Roger O Green

Ask Roger Anything, Solstice Edition

Now that it’s summer (or winter, depending), it is time to Ask Roger Anything. Oh, but wait – I’m distracted by somebody who recently noted that if people from space came to Earth, they might conclude the South Pole is the top of the world and the North Pole is on the bottom; after all there is a large land mass. Or maybe they’d pick some point on the equator or the Tropic of Cancer. Is our sense of top and bottom somewhat arbitrary?

Usually I do this because I’m afraid I’ll run out of things to write about. This is not the case presently; I have three or four blogposts re my trip to North Carolina alone. I am, though, having trouble actually composing them, or even deciding if I should. Answering YOUR questions gives me opportunity to muse on them some more.

Anyway, I already have a question from SB: “So perhaps you’ve already written about this, but I’d be interested to hear how libraries continue to change and evolve with stuff like Twitter and Facebook. Do libraries have their own Facebook badges? Is that – gasp! – allowed?”

Our library has a Facebook page, which is fueled in part from our blog feed. We have a Twitter feed that keeps both our blog and our website fresh. Our Facebook badge is a variation on the SBDC logo.

I’ve seen over 1000 libraries on both Twitter and Facebook, and I’d guesstimate that there are tens of thousands of librarians who are on one or both of the sites; I am on those, LinkedIn and a couple others.

The Library of Congress has over 10,000 followers but is following, last I checked, no one. At least the Library Journal is following a couple hundred while it is followed by over 5,000. I – and apparently others – had contacted the LOC about this, and the folks responded, rather quickly, that were worried that there would be too much noise in the feed. I’m not sure I agree with their thought process.

So, any other questions, folks? Everything is on the table. Let your mind get creative.
ROG

Father’s Day 2009

As usual, I’m missing my father, glad to be Lydia’s father, and wishing that my father and my daughter had met.

I’ve been musing about this for a while: do guys say, “I love being a dad” the way some women say, “I love being a mom”? I mean I love being LYDIA’S dad, but it’s not the same thing.

You know what cereal commercial I hated? The one for Kix that went: “Kids like Kix for what Kix has got. Moms like Kix for what Kix has not.” It seemed to suggest that dads didn’t care what was in their children’s breakfast food. Not true, and the implication made me a bit peevish.

I really liked traveling with Lydia, just the two of us. Save for a couple 1.5-hour bus trips from Albany to Oneonta and back, we don’t travel alone together beyond the routes of the CDTA regional bus system. She traveled well. She was momentarily peeved when I had to put her tray table in its upright and locked position until she realized that EVERYBODY had to do that.

Lydia made me a drawing for Father’s Day. Drawing seems to be the gift for every occasion of late: birthdays, Christmas, anniversaries.

From AwesomeStories:

In 1909, Sonora Smart Dodd was listening to a Mother’s Day sermon when she wondered why people didn’t celebrate Father’s Day. After her mom’s death, Sonora’s dad – William Jackson Smart, a Civil-War veteran – had raised all of his children alone.

To show her gratitude, Sonora worked to have Father’s Day celebrated during June – the month of William’s birth. She was successful, and the event took place on the 19th of June, 1910. Fourteen years later, Father’s Day had become so important in America that President Coolidge recommended it should be a national holiday.

It was President Lyndon Johnson, though, who designated the date as the third Sunday of June and President Nixon who formally instituted Father’s Day as a time of national observance.

And … in case you didn’t know … the rose is the official Father’s Day flower. Red is for fathers who are living; white is for fathers who have died.

ROG

Ray Davies Is 65 – tomorrow

I think I may have heard the Kinks’ All Day and All of the Night as an in-store play in a Binghamton, NY department store called Philadelphia Sales. It seemed to be the loudest, most unrelenting piece of music I ever heard; I loved it.

The Kinks seemed to go in and out of fashion. There was the early success, then a second wave in the early 1970s (Victoria, Lola, Apeman) to some spotty success in the late 1970s (Superman) and somewhat greater acclaim in the early 1980s (Come Dancing, Don’t Forget to Dance).

I’ve been listening to a lot of Kinks music this month. One is the The Ultimate Collection, a 2002 greatest hits compilation. It’s a great grouping of songs, though it does not include the minor hit Destroyer [YouTube video], which cops the main riff from All Day and All of the Night, and the storyline is a continuation of the Lola saga. Fortunately, that song and Give The People What They want both show up on a live Kinks album I own.

Nor does the collection contain anything from my favorite Kinks album, the 1971 release Muswell Hillbillies. It was their debut album on RCA Records after their previous contract had expired. “The album is named after the Muswell Hill area of London, where band leader Ray Davies and guitarist Dave Davies grew up and where the band formed in the early 1960s.” The album bombed horribly, especially in contrast to the hits, but I enjoyed it greatly. It has elements of Dixieland jazz, dance hall tunes, and country. While Alcohol is probably my favorite song, I recall going around at the time saying, in the manner of Complicated Life, “Why is life soooo COM-plicated?”

I’m pleased to note that Ray Davies’ Other People’s Lives was one of my favorite albums in 2006. I noted at the time: “Given its long gestation period, an amazingly coherent album.”

So Ray Davies has had a positive musical effect on me for over four decades. Happy early birthday, Ray.

Old friend of mine with Ray late in 2005 or early in 2006.
ROG

What I Am

My old friend Uthaclena (and by OLD, I mean more than a week older than I am) got all philosophically musing on us recently. Worker, son, husband, father, this-and-that. These are not just voices – these are personae and skill sets, some greater, some lesser, a psychic closet of costumes and masks from among which we may select.

I am a son, brother, husband, father. But I have, either by my own doing, or those imposed on me, been defined by other roles.

Bus guy – not only is CDTA a primary form of transportation for me, but I’m pretty good at answering questions about the best way to get from here to there by bus – or IF one can get there. Assuming I’ve ridden the route more than a couple times, I can pretty much suss out the system.

Bicycle guy – though I barely rode for a year for various reasons, there are folks who know me from one two-wheeler or another.

Cereal guy – I swear there are people in my building who don’t even know my name but could tell you what I have for breakfast (or occasionally lunch) each weeekday: Cheerios and/or Spoom-Size Shredded Wheat.

JEOPARDY! guy – it’s sorta like the Oscars. OK, more like the Golden Globes.

Luddite guy or alternatively, computer guy – the former is most definitely true. I remember someone who was talking about compression of my iTunes folder; I was just happy I could figue out how to download music at all. And don’t get me started about my cellphone. Yet some people who are even more inept technologically than I am keep asking questions that even I can answer.

Blog guy – less from this blog as from the other blog, even though I’ve been doing this one for over three years longer. It helps that occasionally, the text has appeared in the newspaper, providing a faux sense of authority.

Black guy – often I’m the only black male in a situation. So if someone who didn’t know me by name were to ask who I was in a group, he or she might ask: “Who is that balding guy?” Well, they could, but it’d probably be more efficient, and not at all racialist, to ask the more obvious question.

I took one of those personality tests a while back, and I’m an INFP:
Extraverted 16% Introverted 84%
Sensing 47% Intuition 53%
Thinking 32% Feeling 68%
Judging 16% Perceiving 84%
Some people are surprised that I am as introverted as I score; I am not.

So, to quote the musings of a fellow March Piscean, a Roger named Daltry, who are YOU?
***
Here’s something really silly:

Created by OnePlusYou – Free Dating Site

This rating was determined based on the presence of the following words:

death (5x) breast (3x) dead (2x) vulva (1x)
***

My sister asked, and I don’t know. Does anyone know who produced “Daily Bread”, shown here?

ROG

Macca and Ebert

It’s James Paul McCartney’s 67th birthday.

I continue to like about 50% of Macca’s output. Never really warmed to the Fireman album as I did Chaos and Creation. But I LOVED this ~~bootl~~ unauthorized recording of Paul doing Beatles songs someone sent me. Some are straight covers, but others, notably Yesterday and Hey Jude are just plain goofy; in the former, rabbits are mentioned.

There’s always one story in Beatlefan magazine that I treasure. The March/April 2009 edition is no exception. Bruce Spizer did a tribute to Alan Livingston. Don’t know who he was? He was the one who signed the Beatles to Capitol Records. The bare facts of his life are reflected on the Wikipedia page, but not his personality. As Livingston’s widow recalled, he was the one who recognized the group’s full potential and put the resources of Capitol Records behind the group. Here’s a different, less in-depth Livingston interview. But his career ran from Bozo to Sinatra and from Beatles to Star Wars; he was president of entertainment at 20th Century Fox when the movie was being developed. Livingston died on March 13, 2009 at the age of 91 and without him, you might not have heard of Paul McCartney.

It’s also Roger Joseph Ebert’s 67th birthday. I used to watch Ebert & Roeper religiously, and before that, Siskel & Ebert. Lately, I’ve been more interested in his non-film essays than his reviews. His recent essay about death is a prime example. Always engaging.

Happy birthday, Paul and Roger.
ROG

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