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.
My sister Leslie went on the 2025 Dave Coz cruise. Someone described it as a “24/7 daytime adventure from Amsterdam to Norway and finally Iceland. The sun never sets this time of year. Wow, what an excursion.”
The website says, “Our guests are fully immersed with the energy and sounds of an array of all-star talent, guided tours, relaxation, and fine dining. ‘Seeing the world together through music’; that’s what the Dave Koz and Friends at Sea cruise is all about!” The 2026 tour of Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina is already sold out, and a waitlist exists.
Leslie has been on a few of these Koz tours, generally as the guest of Rebecca Jade, a ship performer and, not coincidentally, Leslie’s daughter. Based on her comments and those reposted by others, Leslie was particularly taken by Iceland.
In 2018, Leslie dueted with Larry Graham of Sly and the Family Stone. She’s participated in some music competitions onboard and has done well, which is not a surprise, as she’s been singing virtually all her life.
In anticipation of her birthday, I played a CD called Harbor City Heights Worship 2009 on which she appears. It’s not a fair representation of the range of her skills, and they misspell her first name as Lesley(!), but I can hear her vocals, usually in the harmonies. Anyway, I found it on YouTube.
I have other recordings of hers, mostly her solos during her church’s Advent/Christmas Eve services. Alas, I’ve never come across any Green Family Singers recordings.
Genealogy
In the past year, Leslie has spoken to two of our cousins, one each on our mother’s and father’s side, trying to fill the holes in the family tree. As I’ve noted, our lineage has peculiar mysteries, going back not that far.
Anyway, happy birthday, Leslie! If you ever retire, you must transcribe all that family data!
As a follow-up to the filmmakers’ poll, the NYT readers pick Best Movies of the Century, casting 200,000ballots; the “century “started on 1/1/2000. Here are the films NOT on the filmmakers’ list. The year is the date of the review.
If I saw it and wrote about it, I will link to that post. I will note movies I have NOT seen this way:
DK—I don’t know this film and have never heard of it before, except if it was indicated in previous lists.
WS- I’m familiar with the film and would have seen it, but it fell through the cracks, usually during the Oscar rush to see movies in December through February.
FF – There was a fear factor that it would be too violent or otherwise upsetting to watch.
I will admit to a particular recency bias. It helped that I’d written about most of them. I would see these films again, whereas I won’t rewatch Parasite or The Zone of Interest.
I’ve been experiencing what they used to call manic depression. My highs can be really high and often unexpected. But my lows might be rage-fueled tantrums.
In music, which I’ve listened to dozens of times before, I’m often struck by how emotional I will get. Familiar pieces can bring me extraordinary joy – or great contemplation. An example of the former: The Concerto in F by George Gershwin is a recently heard example.
This tale of a memorial service brought me familiar recognition.
Here’s a wonderful bio piece about first niece Rebecca Jade for a concert she performed last week.
I loved the clue on a recent JEOPARDY so much that I stopped the recording – I watch almost nothing in real time – to point it out to my wife. 3 CONSONANTS IN A ROW, $800. “The comical coinage aibohphobia describes the fear of this type of word.” What is palindromes? I should have gotten it because it was used before, in 1999. PALINDROMES, $1000. “The whimsical coinage ‘aibohphobia’ means this.” What is fear of palindromes? It was a triple stumper both times.
I am bemused and more than slightly amused by how much the Jeffrey Epstein issue is the hill that MAGA people are willing to die on. Besides knowing that Epstein was dreadful, I’ve thought of nothing about him. Given all the other things happening in the country, he took no space in my brain.
Won’t get fooled again
I got an e-mail from what purported to be the company that hosts my blog saying that the payment didn’t go through. Given my technological difficulties a few weeks ago, this was a reasonably possible situation. So I went to the login page, but it wasn’t my provider’s URL, though it looked like their page. I contacted my provider, and they asked me to resend them visuals, as I must not have properly understood. So it was with GREAT JOY when they indicated they’d gotten enough complaints on this topic from others that I didn’t need to send them anything else—something off my plate.
Our backyard has a shed that holds our bicycles, lawn chairs, grill, etc. We could no longer lock it because some gophers or other rodents had undermined the shed’s base. This was a great concern because there’s a neighbor boy about 12 who would wander into our backyard; our next-door neighbor came to our house to express concern about the kid. We started putting cinder blocks in front of our yard gate, but that’s suboptimal. So I was pleased when one day we came home and suddenly the shed door locked; it must have been our contractor, whom we had contacted several days earlier. It gave me a sense of real joy.
Conversely
The news in the country made me not just disappointed but furious, enraged. No recent story ticked me off more than ICE being able to access information from CMS about 79 million Medicaid users, including home addresses and ethnicities, information being passed along so that they could “root out fraud.” It infuriated me so much that – and my wife can verify – I was spewing invectives to no one in particular. “Don’t those F***ing SOBs know about HIPAA privacy laws? Their ethnic bigotry knows no end!”
Then I read about the US Secretary of State’s plan to burn 500 metric tons of emergency food aid that had “expired” because the State Department failed to distribute it when it took over USAID.
The EPA says it will eliminate its scientific research arm and “begin firing hundreds of chemists, biologists, toxicologists, and other scientists, after denying for months that it intended to do so.”
And this, on top of the other crappy things, such as Congress codifying the cuts of previously allocated funds to PBS and NPR, and authorizing health cuts that would have prevented people from dying, really broiled me. Oh, former criminals need more access to guns!
You may have seen David Brooks share Alistair McIntyre’s explanation of FOTUS in The Atlantic magazine: He “doesn’t even try to speak the language of morality. When he pardons unrepentant sleazeballs, it doesn’t seem to even occur to him that he is doing something that weakens our shared moral norms. [He] speaks the languages we moderns can understand. The language of preference: I want. The language of power: I have the leverage. The languages of self, of gain, of acquisition. [FOTUS] doesn’t subsume himself in a social role. He doesn’t try to live up to the standards of excellence inherent in a social practice. He treats even the presidency itself as a piece of personal property he can use to get what he wants. As the political theorist Yuval Levin has observed, there are a lot of people, and [FOTUS] is one of them, who don’t seek to be formed by the institutions they enter. They seek instead to use those institutions as a stage to perform on, to display their wonderful selves.”
And it makes me think of less than charitable thoughts… So, some joy, some rage. The rage turns into the melancholy of One More Damn Thing.
Welcome to Sunday Stealing. Here we will steal all types of questions from every corner of the blogosphere. Our promise to you is that we will work hard to find the most interesting and intelligent questions. Cheers to all of us thieves!
This week we stole from Follow That Dream. Bonnie, who posted it, admits she stole it from Stella. Now here it is, just waiting for you to steal it for your blog …
Stolen from Follow That Dream
1. My bestie and I once …
One of them and I went to Las Vegas in September 2024, which was my first time and likely my last, though I had a good time.
2. When I’m nervous …
I look around a lot.
3. My hair …
Has been receding since I was 17.
4. When I turn to the left, I see …
A shred bag blocked the front window.
Adenia
5. My favorite aunt …
My great aunt Deana (Adenia) Yates was born in 1908, the youngest of my maternal grandmother Gertrude Williams’ siblings. She is to the right in the picture above with her sister, mother, and niece (my mom). There are more descriptions here.
My sisters and I visited the house that Deana and Gert shared, 13 Maple Street in Binghamton, NY, almost every day during lunch and after school during the academic year.
If I hadn’t been watching JEOPARDY with Deana on weekdays at noontime, I might not have become so obsessed with the program that I tried out for the show in 1998. I taught her canasta, and she taught me 500 rummy. She played SCRABBLE with me a lot. Sometimes, I would watch her “programs” with her and her sisters, the CBS soap operas Guiding Light, Edge of Night, and Secret Storm.
I was sad when she died in 1966, in part because she was a buffer between her sister and me. Gert didn’t think a boy should wash the dishes, which I did at home. More than once, Deana said to her sister, “Leave the boy alone!”
6. I have a hard time understanding ….
Consider this an expletive-filled rant about the politics in the last six months in the United States, and the capitulation by media (I’m talking about you, ABC, CBS…) More people will become sick and die.
Here are the 1965 Hot Rhythm and Blues singles, mostly from Billboard. From November 30, 1963, through January 23, 1965, Billboard eschewed the R&B single, assuming it was not significantly different from the pop charts. The sources I’ve been checking used the Cash Box Top 50 in R&B locations for that period.
The Billboard category changed to Top Selling Rhythm and Blues singles on June 5, 1965.
I have a book called Across The Charts: The 1960s from Record Research, written by the late Joel Whitburn. Let’s see the crossover of these songs.
I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch) – Four Tops, nine weeks at #1; two weeks at #1 pop
Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag (Part 1) – James Brown and the Famous Flames, eight weeks at #1; #8 pop. When I was a kid, James Brown dominated the charts in the back of Jet magazine, which my family got every week for several years. Many of these songs I had never heard on the pop radio stations in Binghamton, NY, at all.
My Girl – The Temptations, six weeks at #1; #1 for one week pop
I Got You (I Feel Good) – James Brown and The Famous Flames, six weeks at #1; #3 for three weeks pop
Rescue Me – Fontella Bass, four weeks at #1; #4 pop
Shotgun – Jr Walker and the All Stars, four weeks at #1; #4 pop
As a follow-up to the filmmakers’ 
Welcome to 
Here are the 1965 Hot Rhythm and Blues singles, mostly from Billboard. From November 30, 1963, through January 23, 1965, Billboard eschewed the R&B single, assuming it was not significantly different from the pop charts. The sources I’ve been checking used the Cash Box Top 50 in R&B locations for that period.