Musings from Brian J. Noggle: February 2009

Musings from Brian J. Noggle

Thursday, February 26, 2009

An Nogglian Law Coming Soon To Mandatory Healthcare Near You

Cradle-to-grave health insurance becomes more cost effective, yea, efficient, the closer the grave is to the cradle.

Build that into political law at your own risk.

Just kidding! If you're building the laws, you have special exemptions.

- posted by Brian J. @ 12:06 PM 1 comments

Wednesday, February 25, 2009

A Name So Good, I'm Starting A Band To Use It

44 Knives and Sharp Instruments.

Can any of youse guys play instruments or sing? Because I was envisioning my role to be more like C or C from C & C Music Factory.

- posted by Brian J. @ 6:45 AM 0 comments

Tuesday, February 24, 2009

I Thought It Was A Different Kind Of Religious School

My toddler attends a preschool thing at the local religious school. I was under the impression it was a Christian school of some sort, but he came home with this idol, so I'm not sure:

Cthulhu fhtagn!

I have seen that sort of thing in Lovecraftian nightmares.

I lost 1d4 SAN just looking at it.

- posted by Brian J. @ 11:17 AM 1 comments

Monday, February 23, 2009

Changing Tense

My wife points out the Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal is our age.

I guess I can go from wasting my life to wasted my life at any time.

- posted by Brian J. @ 8:14 PM 1 comments

Sunday, February 22, 2009

Book Report: Good Intentions by Ogden Nash (1942?)

This book collects some of Nash's work in an around the World War II era, complete with mocking tones about Mussolini and Germany. However, it includes some gems of zingers and whatnot and amusing enough poetry to read aloud to a couple of children who don't get the point but like to chant when they hear words they recognize.

I liked the book, and I hope some day I get to use "Who was Ogden Nash?" as a Jeopardy! question.

Books mentioned in this review:

- posted by Brian J. @ 2:28 PM 0 comments

Saturday, February 21, 2009

Book Report: William Zorach by American Artists Group (1945)

This book is a monograph, I think, which means it's a short autobiography along with photographs of selected work by the artist. This particular volume is special in that it contains not only a clipping of the artist's obituary from a 1966 New York Times, but it is signed by the artist.

He led an interesting life, born in Lithuania in the nineteenth century and moving to America at age 4. He lived in poverty and quit school at 13, but he had a talent for art and worked in lithography until he saved enough for a trip to Europe. There in France prior to World War I, he painted, hung out, and met his wife. They came back to America and managed to support themselves on art fairly well.

His work is modernist, where the lines of statuary blurs to sculpture. His figures, mostly nudes or busts, blur the lines and don't strive for absolute anatomical correctness but do resemble the human form. I liked it well enough.

I inherited this book from my aunt, and she searched and searched to find more information on the artist and the monograph. Four years later, with wikipedia and better online book listings, I found enough to know the book isn't worth the amount she'd hoped it was worth. Back in the day, I got her and another friend of mine into going to garage and estate sales looking for things to sell on ebay. Me, I had a couple hundred bucks a month positive cash flow--not including the neat stuff I got myself out of the proceeds--but neither of my women companions really ever managed to list much on ebay. As a result, Pixie's house is littered with stuff she bought (oh, and how we would fill her station wagon up, stop and unload it, and then fill it up again on a Saturday), and my aunt accummulated a large number of books and some ceramics that scattered to the family when she passed.

There's a metaphor for or lesson of art in that perhaps. But I am too lazy to find it. Books mentioned in this review:

- posted by Brian J. @ 4:51 PM 0 comments

Who Would Have Listened To Cassandra?

In 1992, if you said Ice-T, the rapper responsible for "Cop Killer", would one day appear on Sesame Street without controversy, they would have thought you were mad.

Fifteen years later, your prediction would have come true.

- posted by Brian J. @ 6:33 AM 0 comments

Thursday, February 19, 2009

On My Wish List

Want to know what to get me for my birthday? How about a Unique Cave Home from ebay?

Historic, regionally famous cave: 15,000 square feet, divided into three main chambers.

The front chamber houses the main part of the 3-bedroom finished house.

The middle chamber holds the laundry room, storage, and a spare bath. The middle chambe made a great party room. 80 feet by 80 feet.

The back chamber still has the stage where Ted Nugent, Bob Seger, Ike and Tina Turner, the MC5 and many other bands performed.

Property: 2.8 scenic, partially wooded acres provide excellent privacy and the feel of the country right in the middle of town, just several blocks from shopping, dining, and other conveniences.

Energy efficiency: Geothermal and passive solar keep the home comfortable year-round without a furnace or air conditioning. In spite of the vast size of the home, our energy costs here run about the same as they did in our 800 square-foot starter home. The home naturally stays a little cooler than the average above-ground home, but we found that we acclimated quickly and easily.

Kitchen: The kitchen is the crowning jewel of the house, with nearly 400 square feet and a floor plan that lends itself well to cooking for one person, two, or parties of a hundred guests! Some of the features include a customizable Jenn-Air cook top, two convection ovens, Kitchen-Aid triple sink, large island with secondary sink and breakfast bar, and granite tile countertops.

Occupancy: The house could still could use trim and finish in several key areas. Trim is not a safety feature and not required by code. The City of Festus granted us an occupancy permit in May of 2008, and we have been living here happily ever since.

You choose whether to hire pros to customize before moving in, or live here and take your time getting intimate with the space while making your decorating choices.

Water features: The property has at least three groundwater springs, one accessible via a cistern in the middle chamber of the cave, one that yields an average of 100 gallons a day that drips into an indoor pond in the front chamber, and one near the woods that creates a shallow pond. During heavy rain, the property gets as many as fourteen beautiful waterfalls from the cliffs.

Anyone know how much huge closing concrete doors would cost? I'd call it NOGGLAD.

- posted by Brian J. @ 4:26 PM 0 comments

Good Book Hunting: February 14, 2009

For Valentine's Day, I took my sweetie to a book fair in St. Peters. The library out there broke their book fair into three parts: paperbacks, hardbacks, and childrens books (presumably printed after 1985 and having no non-book components). This weekend was the hardbacks weekend, which apparently only included mystery/horror books, bodice rippers by Janet Dailey, two Tom Wolfe novels, and videocassettes.

No nonfiction and little, if all, general fiction. Bare slices of science fiction, and really only stuff that was near-future suspense stuff.

I got some books, many to replace Book Club editions in my library, and some videocassettes:

Click for full size

This includes:

Desperate Measures by Joe Clifford Faust. Back in 2004, I read one of his books (A Death of Honor and he linked the book report on his blog, so I'll read another of his books.
Dark of the Moon, a Sandford book that features a minor character from the Davenport series.
Calamity Town by Ellery Queen.
Cujo by Stephen King, which will replace a BCE of the same in my library.
Red Storm Rising by Clancy. This might replace a book on my to-read shelves or might just be a duplicate.
Rose Madder by Stephen King. I didn't already have it, honey, honest.
Shadow Money by George Alec Effinger. I read one of his a long time ago and recognized the name. I hope I'm not repeating a mistake.
A Salty Piece of Land by Jimmy Buffett. Because I've read most of my Florida-themed crime books to this point (except for the McBain Hope novels which are building up).
Sudden Prey by Sandford. I didn't think I had this one (and I was right), but I was judging by plotlines. Hopefully there's not another in the series which I don't own which features grisly killings where the bodies were staged, gruesomely, to send a message. Because I saw a number of the Prey novels with something similar on the flap.
Rainbow Six by Clancy. Might be a replacement or duplicate. But the Clancys were very, very evident at the book fair.
Misery by Stephen King. Probable replacement for BCE.

Among video cassettes, I got:

Three movies made from Clancy novels: The Hunt for Red October (timely!), A Clear and Present Danger (pretty timely!) and Patriot Games.
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, which I was missing from my Star Trek VHS collection.
The Sands of Iwo Jima because it was a John Wayne movie for a buck.
Faith, a collection of music videos from the George Michael album. Sure, I could have gone to YouTube and seen any one of these videos at any time I wanted to, but there's a difference between browsing and searching. If you don't know what I'm talking about, you probably own or want a Kindle.
Hamburger: The Motion Picture. I already have the Kentucky Fried Movie and Star Trek: The Motion Picture. This is some sort of hybrid, right?
The Poseiden Adventure because I haven't seen it, and Mrs. N wants desperately to go on a cruise, so I need to bone up on survival techniques.
Cast a Giant Shadow, a movie glorifying the founding of Israel. They don't make them like that any more.

And the most exasperating thing about this book fair? Although Koontz novels were prevalent, the tables had a large number of Forever Odd, the second book in the series (which I have read) and a couple copies of Odd Hours, the fourth book in the series which I own but won't read until I read Brother Odd, the third book in the series--and the one that I could not find anywhere.

- posted by Brian J. @ 11:26 AM 0 comments

Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Truish Conversation

Sainted Mother: Do you know Ann Rand's Atlas?
Me: You mean Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged?
Sainted Mother: Yes. Does it predict what's happening now? They mentioned it on Fox News.
Me: Well, yeah, sort of.
Sainted Mother: I'd like to read that.
Me: pauses. It's over 1000 pages.
Sainted Mother: A thousand pages?
Me: Yeah. Sainted Mother: pauses Maybe not.
Me: You were expecting 160 pages?
Sainted Mother: Well...

On the other hand, it's still longer than the omnibus spending measures passing through Congress.

Or at least the last one.

- posted by Brian J. @ 4:37 PM 0 comments

Laying Odds On Obama's Mortgage Plan

Chances that President Obama will heed one of his most beloved senior advisors and give out a brand new house to everyone in the audience today in Mesa, Arizona: 1 in 2000.

It would ensure enthusiastic, bipartisan crowds (including a couple of Republican governors who might need somewhere to live after their next election) at all his stumps and it would keep the wife of a Republican state legislature from upstaging him again. Win-win!

- posted by Brian J. @ 7:13 AM 3 comments

Book Report: The Hunt for Red October by Tom Clancy (1984)

This is an early Tom Clancy book, and you can really tell if you read it soon after one of his later books. For starters, it's under 400 pages. This comes at the expense of some of the elaborate cast of characters you get in later books, where Clancy fleshes out even minor characters with a page or two of their own. Instead, only the major characters--and eventual recurring characters--get the treatment, which is odd, because later books don't go into as much depth. I guess Clancy expects you'll remember who Jonesy is (he's the one possessed by the alien Mr. Gray, isn't he?).

At any rate, a Russian sub wanders off the reservation, and the whole of the Russian navy chases it to the edge of American waters. Jack Ryan suspects the Russian captain is trying to defect and needs to come up with a plan to establish contact and to somehow get the sub and its new propulsion system into American hands. You know, like in the movie.

Clancy's not at his peak building tension here, either. The final climactic sub battle seems almost tacked onto the story and relies on quick scene switching, and I mean after a paragraph in many cases, to artificially attempt to create tension. It's not as effective in that short of bursts; Clancy gets better at it and at continually building tension to a resolution as he matures as a writer.

Still, a good book. You know when they study literature after the next Dark Age, they'll read Clancy and King from our era.

Books mentioned in this review:

- posted by Brian J. @ 6:56 AM 0 comments

Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Let's Talking About Parsing Statements

From a Washington Times article entitled "'Doom' talk scored as 'not presidential'", we have a former "senior aide" to George W. Bush showing that Republican professional political parasites can look like twits:

Brad Blakeman, a senior aide to Mr. Bush from 2001 to 2004, said the new president's language is immature.

"It's not presidential. An American leader needs to be hopeful and optimistic - and truthful. Everything he says is parsed; everything he says is searched for deep meaning. When he goes to 'DefCon 5' on the economy and says that we're on the brink of catastrophe, it's absolutely insane."

As anyone whose life was changed by the 1983 film WarGames can tell you, the DEFCON scale goes from 5, the lowest which is used during normal peacetime conditions, to 1, which means the mountain is closed, brother.

Maybe professional political parasites should really stay away from the military talk since they don't teach that so well at the Kennedy School of Government.

- posted by Brian J. @ 12:17 PM 0 comments

Where The Humor Goes Awry

You know, you would think, "What's there for Brian not to like?" It's a Web site with cat pictures and captions with a name sort of like an affinity to one of my blogs: MyCatHatesYou.com.

I mean, it's meh a bit relative to ICanHasCheezburger.com and StuffOnMyCat.com. But I tolerated it for a few clicks until I got to this entry.

Vulgarity+Cheney=Comedy Gold!

Well, no, not so much. That's just juvenile, really. I mean, I do from time to time run to a little schizophrenic satire about politicians with whom I do not agree, but simply saying Fuck <politician> isn't any sort of intelligent humor no matter how you package it, Ms. Cho.

Maybe the site will be worthwhile after the author emerges from puberty at the age of 40 or so.

- posted by Brian J. @ 10:57 AM 0 comments

I Can Hardly Wait

Just back from the Post Office. Foolish to go on a morning after a holiday, I know, but I had the time, so I tried it.

There were 18 numbers ahead of my ticket and a dozen or so people waiting around. There was one window open.

I waited for about five minutes. It looked as though a second window would open, but instead a postal employee with a fake tan just looked at the crowd that gathered to adore her. I left after the five minutes because the one open window had processed one customer shipping one package in the time I was there, and the guy leaning on the table in front of me had about 60 Priority Mail envelopes.

I cannot wait until our federal government does the same to our medical industry. And once it does, I will wait, hardly.

- posted by Brian J. @ 10:33 AM 0 comments

Monday, February 16, 2009

Book Report: The Memory of Running by Ron McLarty (2004)

I admit it, I bought this book (finally) because Ron McLarty was Sgt. Belson in the television series Spenser: For Hire.

It got some critical note and some commercial success (I hope), because it's ultimately a pretty good book. An obese Quality Control inspector in an action figure factory spends his lonely nights in an alcoholic haze. After a week at the cottage with his folks, they die from an automobile accident just as the father finds the crazy disappeared sister. This quite frankly breaks the fellow from his moorings and from his current life.

He sort of stumbles on a cross-country bike ride to claim his sister's body, and the narrative splits between flashbacks that tell the story of the happy suburban life's disintegration as the daughter goes crazy and the man on his meandering voyage of self-discovery.

This is the second of the crazy sister books I've read recently (the other being The Moment She Was Gone which I read in December), and I'm pleased that this book didn't resort to a cheap gimmick to twist it. I figured out the exact moment where the narrator would have died if we were going for an Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge twist, but that didn't erupt. Instead, we get a measured (but slightly fantastic) story about a man's reawakening when everything he knew goes.

I recommend it.

Books mentioned in this review:

- posted by Brian J. @ 7:05 AM 0 comments

Sunday, February 15, 2009

Book Report: The Jeopardy Book by Alex Trebek and Peter Barsocchini (1990)

I bought this book because it was $1 at St. Michael's and because our family and I have recently become fixated on this show. We watch it every night, and I took the online contestant test recently.

That said, the book is a little underwhelming. It was published in 1990, when the new show was 4 years old, so it's a very high level gloss over the show. A bit about Alex, a bit about contestants, something about how it's taped, and then lots of trivia answers, mostly laid out like game boards so fewer questions would win more space.

I guess there are some other books out there about the show that give a real insider's view of the process, including a couple written by contestants. I should check those out.

So I guess it was an okay thing if you're into the game show, but as I said, underwhelming.

Books mentioned in this review:

- posted by Brian J. @ 12:33 PM 0 comments

Saturday, February 14, 2009

Book Report: Breaking Legs by Tom Dulack (1992)

Now this is a funny play.

A staid Irish-American professor approaches the family of one of his former students, one of his former hot students, for money to produce his play about a murder. The family? Oh, yeah, the Family.

It's a two act bit, of course, because none of these new kids have the stamina for a five act play, but it has structure, it has wit, and it worked for me.

Books mentioned in this review:

- posted by Brian J. @ 9:39 PM 0 comments

Yeah, I Noticed, Too

That is David Axelrod's wife and kid on the cover of Parade magazine this week.

- posted by Brian J. @ 8:32 PM 0 comments

For Your Review: Gallery of Bad Band Photos

That's not what Rock and Roll Confidential calls it, but it is here.

- posted by Brian J. @ 8:10 AM 0 comments

New Floor Established

Congress has passed the new, $787 billion dollar stimulus bill.

Anyone else remember how, in the ancient history of a half decade, a $250 billion dollar transportation bill was a big deal?

Then came TARP at $700 billion (essentially, a number the then-Treasury Secretary made up. Now we have $787 billion.

Thus, the new floor is set. Next time, Congress will have to pass something even bigger. Which they probably will. And anything less than $787 billion dollars will seem as though Congress isn't trying harder.

(At least one of these links seen on The Anchoress, where she's gloomier than I am.)

Also read this for a summary of some of the things in the bill. At 1000 pages, nobody really knows what all is in it. Some lobbyists no doubt know the parts they wrote, but no one knows what is in the whole thing.

- posted by Brian J. @ 7:26 AM 1 comments

Friday, February 13, 2009

In Unrelated News (I Hope)

The two most e-mailed stories yesterday from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

Click for full size

St. Louis Zoo elephant has deadly herpes strain
St. Louis keeps No. 1 for two STDs

- posted by Brian J. @ 7:41 AM 0 comments

Good and Bad to Start 2009 in Missouri

Good:

Bad:

Bill to allow students who don't graduate chance to participate in graduation if they're disabled. The disabled have more legal rights than the enabled, do they not? As a bonus, this bill has a girl's name attached to it. A MfBJN rule of thumb: if a bill has a child's name on it, it is a bad law rushed into the books for sentimental reasons.

- posted by Brian J. @ 6:04 AM 0 comments

Wednesday, February 11, 2009

It Probably Says Something

Has anyone else noticed that free rein now appears more and more in print as free reign?

I'm not sure if this means more and more people are using it in reference to the growth of government and are consciously making a pun (I doubt it) or if educational standards or cultural references have obscured the horsemanship origin of the phrase.

- posted by Brian J. @ 10:26 AM 0 comments

Monday, February 09, 2009

Ace Embraces The MfBJN Lifestyle

To add variety to Valu-Rite Vodka and hobo-killin', Ace embraces the MfBJN lifestyle:

Allah, the technojunkie, is swooning over the new improved Kindle. I'm not, and I don't think most will.

For one thing it costs $360. Quite an investment.

For another thing, books are not precisely difficult to carry around, especially on the places where you'd read a book outside your home -- subway, airport, Starbucks, park. The Kindle is a bit thinner and lighter, but who's sweating the weight of a book?

For yet another thing, books are intrinsically pleasurable as objects. People like books -- the feel of paper, the smell of them. Kindle is not going to replace that attractiveness anytime soon.

But here's the big reason Kindle will never catch on, as a friend explained to me:

"How do you know what to read?"

By which he meant -- without the pleasant ritual of going to a book-store, browsing the stacks, picking up a book and reading its back cover and first few pages -- how the hell do you know what you want to read in the first place?

You know, modern Americans read 36 books a year and buy 84 books. Because I bring the average up that much, baby! (see also this and this.)

- posted by Brian J. @ 7:58 PM 0 comments

Book Reading 2008 Wrap

You know, every year I provide a handy little boast list of how much I've read in one place. Because of the hiatus, I didn't get that list out.

Until now.

Read it and weep (for my lack of a life outside the pages):

Friday by Robert Heinlein
Star Trek II The Wrath of Khan by Vonda N. McIntyre
Star Trek III The Search for Spock by Vonda N. McIntyre
Heat by Ed McBain
The Fred Factor by Steve Gill
The Return by William Shatner
The Best of Slate: A 10th Anniversary Anthology by David Plotz (ed.)
Kill Him Twice by Richard S. Prather
Lost in Yonkers by Neil Simon
Dogbert's Top Secret Management Handbook by Scott Adams
April Evil by John D. MacDonald
Ranting Again by Dennis Miller
Playgrounds of the Mind by Larry Niven
Infinite Possibilities by Robert Heinlein
Stranger in Paradise by Robert B. Parker
Secret Prey by John Sandford
Paris Kill-Ground by Joseph C. Rosenberger
The Wrecking Crew by Donald Hamilton
John Hawkwood: An English Mercenary in Fourteenth-Century Italy by William Caferro
The Forge of God by Greg Bear
First Blood by David Morrell
Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
Mischief by Ed McBain
Rambo: First Blood Part II by David Morrell
Journey to Cubeville by Scott Adams
Mad as Hell byMike Lupica
The Dead Zone by Stephen King
Man O' War by William Shatner
The Running Man by Stephen King
The Case of the Horrified Heirs by Erle Stanley Gardner
Strange But True: Mysterious and Bizarre People by Thomas Slemen
Top Ten of Everything 2008 byRussell Ash
Michelangelo: His Life and Works byDonatello de Ninno
Solved Selected by Richard Glyn Jones
Pogo: We Have Met The Enemy And He Is Us by Walt Kelly
How to Break Web Software by Mike Andrews and James A. Whittaker
Hard Times by Charles Dickens
An Altogether New Book of Top Ten Lists by David Letterman
Alice in Jeopardy by Ed McBain
Space Wars: Worlds and Weapons by Stephen Eisler
The Book of Tomatoes by National Gardening Magazine
Rooster Cogburn by Martin Julien
The Braille Woods by Ann Townsend
Lonesome Cities by Rod McKuen
Best Home Plans by Sunset Books
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Tales by Washington Irving
And To Each Season by Rod McKuen
The Job by Douglas Kennedy
Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling
Red Zone by Mike Lupica
Sweer Savage Heathcliff by George Gately
Twice-Told Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Bread by Ed McBain
Paradise Alley by Sylvester Stallone
Contrary Pleasure by John D. MacDonald
Clash of the Titans by Alan Dean Foster
A Pair of Blue Eyes by Thomas Hardy
The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler
No Witnesses by Ridley Pearson
Phantom Prey by John Sandford
Conquest by Hugh Thomas
Shadows Over Baker Street edited by Michael Reeves and John Pelan
Love Sonnets edited by Louis Untermeyer
The End of the Night by John D. MacDonald
The Private Dining Room by Ogden Nash
Nobody's Safe by Richard Steinberg
The Careless Corpse by Brett Halliday
The Case of the Mischeivous Doll by Erle Stanley Gardner
The April Robin Murders by Craig Rice and Ed McBain
The Fruminious Bandersnatch by Ed McBain
Murder at the ABA by Isaac Asimov
I'm Glad I'm Not Young Anymore by Clarissa Start
Murder Spins The Wheel by Brett Halliday
From Russia With Love by Ian Fleming
Many Long Years Ago by Ogden Nash
Reflections on Our Friendship by American Greetings Corporation
The Pope of Greenwich Village by Vincent Patrick
The Lost City of Zork by Robin W. Bailey
Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats by T. S. Eliot
Chasing Darkness by Richard Crais
Resolution by Robert B. Parker
Do As I Say (Not As I Do) by Peter Schweizer
Elephants Can Remember by Agatha Christie
The Man With The Golden Gun by Ian Fleming
A Friend Forever Edited by Susan Polis Schutz
Myths, Lies, and Downright Stupidity by John Stossel
The Silencers by Donald Hamilton
Invisible Prey by John Sandford
The First Immortal by James L. Halperin
True Grit by Charles Portis
Crossword Poems Volume One by ed by Robert Norton
50 Great Horror Stories edited by John Canning
Event Horizon by Steven E. McDonald
24 Girls in 7 Days by Alex Bradley
Smarter by the Dozen by Dahlin/Tipple
Back to the Future by George Gipe
Elm Ave by Save the Heart of Webster, Inc.
Indians of North America: The Aztecs by Frances F. Berdan
The Explainer by edited by Bryan Curtis
Rough Weather by Robert B. Parker
TV Theme Song Trivia Book by Vincent Terrace
The Three Musketeers (abridged) by Alexandre Dumas
Heat by Michael Lupica
The Wall by Jean-Paul Sartre
The Lonely Silver Rain by John D. MacDonald
Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life by Dave Stern
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
One More Time: The Best of Mike Royko by Mike Royko
Sharpe's Tiger by Bernard Cornwell
Back to the Future Part II by Craig Shaw Gardner
The Moment She Was Gone by Evan Hunter
The Great Lakes: A Photographic Journey by Ann McCarthy
Godless: The Church of Liberalism by Ann Coulter

What's odd is how sometimes you can remember what you were doing when you were reading the books. The first of the books I read while painting my new office space and preparing for the transition to newborn fatherhood. Later, I read a stack of books rather quickly in the waiting room outside an ICU.

Also, I remember something of most the books I read, but the compilations are harder.

So what did you read last year?

- posted by Brian J. @ 7:40 PM 0 comments

Book Report: Laughter on the 23rd Floor by Neil Simon (1995)

I don't know why I am such a sucker for Neil Simon plays. They're short, as are all modern plays, and they're often amusing, but frankly they tend to lack a proper story arc in the two acts. I Ought To Be In Pictures and Chapter Two are pretty good, but Biloxi Blues and Broadway Bound just kind of drop a couple of scenes out of Simon's life, fictionalized, onto the stage. I guess Lost in Yonkers is somewhere in between. However, the lesson I've learned is the closer the story tracks to Simon's life, the less interesting it will be.

This play has two acts about a young writer working for a comedy/variety show in 1953. We get two acts of the writers who work there ripping on each other and making jokes as fast as they can. Their mercurial boss, the head of the show, makes an appearance. The HUAC is at work, and the network wants to cut the show. Then, in act 2, we get more of the same and the show ends.

This is the weakest of the plays of Simon that I've read, and it also tracks autobiographical, perhaps proving the my theory. On page, it's less funny than a public domain episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show which has a similar vibe vis-a-vis the working environment without the benefits of wacky situations and an hot young Mary Tyler Moore.

As a side note, I always read the original cast list that appears in the front of the book and see whom I recognize. In this case, it's Nathan Lane as the show host. I also recognized Mark Linn-Baker's name, although if you would have asked me, "He played the American cousin on the television sitcom Perfect Strangers," I would have been at a loss. But give me the name, and I recognize his most famous role. A note of amusement is that he played the guy without the accent in that show, but in this play he portrays a Russian immigrant, so he's the only one with an accent. Huh.

So it's a quick hour's worth of reading, more worth it if you're doing a paper on Neil Simon's works than if not.

Books mentioned in this review:

- posted by Brian J. @ 7:45 AM 3 comments

Sunday, February 08, 2009

Book Report: Every Little Crook and Nanny by Evan Hunter (1972)

Even though in later years, Evan Hunter/Ed McBain got a little onto the bash Bush wagon, the bulk of his work occurred before he went nuts, and I read most of it so far before that, so I cut him more slack than I do someone like John Sandford. So I don't think anything of picking up a new Hunter novel, especially since it looks like Last Summer was an outlier in its pathology.

This book details a kidnapping of a crime world figure's son while he's vacationing in Capri. The Nanny, with whom the Ganooch had left the urchin in the states, calls one of the lesser men in the underworld circle to help her figure out what to do. He employs various methods and criminal plans to try to raise the ransom money before the Ganooch comes home or worse.... if anything could be worse.

Hunter names the chapters after characters who appear in them, often for the first time, and on the page facing each chapter we get a photograph of those people, apparently taken of not only Hunter and some family members, but other people he knew. An addendum tells who the photographs really are and makes reference to some of the other material in the book so you know he wasn't making things up. The photograph gimmick was amusing and worked for me.

I get the sense that Evan Hunter liked to write. Most writers, you don't get that sense or worse. But he liked doing novel things with his novels.

Books mentioned in this review:

- posted by Brian J. @ 8:04 PM 0 comments

A Secret Revealed

Instapundit links to a post on the Atlantic Monthly site and asks:

WAS THE MELTDOWN CAUSED by Texas Hold 'em?

I can answer in a word: No.

I caused the financial meltdown.

You see, for years I've been taking all the credit card offers I received in the mail and sent the post-paid envelope back with only the terms and the conditions of the offer enclosed. I did this up to 20 times a week when the credit was easy, when I got several offers a day, often from the same promotion but with the picture on my new card-to-be changed from my university to other universities people I know attended.

I thought it might teach them a lesson, perhaps drive the price of new customer acquisition up to the point that it was less worthwhile to carpetbomb the country with the offers. Also, I'm often juvenile.

Little did I know that the cumulative effect not only ate into the cash flow of the organizations in question, but because they borrowed money for short term expenditures, the nominative predicative delta accelerated as the time participular refluxion elapsed. To put it succinctly:

ÐÞª×ßµ²

I should have thought of that before the first time I scissored out the little faux customer locator code from the back of one of those envelopes.

Of course, I just made this whole business up out of whole cloth, including vocabulary and formulas. Kind of like the smartest people in the country who still work for the major banking companies and the government offices that service the financial industry, hey? I could have a career in one or the other, except it would be too hard for me to play it "straight" there and not snicker from time to time when I'm building the fables that are modern instruments of policy and banking.

- posted by Brian J. @ 7:12 PM 0 comments

Book Report: The Deal by Peter Lefcourt (1991)

This is a quick little comic, almost-heist of a novel set in the movie industry. A washed-up marginal producer about to commit suicide gets one more chance when his nephew from New Jersey shows up with a script about Benjamin Disraeli and William Gladstone. Smelling his last chance, the producer sort of misleads a hot but impressionable action star into wanting it and then gets a budget and an office at a studio. Once he's set, he only has to completely have it rewritten into an action flick and shoot it in Hungary. When that falls apart, he can always go with unplanned B: attaching major Oscar talent to it and shooting it as an actual period piece.

An amusing read. I was saddened that the author hadn't written many books between now and then and wonder what to think now that its sequel is coming out fifteen years later.

Books mentioned in this review:

- posted by Brian J. @ 7:41 AM 0 comments

Saturday, February 07, 2009

Good Book Hunting: January 2009

You think that because I haven't posted a good book hunting segment in a while that I have not been out there buying books? Hah! Think again.

Although January isn't normally a good month for book fairs, this January 2009 proved to be fruitful indeed. We visited the following three book fairs.

St. Michael's

The first book fair we visited was St. Michael's in Shrewsbury. I think we missed this book fair last year; however, we saddled up our children and went to this one (a side benefit of having toddlers as big as horses is you can, in fact, ride them). St. Michael's is tucked off a side street in Shrewsbury (St. Michael, for some reason). Here it is:

View Larger Map

The book fair is tucked into a small room to the left of the entrance. Small rooms with few people mean that toddling children can walk by themselves, exploring the books on their own. Our toddling child offers his own suggestions for purchase, not only in children's books but also in adult books, but his determinations of his parents' reading interests are more random than an Amazon algorithm. At any rate, here's what we got:

Click for full size

I got:

The Jeopardy Book, a book based on the popular television game show.
A four volume set of Masterpieces of World Literature, a reference work.
On the Road by Jack Kerouac in bound, not scroll, form.
Hard Drive, a book about Bill Gates and Microsoft. I'll read it sometime, like I'll read Softwar about Larry Ellison and Oracle sometime.
Life in the Castle in Medieval England. Self-explanatory.
The Natural, the book upon which the movie was based.
Breaking Legs, a play.
Blackhawk Down, the book about the Somalian excursion. I read the book serialized in the late 1990s, but I'll probably want to read it again. You know, I think I saw the film, too.
Main Street by Sinclair Lewis.
Stonehenge by Bernard Cornwell. It doesn't fit into the Sharpe series, so I didn't blow it with all the people who will get me the series for my birthday.
I'm No Hero. I forget who wrote this, or why he or she bothered to assert it. I guess I'll find out sometime in 2019, unless I'm forced to burn the book for fuel first.
If You Come To A Fork In The Road, Take It, a memoir by Yogi Berra.
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison.
Laughter on the 23rd Floor, a Neil Simon play.
Life After Death, a play by someone else.
Introduction to Logic, as though I need another textbook on this deprecated subject.

That's 19 books.

Heather got some books, and the toddler got some books that he can't wait to read. And he hasn't.

St. Mattias

We'd seen the signs for weeks, so when the time came, we had a babysitter lined up and went down to St. Mattias for its book fair. I entered a raffle for a quilt which I didn't win. The fair was in the church's gym, a bit bigger than we would have wanted to let the child run in anyway. I have totally given up pretense, and I grab a box right away when entering these affairs. You can see why:

Click for full size

I got:

The Birds on VHS. It was written by Evan Hunter, you know.
A Short History of Australia because I don't have a lot of time for a long history of Australia. Speaking of which, since Pluto is a dwarf planet, shouldn't we also have a movement afoot to demote Australia to a dwarf continent?
Breaking Point, a DAW paperback original science fiction thing. Just because.
A volume in the History of Philosophy series. A duplicate, of course, but one of these days I'll get lucky. Or I'll get smart and list what I have so I don't buy up all the duplicates in circulation.
Renny's Daughter, part of some series by Mazo de la Roche. I bought some others in the series. Why not get them all just in case I like them? Well, I guess the argument would be what if I don't like them, but I can always burn them for fuel.
The Klutz's Guide to Knots, complete with strings to practice with. Should come in handy if I'm impressed onto a frigate.
Odd Hours, by Dean Koontz. I already had a BOMC edition complete with erratum notice; this standard edition will replace it and provide my brother's new birthday gift.
The Big Play, an old collection of big NFL plays.
Devil's Holiday.
The Complete Book of Swords. This had been in the history section, but I know better. The volunteers at St. Mattias appeared to be somewhat clueless since many books were classed according to the title and not the content.
O Pioneers in the coveted Readers Digest edition no less.
King Edward VII. A biography. Don't know who he is? Someday I won't be able to say that.
Brave Men, a collection of works by Ernie Pyle.
The Ends of the Earth by Robert Kaplan.
Bankrupt: The Intellectual and Moral Bankruptcy of the Democratic Party. Get them before they're banned!
Strange Stories, Amazing Facts, a Readers Digest collection. These are such good sources for ideas. I have so many, I should put the good ideas to use sometime.
How a House Works, a home repair thing. I have so many, I should repair my house sometime.
A Memory of Running by Ron McLarty. He played Sgt. Frank Belson on Spenser: For Hire, you know. I didn't need more reason than that.
2201 Amazing Facts, hopefully another idea source.
2 volumes of a collection of Kipling.
Not Exactly the Three Musketeers, a Guardians of the Flame book by Joel Rosenberg. You know he's a CCL instructor, right?
Why Johnny Can't Tell Right from Wrong, another screedish, no doubt, book.
Black Money by Ross MacDonald. When you find a Ross MacDonald in the wild, you take it.
The Yuppie Handbook. For times when I want to reminisce about being DINK and project myself into a city in the 1980s.
I'm a Stranger Here Myself, poems by Ogden Nash. I shall have the whole set someday.
Daytrip Missouri, a travel thing for Missouri.
Well Versed in Business, poems about business.
Let it Rot about composting.
The Fall of the Ivory Tower, a screedish book a la The Hollow Men and ProfScam, I assume.
The Tommyknockers by Stephen King.
Napoleon Bonaparte. Man, if I ever start reading historical biographies, I will be set.
Michigan, a picture book. Hopefully, it will skip Detroit (although I have looked at a picture book dedicated to that city in 2007).
Manual of Home Repairs, Remodeling, and Maintenance. See comment above for the other home repair book.

Additionally, I bought some Diane Schuur CDs and the Verve Pipe CD with "The Freshmen" on it. Heather got some books and some LPs, including a Styx album whose cover creeps me out seriously. Seriously.

I'm only going by line numbers here in my HTML editor, but is that 32 books? That puts me at 52 purchased for the month before the deluge.

The JCC Mini Sale

This year, apparently the Jewish Community Center in Creve Coeur will renovate the building that houses its book fair, so they threw a mini-book fair for five days in January. We were going to go on Tuesday, the penultimate day, but a schedule conflict emerged, so we ended up going on the last day. Five dollar bag day. You know what that means.

I didn't have too many books, but then I looked again at a large collection of Walter J. Black-printed three-mysteries-to-a-volume series, and thought, "Man, I could pick those all up for $10. So I did, and then some:

Click for full size

I got:

43 of the aforementioned mystery books, or 129 mystery novels total.
Shakespeare Whodunnits, mysteries based on Shakespeare plays.
From Here to Eternity by James Jones. I am on a WWII kick here. By "kick," I mean buying a lot of WWII books.
M*A*S*H Goes to Moscow, a book based on the television series.
Star Trek 2-7. Some are dupes, but they all fit in the bag, dig?
The Black Death by Nick Carter. Quality pulp.
Four From Planet 5, a science fiction thing about kids from another planet.
Happy Days: Ready to Go Steady, a book based on the television series.
It's Always Something, the autobiography of Gilda Radner.
The Beyonders by Manly Wade Wellman. Probably not about the Secret Wars or Cosmic Cubes.
The Covery and Then. I have no idea. I bought that?
Thunderball, the James Bond novel.
The Yom Kippur War, a historical account. The J is always good for Israeli history; what are the odds?
Shogun. Remember the miniseries? I remember it was on. Sometime around the time Masada was on, too.
Shopping Smart, an early book by John Stossel.
Goldfinger, another Bond novel.
Screenplay, a book about how to write screenplays? Hey, it fit in the bag.
Wild Fun, a galley or ARC of a novel by Nelson DeMille. The J is also good for prepublication materials.
Captives, a galley or ARC of another novel. Bought because it's prepublication and hence worth more if anyone bothers collecting books in 20 years and this chap is any good. If not, it burns at a cozy 451 degrees.
At That Point In Time, Fred's book about Watergate.
My Life by Golda Meir. I think I already have this in paperback, in which case the hardback is a replacement.
Freedom in the Ancient World, a book that examines and, hopefully, rates the individual freedom in ancient societies.
Bush Country, a pro-Bush screed.
Degas, a picture book of the artist's work.
Historic Midwest Houses, a picture book of, well, you can guess.
The World's Great News Photographs 1840-1980

Heather got a couple of books and some music, as is her wont.

As you know, on dollar bag day (or $5 bag day in this case), you buy books by volume. Our collection was four bags, so $20. We didn't even really try to stuff the bags. The selection wasn't the best, as it was only a minibook fair and the last day of it to boot. Maybe I was a little gun shy about going nuts, too, knowing it was license to acquire too much. Because, you know, 73 books wasn't too much.

Total: 124 new books.

That is, more than a year's worth of reading bought in one month.

And it's not even book sale season yet.

- posted by Brian J. @ 1:07 PM 0 comments

Book Report: Master and Commander by Patrick O'Brian (1970)

After I read the first book in the Sharpe series, I realized that I didn't have the second book in that series, so I looked around for other historical fiction on my shelves, and I came to this book. I'd seen the movie Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, but apparently that is a later book in the series. This book introduces Jack Aubrey and the surgeon characters and describes Aubrey's first command.

Meticulously researched, the book describes the technology, procedures, and military of the era as much as any Clancy novel. However, the pacing on this book is very mellow and languid. A lot of exposition, some action, more exposition, some politicking, some exposition, action, and the novel kind of ends without a real climax.

As such, it's not as compelling as Clancy or Cornwell, but still interesting enough that I wouldn't mind reading the next in the series.

Apparently, I'm really getting into British military history ca 1800 with the Sharpe and Aubrey/Maturin books. Reading these makes me want to do my own research so I can really be steeped in what the authors describe, so that the exposition isn't educational but merely a reminder. Maybe I should get into Civil War fiction instead since I already have a good library on it.

Books mentioned in this review:

- posted by Brian J. @ 8:00 AM 0 comments

Friday, February 06, 2009

Book Report: St. Louis 365 by Joe Sonderman (2002)

First of all, let's log the defect. The book is called St. Louis 365, but it includes February 29, so it should be St. Louis 366.

That said, it take each day of the year and relates a set of things that happened on it in St. Louis history. Sonderman and his assistants scoured newspaper archives, apparently, to come up with this list. It includes a lot of one-off tidbits that give you neat little origins for street names and whatnot throughout the city and county, but also provide some narrative in identifying events in a series for larger stories, such as the Greenlease kidnapping and the World's Fair in 1904.

It took me a while to get through it, since it's not a book that drags you along. It is, however, a good book for stop and start, pick it up for a couple minutes in a doctor's waiting room, sort of reading. I started reading it last year when I was going through browseable books during ballgames and only finished it in January.

But a good idea book and something that will give me odd bits of trivia to throw out randomly in conversations where the trivia don't exactly fit and will meet a sort of stunned silence as people puzzle out the irrelevance. But that's why I read.

Books mentioned in this review:

- posted by Brian J. @ 8:07 AM 0 comments

Well, If His Signatures Are On The Checks

AP helpfully kicks Bush again: Bush overpaid banks in bailout, watchdog says.

So, will Obama be at fault when the new stimulus plans, or will it be the dark nature of humanity rejecting or sinning against the perfection of Porktopia?

- posted by Brian J. @ 7:53 AM 2 comments

Thursday, February 05, 2009

Book Report: Godless by Ann Coulter (2006)

Any book with Ann Coulter on the cover, you kinda know what you're getting. Ann Coulter.

This book is a little schizophrenic, as it really has two parts. The first is normal liberals are bad men and women sort of thing you get on the Internet and in Coulter columns. Whereas she's amusing in columns and in short doses, sometimes a book-length treatise by Coulter grates on my nerves.

So I was fortunate, surprised, and pleased when the book took a thoughtful turn into exploring intelligent design versus evolution debate, exposing some of the holes in the evolution theory and keeping the mouth, or its textual equivalent, to a snarky minimum throughout.

I don't read the debates nor the supporting materials very closely, but Coulter's treatment was a decent survey of it. After a couple chapters of the normal political nyah nyah of which this blog often joins in.

Books mentioned in this review:

- posted by Brian J. @ 7:20 AM 0 comments

Wednesday, February 04, 2009

Book Report: A Clear and Present Danger by Tom Clancy (1989)

When reading Clancy books, you come away from them about seven hundred pages later with the description, "It's the drug war in Colombia one," or "It's the nuke at the Superbowl one," or "It's the one with the submarine." This one happens to be the one with the drug war in Colombia. Maybe that's better than you get with a lot of thrillers, especially ones of this size.

The British first edition I have here clocks in at 816 pages; you know what? That's sort of okay, since Clancy is quite honestly writing serious epic stuff here. Even though this one doesn't bring the United States to the brink of a major war, it has enough tension within it to mostly sustain its size. Clancy uses his standard characters of Ryan and Clark (and introduces some soon-to-be standard ones in this book). Additionally, he details a lot of incidents and makes a lot of throwaway minor characters into actual characters.

Plot summary: The US government sends covert troops into Colombia to report on drug flights leaving; when the drug lords kill an important government official, the government orders them to start attacking. And then the government abandons them when it's convenient, but Jack Ryan and Clark don't let that happen.

There's a lot of double-dealing, a lot of plot turns, and it almost makes you forget you're reading 800 pages of fiction. But not quite.

Still, it moves along faster than a Dickens novel (but Dickens novels, being shorter, are quicker to the finish line). It's also quicker than an O'Brian Master and Commander sort of book, which carries the same amount of technology cut into it (albeit an old-fashioned technology). And a meal of Clancy really sates your thirst for his books for another year or two and opens a big space on your to-read bookshelves for stuff coming from book fairs this year.

If that's not a book report damning with faint praise, I don't know what it; however, I did enjoy it.

Books mentioned in this review:

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- posted by Brian J. @ 7:52 AM 0 comments

Tuesday, February 03, 2009

They're Going To Put Them On Stilts?

Most flooded homes will be raised

Them homophones are tricky. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

- posted by Brian J. @ 7:52 PM 0 comments

It Says Something About Us, And Not Something Necessarily Flattering

Today, I changed the paperclip in my sainted mother's toilet.

This time, I used a rubber-covered one, so it should last a while.

- posted by Brian J. @ 7:45 PM 0 comments

Book Report: Urban Affairs by Elaine Viets (1988)

Man, I lament that the St. Louis paper doesn't have a real metro/lifestyle columnist, what with Bill McClellan and his "Here's a bad guy who's in a bad situation, don't you feel bad for him" schtick and the black guy. But when it did, I didn't pay too much attention. Aw, heck, I was just a kid.

This book collects a hundred or so columns from Viets's tenure at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and she covers the South Side of the city with an eye for amusing anecdotes and St. Louisisms. As I've now spent more time in St. Louis than my home town, unfortunately, I enjoy these stories way too much.

So I should go forth and look for more of Viets's collections or try some of her fiction. I shall.

Aside, tying in books I've read. The cover shot for this book, unavailable from Amazon, was taken at the Coral Courts motel; the first couple of columns talk about its preservation attempt, and Viets wrote about it in the forward to the book Tales from the Coral Court, which I reported about in November 2007.

Books mentioned in this review:

- posted by Brian J. @ 7:19 AM 0 comments

Monday, February 02, 2009

Book Report: Dead Watch by John Sandford (2006)

Oh, spare me. Is there any damn thriller writer operating after 2000 who doesn't feel compelled to take shots at Republicans and/or President Bush? Because Ed McBain did it, and Robert B. Parker does it, and with this book, Sandford gets his digs in. We've got the closeted gay rich former Senator and his circle of evil gay Republicans, we've got the clandestine meeting with an RNC official at the museum because nobody from his work goes there (maybe it would be better for the Republic if they did, haw haw!). Hey, did you know the RNC HQ was reinforced because a teacher tried to blow himself up at it to protest Republican educational policies (I don't blame him, says the first person narrator). Don't get me wrong, Sandford has his bad apples in the Democrat party, too, but they're bad apples, gun nuts, and thugs in the party; it's not the party itself nor its views that are a priori bad. Does Sandford think he can get away with it because he thinks that Republicans aren't literate enough to read books not written by Ann Coulter? Or does he think we should be thick-skinned enough to take a joke, even though we take that damned joke every day in the media, from the government, and throughout the Internet? I don't know, but jeez, I lost a lot of respect for Sandford.

That diatribe aside, this book distills most of the bad aspects of a Lucas Davenport number and transplants it to Washington, perhaps so Sandford can become a national thriller writer and not a regional author. There's a crime, or series thereof, but the book spends an awful lot of time worrying not about right or wrong or serving justice, but serving political ends. How will this play? How will that play? How should the hero do this to minimize political fallout? And so on. I can take some of that in a Davenport novel because they weren't always that way, and if I read them out of order, I can mix in the better novels with the lessers. But here, Sandford dangles it all out. A disabled Afghanistan vet now works as a fixer for the White House Chief of Staff and has to investigate the disappearance of the closeted gay rich Republican former Senator who might have a politically damaging "package"--evidence of corruption--that could hurt the reelection chances of the President. His first goal is to protect the Democrats in power, natch.

After a while and some more dead gay Republicans, the situation is resolved with the stock ambush-in-the-woods.

So, Sandford, how come all the veterans in the book are disabled Afghanistan vets except for, you know, the psychotic ones?

Ah, who knows. I'm glad this Sandford book is the last on my unread shelves for now. I think I'd be a better person, and at least in a better mood, if it were still up there.

Meanwhile, I think I'll confine myself to old crime fiction again, back before they were compelled to attack the political beliefs of roughly half of the country.

Or Robert Crais, who hasn't done this sort of thing so far. I hope I didn't just out somebody. Books mentioned in this review:

- posted by Brian J. @ 7:25 AM 0 comments

Superbowl Recap

So the team I'm rooting for goes down big on a mistake or turnover, then fights its way back to take a small lead with very little time left, when suddenly the defense collapses and the opponents march down the field to score the winning touchdown, followed by my team turning the ball over in its last second desperation drive?

It felt like I was watching a Packers game.

- posted by Brian J. @ 7:09 AM 4 comments

Sunday, February 01, 2009

Book Report: Sharpe's Tiger by Bernard Cornwell (1997)

I got this book at a garage sale last April, along with 10 others in the 20-something volume series. You know what? Ultimately, I made a mistake. The eleven I have are not contiguous in the series, and after this dose, I want to read the series in order. So instead of a cheap set of books, this one might prove to be pretty expensive if I have to fill in the books at full price.

This book details Private Sharpe's participation at the seige of Seringapatam in 1799. Not just a grunt's level view of life in her majesty's army, but a good look at that nevertheless with detailed but readable. Sharpe gets under the skin of a sargeant and is drawn into striking the man, which warrants a flogging whose number is not only gratuitious, but also a death sentence in the tropics. He is reprieved and sent into the enemy stronghold as a deserter. His real mission: find a senior intelligence official held captive and get his information and, if possible, him out.

An excellent set of books, if this is any predictor.

Books mentioned in this review:

- posted by Brian J. @ 7:44 AM 0 comments

To say Noggle, one first must be able to say the "Nah."

Endorsements
"I will."
          Heather L. Igert,
          angelweave.mu.nu

"Genuis."
          Neil Steinberg,
          Chicago Sun-Times

"Some wanker."
           Kim du Toit,
          on the Noggle Library.

"Brian J. Noggle apparently forgot that the proper design for a tin foil beanie calls for the shiny side out."
          Robb Allen,
           Sharp as a Marble.

"I'm weeping openly right now. Thanks for hurting my feelings, pinhead."
          Bob Rybarcyzk,
          St. Louis Post-Dispatch