Roger O Green

Y is for the Year 2017 (ABC W)

August 21 – A total solar eclipse will take place.

No one really knows what will happen next year, though Bloomberg’s The Pessimist’s Guide to 2017 paints some scenarios.

We do know a couple of things about the year 2017, though, mostly anniversaries of past events. I was looking at Wikipedia and ITN source and note:

JANUARY 2017
15th anniversary – Launch of the Euro

FEBRUARY 2017
20th anniversary – Dolly the sheep was cloned

APRIL 2017
100th anniversary – USA declares war on Germany
30th anniversary – the Falklands invasion

JUNE 17
50th anniversary – The Six-Day War
20th anniversary – The Hong Kong handover

JULY 2017
80th anniversary – Amelia Earhart disappeared

AUGUST 2017
55th anniversary – Marilyn Monroe’s death
40th anniversary – Elvis Presley’s death
20th anniversary – Princess Diana’s death
August 21 – A total solar eclipse will take place. This will be the first total solar eclipse of the 21st century for the United States, and the first visible in the continental U.S. since February 26, 1979. Totality will occur along a path curving from Oregon to South Carolina and will last at most for 2 minutes and 40.2 seconds. The location and time of “greatest eclipse” will be on the western edge of Christian County, Kentucky, at 36.9715 degrees north and 87.6559 degrees west, occurring at 18:25 UTC.

SEPTEMBER 2017

45th anniversary – Israeli Olympic team killed
40th anniversary – Steve Biko’s death
September 15 – The spacecraft Cassini-Huygens, after having studied Saturn for 13 years, will be disposed of by plunging into Saturn’s atmosphere

OCTOBER 2017

October 26 – The collection of records established by the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 must be completely disclosed to the public.

DECEMBER 2017

50th anniversary – First human heart transplant

But for me, the biggie comes on Halloween. On 31 October 1517, the (Protestant) Reformation began with Martin Luther’s composition of his 95 Theses, which Luther started by criticizing the selling of indulgences. The Reformation was aided in no small part by the invention of the printing press.

2017 is a prime number. The last year that was prime was 2011, and the next one will be 2027.

Easter will be on April 16. There will be two times Friday is on the 13th, in January and October.

What do YOU anticipate for the year 2017?

ABC Wednesday – Round 19

The Lydster: very grave situation

The family went to this fair at a church in Claverack, NY, SSE of Albany. The Wife sees a friend who connects with that one time a year. The Daughter played on the swing, but I headed for the adjacent cemetery.

My maternal grandmother Gert and her sister Adenia have no gravestones. Gram died on Super Bowl Sunday 1982, and my aunt Deana a decade and a half earlier. So I decided to check out the condition of the memorials.

I noticed right off that many of them have a covering of green substance I believe to be lichen. Some are more prone than others.

The Daughter, finished on the swing, joined me in the cemetery. I started cleaning off the lichen with the back of a plastic fork I happened to have, and she used an old pen to clean out the letters. I wish I had taken a “before” picture, but one could barely see HICKEY, and the names below were not visible. As you can probably tell, there is still plenty of lichen there, but at least it’s readable.

Ah, Mildred Rowe was a couple of years OLDER than her husband, but outlived him by a couple of decades.

Pleased with our work, we went onto another grave. Headstones tell interesting stories. The Duntz couple had two kids. Emily died before she was 40, and Azano didn’t make it to his 18th birthday. The parents buried both of their children.

Interestingly, there are separate little headstones at ground level for AZANO, EMILY, and MOTHER (Edna Alger), but not for the father, Ellis, because others evidently made that determination.

Later, with friends, I’ve had several conversations about making plans for that time after death so that family members don’t have fights about it. I speak from experience in this matter.

We had almost run out of time – the Wife was calling us to have lunch at the event – but we thought this one headstone needed our help, not so much from the lichen, but from some other growth. Even together, we could not pull out the weed obscuring the view, and I didn’t have a knife on me to cut it away. Instead of removing the obstruction, the Daughter took a weed and tied them down, then found a rock, an adventure in itself, to keep the mess down.

We did relatively little lichen removal on this one, but it needed less work. This headstone was next to another stone I suspect marked the sister of the woman noted here.

The Daughter thought that she might like doing this kind of work for a living, or maybe do it as a hobby to get away from her busy lawyer career. We found it very relaxing on a perfect, sunny November day (67 F, 19.4C), a day before it snowed!

Christmas was on a Sunday

I had no sense that 1978 would be MUCH better.

It’s rather peculiar, I suppose, that I almost never go to church on Christmas Day, whereas I almost ALWAYS sing at church on Christmas Eve.

I did go at least once in the past ten years – I know the time frame because our current pastors were there. It is the one service you can go to in your pajamas, if one were to have a mind to.

Christmas is on a Sunday this year.

1960: Christmas was on a Sunday. I don’t recall what time my sister Leslie, who was 6, and I, who was 7, were allowed to wake up our parents. Baby sister Marcia was only two and we wouldn’t wake her up until she got up on her own.

I DO know that as we got older, the time got later and later before we could open the presents. (That’s Leslie and me in the pic, probably a couple of years earlier.)

1966: Christmas was on a Sunday. I delivered the paper six evenings a week, back in the olden days when there WERE afternoon papers, and then on Sunday morning, back in Binghamton, NY.

My father, who NEVER helped me with my route, because it was MY job, not his – not that I ever asked him – got up (or maybe stayed up) to help me deliver that thick newspaper to my customers on Clinton Street, Front Street and McDonald Avenue. That meant a lot to me, but I doubt that I ever said so.

1977: Christmas was a Sunday. I was probably crashing on the sofa of friends of mine in Schenectady, near Albany. That whole year was difficult, and I lived in New Paltz, NY; Charlotte, NC; Binghamton; Jamaica, Queens, NYC; back to New Paltz; and finally in the Electric City (GE was huge there at the time). It was undoubtedly the worst year of my life, even though I made some friends that year I still have. I had no sense that 1978 would be MUCH better.

1988: Christmas was a Sunday. I had left FantaCo, the comic book store less than two months earlier, burned out. Probably in a relationship crisis.

1994: Christmas was a Sunday. I had started my current job on October 19 of that year. But I was very DEFINITELY in a relationship crisis.

2005: Christmas was a Sunday. The Daughter was born the year before, the Wife and I were in our current house, in our current church. Life is pretty good.
***
Berlioz: the shepherds farewell from the oratorio L` enfance du Christ”

Coverville 1152: A Very Coverville Christmas 2016

A Comic Book Christmas Carol

Music Throwback Saturday: Bethlehemian Rhapsody

Because the wise men come, wise men go, angels high, shepherds low.
This is how God’s love shows.
It’s a wondrous story to me, to me.

Surely, you are familiar with the Queen song Bohemian Rhapsody. Well, apparently unrelated to what would have been Freddie Mercury’s 70th birthday year, my church’s youth leader directed a version of something called Bethlehemian Rhapsody, about the birth of Jesus earlier this month.

There are a few examples of these online, always involving puppets. But the version the church kids did was a live-action bit, with The Daughter playing Mary. The adult choir soloists also sang with the kids. They did a boffo job.

The lyrics start:

Is this the real birth?
Is it nativity?
Caught in a census
in the town of his ancestry.

Open your eyes, look up to the skies and see.
He’s just a poor boy foretold by prophecy.
Because the wise men come, wise men go, angels high, shepherds low.
This is how God’s love shows.
It’s a wondrous story to me, to me.

This is not to be confused by a different Bethlehemian Rhapsody, involving David and Goliath, sung by the group ApologetiX, with the lyrics here.

Listen to Bethlehemian Rhapsody (primarily the Jesus version):
here or here or here
here (video and lyrics)
here – lyrics of Jesus version, plus video of both the Jesus and David & Goliath versions
the ApologetiX David and Goliath version

Compare with Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen:
here and here, including those lyrics

The amazing power of Santa Claus

Chuck Miller, the guy in the plaid shirt, organized the event,

More than once, someone, almost always unknown to me, has referred to me as Santa Claus. Big man, white beard; I get it.

Interestingly, it’s usually done by women, especially young women, and it’s almost always said in December. I might have the same beard length in March, but it never engenders a St. Nick comment.

I was at my allergist back at Corporate (frickin’) Woods, where I used to work. Well, I know the bus schedule for the #737. I left the building in plenty of time to catch the 9:45 a.m. bus, but either it arrived early, or didn’t come at all. This means walking out of CW, because there’s not another bus downtown for four hours. I trudge up the hill- beware of the speeding cars going down since there’s no sidewalk and the grass is covered with snow and ice.

As I’m finally on the mostly straightaway of Albany Shaker Road, this woman, driving the opposite way from where I’m going, stops and wants to know if I’d like a ride. It was cold out, and I had maybe a mile to walk on roads with no sidewalks, so I said yes.

She was a photographer for children, sometimes with Santa Claus. She just couldn’t bear to see Santa walking, so she turned around, gave me a ride down Albany-Shaker, and just after she makes the right turn on Northern Boulevard, I see the #182 bus that would take me downtown, and she gets me to the stop, near the WTEN-TV station, just before the bus gets there.

The power of Santa Claus.

Oh, this is a picture, taken two days later, at the home of retired newsman Ken Screven, the guy front and center, with a couple of Ken’s friends, Denise and Arnelle, and a coterie of Times Union bloggers, including Chuck Miller, the guy in the plaid shirt who organized the event, Aaron Bush, Judi England, and Walter Ayres. Unfortunately, Michael Rivest had departed before the camera came out.