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.

Useless skills QUESTION

What obsolete skills do YOU have?


My daughter went bowling at a friend’s birthday party, and the machine at the lane kept score. I can keep score in bowling; I learned when I bowled in a league when I was 9. A spare (/) counts 10 plus the next ball, a strike (X) 10 plus the next two balls, which is why one likes to string marks (X and /) together. (A Dutch 200 is a game with alternating strikes and spares.) And sometimes the machine is wrong. It counts pins that are down and vice versa, but I can’t override it, and I hate that.

When I started my current job in 1992, one of my jobs was to operate the electronic bulletin board system. Though I had never heard of such a thing, I eventually became proficient at it, just as it became mostly defunct.

I can still figure out square root with pencil and paper; my calculator can do it in a second or two.

What skills do you have that, because of change in technology, have become obsolete?

January Ramblin’

The Rev. Roger Green was a priest of the Church of England.

Finding a Religious Common Ground. A reminder that the religions that sometimes divide us have much history in common. (CBS Sunday Morning)


From the Wikipedia:
One relatively minor aspect of the [Green Hornet] character that tends to be given limited exposure in the actual productions is his blood relationship to the Lone Ranger, another character created by [Fran] Striker. The Lone Ranger’s nephew was Dan Reid. In the Green Hornet radio shows, the Hornet’s father was likewise named Dan Reid, making Britt Reid the Lone Ranger’s great-nephew.

On November 11, 1947, radio show episode “Too Hot to Handle”, Britt tells his father that he, Britt, is the Green Hornet. After Dan’s initial shock and anger, Dan refers to a vigilante “pioneer ancestor” of theirs that Dan himself had ridden alongside within Texas. As he expressed pride in and love for his son, the Lone Ranger theme briefly played in the background.
The Lone Ranger property was sold to another company in the 1950s, which resulted in a legal complication that precluded The Lone Ranger from being directly associated with the Green Hornet.

And here’s a joint chronology of the Lone Ranger and the Green Hornet.

The Lone Ranger intro
Fred Foy, the announcer of the Lone Ranger, who died in December 2010, recreating the intro
the last 3/4s of the William Tell Overture by Rossini, the final section of which is the Lone Ranger theme

All The World Is Waiting or should be. Interesting history in five minutes, of the best known female character in comics, Wonder Woman.

Who could play the Marvel Comics character, the Black Panther?

Sean Smith resigned as L.A. bureau chief of Entertainment weekly to join the Peace Corps, which he wrote about in this Newsweek article. My favorite paragraph:
“Writing about Hollywood is like being a reporter at Disneyland. At first, you can’t believe that you get to spend every day in The Happiest Place on Earth. Everyone wants to ask you about your work. You’re surrounded by princesses, and the sky sparkles with pixie dust. But as the years go on, you learn about the oily machinery that manufactures all that enchantment. You see what Cinderella’s really like when that glass slipper comes off. And then one day you notice that the magic is gone, and all you’re left with is a small, small world.”

Daniel Johnston’s “Infinite Comic Book of Musical Greatness”
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Google Alert finds

A Friend Like Charlie
Charlie Green is 14 (on Feb. 16) and his father, Roger Green, is 70. They are bound together more than just by blood. It’s music that also binds them.

Teaming up with CareerBuilder provides our national, regional, and local advertisers with access to job seekers in towns and cities where we’ve not traditionally been present,” said Roger Green, Managing Director, Newsquest Digital Media. “Plus it provides our audience with the greatest number of opportunities for jobs and careers.”

Roger Green made this Freedom of Information request to Devon County Council; definitely my kind of thing.

The Rev. Roger Green was the father of Timothy Green. Roger was born about 1611 in England and came to Virginia in 1635 on the ship Abraham at the age of 24 years. The Rev. Roger Green was a priest of the Church of England and was active in establishing the Church of England in Virginia and North Carolina.

Roger Green, age 80, of Huntington [Indiana], died at 9:05 p.m. Monday (January 25, 2010) at Oakbrook Village in Huntington.

Beatles Island Songs, 103-94

OK, a schmaltzy song from Lennon, sung by Starkey, but for over a year, I sang it to my daughter to get her to sleep.


JEOPARDY! answers. Questions at the end.

FAMOUS WOMEN $200: After taking up with John Lennon, she became known as “The Woman Who Broke Up the Beatles”
NONFICTION $400: Vincent Bugliosi took the title of this 1974 book about the Manson murders from a Beatles song
INVENTIONS $200: Name shared by a Beatles album title & an 1835 invention of Samuel Colt

The rules of engagement

103 Words of Love from Beatles for Sale (US), Beatles VI (US). My sisters, neighbor, and I used to lipsynch to this album and charge the neighbor kids a nickel each to watch. I was Lennon and sister Leslie was McCartney. Listened to this Buddy Holly cover a lot.
102 She’s a Woman from the B-side to I Feel Fine (UK), Beatles ’65 (US). A jaunty McCartney tune.
101 I Will from the white album. A lovely McCartney tune, but I always thought it needed to be longer than 1:42, as most of the covers (Ben Taylor, Alison Krauss) are.
100 Paperback Writer, A-side of single (UK), Hey Jude album (US). Not sure that I really liked this song all that much on the first listen, but it grew on me, especially the opening riff.
99 Yellow Submarine from Revolver.  This, b/w Eleanor Rigby, was possibly the first single I ever purchased. And then the album came out, and I was mystified that the response vocal in the last verse started one line later on the album than the single – no, I’m not crazy – confirmed finally on one of those Anthology singles. I like this McCartney song, performed by Starkey, though I’m not convinced that, tone-wise, it belongs on the album.
98 I Need You from Help! In the 1980s, my favorite local radio station had something called Fourplay, four songs related by a theme. I found four songs called “I Need You” – this Harrison song, an obscure Who tune, the ones by America, and I think, Joan Armatrading. Or maybe it was Paul Carrack. They went together surprisingly well.
97 Please Please Me from Please Please Me (UK), Introducing the Beatles/The Early Beatles. About a perfect early pop tune from Lennon.
96 Good Night from the white album. OK, a schmaltzy song, with sappy strings, from Lennon, sung by Starkey, but for over a year, I sang it to my daughter to get her to sleep.
95 Dear Prudence from the white album. Lennon’s song about Mia Farrow’s sister in India. I like that it’s of a specific time and place.
94 Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite! from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. From circus posters Lennon saw. A fun, psychedelic cut.
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JEOPARDY! questions:
Who was Yoko Ono? (But I don’t buy the charge.)
What was “Helter Skelter”?
What is Revolver?

The Lydster, Part 82: The Girl Who Mistook A Coat Rack for Her Mother

Lydia tells her jokes(?) with such relish, I can at least appreciate the delivery, if not the content.


Someone told me, when my daughter was an infant, that she would see me as perfect until she was about 12, then turn on me. That has proven not to be the case. On the contrary, the Daughter is really good at pointing out the errors of both of her parents already, though, like most of us, is less perceptive about her own flaws.

So if I leave something on the floor, or don’t hang up my coat or [horrors] EAT IN THE LIVING ROOM, then I definitely hear about it. Yet she is struck blind by the things on the floor that are hers unless I threaten to vacuum them up.

She laughs when I accidentally misspeak a word, but not so much when I am deliberately trying to be funny.  Meanwhile, I scratch my head at what passes for humor in kindergarten, though she tells her jokes(?) with such relish, I can at least appreciate the delivery, if not the content.

One day, she was upstairs. I was downstairs vacuuming, but when I had finished, I had not yet put back the coat tree in the corner, so it was in the middle of the living room floor. Her mother and I were talking at the dining room table when Lydia came downstairs. The coat nearest her on the coat tree was her mother’s, so she started talking to her mommy. Then she looked over to the dining room table, saw her mother, looked back at the coat rack, walked into the dining room, and continued telling her (actual) mother her story. No embarrassment, no “oops”; I was impressed, actually, as I would have been mortified at her age.

B is for Brain Blips

On 60 Minutes, Lesley Stahl reported on a very rare ability: to remember each day of your life as if it happened yesterday. It’s called ‘superior autobiographical memory’.


A couple of months ago, I came across this interview of Barbara Strauch, author of “The Secret Life of the Grown-up Brain: The Surprising Talent of the Middle-Aged Mind.”

This paragraph jumped out at me: “Strauch notes that people in midlife start experiencing more brain blips. She opens the book in her basement, pondering what she went there for. She asks around, and finds that her middle-aged acquaintances have similar zone-outs.”

I do recognize this. Oh, and this: “Names, in particular, are easy to forget if all we’ve learned is the sound. The more context we have — the more ways something is cross-referenced in our memory banks — the better chance we have of excavating it from storage.”

When we were children, my sisters and I used to razz my grandmother for saying things like, “Oh, that’s the old [such and so] building.” It had never been called that in OUR lifetimes; why couldn’t she call it what it’s called now?

Move forward 40 years. I seriously can’t remember the name of my bank. It used to be Albany Savings Bank, then Albank, then it was purchased by Charter One, then THAT was bought up by Citizens Bank. The brain knows it’s not ASB or Albank, so it settles on Charter One, which, like Citizen’s, starts with the letter C, until I’m trying to look up my bank online.

Likewise, my power company used to be the geographically descriptive Niagara Mohawk, but is now (yawn) National Grid; it DOESN’T help that they both start with the letter N.

Sorry, grandma.

Both Demeur and Arthur have touched on this recently; the latter referred to “holiday brain”. Then there was this piece about adult ADHD, which I swear I experience periodically.

On the other hand, Newsweek magazine had a cover story called Can You Build a Better Brain? Notable is this piece: “taking up a new, cognitively demanding activity—ballroom dancing, a foreign language—is more likely to boost processing speed, strengthen synapses, and expand or create functional networks.”

I was most fascinated by a story on the TV show 60 Minutes. “Lesley Stahl reported on a very rare ability: to remember each day of your life as if it happened yesterday. It’s called ‘superior autobiographical memory’ and scientists have only identified a handful of people in the world who have it. One of them is actress Marilu Henner of ‘Taxi,’ oddly enough.”

I’m not sure I would WANT the ability to remember EVERY day; forgetting DOES have some definite benefits.
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Roger’s brain:

Arthur may have liberal politics on the brain.
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Oh, I need to thank Lily at Long Island Daily Photo for a $100 gift certificate!


ABC Wednesday Round 8

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