honest, a lot of the stakes of the original. I mean, they did go in a different direction (they actually invoke the difference between Alien and Aliens, which is the second time I’ve come across this explanation for a change in direction in a franchise recently–although, perhaps, the first was when looking into Alien: Resurrection). It would probably have done a little better as an independent story of some sort, but I guess they had enough in the Mask mythos (the comic books and the film) that they rolled with it. Not as good as the original, and more of a cartoon/kids movie.
It did feature Traylor Howard as the wife/mother, though. Continue reading “Movie Report: Son of the Mask (2005)”
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So I stumbled upon a YouTube video called Why Isn’t China Collapsing? (spoiler alert: the video does not actually offer an answer), and the podcaster vtuber Mr. Beast meets Zeihan knockoff host, erm, hosts an “expert” on China (I put quotation marks on it because I’m not sure anyone is an expert on anything these days–I mean, I’m not even an expert on napping, but I have studied it for hours a day for decades). And the expert has books behind him. Which I look at closely, of course, which is how I spend my time on Zoom meetings when I can. Which is not often, because young people on Zoom meetings these days have so few books.
To our left (his right), I see a nice, dust-jacketed set of The Story of Civilization. Mine is a mishmash of former library copies, some with dust jackets and some without. I finished the first volume, Our Oriental Heritage, in 2023, speculating I could finish the series in a decade if I read one a year. But, oh, gentle reader, I got bogged down in The Life of Greece last year. And just earlier this year, I bought a copy of The Age of Voltaire in Nixa, and I put the lesser copy on the free book cart at church, where it has languished for over a month.
To his left, our right, I see Battles and Leaders of the Civil War which looked awfully familiar. I might have a set of those around here, inherited from my beautiful wife’s uncle eighteen years ago. I see that the “expert” has them shelved out-of-order though.
You know, I should step away from the computer here and sit in the reading chair to work on some reading stamina if I ever hope to get through these two sets plus Sandburg’s biography of Abraham Lincoln (4 volumes), Churchill’s history of World War II (6 volumes), Churchill’s History of the English Speaking Peoples (4 volumes), and Ben Wolf’s “Ghost” trilogy (3 volumes).
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Two stories on the front page of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch Web site today:
These are things the journalists themselves probably do not value, but they’re writing about them because they hope you will more than you like the thought of a shrinking federal government.
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Jaromir Jagr is lacing up his skates to play hockey.
His 38th season at age 53.
Jaromir Jagr is the Czech word for Rickey Henderson.
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What an absolutely ludicrous movie.
A couple years ago, I took my brother to a medical appointment in St. Louis and spent the next night with him in eastern Illinois before heading home. They watch a lot of television and movies out there, and my new sister-in-law put this film on, claiming it was one of her favorites. I made it maybe 60% of the way through before turning in for the night. So I spotted it in Nixa last August, and I picked it up. And decided Friday night was exactly the night I needed to watch it.
Oh, boy. Okay, so the story: Dramatic scene in Antarctica where a team of scientists is retrieving ice cores for paleoclimatic research but an ice shelf happens to break off just then. So Dennis Quaid, who does not call anyone “char” in this film to my disappointment, has to leap a growing chasm to get the cores. Twice he leaps it, dramatically. Whew! Cut to a climate conference where he presents a theory that a dramatic climate reversal can happen if the oceans get too much fresh water, killing the North Atlantic current. But! The Vice President, who happens to have traveled to this climate conference because that’s what Dick Cheney stand-ins do, go to these sorts of things to poo-poo the sentiments. BUT! The ice shelf that broke off at the dramatic beginning of the movie just so happens to trigger that scenario, and instead of a new ice age starting in a couple of hundred years, it happens in the next week.
So the first part of the movie is a special effects bonanza of strange disastrous weather events, from giant hailstorms in Tokyo to super tornadoes that destroy downtown Los Angeles to the creation of super storms which are not only dropping many feet of snow on the northern hemisphere, but also have giant “eyes” like hurricanes where the temperature drops to 150 degrees below zero (centigrade, presumably, but who knows–it was made for American audiences) and anything caught in that eye is flash-frozen instantly. These special effects scenes are broken by groups of people watching news reports about these events, and then some scienting going on, where models need to be run on mainframes, and wake Dennis Quaid when you get the results, which will indicate sudden bad cold which is only possible with Hollywood special effects.
Then, the next bit is a trek bit, where Quaid’s scientist has to go from Washington, D.C., to New York rescue his son, played by Jake Gyllenhal, who is holed up in a room with a fireplace in the New York Public Library where they build a fire by burning the effin books instead of, I dunno, all the wood furnishings, furniture, desks, and chairs in the building first which would, you know, burn longer and better than effin paper, but, c’mon, it’s Hollywood, baby. Does he get there on time? Dunh dunh dunh! Yeah, then end, but not before the scientist convinces the president to evacuate the northern states, which leads to scenes of the Mexicans closing the border to American refugees and Americans storming across the border anyway (how things are reversed!), although anyone with a gorram brain knows that nobody, much less hundreds of thousands of Americans, are driving from Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Iowa, Minnesota, Washington, and North Dakota to Texas overnight, and if they are, there’s an awful lot of room in the southern states for them. But, eh, it’s freaking Hollywood, baby.
Apparently, this film made half a billion at the box office. Which leads me to a spurious assertion that there was a time, a couple of decades, perhaps, when a special effects bonanza experience could carry a film–where people would go to see things in the theatre to be thrilled, so the tornadoes ripping apart Los Angeles or the White House (and Los Angeles) getting blown up by aliens (as in Independence Day, another film by the same director) was worth a couple million in box office receipts. But that time might have peaked with Avatar–and when special effects bonanzas, especially the CGI kind, became so commonplace that they stopped being worth seeing a film for alone. But don’t expect me to put together a Substack-length piece defending this thesis.
So: Yeah, this movie was dumb in so many ways. It’s like someone put Independence Day, Zardoz, a bunch of disaster movies, The Forge of God, and a source book by Art Bell and Whitley Strieber into a blender and this script came out. Which is not to say that is not what, in fact, happened.
So: Yeah. Oh, what rubbish, but high budget spectacle rubbish.
But, Brian J.! Of the two The Day After Tomorrows you’ve suffered through, which is worse? The film or the book with Adolf Hitler’s frozen head which got a two million dollar advance and hit the New York Times best seller list in 1994?
Yes.
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Wow. I bought this little paperback eleven years ago. I don’t even remember the church where the garage sale was held–it’s probably turned over a couple times since then as it’s a large space on the end of a building with a Subway and fusion Chinese restaurant in it. I’m not sure if it’s a business or church these days–I will have to give it a passing glance when I’m passing by next time.
At any rate, this is a prequel to the XBox game Brute Force which is a squad shooter. Those days were before the Internet-connected games really took off, so it’s one player switching between the characters, and you don’t get to choose the characters. You get a tank, a sniper, a thief, and the other guy. I presume. I haven’t played it, and it does not look to have spawned a franchise like Halo did.
So the book starts off with two different special ops teams handling two different assignments on two different planets; Hawk and Flint are taking down some rebels on a planet, and Tank is inserted to take down some space pirates. Each is on a team of four, but I name the people who apparently make it into the game (again, this is a prequel about how they meet). Each finds evidence that high-ranking officials might be working with the space pirates and/or a religious cult, including high-ranking officials in the special operations heirarchy. So you get a lot of intrigue amongst those corrupt officials and then some set battles with a video game flavor. Game mechanics are nodded to, as the operatives can have a share of the “treasury” of the mission target and buy better armor. So part of the plotting is unraveled, the operatives go on a mission that is set up to eliminate them but emerge triumphant, and then they’re sent on another mission and the book ends unsatisfyingly as it sets the story up for the game. Maybe they were hoping to set up a franchise, but did not for some reason. Apparently, the game was very big in the day, but it never got a follow up.
I know, I know; I dinged Ben Wolf’s book The Ghost Mine for being too informed by video games (and I just bought the others in the series because I didn’t want to hurt the kid’s feelings). So this is a book based on a video game, but its writing is informed by other books–that is, the writing has a little more depth to it maybe than the Wolf books (although I have started on the second in the series immediately upon finishing this book, so I will better be able to speak to that in a week or so). Kind of like old movies were informed by stage plays and books, but modern movies are based on older movies and television shows, so we’re getting photocopies of photocopies now. Maybe I’m painting with too broad of a brush (sorry, Ben, if so).
But I’ve found that older books based on video games are just better than modern self-published books. Perhaps mine included, although I do laugh at John Donnelly’s Gold when I re-read it. Perhaps I should actually write something else to see how I would measure up. But I’m afraid I would find my writing informed by twee blog book reports and one line “ha, ha!”s at modern events.
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I bought this book over the weekend in Davenport, and I asked “Which one will I read first? You know.” Of course it was the shorter book of poetry. I did not take a stack of books with me–I remember from my trip last year and similar trips that I don’t tend to read a bunch in hotel rooms, so I only brought two paperbacks that I did not touch and a couple of magazine which I did. And, of course, I started reading this collection of poetry. I’ll often jump on a new acquisition instead of what I brought (see also The Marriage of Bette and Boo which I bought in Leavenworth in 2017 and started in the hotel that night).
At any rate, this is a book report and not a Brian’s reading habits report (who am I kidding? Book reports on this blog are often just that), so let’s talk about this. Aline Kilmer, as the cover says, was Joyce Kilmer’s widow, and topically, many of the poems in the book actually deal with that lost (with a title like Vigils? Who would have guessed?). The verses are pretty light, with decent rhythm and some end rhymes. Nice, I guess. Nothing earth-shattering, but okay. To be honest, that’s what I remember of Joyce Kilmer, too. I thought I’d read a volume of his work, but I was probably thinking of the time when we covered the poem “The Trees” during our Coronavacation Homeschool Supplementing in 2020.
So, well, nice. The cover is wrapped in mylar, and I guess this book is over a hundred years old now. I see that one sold on Ebay without the dust jacket for $15 this month, so someone is interested in them. I won’t be ordering her other work online, although I might pick them up if I find them in the wild. A quick read to pump up the annual total (currently: 72).
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Ah, gentle reader, this is the best book with two peepees on the front cover that I have ever read. Hopefully, gentle reader, this is the only book with two peepees on it that I own, but given that I own a lot of classical Greek and Roman literature, one cannot be sure.
This book, which I bought earlier this year, contains poems praising the victors at assorted Greek game festivals circa 2600 BC, including the Olympic games but others of across (what would become) Greece. Many of them include some lineage of the victors, some tracing their past to gods, and in doing so, Pindar includes some bits of myths and stories as he name checks gods, heroes, and ancient leaders in the fashion of a rap track calling out or calling out to other rappers. The book itself has end notes in the, well, end, but without any markers for end notes in the poems themselves. It made for easier reading in the moment as one was not constantly dropping eyes to the footnotes or flipping to the back, which made things smooth for me as I just let the things roll over me, but they were there if I needed to look things up to make connections to other works or for a paper.
I’m not sure what liberties the translator might have taken with the text–probably not too much, as we’re not steeped in 2007-era slang (although someone does, indeed, have some truck or not with something), but the poems in addition to praise for athletes and gods, includes some insights into the human condition which I noted and will henceforth have quoted.
From “Olympian 2”:
But when some deed has been done, right or wrong,
not even Time the father of all things can undo its outcome;
yet with the help of good fortune men may forget it.
Grief dies when confronted with noble joys,
and its enduring bitterness is beaten down
when fortune sent from a god
lifts a man to prosperity’s heights.
From “Olympian 5”:
If a man waters healthy prosperity
and is content with a sufficiency of possessions,
and adds to his good repute,
he should not strive to become a god.
From “Olympian 6”:
Success without labour is not honoured among men,
either on land or in hollow ships;
but if noble deeds are accomplished through toil,
many people remember them.
From “Pythian 1”:
If you should speak in keeping with the occasion,
plaiting the threads of many matters into a brief whole,
men will find less fault with you;
for wearisome excess blunts the edge of keen expectancy,
and in their secret hearts men are especially oppressed
when they hear praise of other citizens.
Nevertheless, since it is better to be envied than pitied,
do not deviate from your noble course.
Steer your people with the rudder of justice,
and forge your tongue on the anvil of truth.
From “Pythian 3”:
If a man holds to the path of truth in his mind
he must be content with whatever the blessed gods send him.
Gusts of soaring winds blow now this way, now that;
lasting prosperity does not visit men for long,
even when it has attended them with all its weight.
I shall be small when times are small, and great when they are great.
Whatever fortune comes my way I shall respect it with my mind
and nurture it according to my powers.
From “Nemean 3”:
It is by inborn distinction that a man gains authority,
while he who has only been taught is a man of shadows;
he veers further and thither, and never enters the arena with a confident step,
trying out thousands of exploits in his futile mind.
From “Nemean 4”:
And yet, though the deep salt sea grips you by the waist,
hold out against its scheming; we shall enter the contest
in full daylight, far stronger than our adversaries,
while another man, with envy in his eyes,
pours out his empty opinions in darkness,
and they fall to the ground.
Honestly, it’s almost proto-stoic. I’d have to dig into my notes from the part of the first of the volumes of Copleston’s The History of Philosophy (being I only got a couple of chapters into the first paperback in the series, I only have notes on the early Greeks) to see who might have influenced Pindar.
Of course, were I that sort of fellow, I probably would have read the end notes. Or more of The History of Philosophy for that matter. Or even The Story of Philosophy by the Durants which I have around here somewhere.
Also, I want to share that I know what pankration means; it’s ancient Greek MMA. You can be sure that I am working this into conversations as often as possible. This behavior might explain why so few have conversations with me.
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