Roger O Green

Roger Answers Your Questions, Jaquandor

From the guy from Buffalo who does Byzantium Shores.

1. If they re-did the Jeopardy! eligibility rules so you could try out again, would you?

Quite possibly so. I feel ever so slightly jealous that they doubled the values a couple years after I was on. This doesn’t mean I would have won $35,200 instead of $17,600 when I played, but it made me wonder. Of course, maybe I’d suck at the game now. Certainly, I’d go in the next three years, when I’d be 60, or not at all.

Somehow I feel like one of those baseball players who came along just before free agency.

2. In retrospect: Should Spitzer have resigned?

In retrospect, no, but that whole thing wasn’t going down “in retrospect”. It wasn’t his sexual behavior that did him in, it was his hypocrisy. Truth is that he never had the patience to be governor; things he could have bullied people to do as Attorney General, with the force of law on his side, could not be achieved as Governor, where give and take is more the requirement.

No doubt that if he were not tainted, he might have continued to sound the alarm about the Wall Street fiasco, as he was working on as Attorney General. Equally true that Wall Street as happy to see him go. The truth of the matter is that I wish he had stayed as AG, but he would have had to resign that position as well, once the Customer Number Nine stuff came out.

I continue to be fascinated by sexual scandals in terms of who gets to stay in office and who has to go. I always thought that Bill Clinton got to stay because there was a general feeling that 1) he already had a reputation as a womanizer, so he didn’t have the hypocrite label slapped on him (only the “liar” label) and 2) that the impeachment over sex, and lying about it, was an overreach for something that started off as an investigation of a land deal.

3. What the hell is going on with the Catholic Church? I mean, seriously: WTF?!

The church seems to continue to be tone deaf to the scandal. Some archbishop in New York State is attacking the attackers of the Pope, as though THEY were the problem instead of the pedophile priests and the system that protected them.

SamuraiFrog had a good post about this. The church
treated it as an “internal matter”, fearing that somehow admitting it and exposing it would undermind its moral authority. Have they not learned from Watergate? It’s the COVER UP that REALLY underminds their moral authority. If they’d gotten in front of this even 30 years ago – John Paul II became Pope in 1978 – then it would have been painful, yes, but not this drip-drip-drip of scandal.

Mr. Frog notes the fact that the church feels selectively persecuted/prosecuted for its religion, that other people did wrong things. OK, and the church also claims that its first Pope knew Jesus personally, which, I’d like to suggest, places it at a slightly higher standard.

The Catholic hierarchy for years has been blaming this problem on the United States’ culture and society, as though it had been the “permissive” Americans who regularly ignore Papal dictates on issues such as birth control as the problem. Classic misdirection, but it did not “take”, given the worldwide problem.

And the “it happened a long time ago – get over it” argument, not just on this issue, but any issue, such as institutional racism and sexism, has always irritated the crap out of me. Let me say it again: the persecutors oughtn’t be able to say “Let’s move on” without the adequate response of not only apologizing for the problem, but, to the degree possible, rectifying the problem. This is why the Armenians in Turkey are still, and rightly from my POV, kvetching about the 1915
genocide that the Turkish government still denies.

As someone who protected a priest who had victimized 200 boys, the former Cardinal Ratzinger has given new meaning to “papal bull”.
***
Remember last month when I directed you to a link to my guest review for Trouble with Comics, then it went away? Well, as Bullwinkle J. Moose says, This time for sure!

ROG

Happy Easter

One is supposed to associate Easter with life, resurrection. But I instinctively think of 4/4 as the date of death, specifically the death of Martin Luther King, Jr. Interestingly, the first Easter landing on 4/4 after MLK’s assassination in 1968 didn’t take place until 1999. Then, there’s 2010, 2021, and then not until 2083, when I’ll be 110. Gotta reframe here.

I also feel lousy (chills, sore throat), though better than a couple days ago, when I had to forgo the Maundy Thursday service, so that doesn’t help. I need to go through the agony to get to the ecstasy, I suppose.

Easter is also discombobulated for me this year because I won’t be at my church for it. One gets comfortable with one’s own ritual, understandably. Working on getting to that Jacquie Lawson electronic card feeling. Or something like that.

In a sermon a few weeks ago, the guest preacher asked us to each think of the person we dislike the most. After considering Pat Robertson and Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck was the person I finally settled on. After a few seconds, she proclaimed, “Remember, God loves that person as much as He loves you!” Ouch, does that poke a finger in one’s faith, perhaps.

One of the things I will miss is people from the congregation joining with the choir to sing Halleluhah! by Handel. So, in that tradition, Hallelujah Chorus by silent monks.

ROG

Binghamton, My Battered Hometown

It was a year ago today when my hometown became the latest victim of seemingly random violence. I usually steer away from the phrase “senseless violence”, because it gives the impression that violence is sensible. One can argue that it is necessary, such as in self-defense, but not that it’s sensible.

In any case, I wrote this piece last year, and posted it elsewhere but I never actually posted it in THIS blog, to my surprise. So on the anniversary of the event here’s what I wrote. The * is to an article link that no longer works.
***
I grew up on Gaines Street in Binghamton, NY’s First Ward (or The Ward, as it was commonly referred to.) Gaines is a one-block street between Oak and Front Streets. When I walked to high school, I’d pass one house before heading south on Front Street. I’d go by the houses that were on my newspaper route a couple years earlier – the Evening and Sunday Press, back in the days when the city of 70,000 had two newspapers six days a week. Invariably, I’d look up Dickinson Street so see in the distance my elementary/junior high school, Daniel S. Dickinson. Then I’d go by the place I used to attend Bible study, followed closely by the American Civic Association, then turn right onto Main Street to get to Binghamton Central high School.

The ACA was not just a place I went by, though. My late father, Les Green, was active in the civil rights front and the Association was active in trying to bring different people together, so he had some relationship with the place, the specifics of which unfortunately escape me.

What I do remember, though, is the fact that my father, sister Leslie and I performed there at least once as the Green Family Singers, with a repertoire of folk, gospel and popular songs. More ingrained in my mind is the fact that in March of 1969, I had my 16th birthday party there. This was an extravagant act on the part of my parents, I thought, renting out the hall for my friends and me. (I specifically recall my father catching one couple making out in a closet.) I still remember some of the presents I received, including Judy Collins’ Who Knows Where the Time Goes.

Then on April 3, 2009, the place of some very pleasant memories became the location of yet another batch of senseless violence. Reading the coverage was not an act of disengaged voyeurism; I walked those streets shown on the television, probably a thousand times or more. And my hometown, now a city of 45,000, with but one public high school that was for a time in lockdown that day, became, most awfully, the lead story on the evening news.

Reading the reports, I couldn’t help noting that there are those who will always comment on a story to drive home their agenda. In the city’s now single local paper’s website*, along with expressions of sympathy, distress about the human condition, requests for more help for the mentally ill, and people on both sides of the gun control issue were xenophobic rants about immigration, as though that were the lesson to be learned. I happened across this list of recent mass killings – which I did not even have to look for – makes such a conclusion just bizarre to my mind.

I will save the whys for later. Right now, all I can do is grieve for my hometown in a way that words fail.
ROG

Theological QUESTIONS

I was talking to my Jehovah’s Witness buddy on the bus the other day. Frankly, I agree with him a lot more than not, and he certainly knows his Bible. So I was surprised that he thought that we were in the end times, that the things that are happening NOW suggest the Armageddon foretold in Revelation.

Having read the Epistles, I believe people have predicting the Lord was coming back at least since Saint Paul was on the earth (which, not incidentally, predates the writing of Revelation), that these particular circumstances (Israel as a nation, the United Nations as an entity that will try to create a one-world secular government in violation of God’s will, and all the earthquakes, floods, etc. worldwide) are the signs of the End Times. Well, maybe. I’m of the school that “No one knows the day or time when the Lord comes”, so you might as well live your lives loving each other, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked and the like.

Meanwhile, the sermon at church on Sunday was useful in another way. I know there is evil in the world, but haven’t attributed it to a personified devil, Satan, Lucifer, the accuser since I was a teenager. Apparently, most people don’t; how else could we make devil’s food cake, deviled eggs and buy Underwood deviled ham, with a little red devil character right on the can?

So, a couple of lighthearted questions for Good Friday:
1. How do you think the world ends? With a bang or a whimper? In lack certainty, so I don’t really worry about it. I DO doubt that the UN will be the vehicle through which a one-government body will arise, if it ever does; it’d much more likely be via the multinational corporations pulling the strings than the US, Iran, Israel, China, and Russia all ceding authority to a controlling government.

2. Do you believe in a personified Devil? I don’t. As a monotheist, which I am, if there is one God, then making “the Devil” like unto God seems wrong.

But what do YOU think?
***
And all he asks of us is we give each other love
– Marvin Gaye (April 2, 1939 – April 1, 1984)
God is Love, from the What’s Goin’ On album
Album version
Extended mix

ROG

CREATIVE PUNS FOR EDUCATED MINDS

The Popsicles that my daughter eat have these puns on the stick. You can see the question, or at least most of it, on the handle, but you have to eat the treat in order to get the punchline. (EXAMPLE: What do you call a sleeping cow? A bulldozer.) These types of jokes the daughter doesn’t quite get yet, but will probably be telling next year.

As I’ve noted before, I can be, I’m told, rather funny, but I can’t tell a joke to save my life. And the only jokes I can remember have punchlines that are terrible puns, specifically this one, which, in spite of its title, is NOT “the world’s funniest joke.” (More groaners here and here.)

I’m sure someone – I’m guessing one of my sisters – sent these along, and far be it for me to let them go to waste. (For singers and musicians, Holy Week is hell week, of a sort).

1. The roundest knight at King Arthur’s round table was Sir Cumference. He acquired his size from too much pi.

2. I thought I saw an eye doctor on an Alaskan island, but it turned out to be an optical Aleutian

3. She was only a whiskey maker, but he loved her still.

4.. A rubber band pistol was confiscated from algebra class because it was a weapon of math disruption.

5. The butcher backed into the meat grinder and got a little behind in his work.

6. No matter how much you push the envelope, it’ll still be stationery.

7. A dog gave birth to puppies near the road and was cited for littering.

8. A grenade thrown into a kitchen in France would result in Linoleum Blownapart.

9. Two silk worms had a race. They ended up in a tie.

10. Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.

11. A hole has been found in the nudist camp wall. The police are looking into it.

12. Atheism is a non-prophet organization.

13. Two hats were hanging on a hat rack in the hallway. One hat said to the other, “You stay here; I’ll go on a head.”

14. I wondered why the baseball kept getting bigger. Then it hit me.

15. A sign on the lawn at a drug rehab center said: “Keep off the Grass.”

16. A small boy swallowed some coins and was taken to a hospital. When his grandmother telephoned to ask how he was, a nurse said, “No change yet.”

17. A chicken crossing the road is poultry in motion.

19. The short fortune-teller who escaped from prison was a small medium at large.

20. The man who survived mustard gas and pepper spray is now a seasoned veteran.

21. A backward poet writes inverse.

22. In democracy it’s your vote that counts. In feudalism it’s your count that votes.

23.&nb sp; When cannibals ate a missionary, they got a taste of religion.

24. Don’t join dangerous cults: Practice safe sects!

And Mark Evanier supplies even more of them
***
I was in the supermarket yesterday, and on the cover of People, Us weekly, InTouch, the National Enquirer amd a couple other publications near the checkout counter was the sad face of Sandra Bullock, and not because she just won the Oscar. I know she’s the bigger star than Wyatt Earp, or whoever she’s married to, but it seems unfair.

Anyway, this song by the Main Ingredient, featuring Cuba Gooding Sr., came to mind, appropriate for the day: Everybody Plays the Fool.

ROG