Musings from Brian J. Noggle
Monday, March 05, 2007
 
Scenes From the Front Line In Homeland Security
Espied as I waited for my driver's license to print several weeks overdue because I'd sent off to the Great State of Wisconsin for a Certified Birth Certificate and paid $15 for the effort to comply with the Lesser State of Missouri's new laws designed to thwart the malevolent forces in the world from obtaining driver's licenses with fake credentials so they could wreak havoc upon this nation.

Woman: (Retrieving a photostat of a birth certificate that looked like it had been washed in the pocket of blue jeans with the stones to create that worn effect that is found by certain segments of young people to be so pleasing as to pay extra for) I'm sorry, I sent for a new one and haven't gotten it.

22 year old license office employee with the ring in her nose: (Not glancing at but not unfolding the three pieces) Okay.

Woman: Can I change my address? I moved.

Employee: I need something with your new address on it. A utility bill, a check, or something.

Woman: (Rifling through purse) Oh, I don't have anything. That's okay, keep it the same.

Thank you, faceless license bureau employee with the ring in her nose. Your efforts have ensured that this potentially lethal agent of destruction could not change the address on her driver's license inappropriately. Our nation is safer!


- posted by Brian J. @ 8:24 PM   0 comments
 
Alaskan Insurgents Strike
Alaska Moose Brings Down Helicopter

Retreat! Redeploy our rangers to Seattle where they'll be safe!


- posted by Brian J. @ 7:10 PM   0 comments
 
The Men Who Would Be Demigods
Lileks today takes issue with urban designers:
    What really caught my eye was an interview with a University of Minnesota professor named Thomas Fisher, the dean of the U's new School of Design. It was a conversation about the new Design Economy, a term I hadn't heard before. America will compete and thrive because we design good things, like the iPod. You might wonder how a nation of 300 million can be sustained by design, but rest assured the term has broader definitions. The interview, called "Intelligent Design," focused on cities. As you might expect they are in dire need of Design, and I suspect this design will be administrated by experts. (As Dr. Johnson once said: A man who has tired of criticizing London is tired of tenure.) In order to compete, our cities need better design. No argument here - until we look at the specifics.
Wouldn't it be neat if we could get all of these government planners together and buy them copies of SimCity and let them go at that for their tax-money squandering fun as they tried to one-up each other?

No, probably not, because design and aesthetics and micromanaging Cits is only one component of their self-aggodizement. The other is enriching themselves and their unelected Elect.


- posted by Brian J. @ 7:06 PM   0 comments
Saturday, March 03, 2007
 
Why QA A Simple Mail Merge?
Mail merges have been automatic for 20 years, right?


Front


Back


- posted by Brian J. @ 3:05 PM   1 comments
 
Book Report: Lucky You by Carl Hiaasen (1997)
I didn't care so much for Nature Girl, but this book hearkens back to Hiaasen's strengths. A winning lottery drawing has two ticket holders: a black woman from a small town in Florida and one of a pair of self-styled white supremecist militia wannabees (who belong to the NRA). The black woman wants to buy a stretch of undeveloped land to save it from developers because her turtles are from there. A mob attorney from Chicago wants the land as part of a way of laundering money in a money-losing development. The militia men (who belong to the NRA) want the black woman's lottery ticket because they don't want to share the lottery winnings. So they take it, and the woman and a newspaper reported try to find them and retrieve the ticket. Throw in a dopey convenience store clerk who wants to be in the band--no, the militia, a Hooters waitress that one of the militia men (who happen to belong to the NRA) has his good eye on, an ATF agent smitten, unrequitedly, with the lottery winner who is not in a militia (or the NRA), and a newspaper feature writer who started out with a fluff piece about the lottery winner and a price on his head by a judge whom he cuckolded, and we've got a Hiassen novel. It ends, mostly, on a key with some gun play and violence, in which the heroes (who do not belong to the NRA) use firearms and a well-placed stingray to defeat the enemies.

So it's a pretty good book. Hiaasen, post Murrah, gets in his digs at militias and then stripes the whole NRA as kooks, but several of his characters are responsible gun owners. Some people might take issue with that distinction. Also, he relies a lot on the "newcomers are spoiling Florida" motif that has been popular with Florida writers since the invention of air conditioning. But the book is enjoyable and entertaining, so it's easier to not take the minor polemics as earnest.

So this book is one of Hiaasen's better novels. I can say that having come off of reading one that was not.

Books mentioned in this review:


- posted by Brian J. @ 10:47 AM   0 comments
 
Honey, I'm Home
At least, I was when the Google satellite passed over our old house:

Honey, I'm Home


I take pride in how clean those gutters are; of course, as you well know, I had to.


- posted by Brian J. @ 10:17 AM   0 comments
Friday, March 02, 2007
 
Implication
Remember, if someone tells you, "You look nice," that person is really saying, "Most of the time, you look like crap."


- posted by Brian J. @ 5:59 AM   2 comments
Thursday, March 01, 2007
 
Idle Speculation on a One Hit Wonder
It's been ten years since Meredith Brooks charted her only hit song, "Bitch". The song itself was one of those songs celebrating the essence of womanhood, or at least the essence of using being a woman as an excuse for mercurial mood swings and taunting a male if he couldn't handle idiocy from his lover. You know, a retread of Sheryl Crow's "Strong Enough To Be My Man", but without the remorse and with a dirty word as its name. Brooks charted with that song, but that's it for her. Even Alanis Morissette got more than one single from the scthick.

So I was wondering today: Ten years later, who does Meredith Brooks hate to get mixed up with most?

  • Meredith Baxter-Birney?

  • Merril Bainbridge, whose 1994 song "Mouth" also was one word long but was upbeat and fun, something a even a guy could sing without feeling dirty:



  • Elizabeth Wurtzel, author of the book Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women:



  • Burgess Meredith

  • That one waitress at Applebee's.


- posted by Brian J. @ 7:31 PM   0 comments
To say Noggle, one first must be able to say the "Nah."