Musings from Brian J. Noggle – Page 90 – To be able to say "Noggle," you first must be able to say "Nah."

When Your OCD Fails You

January 8, 2022 Brian J. Noggle

You know, some years ago, on a Saturday morning, we were getting ready to go to a martial arts class. I had not loaded up my pockets with wallet, phone, keys, and whatnot when I stepped into the garage to load our gym bags into the back of the truck, and everyone came out to get into the truck and locked the door to the house. Gentle reader, we lock the door from the house to the garage consistently because we don’t want to just give the house to anyone who gets into the garage–and given that the boys like to come in with the garage door open, that could be easy to sum d00d. As I did not have the keys, we had to call my mother-in-law to come bring us a key.

Since that day, we have taken precautions. We have hidden a key in the garage, not that it takes much hiding with the garage as messy as it is. I am not sure I can find anything in there that is not hidden. And I have made sure when stepping out of the door, before locking it, to check to make sure I have my keys on me.

On Wednesday, I scheduled a mid-day martial arts class, but I worked a little later than I intended–it had been a while since I’d done a mid-day class, so I thought I had an extra ten minutes, but when I realized I leave at noon, not I start to get ready at noon, I flew into action. I got my gi on, tucked my wallet, keys, and phone into the gi, and headed out. Before I locked the door between the house and the garage, I patted to make sure I had the keys. I did.

As my beautiful wife had our primary truck, I was taking the secondary vehicle in the driveway. I gathered my bag and some hydration materials (one water, one Gatorade). And I stepped out the door between the garage doors, locking the door and pulling hard as the latch sticks a bit when it’s locked. Then I reached into my gi for my keys, for the infamous needlepoint fob, and….

I had grabbed the wrong keys.

In the same drawer where I keep my pocketstuffs, I have a keyring with all the strange and auxiliary keys that one accumulates over a lifetime. I culled my keyring a number of years ago, removing everything but my car keys and my house key from it, which lent itself to this collection. In addition to keys for bike locks I’ve never used, keys to trigger and cable locks, and keys to the family lockbox, the ring also has house keys to….what? My mother’s old house? My mother-in-law’s house? I don’t know, but it has several house keys on it. Just not any for our house.

And I was outside the house, not in the garage, so I couldn’t use the hidden key there.

So I called my beautiful wife, who cancelled a meeting and came back from Springfield to let me in.

However, I did get the chance to sit outside in 35 degree weather for thirty minutes to prove how Wisconsin tough I am. However, fortunately, the sun was out, and the gi is black. As I managed to stay out of the wind, it was not too bad.

So I have moved the auxiliary key ring so I don’t make that mistake again.

And for the next couple of weeks or months, you can rest assured I will check the keys harder when I step out of the house.

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On Friedrich Neitzsche narrated by Charlton Heston (1991)

January 7, 2022January 5, 2022 Brian J. Noggle

Book cover Not long after having Charlton Heston and vocal talent narrate Søren Kierkegaard, I picked up the next chronological set of tapes, those on Neitzsche. You know, I am listening to tapes more than lectures or books on CD because my truck has a CD changer in it, where you can load up six CDs at once. Which sounds good if you’re the only one driving it, but it’s a bit of a hassle to load six CDs at once, and it’s even more of a struggle when your beautiful wife wants to load some of her CDs as well. Oh, the humanity!

So. This set details Neitsche’s life and thought, focusing mostly on the thought, and focusing mostly on Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil because, face it, that’s where the bulk of what you talk about when you talk about Neitzche comes from (unless you like to talk about his facial hair).

They rely a lot on vocal talent ranting Neitzsche’s own words in a harsh German accent, so it was distracting and hard to follow. But Neitzsche’s work is harsh and ranting anyway–I am sure I thought a little better of it when I was young, inclined to Dionysianism and thinking of myself as an ubermensch. But ultimately, the recasting of morals as dependent upon man’s capacities or whatever so that different actions are wrong or right depending upon…. Well, it’s clear that one, or a national socialist party, might take that to heart.

I never really got into Neitzsche as I was innoculated by my earlier exposure to Aaron Rodger’s favorite author Ayn Rand, wherein the superman (John Galt or Howard Roark, take your pick) was reined in by a real, concrete morality probably influenced by Kant and maybe Thomas Aquinas.

Which is kind of depressing, as I have an old Waldenbooks? Barnes and Noble? omnibus edition of Neitzsche around here, and if I am going to eventually read all of the books I own (assuming medical science can keep me alive until 2173), I will have to read it.

But, you know what? Listening to this book and reading the Neitzsche when my brain is in a jar and the “reading” is the injection of a certain chemical into the jar whilst receiving certain bioelectroradiographic pulses is still a good thing, if only to refresh how far one has come in one’s understanding of philosophy over the decades. Also, it was only a couple of hours of drive time, and, man, I love these things. But not the German accents.

(Oh, yeah, the latest link on the Aaron Rodgers maybe pointing at Ayn Rand on a podcast from Instapundit, who is seemingly the only thing that’s not a tabloid that I read.)

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On Starsky & Hutch (2004)

January 6, 2022January 5, 2022 Brian J. Noggle

Book cover I saw this film in the theaters with my beautiful wife back in the heady days of the Stillerverse and back when we went to the theater a couple of times a year. This film is a lesser entry in the set starring Stiller, Vince Vaughn, and/or Owen and/or Luke Wilson–Zoolander, Dodgeball, and Mystery Men are better. As a matter of fact, my wife said that we did not see this in the theaters, or that she did not remember it, and all the way up to the climax, she did not–but when we got to the end, where Stiller is dressed up like an aging Jersey Shore resident saying, “Do it,” in a deep voice–ah, then she remembered it.

You know, I still found it an amusing film to watch, but I am of an age that I knew of the original Starsky & Hutch; I probably saw some when I was really young, but it wasn’t something I sought out as a young person. My boys didn’t care for it much, either, but that’s likely because they did not know what the movie was playing with/parodying/satirizing. They didn’t like Hot Shots!, either, even though they had just seen the source material (Top Gun), and they did not get Airplane! much at all because they did not know airport disaster movies from the 1960s and 1970s.

Starsky & Hutch might have marked a bit of a beginning of movies being made out of earnest nostalgic properties spun to comedies (think The Dukes of Hazzard in 2005, 21 Jump Street in 2012, and CHiPS in 2017). You cannot say it about Charlie’s Angels in 2000 because that was a bit of a homage, and it, too was a bit earnest in its action movie way. But this set of movies took television programs that were not necessarily serious, but were certainly earnest, and turned them into things that, I guess, kids could laugh at the things their parents watched or something. Except I would guess that the kids, like mine, didn’t get a lot out of them aside from the antics of their generation’s stars as they were not familiar enough with the source material.

Ah, but that is me, the guy with an English degree and a blog, so you can expect me to try to come up with a thesis and write a lot about it, whether it’s ultimately true or even really defensible. The pro forma argument, and publication, is the real goal. But did I mention Carmen Electra appeared in Starsky & Hutch?

Continue reading “On Starsky & Hutch (2004)” →

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Book Report: Tea in the Time of COVID by Ann Kynion (2020)

January 5, 2022January 5, 2022 Brian J. Noggle

Book cover When I bought this book last June, I said I thought I would confuse it with Coffee Is Better Than Therapy. And so I did; as I was reading, I was picturing the woman living in Webster Groves, but then she would mention something from Springfield, and it would throw me off.

The book comes from a bit of a vanity project: It’s a book collecting 100 of her online posts during the first 100 days of the pandemic, which she counts from the lockdown order in Springfield in Spring 2020–although that’s a localized start date. I was skipping triathlon classes for weeks before that to limit my exposure to a disease I feared might be akin to something out of The Stand or The Andromeda Strain (books, gentle reader, books–although I have seen a contagion movie before, but not Contagion, I can’t think of what it would have been). In my paranoid defense, I’d like to point out I thought about cancelling a trip to DisneyWorld during the Ebola outbreak in, what, 2014? That experience–my own fears not coming to pass–mitigated my fears about Wuhan flu as time went by and the dead were only lying in the streets in pictures on the Internet and not in Springfield, Missouri.

So we have 100 entries of a couple paragraphs, more or less, talking a little bit about what she did that day, the tea mug that she used (she collects hand-crafted tea mugs from around the world), the little aphorism or proverb on her tea bag, and maybe a little bit of something else. Most of them cross some of the Country Grandmother/Rural Reporter column from small-town newsletters. They give a little insight into the mindset in early 2020 about the state of the disease and the government responses to it. I think Ms. Kynion continued believing in its potency and virulence longer than I did–after all, I was out in person several times a week going to essential businesses to keep things topped up even though I’d laid some things up before the lockdowns, and I saw the same checkers week after week meaning that they were not dying of a plague.

At any rate, an interesting project and a bit of a time capsule, but not something to read straight through as many of the entries cover the same ground and very similarly. It took me months to read it, as I would read a bunch of them and put it aside for a while. Also, I think it got lost in the truck for a while after I took it out to read elsewhere at one point.

Perhaps pace one’s self to a couple a day to better mimic the daily updates that each entry represents.

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The PSAs Have Gone The Other Direction

January 5, 2022 Brian J. Noggle

Instapundit links to a Joanne Jacobs Teens eat more, exercise less.

Which is weird, because all the NFL public and charitable announcement commercials during football games are no longer about Play60, its program to get kids to exercise. Instead, they’re all about the It Takes All Of Us announcements about programs raising awareness about race.

You mean the first actual, you know, health problem wasn’t solved yet and in fact worsened, but it was superseded by a more contemporary political concern?

What is this world coming to?

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No Hobgoblins In This Small Mind

January 5, 2022 Brian J. Noggle

As I have mentioned, gentle reader, the one genre of music I do not like much at all is not rap or hip hop (although I don’t like much from that genre either) is the seventies folk, especially male folk singers like Dan Fogelberg and John Denver (women like Linda Ronstadt, Lynda Carter, Olivia Newton-John get a pass because, well, PWOC).

Explain to me, then, how I have come to enjoy the vocal stylings of Michael Franks?

I could probably go into a paragraph talking about his distinct vocal stylings, but I’m not that smart, or I could point out that he is more smooth jazz than folk, but….

Really, it’s because WSIE provides a steady diet of a couple of his works, and I tend to pick up my jazz recordings based on what WSIE plays. I have not picked up any of his CDs, but I have gotten a couple of records when I’ve found them in the wild.

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Welcome To The New Normal

January 4, 2022 Brian J. Noggle

How do you like this, the middle part of the first half of the 21st century?

I saw this ad whilst watching football this weekend:

For those of us in the future, when this video has been removed by the owner or when YouTube re-writes its embeds again and renders three quarters of a twenty-year-old blog inscrutable (actually, I’ve only been embedding YouTube videos for about ten years, so I’ve only had to deal with dead embeds twice so far), this is an ad featuring Drew Brees, Jerome Bettis, and Jerry Rice sharing breakfast with a family of football referees, and they call Quaker Oats instant oatmeal a “superfood.”

You know what I call it? Gruel.

That’s right, gentle reader, the powers that be want you to think gruel is a superfood. Please don’t riot over the prices of meat and milk when you can find them in stock. You can grind your own grain and bark and think it’s good for you.

Alright, alright, alright, I am trying to be a bit arch and wry here. Full disclosure: I actually eat Quaker Oats for breakfast a couple of times a week since it’s fast, filling, and will not leave me bonking in the middle of a gym workout. But I eat meat with it. Bacon, to be precise. And although bacon doesn’t make everything better, unlike what the Internet of 2014 might have told you, paired with some carbs, it’s a good thing.

Still, when I saw the ad, the first thing I thought was “They’re calling the food of poor people, ground grain soaked in water, a superfood now?”

Another full disclosure: If you add the amount of water recommended on the packet, one half cup to the packet, it’s more of a porridge than a gruel. But if you have a family to feed, you’ll add more water than that, ainna?

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The Sunrise Is So Far Away In Winter

January 4, 2022 Brian J. Noggle

Like Lileks, I am not a fan of getting up before the dawn:

I never do anything of consequence between 3 and 5. Good for me nothing is required, either, or I might have to go to bed at a normal hour.

NORMAL ACCORDING TO WHO, the night owl screeches. The high achievers? Hah: they get up too early. Wife regularly has meetings with doctors that start at 7. People in finance and high-powered law firms are on the treadmill at 5:30. Normal for them, I suppose. When I had to get up early and get to work to do the news broadcasts I was compelled to take to bed early and wake in the bleak dark, and I hated it. The day seemed impossibly long, like a frozen baguette you had to gnaw from one end of the other.

If I could control my sleep with willful precision, I’d rise at 7:00, then sleep from 2 to 6, then stay up until 2. I’ve always hated afternoon. The very word sounds like a yawn.

You know, I’ve had to get up early for work most of my life. When I was at college, I had to get up early many days to get to campus, and I had to get up to open the grocery store produce department other days. After school, I had a bunch of jobs where I had to be at work at 7 or 8, often an hour away from work, so it was up at five (often after being up until after midnight the night before, but I was young).

But I had a brief idyllic period during my first remote working experience, before we had kids. I could sleep until 7am, hit my desk at 7:02am, take a nap at lunch, work until 4pm, doze until my beautiful wife came home from work, and then stay up until 1am or 2am. I wrote most of John Donnelly’s Gold during that, what, year and a half? But then the boss rented some office space downtown, and I had to be up at 5 again to be at the desk at 7am, and then we had kids, and I was up at 5 with our early rising baby and then up a 4am or 5am to get a couple hours of work in before having to take the kids to school and taking off early in the afternoons to retrieve them.

I have given some thought as to what life will be like when the boys leave us in only a few years. The evenings will be quieter; I will not feel like I need to be available for guidance all evening long, so perhaps I will undertake projects in my office or garage or maybe leave the house. Weird thought, that.

But I have certainly thought that if I’m still working from home, my schedule will involve waking after sunrise.

I feel this most acutely this, the first week of January. Over their Christmas break, I’ve slept in as I’ve not had to run into town in the 7 o’clock hour. And we’ve put the Christmas down, so Nogglestead is suddenly darker without the lit Christmas lights (we leave the trees on all night and all day). And the sunrise is so far away. It’s, what, almost 7am, and it’s going to be dark for another hour or so. The oldest tends to put on a bunch of lights on the upper level of the house as he gets ready to get himself on the high school bus. Normally, I go along after he’s left and turn those lights off. On days like these, though, I leave those lights on until after dawn.

C’mon, dawn, I’m waiting.

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Ace of Spades HQ Finds The Real Killer

January 3, 2022 Brian J. Noggle

Hidden in plain sight at Ace of Spades HQ, in the sidebar, the identity of Betty White’s real killer:

And he would have gotten away with it if it weren’t for those meddling morons!

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On The Blues Brothers and 9 To 5 (1980)

December 31, 2021 Brian J. Noggle

Book cover You know, these films were released in the same year. It’s crazy, because the aesthetics of each differ so wildly.

The Blues Brothers self-consciously represents a bit of a throwback, a bit purposely so. I’ve heard the story that the producers wanted the film to include more contemporary, disco musicians in it, but Dan Ackroyd and the dead Belushi wanted to have old Motown musicians. By 1980, Aretha Franklin, James Brown, John Lee Hooker, and Ray Charles were past their pop-culture sell by dates, apparently. I don’t know what to think of this–there’s an uncanny valley between first popular appeal of some artists, followed by a lull, and then perhaps another ascent into the zeitgeist that some artists enjoy. Kind of how artists have a “comeback” album two or three years after a hit album. Elvis, for example, did his big comeback special in 1968, not far past his film successes. But I digress.

When I read the novelization earlier this year, I recounted the plot for those who didn’t know it. I will spare you the rehashing of the rehashing here, I’ll just do a little comment on the aesthetic, a la Lileks, but without the screen caps. So: As I mentioned, it’s a bit backward-looking, and the settings in gritty parts of Chicago are darker and dirty. The film is definitely feels like a film from the late 1960s or 1970s.

9 to 5, on the other hand, is an eighties movie. The colors are a bit more pastel, the whole film is a bit brighter. You can see that the film is more like The Secret of My Success than Network. Even though it’s set in Manhattan, it’s not the Manhattan of Midnight Cowboy or Escape from New York (released a year later than this film). It’s a bright, optimistic vibe, where the women are getting liberated and overthrowing their sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot bosses.

Oh, but the professional look of 1980. The tight curls and those giant glasses. Most people think of the big and teased hair as the 80s look, and God bless them for their either forgetting or never knowing. The teased hair is flattering. This is not.

I think Missouri might have been a trailing indicator for this look; I remember in the middle 1980s, when someone would give my poor sainted mother a makeover, it always included a cropped, curly perm, big glasses, and too much makeup. She ended up looking like a zombie.

At any rate, 9 to 5 spawned a television show that ran for six years through most of the 1980s. I vaguely remember it.

And in a stunning twist, I watched the film a couple of times on cable when it was fresh, but not on Showtime. It must have hit HBO when friends of the family were early adopters of cable television, and we spent some time at their house including our last month living in Milwaukee after my mother gave up the apartment in the housing projects and before we decamped for Missouri at the end of the school year.

So I saw this film when it was new, and I was young, and the world was pastel and promising. So I remember it with more affection than it probably deserves on rewatching.

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On Comedy, Tragedy, History: The Live Drama and Vital Truth of William Shakespeare by Professor Peter Saccio (1996)

December 30, 2021December 29, 2021 Brian J. Noggle

Book cover This is an old timey Great Courses/Teaching Company set of cassettes. The copyright date says 1996, but the instructor at one point talks about the 1980s as being the present time, so it might have been recorded a couple of years before the copyright date. The lectures feature a live audience, so people laugh at his jokes and you can hear them shift from time to time–and one can expect that it’s actually them applauding at the end of each lecture–a sound effect that the company has kept throughout even though you cannot hear the audience otherwise or see them on the few DVDs I have watched.

The lectures include:

Shakespeare and Stratford
Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Theater
Richard III
Henry IV and Henry V
Twelfth Night
The Merchant of Venice
Hamlet
King Lear

It was a pretty short course–four or five hours–and the professor goes not only into Shakespeare in his time for context, but then delves into eight plays to provide some comment on them, their genres, and their interpretations over time.

For example, he talks about the Shylock question. As you might know, gentle reader, Shylock was a Jewish character in The Merchant of Venice, and the play apparently contains some stereotypes of Jews (that carry forward to this day). The professor talks about how the interpretation has changed over time to present a more sympathetic portrayal of the character, and the professor remarked that at least one performance he saw stripped some of the Jewishness from the character–and that plays in the 19th century were Bowlderized to remove the sex jokes, but in the late 20th century they were getting chopped up to remove other objectionable content. Brother, have I got news for you from the future.

At any rate, I really enjoyed these audiocassettes. If you’ve been here for some time, you might remember that I started reading the complete works of Shakespeare in 2018, and I got about five plays in before laying the book aside. See my category Shakespeare for my current progress on reading the book. If it has more than five entries, know that I have been inspired by this lecture series to pick it back up. I will have to pace the plays out like Executioner novels to ensure that I don’t get tired of them and see the formulaic parts too clearly. Perhaps 2022 will be a year of drama, as I have Volume 2 of the complete works of Ben Jonson, a contemporary of Shakespeare, around here somewhere (the first volume comprised the reading of my college course on Ben Jonson back in the early 1990s).

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Worth Less Toward My Retirement Than My Baseball Cards

December 29, 2021 Brian J. Noggle

Over at Outkick, Joe Kinsey’s daily post reminds me of an old pastime:

Winters seemed snowy back then in southwestern Ohio. Very cold. Dark. But there were always those Summerall and Madden afternoon Redskins or 49ers games to get us through. I’d be filling up NFL sticker books with my Christmas stocking hauls and listening to those games religiously. I can still go back in my mind to 1987-1989 specifically and remember the setup in our house and how we’d spend Sundays with the NFL.

I’d not only like to point out that the 80s were snowier than the current decade–we had a lot of snow in Jefferson County, meaning a lot of time off of school–but…

Collectible sticker albums. I’d not thought of those since probably the 1980s, but I, too, would buy an album and then buy packs of stickers, sight unseen, to stick into them. I did baseball albums, though, not football albums. I never completely filled one, but I am sure I had a couple of them going in the middle to late 1980s.

I don’t have them now, even though I have all my baseball cards from the era. I wonder how collectible the sticker albums eventually proved to be. Not enough to check the prices on eBay. Just enough to say, huh, I remember those.

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2021: The Year’s Reading in Review

December 28, 2021 Brian J. Noggle

Herein I present to you the list of books that I read in Book Year 2021, which starts the week after Christmas and runs to the week after Christmas (so this is technically Book Year 2022, wherein the Executioner novel I’ve been nibbling at a chapter a night will likely be the first entry).

So, my assessment? I started strong with a number of classics finished (Wuthering Heights, David Copperfield, and The Picture of Dorian Gray among them). The Winter Reading Challenge from the library propelled me strongly along. Later in the year, though, I kind of bogged down and did not read as much–poetry and football browsers being the bulk of Q4. The Eric van Lustbader thriller The Ninja really bogged me down late in the year.

But I read:

Black Hand The Executioner #178
Boxer’s Start-up by Doug Werner
War Hammer The Executioner #179
One-Step Sparring by Shin Duk Kang
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
Whiskey Words & a Shovel by r.h. Sin
Like the Pieces of Driftwood by Jon Francis
Complete Karate by J. Allen Queen
We Live on Mackinac Island
Gettysburg Visions by Sam Weaver
The House on the Rock
Sid Meier’s MEMOIR! by Sid Meier and Jennifer Lee Noonan
Book Lust by Nancy Pearl
The Good Girl’s Guide to Murder by Susan McBride
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
The Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi / Translated by Thomas Cleary
Books: A Memoir by Larry McMurtry
Widows by Ed McBain
Danger on Vampire Trail by “Franklin W. Dixon”
Force Down The Executioner #180
Vespers by Ed McBain
Chocolate: The Consuming Passion by Sandra Boynton
She Had Some Horses by Joy Harjo
The Judgment of Caesar by Steve Saylor
Karate! by Russell Kozuki
A Ginger on a Mission by Lynn Daake
Alien Nation by Alan Dean Foster
The Biggest Lie in the History of Christianity by Matthew Kelly
Mission: Impossible by Peter Barsocchini
Supercarrier by George C. Wilson
More Book Lust by Nancy Pearl
The Last Picture Show by Larry McMurtry
True Lies by Dewey Gram and Duan Dell’Amico
Men in Black II by Michael Teitlebaum
On Bullshit by Harry G. Frankfurt
High Fidelity by Nick Hornby
The Book Shop by Penelope Fitzgerald
Hackers by David Bischoff
Babylon 5: The Coming of Shadows by Jane Killick
Mr. Monk Goes To The Firehouse by Lee Goldberg
Mr. Monk Goes To Hawaii by Lee Goldberg
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
Home Is Where The Heart Is by “Thomas Kinkade”
Alien by Alan Dean Foster
Heroes and Outlaws of the Old West by Shane Edwards
The Great Optimist by Leigh Mitchell Hodges
Journey Through Heartsongs by Mattie J. T. Stepanek
Cocoon by David Saperstein
The Blues Brothers by Miami Mitch
Lethal Agent The Executioner #182
Life After Favre by Phil Hanrahan
Whoppers by Alvin Schwartz
Rescue Run The Executioner #204
Hell Road The Executioner #205
I Remember Vince Lombardi by Mike Towle
Moon of Mutiny by Lester del Rey
Rock On by Dan Kennedy
Coffee is Cheaper Than Therapy by Ann Conlkin Unruh
Selected Poems by Mary Phelan
The Pessimist’s Guide to History by Stuart Flexner and Doris Flecner
Death Whisper The Executioner #208
Three Comedies by Aristophanes
My Cat Spit McGee by Willie Morris
Asian Crucible The Executioner #209
Fission Fury The Executioner #214
Oriental Love Poems by Compiled by Michelle Lovric
Firefly: The Official Companion Volume One
Firefly: The Official Companion Volume Two
Poetics South by Ann Deagon
Sonic Warrior by Lou Brutus
Laugh Lines by Alison Pohn
Fire Hammer The Executioner #215
Poems by Chris Alderman/Harold Alderman
Four Past Midnight by Stephen King
Descartes in 90 Minutes by Paul Strathern
Lake Honor by Alan Brown and Brian Brown
A Bend in the Road by edited by Mary A. Shaugnessy
Gone in the Night by Alan Brown and Brian Brown
Shadow Valley by Alan Brown and Brian Brown
Carver: A Life In Poems by Marilyn Nelson
The Controlled Clasp by John Bahnke
Prayers and Meditations by Helen Steiner Rice
We’re Doing Witchcraft by E. Kristin Anderson
Thoughts from a Dark Room That Lit Up by Denzel Norris featuring Joel Smith
The Legend of the One by Orlea Rayne
Something to Someone by Javan
One World, One Heart by Susan Polis Schutz with Stephen Schutz
Thanksgiving Ideals magazine
American Art Deco by Eva Weber
Terra Nova: The Wars of Liberation by edited by Tom Kratman
Look What God Did! by Patty E. Thompson
Whose Job Is It Anyway? by Patty E. Thompson
Kung Fu Mace #4: The Year of the Dragon by Lee Chang
Fugitive Blues by Debra Kang Dean
I Marry You by John Ciardi
Vengeance by Richard Marcinko and Jim DeFelice
The Hirschfeld Century by David Leopold
End Game The Executioner #218
The Ornament Keeper by Eva Marie Everson
Little Thoughts On Love by Anne Geddes
Antoine Watteau
Edward Hopper: A Modern Master by Ita G. Berkow
At the End of the Rainbow by Mary Worley Gunn
Field Stones by Robert Kinsley
Terse Verse by Roberta Page
In Praise of East Central Illinois by Alex Sawyer
The Ninja by Eric Can Lustbader
The Wisdom of Father Andrew by edited by Kathleen E. Burne

That’s a lot of Executioner novels–what, 11? I’m clearly making it a priority to finish that series presently.

I have a lot of fine, fine books–the Summa Theologiae now among them–to read, so perhaps I should make a greater priority of reading in the evenings.

108 is not as many as SupaTrey, but he includes audiobooks he listens to, and I only count the actual books I read (and physical books, too, not ebooks).

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Nogglestead Christmas Round-Up

December 27, 2021 Brian J. Noggle

Gentle reader, I had one of the best Christmases in recent memory even though the days have had high temperatures in the 1970s, as un-Wisconsinlike as you can imagine; the only snow we had was in Christmas songs. However, this is not far outside the wide range we’ve seen here at Nogglestead in our time here–we have had a sum total of one white Christmas, I believe, when an unexpected snowfall lightly dusted southwest Missouri in 2010.

So what made this Christmas special?

My brother and nephew came over from Poplar Bluff on Christmas Eve to spend the night, open presents and to have Christmas dinner before returning to Poplar Bluff. Which explains why I know what this means:

Compared to a standard Kawasaki Mule, the Roxor is a little bigger, a little heavier, a LOT more powerful, and a bit simpler in most respects. Most critically, because it’s not CVT-equipped, it can tow quite a bit more, to the point where I’d feel comfortable using it to maneuver a loaded car trailer around our property.

You know what has a continuously variable transmission? A Jeep Compass such as my brother drives. Which led to a series of adventures.

My brother felt the transmission struggle a bit as he hit my farm road after driving on the highway for three hours. He checked the transmission fluid and found it a bit low, so we went out at six-thirty on Christmas Eve looking for CVT Transmission Fluid, which is different from regular transmission fluid. All the Walmarts were closed, so we ended up hitting a couple of gas stations and an extensive truck stop, but no luck. Plenty of regular transmission fluid, but none of the special stuff. So my brother and nephew would also stay Christmas night, and we’d hit Walmart in the morning so he could top it off.

Christmas itself went well. We opened presents, of course. My beautiful wife got the Iron Maiden cooler she never knew she wanted:

My best moment was when my youngest, acting as Santa and passing the gifts out, slid a wrapped box toward me. I picked it up and said, “This feels like the Summa Theologiae.” And my beautiful wife said a not beautiful word, because it was.

I have mentioned often, whenever I listen to audio books or courses on Aquinas, that I wanted to own a copy of Summa Theologica. Well, now I do, and I’m going to have to consider reading it.

We spoiled the boys, of course. The nuclear family got the standard pajamas, warm pajamas suitable for many Decembers, albeit not this onw. I have my brother-and-nephew tactical pens–if it has tactical in the name, it’s a good gift for them–along with books and gun targets. We then ate a great meal, watched a Packers victory, and watched my new DVD of The Blues Brothers–I read the novelization in March and haven’t seen the film in estate sales, thrift stores, or antique malls since, so my beautiful wife found it for me at a music/video resale shop (and paid $6 for it).

Then, on Boxing Day morning, I took my brother to Walmart when it opened at 6:00 for some special transmission fluid; he topped it off, but when he threw it into reverse to head home, the transmission made a crashing sound, and he had no gears. So I spent Boxing Day driving he and my nephew back to Poplar Bluff. He’s in a bit of a spot–it was his only running vehicle, and he is yet unsure where to have it repaired, how long it will take, or how much it will cost. So his adventure is a little more problematic than my drive, but I enjoyed the extra time with him.

And the whole weekend provided a little break from my routine. Towards the end of this year, I’ve been spending too much time at my desk getting too little done. I was going to write a cri-de-coeur post–I even had a great pun title, L’Eh State, C’est Moi, but never mind. I’m going to find space on my bookshelves for Summa Theologica, write my thank you notes, and get away from my desk.

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Book Report: The Wisdom of Father Andrew edited by Kathleen E. Burne (1949, 1950)

December 24, 2021December 23, 2021 Brian J. Noggle

Book cover I must have gotten this pamphlet tucked into a pack of chapbooks bought from the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County. It is a mid-(twentieth)-century pamphlet, apparently one of six in the set, from Britain collecting the wisdom of Father Andrew, real name Henry Ernest Hardy, one of the founders of the Society of Divine Compassion, an organization dealing with the poor in London.

This 32-page book has a bunch of paragraph or two snippets from Father Andrew’s other works, presumably. A number of them deal with focusing on one’s work as a vocation, not merely a job, but doing work for God no matter what the work is. So it reminded me a bit of C.S. Lewis’s work blended with Buddhism, perhaps. It’s definitely Christian work, though, as Father Andrew wants you to live like Christ. Father Andrew died in 1946, so this book and its brethren are posthumous.

More interesting, though, is the provenance of the book. Kathleen E. Burne was apparently a female poet of the World War I era (just like Joyce Kilmer!), but if you search for her now, you find some mention of her books of the life of Father Andrew (you can find Prayers from Father Andrew online here). The booklet I have is a second impression from 1950, and in the intervening ~~fifty~~ seventy years, it’s made its way across the ocean and into the interior of another continent (not as quickly as Five Themes of Today, but still).

Imagine a tract in the little plastic holder in the front of your church in the hands of someone in another country in 2095. Hard to imagine, ainna? And yet, my beautiful wife’s current Portals of Prayer might go far. If we did not recycle them at the end of every month. I think that might be a bit of a difference: Ephemera like that, and current Reader’s Digests that we read, we discard–unlike people in the last century, and certainly not like people in mid-century Britain would have.

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Happy Hobgoblin of Little Minds

December 24, 2021 Brian J. Noggle

I say Christmase’en.

Because I am consistent.

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An Uncomfortable Conversation At Nogglestead

December 23, 2021December 22, 2021 Brian J. Noggle

Honey, former crushes of mine are sending me pictures of themselves in bed.

The Triplets sent me an email wishing me happy holidays, along with the above photo, and invited me to join their email list. I did. Strangely enough, I had listened to their Christmas album, Christmas Time Is Here, earlier in the day.

Time was when I could tell Sylvia, Diana, and Vicki apart. But that was thirty years ago. Also, in this picture, they’re upside down. Although I can read a book upside down–the product of a lot of practice reading books to children so they could see the pictures–I cannot easily recognize an upside down face. Which is why I am pleased that gravity works for all of us, and special effects from Doctor Strange movies are just that.

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An Album I Need To Own

December 22, 2021 Brian J. Noggle

KCSM, the Bay Area’s Jazz station, posted this on Facebook:

Great, now that’s something I must own.

I actually bought Canta en Español and Cuatro Vidas on CD about ten years ago when I was adding to my Spanish language CDs (the time I bought a lot of Claudia Acuña, Rocío Dúrcal, Rocío Jurado, Paulina Rubio, Shakira, and José José among others), and I have picked up a couple of the records since then. But there’s a Christmas record? I really, really want to find that out in the wild now.

Probably more likely that finding Ella Wishes You A Swinging Christmas by Ella Fitzgerald. In the original, anyway; apparently, there’s a reissue on vinyl, so I might run across one somewhere, but one does not find Ella Fitzgerald records in the wild, like almost at all.

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A Quiz, But Not A Definitive Guide

December 21, 2021December 20, 2021 Brian J. Noggle

In 2011, The Mystery Bookshelf posted a four-part series entitled 20 Must Read Hard Boiled Classics (hey, I’m late to the party, but OregonMuse just posted it on the world-famous Ace of Spades HQ Book Thread this week).

So of course I decided to turn it into a quiz to find out how many of them I’ve read.

The results are not pretty. I have highlighted the titles of the ones that I have read.

Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett
The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain
Double Indemnity by James M. Cain
The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler
I, The Jury by Mickey Spillane
It’s a Lonely Place by Dorothy B. Hughes
The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith
The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson
Pop. 1280 by Jim Thompson
The Drowning Pool by Ross MacDonald
The Chill by Ross MacDonald
The Deep-Blue Goodbye by John D. MacDonald
The Last Good Kiss by James Crumley
Eight Million Ways To Die by Lawrence Block
When The Sacred Ginmill Closes by Lawrence Block
Miami Blues by Charles Willeford
Black Cherry Blues by James Lee Burke
L.A. Confidential by James Ellroy

40%, If you throw in movies, I would be all the way up to 45% (unless you counted varied renditions of The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye as extra credit).

I am not sure if I have any of the ones I have not read that I do not have on my to-read shelves. I have some James M. Cain–Mildred Pierce, which I started once but did not finish yet–but not the two listed here. I bought a couple of James Lee Burke books last year, but not Black Cherry Blues.

I would like some extra credit for reading the complete works of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Ross MacDonald as well as extensively in John D. MacDonald (all the Travis McGee novels, to which the Deep-Blue Goodbye belongs) and Mickey Spillane.

What would I add to this list? I don’t know that I could right away. Perhaps after some thought, reflection, and perusing of my shelves.

But I don’t have time for that now.

I will maybe keep an eye out for some of these books, but I would expect to find many of these out of print, or at least out of the print that would put them on the cheap bookshelves I haunt.

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Footnotable Humor

December 20, 2021 Brian J. Noggle

I guess it’s a meme, which is the modern equivalent of the cartoon but requires no actually drawing skill, but Instapundit posted this on Facebook, and I was amused.

I mean, I’ve told that story once or twice, but probably not to pretty girls. Well, except my beautiful wife, but I learned it after we were married, and she was stuck.

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