June 2025 - Page 2 of 7 - Ramblin' with Roger

Lydster: plane ride home

Thandeka Dladla

The day before the daughter took the plane ride home, I asked her, on WhatsApp, if she had her ticket and passport. She wrote back, “I hope so.” Of course, she did, but it wasn’t the answer I had been seeking. She arrived at the airport in Cape Town about four hours before her scheduled flight on June 17, as recommended, which was beneficial because loading began over an hour before takeoff.

So it wasn’t precisely a plane ride “home” but to the DC metro. Meanwhile, my wife was driving us from the Poconos to a Hampton Inn near Dulles International Airport. We could follow the 14-hour flight on the United Airlines app.

The daughter has landed!

On the morning of June 18, we took a hotel shuttle to the airport, and after the driver spoke with the daughter on my phone, he was able to locate her. We see the Daughter! After brief hugs, we returned to the Hampton, ate breakfast, and then went back to the Poconos. Since her internal clock was six hours ahead of Eastern time, and she hadn’t slept much on the plane, there was a period of adjustment.

Still, she shared gifts with us, including some various flavored salts and teas for my wife. I received a University of Cape Town hat and t-shirt. Additionally, I got CDs of Miriam Makeba and a live album by Thandeka Dladla, a devotee of Makeba who my daughter has seen perform. As my daughter predicted, she fell asleep listening to Dladla.

The next day, after breakfast, we went to the miniature golf course. It was two 18-hole courses, one on the plains and the other on the mountains. It was accurate in that the latter involved far more steps to climb. It also started getting very warm and muggy as we swatted some mosquitoes.

We stopped at the general store for lunch, then stayed for ice cream when a quick deluge fell from the sky.

The next day, we went home, stopping at Milford, PA en route. About three hours after arriving home, the daughter went out with a friend. It’s good to have her back.

“Librarians aren’t the flashiest people”

liars aiming to avoid accountability will become more believable

My friend Catbird wrote:

Hi Roger—

I just saw Carla Hayden on PBS NewsHour. She made a remark (something to the effect of )“maybe maybe librarians aren’t the flashiest people, but they’re trusted,” that took me right to “information without the bun.”

Information Without the Bun was the name of my blog on the Times Union website from 2008 to 2021.

I got excited to be reminded of you. … it was a happy surprise!

I hope you are sufficiently happy in your life right now.

And in case I forgot, happy Father’s Day.

This was very touching. I strive to provide accurate data on this blog diligently. On Facebook, I often post police reports of traffic jams and parking restrictions because it seems useful.

Librarians, by training and perhaps upbringing, want information disseminated. That’s why shutting down the Voice of America, PBS, NPR (Protect My Public Media!), Radio Free Europe, and gutting the Smithsonian breaks my heart.

Tactics designed to make us more stupid, such as book bans or getting rid of people, as well as departmental websites due to “DEI,” etc., which happened to the former librarian of Congress, Carla Hayden, are extremely troubling to me. Incidentally, I never met Dr. Hayden, but librarians I know in real life who have are monumentally impressed with her.

However, it’s challenging, and it’s becoming increasingly complex always to get it right. The things I see on Facebook and other social media that are stated as fact but are wrong cause me some mental pain.

From WIRED: “When I read a tweet about four noted Silicon Valley executives being inducted into a special detachment of the United States Army Reserve, including Meta CTO Andrew ‘Boz’ Bosworth, I questioned its veracity. It’s tough to discern truth from satire in 2025, in part because of social media sites owned by Bosworth’s company. But it indeed was true. According to an official press release, they’re in the Army now, specifically Detachment 201.”

Of COURSE, Steven Levy didn’t believe it. The concept seems absurd.

The liar’s dividend

John Oliver discussed AI Slop on Last Week Tonight. He explains “why you’ve been seeing more AI-generated content online [and] the harm it can do.” This leads to a more toxic spinoff: the liar’s dividend.

From Cambridge Core: “This study addresses the phenomenon of misinformation about misinformation, or politicians ‘crying wolf’ over fake news. Strategic and false claims that stories are fake news or deepfakes may benefit politicians by helping them maintain support after a scandal.

From the Brennan Center: Scholars “posit that liars aiming to avoid accountability will become more believable as the public becomes more educated about the threats posed by deepfakes. The theory is simple: when people learn that deepfakes are increasingly realistic, false claims that real content is AI-generated become more persuasive too… Deepfakes amplify uncertainty.”

And there are other AI informational flaws. From The New York Times: They Asked an AI Chatbot Questions. The Answers Sent Them Spiraling. “Generative A.I. chatbots are going down conspiratorial rabbit holes and endorsing wild, mystical belief systems. For some people, conversations with the technology can deeply distort reality.”

I try to double- or even triple-check items I post. But if I muff it once in a while, it’s not for lack of trying.

On the road to see the daughter

Anticipation

On the road to see the daughter, there were moments. As I mentioned earlier, my wife and I decided to drive to Dulles Airport to pick up our daughter, who had been away at the University of Cape Town for 4.5 months for her semester abroad.

She was initially supposed to fly back to Newark on June 16th, but that made us uncomfortable. Instead, she flew back to Dulles on June 17th. To make this trip, my wife took time off from work and made reservations at a timeshare her mother owns in the Poconos of Pennsylvania for four nights, as well as at a Hampton Inn near the airport in Virginia. BTW, Dulles, which I’ve never been to, is at least 40 minutes away from the nation’s capital.

Monday, June 16

My wife started driving down the New York State Thruway, I-87. We passed Exit 20 (Saugerties) in the right lane. Suddenly, a small car started passing us on the shoulder. It was terrifying because, among other things, it was deafening like a lawnmower.

My theory is that it had decided to take exit 20 and then realized at the very last minute that it was the wrong exit. Why it didn’t just fall in behind us, then merge onto the road is beyond my comprehension. (Other weird driver behaviors on this trip were too tricky to explain.)

For lunch, we stopped at a Perkins Pancake House, which I have an odd affection for. When we were in high school, my sister Leslie was a hostess at the location on Main Street in Binghamton, NY. Sometimes, my not-so-friends and I would come in for a late-night meal.

This Perkins in Pennsylvania also included, in the adjacent building, a standard Thruway snack shop. Next to that was a gas station. A bus of tourists going to Las Vegas stopped in.

While waiting for our food order, a couple of folks at a nearby booth were discussing the musical concerts they would be attending with their kids. One said they were going to see Kendrick Lamar; I wasn’t expecting that, which reveals my own biases. The other person asked who that was; I thought the first would say the guy from the last Super Bowl, but merely said, “a rapper.”

Everything’s legal in New Jersey

We traveled through the small town of Milford, PA. It looked charming, like a small city in New England, such as Stockbridge, MA. (We stopped on the return trip; it even has a castle!)

I was navigating via the mapping device on my wife’s phone. On PA 209, I couldn’t tell quite where to go, so I directed her left, across the Delaware River into New Jersey. She wondered if she should turn around. I said, “Nah.” We could take Route 206 – or was it 209? – and eventually cross a bridge back into Pennsylvania. However, we ended up crossing what I believe was Dingman’s Bridge, a narrow and old, nay, historic construction. At the end, there was signage indicating that we were to pay $2 for the privilege of crossing this private bridge, with a fellow present to collect the fee. No E-Z Pass either.

DQ

We got to our destination, unloaded the car, and then stopped at the local Dairy Queen. We’d only been to a DQ once in years. I was at the register when the young staffer had to break open a roll of quarters. He was rapping it on the counter, and when he finally broke through, the coins flew all over. I shared with him something I learned from my one month as a teller at Albany Savings Bank in 1978: hold BOTH ends of the roll, and break. The paper breaks easily, but the coins don’t fly away. Naturally, he then opened the roll of dimes as he had the quarters, with the same result.

Tuesday, June 17

Onward to Virginia. The trip involved being on US Route 15 for dozens of miles, passing through various types of highways, including four-lane and two-lane roads, and traveling through small towns. In one town, there were, at all four intersections, signs indicating “Do Not Cross.” This meant that the only legal way to get from a bank to a Wendy’s, kitty-corner away, was to drive?

On our family WhatsApp group, our daughter was giving us a blow-by-blow account of her trip, including details about getting to the Cape Town Airport and boarding the plane (with an aisle seat and no one in the middle).

Writing under a nom de plume

Arro Verti

On the Medium log, Harris Sockel wrote, “Why now might be the perfect time to try writing under a nom de plume.”

“Two of my good friends write under pen names. They do this for many reasons. Some are practical: They have relatively high-profile day jobs and want to maintain professional Google search results.” That would be a legitimate consideration for some. But I never had a high-profile job, although some of you may disagree.

I am fascinated when a big-time author uses a pen name. Famously, Stephen King wrote under the name Richard Bachman. The story: “At the beginning of King’s career, the general view among publishers was that an author was limited to one book per year, since publishing more would be unacceptable to the public. King wanted to write under another name to increase his publication without saturating the market for the King ‘brand.’ He convinced his publisher, Signet Books, to print these novels under a pseudonym.”

Sockel notes: “Others are spiritual: When they write, they want to feel like someone else. They want to feel free. They don’t want to be weighed down by their work persona when they’re writing something deeply personal.” This is an interesting idea.

However, my writing before this blog was generally tied to my work situation: newsletters for the Schenectady Arts Council and the New York Small Business Development Center. Also, I did some writing/editing for FantaCo.

Chronicles

The only time I used a pen name was when I created an index of appearances of the X-Men or the individual members in the X-Men Chronicles for FantaCo. I wrote that under the name Arro Verti. It was probably apparent to most people that this was me, yes? Arro for R.O. (Roger Owen) and Verti is a variation of vert, meaning green.

At this point, whatever I write will be me writing as me unless it becomes too dangerous. Sockel: “Heath Brown, associate professor of public policy at CUNY, mentions Madame Restell, a 19th-century physician who sold abortion medication under a pseudonym. Brown makes the case for using a pen name to express your potentially contentious ideas during polarizing moments in history (like, maybe, right now).

“The U.S. founders declared independence under a collective pen name, too: ‘Hamilton, Madison, and Jay… wrote many of the Federalist Papers under the pseudonym Publius, the name of one of the founders of the Roman Republic.'” I’m an old poli sci major; I knew that.

Finally, the piece links to a pen name generator. It recommended for a male, starting with R, Randall Martin (English- boring), Rashaad Saadeh (Arabic), Roul Blaise (French), Reto Wolf (German), Rajesh Padmanabhan (Hindi), Rufino Insigne (Italian), Ryo Ishimoto (Japanese), Ryung So (Korean), Ru Luo (Mandarin Chinese), Reinaldo Mancillas (Spanish), and Rashidi Adeoye (Swahili). But if I didn’t like those, I could pick others.

Sunday Stealing — What Would You Say At This Moment?

some guy named Paul

Welcome to Sunday Stealing. “This week, we were inspired by Lucky Zoan. She suggested themes for letters to particular people. Let’s change it up a bit and imagine conversations rather than correspondence.”

What Would You Say At This Moment to:

1) Someone you have hurt?

It wasn’t intentional. I was just an idiot.

2) Someone who has hurt you?

What’s done is done. I may be baffled as to why you did that, when you hated it when you-know-who did the same to us. But whatever.

3) Your favorite teacher from grade school?

The late Paul Peca, my sixth-grade teacher, whom I wrote about here. I continue to use the lessons you taught us. Yes, we WERE your best class, as you said, even if you told everyone that.

4) Your most hated teacher from high school?

The gym teachers from 10th and 11th grade were sadistic twits, I thought, but I have nothing to say to them. I don’t even remember their names.

5) Your best friend from college?

Hey, effendi: glad you’re still doing that activist thing. Boston Taco Party, indeed.

6) Your favorite recording artist?

It’ll either be Paul McCartney or Paul Simon. Once I’d bored them with how much their music meant to me for many years, I’d asked if they had any pull in getting Estelle Axton into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

7) Your favorite author?

I might tell John Green (no relation) that I promise to buy Everything Is Tuberculosis very soon, and I LOVED when Desi Lydic interviewed him on The Daily Show.

Library

8) Your first boss?

That would be the late Beccye Fawcett, a woman who attended my church, Trinity A.M.E. Zion, in Binghamton, NY. I was a page at the Binghamton Public Library c 1969, where she worked. Only two decades later, I went to library school. She was the first black librarian in Broome County, and though I never asked her about it directly, I heard she had a difficult time early on. I want to ask her what that time was like. “In the Press & Sun-Bulletin’s 1974 profile piece at the time of her retirement, Beccye Fawcett explained the approach she had taken towards her life’s work: ‘lift as we climb.'”

9) Your first love?

I’m delighted that we are in a good place with each other. That wasn’t always meant to be.

10) Your true love?

As much as I complain about you saying, “Let’s go” as we’re leaving church or another event, only to get involved in another conversation, it doesn’t aggravate me anymore. It just is.

Thank you for playing! Please come back next week.