Musings from Brian J. Noggle
Monday, March 07, 2005
 
I Got Nothing

Since I don't have anything witty or insightful to say today, perhaps you should just go read the Chicago Tribune's Steve Chapman in his column "The illusions of the minimum wage", which begins:
    Asking Democrats if they favor an increase in the minimum wage is like asking Martha Stewart if she'd mind sharing some decorating ideas. There are few things they'd rather do, and Sen. Ted Kennedy thinks it is high time.

    The Massachusetts Democrat is offering a measure that would boost the wage floor from $5.15 to $7.25 an hour over the next two years. He notes that it has not been lifted since 1997, during which time senators have gotten seven pay raises. "If the Senate is serious about an anti-poverty agenda," he said, "let's start by raising the minimum wage." Republicans, meanwhile, might accept an increase of $1.10, as proposed by Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.).

    It may seem like an inescapable truth that if you increase the amount employers pay their lowest-wage workers, you will have fewer poor people. Money, after all, is what they lack, and a higher minimum wage means more money to those in the worst-paying jobs.

    In fact, this is one of those obvious facts that turns out not to be a fact at all. The available evidence suggests that raising the minimum wage doesn't do what it's supposed to do.
You see, the gentleman can sound kinda smart about things when he's not la-dee-dah about foreign policy.


- posted by Brian J. @ 8:26 PM   0 comments
Sunday, March 06, 2005
 
Deep Cover Investigative Journalism

Norville to Anchor From 'Home Confinement':
    Now HERE'S a good excuse for working at home. Deborah Norville will anchor Monday's program of "Inside Edition" from her home on Long Island, N.Y., to try to give viewers a taste of what Martha Stewart's home confinement is like.
Muhahahaha! I laugh with almost hysterical tears. I work from home, so I sometimes don't leave the house for weeks. You want to know what it's like?

It's maddening, but I like madness. It keeps me company and walks on cats' paws.

Seriously, what's next? Deborah Norville drives her own car so viewers know what commuting is like?

(Link seen on Tim Blair's site.)


- posted by Brian J. @ 7:03 PM   0 comments
 
Were I a Cynical, Suspicious Man

If I were a cynic, or a hopeful writer of suspense fiction, I might make something different of this story: Italian Journalist Rejects U.S. Account.

Okay, we have these salient events:
  1. Sympathetic "journalist" disappears, "kidnapped" by "insurgents."

  2. Releases a tape making normal coerced political demands, which doesn't differ from her normal uncoerced political demands.

  3. Her government "negotiates" her release, which involves paying ransom money.

  4. Upon her release, she claims the United States military "targeted her"--but missed--with 300 or 400 shots--after which her car looks like this, but

  5. The only casualty is the Italian intelligence officer that acted as the bag man, who took one round to the temple, almost execution style; everyone else in the car miraculously survived.
And when the heat cools off and the journalist "recovered," she would retire to Switzerland with her Iraqi lover on their ill-gotten loot.

I would title the book Ill Manifest.

Update: Real-life mystery writer Roger L. Simon offers a plot.

Update II: Baldilocks, who deploys a Ludlumian title for a post in The Sgrena Gambit, indicates that the car depicted above might not be the car alledgedly shot 300-400 times.


- posted by Brian J. @ 5:36 PM   0 comments
 
Homelessness Rediscovery Watch

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch waxes romantic about homelessness in its Metro section today: For two men, it was a place to call home.
    Even now, more than a month later, the discarded bits of their lives litter the ground around the little green bench — a few twist-off beer caps, a couple of dozen cigarette butts and some scraps of candy wrappers half-buried in the March mud.

    For the better part of a year it had been their bench, and even on those rainy nights when they would leave to take shelter under the roof of a nearby bus stop, they would always return. There was no address, not in the strict sense of the word, but for Morris White and Kerry Smith, it was the closest thing to a home they would know for much of 2004.

    They arrived for the first time in the late spring, when the city air was warm and clean, and the sweetgum trees were heavy with new leaves.
I don't understand. I thought homelessness was bad, but here the Post-Dispatch sepia-tones the story of two men who preferred to live on the streets to living with their families or in homeless shelters with their pissant regulations.

If these homeless people don't care to change their condition, why should I? Why should tax money be spent on them, other than it's free?

I doubt the Post-Dispatch wanted to raise these questions.


- posted by Brian J. @ 11:54 AM   0 comments
Saturday, March 05, 2005
 
St. Louis County Excited to Seize Tax Money from Employees

Well, that' how I would have titled this story, which the St. Louis Post-Dispatch entitled "St. Louis County lures 300 jobs from Alton":
    Smurfit-Stone Container Corp. will move 300 jobs from Alton to Creve Coeur as part of a deal with St. Louis County that could net the company up to $4.2 million in tax breaks.

    Those workers will move into a new 10-story headquarters building just off Interstate 270 and Olive Boulevard, where they'll be joined by 200 employees from Clayton and a dozen or so from Chesterfield, under the deal unveiled Friday.
You see, the corporation is getting $4,200,000 in tax breaks, but the St. Louis County Executive says:
    "Of course I'm excited," said County Executive Charlie Dooley. "When someone tells you they're going to move jobs someplace else, you take it very seriously. We need to do this to expand our tax base and keep our tax burden low."
That expanded tax base isn't coming from the company, dear friends. It's coming from the employees who will have to travel further to work but will have to buy lunch in Missouri instead of Illinois, expanding the St. Louis County sales tax base. It will help, too, when they gas up here, since they can pay for our roads more cheaply than they can pay for Illinois roads.

Remember, St. Louis County government serves itself and its corporate juicers, not the residents. If you don't believe it, buy a house where developers will want to build a strip mall in 2014.


- posted by Brian J. @ 9:10 PM   0 comments
 
Book Report: A Century of Enterprise: St. Louis 1894-1994 by Rockwell Gray (1994)

This book represents another picture book I inherited from my aunt, and if the used price on Amazon is any guide, it might have been her biggest eBay score. But she lacked a certain follow through on the whole online auction thing. So I've got it now, and I thumbed through it, looking at the historical photos of business in St. Louis and reading the flattering paragraphs accompanying the photos. The book was, as a matter of fact, underwritten by one of the enterprises whose start is depicted in the book. Of course that company and all others in St. Louis are praised. Lavishly.

So the book provides interesting photographs, and some trivia and insights, including:
  • The smile was invented in 1948.

  • It's a wonder turn of the century families were so large considering how ugly the women were.

  • The years since 1994 have been harsh for St. Louis business, since most of the grand corporations lauded in the book--Edison Brothers, May Company, McDonnell Douglas, Pet, Inc., Sherwood Medical, and so on have been bought out or have otherwise left the area.

  • Those who have the juice now in the city of St. Louis have always had the juice in St. Louis.
Still, an enjoyable experience, once again a short one since it was mostly photos, and something I'll share with the more historical members of my family. And, dear readers, if you offer me what they're asking for it on Amazon, I'll share it with you, too.


- posted by Brian J. @ 9:07 PM   0 comments
 
The End is Nigh

On September 30, 2005, Teddy Ruxpin became self-aware:
    The teddy bear sitting in the corner of the child's room might look normal, until his head starts following the kid around using a face recognition program, perhaps also allowing a parent talk to the child through a special phone, or monitor the child via a camera and wireless Internet connection.
Therapists from the future undoubtedly provided the venture capital for this innovation.


- posted by Brian J. @ 9:28 AM   0 comments
Friday, March 04, 2005
 
Book Report: The 100 Greatest Movies of All Time by Ty Burr (1999)

This book represents another picture book I inherited from my aunt. Not that it meant much to her; she probably bought it at a yard sale to sell on eBay, and I might well have been at the yard sale with her, egging her on.

It's a compendium of 100 of the best movies from 1894-1994, as determined by Entertainment Weekly and Ty Burr. It contains the requisite mixture of classics and foreign films. Man, you know, the last foreign film I saw was El Mariachi, and prior to that it's limited to Jackie Chan and kung fu flicks. I didn't even see Crouching Estrogen, Hidden Misandry even though my wise and benevolent mother-in-law recommended it.

But books of this stripe are good browsing material, even if you're not a tabloid fan or if you don't care for anything lighter than The Atlantic Monthly for your magazine reading. Books like this are quick espresso shots of trivia information, information I hope to put to use at the next North Side Mindflayers Trivia Night victory.

Plus, if you're a trivia smart aleck like me, you'll look for flaws in the book. Like that the cover contains a still from Rebel without a Cause, which didn't make the book. Or that the still of Han Solo confronting Jabba the Hutt from Star Wars was not from the original, but from the 25th anniversary re-release (in 1997, which was beyond the five year cutoff of the book).

So it's a good enough book, a quick one-night flip through, and it won't kill as many brain cells as, say, watching the French language liberated sexuality movies.


- posted by Brian J. @ 8:38 PM   0 comments
 
Book Report: Treachery by Bill Gertz (2004)

My beautiful wife bought me this book, whose full title is Treachery : How America's Friends and Foes Are Secretly Arming Our Enemies, for Christmas, because the message of the season is Peace on Earth and this book details, in part, why that ain't happening.

Gertz compiles the evidence that other countries, including Germany, France, Russia, and China, are arming rogue countries. I don't know that I would have ever called these nations our friends, contrary to what Tom Clancy would have had us believe, so I'm not plussed by this information. It's all pretty damning, and it's the stuff I get daily on the blogs I tend to read. But to the uninitiated, and to those who don't get their daily dose of human nature writ large on the international scale on the Internet, I'm sure the book was an eye-opener.

Gertz is a good, methodical writer and has a lot of access to insights and insiders to tease out information about national security and to present compelling calls to action with that information. So if you've got a hot and sexy wife who buys you things, I cannot emphasize enough that this is a good book to receive.


- posted by Brian J. @ 8:14 PM   0 comments
 
Still Learning

My wife likes musicals.

Top Secret, while it includes singing, is apparently not a musical.


- posted by Brian J. @ 7:05 PM   0 comments
 
Great Minds Think Alike....And Sometimes I Think That Way, Too

I just ordered this book after Instapundit flogged it:

Go Directly to Jail : the Criminalization of Almost Everything.

That's a live horse this blog continues to beat, hopefully unto death, after which I will continue to strike just so it doesn't arise as some undead nightmare. No pun intended, but I'll take it.


- posted by Brian J. @ 3:55 PM   0 comments
 
Forget the Articles, Send Me More Naked Women E-Mail

Playboy sends me this junk mail teaser:
    On the eve of the re-issue of R.E.M.’s last eight albums on special-edition CD and DVD, front man Michael Stipe spoke openly with Playboy.com about the band's early days, his disappointment over last November’s elections and why R.E.M. never called it quits.
Which is different from his other interviews, where he had to speak guardedly in case the editorial staff at Rolling Stone, Esquire, Spin or Gentleman's Quarterly were members of the Bushtapo.


- posted by Brian J. @ 3:30 PM   0 comments
 
End of Week Snark

Another coming of age story for young men results in charges: Teacher Accused of Sex Abuse:
    A Braxton County middle school teacher is in police custody after allegedly confessing to sexual misconduct with five of her students.
The number could increase, as she could not be sure of an exact number because she was wearing a bag at the time.


- posted by Brian J. @ 3:22 PM   0 comments
Wednesday, March 02, 2005
 
Rolled a 1 on a d6

Archaelogists uncover three coffins, mummies behind a secret door:
    Archaeologists in Egypt have uncovered three coffins containing mummies behind a secret door that was hidden behind 42-hundred-year-old statues.
They didn't even need an elf with them, werd.


- posted by Brian J. @ 5:23 PM   0 comments
 
Book Report: The Forgotten Man by Robert Crais (2005)

This book is the latest in the Elvis Cole novels by Robert Crais; he released it just last month. As a later Elvis Cole novel, it features all the hallmarks of the Cole novels:
  • A woman character who falls madly in love with Cole, who is oblivious because
  • Cole is pining for Lucy Chenier, and that's going badly, meanwhile
  • He takes a case for personal interest instead of for, you know, pay, because this time it's personal! which leads to
  • A major character getting shot and dying, and another surviving but weakened by the aftermath.
So the book covers all of those bases. It's readable, and one can overlook certain consistencies with plot amongst the novels and certain, um, non sequitors with the plot of this book. Crais does dial back his use of the third person narrator so that more than half of the book uses the first person voice of Elvis Cole.

When a strange, tattooed man is murdered, his dying words claim that Elvis Cole is his son. Cole, who never knew father, wonders if this is the man and if not, why the dying man would make the claim. So Cole investigates, dredges up some long fallow crimes, and pines for Lucy Chenier.

I am finally done with the series, which is a blessing and a curse; now I have to stand before my bookshelves when I finish a book and pick another one from the hundreds of volumes on my to-read shelves. It was so easy to just resignedly pick up the next Crais novel, and now I am stuck with my indecision.


- posted by Brian J. @ 11:14 AM   0 comments
 
Officer, It's Not What You Think

Fark links to the story Teacher Has Sex with Pupil While Baby in Car: Cops with the unfortunate summary:

Teacher arrested for having sex with a two-year old in back seat


That's preposition abuse if I ever saw it.


- posted by Brian J. @ 11:06 AM   0 comments
 
Automotive Shopping Advice

A review of the Lincoln Town Car BPS, courtesy of Business 2.0:
    When choosing an armored vehicle, it's important to keep in mind how badly someone wants you dead. This will affect your purchase. If your assassin is an amateur -- perhaps some punk with a .38, which fires a 158-grain, round-nose lead bullet at a velocity of 850 feet per second -- you'll probably be just fine in an aftermarket armored sedan or the one offered by Cadillac. In fact, even if your enemy comes at you with a .357 Magnum -- a serious weapon capable of spitting metal-ripping charges at up to 1,395 feet per second -- you'll probably escape without a scratch in one of those sedans. But if someone really wants to kill you, you'd better be riding in the 2005 Lincoln Town Car Ballistic Protection Series.
Excellent.


- posted by Brian J. @ 10:56 AM   0 comments
Tuesday, March 01, 2005
 
St. Louis Post-Dispatch Sides Against Seniors

In a story entitled "Between a rock and a hard place", the St. Louis Post-Dispatch must choose between tax spending government bureaucrats and senior citizens. And it chooses the government spenders:
    Two changes in tax exemptions offered to Illinois taxpayers will mean a decrease in local funding for school districts.

    Districts rely on property taxes for a significant part of their budgets.

    For the Collinsville School District, that decrease is expected to total close to a $800,000 revenue shortfall for next year.

    "We're not alone with this. All school districts are affected - some more and some less," said Superintendent Dennis Craft. "But we did not expect this (cut in funding) to this extent."

    The decrease stems from two exemptions. One, called the Homestead Exemption, is offered to senior citizens. The program increased the reduction amount from $2,500 to $3,000 on property assessments.

    Another program, called Senate bill 1790, or owner-occupied exemption, increases what can be omitted from property assessments by as much as $1,500 from what was originally set at $3,500. This means that homeowners can potentially pay less in taxes because their property assessments are decreased. Seniors who own a home can take advantage of both exemption programs, saving as much as $8,000 from their home's assessed value.

- posted by Brian J. @ 11:08 AM   0 comments
 
Poetry Hint of the Day

Ichor and vicar do, in fact, rhyme; feel free to use them in your next sonnet.


- posted by Brian J. @ 10:00 AM   0 comments
To say Noggle, one first must be able to say the "Nah."