March 2010 - Page 6 of 7 - Ramblin' with Roger

Feeling Your Age QUESTION

One of the things I hated about some of the music of the 1990s was that it sounded like songs I knew, sort of. This wasn’t just a copyright issue (Hammer, for one, was very good at attribution of the original source). It was that I would be briefly lulled into the familiar, only to be jolted into…something else. P. Diddy’s music did that to me a lot.

(Though the Every Valley from Handel’s Messiah: A Soulful Celebration was a GOOD surprise.)

So my family was at the 60th birthday party of the colleague of my wife’s. And this song comes on. I think it’s Werewolves of London by Warren Zevon, a song for which I have deep affection. Turns out to be some popular tune by Kid Rock that I had somehow missed. And, just for the moment, I was feeling my age.

What makes YOU feel like, just maybe, you’re not still a kid?
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Blue Is Frustrated from Blue’s Clues. Pray tell, what is Blue frustrated about?
***
GORDON’S BIRTHDAY TODAY.
ROG

Avoiding the Credit Card Late Fees

I’ve previously kvetched about Bank of America tacking on a $1.50 monthly fee for the privilege of holding their credit card. I’ve since noticed that my cards with Chase and Wells Fargo likewise are charging me this, and I intend to cancel those as well; they are a little bit trickier in that I have some automatic payments tied to those cards, such as my cable/phone bill.

Let me be honest; 15 years ago, I might not have noticed. But 15 years ago, I had credit card debt approaching five figures. Surely I would have been paying far more interest every 30 days than eight or twelve bits.

Now that I finally have zero credit card debt – none, zilch, nada – these ticky-tack charges really bugs me.

Citi ISN’T charging me this monthly fee yet. It’s just, like most of the rest of them, threaten to increase my interest rate by 50% or more and tack on an outrageous fee if I’m late. This is why I have at least my minimum payment taken out automatically from my checking account.

I got my Discover bill this week. I have an automatic payment on this card too, which happens to be the whole amount of $36. It also has the Late Payment warning: “If we do not receive payment by the date listed above, you may have to pay a late fee of up to $39…” Ah, a potential $39 charge on a $36 purchase.

But here’s the kicker: the minimum due date is March 25, but my “next automatic payment will be on” March 26! I am so paranoid that I called DISCOVER to see if I have to write a check, something the arrangement should have avoided. I discover from a nice woman named Donna that my auto-payment would NOT be considered late, that it was DISCOVER’s processing mechanism. Moreover, she stated – correctly – that if the company were to treat their customers that shabbily, they would soon not have many customers left.

So I shan’t worry about it. But I WILL blog about it…just in case.
***
A video only everyone who owns, used to own or will own a credit card should watch.
***
How do you make a contribution to reduce the public debt?

ROG

I would Have Voted For Harold Ford

I was mildly disappointed that Harold Ford, Jr., the former Tennessee congressman, has decided this week not to run in the Democratic primary against US Senator Kirsten Gillibrand.

I’m pretty sure I would have voted for him…in 2006, when he ran for US Senator from Tennessee. He was clearly the more moderate choice in his race against Bob Corker. But it he lost, and many folks thought it was in no small part because of some racially tinged commercials.

In 2010, though, he never identified any particular reason to vote for him. He was evasive in his February 14 appearance on Meet the Press concerning his Merrill Lynch bonuses. His reception at the Black and Latino Caucus, based on what I saw =on television, was lackluster at best. He was one of only a handful of Congressional Democrats to vote for a Constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, and his recent conversion supporting gay marriage has been met with a decided lack of enthusiasm. The one thing I would have advised him not to have worried about the carpetbagger charge – everyone else who was so charged (RFK in 1964, James Buckley in 1970 and Hillary Clinton in 2000) not only ran but won.

Whereas Kirsten Gillibrand, who started off as an apparent afterthought of a choice of Governor Paterson, and was thought likely to be primaried from someone on the left, seems to have grown into the role of junior Senator. I watched her during her live video Facebook chat back on February 24, and her command of the issues was very impressive. She was strong in her support of the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and believes that the process of hearings that had just started would get to that goal. She also adamantly opposes the so-called Defense Of Marriage Act. She was equally forceful on health care, jobs, tax credits, and reproductive rights. She explained that the agricultural committee she serves on deals with financial derivatives, a vestige of a time when farmers used their crops as collateral.

I should say that while Harold Ford Jr. almost always seems slick and polished, Kirsten Gillibrand trying to read the questions that scrolled by too fast was a bit comical. Still, had Ford actually decided to run, I think Gillibrand would have cleaned his clock. We’ll never know, of course. And with the primary falling so late, in September, it does avoid the internecine warfare that the Democrats are known for, thus giving them a better chance to hold onto the seat.

But that race would have been FUN.

ROG

The Pretentious Blogging Meme

Apparently, I’m in a blogging about blogging mode: From Sunday Stealing.

1. How long have you been blogging?

4 years, 10 months yesterday. Or the day before, if you count the time I wrote it.

2. What made you start?

Discussed here, but what MADE me start ultimately is being very opinionated with no venue.

3. Who inspired you?

Fred Hembeck and the late Steve Gerber.

4. About how many hours a week would you estimate you spend on your blog?

You mean THIS one? Well, probably eight hours writing it, then another five checking out other blogs, getting rid of spam comments, responding to questions, etc.

5. What kind of experience or background do you have with writing?

I wrote for my high school newspaper; in my senior year, had a column called Pa Central (I went to Binghamton Central); snarky before I knew the word.
I co-edited a newsletter in college and edited one in grad school. I edited, for six years, a monthly work newsletter. Wrote some press releases for the Schenectady Arts Council and a little for FantaCo. Edited three and a half issues of FantaCo’s Chronicles Series. Inevitably, anything I edited involved a degree of writing as well.

6. Talk about how you come up with blog topics. Where do you get your ideas?

Steal ’em. Well, sometimes, but finding topics is not the problem; the problem is a lack of time to write coherently about certain topics. I have three topics I could write about tomorrow, but will I have time to compose ANY of them?

7. What or who inspires you and your blog?

Life. Politics. Sports. TV. Music. The newspaper. Really, inspiration I get easily; time, not so much.

8. Where and/or how do your brainstorming for your blog?

Anywhere – riding the bus, taking a shower, occasionally, my dreams.

9. Do you have any blogging rules or guidelines you follow?

Probably. I tend not to use language that’s likely to offend a segment of my vast readership. I try not to write about the same topic too often in a row. Not only might it be tedious for the reader, more importantly it’d likely be boring for me. Or maybe my approach is ADHD-driven.

10. Is there anything you will not blog about?

Yes. And if I told you what those topics were, that’d kind of defeat the purpose of not blogging about it. “I’m not going to tell you about…”; yeah, right.

11. Do you have any sort of a publishing schedule in terms of day of week or topic?

Well, Tuesday is ABC Wednesday. The 26th of the month is Lydia day. Mondays are memes, sometimes (not this week, apparently). Saturdays are questions, often but not always. The rest I fake.
***
More in re: blogging. I entered Rose’s blog hosting contest. Guess what? I WON! I got a confirming e-mail yesterday afternoon, and I have some ideas for a URL, but if you have some thoughts before, say, 1 pm Eastern Time today when I go to lunch and contact the provider, have at it.
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I noted only a couple days ago that I had appeared in the Trouble with Comics blog. Then Mr. Doane wrote to comment: “My apologies, but Guest Reviewer Month has now been pushed back to April due to some technical problems. Your piece should go up 4/1, Roger. Sorry!” The trouble with this was that I thought he was making a joke; the piece should go up on April Fools Day? Les & Trudy didn’t raise someone THAT gullible.

Except that my friend Rocco noted that the piece that had been posted had disappeared. This probably has something to do with Trouble with Comics changing its URL because of changers with Blogger re: FTPs.

In other words, I have outwitted myself. Expect the piece on – April 1? Really, ADD?

ROG

G is for Green

The flag of Brazil
There was an answer on the game show JEOPARDY! recently (2010, Jan 27)- IT’S NO WHITE $1000: According to Webster’s, the serpentine shade of this color is “paler than citrine”.
The question was “What is green”? I had no idea. (I guessed yellow.)

I’m a Roy G. Biv kind of guy, that, of course, representing the main colors of rainbow. You know, yellow and blue equals green; the basic stuff.

But in fact, I do there are lots of gradations of green. I’m also aware in the color spectrum as used in HTML, that colors are “defined using a hexadecimal (hex) notation for the combination of Red, Green, and Blue color values (RGB)”.

Flag of Norfolk Island, “tax free haven of Australia”
I’ve always been fascinated by flags. For flags, green can symbolize the Earth, agriculture, fertility, and/or the Muslim religion.

Before our child was born – and we never knew the gender until she was born – we categorically eliminated some names from consideration:
Olive Green
Kelly Green
Forest Green

And since my last name IS Green, I get to list some of my favorite green things:

Vermont: the nearby Green Mountain state

M&Ms and, specifically, Tegan’s continuing green M&M challenge.

Monopoly: one of my favorite board games features little green houses

Green Goblin: favorite villain in my favorite comic book, Spider-Man

The Green Lantern/Green Arrow comics of the mid-1970s.

Going green: the 3 Rs of reduce, reuse & recycle

Greenwich Mean Time: longitude and time are reckoned by the prime meridian

Green Eggs and Ham: An editor bet that Dr. Seuss could not write a book using 50 words or less; he lost. It’s Dr. Seuss’ birthday today!

Naturally, the music:

Al Green-Take Me To The River
Creedence Clearwater Revival-Green River
The Lemon Pipers-Green Tambourine
And finally, the song that’s been sung by Frank Sinatra, Audra McDonald, Van Morrison and countless others, but never better than by the amphibian: Being Green-Kermit the Frog.

ABC Wednesday

ROG