Roger O Green

At the Old Ball Game

It’s baseball season already? Two games in the books, played in Japan, and a full slate starting next week. Weren’t some games postponed last year because of snow?

A baseball – will it blend?

Still, I love baseball. I love its traditions. I love its attention to arcane statistics. Speaking of which: What team and in what season did every player with over 300 at-bats had a batting average over .300, the only time in history this has happened?

Baseball is…. narrated by the legendary announcer Ernie Harwell – I have this on CD

The hardest part of the new season is finding out where players got traded to. I know pitcher Johan Santana signed with the Mets and that Mets OF Lastings Milledge was traded, but not much else.

A version of Abbott & Costello’s Who’s On First different from the version I own on CD

Baseball by Bill Cosby, from the album ‘To Russell, My Brother, Whom I Slept With’

According to this story, actor Richard Widmark, who died this week, was the father-in-law of Dodger Hall of Fame pitcher Sandy Koufax.

Baseball and Football by George Carlin: I own a different version on LP. This one seems more recent, more expansive. I most love that final description of football.

The answer to the trivia question: the 1930 St. Louis Cardinals. I did not know that; I would have picked the 1927 Yankees.
***
Oh, and it’s March Madness in college basketball. I know for nothing about it, yet managed to get 15 of 16 right on the first day. I picked Davidson over Georgetown! I picked Siena, located in Albany County, NY over Vanderbilt! And I still lead my pool. The bad news: I had Pitt going to the Final Four, losing to UCLA (with UNC beating Kansas, and UCLA over UNC). All my remaining picks are overdogs. Go, Bruins!

ROG

The Lydster, Part 48: Lydia is Four

Random thoughts for the occasion.

Lots of people say things like, “Can you believe it’s been four years? The time goes by so FAST!” Yes, I believe it’s been four years. I’m never quite sure what I’m supposed to say when folks utter such folk wisdom. Usually, I nod my head and say “Hmmm.”
I’ve been grousing about the early change of the clocks, which may not even save energy. Used to be that when I need Lydia to wake up at 6:20, so we can catch the 7 a.m. bus, I could just raise the shades, and she’d get up. But it’s DARK at what was 5:20 a.m., standard time, in March. She took a couple weeks to adjust to the new time. Heck, I’M still tired in the morning.

She definitely has a pecking order when it comes her playthings. Whereas all of her dolls (most of them called Hannah) used to rule, now it’s the stuffed bears (Elizabeth and TeddyTeddy) and the stuffed lamb. The dolls? “They’re just dolls!”, but the creatures are her “sisters”; very strange.

Lydia is one of the youngest kids in her class and one of the tallest. There may be a boy who’s taller, but he’s several months her senior. She is reasonably well, though she had had a touch of whatever was going around earlier this month. She’s only gained a pound or two in recent months, but is getting harder to lift. She’s been in a real hug and cuddle mood; I hear that this passes, so I shan’t complain.

She’s pretty smart. Some books she reads to me. I don’t think she’s actually reading them as much as reciting from memory based on the pictures, but it’s fun to be read to. She can count to 29; she stubbornly rejected my suggestion for “thirty” in favor of “twenty-ten”. She also knows what the color turquoise is, which I’m pretty sure I didn’t when I was four.

I still am not using the digital camera. These pictures were all on the same disposable camera I’d use then forget about, then use, then misplace. So it’s a lovely coincidence that it covers well the past few months of her life.

Happy birthday, Lydia!

ROG

Roger Answers Your Questions, Nik and Scott

Nik, the expat in New Zealand asks: I’ll go all deep — so has the coverage/reaction to the Obama campaign so far made you MORE hopeful about race in America or LESS hopeful?

Scott asks: Clinton aide Ferraro makes a racist-type remark about Obama, and the Clinton campaign barely has to say anything to be excused. The pastor of the church Obama attends (who is not working for Obama) makes racist-type remarks, and Obama has to continually distance himself from them. It seems obvious to me that racism is even present in this scenario. How do you feel about these events?

OK. Let me try to answer this in a coherent way, because I’ve found the last week rather mind-boggling. First, I’ve long thought that Barack Obama’s attempt to run a campaign for President of the United States without race being a major issue was incredibly naive and/or disingenuous. I didn’t think that country is/was “post-racial” enough for that. I figured that, sooner or later, race would come to the fore. And it did, in subtle ways with Bill Clinton comparing Obama’s South Carolina win to Jesse Jackson’s; hey, they’re both black. But here’s the thing: as much as Barack has tried to downplay it, pssst, he is partly black.
And notice how well Obama’s done among the different constituent over time. He wowed ’em in Iowa, a largely white state, which made some black Americans nervous. But once it appeared the Hillary Clinton campaign was trying to paint Barack as black, playing, if you will, the “race card”, he became the “black” candidate. The Mississippi primary is instructive, as Obama got about 90% of the black vote and less than 30% of the white vote.
The Jeremiah Wright situation was problematic not just for the reverend’s rhetoric but because it reminded people once again: he goes to a black church; he must be…black!
Geraldine Ferraro was clumsy in her wording. She could have said something like “the black community must be very proud how well Barack is doing” and gotten across the same message – that he’s a black man – and still be on the Hillary team.
So, Nik, in answer to your specific question – am I MORE hopeful about race in America or LESS hopeful? – the answer is yes. I thought it was a GREAT speech that Obama gave last week, one that made me MORE sure of Obama than before, but as I noted here, it’s been misinterpreted or heard merely in soundbites.
Scott, I don’t know that the coverage is racist as much as it’s “If it bleeds, it leads” inflammatory. The perception I’m getting that, OK, he’s the Obama pastor for 20 years; let’s say he was sitting in the pews for 50 weeks a year. This means that Barack and his wife heard this “God Damn AmeriKKKa” rhetoric 1000 times AND subjected their daughters to it dozens of times as well. The assumption seems to be that’s the sermon topic EVERY week, which is clearly not the case by all informed reports. So Barack, a state senator in Springfield, 200 miles and over 3 hours away from Chicago for a number of years before being in Washington, DC, probably hadn’t heard hundreds of examples of vitriol, as the case seemed to be painted.

Finally, slightly off the topic, I started attending a (predominantly white) church in Albany in June 1982, started attending regularly in January 1983, became a member in December 1984, and took on leadership roles in the church. Stuff happened often – I won’t get into it here, but it involved the pastor – but it wasn’t until February 2000 that I largely stopped attending, and I was still going to meetings at my old church as late as August 2000. It wasn’t until 2002 that I ended my membership with my old church and joined my new one. So I sympathize greatly with the notion that one just doesn’t abandon one’s church lightly, for the people are the church, not the pastor.

ROG

iTunes MEME

From Johnny B.:

Instructions: Open up your iTunes and fill out this survey, no matter how embarrassing the responses might be.

How many songs total: 829
How many hours or days of music: 2.1 days

Most recently played: Billy Joel- Elvis Presley Boulevard
Most played: Simon & Garfunkel – A Simple Desultory Philippic
Most recently added: Mike Nesmith, Complete First National Band Recordings

Sort by song title:
First Song: About a Girl-Nirvana
Last Song: Zydeco Gris Gris- BeauSoleil

Sort by time:
Shortest Song: “Eat for Two” 10,000 Maniacs (cut off)(0:16); Holiday Greetings from Hello (Hello Family Santa Special) (0:20)
Longest Song: 17:07 (some unidentified noodling song; in fact the 11 longest songs are all unknown)
Longest song I can actually identify: Africa Talks to You (8:45) Sly & the Family Stone from There’s a Riot Going On

Sort by album:
First album: Amandla! soundtrack
Last album: Toy Story 2 soundtrack

First song that comes up on Shuffle: Graceland- Willie Nelson

Search the following and state how many songs come up:
Death – 0
Life – 15
Love – 56
Hate – 2
You – 76
Sex – 2
ROG

Roger Answers Your Questions, Scott and GayProf

Happy Easter! Appropriately, I’m answering questions from a couple of good eggs.

Scott, who I recently offered a few questions to, has responded in kind.

1. Who do you think will win the NL East this year?

Why, the M-M-M-M-Meh-Meh-Meh-Meh. I’d rather not say; I don’t want to jinx them. They have a new front-line pitcher which should avoid that near-record collapse from last year.

2. Who is your favorite singer?

Gee, that’s hard. I like lots of different singers for a lot of different moods. People such as Nat King Cole and Sam Cooke certainly would be on the list, but so would a lot of rockers. I find it difficult to separate the vocal from the material. Mike Love of the Beach Boys has a bit of a nasally sound to his voice, yet those BB songs on which he sings lead work for me. Other living singers? Cassandra Wilson immediately comes to mind.

3. Who is your favorite comic book hero? (Gay Prof adds: “I hope the answer to question number 3 from Scott is Wonder Woman.”)

Oh, GP, I so do hate disappointing you. Let me explain how I got into comics in college. A new friend of mine collected them. I thought he was crazy, then I started looking at them. The first one I bought was Luke Cage, Hero for Hire #1. I thought he was pretty cool. (Later, he decided to change his name to the boring Power Man, and my interest waned.)
Luke Cage appeared in the shadows of Amazing Spider-Man #122 and was on the cover of #123, which got me interested in the webslinger. At about the same time, I was interested in Sub-Mariner #50 (or so) at a point when Bill Everett, the golden age artist who had created Namor, returned to the book. In fact, Sub-Mariner was the first book I sought out back issues of. I got into the Defenders because Namor was in it, then the Avengers because of the Defenders-Avengers war. So I was a Marvel zombie. I’d say my favorites are Spider-Man, Namor and Luke Cage, but I discount anything that might have happened in the last decade or so.
Conversely, I really wasn’t interested in the mainline DC superheroes that eventually bored me in my childhood (Superman, Batman, Flash). By the time I DID look at Wonder Woman, she wasn’t even wearing the star-spangelled garb. These stories were so damn EARNEST – they marketed some of them as “Women’s Lib” issues – their term, not mine. I owned this particular issue, maybe my first, but didn’t stay with it long, I’m afraid, GP.

4. What was your favorite subject in school?

Spelling. Eye wuz allwayz a gud speler. And math. I always liked arithmetic and algebra. I like how if you have a long number and the digit adds up to nine, then it’s divisible by nine. Numbers are magic. I’m more likely to remember someone’s phone number than someone’s name.

5. What was the toughest subject for you in school?

Shop. I had it in seventh and eighth grade – wood, ceramics and something else. The wood items never came out evenly; the ceramic things kept blowing up in the kiln. Strangely, ninth grade metal shop wasn’t so bad, maybe because the tools were more precise so I couldn’t muck things up so much.

GayProf: My question would be what food is your ultimate “comfort food?”

Mac and cheese. My wife makes it, grating the cheese. We’re not talking blue boxes of Kraft here.

Scott, I’ll answer your other question soon; it’s tied into Nik’s, and should best be answered together.

ROG