Ramblin' with Roger

OK, I don’t know how to take a picture of me on this day. I gave my wife a digital camera for Christmas, 2007. She doesn’t know how to use it either. I have actually taken pictures accidentally with my cell phone but haven’t figured out: 1) how I did it or 2) how to retrieve them.

Now, to be fair, neither of us have put much effort into it; always something more pressing. I suppose I could have asked someone else, but I am disinclined. Read the rest of this entry »

This seems like a suitable abecedarian follow-up to ABC Wednesday, which I did on Tuesday. Here is something from a Thursday Thunks from a few months ago, which I’m actually doing on a Thursday, which is unusual.

A – Apples. I like them, especially McIntosh and Macoun, which is a cross between the McIntosh and Jersey Black; not as tart as the Mac.
B – Beatles. My wife got for me the Mono box for Christmas; it’s only in the later albums, Revolver and the white album in particular, where I really hear the difference between that and the standard recordings.
C – California: almost certainly the state I have flown to the most. When I visited my parents in North Carolina, I sometimes have gone by car or train. But seeing my sister in San Diego, it’s by air. Also flew to my niece’s graduation from Berkeley a few years back.
D- The Defenders. One of my favorite Marvel Comics (Dr. Strange, Sub-Mariner, the Hulk and others) and one of my favorite TV shows (E.G. Marshall and a pre-Brady Bunch Robert Reed as father-and-son attorneys).
E – I like eggs poached, fried, scrambled, deviled, boiled or in an omelet. The salmonella scare hasn’t reached New York state – yet.
F – French. the language I took in high school. By third year, I was pretty bad, so my skills are rather rudimentary.
G – Green. Last name, also a favorite color. Read the rest of this entry »

I love the movies, and I love movie quotes. When the American Film Institute presented its list of 100 Top Movie Quotes, you know I had to be watching. The Wizard of Oz is a particular yeasty source of quotes.

The one I may have actually used most often in real life is Read the rest of this entry »

When I married Carol Powell on May 15, 1999, it was not only a blending of families, it was a mixing of family sizes. My family is very small, while hers is ginormous. Since both of my parents were only children, and all of my grandparents, by that point, were deceased, this was pretty much it on my side of the ledger: (L-R) my niece Rebecca, her mother/my sister Leslie, Carol, me, my mother Trudy, my late father Les, my niece Alexandria, and her mother/my sister Marcia.

Whereas my new wife had LOTS of relatives. My mother-in-law had seven siblings, my father-in-law two. My wife had three brothers and over 30 first cousins. I, of course, had no first cousins since I had no uncles or aunts. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m listening to the Coverville podcast a few months ago, as I usually do a couple times a week. Brian was doing the Mondegreen episode, a term that, if I had heard it, I had forgotten. The definition, which I stole from somewhere: “Misheard lyrics (also called mondegreens) occur when people misunderstand the lyrics in a song. These are NOT intentional rephrasing of lyrics, which is called parody.” There are whole websites devoted to this issue.

The correct lyric is: Read the rest of this entry »

In July, David Warren, inventor the flight data recorder, or “Black Box,” passed away at 85. His prototype was was not warmly received, and as an employee of the Australian government at the time, he made no money from what is now considered a critical invention. He did, however, receive a rather nice obituary in The New York Times.

That gave me a bit of perspective. Looking at multiple news sources does that for one, too. Read the rest of this entry »

There was a time when I used to buy into the notion that the past is past, and you move on to the next thing, as though life were some connect-the-dots puzzle, where you go from point A to point B to point C without ever doubling back. It’s not that I ever really thought that on my own, but that others suggested it, and I, for some reason, bought into it for a while.

And some people don’t forget. Not that often, given the fact that I worked there 8.5 years, I’ve mentioned FantaCo, the comic/film book retailer/publisher/convention operator in Albany, NY. Even less frequently, I have mentioned Raoul Vezina, the house artist who also worked on publications for FantaCo Read the rest of this entry »