Musings from Brian J. Noggle
Thursday, July 07, 2005
 
Wherein the Author Uses The London Bombings to Flog His Political Points
Still believe them when they tell you surveillance cameras make you safer?


- posted by Brian J. @ 11:37 AM   0 comments
 
SUMMER OF THE SEA LION!
Sea Lion Attacks Lifeguard:
    A lifeguard in Santa Barbara, Calif., is recovering Wednesday after being attacked by a sea lion in the waters off El Capitan State Beach.
I suspect a conspiracy with collusion amongst the sharks, alligators, pit bulls, and now the sea lions.


- posted by Brian J. @ 9:14 AM   0 comments
 
Please Don't Feed the Moonbats
AP reports on the London bomb attacks:
    British police told the Israeli Embassy in London minutes before Thursday's explosions that they had received warnings of possible terror attacks in the city, a senior Israeli official said.

    Israeli Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had planned to attend an economic conference in a hotel over the subway stop where one of the blasts occurred, and the warning prompted him to stay in his hotel room instead, government officials said.

    Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom said he wasn't aware of any Israeli casualties.
Israeli warnings spared Jew lives. Where have we heard that before?

UPDATES:
  • Power Line guesses correctly!

  • Michelle Malkin thinks the record will be corrected. Forget it, once AP ran the story, it became the truth forever to be covered up by, well, facts.

- posted by Brian J. @ 7:02 AM   0 comments
 
Book Report: Naked Prey by John Sandford (2003)
This book represents the third of the Lucas Davenport series that I inherited from my aunt. It's the second book following Chosen Prey, so certain personal situations within Davenport's life have resolved themselves. Not really to the detriment of this particular item in the series, as they really only provide characterization and background in this book instead of Important Life Decisions which the main character must face.

Lucas Davenport now works for the state of Minnesota (crap, I ruined it for the single reader who's made it this far into the review). He's got fewer of the previously-developed characters within the Minneapolis police department to prop him up, but a richer supporting cast of temporary (but perhaps recurring) characters to help him out.

The plot deals with a northwestern Minnesota car theft/drug dealing ring exposed when small-time members decide to kidnap and kill children for ransom. Well, they only kidnap for ransom and then kill, but the whole thing comes crashing down when a murderous Republican comes to town and inadvertently destroys the compassionate drug-reimportation smuggling ring run by some Catholics with conscience.

Aside from the laughable political aside and the other implications, the book makes a quick read. I like the Minnesota winter as a character slightly more than the millionaire political appointee detective main character, but Sandford makes the book compelling enough to read if it falls into your hands.

"Do you want to buy more in the series?" my beautiful wife asked. "Not for more than $1 a book," I replied. So there you have it. A good set of stock novels set in the upper Midwest, but in a Democrat stronghold (which the books remind you).


- posted by Brian J. @ 12:31 AM   0 comments
Wednesday, July 06, 2005
 
Starting a Rumor
Hey, did you hear that Roger Waters and Dave Gilmour were seen going into King's Rood Studios outside of London on Monday?

Me either, but since this is the Internet, it might be true. If true is a synonym for "made up on the spot."


- posted by Brian J. @ 9:45 AM   0 comments
 
Spam of the Day
    opt-in broadcast email advertising is a completely legal method of reaching millions of people with your message instantly...

    is your business or organization utilizing broadcast email advertising to reach millions of people a day for free...?
Funny, I didn't opt in for that....


- posted by Brian J. @ 9:44 AM   0 comments
 
Wisconsin Lottery Discriminates Against The Poor, Journal-Sentinel Imagines
Apparently, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel wants to paint that picture. Poor get poorer in lottery land: Higher-poverty areas win less:
    Nearly one-third of all state lottery tickets sold in southeastern Wisconsin last year were sold in poor neighborhoods, and players in these areas hoping to strike it rich have not seen as many big payoffs as the rest of the region, a Journal Sentinel analysis shows.

    Longtime lottery player Tim Butler, who lives on Milwaukee's west side, didn't need to see the numbers to know that he and his neighbors are not exactly reaping big rewards from their investment in lottery tickets.

    "I have never won any decent amount of money with tickets I bought in the inner city," said Butler, a Milwaukee County bus driver, shortly after returning home with another $20 worth of Pick 3 and Pick 4 tickets.

    He said in the seven years he has been buying lottery tickets - usually several every day - his biggest prize has been $500 won in the Super Cash game with a ticket, he makes a point of noting, that he purchased on the city's south side.
By far the worst abuse of statistics to support a cracked hypothesis that I have seen in my lifetime.

Shame on the Journal-Sentinel. Analysis?

(Submitted to the Outside the Beltway Traffic Jam.)


- posted by Brian J. @ 9:19 AM   0 comments
 
Serendipity?
Great minds move in tandem? Who knows?

All I know is that Inaniloquent and Dustbury both mentioned the Champaign County Rifle Association's Burma Shavesque signs yesterday.

What are the odds of that?


- posted by Brian J. @ 7:03 AM   0 comments
Tuesday, July 05, 2005
 
Disextinction
Scientists flip over new dolphin:
    A NEW, dinkum, species of dolphin has been found living in the crystal waters of the Great Barrier Reef.

    The Australian snubfin dolphin, or orcaella heinsohni, was originally believed to be the Irrawaddy dolphin, found in coastal waters and rivers in Asia and northern Australia.

    But James Cook University Townsville marine researcher Isabel Beasley said yesterday investigations carried out in collaboration with Dr Peter Arnold from the Museum of Tropical Queensland revealed enough differences to identify the mammal as a new species.
When species die out, the environmentalists blame humans. So do we get credit for new species?


- posted by Brian J. @ 11:10 AM   0 comments
 
Supply and Demand Strike Fear In IT Hearts
Coding for $15 an hour?
    Could a computer coding job paying just $15 per hour signal something's wrong with the tech world?
A generation of IT workers have come into the marketplace assuming that they're due exorbitant salaries. So if the salaries fall, their world ends, and so must ours, they project:
    Even so, the ad's wage does make one wonder if guest worker visas and the rise of offshoring are undermining U.S. tech careers--and by extension threatening the country's tech leadership.
Ho hum. You know what killed US automotive manufacturing leadership? Giant corporations and unionized employees who made the enterprise cost ineffective. If United States born developers price themselves out of the market, whose fault is that?

Oh, yeah: the government or the Other.


- posted by Brian J. @ 6:54 AM   0 comments
 
SUMMER OF THE ALLIGATOR!
Wilmington Man Attacked by Alligator in Lake!

Granted, the alligators remain behind the pit bulls and the sharks in the standings, but the summer's not yet half over.


- posted by Brian J. @ 6:23 AM   1 comments
Monday, July 04, 2005
 
Three Steps Not Given
2 dead in apparent murder-suicide:
    It seemed like a regular night at Mr. Frog's Bar on Brewster Avenue before a gunman entered about 6 p.m. Saturday, police said.

    His first shot hit a man in the head. Then the woman he was dancing with and the gunman were fatally shot. Police, who have not released the victims' names, are investigating the incident as a murder-suicide and have no suspects.

- posted by Brian J. @ 7:23 PM   0 comments
 
Steinberg Blames Republicans for Kelo
Isn't that what I should make of this?
    Nowadays, intrusive government is a liberal worry. Between the Patriot Act and the Supreme Court deciding that any claque of local official can, at their whim, seize your house and give it to his brother-in-law to develop into a Starbucks, Democrats have inherited the difficult task of keeping our leaders from seizing control of an ever-increasing slice of our lives.
I think I am having vapors. Someone wave a beer under my nose to revive me.

The man once called me a genuis. Just so you know what his standards really are.


- posted by Brian J. @ 7:15 PM   0 comments
 
Someone Understands Mass Transit
The transportation columnist at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (transportation columnist?) compares light rail to buses:
    So for $550 million, here's how many more buses Metro could have put on the road every day of the year for 16 hours a day: 241 new bus routes for five years; 120 bus routes for 10 years; 80 bus routes for 15 years; or 60 for 20 years.
So why does the government prefer light rail schemes to buses?
    But Metro says about half of the passengers who ride MetroLink make between $50,000 and $75,000 a year. Only 17 percent of bus riders make that much. In fact, more than half of them make less than $15,000.
Quite so.


- posted by Brian J. @ 7:01 PM   0 comments
 
Book Report: Chosen Prey by John Sandford (2001)
This bookis the second of the three that I have inherited from my aunt and all three are well along in the series. I'm glad I read the preceding book, Easy Prey, since that book begins with some characterization of the main character and his relationship with his team.

Chosen Prey jumps right into the chaotic world of Lucas Davenport and his special Minneapolis police team. Well, no, it starts with a quick insight into the mind of the named criminal, a sex fiend academic (do I repeat myself?) named James Qatar who likes to do kinky things to artsy blondes and then kill them. We know this in the first chapter, because the semi-omniscient narrator follows Qatar to a tryst.

So the book is a race between Qatar and the police, who must track him down before he kills again. Or at least must stop him before he depopulates Minnesota and western Wisconsin.

The book's pace captures the nature of the frantic team investigation captained by Davenport. His personal life interrupts, as his True Love and recently (Easy Prey) returned Weather wants to have a child and marry Lucas. The sub plotline would detract had I not read the preceding book and known who she was and why this was different or difficult for Davenport.

It's an okay turn for a series book, but I'd hardly recommend it as the first in the series, as the author expects the reader to be familiar with the characters. Heck, I probably missed most of the inside humor. On his worst day, McBain does a better police procedural and characterizes the familiar so even the uninitiated can pick up on them. Sandford doesn't, and he doesn't seem to try. Of course, this isn't much of a police procedural, either, since the main character is at a high level and although he does do some interrogation himself, he's also a millionaire zipping around in a Porsche (when the weather's good) and a deputy chief with all the resources of the police department at his disposal. So it's not so much a police procedural as as a simple suspense page turner.

So Sandford's no Ed McBain, but no one really can hold a candle to that. He's no Randisi either, and he actually suffers from that particular comparison. Unless he really is Randisi in a different pseudonym.


- posted by Brian J. @ 6:59 PM   0 comments
 
Blogger Problem
Wow, it looks as though each post I put up yesterday overwrote the preceding entry, so instead of 3 posts, you only get the last one, and that's not without some work since Blogger wants to overwrite it with this post.

Allow me to assure you that you are definitely missing out on a lot of my eloquence, but rest assured that the only post that displays for yesterday is in fact probably the best.

I guess I shall have to return to the habit of saving all of my posts outside of Blogger. Again.


- posted by Brian J. @ 8:43 AM   2 comments
Sunday, July 03, 2005
 
Hearsay
Here's what some are saying and how that's headline material for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:
  • Both sides fear "stealth" nominee, observers say

    One wonders what observers these are. International appointment observers? Professional observers? I know it doesn't include me, because the Post-Dispatch never asked. But then, citizens are not engaged observers and independent thinkers. They're children to whom the press must explain things like they really are, not how they are portrayed on Fox News.

  • Ranchers don't always report cattle diseases, some say

    Some ranchers? Some cattle diseases? No, wait, the "some" does refer to ranchers. Some ranchers say the other ranchers do illegal things. Why would businessmen say ill things about their competitors? Who cares, it's news!

  • Man kills himself after standoff, police say

    Of course, the Post-Dispatch wants you to know that what follows is only the police story; actually, it's entirely possible that the police shot him dead with his own gun or that a Republican strangled the man and staged the whole crime to cover it up and used illegal capitalist profit to buy off the police. So of course the police would say it was attempted murder-successful suicide.
  • Iran's president-elect wasn't hostage taker, ex-secret agent says

    Of course, that's Saeed Hajjarian, a top adviser to outgoing President Mohammad Khatami, so we have an Iranian ex-secret agent defending the newly-minted (and not elected) Iranian president. But the Post-Dispatch has conveyed as much gravitas as it can on the report by noting that it's a secret agent and someone who would know. Theirs, ours, it's all the same to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

  • Vote fraud verdict won’t change results of Nov. 2 election, officials say

    Of course not, as a Democrat was elected. However, the story only seems to quote one official, and he says "I think it would be really difficult for a losing candidate to get a judge to overrule the election code," which is a far sight from won't. Perhaps the other officials said won't. Perhaps it was just the headline writer.
So does the St. Louis Post-Dispatch include or alter the "x says" portion of its headlines to flavor the following story? Eh, who knows. All I know is that they waste an awful lot of words on he-said, she-said, they-said.

- posted by Brian J. @ 5:41 PM   0 comments
Saturday, July 02, 2005
 
Book Report: The Long Valley by John Steinbeck (1938)
This book collects a number of John Steinbeck short stories. They're centered around the Salinas Valley in California, and I feel a little more connection with them and the topography that Steinbeck describes since we visited northern California this year. Suddenly, I understand mountains at the edge of the ocean.

Steinbeck's writing is accessible enough for modern readers steeped in commercial fiction (like me) to grasp. James Joyce, Benjy Campson, and all the tangled verbiage artists have done more to drive readers away from any literary fiction than Steinbeck or Hemingway could hope to save.

I find Steinbeck's style a little disengaging, although easy to read, and it can take me a while to get into a rhythm where I appreciate the characters and want to find out what happens next. In Steinbeck's novels, this doesn't pose difficulty other than the initial start-up costs of turning the first few dozen pages by discipline. However, with short stories, you have to start over with a new character or set of characters. So a number of stories just don't work.

However, the last set of stories features the same set of characters, so I was able to plunge, enjoyably, through the last quarter of the book.

So I enjoyed the book, but not unabashedly. But this completes my hardback study of Steinbeck spurred by the purchase of a set of these hardback editions at an estate sale two years ago. Although I still have East of Eden in paperback, I don't know how quickly I will get to it.


- posted by Brian J. @ 5:02 PM   0 comments
 
US Imperialists Attack Sovereign Comet
Deep Impact Spacecraft Ready for Mission:
    A NASA spacecraft was speedily closing in on its target Friday, a comet scientists hope to smash open this weekend, producing celestial fireworks for the Independence Day weekend.
Finally, we're an interplanetary hegemon! Woo!

Perhaps I'll have to retool the t-shirt:

Visualize World Hegemony



- posted by Brian J. @ 11:34 AM   0 comments
 
Balance
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch demonstrates balance in this article: Reverse mortgages can be a godsend or a curse to the elderly. Unfortunately, the balance is only in the ill-written headline.

It sits atop an otherwise evenhanded explanation of the reverse mortgage, including a number of anecdotes of people whom the instrument has helped, coupled with a financial advisor who explains some of the risks involved.

Where's the curse besides the headline?


- posted by Brian J. @ 11:22 AM   0 comments
 
Kelover
City forces out 2 downtown businesses: Action follows high court ruling on eminent domain:
    Last week's U.S. Supreme Court ruling approving a Connecticut city's plan to take private land by eminent domain may seem far away.

    But to John Revelli, whose family has operated a tire shop near downtown Oakland for decades, the implications hit home on Friday.

    A team of contractors hired by the city of Oakland packed the contents of his small auto shop in a moving van and evicted Revelli from the property his family has owned since 1949.

    "I have the perfect location; my customers who work downtown can drop off their cars and walk back here," said Revelli, 65, pointing at the nearby high- rises. "The city is taking it all away from me to give someone else. It's not fair."

    The city of Oakland, using eminent domain, seized Revelli Tire and the adjacent property, owner-operated Autohouse, on 20th Street between Telegraph and San Pablo avenues on Friday and evicted the longtime property owners, who have refused to sell to clear the way for a large housing development.
It's not fair, but late trends in our governance indicate that it's more fair for some than others.


- posted by Brian J. @ 11:09 AM   0 comments
Friday, July 01, 2005
 
Philosophical Question
If you, like, bust a vampire in the mouth and skin your knuckles on its teeth, are you in danger of becoming a vampire?

Please let me know within the next night or so. Thanks.


- posted by Brian J. @ 8:21 PM   3 comments
 
Update Your Scoreboards
Pit Bulls: 19
Sharks: 6.

The Sharks are really pouring it on and could mount a comeback!


- posted by Brian J. @ 2:28 PM   0 comments
 
Must We Resort to Name Calling?
Juvenile division missing $13,152.

As reported by the Busybody division, no doubt.


- posted by Brian J. @ 2:16 PM   0 comments
 
The Obvious Replacement
Who better to replace Sandra Day O'Connor than Daniel Day-Lewis?

It keeps the Day parity on the court, which is vitally important, since the judiciousness and meaningful career are less important to opposition forces than trivia.


- posted by Brian J. @ 2:08 PM   0 comments
 
Misleading Headline of the Day
Minn. Government Shuts Down; 9,000 Jobless.

Jobless? Hardly. It's not as though the Minnesota government will not come back. It should be Minn. Government Shuts Down; 9,000 On Unscheduled Paid Vacation.

But how would that play out the evolving epic of governments tearing dollars from the hands of the little guy?


- posted by Brian J. @ 9:52 AM   0 comments
 
The St. Lawrence Seaway Is Ours!
The Canadians can no longer adequately defend it:
    The navy is back down to one working submarine.

    Of the four used subs Canada acquired from Britain for $891 million, Halifax’s HMCS Windsor is the only one that can go to sea. HMCS Victoria has stopped sailing from its British Columbia base and will go into an extended docking work period next month that will last almost two years.

    "We have no choice," said Lieut. Diane Grover of navy public affairs.
We had better strike now. The Canadians will enter the 20th century in a matter of months. Well, 30 or 40:
    The navy expects to see its first sub fully operational and able to fire torpedoes by 2009.
BTW, Happy Canada Day to all of my Canadian readers. Enjoy your first of July celebration while you can, before we subjugate you and force you to celebrate the fourth of July with us.


- posted by Brian J. @ 8:19 AM   0 comments
 
Think Of It As Air Space Eminent Domain
Neil Steinberg, Chicago Sun-Times, supports government reduction of property rights:
    I'm generally a personal liberty, Milton Friedman, let-'em-buy-heroin-if-it-makes-'em-happy kind of guy. Yet I'm also always glad to see cigarette smoking restricted, basically, because it kills some people and annoys the rest (so would legal heroin, but heck, why be consistent? It's summertime).

    We seem to be doing it the right way, too, slowly whittling away the social space allowed to smokers. Smoking has gone from being cool to being an embarrassing personal lapse, somewhere between picking your nose and bedwetting. Soon the guy standing on the corner smoking a cigarette will carry the same cachet as someone standing on the corner sucking wine out of a bottle in a bag.

    I'm not gloating. I'm sad for cigarettes -- a lovely habit, a nice vice. Except for the kill-you part. But it's in society's interest to shuck them as soon as possible. Women used to paint their faces with white lead, but it had bad side effects, like death, so they got out of the practice. Habits change, if we're lucky.
Sorry to join the cacaphony of people who only comment when they disagree with you, Mr. Steinberg, but the slow whittling is not of smokers' rights, but property owners' rights in many cases. Would you applaud it were the governments to start banning pasta in restaurants because of the obesity academic?

They wouldn't do that? Why not? It's a public health issue, and property rights mean nothing any more.

Perhaps we could just think of it as though the local governments were condemning the airspace within private property and offered just compensation in the form of their continued indulgence in the "owner's" "right" to own/operate the property/business.

Update: Apparently, this set off William Squire: Neil Steinberg is a Bigot.

(Submitted to the Outside the Beltway Traffic Jam.)


- posted by Brian J. @ 7:34 AM   1 comments
To say Noggle, one first must be able to say the "Nah."