Musings from Brian J. Noggle
Thursday, October 07, 2004
 
Mishandled Metaphors

Meanwhile, back in the Seattle Post-Intelligence, columnist Thomas Shapley decries an ad from a candidate for Senate. George Nethercutt, the Republican challenger, includes in the advertisement Senator Patty Murray from this immortal exchange:
    "He [Osama bin Laden]'s been out in these countries for decades, building schools, building roads, building infrastructure, building day care facilities, building health care facilities, and the people are extremely grateful," Murray told them.
Shapley tut tuts the despicable practice of using someone's words against her and opens a can of whoop metaphor:
    By that standard, fighting crime by trying to figure out what drove Gary Ridgway to murder 48 women is excusing him of the crimes. Sorry, that Doberman won't hunt.
Perhaps Shapely took a Doberman hunting when he went crawling through the brush with John Kerry and a trusty shotgun while deerhunting.

(Link via National Review's Kerry Spot.)


- posted by Brian J. @ 1:56 PM   0 comments
 
The Counterfeiting-Proof Fifties Work!

Apparently, the new design has made the fifty dollar bill impossible to counterfeit, so the counterfeiters have had to turn elsewhere.

Apparently, in Georgia, they're now counterfeiting dimes.

- posted by Brian J. @ 11:11 AM   0 comments
 
Free PUNchline

Red Hair Ring

Red Hair Ring.

Write your own joke around it. Jeez, do I have to do everything?


- posted by Brian J. @ 11:02 AM   0 comments
 
A Sincere Offer of an Honest Trade

Friends, Romans, and those with differing political philosophies: I offer a sincere, heartfelt trade to you.

I shall not extrapolate the vandalism and thuggery of a few criminals galvanized by their support of John Kerry as a property of the whole Democrat party or anyone with liberal sympathies if:

People on the left do not extrapolate the actions of a few vandals and thugs as being an insurgency of the entire populations of Iraq or Afghanistan.

Do we have a deal?

No? I didn't think so.


- posted by Brian J. @ 7:14 AM   0 comments
Wednesday, October 06, 2004
 
Here's a Slogan For You

Sam Adams Light: The taste of NA beer, but with alcohol in it!

Note to the fellows at Tap City: Last two of a sample twelve pack, I swear.


- posted by Brian J. @ 9:10 PM   0 comments
 
Steve Jobs and Michael Dell ARE IN MY HEAD!

Dell Computers and Apple Computers are trying to brainwash me. Here's how:

In the course of my self-employed Pat-Verbeek-of-Software-Testingdom, I have cause to use an eMac computer and a Dell workstation to test the various and sundry applications that clients pay me innumerable (as I explain to the auditor) dollars to test. My main workstation has a standard keyboard, with the slight rise and the stadium keying layout, where each row rises a little above it. The kind I've used since I got my first Packard Bell in 1990. The natural shape one can even remember from Commodore 64s and Apple IIs, and probably even abacuses.

But the eMac has a concave keyboard; that is, it's curved, with the tops of the keys actually turning toward your fingers like flowers to a star.

But the Dell workstation has a convex keyboard; that is, it's bowed outward, like its keys are employing centrifugal force to fling my software-destroying fingers into space.

And you might think it's nothing but some sort of Substance of Style-ing to be neat-o, but friends, I can tell you what they're doing--they're doing Pavlovian and Skinner tricks on you, and you're the dog and chicken. Apple, dog, and Dell, chicken. Pay attention!

You see, if you use one of these freak keyboards as your primary interface with the greater intelligence that is the Internet, Blogosphere, and Return to Zork, you'll grow accustomed to the unholy shape beneath your fingers. Then, when you're forced to use a different computer, that is, not a Dell or not a Macintosh, you'll think it weird, inconvenient, and slightly uncomfortable. All because you'll have to use a normal keyboard.

So forget Bill Gates; he's trying to rule the world in an honest, straightforward fashion. Dell and Jobs are conditioning you, man. Rise up! By an old keyboard at a yard sale for a buck and use it. Or you will be a lifelong customer lackey of one of these aforementioned diablolical geniuses.

I beg of you.

(Why, yes, another part of my s.e.P.V.S.T. lifestyle is drinking a lot of coffee, sometimes two or three pots a day. Why do you ask?)


- posted by Brian J. @ 8:52 PM   0 comments
 
The News Eric Mink Avoids

Courtesy of Allahpundit, we find this analysis of current events in Afghanistan courtesy to someone closer than Tucker Boulevard:
    Three years after the Taliban were chased out, Kabul has returned to the real world. The streets are jammed with cars, the shops are full of goods. Last year Afghanistan's economy grew by 30 per cent. The weirdest thing about Kabul under the Taliban used to be its unnatural silence. Now it's as noisy as anywhere on earth.

    This week, though, the move back towards teeming normality has received a perceptible check. The host of restaurants that have opened up here (I remember only three during the Taliban days, all disgusting and utterly predictable as to the menu) are empty.
And:
    This is not Baghdad. The Americans and their allies are not unpopular here - except in the east and south of the country, where there has been fighting - and they are regarded as guarantors of Afghanistan's stability. The West is seen as essentially benign. At the international donors' conference in Berlin last April, $8 billion in aid and investment was pledged over the next three years: about as much as the Afghan economy can absorb.

    There is no equivalent here of the stories you hear every day in Iraq, about people being insulted or mistreated by American soldiers; no suburbs, towns or cities are attacked with the latest American weaponry. If Afghanistan gets safely through this week, it will be a remarkable success story.
Eric Mink probably has enough cosmopolitan stuporhuman skill at seeing through reality to the fantasy beneath to ignore these hopeful signs. Still, I think he would waste even less of my time were he still in the clique that lauds Desperate Housewives for lifting a leg on the American Dream, wittily and intelligentsially, of course.


- posted by Brian J. @ 8:39 PM   0 comments
 
Speaking of Packer Partisanship

Packer Nation, note that St. Louis Post-Dispatch columnist Jeff Gordon has spoken heresy about the most revered Favre:
    How can doctors really tell if free-spirited Brett Favre has suffered a concussion?
Summon the Wisconsinquisitors!


- posted by Brian J. @ 1:48 PM   0 comments
 
When Television Critics Attack!

Former television critic and now the peter principled head of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch editorial page Eric Mink asks a vital question:
    Why would anyone who is concerned about the safety of his family, the security of our country and the fight against Islamist terrorism favor Bush?
Because Bush is responsible for 9/11:
    Speaking in Des Moines last month, Vice President Dick Cheney warned that electing the wrong person in November could increase the danger that "we'll fall back into the pre-9/11 mind-set. . . ." Bush owns nine months of that mind-set.

    It's not fair to blame Bush for those attacks, although six of the 10 "missed opportunities" to stop them identified by the 9/11 commission occurred on his watch. But it is fair to hold him responsible for the rigidity of his White House bureaucracy and the lackadaisical attitude toward al-Qaida, both of which made America more vulnerable before Sept. 11, 2001.
Is Mink admitting he's unfair? He starts the second paragraph of that quote with "It's not fair to blame Bush for those attacks" and puts that admission among:
  • "Bush owns nine months of that [pre-9/11] mind-set."

  • "six of the 10 "missed opportunities" to stop them identified by the 9/11 commission occurred on his watch."

  • "it is fair to hold him responsible for the rigidity of his White House bureaucracy and the lackadaisical attitude toward al-Qaida, both of which made America more vulnerable"
In other words, Eric Mink is unfair.

Eric Mink must be a fat lady:
    The U.S. military won a stellar victory in Afghanistan in 2001, but Bush failed to follow through on the pursuit of Osama bin Laden and, much more important, failed to fulfill commitments to secure and rebuild the country.
Because apparently he feels our commitment to Afghanistan has ended and he's writing the post-mortem. Notwithstanding the coming elections there, notwithstanding our continuing partnership with the Afghan people, and notwithstanding that Afghanistan will soon surpass its condition before the war if it hasn't already. Perhaps Mink expected that, two years later, Afghanistan would be a trendy gentrified urban hotspot.

Ah, screw it. I don't have the tolerance to refute Mink line by line.

Go read it yourself if you have the stomach. Meanwhile, I think I'll go back to reading Emily Dickinson and demonstrating unabashed Packer partisanship.


- posted by Brian J. @ 1:19 PM   0 comments
 
I Meant Guinness Draught

Republican representatives have forced a vote on Chuck Rangel's bill to reinstitute a draft and voted it down 402-2. Of course, activists who like the sound of that particular drum when they beat it disagree with what the legislative defeat really means:
    But congressional Democrats and activists elsewhere denounced the vote as an empty exercise that trivialized what many Americans believe is a real possibility.

    "They have used gamesmanship to give a false sense that there is not going to be a draft. Nobody wants a draft. But if you don't have the manpower to confront the need, then there is no option," said Bobby Muller, founder of the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation, an international organization that addresses the causes and consequences of war.
Some might think that these fellows are remarkably disingenuous (depending on what that word means--remind me to look it up later--suspect it's a synonym for pelfiful).

I, on the other hand, applaud the intellectual consistency in the position. Namely, that a legislator's vote or record of votes has no bearing or reflection on the secret plans or inclinations of that legislator. Especially when a legislator runs for a position in the executive branch.

Because that's one of the arguments for a Kerry presidency featuring military strength and, you know, that archaic concept of I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States without the asterisk and footnote except where conflicts with the directives of the United Nations as formulated by France, Germany, Ghana, Syria, or China.

(Link seen on Ranting Profs.)


- posted by Brian J. @ 8:56 AM   0 comments
 
Et Tu, Wisconsin?

Protesters attack Bush Cheney HQ in West Allis.

(Link courtesy of homie Sean Hackbarth.)


- posted by Brian J. @ 7:49 AM   0 comments
Tuesday, October 05, 2004
 
Some Good Things Just Don't Go Together

Just like sex and a Sunday afternoon in late November, where the temperature hovers around twenty degrees in the sun, at Lambeau Field watching the Green Bay Packers and God's Gift to Wisconsin Brett Favre throw for a couple of touchdowns with two or fewer interceptions, some things that are good individually don't combine to make something better.

Just like caffeinated ginseng beer.

In a word: Ew.


- posted by Brian J. @ 8:55 AM   0 comments
 
John Edwards Goes Negative - On Me

According to this Drudge Flash, John Edwards has decided to forego negative attacks on the president and to carry it directly to the electorate:
    ABC'S BOB WOODRUFF: "He has avoided the kind of negative attacks that can make national news, although recently, he has stepped up his rhetoric."

    SEN. JOHN EDWARDS (D-NC) (clip of a speech): "I'd say if you live in the United States of America and you vote for George Bush, you've lost your mind."
Now that he's begun publicly questioning my mental fitness (without even reading this blog), I have contacted my attorney to determine if his allegations are actionable.


- posted by Brian J. @ 8:51 AM   0 comments
 
Lyrics Misheard by Emily Dickinson

Jane's Addiction, "Been Caught Stealing":
    We sat around the pile.
    Sudden Pelf.
    Sudden Pelf and
    Waved it into the air!
    And we did it just like that.
    When we want something,
    We don't want to pay for it.

- posted by Brian J. @ 7:15 AM   0 comments
Monday, October 04, 2004
 
Thank Goodness for Concealed Carry

Emily Dickinson, Poem 551:
    There is a Shame of Nobleness --
    Confronting Sudden Pelf --
    A finer Shame of Ecstasy --
    Convicted of Itself --

    A best Disgrace -- a Brave Man feels --
    Acknowledged -- of the Brave --
    One More -- "Ye Blessed" -- to be told --
    But that's -- Behind the Grave --
Crikey on a cracker, if ever there's a time for footnotes, explaining to this forelorn and slightly half-baked poetical sojourner what the devil Pelf means is it.

I have but one vow: if I'm ever confronted by a sudden Pelf, the damn Pelf will get the worst of it.


- posted by Brian J. @ 10:44 PM   0 comments
 
Good Question

Courtesy of triticale - the wheat/rye guy:
    If our action in liberating Iraq is creating so many new terrorists, how come all the actions taken in response to it are carried out by militants and insurgents?

- posted by Brian J. @ 7:08 PM   0 comments
 
Renaming the Hamlet Test

Some IT shops within the greater St. Louis area have learned to fear the Hamlet test, wherein a software tester (whose identity shall remain hidden to protect him from the raging hordes of developers seeking revenge) pastes the entire contents of Shakespeare's Hamlet into a text box to see what happens when he tries to commit it to the database.

Well, those same developers should prepare themselves for the next generation of the Hamlet test: Hamlet in Klingon.

Unicode includes Klingon letters, ainna?


- posted by Brian J. @ 7:01 PM   0 comments
 
Meanwhile, Further Down The Slippery Slope

In Minnesota, a 17-year-old prewoman (because girl is sexist nomenclature, donchaknow) is running for mayor. The biggest obstacle, aside from being only a write-in candidate and being unable to vote for herself:
    Even so, state law says candidates must be eligible voters and at least 21 years old when they take office.
The plucky little prewoman remains undaunted, because she can tell which way the wind blows, and apparently the wind is the only constant in civic life in the twenty-first century:
    Feehan-Nelson said that if she receives the highest number of votes but is not certified, she is prepared to take the matter to court.

    "I doubt the judge would be able to say no to the popular vote," she said. "The people's right to choose prevails over (state law)."
Isolated incident? A small stone begins an avalanche.

(Link courtesy of The Spoons Experience.)


- posted by Brian J. @ 1:08 PM   0 comments
Sunday, October 03, 2004
 
Brian Misses Hockey

Emily Dickinson, Poem 544, circa 1862:
    The Martyr Poets -- did not tell --
    But wrought their Pang in syllable --
    That when their mortal name be numb --
    Their mortal fate -- encourage Some --

    The Martyr Painters -- never spoke --
    Bequeathing -- rather -- to their Work --
    That when their conscious fingers cease --
    Some seek in Art -- the Art of Peace --

- posted by Brian J. @ 10:35 PM   0 comments
 
All I Have To Say

At least the Packers aren't peaking too early.


- posted by Brian J. @ 6:55 PM   0 comments
Saturday, October 02, 2004
 
The Next Logical Step Down The Slippery Slope

State Representative Frank Boyle of northern Wisconsin gives insight into the proper role of the citizen:
    Boyle told the board he first met Leggate in 1984 when she was a secretary at City Hall. He said she costs the state $24,000 every year she’s in prison and she needs to get back into the work force and generate tax revenue, especially with the state facing a deficit in its next budget.
This person, a convicted murderer sentenced to life, should return to society so that she can generate tax revenue.

Government seizes private property to whomever it thinks will generate the most tax revenue for it. What logically stops it from next using its citizens in the best, most revenue-enhancing way?

More on the outrage at Boots and Sabers.


- posted by Brian J. @ 10:27 AM   0 comments
 
Further Tales of Psuedobachelorhood

Courtesy of Spoons.

While the mice are away, the cats will play...with Spoons, who has nothing better to do.


- posted by Brian J. @ 9:45 AM   0 comments
 
Another Helpful Error Message

Here's a friendly error message courtesy of Amazon.com:



Browser Bug?

Attention: There appears to be a bug in the web browser you are currently using. Here are some ways to get around the problem:
  • To return to the page you were previously on: --click the BACK button on your browser's navigation bar until you reach the desired page.
  • To checkout --click on the shopping cart icon at the top of the page and proceed through the checkout process using the standard server (instead of the secure server). You can phone or fax the credit card information to us.
Your Web browser is Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040913 Firefox/0.10.



Error handling by blaming the user and the user's Web browser. Swell, Amazon. Undoubtedly, your developers have convinced your project managers that this is acceptable, when it's clearly not.


- posted by Brian J. @ 9:20 AM   0 comments
 
Book Review: Instant Replay: The Green Bay Diary of Jerry Kramer
by Jerry Kramer / Edited by Dick Schaap

I bought this book for a dollar at the cheap bookstore in Springfield (you know, the one on Glenstone. Come on, people, work with me here; the name's not important, the six for five dollars hardbacks in the very back are). As the football season geared up, I thought this would be a worthy read, and hey, it was. Packers partisanship aside, it's a good book.

The book chronicles the 1967 football season from the point of view of the veteran guard. He kept notes and recorded his thoughts on tape every day from the training camp through the end of season. It reminded me a lot of Blue Fire: A Season Inside the St. Louis Blues which I read last year; however, the two differ in that instead of a sportswriter, the point of view is all player.

So in our daily capsules, we get inside the concerns of a 31 year-old football player, slightly afraid that he's losing a step to the younger players. We're coming fresh off of the Packers second consecutive NFL championship and their win in Super Bowl I. Kramer's got lots of outside investments that he worries over, and he mentions from time to time what's he's reading during the season. But the book does focus on the Packers, playing with Lombardi and with the loss of Paul Hornung to the new New Orleans Saints expansion team.

As I mentioned, the book's told in a diary style, with each day having its paragraphs or pages whether Kramer goes hunting or participates in the Ice Bowl. This makes it easy to read in short chunks, although the pace and voice really make it entertaining enough to read in larger doses.

Since the book chronicles an era before my birth, part of its charm lies in its details about a world I'd never know. Green Bay and Milwaukee described in the late 1960s and no mention of the War in Viet fucking Nam, man. Which differs, strangely, from the football season 2004, where the whole world's talking about that war. One does get a point of contrast between some aspects of the game then and the game today--no agents, limited free agency, and so on. And on the field: well, let's just give this some eighties kid perspective: the Jerry Kramer's biggest concerns in the opponents he needs to block are Father Murphy, Webster's adoptive father George Papadapolis, and Officer Moses Hightower. That's just weird.


- posted by Brian J. @ 9:14 AM   0 comments
Friday, October 01, 2004
 
Question

Is

The New Soldier

fighting

The New War

?


- posted by Brian J. @ 5:17 PM   0 comments
 
Don't Do Us Any Favors

Those of you who didn't start watching the debates at 6:30 on CSPAN missed their interview with the University of Miami president and her remarks from the lowered microphone that she'd arranged classes, other acadaemic stuff, and a voter registration drive to get students more involved in the carnival that took place at University of Miami yesterday.

Donna "I Am Not Bowzer" Shalala.

Former Secretary of Health and Human services under William J. Clinton.

Former head of University of Wisconsin (Mad).

Organizing voter registration drives.

Thanks, Shalalala.


- posted by Brian J. @ 3:31 PM   0 comments
 
With So Many Words, How Could You Pick Just One?

Thomas Eagleton opines in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in a piece entitled IRAQ: One word says it all: disaster:
    We do not need to recount yet again the history of the war in Iraq. It will go down as one of the most ill-conceived military undertakings in our history.
It doesn't really get better from there. Instead, the former senator and even more former vice presidential candidate to George McGovern (for crying out loud) pontificates on how history will judge Iraq because Eagleton's got the long range vision. Which he demonstrates by savaging George W. Bush politically and talking about the short term impact of the war.

Beg your pardon, Senator, but I disagree. I see differences between this war and the telewars of this century held up for cheap political points by forgotten (and hopefully, soon-to-be-forgotten) senators.

I expect that history will judge the Iraq war much like it judges the Spanish-American War, The Mexican-American War of 1848, the Mexican incursions in 1910, or more recently the invasion of Panama; a small war remembered by a few historians and unfortunately not many citizens. Or history will judge the Iraq war like the reckless Iwo Jima incursion: a small battle with its own costs in service of a greater war. But history will not, no matter how hard some self-appointed men of history try, judge Iraq as a carbon-copy of Viet Nam.


- posted by Brian J. @ 1:11 PM   0 comments
 
Opening Fire with the Forward Moonbattery

The Bush administration, which rules the world and all of nature through Haliburton and Enron and Martha Stewart Omnipedia with the full support of the Optimists International and Boy Scouts of America, has decided to distract voters from its horrible environmental policies which are turning the northwest into desert and are strip mining all of the sanity from the northeast by temporarily closing the ozone aperature that its supporters at Coppertone paid for.

It's the only possible explanation!!!1!!!


- posted by Brian J. @ 10:59 AM   0 comments
 
Yeah, Me Too

Instapundit reports reports over 8,000,000 hits last month and predicts that he'll see a traffic drop after the election.

Hey, this site had 3,000 hits last month, and I think it will drop after the election, too.

Actually, I think it will drop this month without an Instalanche to spur about a third of the total monthly traffic in a single day.

But I don't write for the casual Internet readers. I toss off my insights for my own gratification and for you, the discriminating Internet reader.


- posted by Brian J. @ 10:25 AM   0 comments
 
Something Stink in Suburbia? The Critics Love It

Has anyone else noticed how metropolitan critics absolutely rave about television shows, novels, movies, and other art that celebrates how suburban life with suburban homes, commutes, and families suck? The San Francisco Chronicle's Tim Goodman gushes over Desperate Housewives.


- posted by Brian J. @ 10:16 AM   0 comments
To say Noggle, one first must be able to say the "Nah."