St. Louis leaders look to Detroit for pointers on how to build a lasting resurgence
How can you tell Detroit is resurgent?
Its elected officials and nonprofits will tell you so.
That’ll Fix It
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Well, That’s Embarrassing
Last February (2025), I released my first mobile app, Boxing Drill Companion, which I wrote mostly myself with some help from ChatGPT.
And, somehow, I released it with a critical bug: One of the three types of drills (the Holding drill for holding pads) would not play at all–apparently, it had a bad or missing cast statement.
I found it not because I’ve started using it regularly (ha, ha, eat my own dog food and practice martial arts at home? That’s not what I bought all this equipment for! The heavy bag is merely a waypoint for Nico when he wants to jump from the chair to the top of the bookshelves!) I found it because, a year and a half later, I’ve shown the app to two of the people at my primary dojo, the kyoshi and a renshi. And I tried to show renshi the Holding drills.
I am agog. I know I tested it, kinda (not as elaborately as I should), and my beautiful wife installed it and tested it a little. How I could have missed that, I have no idea. Unfortunately, none of the 4 people who bought it (roughly $2 in annualized earnings) contacted support. And kyoshi, with whom I shared a promo code, might have seen it in its failed state (although I’m not showing a record that he actually downloaded it).
So I fixed it after getting Wunyo Submission Tracker on the Microsoft Store last week, I hopped on a fix. And, I examined the drills in greater detail and corrected a couple of them.
So: The now-working Boxing Drill Companion is now available on the Apple App Store. And soon, perhaps, the Microsoft Store because I now have experience pushing apps there as well.
But, man. I guess I was in a hurry to get things out, and I was making changes on both the Mac and the PC to get it to work, and somehow I scrambled branches or something. In the interim, I’d updated the project a year ago to make the app reach out to an API to get custom updated drills and present/play them, so I (and by “I”, I mean “Claude”) had to rope that all off. Ay, carumba.
Well, that’s out. And now onto my next little game which is far more complicated than Feline Fly Assassin, available on Windows and iOS. Or maybe I’ll try to get a Mac version of Wunyo Submission Tracker. Or maybe I should sit with a pad of paper and write Wunyo over and over again since I changed it from Wunjo at the last minute so people could pronounce it, not that anyone besides me is.
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I Know The Word, And I Know How I Know The Word
The Other McCain (remembered now maybe more than the McCain) has a whole post tripping off his use of the word wont.
Ah, gentle reader. I use that word regularly, at least the noun form, as a search of this blog indicates (last usage: February 21, 2026 in a book review for Guide to Quality Control by Kaoru Ishikawa–but the search will indicate this post is the most recent use of the word, and if you’re reading this in the archives from sometime later than July 2026, that is also subject to change).
I can tell you where I learned the word: From The Call of the Wild which I read in early high school. I was going to write down and look up words I didn’t know, and I wrote down wont and ecstasy, although I don’t use that word as much (as the search proves–prior to this post, the last appearance was in a book review of Divine Fruit in 2019). I didn’t really keep up with that habit, which is why the memory of learning those two words is so distinct (as it is–I don’t remember writing the words down, although maybe I did it at my grandmother’s rented house by the volunteer fire station? That’s in the flavor of the memory, and it might have been middle school, then, as I she died my freshman year of high school).
I guess I have covered this material before in my book report of The Sea Wolf (also by Jack London) in 2016. Pop Pop is repeating his stories, but only once a decade, so that’s not too bad. Yet.
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Twice Is Coincidence
Twice yesterday I read about old soda vending machines that were chests where you slid the glass bottles in slots.
First, Lileks on his Substack:
It would be my most specific pop memory for years, until I found myself working down South as a seed salesman for Northrup King in the summer of 1979. I drove the highways and backroads in an unairconditioned van, stopping at small towns and suburban grocery stores, taking orders and picking up the wire racks they no longer needed. In one hamlet I pulled over for gas. Blazing day. There was one of the old pop coolers, the chest type where you’d slide the bottle down a metal trench line to an opening. They had Nehi. I’d never had a Nehi. I’d only heard of it from M*A*S*H, as it was Radar O’Reilly’s favorite beverage. Well, when in Rome, Georgia, etc. Popped the cap on the bottle opener, and took a sip.
The second was in River City P.I..
I’m not sure I’ve ever heard of these devices before, but I read about them twice today.
In case you’re wondering, here’s kinda what they looked like:
Another thing for me to consider collecting and fixing up, but I’m not doing so much of those things these days, so probably not. I have a garage to clean and a couple of nigh-thirty-year-old refinishing projects to handle first.
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Basically, The Intro To Every Episode of CHIPS
Horror as police pursuit of a truck ends in massive crash with nine rushed to San Francisco hospital
We did not need Cash for Clunkers in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Hollywood demolished cars wholesale.
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That Explains That
When I went to Houston for the Dodge Merrin book signing, I took a different route home:
As to the trip to Houston, I took I-44 to US 38 in Marshfield–the same route to the Independence Day parade, but then rolled east on 38 through rolling hills and hay fields through Hartville (although north of the White Hart Renaissance Festival) and into Houston which is not quite as big as some of the Springfield suburbs but is not exactly a small town. On the way home, I rode down US 63 which is a bigger road that runs through Cabool and down to West Plains, although I got onto US 60 (the Stepmother Road according to the current Citizens Bank of Rogersville radio ads I hear whilst cutting the grass).
One of the reasons I took the southbound route was because I wanted to visit Larry Dablemont’s museum down there. I didn’t see it, and last Monday he explained why:
I tried my best to create a Big Piney River museum and Nature Center near my hometown of Houston Missouri. But it was not to be and now I have to empty it in hopes that someone else can take over and use that building, there in a beautiful, wooded setting a mile south of town, for something useful and lasting. It could have been something great with all the Big Piney artifacts I have from 100 to 60 years ago. I planned all kind of exhibits and a Big Piney aquarium filled with river creatures. I thought God wanted me to do it but I know that sometimes I have tackled things I thought God wanted me to accomplish when it wasn’t His idea at all, but just a product of my own misguided enthusiasm.
My newspaper subscriptions have dwindled, so the dwindling number of papers that carry Dablemont are not available to me, so I need to make a better habit of visiting his blog for his weekly posts.
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Book Report: To Rise Again At A Decent Hour by Joshua Ferris (2014)
Wow, it’s been almost twenty years since I read Ferris’s first novel, Then We Came To The End, which describes a failing ad agency and the rounds of layoffs leading to its closure. I liked that book quite a lot–as you know, gentle reader, I had just finished a couple years’ service at a digital marketing agency about that time, so it really spoke to me. That was his first book; seven years after, this was his first book. I’m not sure where I got it; it’s not on a Good Book Hunting post. It’s even possible I got it at Barnes and Noble on the discounted shelves as the price tag indicates. We will never know. An event in history, lost, unimportant except for its loss.
At any rate: This book deals with a dentist with mental illness, whose father committed suicide before the narrator reached double digits in age. Forty years later, he’s a dentist with a small but successful practice in Manhattan who lives in Brooklyn, alone and deeply lonely even though he ends up pushing people away. In flashback, he talks about relationships he’s had in college and after–one with a Roman Catholic girl with a conservative Catholic family, another with an Jewish woman with a big family–a relationship he started with a temp he hired and who still works with him after the relationship ends. In both cases, he gives himself unhealthily, hoping to join a big, loving family that he never had. But, ultimately, he admits to being an atheist to both families, which drives a wedge between them. The MacGuffin is that someone starts to impersonate him on the Internet, creating a Web site for his practice, commenting on news posts, and starting a Twitter feed in his name and to post some “apocrypha” from a people mentioned briefly in the Bible, where the distant descendents have been persecuted worse than the Jews. A member of that tribe has started reaching out to these descendents and is teaching them about their heritage–and the dentist meets a couple of others in the line and a researcher who is trying to bring them together to visit their homeland in Israel.
But: This is really more of an atmospheric book than anything else. We’ve got parallel stories, where a billionaire financier meets with the narrator. Also a member of the descendents of the hidden-from-history people, he, too. The researcher also has a parallel story, as decades ago he wooed an Orthodox Jewess, going so far as to start the process of converting to Judaism and wanting to become a rabbi, but ultimately rebuffed by the girl’s rabbi father because he, the researcher, admits he does not want to believe in God, but wants to be part of a family and a persecuted tradition. And I guess the climax of the book is the billionaire and the dentist hearing the story of the researcher and maybe discovering it’s all probably invented, a way for him to find meaning and to impart it to others who are in his situation?
I dunno. I was waiting for some resolution, some twist to it. Is the whole thing in the narrator’s head? Is he just crazy? Definitely some indicators that it’s the case–in one episode, he has a meaningful conversation with someone in the know, and one of his employees asks him who he was talking to that might indicate such. But even though the–maybe this is the climax?–the numbered chapters end with him visiting a new patient at home to floss for him, something he does daily now (he reveals)–and we get a climactic play-in game for the Red Sox (the dentist so much a fan, it’s almost crazy)–we don’t get any resolution or change in the narrator. There’s an epilogue where he goes on a mission trip with his lead hygenist, a widow who is very Catholic but does not have a large family, but he does this annually or so with her. And the last paragraph is him agreeing to a pick-up game of cricket with local children. Is this supposed to represent a real change on his part, or is it all supposed to represent more of the same: hope for change, but not forthcoming.
So, as I said, a vibe book, too much effective writing for the story and theme it holds. There’s not a lot of bio of Ferris on the Internet that I could see, but something about his pace of output and the too much good writing made me think he’s a creative writing professor by day. My own creative writing professor and academic advisor whose total career to my college years was a collection of short stories, a novel, and editing a book (The Boundaries of Twilight, which I ordered and read whilst in college) and his career since then has been another collection of short fiction and another novel (which I have around here somewhere, along with his first collection of short fiction which I read in college but only borrowed from the library and whose acquisition I remember even though I don’t have a Good Book Hunting post on it).
I actually sat up from my reading recliner at one point most of the way through this book and thought, “Do I even like to read?” I’d spent months complaining to my beautiful wife on how much I was not enjoying That Hideous Strength and then a week or so saying the same thing about this book. Most of my book reports are not snarky, but they are kind of down on the books I read. But I read a lot of books that are not the core of what I like to read–junk genre fiction and the occasional headier work which I either enjoy and feel pleased to have read or I slag on them. So do I like to read, or do I just do it out of habit? I guess that is a very ringing disrecommendation of this book.
I am less likely to pick up a Ferris book I find in the wild, but he was not so much of a best seller that you see them strewn widely about. Which is good as I have thousands of books to read already, including a new James R. Wilder book to read, four from Dodge Merrin, as well as, I guess, two from C.J. Hribal. If I ever read again, which is “I will” since I’ve already started on the Wilder book and have continued to read old Ideals magazines throughout.
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Good Hunting, July 17, 2026: ABC Books and Relics
Well, it wasn’t that good in terms of purchases, but perhaps that’s actually better for me. James R. Wilder was coming for an early book signing–both in that he’s usually here in December and because the signing was at 10:00am. I took my oldest, who wanted to stop for lunch and go to the Ross department stores in town (both of them) as well. But with a belly full of sushi and vegetable egg fu yung, he kinda demurred on going to both locations of the department store–especially as the southeast location was a zoo. But we stopped by Relics, briefly, in a search for a gift for my mother-in-law’s upcoming birthday (not for my beautiful wife, whose birthday is a week later–I have her covered pretty well, no Facebook-advertised catchkes involved).
Here’s what I got:
I got:
- The new Wilder book, River City P.I., which takes place far later than the other Harbison mysteries and focuses on a relative of Chet Harbison, the main character of the other books, who becomes a part-time investigator in Cape Girardeau. I managed to only talk to Wilder for a couple of minutes, and I sold him a copy of John Donnelly’s Gold. I’m pretty sure my best sales tactic is to jam authors whose books I buy at ABC Books–I think Mr. C. also bought a copy. Also, he mentioned his cover guy does the covers and layouts for his books for $400, which hopefully means that he’s selling hundreds of copies of each book. Good on ‘im.
- The Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi. Yes, gentle reader, I have bought this book from ABC Books and have already read it. But this is a really pretty book, only $7.95 for a hard copy with a pretty dust jacket. So I will read it again.
At Relics, I stopped at the new record booth with the jazz records I found earlier this month, and I looked through the last part of the alphabet. I got Tell It Like It Is by Stacy Rowles with Jimmy Rowles. It’s a woman playing trumpet. I cannot get in trouble buying an album like that. I didn’t find the gift I was looking for, so I might be back or prowling other venues this week.
So, thirty bucks and another forty for a buffet lunch. And some of the rapidly diminishing time with my oldest son. Which is worth more, even though I am unlikely to remember this particular excursion.
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I Know It Was You, Roku. You Broke My Heart.
So my beautiful wife and I watched a couple of Network+ Certification training videos on Thursday night.
She is accumulating a number of certification letter sets behind her name on LinkedIn, and she’s brushing up on her network skills which she is light on (she’s got lots of process stuff and actually taught a community college section of the A+ Certification preparation). Me, I got an A+ certification around the turn of the century, so old that it’s no longer recognized (the new program has requirements to do the continuing education thing and to recertify periodically, but I got mine in the olden days, before the certification-as-a-service and everything-is-a-rental-or-subscription world took hold. Since I’m between contracts, I’m thinking of maybe getting a couple of these low-level, inexpensive (only $400 for the exam–cheep!) so I can apply for starting cable-puller jobs and not get hired for those because I’m old. Or, mostly because I have the time and I’ve historically been a good test taker. The intro streaming classes we watched were under 10 minutes each and were kind of a review–when I got my A+ certification in 2000, I was taking community college classes of my own, scattered among hardware and networking and different programming languages.
So, to watch the videos: Apparently, we have free access to a Dion Training course hosted on Udemy because our library offers Udemy classes for free. So my wife could watch them on her iPad. And I pointed out we could stream them on the big television using the Roku and the iPad’s sharing (but you cannot do this with football games, gentle reader, as I learned several years ago). So she did a proof of concept a week ago, and on Thursday was a little flustered because she did not remember what nested-app-and-menu-path on the iPad and what nested-app-and-menu-path made this work. After only a few minutes but demonstrating the dread that it was not possible or she would never find it, we watched 40 minutes of intro to how the course (a $300 course on Udemy, I guess) and explanation of the exam (following this course and watching a couple hours of the day, I could be Network+ certified in thirty days–wow!).
Yesterday, on Facebook, I get:
An ad for the training company.
It was my wife’s iPad, my wife’s library account, and her free or subsidized login to Udemy, but the Roku account is in my name/email address. So I think I can know it was the Roku. Either parsing the content of the video or reading the metadata and selling it to Facebook to present me with those relevant ads.
But, ah, how used to it we are getting! How normal it seems!
And: I think I quipped somewhere, probably on Facebook, that it’s nice that Facebook shows us people’s birthdays on their birthdays, but we could really use some advance notice to buy cards or presents. Well! My Facebook feed is full of Chinese catchkes and t-shirts in the weeks leading up to my wife’s birthday. So, good? Although I’m unlikely to click through ads and buy from shops of unknown provenance these days. But they’re good for gift ideas: SHE LIKES CATS. Which is my knowledge which trained Facebook to give me this valuable insight.
Tech. Meh. I should maybe become a shepherd. I saw a house on one of my regular driving routes has new tight fences and baby goats. I wonder if they’re hiring.
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Wow, That Was Fast
In the past, it took several days to get my apps through the Microsoft Store process. This one went through in an hour.
It’s basically a little app to track your writing submissions to magazines and whatnot. After I transitioned from a notebook to an Excel spreadsheet in 2020, I’ve found it a little challenging to know what I have that’s available for submitting and to see where I’ve submitted things. This app makes it easy and warns you if you try to submit something to a place a second time, if you try to submit something that’s been published elsewhere, and if you try to submit something somewhere before it’s been accepted or rejected elsewhere.
Of course, now the trick will be to use it myself and to separate the database I use from a test database if I have to build and test it again.
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One of My Newspaper Subscriptions Cancelled Itself
Concerns over future of southwest Missouri newspapers, employees laid off:
It could be the end of an era for newspaper readers in Taney County, Barry County, Stone County and beyond.
Journalists from the Branson Tri-Lakes News, the Stone County Republican-Crane Chronicle and the Barry County Advertiser told Ozarks First that all employees from these newspapers were laid off today.
I used to take the Branson Tri-Lakes News, but it was one of the first I let go because it was $100 a year–but it was twice a week.
The Stone County Republican was one I renewed even now because it had a number of local columnists I liked, including a garden column by Susan Lamb which I shall miss.
We got the most recent issue in the mail this week, and I said, “Uh oh” to my wife because the front page had been in color but was in black and white. I guess it uh-ohed out.
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Lileks’ Main Streets: Been There
Whenever Lileks posts an entry Main Streets: Remnants of the American Downtown, I like to check to see if I’ve been there before.
And I have:
- Berryville, Arkansas in 2021 and 2024–and remember to carry cash, because a couple of places on the square, including the book store, did not take credit cards into the 2020s
- Sarcoxie, Missouri (which he posts about today). Sarcoxie is the exit you take off of I44 if you’re going to a middle school basketball game in Avilla, Missouri, which we did a couple of times. You can take US96 due west, or you can take I44 southwest and get off at Sarcoxie and then take US37 north. They take about the same amount of time due to the higher speeds but greater distance via I44. A couple times, though, when going the I44 route, we stopped in Sarcoxie. Sarcoxie is one of those pseudopod towns where the big highway runs outside of the existing town, so the town annexes land to reach out to an interstate interchange. We’ve eaten at the gas station Subway more than once. One time, we went south into town itself and could not find somewhere to eat, so we probably ended up at the gas station Subway again.
I definitely have better chances in southern Missouri than Wisconsin because I’ve had more time to wander in a car down here, but if he picks a distant suburb of Milwaukee, I might have a chance. Although many of them do not have the traditional downtowns because they’ve grown up later.
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Conspiracy Internet Counterpoint Theory
What if the political drive to ban data centers actually saves American businesses when the AI bubble bursts, and the capital expenditures to BUILD BUILD BUILD occurred more in other countries, leaving their economies even more shattered?
Is this glass half full? Is the glass half empty? Who cares? It’s somebody else’s glass.
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The Circular References Of What I’m “Reading”
As I might have mentioned, I’ve been reading some Alexander Pope recently (I read a 100-year-old textbook copy of The Rape of the Lock, and I later found another 100-year-old edition). After all of that hyperlinked living, I found another 100-year-old textbook copy of Alexander Pope, and I’ve been working through it because it contains “An Essay on Criticism” in it, I decided to read it and the other poems in it to count it for another book in the annual total plus a brief Alexander Pope schtick on the blog, and….
So I might have mentioned, I’ve been working on an audiocourse on ancient Egypt, which… mentions “The Rape of the Lock”. I don’t think that the professor quite got the point of “The Rape of the Lock” as he mentioned it as part of a lecture on Egyptians tearing their locks out in mourning, which is not the point of “The Rape of the Lock” at all, but anyway….
I picked up a fiction book to work through while reading the Pope (blocking because I’m lazy the other thick books on my chairside table which I should be reading), and it mentions Queen Nefertiti of Egypt. Aw, yeah, the main wife of the “heretical” Pharaoh Akhenaten. I know the difference between Nefertiti and Hatshepsut, brah. And, briefly (set to expire in December of this year), I can tell the difference between the 18th and 19th dynasties of Egypt.
But, ya know, dang. How learning reinforces learning.
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Suddenly, I Am 16 And In A School Assembly
Ed Driscoll at Instapundit posted a tweet by Kevin Sorbo indicating that people could be “radicalized” by watching commercials from the 1990s, and Driscoll posts this one:
Ah, gentle reader. A grainy little box on a computer screen is not the way I saw it.
I saw it projected on the wall of the Northwest High School gym at an all-school or more likely an all-school assembly parted into gym-sized groups of students.
At almost 3 minutes, the pseudo-music-video advertisement wasn’t for television, and it would have taken us several hours to download it from BBSes. No, this was designed just for that: To prepend Stay In School/Don’t Do Drugs mass meetings. And it, like Van Halen’s “Dreams” which I also saw for the first time at one of these assemblies, played upon a young man’s blood, for sure.
I, too, remember the before times.
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When Is A Book Report Not A Book Report?
I bought this book when I went to the Thursday night book signing for Garage Sale Vinyl by Christopher Jones. As you might remember, I have bought Samuel Rikard/Levi Samuel’s books at various LibraryCons in the Before Times (before the government spergout in 2020), and I’ve read Dammit Bre! (Samuel Rikard) and The Pandora Gambit (Levi Samuel)–which means I still have, what, five or six of his books around here to read, including a fantasy trilogy whose spines together make a picture (which I would say is why I haven’t picked them up–I don’t want to spoil the look on my bookshelves–but that’s not really it; I just don’t want to commit to a trilogy, and even C.S. Lewis could change my mind on that).
So I picked up this book because it never left my desk after I bought it, and it looked short, and…. It seemed rather familiar.
Apparently with the repseudonyming from Rikard to Samuel, Rikard/Samuel renamed this book to The Pandora Gambit. Perhaps so that he could have thematic names for the sequels–but, no, his Web site indicates the series is Miami Knights. I dunno. Maybe he thought The Pandora Gambit was a better title. I suppose it is.
I thought about re-reading the book, which often happens here when I pull something from the stacks where I’ve picked up a duplicate copy, but the second night, I thought, geez, I have thousands of things in my stacks to read that I don’t know I’ve read before (or that I’ve restocked because I explicitly wanted to read it again). So I’ll put it on the read shelves and in the 26-year-old books database, creaking atop its Microsoft Access backend and Visual Basic type-ahead feature, but I will not count it on my annual total.
So if “Levi Samuel” ever reaches his goal of being one of the greatest fantasy writers of our era, I will have a real collectible here.
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Book Report: The Law of Gun Barrel City by O.C. Marler (2004)
After finishing The Space Trilogy after a year of working on it, I wanted something quick and easy to read to pad my annual reading total before diving into the other long-term and lengthy tomes on my chairside table. And, boy, mister, was this book quick and easy.
It weighs in at 137 pages of large print, double-spacing, and pages with chapter titles and blank pages before each chapter. So it’s really more novella length and young adult in tone and depth; it has a good plot, sparse and moving prose, but not a lot of umami; the main character is good, the people who help him are good, and here are the events/set pieces for the plot. Better, but shorter, than the worst of men’s adventure paperbacks (including Westerns) and probably heavily influenced by television and movie tropes.
So: After recovering from a long bout of pneumonia, the main character, “Red” Weathers, goes hunting for the people who stole his herd of 35 cattle and his really good horse while he was will. He watched them do it, but when he tried to make an effort to stop them, he passed out from the effort before leaving his house. His first stop is a town up the way where he learns that the thieves sold the horse to the local hardman or bad rancher, so he goes to buy his stolen horse from said rancher–who immmediately goes to the gun, and some of the rancher’s gun hands get shot–and Red frees a squaw, the wife of an Indian he has met, from captivity. The rancher gets his friend the sheriff on the case, and Red, the Indian, and the town blacksmith, goes on the run, sets a trap, and kills some of the other gunhands but get captured. After a trial that turns from corrupt to fair–and where Red is freed and the bad rancher is booked, Red goes on to gather his horses from a crooked gambler and to settle scores with those who have wronged him before a happy epilogue where he’s back to ranching and living with a new wife.
So: Well-written, but not very deep. The author is/was a Pentecostal professor/speaker, and a list of his other books includes what looks to be a number of other westerns plus some nonfiction, Christian, motivational, and/or memoirs. I won’t seek the author out, but if I see some of his other books in the wild, I might pick them up.
I bought this book at the Sparta branch of the Christian County Library in 2024. In years past, I’ve kinda gamified hitting all four of the Friends of the Christian County Library book sales in a year at the rotating libraries (Ozark, Clever, Nixa, and Sparta). This year, though, I’ve missed the Ozark sale and the Clever Sale (I could not parse the markings on the calendar for a while, and when I figured it out, somehow I managed to forget what Saturday it was even though it was, semi-scrutibly, upon the calendar). That leaves Nixa’s three day sale in August and Sparta’s one-day bag sale in the autumn. Will I go? I dunno. I seem to be making slight progress on my stacks, or at least my chairside table, so I don’t want to maybe overfill them. HOWEVER, on an autumn day, with a $3 bag (or two) in my hand, who knows to what levels of gluttony I might descend.
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Good Book Hunting, July 10, 2026: The Corner Coffee Shop in Houston, Missouri
On Facebook, I saw that Joshua Chase/Dodge Merrin was going to have a five-hour-long book signing at a coffee and ice cream shop in Houston, Missouri, home of the Houston Herald which I no longer receive because I’m between contracts. But being between contracts means I can take off on a Friday morning for a two hour drive to a distant town to get books from an author I haven’t seen in person in almost a decade. But I did tell him, probably at LibraryCon 2019, that I would buy his later books when I read the first three (Triumphant Empire, Revolution, and Total War). I had kinda planned this to be an excursion to yank my youngest away from video games, but he already had plans to go to the waterpark with a friend, so I made the journey alone with my audiocourse on ancient Egypt.
So I met the author again:
And I got his four latest books.
I got:
- Brink of Extinction, the fourth book in the series formerly known as “The S.T.A.R. Chronicles” but now renamed “Embers of Hope” and Embers in the Dark which is a collection of short stories in the same series, some prequels.
- Rising Shadows, an urban fantasy book where the cats are the good guys.
- Quiet Valor which an omnibus edition of his two fantasy novels Humble Glory and Gentle Fury. It’s a hardback, and it’s the first he sold.
Undoubtedly, I will put them in the Nogglestead stacks and lose them for several years. But I might actually lose them together, so when I rediscover them, I can read them in proper order. I did tell him about ABC Books, though, and if he has a book signing there sometime, I might see him before another near-decade elapses. So maybe I should read these first. But I have started another novel, well, the same novel with a different title by a local author with a newer pseudonym, but I guess I will tell you about that by-and-by.
As to the trip to Houston, I took I-44 to US 38 in Marshfield–the same route to the Independence Day parade, but then rolled east on 38 through rolling hills and hay fields through Hartville (although north of the White Hart Renaissance Festival) and into Houston which is not quite as big as some of the Springfield suburbs but is not exactly a small town. On the way home, I rode down US 63 which is a bigger road that runs through Cabool and down to West Plains, although I got onto US 60 (the Stepmother Road according to the current Citizens Bank of Rogersville radio ads I hear whilst cutting the grass).
So, suddenly, this summer, I have the urge to drive around the area like I did in 2012 when I dragged one or more of my then-very-young children on trips to little towns around the area. I guess I do have time in between all the martial arts classes I’m taking (or dodging on alternating weeks) until I get a new contract. I guess that’s my new plan: Have so much fun this summer that actual income would be a bummer.
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On The Son of Zorn (2016)
In the old DVRing days, I recorded this show and my beautiful wife and I watched, what, the first two episodes? I thought it was in the pre-children days, but apparently this series aired in 2016, so it would have been in a period when we were watching television together regularly–Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Jessica Jones, Cage, Downton Abbey, Almost Human, Human Target, and Sleepy Hollow, and The Blacklist come to mind–we made it through all of many of them, but I gave up on Sleepy Hollow and The Blacklist after a while, and our shared television watching petered out.
But last summer, for some reason, I though of this show, and so I ordered the DVDs on Amazon. And it took us about this long to get through the two discs half hour episodes (13, I think Wikipedia or IMDB said).
So, the premise is that a He-Man/Thundarresque cartoon barbarian comes to Orange County, California, to connect with his teenaged son. He, the teenaged son, named Alangulon, lives with Zorn’s ex-wife and her fiance, Craig, a squishy therapist played by Tim Meadows. The series mixes cartoons with live action, where Zorn and people from Zephyria (his homeland, an island somewhere) are cartoons and the other characters in Orange County are live actors. So, yeah, the whole schtick is a barbarian fitting into the modern world and how that intersects with modern sitcom tropes such as workplace intrigue and parenting struggles.
My wife did not enjoy it as much as I did, but she was amused at various moments. The series features cartoon gore, and although in many cases the out-of-touch father figure plays a part, it’s more because Zorn is different than because he’s dumb. The young people are not overly precocious or more knowledgeable than their parents, so it really does seem to be a throwback to older sitcoms. Although I guess I’m not one to talk; the latest sitcom I have seen was Whitney which was, what, 2011? Or whenever I got around to it on the DVR. Whatever I’ve sampled has been crass, but Son of Zorn is not exactly that, but some of the gags are based on how a barbarian would take on a modern problem. Inappropriately.
So it was a fun little bit, and it has Tim Meadows in it. Man, I remember him mostly from Saturday Night Live, but that was over a quarter century ago. But I’m going to keep my eyes out for a copy of The Ladies Man because I haven’t seen that in that time span after I took my poor beleagured wife to yet another SNL-skit-turned-into-a-movie (she has maybe forgiven me for, or just forgotten The Ladies Man, but never MacGruber).
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Seems Legit
Interesting looking job on LinkedIn; self-hosted application, though, is non-descript and does not mention the job title or function. And step two is:
Sign up for a paid monthly subscription and put some money, as little as $5, in it?
Erm, no. NO harder than job applications with subsidiary third-party applications of unknown provenance to determine whether the employer would get a tax credit for hiring me, applications which require my social security number right out of the gate.
You know, I “meet” a lot of my clients just via the Internet, and I always have some trepidation before I receive my first payment. But making a payment to apply? Yeah, no. I still avoid, for the most part, submission fees and entrance fees for writing submissions (which puts me out of the running for a lot of target outlets).
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