October 2024 - Page 2 of 7 - Ramblin' with Roger

Lydster: absentee ballot

The daughter called home earlier this month to ask about her absentee ballot, which she received at college after I gave her advice on securing it; she had to contact the county board of elections website.

She wanted to know why certain candidates are on more than one political party line. For instance, the Democratic candidate is also often listed on the Working Families line. This is likewise true of the Republican and Conservative lines.

It’s because, as the political science major knows, New York State allows candidates to be endorsed by more than one party or cross-endorsement. She wondered whether it made any difference in terms of the vote counting; I said no. So she asked what the significance was, and I said it had to do with ballot position and whether the minor parties remain official parties.

I only suggested one specific candidate. For reasons I mentioned here, I recommended Jaime Czajka over Jasper Mills in the family court judge race. Curiously, when we get political mail, and we got a lot during primary season, one piece has my wife’s name, and another, my daughter’s and mine.

My daughter was watching a television program recently that mentioned George W. Bush and how he was perceived; I’m a history person. Also, she knew I was the expert on games. She asked me about Monopoly for a project she was working on. I taught her how to play poker, Sorry, and much more. While I know little about current popular culture, I muddle through.

Her mom

On the other hand, she talks with her mother about paying for college, clothes, recipes, driving, medical issues, and banking—you know, the more concrete tasks. Interestingly, my daughter aided her mother in the summer with her workout at the YMCA.

I am involved with a few of these aspects. My daughter’s credit card is a spinoff of mine. Her health insurance comes from my former employer. I went with her when she applied for her passport.

Our daughter knows which specialist to ask when she has a query: the teacher or the librarian.

1994 #1 country hits

Joe Diffie, John Michael Montgomery, Neil McCoy…

Unlike the concise number-one lists for pop, R&B, and adult contemporary, the 1994 #1 country hits list is long, with 30 records. I will list them all, but I’ll only link to the ones that reached #1 for over a week because I’m a lazy blogger. Well, except for two.

Four weeks at #1

Pick Up Man – Joe Diffie. Bobbie Jo Gentry? An obvious reference.

Wild One – Faith Hill

I Swear – John Michael Montgomery, #42 pop. I recall a discussion at the time about how the lines of music had blurred with this song, as All-4-One’s version hit #1 the same year

Wink – Neil McCoy, #91 pop

Three weeks at #1

Summertime Blues – Alan Jackson, #104 pop. It’s a cover of that Eddie Cochran/Blue Cheer/Who song.

Living On Love – Alan Jackson

No Doubt About It – Neil McCoy, #75 pop

Two weeks at #1:

My Love – Little Texas, #83 pop

If The Good Die Young – Tracy Lawrence

Don’t Take The Girl – Tim McGraw, #17 pop

Be My Baby Tonight – John Michael Montgomery, #73 pop

XXX’s and OOO’s (An American Girl) – Trisha Yearwood, #114 pop

Third Rock From The Sun – Joe Diffie, #84 pop

She’s Not The Cheating Kind – Brooks and Dunn

A single week at #1

The rest of the songs were only #1 hits for one week

Live Until I Die – Clay Walker, #107 pop

I Just Wanted You To Know -Mark Chestnutt

Trying To Get Over It – Vince Gill

Piece Of My Heart – Faith Hill, #115 pop. It is the song I know from Janis Joplin!

A Good Run Of Bad Luck – Clint Black

If Bubba Can Dance (I Can Too) – Shenandoah

Your Love Amazes Me – John Berry

That Ain’t No Way To Go – Brooks and Dunn

Foolish Pride – Travis Tritt, #112 pop

Dreaming With My Eyes Open – Clay Walker

Whisper My Name – Randy Travis

Who’s That Man – Toby Keith, #102

Shut Up and Kiss Me – Mary Chapin Carpenter, #90 pop. I own a physical copy of this song and have over a half dozen MCC albums.

If I Could Make a Living -Clay Walker, #121 pop

The Big One – George Strait

If You’ve Got Love – John Michael Montgomery

Thinking about Halloween

the scariest story

Halloween not Xmas Thinking about Halloween, I don’t remember specifically what I wore when I went trick-or-treating as a kid. I’m sure it was with one or both of my sisters, and my mask was one of those weird plastic things with the eyes out so you can see

Maybe it’s partly because I don’t have a lot of photos of me then. I had this wonderful red photo album of mine, which I believe was left at my grandmother’s house when I went to college. Like my LPs and my baseball cards, it disappeared either from theft or subsequently when my grandmother’s house left our family’s possession in a narrative too complicated to get into here.

So, I remember Halloween as an adult much more than I did as a kid. Mostly, it’s because I have photos. I’ve mentioned before Sid and Shirley. I was invited to lots of parties.

Then, I would go out trick-or-treating with our daughter, which was fun. The funny thing about going trick or treating with my daughter is that she would get lots of candy, but a lot of it had peanuts to which she was allergic. This was good news for my wife, who loved Reese’s pieces.

When our daughter was old enough to go out on her own, I also liked staying home and handing out candy. I found that was very much a community thing, as we live very close to an elementary school. We would give away 200 pieces of candy at Halloween. Of course, in 2020, we passed. But the numbers haven’t come back post-COVID.

People complain that teenagers and young adults shouldn’t be going out, but I think they’re being too fussy.

Inbox

I was looking through some of my Gmail because I have way too old emails. I have about 700 items marked Use It. I’m going to post some of them here because I obviously kept them for an odd reason. Many were sent to me by my friend Dan.

I had been working on a comic-related project with ADD in 2015, and I contributed this as the scariest story I had ever read:

I used to own a bunch of the EC box sets that Russ Cochran released in the 1980s. (Why I don’t is irrelevant but annoying.)

The single scariest story I recall was in Shock SuspenStories #2, The Patriots! by Jack Davis, from 1952: “A mob whipped up by anti-communist sentiment” chastises a man “when he doesn’t doff his hat to the flag during a parade.” In their fury, they end up beating him to death. Only afterward do they discover he was a blind war veteran who couldn’t possibly have SEEN the banner.

It was far scarier than any ghost story because it was totally believable.

Links

White Zombies by Key and Peele

Aliens abducting Cows – the holiday is mentioned.

My late near-relative Arnold Berman sent me Rhinoceros – An Animation of the Absurd. In high school, I was in an Ionesco play, The Bald Soprano, so its absurdist sentiment resonates.

Dogs can sense magnetism! What they found is that dogs, um, poop along Earth’s magnetic lines, which is spooky.

This one has nothing to do with Halloween, though the guy is a nightmare: Le papier ne sera jamais mort / Paper is not dead on influencia.net ! It was sent by an SBDC colleague named Leslie.

Daft Punk Cockatoo has no Samhein connection except its oddly mesmerizing enthusiasm.

Those were all from 2012 to 2016 and were buried in my Gmail. More recently:

fillyjonk decorates for Halloween

We Want Our Mummy (1938) The Three Stooges

The Skeleton Dance

DC and Alexandria

Hurricane Debby

I love Washington, DC. It was the destination for several demonstrations I attended, primarily in the 1970s.

In 1998, I took one of those on-and-off tour buses and visited several locations. I visited the Capitol and sat in the House gallery; I must have got permission from my Congressman. I also went to Arlington Cemetery, the Lincoln Memorial, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, and the then-new FDR Memorial.

On our trip on Tuesday, we took the DC Circulator from the Washington Monument, not far from the African American Museum of History and Culture. We also visited the Jefferson Memorial, which I had never visited. It was very striking.

The Wednesday sojourn involved waiting a while for the circulator. A really strange young man was on the lawn on his way toward the Washington Monument. He kept yelling into his megaphone, “You’re gonna burn.” He said “burn” a lot. City workers should quit their jobs. His flag had the 45th president embossed on it.

He seemed to leave for a time, but at some point, he returned, came over to the water fountain not very far from where we were sitting, and washed himself up, including his private parts.

We finally visited the MLK monument, which had not been created the last time I was in town. While I’d seen it on TV before, viewing it in person reminded me of its unfinished nature and the incomplete nature of justice. Then we walked to the FDR Memorial, which is more vast than I recalled.

Discontinued

The free DC Circulator is on the chopping block. “On Monday, July 29, the District Department of Transportation (DDOT) announced the start of the planned phase-down of DC Circulator service, which will begin October 1, 2024, and culminate with service ending December 31, 2024. The program downsize and shutdown are part of the District Fiscal Year 2025 Budget and Financial Plan.

“As services wind down, DDOT is working with Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) to determine service levels to help reduce the impact to the public. DC Circulator is operated by RATP Dev USA, and employees have been provided with written notification of the planned service closure.”

This is unfortunate. Although I must admit that it wasn’t reliable in terms of coming every 15 minutes, this could be a function of previous cutbacks.

Trying to go home

We stayed in Alexandria on Thursday and went to the waterfront on a local free trolley. It must have flooded often in this particular area near the Potomac, as it was that specific day, because people had sandbags already prepared and had them just in case.

We went to a nice restaurant called IndoChen. The waiter asked where he was from. Neither of us guessed Nepal.

On Friday, there were all sorts of weather watches in the DMV area (District of Columbia/Maryland/Virginia), including flash floods and tornado warnings for Alexandria at 8 a.m. caused by the very slow-moving Hurricane Debby. Eventually, the weather cleared, but our 11:10 a.m. Amtrak train to NYC became later and later, so even if we got to Penn Station, we’d miss the train to Albany. The big problem was debris, mostly trees, on the tracks.

Fortunately, an earlier delayed train out of Alexandria had shed enough passengers – they made other plans – and we got to NYC. We were in the Moynihan Station across from Penn Station, which was far enough from us that my wife and I couldn’t sit together. I listened to the loudest, most vapid person I ever heard on a train. And she was sitting BEHIND me, probably boring her seatmate half to death. And it was so foggy and rainy that I couldn’t even see the Hudson River, usually a treat on that leg of the trip.

Nevertheless, we got home only about a half hour behind schedule, very tired, but happy to have been able to fit two vacations in my wife’s time off.

A game of cat and mouse

Stormy

Stormy On a recent Friday evening, I heard rustling, a game of cat and mouse. The cat was playing; the mouse wasn’t nearly as excited about it.

Our remaining cat, Stormy, entered the living room from the hallway with a mouse in her mouth. Initially, I didn’t know if the mouse was alive or not. Eventually, Stormy got bored with holding it in her mouth, let it drop, and the mouse started to run away. Stormy quickly caught it.

The scene repeats a few more times as the mouse scurries into the dining room. Some boxes on the floor stifle Stormy, but I move them, and Stormy snares her prey. Finally, after releasing the mouse again, Stormy can’t quite get to it because it’s hidden between returnable bottles on the floor. I move the bottles, but the mouse moves underneath a tool chest; I don’t know how it fit under there.

Goodbye

The mouse was lying on its back, so I got a pair of winter gloves and picked it up. It was still moving but not nearly as robustly as before. I took the mouse outside, probably to meet its fate via an outside cat or a raptor.

Midnight and Stormy were inside cats and didn’t have the killer instinct. But they did have the play instinct. Earlier this year, we discovered a dead mole at the top of our steps. Even then, we were sure the cats didn’t kill the rodent but found the deceased creature.

Stormy is a great alarm clock for these things. One time, about a decade ago, she was staring at the brick wall above a fireplace, and we discovered that a bat was hanging there. We managed to get the bat out of the house without hurting the bat or us, but it was only because Stormy was so intent on staring that we even discovered the creature.