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

Musical Balance: A Catch Up Post

May 16, 2024May 15, 2024 Brian J. Noggle

So my post yesterday about the band Toto got me to thinking. I have a whole category here on “Musical Balance” wherein I describe the music I have purchased recently and how it falls into two camps: Either it’s metal, or it’s jazz songbirds. And I thought I might be due for a post because I had not done one in a while.

What’s a while? I guess two and a half years. What? That long?

To be honest, where was I in December 2021? Ah, yes. I was on a part-time contract after having left the government service (well, a government contract) a year before, and I was not filling out my dance card with other contracts. So I was trimming my musical purchasing for the most part. I bought a couple more CDs in 2021, but it does drop off in 2022 (although I got a full-time engagement, my beautiful wife’s income was temporarily tailing off). I did, however, play on Facebook and its ads to “get a free CD if you pay shipping” offer(s). I took a flier on a number of bands based on this, and I am pretty sure I only really liked one and sort of liked another.

So, Brian J., what have you bought?

Gentle reader, I admit to you now that I blend in this list not only MP3 singles with CDs, but also MP3s with actual CDs (records, of course, are a different thing entirely, and they’re acquired when I find them–the following are things I sought out in one way or another). For the most part, I’ve looked for CDs and autographed CDs directly from the artist Web site where I could.

And I got:

2021

Dark Connection Beast in Black (metal)
Four Corners Craig Chaquico (jazz guitar)
Empty Rooms Halflives (rock)
Phases Wild Fire (pop)

2022

At Last Cyndi Lauper (jazz, believe it or not; see the previous entry on Queen Latifah)
Forever Mindy Abair (jazz)
Daytime Stories, Nightmare Tales Attick Demons (metal)
Seasons of Love Lani Hall (jazz?)
Tokyo Groove Tokyo Groove Jyoshi (funk)
Explosions Three Days Grace (hard rock)
Vermillion Eclipse Semblant (metal)
Naked Dreams Open Wire (hard rock)
Hello Indie Bossa Janet Evra (jazz)
Morissette Morissette (pop)
Vessel The Accidentals (folk)
Quietus of Autumn Mute Prophet (metal)
Stillborn Reflection Mute Prophet (metal)
The Unheard Warning Mute Prophet (metal)
As December Falls As December Falls (metal)
Fear Gorta & Tales of the Undead Dratna (metal)
Soldiers of the Mark New Jacobin Club (metal)
Circus of Doom Battle Beast (metal)
“Out My Mind” (single) The PitchPockets (funk)
The Great Heathen Army Amon Amarth (Viking death metal)
Ballads of the Broken Jelly Roll (rock, but he gets more play on country stations these days)
“Forever and Beyond” (single) Mortemia (metal)
The Merriest Jane Monheit (holiday)
All I Got For The Christmas Was The Blues Mindy Abair and the Bonecrushers (Christmas)

2023

“What Else Is There?” (single) Mortemia (metal)
“Adrenalize” (single) Mortemia (metal)
“Here Comes Winter” (single) Mortemia (metal)
Princess of Funk Juna Serita (funk)
“Thirteen” (single) Danzig (metal)
Let It Snow Jewel (Christmas)
The Diamond Covers Diamante (rock)
“Tu stai bene con Me” Violante Placido (European pop)
“Only Woman” Connor Fiehler (folk, but the son of a friend)
Tierra Xeria (metal)
Habit Margo Rey (Latin jazz?)

2024

TGJ Grooving and Dancing Tokyo Groove Jyoshi (funk)
Butterfly Dream Harumi Imai (funk)
“Mantra” (single) Bring Me The Horizon (hard rock)
Waves Yuko Mabuchi (jazz)
Caribbean Canvas Yuko Mabuchi (jazz)
“Don’t Rain on My Parade” (single) Sacha Boutros (jazz)
“Estate” (single) Sacha Boutros (jazz)

Well, I’m not going to count it for you, but that looks pretty evenly balanced. I’ve added funk to the rotation–I said about Tokyo Groove Jyoshi “coming soon to a music balance post near you” in 2022, but clearly “soon” has taken on Nogglesteadian time dilation. But I’ve bought a couple Tokyo Groove Jyoshi CDs and a couple CDs from related performers (Harumi Imai, Juna Serita).

I admit this list might not be complete; I’m compiling it not only from Amazon orders (easy) but also emails from individual artist Web site order confirmations spread across two email clients for one email address and into another after a phishing scare. So it’s entirely possible I have missed a CD or digital download or two, but….

It does continue to indicate that I buy new jazz and metal on CD and do not order 70s and 80s hits or artists on new media.

It also indicates I am probably a CD or two behind on many of my favorite contemporary artists, which I would like to rectify should I fall into more income certainty.

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The Kids Today Are Wrong, As Usual

May 15, 2024 Brian J. Noggle

Gentle reader, it is time to talk about the best Toto song. I mean, the time had to come around once after 1985, right? You live in the quantum universe where that time has come.

Now, you might think I favor “Rosanna” because it came on a cassette I got out of a box of Chex cereal in the days where prizes came in the box or you might already be a winner when you unscrewed a cap on a soda bottle or opened a pack of gum. Now, of course, you get a code where, after you sign up on the Internet and give the consumer package goods conglomorate all of your personal information or, heaven forbid, download the app and give the conglomorate and its “partners” the right to track your every move before discovering, nah, bro, you didn’t win. But in the 1980s, cereal boxes gave you compilation cassettes of “old” songs which were in fact only a couple of years old, but they came out when you were in elementary school and not after you grew up and went to middle school, so they were uncool.

Anyway, Toto’s best song is not “Roseanna”:

Strangely enough, I went looking for that cassette in the bins under the bed where we store out old cassettes, and I did not find the un-cased tape in a quick search. Given how I don’t tend to get rid of anything, I presume it’s there or misplaced, but I don’t doubt I still have it. I found cassette singles from the era, though. You know, every couple of years, I get out the 45 records and listen to them. But one never pulls out cassette singles and listens to them. Whether it’s because the tactile experience is different, because records are hip (or hep) now, or because you either have to pause the listening to rewind or have to listen to all B-sides, I am not sure, although it might be the last.

Of course, Toto is most known for “Africa” because Weezer covered it with “Weird Al” a couple of years ago. But, to be honest, that is five or six years ago, so the Weezer has slipped out of the zeitgeist and off of the radio’s abbreviated playlists. Toto’s version appears from time to time between the Aerosmith, Tom Petty, and Journey.

I will listen to arguments that Leo Marachiolli’s heavy metal cover is Frog Leap Studios’ best song. In between sentences here, I’m going to see what Leo’s been doing lately. He’s still doing metal covers, but it looks like his output has declined a bit. But he’s in a different place in his life than he was six or seven years ago. Aren’t we all.

But back to Toto. The best Toto song, at least among their radio hits, is definitely “Hold the Line”:

Although the song comes from their debut album in 1978, it got a lot of radio play on the classic rock stations in the middle 1990s, so I heard it a bunch, and it was in my dating years, and I’d just started seeing this really hot chick who, I’m not joking, was either the #2 or #3 hit on the Google Image search for “legs.” So it hit me in a spot back in the day when the radio stations were probably playing old songs over and over again but probably with larger playlists and when the songs were still new enough to me that I was not tired of them. I heard it on the newest preset in my car, a radio station with no DJs and few commercials whose mix of 80s, 90s, and whatever is slightly different from the other similar stations in Springfield, for a little while, anyway. Over time, I will discover it overlaps with the other stations more than I prefer (and probably a convergence is forthcoming) and that its library is not that big, either. I am this far away from another curmudgeonly radio post.

Last night, I spun Foreigner’s Records, their greatest hits collection that I inherited last weekend. I had actually bought this album on cassette in college, so I was familiar with the songs already. You’ll hear the occasional Foreigner song on the radio today, but not my favorites, “Dirty White Boy” and “Long, Long Way From Home”.

Both Toto and Foreigner were old bands when I came to listen to pop radio in the late 1980s, so they were kind of background noise at the time. But, you know what? They’re all right. I’m not likely to rush to order their music on Amazon–they’re not metal or jazz songbirds, after all–but I’ll watch for their records. Although, to be honest, they’re in that peak of priciness–pop bands from the 1970s and 1980s–so I’ll not likely find any inexpensively.

But they’re interesting to reminisce to and about.

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Brian J. Lets The Old Man Out

May 14, 2024 Brian J. Noggle

Ah, gentle reader. As you might know, I am one of those old men who thinks he’s holding the line on aging. Well, not in my popular culture knowledge. I’m certainly not listening to new hip hop or pop music nor watching the latest reboots of things I enjoyed when I was younger. I guess I’ve always had an old soul when it comes to that sort of thing. I’ve always read old books, whether capital-L Literature or old suspense and science fiction. But, still, I’ve done martial arts classes with people much younger than me, and I’ve had my children in school with children whose parents were ten years younger than I am. So I might have been fooling myself, but I thought as long as I had kids in school, I was young.

But, oh, gentle reader, the oldest has graduated from high school. And even before that event, I’ve been letting the old man out by expressing the way we did things in the 20th century. To whit:

On a recent visit to the dentist, I was confronted by a new hygenist who was young and pretty. And although I am happily married, it is the way of the Man to puff out one’s chest a little in this situation. However, at the end of the visit, she scheduled me for my next four-month-cleaning, and I said it was the easy one since it was in the same year. The hard ones were the ones that occurred in the next year, because I would not have the calendar yet upon which to write the appointment.
Silly old man! In the 21st century, people put appointments in their phones nowadays. Although I do put appointments in a Google calendar for work, it’s still not my default for doctor’s appointments. I still write them on the wall calendar in the dining room. I’m the only one who does, though, so I never know what’s going on with my beautiful wife or my children.
One of the organizations for which my wife volunteers had a game night to bring together IT students from various universities with the members of the IT organization. She had trusted me to buy soda and water for the event, and I bought something like four cases of soda and a couple cases of water for the projected 30-60 attendees. I didn’t think it was too much, thinking college kids could easily drink three or four sodas over the course of a three-hour event.
The treasurer of the organization brought along the big ledger checkbook for the organization to write an expense check for another member. “And a big bag of quarters in case we run out of soda so we can pop down to the vending machines,” I said, ever the jester.

But the gentleman, older than I am and a manager/executive for many different firms in his career, pointed out that the kids used their cards at the vending machines. Of course they did. But I come from an age where Cokes were not quite a dime, but Vess soda could be had for a quarter from a vending machine.
I mentioned my brother got married. He and his wife also closed recently on a nice slice of land which has a nice pre-fab house on a foundation along with twenty-five acres of land which means he has accidentally on purpose, perhaps, but it’s nice.
Also, it is a new address, so I wrote it in my address book.

The address book was a gift I received when I graduated high school a couple of years ago. I wrote in it the addresses of high school friends and family members with whom I would correspond throughout high school and beyond (I still double-check my grandmother’s address in the book even though she has lived in the same place for a couple of years now.

The address book itself now contains more scratch-outs than confirmed addresses, and an Excel spreadsheet maintains the shrinking Christmas card list, so it’s a more accurate and useful representation of street addresses of people with whom I regularly (annually) correspond.

But I still put this address in my address book.

Which makes me think I might need to update the centerpiece of the Family Bible as well with wife and children’s names. Which seems fitting as they’re about to head out on their own.

As if these examples enough were not enough to indicate I might be approaching middle age, the wedding videos and photos themselves did.

And I guess I might as well embrace it. After all, it’s not like I’m getting any younger or getting any more sincerely interested in the concerns of the younger amongst us.

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On John Dewey read by Charlton Heston (1990)

May 13, 2024May 12, 2024 Brian J. Noggle

Book cover Well, gentle reader, it has taken me several years and several tries to get through this particular volume of The Giants of Philosophy series. As you might recall, I listened to several volumes in 2021 and 2022, including:

I mean, those are giants of philosophy, for the most part, and innovative thinkers who challenged the paradigm of thought in their time, whereas Dewey was just the guy who took Pragmatism and turned it into the seeds of elitist destruction we see around us, where the credentialed “experts” should be in charge and should help usher those of us who are lesser than they to an atheist, relativistic, collective future.

It takes a very special hobgoblin of a mind to take uncertainty in thought and wed it to the certainty that some of the elevated thinkers should actually run things because, uh, their uncertainty is more pragmatic than the common person. He denies any objective reality aside from the interaction of people with the environment in their circumstances, and somehow derives a “better” that can be applied somehow to different circumstances, environment, and people, because Dewey somehow in his voluminous writings says so.

So, yeah. Not only is it rather administrative in its scope, but…. Well, no, that’s a good way to put it: Dewey would be the patron saint of adminstrators had they a religion of their own, but no. I agreed most with this course when Charlton Heston said Dewey’s critics would say that he is….. And he is, and I do.

So if you’re making a time machine and want to go back and take care of Hitler, if it’s all right, I’d like to borrow it and take care of Dewey. Ah, but it would not work: The communist infusion into university thought was not only the work of Dewey, and turning him so that he got rich making a New England brewery would only have delayed where we are today.

Still, after finally finishing this particular two cassettes (Only two! Which averages out almost to one whole cassette a year for my listening!) leaves me with two takeaways.

First, My youngest son had to listen to part of this series a couple weeks back when we were on the road to a conference in Arkansas, and he said, “John Dewey” in the fashion that the kids said “John Cena” when that was a thing several years ago, and I will forever say John Dewey in that fashion.

Secondly: I have really enjoyed this entries in this series. I don’t remember where I bought them–probably the Friends of the Springfield-Greene Library Book Sale some year or another–but they’re quicker listens than a full audio course, and as I’ve mentioned, having Charlton Heston read them is something. The voice acting now reminds me of the 1990s videocassette Richard the Lionheart–as these cassettes have different vocal actors for different thinkers, critics, and inspirations–sorry, where did I first apply the em dash?–but it’s slightly less distracting on audio cassette. But if I run into other entries in this series, I will pick them up, although the closer the subjects are to the twentieth century, the longer it will take me to listen to them. Unless, of course, they have a couple of cassettes on Ayn Rand. But they won’t.

At any rate, I’m fond of the series, but not of this particular spit philosopher.

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Word of the Day

May 9, 2024 Brian J. Noggle

Compromisation.

The Internet says it is a word based on a single usage of it on a blog somewhere, sometime, referring to making a compromise, not in the sense of a computer system security incident.

And now the AIs of the world are making it happen.

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On Red Dwarf: The Complete Collection (as of then) (2006)

May 9, 2024 Brian J. Noggle

Book cover Ah, gentle reader, we have been very light with the movie reports here at MfBJN, and that’s for a good reason: I have actually watched the boxed set entitled Red Dwarf: The Complete Collection which my beautiful wife gave me for my birthday in 2011. Soon, though, it was an incomplete collection, as they made two movies and four more “series” (seasons) of the program all the way up to 2020.

As I have mentioned, the PBS station in St. Louis played an episode of this television program after Doctor Who on Sunday nights. So I recorded a couple of them by programming a videocassette recorder like the ancients did. The first two “series” (seasons, as we spell it in the United States) were released in 1988, so they would have been the ones I have on the old grainy videocassettes. Given that each series is only six episodes, I must have seen quite a percentage of them in those old days. Not long after I got the set of DVDs, I started watching them with my beautiful wife, but she did not care for the common insult of the show, smeghead, so she dropped. And when I got to the start of the third series and saw its abrupt shift in the opening and the different look to it, I shelved it for a decade. But I powered through it this time.

So, the setup: The Red Dwarf is a mining ship, and Dave Lister is the lowest technician on the ship. He smuggles a cat on board and, when it is discovered, he is put into a stasis field for the remainder of the voyage (and will be docked that pay). A radiation leak kills the crew except for Lister, and the computer (known as Holly) releases him three million years later when the radiation levels have cooled. Holly can also project a hologram of a single ship’s crewman, so he chooses Rimmer, Lister’s immediate superior officer, roommate, and foil. Additionally, the pregnant cat gave birth three million years ago, and her progeny evolved to a cat civilization in the ship’s hold, of which only a single representative, called, appropriately enough, Cat, remains. Eventually, they pick up a fifth main character, a service mechanoid named Kryten.

So that’s basically the show: Four or five people dealing with zany creatures they encounter, time rifts, and so on. The first two series were just a couple of sets, but the show’s budget increased over time, and the individual series kind of have themes. The Red Dwarf is stolen for a couple, so they’re pursuing its trail. Or nanobots have rebuilt the Red Dwarf, including the crew (this is the last series in the set). The characters are kind of types: Rimmer is the Flashman type, a blustery nincompoop; Lister is a lower class slob; Cat is a dumb dandy; Holly is a bit daft; Kryten is servile. The humor tends toward the zany situations in which the characters find themselves, the characters playing to their types, and the crazy verbal metaphors they come up with to describe circumstances and situations. It’s funny in spots.

The Wikipedia entry uses the term “retcon” to describe changes between the series, but that implies a continuity that the show itself does not expect or enforce. Kryten, for example, is a one-off character in series 2–the first episode, actually, and he does not appear again in Series II but is a regular character in Series III. In Series III, the original Holly is replaced by a Holly from an alternate universe they encountered in Series II, but the substitution is not explained. Some of the series end in cliffhangers which are sometimes explained quickly at the beginning of the next series–or not. The series that features them hunting for the Red Dwarf starts without showing the precipitating events. Sometimes it tries to explain things–like how they swap out Rimmer for Christine Kochanski in Series VI. So they’re comfortable with having some recurring characters/situations/themes, but they’re not tightly bound to what has gone before (and I understand that later series kind of throw out the last couple of series in this set).

So amusing overall and funny in spots, and I planned to be discouraged about the crew going on for a decade without changing or finding earth, but the different concepts and shifts from series to series kept it fresh.

However, I found binge-watching–and I watched two or three episodes most nights for several weeks–to be kind of difficult. It’s probably easier to enjoy a show like this in its original form–an episode a week, which keeps the repeated tropes from being too obvious.

I am not in a hurry right now to run out and buy the rest of the series. But if I found them at a library book sale for a buck each or in an antique mall for a couple of dollars, I would be tempted. And you all know I cannot resist that temptation, so perhaps the word I’m looking for is fut accompli. That is, a fait accompli in the future.

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In Case You Were Wondering What Mack Bolan’s War Wagon Looks Like….

May 8, 2024 Brian J. Noggle

Ms. K. has a photo of a GMC motorhome from the early 1970s.

Apparently, its missile racks are retracted for urban operations camouflage. But I presume they’re there.

(Footnote: In a number of the later Pendleton titles, Mack Bolan drives one of these, somehow inconspicuously, to the hardsites he wants to hit. And no one seems to catch on that one of these was nearby during the climactic finales of each book.)

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Book Report: The Deserted Village and Other Poems by Oliver Goldsmith (1894?)

May 7, 2024May 6, 2024 Brian J. Noggle

Book cover After reading a century-old copy of The Courtship of Miles Standish and Elizabeth, I quickly picked up another one of these old, old elementary school (!) textbooks. This one bears the copyright date of 1894 but is likely newer. Although it has an owner’s name penciled in, it’s less legible and would likely yield a less interesting account of the previous owner.

So: Oliver Goldsmith is most known for The Vicar of of Wakefield, but these poems are what really put him on the literary map right about the time of the ~~British Transcontinental Civil War~~ Revolutionary War (we won, we call it what we want).

“The Deserted Village” is a response to the industrial revolution and how the rural areas were depopulating as people moved to the cities for work. Wow, this was a thing before the 20th century? Of course it was; but by not reading these things in school any more, we don’t need that perspective about how some things, themes, and sentiments or concerns precede the solutions that salesmen and politicians would offer us today for our completely novel troubles. “The Traveller” is a, well, travelogue of someone visiting the continent and comparing the different places and their foreigners to England (which is clearly the best). A couple of shorter poems appear to fill out the thin (96 page) volume.

These poems and The Vicar of Wakefield represent the bulk of Goldsmith’s work (although he had a couple plays put on and a couple other novels). But he was lauded in his time. We have forgotten so many of the people who were big literary stars in their time.

The poems are easy to read. Long lines and end rhymes, attention to rhythm. Meant to be read aloud, perhaps to friends, but that’s not how the party people do it these days.

So, again, suddenly I am enjoying these century-old poem collections, so don’t be surprised to see me pick up another in the future. So many of the ones I have, though, are Longfellow, so I will try to pace them out.

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Good Album Hunting, Saturday, May 4, 2024: Wedding Gifts

May 7, 2024May 6, 2024 Brian J. Noggle

On Saturday, as I mentioned, I went to a small town in southeast Missouri to attend my brother’s wedding.

As it was the first time that I’d seen him in quite a while, we exchanged Christmas presents for 2023, and he had a couple of milk crates with records in them. He said they were from our mother, but I thought that I had gotten all of her records already. When I started dusting them off and going through them, it became clear that most of the records came from someone else.

I mean, certainly some of them bear the sale tags with a G on them that indicated she’d placed them in the garage sales of the early century, but, again, most of them did not have it, and they were a mixed lot of old/small label gospel (the kind I thought I’d never own), 80s pop, and folk. I wonder if they were just other records that other people had put into the yard sale that were still in my mother’s garage when she passed away or perhaps they were records my aunt picked up before she passed away–given that they included some photos and art with a note written in our family friend Gloria’s hand, it could be any of the above.

So I dusted them off and here’s what the stack included:

Workers Together For Him by the Pentecostal Children’s Home. Not found on Discogs)
Birthday of a King / Christmas with Bob by Bob Harrington. $3.99
Bizet Carmen Suite by Fortuna Records. $19.99
To You With Love, Donny by Donny Osmond $.50)
Where Did Our Love Go? by the Supremes $1.99)
Honky Tonk Classics Volume 2 by Mike Di Napoli’s Trio $3.99)
Organ and Chims by Robert Rheims for the Whole Family At Christmas $12.00)
Poor Rich Man by Bud Chambers. The cover says he’s America’s Number One Song Writing Preacher. Not found on Discogs, but others of his are listed between $15 and $100
Looking for a City by Jimmy Swaggart. $1.68)
It Is No Secret by Stuart Hamblen $1.99
Bobby Rich Sings Your Requests. $4.99
The Best of Scripture in Song by David and Dale Garratt. $3.99
What’s Going On by Marvin Gaye (no cover). $0.34
Happy Holiday With, a Columbia collection (no cover).
Live at the Lighthouse by Elvin Jones (no cover). $10
Wheels of Fire in the Studio by Cream (no cover, and only one record from a two-record set).
Lonely Blue Boy by Jimmy Griggs (no cover). $3.46
La Familia by Kracker (no cover). $2.15
The Battle of New Orleans by Jimmie Driftwood (no cover). $12.00
You’re All I Need by Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell, a compilation (no cover). $7.32
Children’s Favorites by the Jingleheimers (no cover). $1.00
The Wilderness Road and Jimmie Driftwood. $2.85.
Mighty Clouds Alive by the Mighty Clouds of Joy. $3.50
Oh, Lovely Galilean by Wayne Baldridge. Not found on Discogs.
Happiness is Gladness by Gladness Jennings (no cover). $9.99
Sing Your Song, Jimmy by Jimmy Williams (no cover). Did not find on Discogs.
Don’t Let The Ship Sail Without Me by the Happy Gospel Four (no cover). Did not find on Discogs.
Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs by Marty Robbins. This copy does not have a garage sale sticker on it, so I don’t know if it’s the one from my youth, but I know we had a copy as my father played the record on Christmas. $1.98
I’ll Keep Holding On To Jesus by the Kenny Parker Trio. Not on Discogs, but other records sell from $3 to $25
The Lord’s Prayer by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. $.16
Surfer Girl by the Beach Boys. $1
Dance, Dance, Dance by the Beach Boys. $2
Control by Janet Jackson. $.38
You’ll Never Walk Alone by Elvis. $.25
Elvis Sings Flaming Star by, well, Elvis. $.32
Elvis’ Christmas Album. This is the third or fourth copy we have at Nogglestead. $.50
The Muppet Movie Original Soundtrack Recording. This is the second or third copy we have at Nogglestead. $1.99
Hi In-fidelity by REO Speedwagon. $.54
The Nostalgic Voices and Sounds of Old Time Radio Vol. 2. $1.02
You Can’t Be True Dear… in the Ken Griffin Style by Charles Rand at the organ. $.99
Blue Hawaiian Waters by Harry Kaapuni and His Royal Polynesians. $1.50
This Is A Recording by Lily Tomlin. $.89
Little Things by Bobby Goldsboro. $.39
Country & Western Stars. $1.49
Johnny Horton Sings with a back side by Texas Slim & His Cowboys. $1.02
Save the Last Dance for Me by the DeFranco Family featuring Tony DeFranco. $1.45
The Brightest Stars of Christmas. $.69
This One’s For You by Barry Manilow. $.25
I Love You So Much It Hurts Me by Tennessee Ernie Ford. $.74
Lawrence Welk’s Ragtime Gal by Jo Ann Castle. $1.08
Go Honky Tonkin! by Maddox Bros.& Rose. $1.45
Our Best To You: Today’s Great Hits, Today’s Great Stars, a Columbia collection (no cover).
Greatest Hits The Fifth Dimension (no cover).
Unforgettable Oldies Volume II (no cover).
Greatest Hits Volume One by Roy Acuff (no cover)
Happy Holidays: The Music of Christmas Volume 2 (no cover)
Monkee Business by the Monkees, a photo disc from 1982. $9.25
Jerusalem by John Starnes.
Sing and Be Happy with Little Marcy. $5.00
Andy Presents: The Book of Matthew
The Little Drummer Boy featuring Don Janse and His 60 Voice Children’s Chorus, a Clark gas stations record.
Perry Como Sings Merry Christmas Music. This is the third or fourth or fifth copy of this record at Nogglestead.
40 Hour Week by Alabama.
The Osmonds Live
Colour by Numbers by Culture Club. A very nice cover. In middle school, I got a button of this cover out of a vending machine for a quarter and wore it to school to some teasing. Or as they would call it now, bullying.
Records by Foreigner, the greatest hits collection. I actually have this on cassette already–I bought it in college.
Blondes Have More Fun by Rod Stewart.
Dirty Dancing, the original soundtrack.
Disney’s Christmas Favorites.
Xanadu by Olivia Newton-John and Electric Light Orchestra. Again, the third or fourth copy at Nogglestead, but the cover is very nice.
Candyman, a Disney record.
Foot Loose and Fancy Free by Rod Stewart.
Gideon by Kenny Rogers.

Jeez, man, that’s over 70 new records. Some didn’t have sleeves; others were only in sleeves and not covers, so I will have to order another set of 12″ cardboard sleeves, too.

Additionally, I got two empty sleeves: Everything is Beautiful by Evie (sad to learn it was empty), This Is Another Day by Andraé Crouch And The Disciples, and No Trespassing and Other Stories for Children featuring Uncle Charlie and the Children’s Bible Hour Staff. I have not looked through all the records I have to ensure that the covers match the contents, but I might just have these sleeves. I have saved one or two others in the past when I was not scrupulous about checking the contents of the sleeves and either got a mismatched or empty sleeve. I don’t know what I’ll do with them. Perhaps recycle them as “cleaning the garage” (where the whole of the cleaning is recycling these sleeves.

At any rate, I am looking forward to listening to some of them. But I really, really need to build additional shelving now.

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Authorities Have Unleashed An Eldritch Horror (Again)

May 6, 2024May 6, 2024 Brian J. Noggle

Mystery as California firefighters find two dead bodies inside ‘human-dug cave’ surrounded by ‘white powder’

These brave adventurers gave their own lives to dig a burrow for the chthonic demon and lured it in with themselves as bait before completing the protective circle to trap it (and them) forever, saving the world, and authorities don’t recognize it for what it is and loose the demon again as part of their “investigation”? Or are they serving their Dark Lord the Molevolent?

Reading the article:

Meh, drugs. Never mind.

The world in my head is so much more interesting than reality.

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Not Mentioned: Gorean Communities Violate Internet Terms of Service

May 6, 2024 Brian J. Noggle

Anachronomicon has a short post in a series on real banned books covering John Norman’s Gor novels.

Kulak mentions how Gorean communities for, erm, role-play sprang up. But Kulak does not mention, or probably know, that such communities violate at least one Internet Service Provider’s terms of service as late as 2021.

I told the story of how I first encountered Gor books back when I was actively dealing on Ebay and found a number of first and second printings for a quarter each and made quite the multiplier on them (I told the story, briefly, in my review of The Priest-Kings of Gor in 2006).

I later filled out a set of the first ten(?) at Patten Books back in the day, and I think I’m down to my last one or two (I read the eighth, Hunter of Gor in 2020). I think I only have one left on the to-read shelf along with Time Slave, a non-Gor book by Norman, which I have tried to pick up a time or two since I bought it in 2017.

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The Clown At Every Funeral, The Jester At Every Wedding

May 6, 2024 Brian J. Noggle

So my brother got married (again) this weekend. We drove three hours to a small town in southeast Missouri where the bride has lived all her life and will live all the remainder of her life (likely) as they just bought a nice homestead with 25(!) acres of land.

I was not the best man this time around, just a groom’s man. Although I did not give a highlarious toast (probably more Steve Buscemi than Adam Sandler, if you know what I mean), I did use my power of quipping (probably inappropriately) to keep things light on what might have been a tense day. Jeez, I remember my wedding day a couple years ago, where I got lightheaded when I took my position at the front of the church, taking off my jacket and helping to put out the food at the reception because nobody else was doing it, and calling the same brother dickhead when he, a groom’s man, wanted to sit at the head table which had only room for the bride and groom and the best man +1, and man of honor +1.

So I hope I helped to alleviate some of that.

It was not a church wedding; the ceremony and reception were held in a small hall rented from an old church (or maybe just an old church turned into a rental hall).

The best bits:

Fifteen minutes or so before the ceremony was scheduled to start, I told the best man, my nephew, that in three minutes, I was going to come up to him and loudly say, “I don’t have the rings!”
About fifteen minutes later, I came up to him and said, “I don’t have the rings!”
After the ceremony, I came up to him and said, “You don’t have the rings?”
The bride’s party arrived just at the time scheduled for pictures; prior to that, my brother ran home for something, so it was just the groom’s men at the facility, leading to speculation that one or the other of them made a break for it. We even speculated what it would be like if both of them decided to bolt only to meet at the airport. What a rom-com that would make.
The itinerant preacher was late, leading to speculation that maybe he made a run to the airport.
After the recessional at the end, we all ended up crowded on the front stoop of the hall. “The rehearsal went well,” I said. “When do we do it for real?”
Et cetera.

Jeez, I hope I didn’t make it worse with my japery. But, somehow, I fear I might have.

And, unfortunately, in the same circumstances, I will jape again.

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Wow. That Long.

May 3, 2024 Brian J. Noggle

Today, Pergelator posts a bit about having watched Drunken Master II, also known as The Legend of the Drunken Master.

You know, I just watched that. Well, “just” being January of last year. The older I get, the longer the periods of time known as “just” and “recently” become.

With both agree on Anita Mui, but only I, gentle reader, posted pictures. Because I care about you. And because one of these days I’m going to remember to submit such posts to the Rule 5 link fests on TheOtherMcCain.

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Kind of True, But….

May 2, 2024 Brian J. Noggle

As you might recollect, gentle reader, I read a volume of Kaur’s poetry in 2022 and was not impressed, finding it to be just tweets.

But, hey, if that’s what gets the kids reading poetry these days.

One could also do a 18th Century Poet of Note versus My Friend Doug.

My friend Doug, whom I met when working at the grocery store when I was at the university, had a Lutheran high school education but not really the capacity to work anything but entry level jobs. But he liked to write letters, and he liked to write poetry, and he shared some of the latter with me. His work had long lines, some end-rhyming, and a lot of commas. Not a lot of vivid imagery, though, and not a lot of true rhythm.

Which is the only difference. I mean, you throw up any number of Keats’ poems side-by-side with Doug’s, and they’re not that far off–clearly Doug (and a certain blogger-slash-poet whose name we won’t mention) was influenced by that old timey poetry as to what poetry was and how it should look and read. And, to be honest, before radio, television, and Internet, some of the poetry was long enough to fill an evening with it as entertainment. Plus, so much of it refers to contemporaries and current events which are lost on us.

So I read a lot of the old junk and a lot of the new junk. And I write some new junk, which is somewhere between the tweets and the sonorous but archaic.

I read a lot because there are good nuggets in both, but most of it is not good and/or does not speak to me as an individual. But sometimes, it does.

Sudden thought which might be a thesis for further thought: Do we expect poetry to hit differently now? I mean, I look for a very evocative spark in the words that triggers a sharp emotional response. But that’s not really what they were going for then.

At any rate, meme via Wilder.

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Others Agree

May 1, 2024 Brian J. Noggle

Peter Grant writes Gov. Kristi Noem was (and is) right.

As I said.

Some people outside the professional chattering classes are starting to weigh in in the backwaters of the blogosphere, and they tend to disagree with the commentary coming from the East Coast. As I would expect.

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Nogglestead: Super Computing Headquarters

April 30, 2024 Brian J. Noggle

Commodore 64 claimed to outperform IBM’s quantum system — sarcastic researchers say 1 MHz computer is faster, more efficient, and decently accurate:

A paper released during the SIGBOVIK 2024 conference details an attempt to simulate the IBM ‘quantum utility’ experiment on a Commodore 64. The idea might seem preposterous – pitting a 40-year-old home computer against a device powered by 127-Qubit ‘Eagle’ quantum processing unit (QPU). However, the anonymous researcher(s) conclude that the ‘Qommodore 64’ performed faster, and more efficiently, than IBM’s pride-and-joy, while being “decently accurate on this problem.”

Well, yeah. The article goes into detail how they did it using under 64K of memory.

Unfortunately, it’s only hobbyists and, presumably, super low-end embedded device programmers, maybe, who continue to squeeze the maximum out of their code.

Everyone else in 2024 is just scaffolding stuff up with thousands of dependencies and hundreds of MB of code they never look at or seek to understand.

Oh, and as a reminder, I have at least five Commodore 64s. And after that enumeration in 2005, I added Triticale’s Commodore 128. The turn of the 21st century proved to be a high water mark for finding those old computer systems in the wild as people emptied their closets of fifteen and twenty year old technology. Since we moved to Nogglestead, I’ve only bought a pair of TI 99s at a church garage sale. You don’t even see them, really, at antique malls, although I have seen a TRS-80 at Relics.

Maybe I really do have all of them now.

(Link via Tech Shepherd.)

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Recommended For Me

April 29, 2024April 27, 2024 Brian J. Noggle

When doing my Discogs research for my Good Book Hunting post this weekend, when I lit upon the entry for Stereo and All That Jazz, it presented me with a carousel at the bottom with recommendations:

Pretty good recommendations. Of them, I already have:

Fun and Games by Chuck Mangione
Breezin’ by George Benson
What’s New by Linda Ronstadt
What Now My Love by Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass
John Denver’s Greatest Hits (to be clear: My wife and her mother both liked 60s/70s folk. This was not MY doing).
Chicago IX

Six of ten easily.

Given the musical tastes in the family and the fact that we inherited a couple of boxes not in our regular library yet, it’s entirely possible we own a couple more of the Chicago albums listed and maybe the Paul Simon.

So Discogs has me pegged indeed based on this random jazz album pickup.

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Book Report: The Prophet by Khalil Gibran (1922, 1962)

April 29, 2024April 29, 2024 Brian J. Noggle

Book cover I bought this book in 2007 (that’s right, seventeen years ago, when I was attending more than one book sale per weekend whilst living in Old Trees), and I picked it up now because I just read The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, and I was prone to confusing the two. After all, both were Middle-Eastern-flavored collections of poetry and parables which were huge in their day and which were still found around middle class households in the late 70s and early 1980s. I am pretty sure that my “rich” aunt and uncle had a copy of this book if not both.

So: The frame is that a “prophet”–a wise man or hermit of some sort–has lived on the edges of an island’s society for some number of years, and a ship has come to take him to his native land. So as he makes his way to the docks, the people want him to make a speech, and he does: 90 pages of individual poems on the philosophy of various topics such as friendship, death, prayer, joy and sorrow, and so on.

To be honest, it kind of read like a garlic-infused Rod McKuen for the most part, but some segments hit me. Like this one:

You may give them [children] your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.

Day-um. As I mentioned, my oldest graduates high school next week. So, yeah, this rang true.

Also:

Your reason and your passion are the rudder and sails of your seafaring soul.
If either your sails or your rudder be broken, you can but toss and drift, or else be held at a standstill in mid-seas.

So to call it Lebanese Rod McKuen diminishes it too much. It’s lightweight poetry, easy to read, with aphorisms that will speak to a variety of readers spread throughout. It’s poetry that you could read aloud with the lyric and narrative rhythms to match. And with a taste of the exotic even though Gibran was Lebanese-American and not tenth century Persian (like Omar Khayyám). Still, the sum of these parts explain why the book was very popular; the hardback I have was the 67th printing, forty years after the book first appeared. I wonder if it’s still in print and still read–given that the author was a hyphenated-American, he would not have been eliminated from the curricula based on race.

As I mentioned, I picked up the musical version of it this weekend, and I will have to give it a listen soon. I bet it translates pretty well to music.

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Tell Me You’re An Ignorant City Dweller, And Be Proud Of It

April 29, 2024 Brian J. Noggle

All this kerfluffle about Kristi Noem putting a dog down.

To be honest, I have not read her book. Books by politicos are not my bag, baby. Although I bought a bunch of them early in the century, I have come to realize how much they ultimately bore me and how anachronistic each is after the election it precedes.

I am not even sure that I’ve read the section where she mentioned putting her dog down completely; now, all the Xeroxed outrage just tells us what she said.

But I do remember hearing that the dog attacked the neighbors chickens. And tried to bite its owner. And, the interpretations go, the hotheaded and packing governor of South Dakota pulled a pistol

The original Guardian story does not present the account as it appears in the book, but instead intersperses it with the easily anticipated editorial outrage.

But, you know what? The dog attacked neighbor chickens. The dog tried to bite its owner in a berzerker frenzy. I understand the decision to put the dog down. Especially as she had young children at the time who would also be vulnerable to a berzerker dog.

But it’s run up to election season, so cry “Havoc!” and let slip the stories of Republicans being unkind to dogs somewhere, sometime.

Full disclosure: When my boys were young, neighbors in the new house across the neighbor’s meadow let their pit bulls roam free, and on a couple of occasions they wandered into the back half of Nogglestead. If those dogs had ever, ever posed a threat to my young children at the time, they would have been buried in the copse amongst the cat graves. In the rural areas, they have an abbreviation: SSS. Shoot, shovel, shut up.

So I don’t fault Noem her actions, but she might have been better served remembering the last. Because no matter how authentic and real she might want to be to rural voters, she could certainly not avoid the, erm, dogpile in the media that should have been expected.

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Good Book Hunting, April 27, 2024: Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library Book Sale

April 28, 2024April 27, 2024 Brian J. Noggle

Technically, this is not so much a Good Book Hunting post as I really only bought a couple books. I dragged my youngest away from his video games for a couple hours yesterday to head up to the sale’s Half Price day, where records, DVDs, and most books were fifty cents each. First, we hit the records:

I got:

Several Tennessee Ernie Ford spiritual/gospel albums since his A Friend We Have has replaced the Swedish Gospel Singers and The Teen Tones as our Sunday morning spin as they have disappeared into the disorganized LP library of Nogglestead. I cleaned the desk in the parlor before going to the book sale, so it, too, is probably lost. Instead, for the next couple of weeks, undoubtedly we will listen to the new platters, Jesus Loves Me, Nearer the Cross, and Tennessee Ernie Ford Sings from his Book of Favorite Hymns. The sale had a lot of his work and several copies of each of these.
A couple of pianist Frank Carle’s platters: Frankie Carle plays the Great Piano Hits, Favorites for Dancing, and Let’s Do It, which appears to be a later record as he is much older in the cover photo.
A couple of ~~Florencia Vicenta de Casillas-Martínez Cardona~~ Vikki Car records: For Once In My Life (which I might already have) and The Best of Vikki Carr (which I also might already have).
Music for Trumpet and Orchestra by the Unicorn Concert Orchestra. Because I can get away with these spending sprees if I bring at least a couple of trumpet records home.
George Jones and Gene Pitney which features both artists and many duets from the middle 1960s. I don’t usually buy country records unless there’s a Pretty Woman on the Cover (PWoC), but, c’mon, early George Jones, y’all.
The Beat of the Big Bands: Tommy Dorsey and His Orchestra.
Bergen Sings Morgan by Polly Bergen. The PWoC sings the works of Helen Morgan.
Bach Live at Fillmore East by Virgil Fox / Heavy Organ.
The Prophet: A Musical Interpretation Featuring Richard Harris which was a timely pickup as I just finished reading The Prophet on Friday night (as you will soon see or, perhaps, have already seen if you’re not visiting every day and this post appears below the book report).
The New Limelight by Frank Chacksfield and his Orchestra. Close enough to Frankie Carle. Also, it has and his orchestra which probably means I’ll like it.
The Tender Touch by Nelson Riddle and His Orchestra. See? I already know I like Nelson Riddle who worked with both Frank Sinatra and Linda Ronstadt.
The Bravado Brass by Brass Busters (or Brass Busters by the Bravado Brass). Another trumpet record to please my beautiful wife.
Stereo and All That Jazz. Which has jazz in the title, so it’s likely something like and his orchestra, a safe jazzy record for squares in the 1960s.
A couple from Placido Domingo: A Love Until The End of Time and Great Love Duets with Katia Ricciarelli. Because he is not Mario Lanza.
Hurra Die Games by Orig. Mürztaler Musikanten. An Austrian LP from 1985 that might well be the find of the sale, as Discogs says this band’s records list for $100 on Ebay.
Swing Softly With Me by Steve Lawrence. Arranged and produced by Don Costa, who is not as pretty as Gal Costa but who did good work.
A couple of Nonesuch Records entries: Virtuoso Wind Concertos and Yankee Organ Music. I will pretty much by a Nonesuch Record on sight, as my youngest, who carried the growing stack of records, learned.
The Bells of the Protestant and Orthodox Center at the New York Worlds Fair played on the world-famous Schulmerich “Americana” Carillion by John Klein. C’mon, man, you know I’d never see this again. This disc is so rare that the Internet and Discogs do now know it exists. So maybe it’s worth more than the Austrian record above.
Festival De Éxitos En Voltops Vol. 10, a 1972 collection of South American pop (I presume). “Que es ‘voltops’?” I asked my son, who speaks remarkably little del español for someone actively studying it in school. “You’re getting records in other languages now?” he said, ignoring the fact that he was already holding records in German and, presumably, some Italian.
Look To Your Heart by Perry Como. I passed over a number of other records of his that I already had.

27 records for $13.50, y’all. Including a couple that made the trip a financial gain.

I spent most of the money on audiobooks and audio courses. I got one audiobook from the dollar section, but the Great Courses/Teaching Company and Modern Scholar courses were in the better books section, where prices ranged from $1 to $7.50. I bought a ton. Well, if not a ton, several cubic feet.

They include:

Early American History: Native Americans through the Forty-Niners
Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition
Great World Religions: Hinduism
Great World Religions: Judaism
Great World Religions: Christianity
Physics of the Future by Michio Kaku, the aforementioned fifty cent audiobook
The Masters of Enterprise: American Business History and the People Who Made It
The Lives and Works of the English Romantic Poets
WWII: A Military and Social History. Oh, boy, social history.
The Long 19th Century: European History from 1789 to 1917. This might only be part of the full course.
Philosophy and Religion of the West
A History of the English Language

Most of them are on CD, which means car listening. But I’ve been trying to venture out to the gym a couple times a week which might give me a chance to listen to some of the audio courses. But for now, they’re relegated to boxes in the closet.

I went quickly by the DVD tables. They were both crowded and mostly picked over, so I only got a couple.

I got:

Assassins with Stallone and Banderas. How did I not hear of this film? Or had I forgotten it?
Bill Cosby: Himself
Police Academy: Mission to Moscow. My son asked if this was the second film in the series; I said no, and I guessed the fifth. But this is actually the 7th film in the series, released 10 years after the original.
Butterfield 8. Not sure what it’s about, but it has a lovely Elizabeth Taylor on the cover. I might have to introduce the PWoDVDC abbreviation.
Epic Movie by the people who did Not Another Teen Movie and Date Movie. So I know what I’m getting into.
Denis Leary: The Ultimate Collection which includes No Cure for Cancer and Lock ‘n’ Load along with other clips.
Git-R-Done by Larry the Cable Guy.
The Right Stuff
Posse starring Mario von Peebles, Stephen Baldwin, and Billy Zane. I can guess what I’m getting into here.
The Dean Martin Celebrity Roasts featuring the roasts of Bob Hope and Ronald Reagan, or parts thereof. After watching videocassettes in the The Best of the Dean Martin Show set a couple years ago, I wondered if I’d find volumes in the celebrity roasts set. This is on DVD instead of VHS, so it seems newer, but they probably both sold to the same audience with different home video formats in the middle 1990s.

Ten DVDs. Five bucks. And, best of all, the stack is not so big that I’ll have to figure out where to put it. They should fit in the cabinet where I’ve created space by actually watching films and whatnot recently.

Oh, and it’s a book sale? Well, I did pick up a couple.

As is my wont, I looked through the lit section and the poetry section of the dollar books. The poetry section had three bundles of chapbooks and pamphlets banded together, but one band had Journey through Heartsongs and another had One World, One Heart facing out, so I skipped them.

I bought a bundle that contained:

The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Hour of Lead: Sharing Sorrow by Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Memoirs of Ms. P. by Amy Petrus
Recipes of Hope: Holiday Stories for and From the Kitchen (with a special gift of Christmas stories from David L. Harrison, the local children’s book author with a school named for him here in southwest Greene County). The Kitchen is a local non-profit.
One Story, One Story Among Many…. which looks to be a fundraiser for and/or history of a church damaged by a tornado in Stockton, Missouri. Strangely, this is shaped like a chapbook, saddle-stitched, but the text is laid out on 8.5″ by 11″ page, so that it’s oriented so that the staples are in the middle of the page, and you read the book sideways.
A Thistle Flower From the Prairie by Jens Christian Bay, a story.

I also dropped fifty cents on Sonnets and the Ballad of Alanna McDale by Michael J. O’Neal. Because, hey, sonnets.

Then I breezed through the Better Books section. I went looked over the collectibles/antique books section, the Books about Books section, and breezed over the local interest books before loading up on the aforementioned audio courses and looking over the disappointing set of better records.

I got:

Lieutenant Hornblower by C.S. Forester in a nice 1952(?) Book of the Month Club edition with a nice mylar-wrapped dust cover. Has it been seven years since I read a Horatio Hornblower book? Yes. To be fair, they’re not exactly easy for me to spot in the wild since I’m mostly looking at record crates.
The Play Goes On, Neil Simon’s memoir. Jeez, Louise, has it been thirteen years since I read a Neil Simon play? Yes. I keep passing over one of his novels. Maybe I should get to that and then read this, or vice versa.
Book Finds: How To Find, Buy, and Sell Used and Rare Books by Ian C. Ellis. I just read A Pound of Paper, I bought a $100 record for fifty cents, and I might have a lot of free time soon for scavenging estate sales and rural junk shops. Maybe I will turn this hobby again into a slightly profitable endeavor.
Poetry Slam: The Competitive Art of Performance Poetry edited by Gary Mex Glazner. I’d hoped for a history or discussion of the poetry slam, but it looks like it’s more of a collection of poetry slam-style poetry. You know, poetry open mic nights and poetry slams greatly influenced my poetry, transitioning it from the traditional to the fun to read somewhere in the middle 1990s. Between the Unrequited and Deep Blue Shadows chapbooks and Coffee House Memories. We will see if I enjoy this collection. More than Insta-poetry at least.
Collected Sonnets of Edna St. Vincent Millay. I already have a copy, of course, so I have two options with the lesser copy: 1) save it so both my heirs have a copy or 2) put it on the free book cart at church or in a little free library. It cost $1, so either option is good.

All told, I spent $70, mostly on the audio courses (which sold new for, what, $60 or $100 each)? Given that I’m only going to the two Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library book sales each year, I can probably splurge. It’s certainly less expensive than going to ABC Books every week.

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