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.

Ask Me?

Interesting unsolicited e-mail of the month. I’ve obviously fictionalized a couple things, but not the name of the available website: “Hello, my name is AAA with BBB.

askroger.com will be listed for sale in the next couple of days.
You are one of 19 companies/individuals who are either bidding on, have organically integrated or operate domain names related to the keyword set “ask roger”.
You can lower or eliminate any current/future advertisement expenses by becoming number one in search engines for this keyword set.
Purchasing askroger.com can help you become the market leader. If you are interested please visit:
http://www.BBB.com/sales/
I will try to answer the most common questions I receive from my customers below.
In case your specific question is not answered, you can call us at 1-888-333-3333 (toll free in the USA and Canada) using reference code 812406.
A live person will handle anything you need pre/post purchase. To better serve you, we do not use automated phone support.
1) You receive a year of registration on us with your purchase so you don’t have to stress about renewing your domain for one year.
2) We only require a one-time fee for exclusive ownership. BBB will only charge you once.
3) You don’t have to worry about re-branding or changing your current site. You can forward askroger.com to any of your domains or vice versa at no cost.
4) All transactions use a 128-bit SSL encryption and are processed through Authorize.net, a leading payment gateway. We also accept PayPal for secure transactions.
Once you confirm your interest and the domain is ready to ship, one of my transfer specialists will contact you.
Thank you and have a great day.”
No, thank you! I think I’ll pass, and yield it the guy with the logo.

MOVIE REVIEW: Buck

What I did come away with is that I’d like to know people like Buck, BE more like Buck.

The Wife and I left the Adirondacks on Saturday, picked up the mail that was being held. And since the Daughter was still in the mountains with her cousins (and their parents and grandparents), we took the opportunity to go to the Spectrum Theatre to see the movie Buck, which we had seen in previews.

Buck Brannaman travels the country for 40 exhausting months a year, usually without his family, “helping horses with people problems.” As Buck put it, “Your horse is a mirror to your soul, and sometimes you may not like what you see. Sometimes, you will.”

For much of the movie, one might mistake it for a laconic documentary travelogue. But interspersed with an early scene of how Robert Redford probably could not have made this movie “The Horse Whisperer”, based in large part on Buck, without the real Buck’s skills, and you realize that the man is genuine and no “one-trick pony,” as one critic suggested.

Then you find out, in a manner like peeling an onion one layer at a time, how Buck, and his older brother, were performers as children. Their mother died early, and their father – well, let’s say, Buck wasn’t his biggest fan. But the lessons he learned from that experience were what is remarkable.

It’s not a really dramatic film, except for one sequence near the end, which is quite so. What I did come away with is that I’d like to know people like Buck, BE more like Buck. You don’t have to be a big fan of horses to be a big fan of Buck.

Oh, you people who leave at the beginning of the credits: hear Buck’s foster mom tell Buck’s favorite joke before you depart.

How Can You Miss Me If I Don’t Leave?

When one blogs every day, not blogging felt like a flashing light – maybe he’s sick. Or MAYBE he’s not home. Continuing to blog was a security measure, as much as anything.

I was away the past couple of weeks. The family essentially circumnavigated Lake Ontario. We were in Niagara Falls for 2 days, 4 days in Toronto, 2 days in Peterborough, ON for the Olin family reunion, 2 days in Canton, NY (near my wife’s alma mater, St. Lawerence University), then 4 days in the Adirondack Mountains of NYS. I was gone from Saturday, July 30 through Saturday, August 13.

Yet I posted every day, through the magic of the thingamabob that allows me to post ahead. If you did miss me, it was that it took me longer to read and comment on your posts, to approve your comments to my posts, and the like.

When one blogs every day, not blogging felt like a flashing light – maybe he’s sick. Or MAYBE he’s not home. Continuing to blog was a security measure, as much as anything.

I didn’t even have time to write anything in draft for the first week and a half, because of time, and the little writing I did manage was pretty much in draft form, as a (pretty much continuous) word documents, without pictures and the like. When I got home, spent most of my time doing things such as getting rid of 350 e-mails.

But expect low content for a few days until I get a chance to catch up.

E is for Ecology

Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology), written and performed by Marvin Gaye, came out 40 years ago, but sounds like it could have been written 40 minutes ago.

Seriously, I have no energy to ‘debate’ the fact that global warming is occurring, and people are causing it. “The glaciers are melting and are a contributor to sea-level rise,” and “many communities won’t be able to adapt to rapid climate change.” The radical flooding in some parts of the planet and droughts in others are just a couple of reflections of the phenomenon.

The deniers, dangerously to my mind, downplay and distort the evidence of climate change, demand policies that allow industries to continue polluting, and attempt to undercut existing pollution standards.

This site provides over 25 easy steps we can take to not only reduce greenhouse gas emissions but also reduce air pollution, increase energy independence and save money.

We CAN reduce our ecological footprint.

 

Meanwhile, here’s Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology), written and performed by Marvin Gaye. It came out 40 years ago, but check out the lyrics; it sounds like it could have been written 40 minutes ago. Here’s a cover version by The Strokes, Eddie Vedder & Josh Homme.

ABC Wednesday – Round 9

Summer Song: Summer in the City

Summer in the City entered the Billboard charts on the 16th of July 1966, and spent 11 weeks there, including three consectutive weeks at #1, starting on 13th of August.

When I joined the Capitol Record Club in 1965, book and record clubs had this thing called the negative option. That is, you would get the selected book or record UNLESS you sent in the response card in time. I was really bad at the negative option; I almost NEVER got the card in on time.

Which is how I ended up receiving the album Daydream by the Lovin’ Spoonful on Kama Sutra Records; loved that yellow label. Turns out, I was very fond of the early Spoonful. And when the subsequent single Summer in the City came out in 1966 (b/w Butchie’s Tune from the Daydream album), I had to buy it, probably from the Philadelphia Sales discount department store in Binghamton, NY, which was only two blocks from my elementary/junior high school, one of the very few singles I ever purchased; I was, even early on, an LP guy.

Summer in the City entered the Billboard charts on the 16th of July 1966, and spent 11 weeks there, including three consecutive weeks at #1, starting on the 13th of August.

It is one of the few songs I ever learned to play on the piano, albeit very badly.

Summer in the City
a grainy ‘live’ version

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