Ramblin' with Roger

Thunks Redux: Sunday Stealing

dermatology

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!

Once again, we return to Thursday Thunks, which is giving us more questions. Alas, the thunking stopped back in 2011.

Thursday Thunks Redux

1. It’s the middle of the night. There isn’t another car in sight. You’re stuck at a red light that just won’t change. How long do you wait until you run it?

I know that on my bicycle, it’s been about 90 seconds. There are some intersections where the bike will not trip the signal. BTW, that’s true in the daytime as well.

2. What’s your favorite recipe?

There’s only one, and it’s for lasagna, which I wrote about six years ago.

3. When did you last ask yourself, “What the hell was I thinking?”

Oh, about now. We at the Friends and Foundation of the Albany Public Library need to put together the postcard for the May/June book reviews and author talks. I have all the information about the book, the author, and the speaker. But I didn’t notice until Friday that I didn’t have any biographical information about the speaker, and the deadline to get that to the library is the same day. I sent out an email, but no response. If I had noticed this earlier, it would have made my life easier.

Excise

4. Have you ever had a mole removed? If yes, where on your body was it?

Not a mole, but what my dermatologist, whom I see annually because of my vitiligo, removed were some skin tags. She uses cryotherapy, which stings quite a bit for about 15 seconds.

5. What website do you faithfully check (other than email)?

fillyjonk

AmeriNZ

Coverville

Vlogbrothers

Forgotten Stars

News From ME

I get feeds from a slew of news sites. Some I only get to see the first paragraph or two (WaPo, LA Times, Wall Street Journal, e.g.). But I subscribe to the New York Times, the (Albany) Times Union, and GroundNews.

The #1 hits of 1926

Red, Red Robin

I know you have been aching to hear the #1 hits of 1926. You may recognize at least three of the dozen from a century ago.

From Joel Whitburn presents a Century of Pop Music: “For popular music, the most historic event of the 1920s was the switch from acoustic to electrical records, which followed a year of experiments by engineers at Bell Laboratories in 1924-25. Instead of the acoustic process of singers and musicians performing directly into a recording horn, they were now able to record with a condenser microphone in a spacious studio.

“With the use of vacuum tube amplifiers and an electromagnetically powered cutting stylus, the frequency range of recorded music expanded by two and a half octaves. The Associated Glee Clubs of America’s pairing of a ‘Adeste Fidelis’ and ‘John Peel’ became the first electrically recorded hit in July 1925. and within months every major label record label had gone electric.”

Valencia (A Song of Spain) -Paul Whiteman and his orchestra with Franklyn Baur on vocals (Victor), 11 weeks at #1. Music written in 1924 by Spanish composer/pianist José Padilla

Baby Face (Carita de Nino) -Jan Garber and his orchestra with Benny Davis on vocals (Victor), 6 weeks at #1

Who – George Olsen (Victor), 6 weeks at #1, gold record. From the musical comedy Sunny, written by Harbach-Hammerstein II-Kern.

Sleepy Time Gal – Ben Bernie with his Hotel Roosevelt Orchestra and Arthur Fields on vocals (Brunswick), 4 weeks at #1

The Birth of the Blues – Paul Whiteman and his orchestra with Jack Fulton, Charles Gaylord, and Austin Young on vocals (Victor), 4 weeks at #1

Crooner

Bye Bye Blackbird – Gene Austin (Victor), 3 weeks at #1. “Austin was a soft-voiced ‘crooner’ whose career horizons were expanded by the greater sensitivity of electrical recording.”

Always – George Olsen with Fran Frey, Bob Rice, and Edward Joyce (Victor), 3 weeks at #1. written by Irving Berlin.

Breezin’ Along With The Breeze – Johnny Marvin, “The Ukulele Ace” (Columbia), 2 weeks at #1. Written by Gillespie-Simons-Whiting

Always – Vincent Lopez and his Casa Lopez Orchestra (Okeh), 2 weeks at #1 (instrumental)

I’m Sitting On Top Of The World – Al Jolson with Carl Fenton’s Orchestra (Brunswick), 2 weeks at #1

“Gimme” A Little Kiss (Will “Ya”? Huh ?)- “Whispering” Jack Smith (Victor), 2 weeks at #1

When The Red, Red Robin Comes Bob, Bob, Bobbin’ Along – Al Jolson with Carl Fenton’s Orchestra (Brunswick), 2 weeks at #1

Five Foot Two, Eyes of Blues (Has Anybody Seen My Girl) – Gene Austin (Victor), one week at #1

Oscar noms: Documentary Feature Films 2026

one-man resistance movement

The nominations for Documentary Feature Films 2026 are:

The Alabama Solution – Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman. I saw this on my laptop this past week. “Inside one of the nation’s deadliest prison systems, incarcerated men defy the odds to expose a cover-up.” During an annual event, where inmates at Alabama’s prisons were, uncharacteristically, given edible food.

This led to prisoners recording contraband cell phone footage taken by incarcerated men at facilities across the state. Jarecki tells Jimmy Fallon how he was able to make the film.

From Sundance: “The Alabama Solution exposes the inhumane conditions, systemic injustice, and brutal treatment of those behind bars in the Alabama prison system, told through their own voices and their own stories. The film expertly weaves the pressing issues of prison privatization, inmate slave labor, abuse of power, government corruption, and extreme violence together to help audiences on the outside get a real sense of the abhorrent conditions of our fellow human beings.”

It is remarkable that it got made at all, very important, and frankly, depressing as hell. One inmate killed by a sadistic guard became a narrative about his family seeking, if not justice, then at least real answers.

For whatever reason, I could not view it on my Roku, yet I could see it online HERE.

Andrea Gibson

Come See Me in the Good Light – Ryan White, Jessica Hargrave, Tig Notaro, and Stef Willen

The Colorado poet laureate, Andrea Gibson, was a rock star. Their live presentations were so popular that they were selling out venues. They met poet Megan Falley on the spoken-word poetry circuit, and Gibson and Falley became a couple.

When the film crew is invited into the home, Andrea had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2021. Surgery and treatments worked for a time, but the aggressive cancer kept returning. Eventually, the doctors declared Gibson incurable.

Yet the couple is occasionally hysterically funny together. Andrea claims she only knows “five words” while Megan edits Andrea’s work, which Andrea “hates” because Megan is usually correct. And sometimes bawdy, as the producers explain in this later interview with Stephen Colbert.

Still, the pair knows Andrea has lived past the time the doctors gave them. It sounds like a cliché, but you believe that Gibson and Falley are aware that every day is a gift and that nothing is a guarantee. Gibson knows every moment is much sweeter. They celebrate after good medical news, but when reading brutal test results, Andrea, in particular, notes. “When I accept it, all of the sweetness trickles in.”

Gibson really wants to perform one more show, but doesn’t want to book it and then have to bail.

This was ultimately a joyous celebration of life and its vagaries. I loved this film, which I saw on Apple TV.

Also

I have not seen the other three films yet.

Cutting Through Rocks – Sara Khaki and Mohammadreza Eyni. “First female councilor in her Iranian village, Sara Shahverdi challenges tradition by teaching girls to ride motorcycles and fighting child marriage, while facing doubts about her motives.” I can’t find it streaming.

Mr. Nobody against Putin – David Borenstein, Pavel Talankin, Helle Faber, and Alžběta Karásková. “Before Putin’s invasion of Ukraine…, Pavel “Pasha” Talankin was just a school videographer and events coordinator. But when the war started, everything changed.” The documentary “charts how Pasha became a one-man resistance movement simply by turning his camera on. He turned his state-mandated footage into an eye-opening exposé on pro-war propaganda at the school level, making Karabash a window into Putin’s insidious militarization tactics.” You can get a 7-day free trial from Kino.

The Perfect Neighbor – Geeta Gandbhir, Alisa Payne, Nikon Kwantu, and Sam Bisbee. “Ajike ‘AJ’ Owens was a beloved mother of four who was raising her children in a tight-knit community in Ocala, Florida. Owens was fatally shot by her neighbor, Susan Lorincz, over a seemingly minor dispute gone wrong, one rooted in Lorincz’s frustration with children playing in a field outside her home.” It is available on Netflix.

Encyclopedia Americana

married 76 years ago today

In musing about how I (eventually) became a librarian, I thought about how my parents bought us the Encyclopedia Americana when I was nine. Or twelve or at some time in between; I don’t quite remember.

I am pretty sure the purchase resulted from a door-to-door salesman visiting our home. While our parents didn’t get into the details of the household economy, my sisters and I knew that we weren’t particularly flush with cash.

My mother was a bookkeeper for McLean’s department store in downtown Binghamton, NY. She was well-suited to the job, as I also saw in her home budgeting.

My father was probably working nights at IBM in nearby Endicott, driving a forklift, a job he hated because it was not intellectually stimulating. He had done and was still doing other jobs, notably floral arranging, sign painting, and a bit of singing, but they were not lucrative enough to support a family of five.

So the purchase of the Americana was a big deal. I’ve read the set costs somewhere between $200 and $300, depending on the binding. That would be around $2000 in 2026 dollars.

It was pitched as an educational investment for the family. But everyone knew who was most likely to read it was the kid who memorized stats from the backs of his baseball cards.

Aardwolf?

Sure enough, I read the entire set, starting with Aachen, followed by aardvark, aardwolf… I didn’t know what that was, but it isn’t an aardvark or a wolf. It took me more than a year to finish. But I sped up the process when they purchased an annual update to the standard set, to reflect the changes, usually political.

One of my sisters commented that my father was certainly the one who used the Encyclopedia Americana more than anyone else, besides me. I was told that he wasn’t much of a student as a kid, but his innate curiosity as an adult required him to always be learning.

Along with the World Almanac, which I received for Christmas every year, my parents boosted my geek cred.

Les Green and Gertude (Trudy) Williams got married on March 12, 1950, and stayed together until my father died on August 10, 2000; my mom died on February 2, 2011.

Mead Art Center

JooYoung Choi; Kwame Brathwaite

On Tuesday, February 17, my wife, daughter, and I visited the Mead Art Center at Amherst College in western Massachusetts. Adventures of the Quantum Soup Surfer was the primary exhibit. It is by self-described astro-futurist artist JooYoung Choi (b. 1982 in Seoul, South Korea; lives in Houston, TX).

The artwork was a series of vibrant colors, with a narrative of self-discovery. “She documents the interconnecting narrative of a fictional planet called the Cosmic Web.” The fiction was stimulated in part because she did not know that her name had changed after her childhood adoption in 1983.

“Choi’s art explores themes such as anti-racism, gender inclusivity, trans-racial adoptee rights, post-traumatic growth, and spirituality rooted in social justice.

The display runs from January 27 to July 5, 2026.

Positive images of African Americans

Also showing is Kwame Brathwaite: Revolutionary Movements. “This exhibition will explore movement as an integral throughline in Kwame Brathwaite’s work—one that spans his deep engagement with social and political movements.”

Kwame Brathwaite, Untitled (Couple’s Embrace), c. 1971. Archival pigment print. Courtesy of the Kwame Brathwaite Archive and Philip Martin Gallery. Copyright Kwame Brathwaite Archive.“Brathwaite (b. 1938 in Brooklyn; d.2023 in New York) is perhaps most recognized for photographs celebrating Black beauty and excellence in fashion, music, and athletics. His studio portraits and concert photography, like his documentation of historic marches, the everyday life of residents in Harlem and The Bronx, and of athletes such as Muhammad Ali, convey the power of the body as a symbol of cultural strength, resilience, and pan-African solidarity. “

There was a massive photo of the Supremes at the Apollo Theater partly on a sliding door, so when the door was open Mary and Flo were visible but Diana was not, as I pointed out to a staffer. Other musicians portrayed include Abbey Lincoln and Bob Marley.

One room had a mirror ball like object. The record player had perhaps a dozen albums/12″ vinyl below. I sat and listened to System of Survival (Dub 1 Mix) by Earth, Wind and Fire. What this record and others (The Blackbyrds’ City Life, Hendrix in the West and two Joan Armatrading LPs, among others) have to do with the photographer, I am uncertain.

Family affair

“Curated in close partnership with Brathwaite’s son and daughter-in-law, Kwame and Robynn Brathwaite (Amherst College Class of 1996 and 1998, respectively), Revolutionary Movements will expand stories about the artist’s work and its international circulation.”

This show runs from February 17 to July 5, 2026. February 17? Then it opened that very day we visited. Staffers were scurrying around moving furniture, asking whether there should be chairs so people could watch a slideshow, etc.

It’s not a particular large exhibit space. We spent about an hour there. Some children’s art was in another room. “The Mead is free for all, and welcomes thousands of art appreciators every year from campus, the local community, and far beyond.”