Ramblin' with Roger

January rambling: sneaky new strain

State TV

Doctors still recommend flu shot despite sneaky new strain

Writing versus AI and A World Without People

Older Americans Quit Weight-Loss Drugs in Droves — Side effects and cost continue to be significant obstacles

Just Before Publishing, a Reporter Receives a Crucial Tip. We were nearly finished with our narrative on a Cold War mystery. Then juicy new info suddenly emerged. Now what?

The U.S. Census Bureau is scheduled to hold a prerelease webinar about the 2020-2024 American Community Survey (ACS) 5-year estimates on Thursday, Jan. 22, at 1 p.m. ET. All datasets will be available to the public Thursday, Jan. 29, by 10 a.m. ET.

Frank S. Robinson’s blog suspension as a result of the comments on a 2017 blog post. BTW, I had replied to his post.

Starring Dick Van Dyke, streaming only until 1/31/2026

Claudette Colvin, who challenged Alabama’s segregation laws, dies at 86. As a 15-year-old, Colvin refused to give her seat to a white passenger. Her challenge presaged Rosa Parks’ and helped integrate Montgomery’s buses.

‘Dilbert’ Creator Scott Adams Dies at 68 After Cancer Battle. On one hand, his politics sucked. On the other hand, he died of the same thing my father died of, prostate cancer, a disease that “nobody” dies of except when they do

Frank Capra at Comic-Con 1974

Go, Bills!! Go, Bears! Go, 49ers. Go, Texans?

Wait, there’s an Australian version of Ghosts?

Capt. Billy’s Whiz Bang

FOTUS and fiends

Lies, and more lies

Abandonment of Global Treaties, Including Landmark Climate Deal, ‘Threatens All Life on Earth’

Renee Good and Our Epistemological Crisis, and Who was Renee Nicole Good, the woman killed by ICE?

He asked Fulton County, GA, for a $6.2 million payout in attorneys’ fees and costs after the criminal charges against him were dismissed. He had been indicted for trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election in Georgia by pressuring Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger to “find” 11,780 votes to give him a victory in the state of Georgia.

The Venezuela attack is a constitutional crisis for the United States, and the euphoria period and Imperialism Is Very Expensive

EPA could limit its own ability to use new science to strengthen air pollution rules

CDC sharply narrows routine childhood vaccine guidance

What Morbidity Hath Secretary Kennedy Wrought? — A choice is not a choice when swamped with vaccine disinformation

Cuts Billions in Federal Childcare Funds for Democrat-Led States

Hegseth starts proceedings against Mark Kelly over video remarks; Kelly is not backing down

America’s third consecutive K-shaped recovery (an economic rally where the rich get richer and everyone else gets poorer)

Rogues’ gallery

Ambassador Kimberly Guilfoyle, the Talk of Athens

Jan. 6 never ended: ‘Filled With Lies’: WH Releases False History and All that the rioters want is everything, and GOP hides the memorial

Jon Stewart on The Daily Show, 1/5/2026

Jordan Klepper on djt’s Tylenol Tirade and Elon’s DOGE-baggery | The Daily Show

Imperial Aggression in Venezuela: Corporate Media Fall in Line

Tony Dokoupil’s ‘embarrassing’ first days at CBS Evening News savaged by staff: ‘It’s state TV.’

MUSIC

Battle Hymn of the Empire – Marsh Family adaptation of Battle Hymn of the Republic

Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage, first by Beethoven (op. 112) and then by Mendelssohn (op. 27).

Ameriican Requiem – Beyoncé

Dance to the music – Sly & The Family Stone –

The Sondheim Concert

Move On Up (Extended Version – Curtis Mayfield

Hang On Sloopy -The McCoys

You’ll Be Back – Lesli Margherita

Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is a Season) – Nina Simone

Your Friendly Liberal Neighborhood KKK – Mitchell Trio feat. John Denver (1966)

The River by John Williams

The Red Bucket Follies’ opening number, December 2025

An der schönen blauen Donau, Walzer, Op. 314

Year-end pop music mashups 2025

New Year’s Eve edition of The Dinah Shore Show, which aired 12/29/61, featuring George Burns, Ginger Rogers, and my mom’s favorite, Nat King Cole

Movie review: Marty Supreme

Timothée Chalamet

My wife and I went to see the new movie Marty Supreme at the Spectrum Theatre in Albany in late December. It’s on many Best Picture lists. Rotten Tomatoes, which gives the film a 94% positive rating, says the director/co-writer Josh Safdie had “the uncanny gift of crafting extraordinary stories from life’s most mundane moments.”

This is a movie about “Marty Mauser, a young man with a dream no one respects, who goes to hell and back in pursuit of greatness.” His greatness lies in his skill at ping-pong or table tennis. His “hell and back” is almost entirely of his own making.

It is very loosely based on a guy named Marty Reisman. Reisman acknowledged that some elements in the movie were accurate, including the scenes with the Harlem Globetrotters.

You want to root for the underdog in a sports movie, and ultimately, this is one. Rudy should make it on the Notre Dame team. Ray should have people come to his Field of Dreams.

Or maybe it’s not. Critic Alan Zilberman wrote: “Safdie’s film is less of a sports drama and more of an anxiety-fueled nightmare, a sustained effort to put the audience into the mental and physical space of a fast-talking operator who only tells the truth when it is convenient.” True enough.

Unfortunately, I found I didn’t care if Marty “made it” or not because Marty is an ass who uses his friends, his family, women, and total strangers to achieve his goal. The fact that he hates his job as a shoe salesman, which he’s pretty good at, might have made him more likable. But no.

Shark Tank!

The character I liked the most is rich guy Milton Rockwell, played by the Shark Tank investor Kevin O’Leary, who serves a demeaning yet oddly justified punishment. There’s a New York Times article, How Kevin O’Leary Made His ‘Marty Supreme’ Character More Cutthroat, which is an interesting read.

Director Josh Safdie likes to use non-actors in his films. He’d watched a TED Talk Pico Iyer delivered on Ping-Pong as a guide to life and “came away thinking that no one might be better suited to playing a humorless, uptight, domineering British table tennis official in 1952.”

I will say that the table tennis play was reasonably entertaining.

But at the end, with the seeming payoff, I didn’t care. I didn’t believe that the final event transformed Marty. Partly, the 2.5 hours were too long. The late, great Roger Ebert noted that “no good movie is long enough and no bad movie is short enough.”

My blogging buddy J. Eric Smith wrote that he hadn’t seen Marty Supreme and won’t “Oscar voters (and the marketing shills who serve them) fall in love with certain performances/actors/musicians in ways that are absolutely inexplicable to me, often creating eye-rolling results in their awards. Currently/recently, among my film peeves, I’d say that the deeply, smugly, annoying Timothée Chalamet appearing as an Oscar contender/fave multiple years in a row is madness.” Sure, even though he spent an hour a day to get his acne-scarred face.

As someone who liked Chalamet in the Dylan film A Complete Unknown, I nevertheless get Eric’s point. The Rotten Tomatoes audience was only 83% positive about Marty Supreme. If you see it and like it, please let me know why.

Technostress

a dozen faucets

The last couple of months of the year were filled with technostress. As I noted here, I got a new router and modem from Spectrum at the end of October. But by mid-November, the Internet had become unreliable more often than not.

I followed all the instructions the bot suggested. So they dispatched a repair guy. Early on, he decided that the particular line of modems they gave me was crap. He got a new one from his truck, and lo and behold, everything seemed to be working for about a month.

On Christmas Eve, I noticed the Internet was spotty. I tried all the usual tricks (rebooting my router/modem and my computer), which worked for a New York minute. But the landline was out, too. We couldn’t use the Roku.

And I was even having trouble utilizing my cellphone, even though I set it up NOT to use the house Internet. (The phone worked fine two houses away from our home.)

This process was making me, usually a warm and fuzzy guy, cranky. I couldn’t write much for the blog or pay bills. My wife had time-sensitive info she needed to do for her mother.

Guy #2

Then a second repair guy arrived on December 27, after the nasty little snowstorm we had, and only 15 minutes late. He had looked over the previous tech’s records and determined that some old hardware downstairs was part of the problem.

He explained it as though it were a garden hose spliced to a dozen faucets. The Internet wasn’t dead, but it was overly worked. This explained why I could access Gmail but couldn’t open the links within it. He even climbed the utility pole to make sure a squirrel hadn’t compromised the equipment.

Okay, so it now works! Until the next morning! Arrgh. I rebooted the modem and router for, no exaggeration, at least the eighth time in a month. This time the fix seemed to “take,” knock wood.

Sunday Stealing Remembers the Good Old Days

Domingo Samudio

Welcome to Sunday Stealing. Here we will steal all types of questions from every corner of the blogosphere. Our promise to you is that we will work hard to find the most interesting and intelligent questions. Cheers to all of us thieves!

We’re going into the new year by looking back. Randy at GeneaMusings encourages us to reminisce. So the group remembers the Good Old Days.

When I Was Young

I used to say that I didn’t really like to wallow in nostalgia. But now it’s more of a mental exercise. Can I remember that stuff anymore?

1. Tell us about a time when your family got a newfangled invention (your first air conditioner, color TV, VCR, microwave, computer, etc.).

Our family got a color TV in either Christmas 1969 or Christmas 1970.

The only times I remember seeing color TV before that were some summer nights c. 1962/63. My sister Leslie had a best friend, Christine, who lived next door to my maternal grandmother.

They, I, and maybe my baby sister would be at Christine’s house watching this piece of furniture. It was usually the Wonderful World of Disney and Bonanza on Sunday nights on NBC. ABC and CBS weren’t broadcasting in color until 1966.

So when we got our color TV, I remember seeing The Wizard of Oz for the first time in color. I had watched it a dozen times before that, but I never saw Oz that way before. I finally got the “horse of a different color” reference; the equine used to be different shades of gray.

Pharaohs?

2. Is there a particular song that sparks a childhood memory?

If you have read this blog for any length of time, you know that there are HUNDREDS, maybe THOUSANDS of songs I can identify from when I was 4 to 18. And most of them generate a memory, many of which I have written about.

I don’t think I’ve ever written about Wooly Bully by Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs. I liked the song a lot, especially the countdown: “Uno, dos, one, two, tres, quatro.” Here’s an oddity: per Billboard magazine, it was the number one song of 1965. However, it never reached number one on the weekly Billboard charts, though it did top Record World.

It wasn’t the song as much as the outfits I was struck by as a kid. These guys weren’t Middle Eastern/Egyptian, were they? No.

Regarding the lead singer, “most sources refer to Domingo Samudio’s ancestry as Mexican-American. However, a 1998 Chicago Tribune article described Samudio as of Basque/Apache descent. In a 2007 conversation with music writer Joe Nick Patoski, Samudio described his grandparents fleeing the Mexican Revolution and settling in Texas, where his family supported themselves working in the cotton fields.”

Learning

3. What is something an older family member taught you to do?

My paternal grandmother taught me canasta, and my paternal grandfather taught me gin rummy. My father’s cousin Ruth described my father at her home, feverishly trying to figure out my name and initials shortly after I was born.

4. Back in the day, what name brands would we have found in your family’s kitchen?

Joy dish detergent, Kellogg’s/Nabisco/General Mills cereals (I LOVED cereal), Fro-Joy ice cream (a truly inferior product), Pyrex bowls, General Electric (refrigerator, maybe?) Our stove/oven was ancient, and I have no idea what brand it was. Maybe my sisters recall.

5. As a child, did you collect anything (rocks, shells, stickers, etc.)?

Stamps, baseball cards, LPs. coins. I was really put out when some kid, the child of my parents’ friends, purloined some of my half-dollars.

Thank you for playing! Please come back next week.

The Motown sound and the Stax sound

The Beatles at STAX?

My friend Jon wrote: If you need ideas for topics to write about, how about a piece on the difference between the Motown sound and the Stax sound?

I wrote back, glibly, “The short answer is migration, but I’ll think about that.”

Rob Bowman wrote in Soulville, U.S.A.: The Story of Stax Records, about the differences circa 1963: “At Motown in Detroit, Berry Gordy was more than happy to put each one of his artists through an in-house charm school with the goal being that each artist could fit into middle-class white America’s image of respectable deportment, style, and grace.

“Jim Stewart of STAX was not as ruthlessly ambitious as Gordy, nor did he have the vision to build the type of vertically integrated empire that Motown became.” I also think geography does have something to do with it. Stax leaned into its Mississippi Delta roots.

1964

Bowman re: 1964: “While STAX was struggling, Motown was on its ascendancy.” In retrospect, 1964 was remarkable not just for the Beatles’ invasion of America but for the string of hits by the Supremes and many others on the Detroit label. Indeed, in ’64, the Supremes put out an album, A Bit of Liverpool, which I used to own, which features five Lennon-McCartney songs among the 11 tracks.

“The sign outside Motown probably proudly proclaimed the company ‘Hitsville USA.'” I made my pilgrimage to the site in 1998.

“The marquee outside the STAX Studio, on the other hand, was adorned with the words Soulsville USA.” (STAX artists also eventually covered the Beatles, but generally sound like STAX.) The Beatles even considered recording an album at STAX in 1966, but it proved logistically impossible.

North and South

“These slogans perfectly sum up the diametrically opposed aesthetic and operating philosophy of the two companies. Gordy was a product of the urban industrial North… and autocratic to the bone. He ran his operation very much from a master plan.

“Stewart, on the other hand, was the product of the rural fraternal South. Although he wanted to make money, he could easily be content with what seemed to be a modicum of success, not caring a wit about making further profits…

“In what had to be the greatest irony of the STAX story, Stewart was always loudly championing keeping the company sound as ‘black’ as possible while various black writers and later co-owner Al Bell were interested in crossover success, Stewart seemingly was not the least bit and interesting interested if crossing over meant compromising what he was gradually coming to understand as the Stax sound.”

Sidebar: I must note yet again the importance of Estelle Axton, Jim Stewart’s sister, and the AX in STAX, as a force in developing the sound. The fact that she’s not in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame – Jim Stewart was inducted in 2002, and Berry Gordy in 1998 – continues to be a travesty.

1966

Bowman, 1966: “Isaac Hayes and David Porter crafted what proved to be the breakthrough record for Sam [Moore] and Dave [Prater] with You Don’t Know Like I Know. Sam and Dave charted, hitting a giddy number seven on the R and B charts while scraping the lower reaches of the pop listening to #90

“Oddly enough, Sam Moore hated the song! ‘Fifty per cent of the songs that were presented to me at STAX I didn’t like,’ exclaimed Sam. ‘I remember saying to myself…it’s hard singing. I wanted to do stuff like Sam [Cooke] and Willie [John] and Jackie [Wilson].

“Hayes and Porter wrote and initially rehearsed the song with Sam and Dave. The melodies would be set in a comfortable lower key, but when it came to recording, they would raise the key.

Porter: “I felt if you were right above where you could be comfortably, then the anxiety and the frustrations and the soul I thought needed to be captured out of those songs would come through.

“I always noticed with the Motown records the singers are so comfortable the melodies are so comfortable one is to have a little different kind of edge and I thought that that gave us that struggling for you to get there would only enhance you to get the soul even though they would be pissed at me pushing them like that they would attempt to do it and they would work I didn’t think you would really doing the record with any kind of soul unless there was some sweat.”

Breaking out

Music critic Joel Francis was asked about the validity of this opinion: “I tend to oversimplify in the following way: Motown is sweet and smooth; Marvin Gaye is Motown’s archetypal vocalist. Stax is raw and gritty; Otis Redding is its archetypal vocalist.” Of course, these things are more complicated.

Eventually, Motown got “less comfortable.” War, initially recorded by the Temptations, but Gordy thought the song would ruin the group’s cultivated image. So he allowed Edwin Starr, lower on the roster, to record it. It went to #1. Likewise, Marvin Gaye’s music, beginning with the album What’s Going On, made Berry uncomfortable, but it was released and was a hit. Stevie Wonder’s series of albums in the 1970s falls within the same category.

So, I guess, especially in later years, the Motown “formula” was modified when the music required.