February 2025 - Page 4 of 6 - Ramblin' with Roger

Valentine’s Day songs

At Last

Oh, wait. It’s Valentine’s Day. Around Christmas time, my wife had intimated that she wanted a certain type of chocolate, so I went out and bought some. But I’d forgotten that a couple of weeks earlier, my daughter and I had purchased the same brand, albeit with a different flavor combo.

So, I guess I’ll give her this chocolate for Valentine’s Day. I should also buy a card, though, shouldn’t I?

Here are 17 Valentine’s Day songs—seventeen because that’s what came to mind, not including the Steve Earle song. I went through several other lists and picked these because some of them were too sappy. This isn’t to say these aren’t sappy also. I don’t think I’ve done this before. If I were to do it five years from now, it’s unlikely that the final two would change.

Just The Way You Are – Billy Joel – I like the sax and the notion of “don’t go changin’.”

Come Away With Me -Norah Jones

Make You Feel My Love – Adele. I own four different versions of this song, by Garth Brooks from the Hope Floars soundtrack, Billy Joel, Adele, and the songwriter Bob Dylan.

Someone To Watch Over Me – Linda Ronstadt. I sang this to a person I was seeing, and she thought it was too clingy. Whatever.

My Funny Valentine -Ella Fitzgerald. I mean, it’s Ella.

Cupid – Sam Cooke – Sam has such a great voice

I Want To Know What Love Is – Foreigner. I’m a sucker for the choir in this song.

Not really…

Let’s Stay Together – Al Green. Cousin Al!

Maybe I’m Amazed – Paul McCartney. Possibly the most romantic song in the Beatles/post-Beatles oeuvre.

Stand By Me—Ben E. King. This list includes many songs that were oldies when I was a teenager.

Ain’t No Mountain High Enough – Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell. Such tension.

Sea of Love – The Honeydrippers. Robert Plant and friends.

Let’s Make More Love – Nat King Cole. There’s no songwriter designation.

At Last – Etta James. This was the first dance at our wedding, so I suppose it should be the finale

God Only Knows -the Beach Boys. I’ve loved this song from the first time I heard it.

Still, the #1 favorite has to be:

I Only Have Eyes For You – The Flamingos can make me a bit teary when actively listening.

What is on your list? If you have it on your blog or something similar, you can share the link to the location. (This means you, J. Eric Smith.)

Meanwhile, here’s A course of studies in the heart by Jessica Kantrowitz.

Movie review: Flow

from Latvia

The star of the movie Flow is a solitary black or dark gray cat. It’s a feline in an animated feature, but it isn’t a cartoon cat, so it speaks only to mew and doesn’t walk on its hind legs. It sleeps on a human bed in a house surrounded by cat sculptures.

Humans must have existed at some point, but none appear in this film. Whatever happened to this world is getting worse, as the cat has to run to higher ground to stay above the flooding.

Eventually, a boat floats by and soon holds a lemur, a capybara, a heron, and the cat. How do these nonanthropomorphized creatures communicate enough to work together to survive? They must find a safe space. Oh, and there is a pack of dogs nearby.

Director Gints Zibalodis from Latvia co-wrote the script with Matiss Kaza, co-wrote the engaging music with Rihards Zalupe, and is listed as the movie’s editor, cinematographer, and art director. I particularly loved the painted aspect of the creature, especially the primary canine.

Future?

Even more than The Wild Robot, which I also liked, Flow is a credible futuristic tale. The reviews were almost universally positive, 97% with the critics and 98% with the audiences. One reviewer wrote: Flow is a spirited and wild film experience that must be experienced and appreciated for the ground-breaking, profound feat of excellence that it is. This writer was moved, engaged, and enthralled by its scope, beauty, and heart. An inspiring ode to wildlife and its resilience in the face of overwhelming odds.”

A friend of my wife said it was a meditative film, which I can relate to. We saw Flow at the Spectrum Theatre in Albany at a mid-January matinee. Thee were only six of us there, and two left when they realized they were in the wrong theater.

The nine-word problem

boycott

I relate to the nine-word problem. It is the superficial understanding of race and racism in the United States.

As someone who has spent some time providing programming about Black History Month this century, I recognize that there’s much more to know and that much of it had been hidden. Indeed, many of the things I’ve written about in this blog about race are things I did not know at the turn of the Millennium. I, too, am learning about what’s going on.

Some of it is historical: for instance, the Red Summer of 1919 and Tulsa. Other aspects are ongoing: misogynoir; The Color of Law’s look at redlining; the unjustified killing of a black man redux.

Then there’s appropriation. Even about Martin, I’ve tried to expand the discussion beyond one address. I’ve linked to several speeches before and after 1963, usually posted around his birthday. Also, MLK is Not Your Wingman.

The Largest Civil Rights Protest You’ve Never Heard Of

On February 3, 1964, there was a massive protest in the United States.

“’Selma!’”

“’Birmingham!’”

“’Washington, D.C.!’”

“My students slowly rattled off cities that came to mind. I had asked them, ‘Where did the largest civil rights protest of the 1960s take place?’ Their answers, building off the traditional civil rights narrative they had learned in elementary and middle school, mostly consisted of Southern cities. They were wrong. The real answer is New York City, where most of my students were born and raised…

“The real Civil Rights Movement was not just about tearing down legal barriers but about economic inequality, police brutality, and access to quality education and healthcare. This movement was national in scope, led by young people, and confronted segregation and racism in both the North and the South. In many ways, this movement was unsuccessful in places like New York City, leading to a deepening of some aspects of structural racism and segregation that exist to this day. The real history of the Civil Rights Movement, therefore, is not simply a narrative of success. It’s a narrative that helps us understand today’s institutional racism, because many aspects of racial injustice that the Civil Rights Movement fought against were never remedied.”

Segregation in NYC

This was an issue of redlining, which created inequitable schools. “By 1964, frustrations with the poor education Black and Puerto Rican students were receiving in New York led civil rights leaders to call for a one-day boycott of all schools. In the 10 years between the Brown decision and the boycott, segregation in New York City schools had quadrupled.

“Though the boycott was a huge success — nearly half of all students in New York City stayed home that day — internal tensions within the coalition that had pulled it off led to its collapse in the following months.

The New York Times editorialized against the action, titled “A Boycott Solves Nothing.” The piece “condemned the ‘reckless’ civil rights leaders who are ‘hellbent on staging’ a ‘violent, illegal,’ ‘utterly unreasonable and unjustified’ boycott, despite the school board’s well-meaning attempts to integrate schools,” even though the action was none of the above.

The poetry section of the post

The beginning of Let America Be America Again – Langston Hughes (1901 –1967). the whole thing is here

Let America be America again.

Let it be the dream it used to be.

Let it be the pioneer on the plain

Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—

Let it be that great strong land of love

Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme

That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty

Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,

But opportunity is real, and life is free,

Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There’s never been equality for me,

Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)

Genealogy: RootsTech 2025 is free online!

Census

The RootsTech 2025 schedule is live, and the three-day online schedule is free. Whether you have genealogical questions or are curious about lineage, you should check out the schedule of over 150 online sessions from Thursday to Saturday, March 6 to 8.

My interests are twofold. I’m trying to find the parents of my great-grandfather, Samuel Walker. I know he was born in Orange County, VA, in 1873 and died in Binghamton, NY, in 1963, but I’m stuck beyond that. I hope Renate Yarborough Sanders’s workshop Til Death or Distance Do We Part: Documenting Marriages of Enslaved and Emancipated Persons will help.

I’m also working on my wife’s family line in a project called the John Olin Origin Project. I’ve written about John Olin before. Assuming he came over on a British ship in the latter part of the 17th century, what was his origin? Was he English, French, Welsh, Irish, or something else? Some of his male descendants have done some DNA testing, but the question has not been answered sufficiently. Perhaps one of the more general sessions at RootsTech will help.

My wife is on the John>Joseph>Joseph>Reuben>John>Earl>Orva>George line. I will check out Tell Your Story Like a True Reporter by Rachel Trotter at Roots Tech because I find the topic fascinating. I wish to share my enthusiasm with others.

Worry

I’m concerned about the future of the Census and the critical data it collects for future genealogists. “Director Robert Santos, the renowned data expert who has led the Bureau for years, abruptly announced his resignation.” This paves the way for a partisan hack replacement.

“Next, the bureau’s website started going dark for periods of time. The New York Times reported that ‘more than 3,000 pages from the Census Bureau, the vast majority of which are articles filed under research and methodology, were affected. Other missing pages include data stewardship policies and documentation for several data sets and surveys.'” It’s another breach of competency to address.

Here’s a factoid: 1890 Census Substitutes: “In January of 1921, a fire broke out in the basement of the Commerce Building in Washington D.C., where the 1890 U.S. Census records were being stored…”

ARA: move to one of the states bordering New York

Mel Allen

Kelly asks:

You have to move to one of the states bordering New York. Which one, and where in that state?

Vermont, the 14th state, which was once part of New York, sort of. It’s a very progressive state. “The Vermont Republic abolished slavery before any other U.S. state…Vermont approved women’s suffrage decades before it became part of the national constitution. Women were first allowed to vote in the December 18, 1880 elections when they were granted limited suffrage…. It was the first state to introduce civil unions in 2000 and legalize same-sex marriage in 2009, unforced by court challenge or ruling.”

I’d probably move to the teeming metropolis of Burlington. The city has about 50,000 people, but the metropolitan statistical area has about 225,000, about one-third of the state’s population. It’s near Lake Champlain, with several ferries crossing into New York.

Favorite sports announcer, reporter, or writer?

First, it would probably be limited to baseball and football because that’s all I read about and watch enough to offer an opinion other than Jim Nantz’s coverage of men’s college basketball.

Baseball

Writers: Roger Angell, Peter Gammons, Roger Kahn, Dan Shaughnessy, George Will (yes, THAT George Will), former MLB pitcher Jim Bouton, and, of course, Terence Mann.

Announcers: On one end of the spectrum is the voice I most identified with the game while growing up: Mel Allen. He was the “longtime voice of baseball’s weekly highlight show, This Week in Baseball.”

But I also enjoyed Vin Scully’s dulcet tones, even though I tended not to root for the Los Angeles Dodgers. Mark Evanier wrote in 2013: “You know what needs Vin Scully? When no one cares about anything happening on the field. The outcome of the game doesn’t matter. One team is six runs ahead. The stands are two-thirds empty because even the people who showed up decided that the fifth inning was a good time to head home and beat the non-existent traffic. That’s when somehow Vinnie manages to make it interesting. Even I sometimes listen to him then. What a great talker.”

Bob Costas was always prepared with a story, even during a rain delay.

There are George Owens and Harry Doyle; in other words, Bob Uecker.

Football

Announcers: On the one hand, I like the straightforward play-by-play folks such as Pat Summerall. BTW, “The urban legend was his nickname became “Pat” because of the abbreviation for “point after touchdown” that a field-goal kicker was credited for in a game summary. But in a 1997 Dallas Morning News story, Summerall said after his parents divorced, he was taken in by an aunt and uncle who had a son named Mike. ‘My aunt and uncle just started calling me Pat to go with their Mike,’ Summerall would say, referencing frequently named characters in Irish jokes told during that time.”

However, for color commentary, I was fond of former Raiders coach John Madden. They were a great team.

Here’s my pet peeve: the sideline reporters who talk to head coaches either at the end of the half or right before the third quarter. They ask mundane questions about what they will do differently in the second half. The answers, by definition, are pretty dull: “Well, we have to make more third downs,” “We’ll have to hold onto the ball better,” or “We’ll have to cut down on those penalties.” It’s almost always some obvious thing that you already know if you were watching the game. Useless, pointless. The coaches have been gracious about it, but it’s unnecessary blather.

Both

Writers: Frank Deford, Michael Smith, Red Smith.

Announcers: there’s a bunch of them, among them Al Michaels.