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.

The salvation that is Ask Roger Anything

it doesn’t seem quite so onerous when YOU ask me to write about the very same topics. Why IS that?

At some point last month, I happen to notice that I had 3600 blog posts published on this blog. This is not really worthy of noting here, but I did mention it on Facebook, adding “millstone or milestone.” At which point, someone said something correct – about it being either one or the other if I let it, or something like that; I can never find anything on FB, even things I write myself.

I was having a terrible time in that period completing posts. I had plenty to write about, but few posts were coming together. Part of that was how terrible the news was Continue reading “The salvation that is Ask Roger Anything”

Leonard Cohen is 80

Judy Collins and Leonard Cohen each had a huge impact on the other’s career

Leonard_CohenI don’t have a lot of the music of Leonard Cohen, “Canadian singer-songwriter, musician, poet, and novelist.” I have a lot of Leonard Cohen music.

OK, I only have one or two of his albums, on vinyl, and none on CD. He is an acquired taste as a singer, yet I must say that I’ve added his new album, Popular Problems, to my wish list, and not just because he could use the money.

But I have a number of songs written by Cohen and performed by other artists Continue reading “Leonard Cohen is 80”

Sophia Loren is 80

Sophia Loren was the first performer to win an Oscar for a foreign-language performance.

sophia-lorenWhen I was growing up, there were women who were supposed to be most beautiful: Marilyn Monroe, Bridget Bardot, among them.

Somehow, though, I was most fascinated by Sophia Loren, the poor Italian girl who became a star. Long before I ever saw her in a full-length film, I’d catch her on some part of a Saturday afternoon movie on TV and was captivated. And I still am.

In Binghamton, there were “art films” at the Robinson Center when I was a teenager, and I’m sure there was a Loren film or two, though I don’t recall specifically which ones.

She was the first performer to win an Oscar for a foreign-language performance, Best Actress in 1962, playing Cesira in Vittorio De Sica’s Two Women.

Here are some links:

Ahead of her time?

A series of photos of Sophia Loren at the height of her fame — made by her great friend and LIFE photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt.

She sings Zou Bisou Bisou.

She dances flamenco.

The movie Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, directed by her husband, the late Carlo Ponti.

Her IMDB page.

Her life and career, from oscars.org.

A documentary – from biography.com.

Timeless beauty Sophia Loren, 79, stuns in chic pantsuit as she arrives hand-in-hand with son Edoardo Ponti to film screening.

There is no point to Talk Like A Pirate Day. Which is the point.

Roberto Clemente, the Pittsburgh Pirates Hall of Famer, would have been 80 last month.

pirates.Twain

I created one of these Talk Like A Pirate Day posts some years back and got criticism from someone who thought pirates were terrible, awful. I’m thinking that it was around the time the pirates around Somalia were so prominent. My response, naturally, was, arrrgh.

Even the official site knows this:

Pirates were and are bad people. Really reprehensible. Even the most casual exploration of the history of pirates (and believe us, casual is an accurate description of our research) leaves you hip deep in blood and barbarity. We recognize this, all right? We aren’t for one minute suggesting that real, honest-to-God pirates were in any way, shape or form worth emulating.

So what is it exactly that we’re celebrating here, if not pirates? What, you’re wondering, is the point?

We’re going to be painfully honest here, perhaps fatally so.

The point is, there is no point.

And that’s what’s fun about Talk Like a Pirate Day specifically, and talking like a pirate in general.

We’re talking about the mere image of swaggering pirateness.


The Treasure of Bedford County.
“Pirate logic … goes down the following path: If you steal a lot of gold, you can’t use all of it right away, because that will provoke the suspicion of others. Assuming that there are banks or other such financial institutions one your area of the world and your era, you can hide some there, maybe, but you run the same risk of discovery. You can’t keep the gold in your home because (a) you may not have a home, being a seafarer and (b) your house would probably be an obvious place for a would-be thief to look. (Check the flour.) And it’s not like you can rely on the local authorities to protect your loot from others, bribes aside, because you stole the loot in the first place. The solution, of course, is to bury the treasure, draw a map, and mark the treasure’s location with an ‘X.'”

The Lorain County Correctional Institution shows pirated movies to prisoners, even as inmates serve time for illegally downloading movies.
“How do you expect someone to be rehabilitated when there are authority figures that are running those institutions that are copyright infringing?”

Most people don’t stop to think that when they grab that “free” book they’re stealing from the creator of the book. “After all, it’s just one little book, right? All those one little books add up, though, and this [45-cent check] is the result of it. So, for the titles I spent a couple of hundred dollars promoting and bringing to my readers, I have earned the grand total of less than $50.”

What do Steve Jobs, George W. Bush, Martha Stewart, the Eiffel Tower, Pluto, and the entire Dark Ages have in common with the Roman Empire, Somali pirates, Three Mile Island, and the survivors of the Holocaust?
“All have been sued by Jonathan Lee Riches.”

The closing scene and end credits suite from Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End.

The Lost Home Run.
“On October 13, 1960, the Pittsburgh Pirates and the New York Yankees were tied in the bottom of the 9th inning in the seventh (and, necessarily, final) game of the World Series.” Bing Crosby figures prominently into the story.

“No No: A Dockumentary” chronicles the amazing life of Dock Ellis, a pitcher for the Pittsburgh Pirates who in 1970 pitched a no-hitter while tripping on LSD.

The enduring mystery of Roberto Clemente’s bat. The Pirates Hall of Famer would have been 80 last month.

Political Polarization in the American Public

Those on the opposite ends of the ideological spectrum disagree about everything from the type of community in which they prefer to live to the type of people they would welcome into their families.

political_polarizationA couple of months ago, I came across this Pew Research poll:

“Republicans and Democrats are more divided along ideological lines – and partisan antipathy is deeper and more extensive – than at any point in the last two decades.” Yeah, I rather assumed that.

“In 2004, only about one in ten Americans were uniformly liberal or conservative across most values. Today, the share who are ideologically consistent has doubled.” And these trends manifest themselves in myriad ways, both in politics and in everyday life…

“The level of antipathy that members of [Republicans and Democrats] feel toward the opposing party has surged over the past two decades. Not only do greater numbers of those in both parties have negative views of the other side, but those negative views are also increasingly intense. And today, many go so far as to say that the opposing party’s policies threaten the nation’s well-being…”

I have to think that partisan media outlets, and less-than-rational beings on the information highway, fuel this divide.

“On every measure of engagement, political participation is strongly related to ideology and partisan antipathy; those who hold consistently liberal or conservative views, and who hold strongly negative views of the other political party, are far more likely to participate in the political process than the rest of the nation…

“Liberals and conservatives are divided over more than just politics. Those on the opposite ends of the ideological spectrum disagree about everything from the type of community in which they prefer to live to the type of people they would welcome into their families…

Thus we often have fewer opportunities to engage with someone not sharing our philosophy, unless you call rancorous online bile rantings “engaging.” In other words, we are totally umbrageous.

Pretty depressing stuff, for me.

Yet I hold out some faint hope that maybe we can figure each other out. From BillMoyers.com:

“A large body of political scientists and political psychologists now concur that liberals and conservatives disagree about politics in part because they are different people at the level of personality, psychology and even traits like physiology and genetics.“

If we could understand how each other ticks, maybe we could understand the other’s POV better, and that could foster some sort of rapprochement. At least that’s my theory, which beats just being morose about the whole thing.

Social media & sharing icons powered by UltimatelySocial