Roger O Green

D-Day + 80 years

National WWII Museum

Today is D-Day +80 years. Since someone asked, D-Day stands for Day-Day. “D-Day and H-Hour are used for the day and hour on which a combat attack or operation is to be initiated.” June 6, 1944, “was so iconic that it came to be used solely when referring to the beginning of Operation Overlord.”

This year, I learned about the National WWII Museum in New Orleans. The site has several articles about the anniversary.

Surprisingly, the number of the war dead from that day is still in dispute. “Of the 4,414 Allied deaths on June 6th, 2,501 were Americans and 1,913 were Allies. If the figure sounds low…, it’s probably because we’re used to seeing estimates of the total number of D-Day casualties, which includes fatalities, the wounded, and the missing.

“While casualty figures are notoriously difficult to verify… the accepted estimate is that the Allies suffered 10,000 total casualties on D-Day itself. The highest casualties occurred on Omaha Beach, where 2,000 U.S. troops were killed, wounded, or went missing; at Sword Beach and Gold Beach, where 2,000 British troops were killed, wounded, or went missing; and at Juno Beach, where 340 Canadian soldiers were killed and another 574 wounded.

“The vast majority of the men who died perished in the very first waves of the attack. The first soldiers out of the landing craft were gunned down by German artillery. Once those pillboxes were destroyed and the machine guns silenced, the later waves of troops faced far better odds.”

There was a disastrous dry run 40 days earlier, so the success of the actual invasion was remarkable.

Albany is represented

From the Albany City School District website: “The Albany Marching Falcons officially kicked off their trip to France on Tuesday morning, loading their luggage, their instruments, and themselves onto two chartered buses bound for an evening flight from JFK International Airport to Paris.

“The group – some 50 City School District of Albany students from grades 6-12” -at least two of whom I know– “will be part of France’s official commemoration of the 80th anniversary of D-Day. They were accompanied by marching arts director Brian Cady and numerous chaperones and family members.

“Take a look at a Facebook photo album of the sendoff.

“Led by director Bryan Cady, the Marching Falcons will be one of only two bands from the U.S. invited to perform on Omaha Beach in Normandy. [The other is from the University of Florida.] The Marching Falcons will also perform at D-Day memorial concerts in Falaise, Saint Laurent-sur-Mer, and Paris before heading back to Albany on June 11.”

Pass

I watched this CBS News story about the WWII museum. A 99-year-old vet told the story of his deployment to kids eight decades his junior.

In the narrative, one teen asked his father to watch the movie Saving Private Ryan. That caught my attention because I decided in 1998 that I would not see the film. I saw previews in the movie theater and a brief clip during the Oscars.

Esquire magazine ran a story in 2023: 25 Years on, Saving Private Ryan’s Opening Scene Remains Cinema’s Most Brutal Depiction of War. Steven Spielberg’s Omaha Beach landings are not for the faint of heart. And that’s the point.

I guess I’m of the faint of heart.

“The 24-minute sequence captures war in a way that we hadn’t seen before, and hasn’t been matched since. It’s the nervous shakes that possess [Tom] Hanks’ hands. The vomit. The desperate surprise of soldiers drowning in the shallows, dragged down by their gear. The indiscriminate German bullets landing with a ‘puft’ in American chests. The relentless machine gun fire and explosions. The arms blown off, the guts hanging out, all of it captured by a cameraman running alongside the actors, instructed to pan to whatever part of the horror caught his attention.”

Some extremely small part of me says that I ought to watch it. Then the “hell, no” part of me wins out. Still, I’m glad it exists.

“To watch this opening salvo is to witness this veteran’s story transposed directly onto the screen. It’s a guttural, terrifying sequence that plays like something from a horror film. As it should; so realistic was this beach assault that it was reported to have triggered PTSD in veterans.”

Rather like war itself, no matter the cause.

End the subscriptions

Audible

**From https://www.aarp.org/home-family/personal-technology/info-2023/manage-unwanted-subscriptions.html**

Periodically, I check out my bills and decide whether to end the subscriptions for certain online and physical services.

For instance, I loved reading the print version of The New Yorker magazine. The problem was that it was so packed with items that interested me that it would quickly pile up. Every month or so, I’d toss the ones more than a half-year-old. Finally, I allowed the subscription to lapse.

The IDEA of Audible really appealed to me. I’m not reading enough books. Maybe if I could LISTEN to them, it would be more efficient. The problem is that I can’t really do anything else when I’m listening to dialogue. My wife listened to parts of How To Be An Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi while washing the dishes, e.g. She also listens to discussions on NPR.

I cannot. Instead, I stop what I’m doing to absorb the information. Conversely, I can clean while listening to music, even songs with lyrics. It’s challenging to do any tedious tasks or even write blog posts without music. (At the time of my writing, I’m listening to Head Hunters by Herbie Hancock.)

Audible didn’t work for me. Besides, I have enough paper books unread in this room to keep me busy for a decade or two.

When I was working at the NY SBDC, we paid to access specific databases. Some we almost HAD to have because our usage was high. We would discontinue others, which may not have been all that expensive because they weren’t helpful enough.

Netflix

Part of the reason I have never had a Netflix streaming subscription service is that I fear that I wouldn’t have time to use it sufficiently. Now, I did have Netflix when they used to mail me DVDs to watch and then send back. I wasn’t that good with that iteration, either. As I mentioned, I received the disc for the well-regarded movie The Hurt Locker. I returned it four months later because I couldn’t find a two-hour block to watch it.

Could I have watched it in two sixty-minute chunks? Well, yes and no. I had an hour here and an hour there, but I don’t think I would have done the film justice. I try not to watch movies like I watch TV. It might take me three days to get through the 90 minutes on CBS Sunday Morning, including ads.

It’s also true that Netflix bugs me. They put out movies that I CAN’T see at the cinema. Maestro was in theaters for less than two weeks before it reverted to the platform. Rustin may have played in New York City and Los Angeles, but I never had the opportunity to see it at the cinema.

To my mind, it’s akin to the Justice Department’s complaint against Apple’s smartphone. “Apple undermines apps, products, and services that would otherwise make users less reliant on the iPhone, promote interoperability…” (Indeed, when my sister Leslie had her bicycle accident in 2018, I COULD NOT open the photos. I now have an iPhone, but I resent the necessity.)

Cat caused chaos

One man’s ceiling is another man’s floor

For about 15 minutes, there was bedlam in my house on Sunday, May 26. The cat caused chaos. Of course, it was Midnight.

My daughter was about to take a shower. Midnight had become fixated on the tub, trying to get water from the faucet. I will acknowledge that at least one person in our household, frequently finding him in the tub, would gently turn on the water. After all, he seemed to enjoy drinking the water that way. Moreover, it was a way to clean his grody feet, especially his rear paws.

But when she wanted to shower, she later said she couldn’t get him to leave. He CAN be onery. So he stayed. Afterward, she texted me, noting that he peed on the floor and a couple of pieces of her clothes.

At the time she was leaving the bathroom, my wife had come home from a visit to her mother’s. So, simultaneously, my daughter is asking me to clean the upstairs bathroom floor AND my wife is calling me, quite insistently, to come downstairs. Plus I was scheduled to talk to my sisters on ZOOM in about five minutes.

There was water in the downstairs bathroom, leaking from the ceiling. When my daughter washed her clothes in the upstairs sink, water got into the hole that stopped the sink from overflowing. The water, I discovered, didn’t have anywhere to go except into the cabinet below and, subsequently, the downstairs bathroom ceiling.

The ceiling dripped for a couple of days, but much of the water was absorbed by the now-sagging ceiling tiles above the downstairs toilet. Ah, another home repair to deal with. When you’re the homeowner, you can’t call the landlord.

Reciprocity

Here’s something dumb that the blogger did more recently (May 30). My CDs are in a library file cabinet I bought from the Albany Public Library when they were renovating a few years ago.

For no good reason, the lowest three drawers were open. There was clutter in front of them, but still. I opened the second drawer from the top and the file cabinet, with about 2,000 CDs, started tipping over.

I called to my wife, “Help me!” She thought it involved the cats; we’d been away for two days. Then I screamed, “HELP! ME!!” as I leaned into the cabinet. She closed the upper drawer, then one of the lower ones.

If it had crashed, I feared it would put a hole in the floor. That goes in the category of things I’ll never do again.

Freedom Summer? Oh, please

Pride month

The Washington Post (behind a paywall) notes: “As part of what Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) is calling ‘Freedom Summer,’ his Transportation Department has told cities across the state that if they want to light up their bridges at night, they can only use the colors red, white and blue.”

Yeah, I know it’s symbolic, and all that. Still, to dub an anachronistic policy after the activism of 1964 means, to quote Inigo Montoya in the movie The Princess Bride, “I do not think it means what you think it means.”

Sixty years ago, people traveled through Mississippi to register Black voters who had been thwarted from voting because of punitive laws and fear of retribution. Volunteers also established Freedom Schools, libraries, and community centers for the Black community in small towns.

(One of those volunteers was David Kabat, whose sister Julie – who I know – wrote about him and the movement in Love Letter From A Pig, which she talked about before a performance of Three Mothers.)

“The[Florida] order — which was shared by Florida Department of Transportation Secretary Jared Perdue on social media recently — means that bridges across the state that normally illuminate in colorful arrays of light to mark holidays or awareness events won’t be able to use any other colors from May 27 through Sept. 2.”

During the 1964 summer, scores of people were arrested, some beaten. Black churches, businesses, and homes were bombed or burned, and several folks were murdered.

“‘As Floridians prepare for Freedom Summer, Florida’s bridges will follow suit, illuminating in red, white, and blue from Memorial Day through Labor Day!’ Perdue wrote on X. ‘Thanks to the leadership of Gov. Ron DeSantis, Florida continues to be the freest state in the nation.'”

The sound you hear is me gagging

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar notes in his Substack column: “It is clear that DeSantis especially wants to target the LGBTQ+ community by denying them the ability to display Pride colors during the Pride month of June. But his ban also affects other light displays during the summer: orange for National Gun Awareness Month; yellow for Women’s Equality Day; and red, black, and green for Juneteenth.”

I looked for articles that showed what I’ve already seen: a concerted effort to roll back gains by LGBTIQ+ folks, and a palpable fear in the community. Many are from 2023.

GLAAD: “Each of the previous two years—2022 and 2021—were record-setting years for anti-LGBTQ legislation, and the public rhetoric around these issues has increased since then.”

SPLC: “A central theme of anti-LGBTQ organizing and ideology is the opposition to LGBTQ rights or support of homophobia, heterosexism and/or cisnormativity often expressed through demonizing rhetoric and grounded in harmful pseudoscience that portrays LGBTQ people as threats to children, society and often public health.”

The Trevor Project: “75% of LGBTQ youth say that both anti-LGBTQ hate crimes and threats of violence against LGBTQ spaces often give them stress or anxiety.”

Homeland Security(!): “To protect against these increasing threats, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), with support from the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), has launched the LGBTQI+ Community Safety Partnership.”

Vigilance

From UN Women in May 2024: “State and non-state actors in many countries are attempting to roll back hard-won progress and further entrench stigma, endangering the rights and lives of LGBTIQ+ people. These movements use hateful propaganda and disinformation to target and attempt to delegitimize people with diverse sexual orientations, gender identities, gender expressions, and sex characteristics. ”

As in other civil rights arenas, fighting against bigotry is arguably more important now than ever. Also true: you think you’ve won the day, only to find out that you still have to fight the battle that you thought had already been litigated.

Meh. It’s exhausting. And necessary, unfortunately.

Sunday Stealing: if you like art

the new orange

Another Sunday Stealing.

1. If you like art, who is your favourite artist and why?

I love seeing art. The Clark Art Museum and MASS MoCA are just two venues not so far away. That reminds me that last week I wrote about the Nell Stokes exhibit at the Albany Institute of History and Art being cut short. It is now scheduled to end on December 31, 2024, as initially promised. This is good because I had not had a chance to see it.

I think Rodin sculptures are sexy as all get out and much more so in person than in photos. Speaking of photos, I’d go with Dorothea Lange. As for painters, there are too many to name.

2. If you were able to learn any three skills or talents instantly and with success, what would they be?

Computer repair, typing, and square dancing.

3. If you were to live in Ancient Times, where – in what country – would you want to live in?

Nigeria, probably because I have ancestors there.

4. What is something you’re embarrassed to admit to liking? Whether it be a guilty pleasure show, or unusual hobby, etc.

I’ve given up on guilty pleasures. I mean, I used to collect comic books. I still have comics-related books and Hess trucks.

Worst job

5. What is the worst job you’ve ever had?

I worked in a box factory, but that was only two weeks. Empire Blue Cross was pretty terrible but it was only 13 months. Possibly my last job because it was so often disappointing; it wasn’t terrible all of the time, but most of the last four years were awful, and there were periods before that.

6. What is something that you wanted to do as a child that you would still like to do now?

Be a trial lawyer. I was a sucker for Perry Mason, Judd for the Defense, The Bold Ones: The Lawyers, et al.

7. What do you hate being judged for more than anything else?

Appearance. It seems so shallow.

8. What is your life’s mission?

To make people’s lives suck less.

9. If everyone walked around wearing warning labels, what would yours say?

I have a very long fuse, but I will likely scream at you if I tell you I’m reaching my limit, yet you keep pushing it.

10. At what age did you first feel like you were an adult?

I think it’ll be next year. Or the year after that.

Speak up

11. When did you not speak up, but wish you had?

I actually talked to someone about this in May 2024. In my last job, the organization was taken over for a couple of years around the turn of the millennium by a corrupt yet idiotic political hack named Felix, who eventually was indicted and went to jail for a time.

I was in charge of a committee tasked to hire someone to be a business advisor, which was all done by the book. Then one of the committee members, who I’ll call Holly, said we had to select someone else as well, a person who had not gone through the vetting process. I said I wouldn’t sign off on it, so SHE did.

I didn’t think complaining up the chain would have mattered – the chancellor’s wife worked for Felix. But maybe I should have found a mid-level bureaucrat to complain to, who might have been more isolated from the chain of command. Still, I was so taken aback by Holly’s action that I didn’t remember the name of the mystery candidate, though maybe the bureaucrats could have found the person by their work start date. But the political corruption was so bad at the time that nothing would likely have happened.

12. What is something that makes your skin crawl?

Bad liars. Orange is the new orange.

13. What was the last thing to give you butterflies in your stomach?

Doing a book review.

14. What’s your favorite type of media to work with? (Paint, clay, pens, etc.)

I’m not an artist. But I used to love Play-Doh.

15. What question do you hate answering?

I might have said talking about racism. But one of the comments to a recent post reminded me that people are at different places in their awareness of the phenomenon.