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.

Perhaps the wait is almost over

Waiting for someone to come out of somewhere

waitOne of my sisters sent me this clip of a song called Wait for the Lord. It’s in the Taizé style, which is to say that the message is repeated. One can become impatient with that, but I think that repetition is its power.

Wait for the Lord
Whose day is near
Wait for the Lord
Keep watch, take heart

And it’s sometimes an impatient wait. O Come, O Come Emmanuel – Tarja.

One of the lesser-known Beatles songs, from Rubber Soul, is Wait.

It’s been a long time
Now I’m coming back home
I’ve been away now
Oh how I’ve been alone
Wait ’til I come back to your side
We’ll forget the tears we’ve cried

Perhaps the best cover version of a Rolling Stones song is I Am Waiting by Ollabelle. The group features Amy Helm, the daughter of the late vocalist of the Band, Levon Helm.

You can’t hold out, you can’t hold out, oh yeah, oh yeah
Waiting for someone to come out of somewhere
Waiting for someone to come out of somewhere
See it come along, don’t know where it’s from
Oh, yes, you will find out
Happens all the time, censored from our mind
You’ll find out.

Norah Jones sang Christmas Don’t Be Late on CBS Saturday Morning recently. Not much like Simon, Theodore, Alvin, and Dave Seville.

Tommy Pett

And of course, The Waiting by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers:

The waiting is the hardest part
Every day you see one more card
You take it on faith, you take it to the heart

This, not incidentally, is the first song on Unconventional Advent (A Think Christian playlist) on Spotify.

I’ve said it before. I do think the waiting IS the hardest part.

It might be waiting for Christmas: the presents, the festivities, family gatherings. Or it may be that you’re waiting for it to be over: the pain, the sense of loss, family gatherings.

Perhaps it’s the end of 2021, which might have been better than 2020, but not as good as you had hoped.

Here’s hoping that what you are waiting for, whatever that might be, comes your way.

Josephine Baker: I knew so little

Genius in France

Josephine BakerI knew that Josephine Baker was a famous black entertainer starting in the 1920s. Yes, I was aware that she left the United States because of its open segregation laws. She was a big star in France. That’s about it.

That is until I was watching CBS Sunday Morning while waiting for my train to arrive. This segment is rightly titled The legacy of Josephine Baker.

First a bit of biography. “She was born Freda Josephine McDonald in St. Louis, Missouri, on June 3, 1906, to washerwoman Carrie McDonald and vaudeville drummer Eddie Carson. Eddie abandoned them shortly afterward, and Carrie married a kind but a perpetually unemployed man named Arthur Martin.” After a brief and difficult career in the US, her career thrived in Paris.

I’m fascinated by how France has been perceived as this sanctuary, at least for a little while. Some of the notable transplants, at least for a time, included James Baldwin and Lenny Kravitz. My noted activist cousin  Frances Beal lived there for a few years. And American soldier Henry Johnson, for years, got a lot more recognition for his World War I exploits by the French than by his home country, the US.

A star over there, but…

For Josephine Baker, a “1936 return to the United States to star in the Ziegfeld Follies proved disastrous, despite the fact that she was a major celebrity in Europe. American audiences rejected the idea of a black woman with so much sophistication and power, newspaper reviews were equally cruel (The New York Times called her a ‘Negro wench’), and Josephine returned to Europe heartbroken.”

She was active in the French resistance during World War II. “She performed for the troops” and… smuggled “secret messages written on her music sheets.” The French government later awarded her medals for her valor.

In the 1950s, “she began adopting children, forming a family she often referred to as ‘The Rainbow Tribe.’ aided by her third husband, composer Joe Bouillon. Josephine wanted her to prove that ‘children of different ethnicities and religions could still be brothers.’ She often took the children with her cross-country.” She raised two daughters, from France and Morocco, and 10 sons, from Korea, Japan, Colombia, Finland, Algeria, Ivory Coast, Venezuela, and three from France.

Civil rights advocate

But she did make it back to the United States again. I was struck by this dialogue in the CBS piece.
Reporter: “How long are you going to stay?”
Baker: “You want me to stay, don’t you?”
Reporter: “I’d like you to stay. I think you could help the Negro movement in the United States.”
Baker: “Oh, don’t say that.”
Reporter: “Why not?”
Baker: “Because it’s not a Negro movement. It’s an American movement.”
True enough.

She spoke at the historic March on Washington in August 1963. “You know, friends, that I do not lie to you when I tell you I have walked into the palaces of kings and queens and into the houses of presidents, and much more. But I could not walk into a hotel in America and get a cup of coffee, and that made me mad. And when I get mad, you know that I open my big mouth. And then look out, ’cause when Josephine opens her mouth, they hear it all over the world.”

Triumphant return

Josephine Baker “agreed to perform at New York’s Carnegie Hall” in 1973. “Due to previous experience, she was nervous about how the audience and critics would receive her. This time, however, cultural and racial growth was evident. Josephine received a standing ovation before the concert even began. The enthusiastic welcome was so touching that she wept onstage.

“On April 8, 1975, Josephine premiered at the Bobino Theater in Paris. Celebrities such as Princess Grace of Monaco and Sophia Loren were in attendance to see 68-year-old Josephine perform a medley of routines from her 50-year career. The reviews were among her best ever. Days later, however, Josephine slipped into a coma. She died from a cerebral hemorrhage at 5 a.m. on April 12.”

And in 2021, she has been inducted into France’s Pantheon, the first black woman, the first performing artist, and the first American so honored. She joins Voltaire, Victor Hugo, and Marie Curie among the 80 so honored.

It’s all relative, apparently

Machetunim

new cousinsBarbara Wallraff’s May I have a word column in the Boston Globe tries to address It’s all relative. Specifically, what you call certain folks to whom you are connected. For instance, how do you “refer to your grandchildren’s other set of grandparents”?

Her favorite suggestion was “parallelogrands, ‘owing to the pairs’ literally parallel positions on one’s family tree. Variations might include parallelogramps and, well, parallelogram. Readers also recommended grandsisters and outlaws. A couple of decades ago, the wives of my wife’s brothers and I would refer to each other as the “outlaws.”

Wallraff’s readers contacted her to inform that “a Yiddish and Hebrew term for relationships of these kinds is machetun in the singular and machatunim or machetunim in the plural… Machetunim covers “all one’s relatives by marriage,” per the late New York Times language columnist William Safire, and its singular form can refer to a relative by marriage even as distant as “your spouse’s mother’s second cousin.” I LOVED Safire.

The writer also discovered on her own “that Spanish has consunegros to describe some or all relationships of this kind, Italian has consuoceri, Greek symbethèra (or συμπεθέρα), Russian a gazillion specific terms categorized in a way I don’t understand, Tagalog magbalae, and English-speaking cultural anthropologists affines.”

Para, perhaps

Mushing all of these suggestions in my head, I think I’m going to opt for para- as a choice. It’s a nod to the parallelogram, but that has too many syllables! Para- means “alongside of”, or “closely related to”, among other things.

I’m thinking about this specifically because I was looking to find a tidy definition of a guy who died this year, who I’ve alluded to before. I was very fond of him. His name was Jack White; no relation to the guy from the White Stripes. He was the husband of my wife’s first cousin, Diane; yes, Jack and Diane. It was she who got me some of his cool baseball books.

In fact, I had envisioned Jack, my late father-in-law Richard, and me going to a major league ballgame one of these days. We always talked about the game at the Olin family reunions. So I’m trying on para. Jack would be my para-cousin. Or maybe para-cousin-in-law because he was my wife’s paracousin, or cousin-in-law?

Or maybe just cousin, because it’s what I call my great aunt by marriage’s nephew. Cousins cover a lot of ground.

Things I don’t want for Christmas

ARA

I suppose I should not be ungracious. Still, there ARE some things I just don’t want for Christmas:

Arguments that the COVID vaccine is contrary to God’s will because we have “natural immunity.”

That the vaccine has a microchip in it, broadcasting to Bill Gates’ new unlisted phone number.

That the vaccine was designed to fail. Or that the disease is fake, planned by the corporatists.

More things I don’t want for Christmas:

“Proof” that climate change has been engineered by a leftwing globalist cabal designed to take our freedom
“Proof” debunking the Holocaust
And “Proof” of Bigfoot’s existence (I just don’t get the Bigfoot stuff)

I bring this up because, in the past year or two, I have received EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THESE, unsolicited, to my email or via Instant Messaging on Facebook. And there were many more of like persuasion. You can’t just return them to Amazon.

Illusionary superiority

Here’s an interesting article from Scientific American. People Who Jump to Conclusions Show Other Kinds of Thinking Errors. Moreover, “Belief in conspiracy theories and overconfidence are two tendencies linked to hasty thinking.”

There was a fishing experiment you can read about. “The earlier a person jumped, the more likely they were to endorse conspiracy theories, such as the idea that the Apollo moon landings had been faked. Such individuals were also more likely to believe in paranormal phenomena and medical myths, such as the idea that health officials are actively hiding a link between cell phones and cancer.”

The article was by Carmen Sanchez and David Dunning on October 15, 2021. Dunning? I remember that surname from a blog post about illusionary superiority I wrote in September of 2015. The phenomenon is “a cognitive bias whereby individuals overestimate their own qualities and abilities, relative to others… Other terms include superiority bias, leniency error… and the Lake Wobegon effect.”

Instead

If you’ve been around here long enough, you know what I really, really want. And no, it’s not the Spice Girls’ greatest hits. (Although I don’t have any Spice Girls music. Should I get some?)

I want YOU to Ask Roger Anything. It could be about Bigfoot or the Holocaust, I suppose, and why I don’t believe in the former but do believe in the latter. 

Expect answers to your questions, probably within a month. Please leave your questions, suggestions, and interpolations in the comments section of the blog. OR you can also contact me on Facebook or Twitter. On Twitter, my name is ersie. Why ersie? I’ve probably answered that before, but I could do it again if you ask. Always look for the duck.

You may remain anonymous, or better yet, pseudonymous, but you need to tell me that. E-mail me at rogerogreen (AT) gmail (DOT) com, or send me an IM on FB and note that you wish to be unnamed. Otherwise, I’ll attribute the queries to you.

 

How things work, or don’t

Observation

I spend a fair amount of time thinking about how things work or don’t, whether it be machinery or systems.

At a complicated, five-way intersection nearby, I know that at one crossing, the Walk sign won’t light up unless one presses the Walk button. But the subsequent crossing changes automatically at the appropriate time.

ITEM: Sometime in November, there was a package on our porch. I picked it up and noticed it wasn’t for us but for a neighbor across the street and down a couple of houses. I carried it over there and discovered in that entryway a package for my wife.

About two weeks later, I received an email notification of delivery. I went downstairs, snapped up the envelope, cut the package opened and discovered content that wasn’t anything I ordered. Then I looked at the package; it wasn’t for me but for another neighbor. Yep, my package was on that other porch. I slipped the neighbor’s package behind the screen door.

Now if I had bothered to LOOK at the photo that came with the email, I would have noticed, “That’s not my porch!” The two packages, in this case, were the same size, unlike my wife’s actual product from earlier, which was much larger than the one we exchanged.

The boom boxes

ITEM: I still play compact discs. One boom box that I had purchased in June 2020 started skipping; I knew it wasn’t the CDs. So I got a different player in December 2020. Nine months later, it too began to skip. I bought the exact same machine, which started skipping only two months later. So I switched back to machine #2, and it plays fine. Maybe it just needed a rest?

ITEM: Some folks complained about one of our local absentee landlord’s hedges, clearly a hazard. A few of them contacted the city’s SeeClickFix site. Now the hedges are severely cut back; they’re hideous, so they were probably cut by the landlord. But at least they are not an obstruction.

Oddly, I noticed the change well before my wife and daughter, both of whom are more visually focused than I. Maybe it was that I was looking through the prism of the glass door we have and saw light through the bushes where none had existed before.

ITEM: I won’t even get into the blow-by-blow of hooking up my new printer. Back in the old days, I ould just plug it in and it took 10 minutes, including taking it out of the box. This one, which operates on WiFi, and ended up requiring software to be loaded both on my phone and my laptop, took an hour and a half.

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