Ramblin' with Roger

State Farm Insurance doodad

Cambridge Mobile Telematics

When I tracked my mail delivery in early September, I noted that we would be receiving a package from State Farm Insurance; we have no policy with the company. When it arrived, it said it was for a gentleman who has never lived here, at least not in the last forty years.

My wife and I find it odd that we receive mail for people who do not live at our address. We’ve been here for a quarter of a century, and the previous owners, now deceased, dwelled here for about 15 years. It’s happened a fair amount over the years, but it’s become more frequent over the past half-decade.

It’s often from insurance companies. A couple of months ago, I called one insurance company that had sent us three pieces of mail that arrived for the same woman. They were appreciative, and we had not gotten anything for that particular party since.

But not only was the package from State Farm for a person a stranger to us, but, and this happens fairly often, an Apartment #1 is added to our address; we live in a one-family house.

Drive Safe & Save

We’d just toss most of the other misdirected mail into the shred bag. But the package sent from Bloomington, IL required a different response. After it sat around for a few days, I decided to open the package. It’s a Drive Safe & Save beacon, “technology by Cambridge Mobile Telematics.”

“Using your smartphone’s camera, scan the QR code, and then log in to the State Farm app to pair your beacon… “Select my vehicle and complete the setup today!”

I called a State Farm main number. But its touted AI technology couldn’t help someone like me who wasn’t a customer with a claim, a tech problem, or the like.

So what does one do with this? Does State Farm want to send these doodads around the country?

Then a subsequent standard mailing arrived, which I opened. I called the agent, who said that the online application came from the 347 area code. A few minutes later, he verified that the client was actually from Brooklyn, where auto insurance rates are much higher, as I understand it.

But how did he get OUR address? I theorize that he somehow got it from a voter registration roll. The designation of Apt 1 was carried over from my wife’s former address, which she has had corrected.

Sunday Stealing Demands the Truth!

comic book conventions

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!

This week’s meme was inspired by FOMA. He shared 10 random true statements. Let’s see if they’re true of you, too. You can answer with just true or false, or give a more elaborate answer if you’re so inspired.

TRUE OR FALSE: Sunday Stealing Demands the Truth!

1. I’m married.

Yes, for 27 years

2. I’m raising a teenager.

No. A couple of years ago, I was.

3. I recently vacationed in California.

Not recently. In fact, I don’t know that I’ve been to California since Rebecca and Rico’s wedding in 2005. No, that’s not correct; I went to tend to sister Leslie when she had an accident in 2018. Regardless, it’s the state I’ve visited most often outside the Eastern Time Zone. I’ve been to San Diego Padres games six times, the Oakland A’s, California Angels, and San Diego Chargers once each.

4. I have traveled to Asia.

No, alas. I’d probably go to Japan.

5. I have a dog.

I haven’t had a dog since I was a child.

Not a lot of money

6. I received money from a class action settlement.

I’ve received several really tiny payments. Last year, maybe a half dozen, totaling less than $250.

7. I’ve been in the waiting room when a family member had surgery.

Yes. My wife had foot surgery in 2017, and my daughter had an adenoidectomy in 2007; the latter was somewhat traumatic for parents and child. I swear my wife had oral surgery, but I don’t seem to have written about it.

8. I have attended a convention.

Several comic book conventions, including some local ones. Also FantaCon, in 1979-1981, 1983, 1988, 1989, and 2013. San Diego Comic-Con in 1987 and 1988. Undoubtedly others.

9. I subscribe to my local newspaper (either print or online).

Yes: the Times Union, plus the New York Times, the Guardian, and a couple of others.

10. I recently had work done to the exterior of my home.

Well, technically. We got a new fence connected to our back porch.

Thank you for playing! Please come back next week.

Hot Country Hits of 1986?

Tom Petty!

Were there any country hot country hits of 1986? The year had 51 songs that went to number one. The only reason there weren’t 52 was that the charts remained “frozen” for the last week of the year.

This occurrence was a manipulation by record labels, radio stations, and others to have as many #1 hits as possible. But when you have a #1 every single week, what is really hot? It’s quite an embarrassment in retrospect.

For the listener, it’s very difficult to really know most of these well. The last #1 song that year, for two weeks, was Mind Your Own Business by Hank Williams Jr. It was written and recorded by Hank Williams Sr. in the late 1940s. This recording features Willie Nelson, Reba McEntire, Tom Petty, and Rev. Ike! It likely would have topped the charts for a longer period.

Here are the others in chronological order:

Morning Desire – Kenny Rogers, written by Dave Loggins, second cousin to Kenny Loggins

Bop – Dan Seals

Never Be You– Roseanne Cash, written by Benmont Tench and Tom Petty of the Heartbreakers

Just In Case – Forrester Sisters; I have a 1990 album of theirs, Come Hold Me

Hurt – Juice Newton

Makin’ Up for Lost Time (the Dallas Lovers’ song) – Crystal Gayle and Gary Morris, written by Dave Loggins and Morris

There’s No Stopping Your Heart – Marie Osmond

Still The One

You Can Dream Of Me – Steve Wariner, written by John Hall (formerly of Orleans) and Wariner

Thinking About Love – Dolly Parton

I Could Get Used To You – Exile

What’s A Memory Like You (doing in a love like this) – John Schneider. The guy from The Dukes of Hazzard.

Don’t Underestimate My Love For You – Lee Greenwood, co-written by Dave Loggins

100% Chance of Rain– Gary Morris

She and I – Alabama

Cajun Moon – Ricky Skaggs

Now and Forever (You and Me) – Anne Murray

Once In A Blue Moon – Earl Thomas Conley

Grandpa Tell Me About The Good Old Days – The Judds

Ain’t Misbehavin’ – Hank Williams, Jr. The Fats Waller song; his given name was Thomas.

Tomb of the Unknown Love – Kenny Rogers

Whoever’s In New England – Reba McEntire

Happy, Happy Birthday, Baby– Ronnie Milsap. It is a 1957 song originally performed by the Tune Weavers

Life’s Highway – Steve Wariner

Mama’s Never Seen Those Eyes – The Forester Sisters

Livin’ In the Promiseland – Willie Nelson. A true patriotic song

I’ll do the next half of the year soon

9/11 plus 25

Day of Remembrance

It’s 9/11 plus 25 years, and my thoughts are all over the place. I recently received an email for a Day of Remembrance blood drive from the American Red Cross. “We invite you to honor the heroes and victims we lost with a simple act of kindness, a blood donation. Our community is strongest when we come together to support one another. The patients who receive your blood may never know your name, but they will always cherish your generosity.”

I’m always in favor of blood drives. Back in 2001, I had a donation scheduled for a couple of days after the awful event. The ARC called me NOT to donate because so many people were already doing something, such as donating blood, ostensibly to give to the survivors. Except that there were relatively few of them in NYC after the buildings collapsed; for instance, about 20 were pulled from the Twin Towers rubble. The Red Cross knew that I was a “regular” and that I would come back.

Forgetting?

2008: I wrote, Even three or four years after September 11, 2001, there was this public conversation that people were “forgetting” 9/11. Or more precisely, had “forgotten the lessons of 9/11.”

If you watched the second plane hit the World Trade Center, you didn’t forget 9/11. Seeing the two towers practically evaporate, you didn’t forget. Nearly three thousand sad stories, and actually, exponentially many more. The anniversary memories I am hearing now are poignant; one I heard recently involved a then two-year-old who doesn’t remember her mother except for a recording, for her mom was a first responder who was killed trying to save others.

My family and I went to the 9/11 Memorial in November 2013. “In honor of the 25th anniversary, 9/11 Memorial & Museum Chairman Mike Bloomberg will match every gift to The Never Forget Fund.”

As horrifically sad as the day was, there was a sense of community, collective grief, and, dare I say, camaraderie. People suddenly didn’t hate the elite New York City folks. Everything You NEED to Know About SNL Season 27 (2001-02) shows how the Saturday Night Live writers and actors pivoted in their approach to comedy.

My wife and I finally got to see Come From Away in 2025, and it is very much in the 9/12 spirit.

Forgotten?

But what were the “forgotten” lessons of 9/11? Newsweek has been running a series, The Road to 9/11, which requires a subscription. Here’s the intro – August 7, 2001: “The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) published a secret report on ‘Iraq‘s Reemerging Nuclear Weapon Program,’ part of a raging debate within U.S. intelligence community agencies as to the state of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction program. United Nations inspectors had been banned from inside the country since November 1998, leaving U.S. intelligence to largely speculate as to what was going on.”

September 1, 2001: In Afghanistan, the Northern Alliance detected a build-up of Taliban forces on September 1, evidently in preparation for an upcoming offensive. The intelligence portended something much larger, but at the time, the CIA failed to see the gathering pieces.

Iraq?

2011: I crashed Albany Pro Musica to sing the Mozart Requiem on a very windy 11 September 2002; that was the only day ever that I wore a tuxedo to work. Exactly two weeks later, I began my weekly vigil, with a number of people who had been there weeks and months before, in my opposition to the war in Iraq. What the heck did Iraq have to do with 9/11? Took a bit of grief over that. And it would have been one thing if it were only “regular people” who jumped all over France for failing to support the curiously illogical war in Iraq; it was the US Congress that opted for the jingoistic ‘freedom fries’. How embarrassing.

Indeed, we are still learning from the event. Just this week, from the NYT: After 9/11, Documents Suggest New Yorkers Were Misled About Air Quality. New York City officials are making public more than 170,000 pages of documents related to the air quality around the World Trade Center site in the months after the Sept. 11 attacks.

What lesson?

So if the “lesson” was that we should adopt the so-called USA PATRIOT ACT, or that a new and unwieldy Department of Homeland Security is necessary, or that Islamophobia is acceptable, then I feel we totally missed the point.

From journalist and former Carter White House speechwriter James Fallows, thoughts on the legacy of 9/11, 25 years after the terrorist attacks: 9/11 changed the U.S.; can we change back?

But if we’ve decided that we can – to quote the cliché – disagree without being disagreeable, and look out for each other, that’s the lesson I can get behind.

There was a U.S. mint in Charlotte, NC?

now TWO museums

In something called the Epoch Times, their Today in History for July 27 was “1844: A fire destroys the U.S. Mint in Charlotte, North Carolina. There was a U.S. mint in Charlotte, NC?

Wikipedia confirms that the Charlotte Mint was the first United States branch mint that specialized in gold coinage.” On March 3, 1835, the United States Congress approved legislation to establish several branch mints; the Mint Act of 1835 stated, “…one branch [to be established] at the town of Charlotte, in Mecklenburg County, in the state of North Carolina, for the coinage of gold only…And for the purpose of purchasing sites, erecting suitable buildings, and completing the necessary combinations of machinery…for the branch at Charlotte, fifty thousand dollars”

The Charlotte Mint operated after the 1844 hiatus on a more limited basis. But it suffered a more serious blow when “the discovery of massive gold deposits in California sent the local miners packing. They figured they could get rich quicker over there. A lot of the ‘49ers were formerly North Carolina miners!”

Niece Alex clued me in. North Carolina was technically the first gold rush (at least, according to her 8th grade social studies teacher) before California and was the leading gold producer.

Yup. Following the first documented discovery of gold in the United States, the country’s first gold mine was established in North Carolina at the Reed Gold Mine. Other gold was dug from up to 600 mines in Mecklenburg County, with the primary city source being the Rudisill Gold Mine near downtown.

Alex noted, “The Reed Family (we live near Reedy Creek) used a 17-pound nugget as a doorstop and eventually sold it for about three dollars!”

Segue

She noted, “It’s also my favorite Charlotte lore that allegedly there are gold stores still hidden underneath Uptown Charlotte (there’s gold in them thar foothills!”) The rebuilt version is now her favorite art museum.

“With two locations — Mint Museum Randolph in the heart of Eastover and Mint Museum Uptown at Levine Center for the Arts —the Mint boasts one of the largest collections in the Southeast and is committed to engaging and inspiring members of the global community.