Author: Roger

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.

It’s Miller time! Chuck is moving on…

One of the great tradeoffs of being an unpaid TU blogger, we were told, is that there would be no editorial interference unless it would fail to meet basic standards – no obscenity, no libel.

Chuck Miller, who had blogged at the Times Union newspaper site EVERY DAY for the past 8.5 years, is moving on to a new blogging venue, Chuck the Writer. NOBODY has been a more reliable blogger, cheerleader for the community bloggers, or more active social director than Chuck.

He initiated several TU community blogger gatherings. His most outstanding contribution, though, has been Best of our TU Independent Bloggers: Ten for Thursday. Sometimes it was 12 or 20 posts – Chuck isn’t that good at math – but I always found pages I had not previously seen that were of interest.

He’s written about his photography, being a trivia maven, obscure musical tracks, the Notorious KGB, and some big life issues, among many other topics.

There were a number of issues that went into the decision to change venues, including the editing of some of his posts in the past few weeks. One of the great tradeoffs of being an unpaid TU blogger, we were told when we were recruited by Mike Huber, the former TU blog herder of cats, is that there would be no editorial interference unless it would fail to meet basic standards – no obscenity, no libel. Chuck found a clever way to work around the former with a humorous grawlix-type graphic.

For his April Fools Day post, he wrote that one Kellyanne Conway would be speaking at commencement at UAlbany, clearly as fictitious as his Collarworld columns. He has written absurdist posts on the 1st of April before without incident. The new piece, though, was not only removed, but Chuck was locked out of his own blog. I’m sure that, if he had been asked, he would have altered or removed the “offending” item.

This became what I call a Popeye moment; “That’s all I can stands, ’cause I can’t stands no more.” So he walked away. It’s not as though he can be fired; as a local band once sang, “You can’t fire me, I QUIT!”

Coincidentally, the TU portal has fallen into disrepair over the past few months. There are bloggers that haven’t posted in almost a year

If I were of the mind to, I’d tell the powers that be at the Times Union that they were CRAZY to suspend Chuck – or whatever it is they call it – over the type of post he had written EVERY YEAR on this date. He has created more visibility for the TU community bloggers than any half dozen bloggers combined.

So I’m going to go follow Mr. Miller over at Chuck the Writer, because the platform is not the thing, it’s the writing.

Emmylou Harris turns 70

No other mainstream star established a similarly large body of work as consistently iconoclastic, eclectic, or daring;

When a friend of mine, who was a big fan of Emmylou Harris, first heard the album Wrecking Ball in 1995, she complained that it wasn’t at all what she was expecting. She threatened to give it away, and I expressed my interest in taking it, but ultimately she held onto it.

I had quite a few Emmylou Harris LPs, and Wrecking Ball wasn’t what I expected either, but I meant that in a GOOD way. Read about the 2014 re-release.

The CMT page describes her well:
“Though other performers sold more records and earned greater fame, few had as profound an impact on contemporary music as Emmylou Harris. Blessed with a crystalline voice, a remarkable gift for phrasing, and a restless creative spirit, she traveled a singular artistic path, proudly carrying the torch of ‘cosmic American music’ passed down by her mentor, Gram Parsons. With the exception of only Neil Young — not surprisingly an occasional collaborator — no other mainstream star established a similarly large body of work as consistently iconoclastic, eclectic, or daring; even more than four decades into her career, Harris’ latter-day music remained as heartfelt, visionary, and vital as her earliest recordings.”

For her sheer range of work – from background singer, to solo artist, to duets with a range of artists including Mark Knopfler, to her best selling collaboration with Dolly Parton and Linda Ronstadt – her distinctive sound always enhances her many projects.

I expect Eddie at Renaissance Geek will feature Emmylou Harris today.

The links below are in roughly chronological order, from the most recent.

The Traveling Kind (with Rodney Crowell)

My Name Is Emmett Till

Amazing Grace/Nearer My God To Thee (with Ladysmith Black Mambazo)

Beachcombing (with Mark Knopfler)

Flesh and Blood (with Mary Chapin Carpenter and Sheryl Crow)

Didn’t Leave Nobody But The Baby (with Alison Krauss and Gillian Welch)

After the Goldrush (with Linda Ronstadt and Dolly Parton)

1917 (with Linda Ronstadt)

Orphan Girl

Where Will I Be

Wrecking Ball

Love Still Remains

Songs from the Trio album (with Dolly Parton and Linda Ronstadt)

Two More Bottles of Wine

Blue Kentucky Girl

Save the Last for Me

Together Again

Acyrologia

I DO curl up in the feeble position.

This is one of those Facebook items, passed along by Grandiloquent Word of the Day, that I loved so much, thought I’d give it its own post. (AND I’m in a river in Egypt.)

How many errors to YOU see?

grammar

One of those words Americans apparently misuse is walla. “The correct word they are looking for is ‘voila’, which loosely translates as ‘here it is’, ‘there you go’, or similar meanings.”
***

I had seen the word “pwned”, assumed it meant “owned,” but never bothered to look up the derivation until Arthur had been pwned. Here’s the Urban Dictionary, again.
***
20 Jokes So Terrible They’re Actually Funny; well, some of them are…

Someone tell me why there is, again, a run of graphics suggesting that Bob Denver, who died in September 2005, died recently. there was a run of these reports in 2012, as I recall, and a couple times since then.

It’s like what SNL used to say about Franco: Bob Denver is STILL dead.

March rambling #2: Vitiligo As Body Art

This Article Won’t Change Your Mind – “The facts on why facts alone can’t fight false beliefs.”

To End Hate, We Gotta Walk the Talk – Aristotle on Why Professing Liberal Values is Nowhere Near Enough

Door-Busting Drug Raids Leave a Trail of Blood and When a no-knock drug raid ends in death, is it capital murder or self-defense? Two cases in Texas took different paths

This Is How Your Hyperpartisan Political News Gets Made

Meet The Homeless Man Who Stopped Thousands Of People Becoming HIV-Positive

Is America’s Military Big Enough?

Amazing Disgrace: How did a thrice-married, Biblically illiterate sexual predator—hijack the religious right?

When He Is Ignorant of His Own Ignorance

Elmo From ‘Sesame Street’ Learns He’s Fired Because Of Budget Cuts

“PrOtEsT” – Poet Activists Throughout the Years

How the Choctaws Saved the Irish

Waiter fired after asking Latinas for ‘proof of residency’ at upscale Huntington Beach eatery

War On The Moon

In the Congressional Fight Over Slavery, Decorum Went Out the Door

Scott Pelley is pulling no punches on the nightly news

For 15 Years, New Orleans Was Divided Into Three Separate Cities

This is what happens to your body when you stop having sex

7 Tips to Get Someone with Alzheimer’s to Take a Bath

First-year residents shadow nurses in effort to better understand, foster future communication

List of inventors killed by their own inventions

Lack of Oxford Comma Could Cost Maine Company Millions in Overtime Dispute

Sweden is tackling its throwaway culture

Six Bad Ass Librarians from Pop Culture

The True Story of the Backward Index

Ask A Cartoonist: Women Who Inspire

Rest in peace, Chuck Barris

Rules for the Black Birdwatcher – With Drew Lanham and Extreme Birdwatching

The 21 most spectacular theaters in the U.S.

Vitiligo As Body Art

Troy native making movie about his hitchhiking adventure – Don Rittner

How Jaquandor made Gluten-Free Fried Chicken

Amtrak snow-motion

A STREET CAR NA_ED DESIRE

Now I Know: The Haircut that Went to War (Maybe) and What They Did Not See and Why People Originally Didn’t “Like” Cigarettes and The Invisible Wall Around Most of Manhattan and The Masterpiece Hidden in Plain Sight

Music

Before and After Chuck Berry and 15 great covers of Chuck Berry classics

Makeba – Jain

Bohemian Rhapsody Played by 100+-year-old fairground organ

10 Female Jazz Musicians You Need To Know

K-Chuck Radio: Feeling kinda “horny”

A New Thelonious Monk Album Emerges From the Soundtrack to a Classic French Film

Godsmack Play A Cover Of ‘Come Together’

Paul McCartney’s “Ram” Reconsidered

Lightning Strikes – Klaus Nomi (1981)

Understanding Deal Breakers: The Psychology of Music and Romance

Never heard of that band – oh, THEM!

Lonely People was used as the sign off song for a Washington, DC TV station for a time in the late 1970s or early 1980s, back when TV stations actually signed off.

I was reminded that back in the early 1970s, the student government at the State University College of New York at New Paltz put on a bunch of concerts, many of which I attended. But I remember reading about one in the Fall of 1971 by some group I had never heard of. The show cost only 50 cents, but I passed.

That group was America, whose A Horse With No Name went to #1 the very next year. In penance, I bought that first album and played it regularly. They’d later have hits such as Ventura Highway, Tin Man, and Lonely People, which I wrote about here.

In 1995, my girlfriend at the time, Carol – now my wife – and I were meeting my old (as in since kindergarten ) friend Karen and this guy from a local (Albany area) radio station named Johnny. As it turned out, Carol and Johnny were acquainted because they’d lived in the same area. After dinner, Karen and the radio guy invited Carol and me to see this musical act which I had never heard of. I might have gone, but Carol was tired so we opted out.

The artist turned out to be Moby, a descendant of Herman Melville, BTW, who had a massively successful album at the end of the decade called Play. What put me in mind about this story was Pantheon Songs’ tribute to a Moby tune that had come out a few years before that dinner, but I had not heard at the time.

Ramblin' with Roger
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