Author: Roger

I'm a librarian. I hear music, even when it's not being played. I used to work at a comic book store, and it still informs my life. I won once on JEOPARDY! - ditto.

The Trouble with Normal (Postal Delivery) Is It Always Gets Worse

From what I’ve been told, the delivery folks are given their routes, plus parts of other routes when the regulars are off. Of course, they never get a chance to understand the added addresses.

One of the problems with the cutbacks in postal services is that it just makes an insufficient service even more inadequate.

Case in point: mail delivery to my house.

We can almost always tell when our regular postal carrier has the day off; the service is inadequate. For instance, we have a locked mailbox, but several times, we have found the mail placed in the box but sticking out so that anyone could just pull it out. And I’m talking four to six pieces that could easily fit down the slot. More than once, we’ve found the mail in the milk box. And once, we even found the mail just sitting on the welcome mat.

Worse, I was home one Thursday with a sick child. I went to the mailbox and every single piece of mail was for the house to our right. I found the (substitute) carrier and told him this. He looked in his mailbag and said that we just didn’t get any mail that day; from experience, I knew that to be that was nearly impossible.

Later that day, I asked the neighbor to the left, who had just moved in, whether he might have received our mail. He had not, but it is a multiunit dwelling, and he discovered our four letters, including a couple of bills, plus a magazine, in another mailbox in his building.

From what I’ve been told, the delivery folks are given their routes, plus parts of other routes when the regulars are off. Of course, they never get a chance to understand the added addresses.

I understand that the Postal Service is in major financial difficulty, but when lousy service is provided, this only makes a bad situation worse.

Off to Niagara Falls

The family went on a two-week vacation, leaving on Saturday, July 30. As noted, this was the very first time I’ve taken off for two weeks from work in over a decade. OK, I was off for a couple of weeks when my mom died in February, but that’s a different beast.

The vacation plan was initiated by the Olin international family reunion on August 5-7 in Peterborough, Ontario, Canada. More on that down the road.

We decided to essentially circumnavigate Lake Ontario. We were going to travel from Albany, NY to the Sterling Renaissance Festival in the middle of the state. That, however, would have meant two one-night hotel stays in a row. I find them unnecessarily exhausting. And that’s a trip we could take at another time.

So instead, we decided to go directly to Niagara Falls, about six hours from Albany. Now, I suppose it would be unkind to say that Niagara Falls, NY is a little bit…shabbier than NF, Ontario; unkind, perhaps, but, in my previous experience, true. On the other hand, it was cheaper, especially since, at that particular time, the dollar was taking a beating against other currencies; something about a debt ceiling crisis?

I know it’s an exaggeration, but it seems that every time we decide to go away, some national disaster occurs. I remember when we went to New Jersey in 2005 to visit friends of my wife, Hurricane Katrina hit. In addition to the terrible loss of life and property, gas prices spiked from $2.66 a gallon to about $3.25 in one week. (Ah, wish we had $3.25 gas now…)

We get to a motel in NF, NY and my wife, when given the choice, will always take the second floor over the first. She believes, not incorrectly, that the first floor is noisier from cars and people than the second. What she never inquired about, however, was whether there was an elevator to the second floor; there is not. So I’m schlepping these bags up the stairs. The worst bag is my suitcase, not because I packed so heavily, but because I actually had some extra room, it became the catchall for everything that didn’t fit elsewhere. By the end of the first week, it was my suitcase that became irreparably damaged.

The good thing about our hotel is that it is on the route for a free shuttle, what they called a trolley, to the Falls. The not-so-good thing is that, except for the airport, it was the farthest point to the Falls, taking nearly an hour to get there.

We finally make it to the Visitor’s Center. While waiting in line to buy a Discovery Pass, a man falls down. It was assumed that he slipped on the wet pavement, though it did not appear so to me. He gets up, but then staggers into a garbage can and falls down again. The people at the Visitor’s Center sit at their booths, dumbfounded, while tourists help him. I suggest to the employees that they ought to call 911. I didn’t say to them that he was either drunk, unlikely at 10 a.m., or, more likely, he had some sort of medical condition.

The Discovery Pass allowed for discounted travel to these Niagara Falls State Park attractions:
Niagara: Legends of Adventure Theater
Aquarium of Niagara
Cave of the Winds Trip
Discovery Center
Maid of the Mist

Where shall we go first?

(To be continued…)

H is for (Methodist) Hymnals

I don’t know how many of those hymns were meant to be sung, because – I neglected to mention – there is no music in the book, only lyrics! Evidently, “everybody” already knew the tunes.


When I was growing up at Trinity A.M.E. Zion Church in Binghamton, NY in the 1960s, we used a hymnal that looked exactly like this. (A.M.E. stands for African Methodist Episcopal.) The first hymn was Holy, Holy, Holy [listen], and when I was younger, I mistakenly believed that the phrase “Blessed Trinity” was a reference to my church, rather than to the preceding phrase, “God in three persons.”

The Methodist Episcopal Church (MEC) initiated the process of creating a new hymnal in 1928, with Methodist Episcopal Church, South (MEC,S) joining in 1930, and the Methodist Protestant Church (MPC) soon thereafter. The hymnal has a 1932 original copyright date. Not incidentally, “The Methodist Church was the name adopted by the Methodist denomination formed in the US by the reunion on May 10, 1939, of the northern and southern factions of the MEC with the MPC”, the three entities that had created the hymnal. Ironically, since the split within the MEC had arisen over 19th-century treatment of blacks, the newly-formed Methodist Church created a segregated entity known as the Central Jurisdiction as a compromise.

Still, the hymnal was of such quality that the black Methodist churches (A.M.E., A.M.E. Zion, C.M.E., and others) often adopted it.

But once the United Methodist Church was created in 1968 by the union of The Methodist Church and the Evangelical United Brethren Church, getting rid of the Central Jurisdiction, I suppose the powers that be decided that the UMC needed a hymnal of its own.

When I started attending the United Methodist Church in Albany in the mid-1980s, coincidentally also called Trinity, they were using a different hymnal (the red one). Still, many of the congregants at that time referred to the hymnal I grew up with as the “real Methodist hymnal,” such was the universality of its use, due to the quality of its structure of the Christian life.

Still, the black hymnal may not be my favorite. That title might fall to the one pictured below; the one to the left looks more like mine, in terms of condition. It has an 1849 copyright date. In the mid-1980s, my girlfriend at the time bought it for me for the handsome sum of $2.50. It has a LOT of hymns by Charles Wesley, many more than in subsequent iterations, starting with O, For a Thousand Tongues to Sing [listen] on the first page, and including Hark! the Herald Angels Sing and Christ, the Lord, is Risen Today, plus a whole bunch with which I am not familiar.


And I don’t know how many of those hymns were meant to be sung, because – I neglected to mention – there is no music in the book, only lyrics! Evidently, “everybody” already knew the tunes.

It too had a structure, but in addition to those in the 1932 hymnal, it also included Duties & Trials, and Humiliation. Fun stuff!

ABC Wednesday – Round 9

Summer Songs: Summertime

The summer songs are over, as the season begins to fade…

I’ve long been a sucker for those Red, Hot, and Blue albums. Not only are they generally great compilations, but they aid AIDS research.

At some point, I purchased By George & Ira: Red Hot on Gershwin, which I was quite fond of. Some critics complained about the multiple versions of a few songs, but I love the way Nina Simone’s version of I Loves You Porgy segues into Bill Evans’ instrumental take, e.g.

There are four versions of Summertime. The first is by an unlikely participant on this mostly jazz album: Janis Joplin [listen], who, according to one reviewer, “will certainly get the listener’s attention as she twists and turns the lyrics in a raspy interpretation.” Of course, as it’s probably the first version of the song I owned, from Cheap Thrills, the Big Brother and the Holding Company album, I have a particular fondness for it. Of course, she died in 1970 at the age of 27 from a drug overdose.

Though a quite different take, I also loved the Billy Stewart version [listen]. I realize it’s the trilling of the tongue bit that I found so entrancing (and one of my former co-workers found it so irritating; she wouldn’t allow me to play it if she were around). His “Summertime” was a Top 10 hit on both the pop and R&B charts in 1966. He died in a car crash in 1969 at the age of 32.

A more traditional jazz version came from The Stan Getz Quartet [listen]. Getz died in 1991 at the age of 64 from liver cancer.

Charlie “Bird” Parker [listen] performs the final version of the song. He too died young, at the age of 34. “The official causes of death were lobar pneumonia and a bleeding ulcer but Parker also had an advanced case of cirrhosis and had had a heart attack.”

The summer songs are over, as the season begins to fade…

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