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.

I Admit I Like Billy Joel

Billy Joel tells the story about when the instrumentation all drops out, it was an accident, when he was playing with the knobs and feared he’d ruined the recording.


One of my colleagues, knowing my affection for music, was telling me about a Billy Joel song called We Didn’t Start the Fire, which you can hear here, after a short ad. I was never a huge fan of the song. But she explained to me that the historical references in the piece made her want to look up the background behind those events. So, I have rethought the song and deem it OK, especially after I came across this teacher’s guide to it.

Actually, I rather like Billy Joel, even though it was never really cool to like Billy Joel. The only time I saw him live in New Paltz in 1974 (I think). Buzzy Linhart opened for him. Joel and the entourage got lost getting to New Paltz and were over two hours late. Billy was practically glued to his piano bench. The song I love most from that period was Captain Jack.

Compact disc

Subsequently, I bought several BJ albums. In fact, when I FINALLY bought a CD player, I bought a half dozen CDs to play on it, one of which was this album:

I got rather fond of much of his music, which seemed to dominate MTV in the early years.
Some favorites:
Big Shot, which I always thought was self-referential
Allentown, with the industrial sounds
Pressure, with the specific reference to Channel 13, the PBS station in NYC. He tells the story about when the instrumentation all drops out, it was an accident, when he was playing with the knobs and feared he’d ruined the recording.
But probably my second favorite song, after Lullaby, is Big Man on Mulberry Street, probably because of that fantasy piece on the TV show Moonlighting, a program I loved early on *(and then not so much…)

There was a recent piece in Salon that called Billy Joel a Misunderstood American Master, and I think he is right.

I’ll end this with BJ’s rendition of New York State of Mind, a great version from right after 9/11/2001.

BJ turns 61 on Sunday.

The New 30 Day (or so) Challenge

The timing is fortuitous. I have two (count ’em 2) conferences, pretty much back-to-back events, this month, so blogging time will be limited. AND I want to tidy things up here.

At the (general) urging of Cal and following also in the footsteps of Jaquandor, I’m starting a new Challenge this month. Do it with me. Or don’t.

The timing is fortuitous. I have two (count ’em 2) conferences, pretty much back-to-back events, this month, so blogging time will be limited. AND I want to tidy things up here.

Now I promise this WILL take longer than 30 days: May has Mother’s Day, our wedding anniversary, plus ABC Wednesday, Lydia day, and anything else I decide to write instead. It’ll probably take me 45 to 60 days. So be it. Indeed, I probably won’t even start until next week.

•Day One: Favourite Actor
•Day Two: Favourite Movie
•Day Three: Favourite Musician
•Day Four: Favourite Book
•Day Five: Favourite Food
•Day Six: Favourite Song
•Day Seven: Favourite TV Show
•Day Eight: Pictures Of Your Room
•Day Nine: Favourite Flower
•Day Ten: Favourite Outfit
•Day Eleven: Recent Picture Of Yourself
•Day Twelve: Where Your Family Is From
•Day Thirteen: Favourite Memory
•Day Fourteen: Favourite Purchase Ever Made
•Day Fifteen: Current Grades
•Day Sixteen: Future Tattoos
•Day Seventeen: A Childhood Picture
•Day Eighteen: Favourite Board Game
•Day Nineteen: Something That Made You Smile Today
•Day Twenty: A 10+ Year Old Picture
•Day Twenty-One: Favourite Movie Quote
•Day Twenty-Two: Picture Of You On This Day
•Day Twenty-Three: Favourite Music Video
•Day Twenty-Four: Something Embarrassing In Your Room
•Day Twenty-Five: One Of Your Most Prized Possessions
•Day Twenty-Six: A Picture From One Of The Greatest Days Of Your Life
•Day Twenty-Seven: A Picture Of Where You’re From
•Day Twenty-Eight: A Drawing
•Day Twenty-Nine: Somewhere You Want To Visit
•Day Thirty: Whomever You Find Most Attractive In This World

I may get rid of some of those excessive letter U’s in the titles. Darn Canadians!

And though I promised these before, this time for sure:
*A list of all the Beatles songs, in desert island order.
*Movie year in review.
*Underplayed vinyl – this is helped out tremendously by the painting of the attic, which allows the ACCESS to and reorganization of said LPs.

Quite possibly none of these before June, but these will be my summer projects.

Yes, I am blogging about blogging; this too shall pass.

And while I’m prattling on, I highly recommend that if you happen to have my AOL e-mail address, don’t send me any messages there if you actually reply more often than once a month.

Oh, I was Googling my name, and I came across this:
What was roger green’s early life?
he was a a canable who perferd eating tiny people with dwarfism

I was SHOCKED! That’s some of the worst spelling I’ve ever seen.

ROG

The Giveaway

So this is how it works. For every non-spam comment of at least – let’s pick a number at random – FIVE words left on this blog between May 3 and July 3, you get a ticket. No more than one comment per post will be counted, but you can comment on any post in the past five years. Every ticket represents a chance for a prize.

I decided, in honor of the new blog, or the old blog with the new URL, or whatever it is that I’m doing, to have a giveaway here, based on aspects of my life.

There will be five winners. Among the prizes are:


*Top Pop Albums, 1955-2009 from Record Research, a list of every album that charted on the Billboard charts in the past 55 years.

*Beyond Words: Daily Readings in the ABC’s of Faith by Frederick Buechner. A compilation of 366 brief essays of faith.

FGH


*THE NEARLY COMPLETE ESSENTIAL HEMBECK ARCHIVES OMNIBUS. 900 pages of Fred Hembeck goodness. If you don’t know Fred’s work, it is tricky to describe. It is largely a series of stories about a character named Fred Hembeck and his interaction with comic book characters, which I fell in love with long before I even met my friend. Donated and signed by the artist.

And a fourth and fifth item I haven’t decided upon yet; behold I bring you a mystery. And in each case, I reserve the right to throw in additional stuff.

Comments

So this is how it works. For every non-spam comment of at least – let’s pick a number at random – FIVE words left on this blog between May 3 and July 3, you get a ticket. No more than one comment per post will be counted, but you can comment on any post in the past five years. Every ticket represents a chance for a prize.

It is not the case that the person making the most comments wins. It IS the case that the more comments you make, the more CHANCES you get. So someone commenting five times gets five tickets, thus five times more chances to win. Once I get the total number of entries, I will do the random number generator thing. The first person chosen gets his or her choice of the first pick of the prizes, the second person gets the second pick, etc. All winners will also receive a Millard Filmore $1 piece; the coin of one of the worst US Presidents coin was current when this new blog started, so there it is.

Now if I don’t know who you are, it will be pretty difficult to assign you a ticket, so if you want to comment anonymously and don’t leave your name, it’ll be impossible to assign you a ticket.

Decision of the judge (moi) is final. Winners will be announced sometime before Bastille Day 2010.

Speaking of giveaways, a Coke commercial

Tubes

A visual representation of What do you want from life? (The Tubes)

Well, you can’t have that,
but if you’re an American citizen you are entitled to:
a heated kidney shaped pool,
a microwave oven–don’t watch the food cook,
a Dyna-Gym–I’ll personally demonstrate it in the privacy of your own home,
a king-size Titanic unsinkable Molly Brown waterbed with polybendum,
a foolproof plan and an airtight alibi,
real simulated Indian jewelry,
a Gucci shoetree,
a year’s supply of antibiotics,
a personally autographed picture of Randy Mantooth
and Bob Dylan’s new unlisted phone number,
a beautifully restored Third Reich swizzle stick,
Rosemary’s baby,
a dream date in kneepads with Paul Williams,
a new Matador, a new mastodon,
a Maverick, a Mustang, a Montego,
a Merc Montclair, a Mark IV, a meteor,
a Mercedes, an MG, or a Malibu,
a Mort Moriarty, a Maserati, a Mac truck,
a Mazda, a new Monza, or a moped,
a Winnebago–Hell, a herd of Winnebagos we’re giving ’em away,
or how about a McCulloch chainsaw,
a Las Vegas wedding,
a Mexican divorce,
a solid gold Kama Sutra coffee pot,
or a baby’s arm holding an apple?

P is for Periodic Table

sodium (Na) and fluorine (Cl) hook up to make sodium fluoride (NaCl)

Before I get started, a JEOPARDY! Daily Double from 4/14/2010:
ONLY ONE VOWEL $2,000: Though it has only one vowel in its name, this element’s periodic table symbol is 2 vowels.

It’s been a long time since I took high school chemistry. Check out, if you would, this nifty dynamic periodic table. If you put the cursor over a category, it will highlight those elements in that category. If you click on the category, it will give you an encyclopedic interpretation of the group. This is likewise true for the individual elements.

One finds a similar function for the elements only here, with YouTube videos about how the elements are used, when available, and a brief history of the periodic chart, starting with Mendeleev arrangement of the 65 elements that were then known back in 1869. Indeed, most of the periodic tables I found online has some interactivity.

If these were available when I was in high school, maybe I would remember more about chemistry than this: the alkali metals in group 1 liked to hang out with the halogens in group 17, because the former had an extra electron hanging out and the latter was lacking one; thus sodium (Na) and chlorine (Cl) hook up to make sodium chloride (NaCl), or salt. Conversely, the noble gases (group 18) didn’t play well with others.

One fun representation of the table is the Wooden Periodic Table Table which ended up winning the 2002 Ig Nobel Prize in Chemistry, with among other features, pictorial representations of some of the greats of science for which some of the latter elements are named, such as Curie, Nobel and Einstein.


But I was confused by the recent news that a new element, element 117, ununseptium (yeah, easy for YOU to say), described in the New York Times this way: “The team produced six atoms of the element by smashing together isotopes of calcium and a radioactive element called berkelium in a particle accelerator.” Wow. I thought the finding of elements would be more – I don’t know – elemental. (Here’s the story in the Christian Science Monitor and the Daily Mail). And only six atoms? There are things I know a lot about; this is NOT one of them.


ABC Wednesday
Oh, The JEOPARDY! question: What is gold? The symbol for it is Au.

 

Welcome Back, My Friends, To The Show That Never Ends

Because time is not fungible, and because there’s a bit of a learning curve for me – WordPress may arguably better than Blogger, but I know Blogger much better – please be patient here.

So: if you have been blogging for five years, some people are of the opinion that you should either 1) quit or 2) get your own URL. Evidently, I have chosen the latter.

When this URL – www.rogerogreen.com – was available, and I got it two months ago, I did almost nothing with it. Then, pretty much in the past two weeks, I said, “Oh, crap, my blog anniversary’s coming up. Wouldn’t it be really cool if I switched at that point?”

But of course, life gets in the way. This site isn’t really ready yet. If it weren’t considered so déclassé, I’d have a great big construction sign sitting smack dab in the middle of the page. Among other things, I haven’t gone through my blogroll on the old site to bring them to the new site. If you were on my old list, and you are blogging regularly (once a week or more) or if you’ve blogged recently or if I’ve met you personally, you’ll stay. I suspect this will take the better part of the month.

Because time is not fungible, and because there’s a bit of a learning curve for me – WordPress may arguably better than Blogger, but I know Blogger much better – please be patient here. I should be settled in by June. Well, I HOPE so. All advice accepted, though not necessarily acted upon.

Also, if you would be so kind:
1) if I am on your blogroll, please change it to www.rogerogreen.com; I know it’s a pain, but I don’t expect to alter it EVER again
2) if you get a chance to mention in your blog or Facebook or Twitter that I’ve changed my URL, that would be swelligant, elegant.

Here’s an odd thing: this blog, with virtually zero content, was in the 120s for my name last week in Google, whereas my old Blogger blog, with five years of content, was invisible. One of the factors, I’m sure, in actually making the move.

Karn Evil 9 – Emerson, Lake & Palmer
LIVE
on LP.

Any observations or questions are appreciated.

Ramblin' with Roger
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