Roger O Green

Lydster: COVID vaccine procurement

Albany Public Library and Mohawk Ambulance

Recently in this blog, I noted the vagaries of COVID vaccine procurement. I had my first shot scheduled for March 31 at the UAlbany campus, when unexpectedly, I got an appointment at CVS on March 3.

Likewise, I had nailed down for my daughter her first shot for April 17 at the Washington Avenue Armory in Albany. Then on March 26, my wife received a text that there would be a pop-up vaccination site the very next day. She’d gotten a text from the Albany Housing Authority a month earlier that she should sign up, though she doesn’t recall how that occurred.

As she was heading for a meeting, she gave me the URL, but it didn’t work. Slightly panicky that the window of opportunity would close, I called the site, the Arbor Hill/West Hill library branch, and spoke to a librarian who I know. He knew the event was taking place but none of the details; I’m sure, as a librarian, that had to bug him. It would have frustrated me.

When my wife was free, she got a second website that DID work, and I got my daughter an appointment. And just in time, because the six-hour window (9-3) was down to about an hour.

The process

Since my wife was going to Oneonta to pick up her mother and take her to Cooperstown for her second injection, my daughter and I needed to take public transportation. We took the #106 CDTA bus, which was the #138 the last time I took it who knows how long ago. It dropped us off at Livingston and Henry Johnson, a couple of short blocks from the library.

One of the things my daughter does that I admire is giving extremely wide berth to those folks we walked past who were not wearing masks. My sense is that these people are on the uptick in Albany, commensurate with COVID cases inching up statewide.

The line was short, and we went through fairly quickly. The event was run by Mohawk Ambulance. Though the information from the website did not specify, I knew I had to go to the table with my daughter because she’s under 18. There were about 10 tables in all, each with someone to register, and another to give the injection.

My registrar was kind but technologically impaired. Fortunately, her teenage daughter was also there to assist her. I offered my daughter’s non-driver’s ID; as I expected, she was confounded. This was because the picture was of my daughter at about the age of six. While the ID is still valid, she hardly looks the same except to me. I was glad I asked my daughter to bring her high school ID. While not an official item, it was sufficient for the registrant.

Easy

Next, I handed the registrant the letter from my daughter’s doctor. It noted that she “has medical conditions that meet current criteria for vaccination under the Phased Distribution of the Vaccine set forth by the NYS Department as seen at” this website. I pre-emptively said, “Sufficiently vague, eh?” I could have noted the need for the doctor to respect the HIPAA requirements of his patient, but I thought of this later.

After the injection, we were supposed to wait for 10-15 minutes. Mayor Kathy Sheehan was there. She said her husband had gotten his injection at the site an hour earlier. We walked to the #12 bus, rode it, then walked home. Eighty minutes from leaving the house to walking back in the door, including public transportation. My sister’s friend in the San Diego area spent FIVE HOURS that same day.

My friend Catbird has a friend over 65 in Albany who, as of a couple of weeks ago, still couldn’t find a vaccine. I suggested that the friend sign up for everything. The county site, the state site, CVS, Walgreens, whatever, because the supply is definitely loosening up.

Movie review: Promising Young Woman

director/writer Emerald Fennell

Promising Young Woman is a movie I was wary of watching. But from the beginning, it rang with a level of truth. Three guys are at a bar complaining about women in the workplace. This conversation I’ve heard about quite a bit.

Cassie (Carey Mulligan) is the title character. She has a dead-end day job at a coffee shop run by one of her few friends, Gail (Laverne Cox). At night, she hangs out at bars with a surprising plan. She has a stare that will shut up construction workers.

It takes a while for the audience to understand why this clearly intelligent and clever woman, turning 30, is still living at home with her parents, Stanley (Clancy Brown) and Susan (Jennifer Coolidge).

Then she meets Ryan (Bo Burnham), a charming former classmate with seemingly endless patience. They seem to have a real connection as they dance through the pharmacy.

Still, there are wrongs to be righted, including the big one. The movie also stars Alison Brie, Alfred Molina, Connie Britton, and Chris Lowell.

Er, ah…

I have no idea how to write more about this without massive spoilers. This I’ll say: for something described to me as a rape-revenge fantasy, I thought it was surprisingly sweet and funny in parts. The music is important to the storyline. It certainly uniquely addressed #MeToo.

And I loved the ending, even if it was too tidy. In a couple of big-time spoiler articles, NPR hated the ending but Vox loved it.

The movie title, BTW, was a reference to Brock Turner. The Stanford swimmer received a six-month sentence for rape, serving half of it because he was, in the words of the judge, a “promising young man.”

This is the debut feature film for director/writer Emerald Fennell, and she was nominated for an Oscar in both categories. She’s written for the TV series Killing Eve and has acting credits, including playing Camilla Parker Bowles in The Crown. She also has an uncredited cameo in Promising Young Woman as a how-to video guru.

This is a polarizing film. I’m sure there will be people who will hate it. 91% of the critics in Rotten Tomatoes were positive. The negative reviews used words like “stylised to the point of styrofoam flatness” (stylized, yes); and a “polemic” (probably). Even those hating the film often praised Carey Mulligan.

I rented the film on Amazon Prime.

Original performers; you know the cover version

Jackie DeShannon

My friend Fred Hembeck gave me a collection of songs some years ago. The thing they have in common is that they were all very familiar, but not by the artists on the disc.

These were the original performers. So I decided to post some songs that I didn’t know were the first recorded versions, some from that album plus a few extras.

Dedicated To The One I Love – The Five Royales (1957), The Shirelles (1959). The Mamas and the Papas also recorded this.
I Can’t Stop Lovin’ You – Don Gibson (1958), Ray Charles (1962). Written by Gibson on June 7, 1957, the same day he wrote Oh, Lonesome Me, later covered by Neil Young, among others.
I’m Leavin’ It All Up To You – Don and Dewey (1959), Dale and Grace (1963). Donny and Marie also covered this.
Twist and Shout – The Top Notes (1961), The Isley Brothers (1962). Also covered by a Liverpudlian band of some note.

Someday We’ll Be Together – Johnny and Jackie (1961), Diana Ross and the Supremes (1969). The songwriters were Johnny Bristol, Jackey Beavers (the singers of the original), and Harvey Fuqua. The cover is Diana with non-Supremes background singers.
Nobody But Me – The Isley Brothers (1962), The Human Beinz (1968)
You’re No Good – Dee Dee Warwick (1963), Betty Everett (1963). Yes, DeeDee was the sister of Dionne. Linda had a big hit
Do-Wah-Diddy – The Exciters (1963), Manfred Mann (1964). Written by the great songwriting duo of Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry

Dr. Kildare?

Needles And Pins – Jackie DeShannon (1963), The Searchers (1964). Written by Jack Nitzsche and Sonny Bono
(They Long to Be) Close to You – Richard Chamberlain (1963), Carpenters (1970). Chamberlain was TV’s Dr. Kildare. Written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David.
Go Now – Bessie Banks (1964), Moody Blues (1964)
I’m Into Something Good – Earl-Jean (1964), Herman’s Hermits (1964). Earl-Jean was a member of the Cookies. Written by Gerry Goffin and Carole King

My Girl Sloopy – The Vibrations (1964), The McCoys (1965 as Hang On, Sloopy)
Good Lovin’ – Lemme B. Good (1965), The Olympics (1965), The Young Rascals (1966)
Bette Davis Eyes – Jackie DeShannon (1974), Kim Carnes (1981). Written by DeShannon and Donna Weiss.
I Love Rock ’N Roll – The Arrows (1975), Joan Jett and the Blackhearts (1982)

America is losing its religion

the unchurched

Amanda Marcotte at Salon explains why America’s losing its religion. “Church membership is in a freefall, and the Christian right has only themselves to blame.” And “fewer than half of Americans now belong to a church, and the trend of pew abandonment isn’t slowing down.”

What’s fascinating to me is the acceleration in the unchurched. “In 1937, 73% of Americans belong to a church. And in 1975, it was 71%. In 1999, it was 70%. But since then, the church membership rate has fallen by a whopping 23 percentage points.” Why is that?

Marcotte notes, “The drop in religious affiliation starts right around the time George W. Bush was elected president, publicly and dramatically associating himself with the white evangelical movement. The early Aughts saw the rise of megachurches with flashily dressed ministers who appeared more interested in money and sermonizing about people’s sex lives than modeling values of charity and humility.”

“Not only were these religious figures and the institutions they led hyper-political, but the outward mission also seemed to be almost exclusively in service of oppressing others. The religious right isn’t nearly as interested in feeding the hungry and sheltering the homeless as much as using religion as an all-purpose excuse to abuse women and LGBTQ people.” And that was before 45.

Begets power

The conclusion: “Christian leaders, driven by their hunger for power and cultural dominance, become so grasping and hypocritical that it backfires and they lose their cultural relevance.”

The Atlantic had noted an increase in the religious non-affiliated earlier. “By the early 2000s, the share of Americans who said they didn’t associate with any established religion (also known as ‘nones’) had doubled. By the 2010s, this grab bag of atheists, agnostics, and spiritual dabblers had tripled in size.”

But the atheists are only about 5% of the total population by most measures, suggesting many people consider themselves “spiritual, but not religious.”

The Black Church

The recent PBS series The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song, the four-hour series from Henry Louis Gates, Jr., touches on this. Henry Louis Gates Jr. notes “The [black] church is the oldest, the most continuous and most important institution ever created by the African American people. In the final hour, in particular, the push-and-pull between social justice and the Gospels was examined.

Jeffrey Brown, interviewing Gates, notes that “as many young people move away from organized religion and protesters again demand justice, the church faces a new challenge of relevance and vitality.

“There was a very moving moment in there to me when Reverend Traci Blackmon is telling [Gates] about going into the streets in Ferguson during the protests, and she talks about holding a prayer vigil. And she says that, halfway through, some of the young people said, ‘That’s enough praying.'”

Of course, Black People in America are not a demographic monolith. The Pew Forum has scads of information about the intersection of race, religion, and justice. Some of a higher economic class may gravitate towards a megachurch, such as the one T.D. Jakes runs in Houston. Others may cheer on William Barber of the Poor People’s Campaign. I relate more to the latter.

Per this link, Black Americans “tend to think [black] churches have declined in influence over the years,” but feel they “should have a greater role today than they do.”

As they say, “God” – or how you experience a higher power if at all – “is in the details.”

Excessive packaging hurts the planet

3 Rs

Excessive packaging. I hate it.

Last month, I asked my wife to buy me some 81 mg, low-dose aspirin. She bought me a Triple Pack, with 36 little tablets in each of the plastic containers. It occurred to me that all 108 of those pills could have fit in one of those containers. This immediately bugged me so much that I called the company and left a message. Whether anything will come of that, I don’t know.

Excessive packaging is an issue that has invigorated me for years. Another thing is that the lids/caps to many plastic containers are almost never marked with one of those numbers within a triangle. This leads me to the conclusion – probably correctly – that they are not recyclable.

Our household tries very diligently to adhere to the 3Rs of waste management. The first tenet is to reduce. LONG before the pandemic, we were eschewing paper/plastic bags. We’d utilize reusable bags or my backpack. (Carrying no bag at all is behavior a little bit more risky than I wish to engage in.)

My very artistic daughter has embraced the second tenet, to reuse. She’s often discovering unusual canvasses such as 3.5″ floppy discs and ancient CD-ROM discs, mostly software updates. Hey, we no longer have a working computer that will read them! She’s also made use of panels from cardboard boxes.

Moving nostalgia

Back in the day when I would move frequently, I was aware when grocery stores and especially liquor stores would break down their boxes for trash collection. Boxes that were designed to carry a case of booze are very strong, though not too large, ideal for packing books or LPs.

Recycling and composting create, in our own minds, a bit of competition in our minds. We almost always get our trash in a single garbage can. Some weeks we don’t bring out our recycling bin, we’ve put so little. I’m sure we can always do better, but we’re rather zealous.

Of course, there are much larger issues in terms of climate change. We have a hybrid vehicle, for instance. Still, I’m sure we can always do more. And then there’s this…