Roger O Green

Music Throwback Saturday: Rare Earth

Motown did not have a name for the new division, so jokingly, the band suggested the name Rare Earth.

Rare Earth was NOT the first all-white group signed by Motown. Wikipedia cites The Rustix, The Dalton Boys, and The Underdogs as predecessors on the label; I actually have a couple of Underdogs tracks on some compilations.

But the group, which had started up in high school as “The Sunliners”, decided, after seven years to change the name of the band to “Rare Earth”, and ended up as clearly the most successful white band on the label.

Motown Record Corporation approached Rare Earth in the latter part of 1968 to sign a recording contract. At first the group was reluctant to sign because of knowing of other white groups and artists before them that had not had any success… It was when Motown decided they wanted to launch a new division of Motown to cater to white artists that Rare Earth started to seriously consider signing.

Motown did not have a name for the new division… so jokingly, the band suggested the name Rare Earth. Unbelievably they agreed.

On 20 Hard to Find Motown Classics, Volume 1 (1990), there appears Get Ready (pop #4, soul #20 in 1970) and (I Know) I’m Losing You (pop #7, soul #20 in 1970), both songs previously recorded by the Temptations. Both Rare Earth covers did better on the pop charts than did the Temps, whose pair of #1 soul hits only went to #29 and #8, respectively, on the pop charts in 1966.

20 Hard to Find Motown Classics, Volume 2 (1990) includes I Just Want To Celebrate (#7 pop, #30 soul in 1971) and Born To Wander (#17 pop, #48 soul) in 1971.

Get Ready was also the name of Rare Earth’s second album (#12 pop), with the title song, written by Smokey Robinson, taking up the whole second side. Ecology, the third album (#15 pop), featured Born To Wander and a nearly 11-minute version of I’m Losing You.

Many years later, Get Ready and Ecology were on a twofer CD, which I bought, but the Ecology songs were obviously shortened. They substituted the album version of I’m Losing You with the three-minute single version, and trimmed Eleanor Rigby and other songs, which really ticked me off.

I Just Want to Celebrate was on the fourth album, One World (#28 pop).

LISTEN TO
Get Ready – single version and album version and album version

I’m Losin’ You – single version and album version and album version

Born to Wander – the version here and here

I Just Want To Celebrate – the version here and here

Ahead of the curve: Harriet Tubman on the $20

I took some great pleasure from the large number of folks who expressed confusion at the decision to pick the $10 for revision.

As you’ve likely heard, the redesign of the United States currency involves putting Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill. While most people thought it was a swell idea, naturally there have also been all sorts of backlash.

One thread, which I shan’t link to, was an attack on political correctness. “Why can’t we have money the way we’re used to?” Why, she wasn’t even a President! Neither were Alexander Hamilton ($10) or Benjamin Franklin ($100).

But the path to get Tubman on the $20 actually predated any government initiative. A non-profit group called Women On 20s was campaigning in early 2015 to get a woman on that popular denomination. I wrote about it on March 15, 2015, including the organization’s reasons for booting Andrew Jackson, in addition to the Trail of Tears: “He was a fierce opponent of paper money and the central banking system, and would probably be horrified to see his face on our national currency.”

Five weeks later, I explained why Harriet Tubman is my choice for the $20 bill. She won the Women on the 20 online poll, announced around May 10, barely beating out Eleanor Roosevelt, who I also seriously considered.

So I was disappointed to hear Treasury Secretary Jack Lew announce in mid-June 2015 that the US is changing the face of the $10 bill. Because of my close personal relationship with Alexander Hamilton, I opposed that choice.

Moderators finished the Republican debate in mid-September by asking the candidates which woman they would put on the $10 bill.

The Rand Paul: Suffragist Susan B. Anthony

Mike Huckabee: His wife, Janet [living people cannot appear on U.S. currency]

Marco Rubio: Civil rights activist Rosa Parks

Ted Cruz: Put Rosa Parks on the $20 bill and keep Alexander Hamilton on the $10 [props to Cruz for picking the $20!]

Ben Carson: His mother, Sonya [still alive]

Donald Trump: Rosa Parks

Jeb Bush: Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher [God save the PM]

Carly Fiorina: “We shouldn’t change the $10 dollar bill or the $20 dollar bill. I think, honestly, it’s a gesture. I don’t think it helps to change our history. What I would think is that we ought to recognize that women are not a special interest group. Women are the majority of this nation, we are half the potential of this nation and this nation will be better off when every woman has the opportunity to live the life she chooses.” [Sisterhood is powerful.]

Scott Walker: American Red Cross founder Clara Barton

Chris Christie: First Lady Abigail Adams

John Kasich: Nobel Peace Prize-winner Mother Teresa [it needs to be an American]

These were some lame answers.

Oddly, I took some great pleasure from the large number of folks who expressed confusion at the decision to pick the $10 for revision. “I thought they had picked the $20,” I read fairly often. People conflated an online campaign by the nonprofit with government action!

Fortunately, the Hamilton musical, which started previews on July 13, 2015, and opened on August 6, became a phenomenon, eventually winning the Pulitzer Prize. The Treasury Department started looking at the $20 bill and ended up planning to redesign the $5, the $10, AND the $20 bills.

This is what I wrote on December 30, 2015: “This is a prediction, based on nothing but a gut feeling, and the unexplained postponement of the $10 redesign. Obama decides that the $10 won’t be replaced after all, because, in his feisty last year, he wouldn’t do that to old Alex. Instead, he dumps Jackson, an opponent of the banking system. He suggests a woman, a black woman, maybe Rosa Parks, but I’m hoping Harriet Tubman.”

Not sure how much, if anything, the President had anything to do with the process. Still, every once in a while, things work out the way I want them to. Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill! Allow me to enjoy the moment.

Of course, many people think it’s fairly irrelevant. I mean, “Who uses cash, anyway?” (Actually, I did this past weekend, when my chip-technology embedded credit card failed to work at the grocery store. Fortunately, they STILL accept greenbacks.)

Oh, I like this from Samantha Bee: “Andrew Jackson Was ‘Trump With Better Hair'”.

Literally, while I was writing this

[I received an email from Women On 20s:]

Without your help, a woman front and center on the widely circulated $20 bill and female representation on two other bills would not have been possible and we THANK YOU for all your support…

We are pleased to claim VICTORY and so should you. We think of this, not as a day done but rather a day just beginning that has everyone seeing with new eyes and new hope. You proved we can work together to make a difference and shake up the status quo. The new TRIFECTA — the $5, $10, and $20 — will look like more of what has made us a great country and why you stuck with us for the last year.

After more than a year of campaigning to convince the U.S. Treasury to replace the portrait of Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill with the face of a female American hero, Women On 20s is celebrating your historic game changing influence. Now, the Treasury Department acknowledges the importance of accelerating production on the new $20 bill, and plans to reveal its design in time for the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage in 2020. Hallelujah! What’s more, we have been assured that Treasury has a commitment from Federal Reserve Board chair Janet Yellen to fast track the $20’s issuance into circulation. What usually takes 10 years per bill is going to happen so much sooner because Women On 20s will make sure Treasury knows you care.

Whether you voted for Harriet Tubman or not, we hope you’ll agree the freed slave and freedom fighter is an excellent choice to replace the slave trader Andrew Jackson on the $20. She provided critical military intelligence to end a brutal Civil war and later fought for women’s rights alongside the nation’s leading suffragists. Whatever obstacles she faced, she kept going. There was no stopping her. She’s an inspiration and now the whole world will know her story. So, let there be no stopping us from making this and the other currency changes a reality.

[Oh, yeah, and then the pitch for money.]

Once again, thank you and help us keep this dream on track for the celebration of women’s inclusion in our democracy in 2020.

xkcd is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License.

Bigotry as pack mentality

The word miscegenation was coined in an anonymous propaganda pamphlet published in New York City in December 1863, during the American Civil War.

When I linked to a couple of articles about obvious signs of bigotry, my friend Chris wrote: “Holy 1952, Batman! What’s up with all the crazy racism stories? Are they more prevalent or are they being reported more?”

Well, yes. Both, I would assert.

At the same time, I’ve come up with a theory. There was a period that bigotry, at least in the public forum, was considered impolite, inappropriate, untoward. What changed is that people have been able to more easily find like-minded folks online. In other words, bigotry as pack mentality.

So, if Malia Obama is going to Harvard — but is taking a year off first, that’s a rather benign story. But the racial vulgarity that appeared in comments in the FOX News, just-as-tame, report, was a torrent that forced FOX to disallow comments altogether.

Old Navy tweeted a picture of an interracial family and Twitter is inflamed in racist blather. It echoes the 2013 Cheerios TV commercial generated Sturm und Drang in numbers so great that the General Mills website likewise had to forego comments.

I contend that a “lone wolf” bigot, being shouted down by other readers, might give up. But when he finds like-minded allies, this emboldens the bigot to spew vile, knowing that at least some others will also take up the cause.

One of the comments in the Old Navy story made reference to the word miscegenation, a rather old-fashioned term:

Miscegenation comes from the Latin miscere, “to mix” and genus, “kind”. The word was coined in the U.S. in 1863, and the etymology of the word is tied up with political conflicts during the American Civil War over the abolition of slavery and over the racial segregation of African-Americans. The reference to genus was made to emphasize the supposedly distinct biological differences between whites and non-whites…

The word was coined in an anonymous propaganda pamphlet published in New York City in December 1863, during the American Civil War. The pamphlet was entitled Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White Man and Negro. It purported to advocate the intermarriage of whites and blacks until they were indistinguishably mixed, as a desirable goal, and further asserted that this was the goal of the Republican Party. The pamphlet was a hoax, concocted by Democrats, to discredit the Republicans by imputing to them what were then radical views that offended against the attitudes of the vast majority of whites, including those who opposed slavery…

Only in November 1864 was the pamphlet exposed as a hoax…

By then, the word miscegenation had entered the common language of the day as a popular buzzword in political and social discourse. The issue of miscegenation, raised by the opponents of Abraham Lincoln, featured prominently in the election campaign of 1864.

In the United States, miscegenation has referred primarily to the intermarriage between whites and non-whites, especially blacks.

Before the publication of Miscegenation, the word amalgamation, borrowed from metallurgy, had been in use as a general term for ethnic and racial intermixing.

Of course, President Obama is the child of a white mother and a black father. For a time, I think that partially insulated him from the full brunt of bigotry. “His mom’s white; maybe he’ll be all right.” But once he showed that he actually expressed the feelings many blacks in America experience, he had his “half-white” card revoked.

Not all gatherings are online. Check out White Power Meets Business Casual: Inside the Effort to ‘Make White Nationalism Great Again’. “Trump, the engrossed crowd was told, intends to smash an oligarchic system ‘stacked’ against white America. The only way to break free from the system that blocks ordinary white Americans from fighting against the ‘disease’ of multiculturalism and the unilateral rule of the American elite is to get behind a candidate with tremendous cultural capital who is also capable of funding his own campaign in full.”

Not getting to Facebook

A couple of weeks ago, on my home computer, I started seeing the first image below, that I might have malware on my computer. Frankly, I was afraid THIS WARNING might be some invasive product, but then I came across Facebook Integrates Trend Micro’s HouseCall to Fight Online Threats, from May 20, 2014.

Then there was this from Facebook itself:

When logging in from the infected device, you’ll see a notification screen about a malware infection, along with a recommendation to use F-Secure’s malware scanning and cleanup technology or HouseCall from Trend Micro. Each product contains distinct malware signatures and is suited to different kinds of threats, so we recommend trying the suggested product even if you already have an anti-virus or similar program running on your machine.

You won’t have to worry about maintenance; these versions are up-to-date and will remove themselves once they’re done running.

You can choose to skip the malware removal process and decline to download the recommended scanner. If you skip removing the malware, you may be prompted again later.

You’ll download and run the scanner, during which time you can continue to use Facebook and other services. When the scan is complete, you’ll receive a notification through Facebook and you’ll be able to review the results of the scan.

So, crossing my fingers, I attempted to download the F-Secure product. Well, it was in the download mode ALL DAY LONG. And no, I could NOT log into Facebook on that computer.

Finally, I got the option to download HouseCall. Three minutes later, I got the notification that it wanted to run. Resigned to the process, I tried it. And at some point, over an hour later, I got the notice that the malware file BREX_SAL_RANK was removed, and I was back to normal.

But what IS it? No one seems to know. One person with the same experience wrote: “I Googled for it, and the only references to it were from other puzzled Facebook customers who also wondered what the Hell it was. What it was is a false positive that doesn’t exist… Well, Trend Micro had to find something didn’t it?”

Wotta pain!

Meanwhile

Earlier in the month, I was also having trouble with Facebook at work. I could get there, but I couldn’t post anything original there. I could post on other people’s timelines UNLESS I were posting a link (URL).

I called the tech support guy at work, who, magically, if I cede it, can take over control of my computer. He found five bits of software that were add ons. I deleted three – one I forget, one was Pinterest, and one changed Donald Trump’s name to Donald Drumpf; none I had loaded in the previous 30 days.

The problem went away for a few hours, then returned the next day. But after rebooting my computer, the issues disappeared for good.

I never had any problem with Facebook with my Kindle Fire.

(Oh, and why, you may ask, are all the graphics below? Because when I attempted to integrate them in the text, they lay over the text. )

The takeaway

There were LOTS of messages for which I got email notifications but could not open. Perhaps 70% were deleted, unread. I got a WHOLE lot more judicious when being on the platform. A friend recently declared: “I swear this is almost as much of a life killer as television.” In other words, Less Facebook, more face time.

***

Trend Micro HouseCall

To clean your computer, you’ll need to download and run this free scanner, Trend Micro HouseCall. This will check for and try to remove malware.

By clicking Download, you agree to the Trend Micro HouseCall Terms.

Malware Removal

Downloadselected
Scan and Clean
Finish

Trend Micro HouseCall is now checking your computer and trying to remove any malware that’s found.

You can log into Facebook and the scan will continue working. We’ll send you a Facebook notification when the scan is finished.

Q is for queue

The difficulties at my polling place were replicated all over the city.

The word queue has several meanings. The first I learned is “a braid of hair worn hanging down behind,” which I swear I learned in an episode of the TV western Bonanza, when someone cut off the queue of a Chinese man, bringing the victim dishonor. When I was growing up, my great aunt Deana and I used the word frequently when we played the board game SCRABBLE.

But the meaning I think of usually is “a file or line, especially of people waiting their turn.” Specifically, I think that line that feeds to several cashiers at the drug store, or clerks at the Department of Motor Vehicles, or tellers at a banker. Though it doesn’t seem to be in the definition, I’ve always distinguished it from “line”, such as what one finds at the grocery store, where I’m always in the longest one.

Generally, I prefer the queue to the line. But when the queue breaks down, I remember.

One time was in 1999 when my new bride and I were flying back from our honeymoon in Barbados (thanks, JEOPARDY!), we stopped at New York City’s JFK airport to go through customs. The queue somehow got turned into a figure eight, and we spent an inordinately long time stuck on the bottom part of the number, even as others passed us.

Another time was in 2011, at Niagara Falls when the elevators broke down while we were at the base of a boating area. Some staff tried to create a queue, but it failed miserably.

Since I’m kvetching, the worst voting line I ever experienced was on February 9 of this year. It was a revote of a proposition to renovate Albany High School, which was rejected by a few hundred votes in November. The $179.9 million request in February trimmed over $10 million from the original budget.

I got to the school, where there were three lines, one, I was told by someone in line, to check in, and two to get the ballots. This didn’t make any sense and was incorrect.

In fact, as one of the guys involved with the school district eventually explained, one line was A-G, another H-R, and a third, S-Z. Or something like that, since he said two different lines contained H. In any case, I was in the WRONG line, and had to switch to the end of another.

Halfway through this second line, they run out of ballots. So one of the workers, who worked in the school as a secretary in that school, made copies of a blank ballot. Unfortunately, the copied ballots wouldn’t run through the scanning machine, so the workers had to reconfigure the machine to take the paper ballots to be counted later.

As I was leaving, people became even testier in the queue. The guy who had made an announcement 20 minutes early got all indignant, yelling at the crowd, “I TOLD you what line to be in!” Except that about half of them would not have HEARD the announcement, since they arrived afterward. He managed to take a bad situation and make it worse.

I spent 40 minutes in the process, which should have taken less than a quarter of that. The problem of the lines would have been EASILY remedied if someone had made SIGNS indicating which queue to be in.

The difficulties at my polling place were replicated all over the city, leading to petitions to State Education Commissioner MaryEllen Elia to throw out the results, when the referendum passed by 189 votes. However, she upheld the February vote to rebuild and renovate Albany High School, denying claims that the vote should be invalidated.

“I cannot conclude that petitioners have established that the fundamental fairness of the … bond vote was compromised and I find no basis upon which to overturn the results of the vote,” the commissioner wrote.

Now, this wasn’t nearly as bad as the fiasco that was the 2016 Arizona primary election, which involved people standing in line FIVE HOURS to exercise their franchise.

ABC Wednesday – Round 18

		It looks like your computer is being affected by malware. We’ll help you fix the problem to keep your account secure and prevent malware from spreading to friends.
		Malware is software that tries to steal personal information and causes problems when you use Facebook. Clicking or sharing links that contain spam can give your computer malware.