Roger O Green

A tree falls in Albany

Estimated Time of Restoration – Assessing

As I’ve noted, my family had this great week in the Berkshires in western Massachusetts in mid-August, most of which I’ve noted. My daughter went to a Six Flags amusement park with her three cousins and an uncle when my wife and I saw a play.

We get home around 2 p.m. on a Friday and start putting things away, including a lot of leftover perishable food squeezed into the refrigerator.

There was a thunderstorm warning for Albany County from 4:45 to 5:45 pm, and some rain did fall, but it didn’t seem so bad. So my wife drove out to the bank. A few moments later, a deluge worthy of Louis XIV fell.

It was raining the extreme rain when the umbrella and slicker are useless. Then it rained even harder so that a couple young women walking by started screaming. I ran out to see if they were being assaulted, and they were, by the skies.

The house lights flickered three or four times, then stayed on for about 10 seconds, before going out altogether. This was roughly at 6 p.m.

Interestingly, there was a notice on my phone from our power company, National Grid. “6:15 pm We detected power outages near [address]. There are currently 229 other customers also associated with this outage. We are investigating and will provide updates around progress when we get more information.” That was 229 in OUR section of the grid; there were plenty of other outages, I later learned.

“Outage Status – New Outage; Estimated Time of Restoration – Assessing.” Now I didn’t actually SEE this information until the next day, because my phone, which had died, which it does regularly. Even my daughter, who is much more diligent about these things, had no phone eventually.

My wife finally got home – she waited out the storm, wisely, and reported a tree down on Lancaster Street, a couple blocks away, and insisted that I see it. It was impressive. A large branch on a tree between two houses, almost certainly struck by lightning, toppled across the street, taking a power line with it, but barely missing someone’s car.

We got out the flashlights and the candles. My wife got pizza from the place a couple blocks away, which had power. But it was so quiet in the house I walked to the local CVS and bought batteries so we could at least listen to the radio.

I carried a flashlight because my block was dark except for the school, which must have an emergency generator. Suddenly, I started craving the same until my wife told me the process would cost us thousands, which somewhat dampened my enthusiasm.

We played UNO by candlelight. I think not having electricity actually got my daughter to go to sleep earlier than usual. But I couldn’t sleep because it was Too Darn Hot.

In the morning, I went onto the front porch to read the newspaper. Then at 9:03 a.m., I heard our air conditioner kick on. Others in the neighborhood got power overnight. National Grid said the neighborhood power was back at 12:41 p.m.

Subsequent to that, we had a couple more periods of large amounts of rain falling in a very short period of time, with the attendant flash flooding. My wife told my daughter to put away the candles, but the teen was understandably resistant.

What an interesting homecoming. Note: I said “A tree fell in Albany,” but there were quite a few, I believe.

Our State Fair is a great state fair

don’t miss it, don’t even be late

As a child, my family had attended the Great New York State Fair in Syracuse a few times. But it has been a LONG time since then.

I didn’t remember how enormous the state fair, founded in 1841, was. The Fairgrounds is a 375-acre exhibit and entertainment complex that offers entertainment year-round. The first day we attended, Saturday, August 31, the event broke its the highest single-day attendance record with 147,749 attendees.

Apparently, the state had made significant improvements in the past four years. Fortunately, they have trams traveling around the perimeter of the area.

Although the gates open earlier – and getting there early is a good idea – most of the buildings don’t officially open until after the Star-Spangled Banner is sung at 9:55 a.m.

We found ourselves in Indian Village, where there was an authentic longhouse. We were treated to dances by members of the Six Nations. According to the MC, the land is technically a reservation of the Iroquois people. This was as a result of a promise Franklin D. Roosevelt made to the tribes in 1928 that it would be so if he ever became President.

This explains an oddity I noticed. Everywhere else on the fairgrounds, bottled water was $2, though the price of soda varied wildly. This was a result, one vendor outside of the village, told me was set by the state of New York, for some reason. But the water in Indian Village, at least on that day, was only $1 because it was not under the state’s jurisdiction.

WEGMAN’S HOME AND ART CENTER

We spent a good deal of time in the home and art center. It had a number of vendors. My wife was taken by the kitchen appliances and bought a few.

I made a purchase from an unlikely locale, the model train room. There were maybe a dozen and a half LPs, mostly from the 1960s. Actually, I owned many of them or had most of the songs on CDs. But I was compelled to buy for $1 Vaughn Meader’s “The First Family”, a comedy parody of the Kennedys. It was an enormously successful 1962 album that was #1 on the charts for twelve weeks. The assassination of JFK in 1963 made it suddenly unfunny.

There was a room where a woman was playing an organ recital. Among other songs, she played Lover. I KNOW that song, but how? It’s not Deanna Durbin version and CERTAINLY not the frantic Peggy Lee take. Of COURSE: I recognized it from The Supremes Sing Rodgers and Hart, the ONLY album of mine by the trio that somehow survived the Great LP Theft of 1972.

I came across the arts and crafts section and found the three pieces by Chuck Miller, a local blogger I know. We meander around the building and find four of his photos. How many did he have accepted? I asked a woman in the section. She said, “Ah, Mr. Miller!” (What did she mean by that?) He did only have the four out of six submitted.

There were other interesting pieces of art. Naturally, one guy did a couple of famous paintings such as American Gothic with dogs.

THE ONE ANNOYANCE

My daughter bought a backpack in the Pan-African Village. We consumed maple ice cream. Though we wandered through the midway, we opted against taking any rides.

I had purchased $10 tickets only a couple weeks earlier online. Thus, I was quite perturbed to discover that, apparently at the last minute, there was a special promotion offering admission for just $1. It was suggested we buy the dollar tickets, keeping the $10 tickets for next year, despite the clear indication on the $10 tickets that we could not do so.

We had taken a hotel shuttle to the fair, and by 4 p.m., we were ready to call it a day, even though we would miss Rick Springfield at 8 p.m. Ah well.

The title, BTW, is from a movie called State Fair, which came out in 1945 and was remade in 1962, about the “Ioway” event. Here’s the theme song from the latter, composed by Rodgers and Hammerstein.

25th Amendment hashtag

Ford and Rockefeller

The 25th Amendment to the US Constitution, initiated by Congress in 1965 and ratified by 3/4s of the states in 1967, has four parts. I expect that the part that people are posting about online is referring to the fourth.

Briefly, the other three. Section. 1. In case of the removal of the President from office or of his death or resignation, the Vice President shall become President.

This is alluded to in Amendments 12 and 20 but is much clearer here. JFK’s assassination in 1963 was surely on the minds of the citizenry.

Section 2. “Whenever there is a vacancy in the office of the Vice President, the President shall nominate a Vice President who shall take office upon confirmation by a majority vote of both Houses of Congress.”

Gerald Ford (under Nixon) and Nelson Rockefeller (under Ford) became Veep under this provision.

Section 3. “Whenever the President transmits to [Congress] his written declaration that he is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, and until he transmits to them a written declaration to the contrary, such powers and duties shall be discharged by the Vice President as Acting President.”

The 25th Amendment has been used 3 times to relieve presidents deemed unfit to govern — each case involving physical health.

Section 4, as noted, is the item most discussed. As early as May 2017, the question was whether the vice president, Cabinet, and Congress would determine that the current White House resident was “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.”

It is not easy, but it is convoluted. “Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide [let’s say the Cabinet], transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.

“But when the President transmits to the [Congressional leaders] his written declaration that no inability exists, he shall resume the powers and duties of his office unless the Vice President and [the Cabinet] transmit within four days to the {Congressional leaders] their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.”

Then “Congress shall decide the issue… [if by a] two-thirds vote of both Houses [determine] that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall continue to discharge the same as Acting President; otherwise, the President shall resume the powers and duties of his office.”

One can argue that the removal SHOULD happen. It won’t. I have serious doubts that, even if the House voted to impeach, the Senate would vote to convict. Ultimately, the only solution is the ballot.

Alphanumeric jumble: Canada

H0H 0H0

Canadian postal district — Creator:OnTheWorldMap.com
Information extracted from IPTC Photo Metadata; H is Montreal, N is Toronto

Meh. No US states, Canadian provinces, or territories starting with J. I could punt, but I decided to go arcane. Thus the alphanumeric jumble that is the Canadian postal codes.

When the US came up with ZIP Codes back in 1963, it made sense to me. Canada followed with postal codes in the early 1970s, which also exist in parts of Europe. The Canadian codes are “in the format A1A 1A1, where A is a letter and 1 is a digit, with a space separating the third and fourth characters.”

In the United States, large cities had zones for mail delivery as early as 1943. Chicago 9, Illinois was the location of the Spiegel catalog, I recall from many game shows. When ZIP Codes came into being, the third address line was: Chicago, IL 60609.

Likewise, large cities in Canada had zones, with Toronto starting way back in 1925, Montreal in 1944, and other cities in the 1960s. The powers that be started a three-digit code in Toronto in 1969, but then quickly abandoned it, inconveniencing businesses and residents alike.

In the Canadian system, the first three characters represent the forward sortation area. The FSA is “a geographical region in which all postal codes start with the same three characters. The first letter of an FSA code denotes a particular ‘postal district’, which, outside Quebec and Ontario, corresponds to an entire province or territory.”

The latter three characters represent the Local Delivery Unit.

“Postal codes do not include the letters D, F, I, O, Q or U.” I assume this is to avoid confusion, the D, O, Q, and U with a zero, F with E, and the I with a one.

I love the Santa Claus postal code, which is H0H 0H0. “The postal service responds each year to tens of thousands of children’s letters from around the world,” in the writers’ own language. The address, in case you need it:
SANTA CLAUS
NORTH POLE H0H 0H0
CANADA

or

PÈRE NOËL
PÔLE NORD H0H 0H0
CANADA

You DO see the significance of the postal code, yes/oui?

For J on ABC Wednesday

Dustbury: Charles G. Hill (1953-2019)

I didn’t even know what blogging WAS in 1996

Charles Hill.Myspace — stolen from his MySpace page

Dustbury, a/k/a Charles G. Hill, had been blogging since 1996. I didn’t even know what blogging WAS in 1996. He had been posting every day since about 2002, usually two or three times daily.

It was therefore weird that when I visited his site on September 5, there hadn’t been a post since the 3rd. Then I see in the comments: “Terrible news: My friend and GOAT Oklahoma blogger @Charles G. Hill was in a terrible auto accident on Tuesday. He is in the trauma ICU … It appears he has paralysis from the neck down.”

This was dreadful news for a couple of reasons. He had been having serious physical limitations of late that were frankly ticking him off. Alive and paralyzed I suspect would have enraged him.

On September 8, his friend Dan wrote: “I’m very sorry to report that Charles has died of his injuries.” His post from September 2 has now frankly freaked me out, in retrospect.

I know quite a bit about popular music from the last half of the 20th century. Dustbury probably knew twice as much. In fact, I discovered him because I was interested in Warner Brothers Loss Leaders and I actually provided him some information he did not know.

Charles was the person most likely to comment on a piece I wrote about music. He would add an anecdote or an obscure detail. Or write about it himself.

He once asked me if I were annoyed by his insertions; the answer was always no. And he knew WAY more about current tunes, from Taylor Swift to Rebecca Black of Friday fame, than most sextagenarians.

He wrote about local (OKC) politics. He wasn’t exactly a liberal, but in the Sooner State, he clearly liked to pick the person rather than the political party.

Charles loved My Little Pony stuff and gave great analyses of Oklahoma City Thunder basketball games.

He helped me tremendously via email with finding me a new website provider, and subsequently answered technical questions I didn’t understand. Most notably, he told me about the Classic Editor plugin that overrode the awful WordPress 5 “improvements.”

Yet, I always felt he didn’t think he had done enough in this world.

Charles has participated heavily on Quora, dealing with the scammers that he put in their place. But one particular post from August 23 touched me greatly.

To the question Who among your blogging peers do you consider the best and why? He wrote: “Easy: Roger Green of rogerogreen.com. He is always thoughtful, never crass, and he has something new to say just about every day.”

Had I answered the question first, I would have said Dustbury. But I didn’t want it to look as though I were merely reciprocating. I DO feel bad that I never told him how much I appreciated his comment.

A POEM

Our friend fillyjonk wrote this about her father’s recent death. Charles liked it, as do I. It seems appropriate here:

Grief is like a garment of variable size.

At times, it is a heavy wool cloak, enveloping, engulfing, it weighs you down.

At others, it is that t-shirt with the annoying tag you cannot rip out and that only gets worse if you cut it

It is never light and comfortable

It is usually too hot and saps your energy

It is a flattering color on no one.

It cannot be removed, cannot be dropped by the side of the road.

Laundering does not help it, nor does washing it in tears.

It will not rip; you cannot remove it; it is as if it is the enchanted

Shoes from that fairy tale; it has molded to your body.

Aloha, Dustbury.