Ramblin' with Roger

Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

My wife and I got a babysitter last Friday night so we could take the bus – MUCH easier than trying to find parking at the uptown UAlbany campus – and watch Slavery by Another Name, “a 90-minute documentary that challenges one of Americans’ most cherished assumptions: the belief that slavery in this country ended with the Emancipation Proclamation.” Though the film will be premiering on PBS, Monday, February 13 at 9pm ET / 8pm CT (check local listings), the real draw of viewing it early on a bigger screen was to be able to see the director of the film, Shelia Curran Bernard, and the writer of the book upon which the film was based, Douglas Blackmon, who I had seen before.

Narrated by actor Laurence Fishburne, “The film tells how even as chattel slavery came to an end in the South in 1865, thousands of African Americans were pulled back into forced labor with shocking force and brutality. Read the rest of this entry »

When I have a subscription to Newsweek, which I get when they’re desperate enough to make me an offer I can’t refuse, one of the features I’ve enjoyed most is when they bring together a group of actors for which there is potentially Academy Awards buzz. But this year’s issue was lackluster, and I know why: some of the best stuff was excised and placed on the Daily Beast website. I’m sitting, reading my magazine, and the last thing I want to do is turn on some electronic device. Especially if I’m reading a week-old magazine and am having trouble FINDING the related piece.

Worse is PARADE magazine. Read the rest of this entry »

When I was in college at SUNY New Paltz, the way one signed up for courses was to go through something called sectioning. You went to various tables representing the different departments, and you got an actual IBM punch card representing that class. Once the cards for a particular class were gone, it was closed out.

I recall that I got three courses I wanted right away, but Read the rest of this entry »

I realized that, while my mother’s death naturally made me very sad, and especially that “adult orphan” thing weirded me out, there were some things that mitigated the pain somewhat.

I figured that I needed to go down by train because flying was too expensive. Read the rest of this entry »

Today would have been the 100th birthday of James Mercer Langston Hughes, “an American poet, novelist, playwright, and columnist.” When he died on May 22, 1967, I wasn’t that familiar with his work, but I knew that someone important had passed. He was born into abolitionist stock, had both black and white critics, but eventually became a leading light of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s.
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Rich Kids For Romney.
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It’s interesting to me that, in the past year, the one guy who most influenced me in blogging, comic book artist/scribe Fred Hembeck, has seemingly left the blogosphere. He hasn’t posted a thing since April 10, 2011. He started FredSez on January 1, 2003, and for a several years wrote almost every day, an inspirational pace. But the output slackened in the last couple years before he stopped altogether. Hasn’t used his Twitter account very much anymore.

Seems that his chosen medium Read the rest of this entry »