Roger O Green

Caitlyn Jenner turns 70

Kardashians? Oy

In the spring of 2019, my church had a forum about transgender people, featuring a panel of a half dozen people of a variety of ages and ethnicities who shared their experiences. It was quite remarkable, and in the political climate, rather brave.

One of them discussed an attempt to explain something to a relative. The relative said, “Like Caitlyn Jenner?” “Yes.” So I guess Caitlyn’s very public transformation was helpful in clarifying the subject to the masses. (BTW, there are no good synonyms or antonyms for “transgender” in the dictionary.)

I’ll admit that I was mortified when I discovered then-Bruce Jenner was involved with the reality television series Keeping Up with the Kardashians. I find explaining Kardashians very difficult, except to say they are the American royalty of self-promotion. They’re collectively very good at it, making oodles of money and becoming trendsetters.

Kristen Mary Kardashian (née Houghton) had four children – Kourtney, Kim, Khloé, and Robert – with her first husband, O.J. Simpson defense lawyer Robert Kardashian. They divorced in 1991, and he died in 2003. Kris then married Bruce Jenner in 1991, and they had two daughters, Kendall and Kylie.

Breakfast of Champions

Bruce Jenner won the men’s decathlon at the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal, which dubbed him as “an all-American hero” and “world’s greatest athlete.” He was on the Wheaties box, which I surely purchased frequently, and was the cereal’s spokesman from 1977 to 1984.

Bruce appeared on six episodes of the TV show CHiPS and did some other TV and film projects. He was even a Playgirl cover model.

Perhaps being a well-known athlete then a reality star helped when describing the transition. Bruce Jenner sat down with Diane Sawyer on April 24, 2015, in a highly anticipated interview. That was the year he got divorced from Kris.

In 2018, Caitlyn Jenner admitted to being quite naive about the current regime. Maybe because of appearances on The Apprentice, she thought the guy in the WH would be more supportive of LGBTQ+ people, which has not proved to be the case except for some lip service.

Caitlyn Jenner turns 70 today.

More Abbey Road than I need

Formerly Everest

Abbey Road.4 discs After seeing Scott Freiman’s Deconstructing the Beatles: Abbey Road, Part 1, on film at the Spectrum, I made a decision. Though Part 2 was also available at the cinema for a day in August, I chose to see Freiman in person at The End of September instead.

As most people know from all the 50th-anniversary hype, Abbey Road was the last Beatles album recorded. Side two starts with Here Comes The Sun, George’s song written in Eric Clapton’s garden. Then Because, a truly lovely song, derived when John had asked Yoko to play Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata backward.

Then the medley, which came from a bunch of sources, some going back to the white album: You Never Give Me Your Money, Sun King, Mean Mr. Mustard, Polythene Pam, She Came In Through The Bathroom Window, Golden Slumbers, Carry That Weight, The End, with Her Majesty at the end.

A bed-in, of sorts

John was late getting to the sessions that took place in July and August of 1969. He and Yoko were in a car accident. A bed was brought into EMI Recording Studios so Yoko could rest there during the sessions.

As a result, John was absent for a few songs, notably Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight. The lyrics for the former were swiped, slightly altered, from Thomas Dekker’s 17th-century poem. The latter was sung by Paul, George, and Ringo.

There are at least three new packages of the album. One is the Super Deluxe Edition, which includes the medley as originally conceived, with Her Majesty placed between Mean Mr. Mustard and Polythene Pam.

Paul didn’t like the way it sounded, so he asked that Her Majesty be cut. Engineer John Kurlander, who knew not to throw out anything, attached the track to the end of the master tape after 20 seconds of silence. The song opens with the final, crashing chord of Mustard, while the final note was lost to Pam.

The album might have been named Everest, after a cigarette brand, but since they were at 3 Abbey Rd, St John’s Wood, London, the street name seemed an easier choice. And they could just go outside for ten minutes and get a photo of them crossing the road, rather than having to climb a mountain.

Super Deluxe?

I realize that I won’t be buying that Super Deluxe edition, even though it has a version of Goodbye, a song Paul wrote for Mary Hopkin. Her take reached #13 on the singles chart in the US. It got to #2 in the UK, blocked by the Beatles’ Get Back, and #1 in the Netherlands and Ireland.

Super Deluxe also has Come And Get It, a song Macca later said was planned for Abbey Road; I have his demo on Anthology 3. The song ended up being given to the Apple band The Iveys, who became Badfinger. That version is on the soundtrack of the movie The Magic Christian with Peter Sellers and one Ringo Starr.

But nope, no Super Deluxe or even the Anniversary Deluxe iteration Because I don’t need it. Now if YOU want to get it for me…

Listen to Coverville 1280: Abbey Road 50th Anniversary Album Cover.

Lydster: talking about school shootings

January 17, 1989, in Stockton, California

Active Shooter Drills At the end of the summer, my daughter was waiting for her friends, who were late. She calls me at home, and she brings up the subject of school shootings.

She wanted to know if I had to think about these things growing up. Heck, no, but I’m better than a half-century older than she is. This got me to look up the Wikipedia page for List of school shootings in the United States. Ah, such a convenient tracking of carnage.

There were shootings back in the 19th century, but most involved zero to two casualties. An exception took place on March 30, 1891, in Liberty, Mississippi when “an unknown gunman fired a double-barreled shotgun into the mixed audience, made up of black and white students, parents and teachers. Fourteen people were wounded, some seriously.”

Six were killed in a melee in Charleston, West Virginia on December 13, 1898. I’ve written about the 1966 University of Texas shooting, the first crime of its sort that I remembered.

20th century

Hmm, they counted Kent State and Jackson State from 1970. I have no recollection of the December 30, 1974, Olean (NY) shooting that killed 3 and injured 11.

The worst shooting in the 1980s was on January 17, 1989, in Stockton, California. A 24-year-old fatally shot five children and wounded 32 others at an elementary school, before taking his own life. “The victims were children of refugees from Southeast Asia.” The shooter “had a history of violence, alcoholism, and drug addiction, and criminality.”

Then April 20, 1999: Littleton, Colorado, with 15 dead, including the two shooters, 21 wounded. I had to admit to my daughter that I had managed to forget the March 21, 2005 incident at Red Lake, Minnesota, where five students, one teacher, and one security guard were killed, wounding seven others, after the shooter previously killed a couple of relatives.

I do remember the guy who killed five Amish girls in Pennsylvania in 2006. The Virginia Tech shootings in 2007 made the international news. Then Newtown, CT; Parkland, FL; Santa Fe, TX. I remember that my daughter was particularly upset by Santa Fe after she and her classmates protested following Parkland.

How stressful her life, and the lives of her friends, must be. She so related to the disturbing Sandy Hook Promise ad here or here or here.

We had duck and cover, but I don’t think we took it too seriously. They have active shooter drills, and they have reason to believe it COULD happen “here.”

1 Corinthians in Handel’s Messiah

Behold, I tell you a mystery

1 Corinthians 15-55 One of the few things I have added to my list of things to do is attending a weekly Bible study at my church. The group was in the midst of reading the Koran in the first part of the sessions; interesting stuff.

The second half was reading the Bible, specifically, when I started, 1 Corinthians. This is the book that contains that reading of Chapter 13 that is used so often at weddings, though the King James Version ends with “And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.” But the Revised Standard Version and most later translations conclude with “So faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.”

Chapter 15 is quite familiar as well. “The center of Part III [of Handel’s Messiah] is a sequence of six movements based on a passage from Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians on the resurrection of the dead, a passage that Brahms also chose for Ein deutsches Requiem.”

As I happen to be the reader in Bible study,

it was VERY difficult NOT to break into song!

46 Since by man came death (Chorus) 1 Corinthians 15:21–22
For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead.
For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.

47 Behold, I tell you a mystery (Acc. B) 1 Corinthians 15:51–52 Resurrection of the dead
48 The trumpet shall sound and the dead shall be rais’d (Air B) 15:52–53
Behold, I shew you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed,
In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.
For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality.

49 Then shall be brought to pass (Rec. A) 1 Corinthians 15:54 Victory over death
50 O death, where is thy sting? (Duet A) 15:55–56
51 But thanks be to God (Chorus) 15:57
So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory.
O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?
The sting of death is sin; and the strength of sin is the law.
But thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.

Here’s the entire Part III of Handel Messiah, including 45. I know that my Redeemer liveth (Air S) from Job 19:25–26; 52. If God be for us, who can be against us (Air S) from Romans 8:31,33–34; and 53. Worthy is the Lamb that was slain/Amen (Chorus) from Revelation 5:12–13.

LISTEN to:
Various artists
The Bach Choir & Orchestra of the Netherlands, Pieter Jan Leusink

Refugees, a poem by Brian Bilston

The world can be looked at another way

For United Nations Day, I decided to post a poem entitled Refugees by Brian Bilston. I came across it on Facebook in 2018, though the author first posted in March 2016. It was buried in my email until now.

It is used with permission of the author. As he says, “Please bear with it.”

They have no need of our help
So do not tell me
These haggard faces could belong to you or me
Should life have dealt a different hand
We need to see them for who they really are
Chancers and scroungers
Layabouts and loungers
With bombs up their sleeves
Cut-throats and thieves
They are not
Welcome here
We should make them
Go back to where they came from
They cannot
Share our food
Share our homes
Share our countries
Instead let us
Build a wall to keep them out
It is not okay to say
These are people just like us
A place should only belong to those who are born there
Do not be so stupid to think that
The world can be looked at another way

(now read from bottom to top)

UN Day

Here’s the Secretary-General’s Message from 2018;

United Nations Day marks the birthday of our founding Charter – the landmark document that embodies the hopes, dreams, and aspirations of “we the peoples”.

Every day, the women and men of the United Nations work to give practical meaning to that Charter.

Despite the odds and the obstacles, we never give up.

Extreme poverty is being reduced but we see inequality growing.

Yet we don’t give up because we know by reducing inequality we increase hope and opportunity and peace around the world.

Climate change is moving faster than we are, but we don’t give up because we know that climate action is the only path.

Human rights are being violated in so many places. But we don’t give up because we know respect for human rights and human dignity is a basic condition for peace.

Conflicts are multiplying – people are suffering. But we don’t give up because we know every man, woman, and child deserves a life of peace.

On United Nations Day, let us reaffirm our commitment.

To repair broken trust.

To heal our planet.

To leave no one behind.

To uphold dignity for one and all, as united nations.

António Guterres

See also the Refugee Rights section from the Human Rights Watch page.