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.

Making the effort

“ministry of presence, support, and advocacy for the victims of society’s injustice and neglect”

Making the effort is its own reward, someone said.

It would have been very easy not to go to church the Sunday morning of February 2nd. Even with my greatest effort, clearing our sidewalk of snow and ice the day before was impossible as the temperature plummeted, even with rock salt. Most of my neighbors were likewise stymied.

Moreover, the service wasn’t at my church but at Emmanuel Baptist, one of the FOCUS churches.  “For more than 50 years, FOCUS has created a community called to be a collective voice – and a helping hand – for those in need.”

Yeah, I COULD have blown it off, but I like supporting FOCUS. Moreover, singing together with people from other congregations is fun. So I took the 910 bus down to the state capitol and walked the two slippery, frigid (<0F, c. -20C) blocks to Emmanuel, where about 25 of us got to sing a couple of songs together.

Pastor Kathy gave a good sermon. She noted that Jesus took a public stand against a faith system that offered religious cover for political violence.  My, did THAT resonate!

Covenant

We always recite the FOCUS covenant. It has changed a bit since the collective formed in the mid-1960s, but the spirit of service has not been altered;

We believe that we are called by God to discern amid the many shapes of need and pain around us, the design of Christ’s mandate for our shared ministry.
We covenant, therefore, with God and with one another:
to engage in a search for faithful and effective forms of ministry;
to provide a ministry of presence, support, and advocacy for the victims of society’s injustice and neglect;
to speak the truth in places of power on behalf of the powerless;
to equip ourselves for the service of Christ through joint educational and community-building ventures;
and to celebrate in worship the meaning of our shared mission.

We commit to these purposes our prayers, our time, our talent, and our material resources with the hope that our life and work together in this time and place will demonstrate the liberating and reconciling power of the gospel.

What now?

After the service, I talked to several people about how they were doing and what they were doing to keep themselves sane these days.  One worked at the FOCUS food pantry, and another served meals at the FOCUS breakfast club. Serving others gave them hope. 

Another person I’ve known for a long time talked about volunteering at RISSE, whose mission is “to support refugees and immigrants to build new lives and thrive in the Capital Region… through language classes, immigration and employment assistance, youth programming, and case management. The service is not very far from my house. (Related: from WRGB-TV, Channel 6 -Local schools prepare for immigration policy changes.)

Yet another person suggested checking out a website called Indivisible. When I got home, I went to the website, but I was wary. The most geographically specific site was labeled: All in for Harris/Walz Action Team Capital Region NY. 

Nevertheless, I wrote in an email titled, “What actions are you doing re: DOGE?” along with this Democracy Now video. Beth from Bethlehem Indivisible replied, “Lots of phone calls to electeds, and after last night’s Indivisible Mass Call, we are planning office visits to Schumer and Gillibrand, which is the most important thing right now.”

So, I’m “in the loop” on what I hope is a fruitful experience. (Oh, Kelly is writing to his Member of Congress.)  I’m tired of being tired, frustrated, and angry without direction. Is this THE answer? Dunno. But I need to do SOMETHING that seems to be a response to political violence.

Genealogy blocked

Hey, I wrote to my state legislators about a potential change in NYS law that would hurt genealogical research.

“As part of New York State’s Fiscal Year 2026 budget proposal, Part U of the Health and Mental Hygiene Legislation would:

  • 😡 Extend embargo periods to 125 years for birth records, 100 years for marriages, and 75 years for deaths — making New York one of the most restrictive states for vital records access in the entire country!
  • 😡 Hike fees by more than 400%, raising the cost of a single genealogical record request to $95!
  • 🤬 Eliminate even the basic vital records indexes, making it nearly impossible to simply confirm if a record exists in the first place!”

Read here and especially here, and if you’re in New York State, contact your state legislators before 5 pm on Tuesday, February 11.

Grisham, Daniels, Grammer turn 70 in Feb ’25

Ferrer, Jobs, Gottfried

Here are some folks who turn 70 in February 2025, plus a few who did not make it.  
Criminal lawyer-turned-author John Grisham  (8th) has written a slew of legal thrillers. I haven’t read any of them, though I did see two of the nine movies made from his books, The Firm (1993) and A Time to Kill (1996).
But I’m most interested in his recent non-fiction book. “From a moral perspective, it is imperative for a society to face and correct injustice… We decided to write about and focus on the ten most astonishing cases, and publish them as Framed. There are hundreds of others.” Grisham wrote this with Jim McCloskey, “the godfather of the innocence movement.” 
Jeff Daniels (19th) is an actor I’ve seen in many films, including Terms of Endearment, Purple Rose of Cairo, Heartburn, Speed, Pleasantville, The Hours, Because of Winn-Dixie, and The Martian.
He has also appeared on Broadway, most recently originating Atticus in the  reimagined To Kill A Mockingbird. (I did not see him, but I did catch Richard Thomas in the touring show.) 
“In 1991, Daniels founded a not-for-profit organization called The Purple Rose Theatre Company, which offers an attractive apprenticeship program for youngsters looking for a career in theatre.”
Kelsey Grammer (21st) is most notable for his two-decade-long portrayal of Dr. Frasier Crane in the hit series Cheers and its spin-off, Frasier. I watched virtually all of those episodes. The reboot of Frasier, which I had seen infrequently, recently concluded after a two-season run. He has also done a great deal of voice acting, most notably as Sideshow Bob on The Simpsons.
RIP

Then there were these folks that WOULD have been 70 had they made it to 2025.

Miguel Ferrer (7th) was an American actor who broke through after portraying Bob Morton in RoboCop. I knew him from the movies Traffic and  The Manchurian Candidate, as well as the TV procedural Crossing Jordan. His parents were the performers  José Ferrer and Rosemary Clooney. He died on January 19, 2017, from throat cancer at the age of 61.

College dropout Steve Jobs (24th) founded or co-founded Apple Inc., Pixar Animation Studios, and NeXT Inc. He was responsible for developing “the iMac, iPod, iTunes, iPad, and the iPhone, which ushered in a new era in the computer, music, and film industries.” Here’s all about Steve. 

He died on October 5, 2011, from pancreatic neuroendocrine cancer at the age of 56.
Gilbert Gottfried (28th): While I saw him on several programs, including The Cosby Show and Beverly Hills Cop II, most know him for the voice: the wise-cracking parrot “Iago” in Aladdin (1992) and the AFLAC duck.
 In the documentary Life, Animated (2016), about a child who learned to communicate by watching Disney films, the young man Owen had a fan club. He invited Gilbert to one of their events, and Gilbert gladly showed up.
 
He died on  April 12, 2022, from recurrent ventricular tachycardia, complicated by type II myotonic dystrophy, at the age of 67. 

Theater: Parade; Maybe Happy Ending

from Atlanta to Seoul

By happenstance, I saw two theatrical productions in three days, Parade and  Many Happy Ending.

In February 2024, Proctors Theatre in Schenectady held an event to announce the 2024-25 Broadway schedule for Proctors and Cap Rep in Albany.

When they discussed the musical Parade, which would start its tour at Proctors, an older gentleman on a screen said essentially that it was a sad and depressing story, but it was good. That could not be the “sell” the Proctors’ folks wanted to hear.

The musical won the 2023 Tony Award®  for Best Revival of a Musical and was nominated for a Grammy Award® for Best Musical Theater Album.

Katherine Kiessling of the Times Union wrote, “The heart of the show is assigned to Leo and his wife Lucille, played by Max Chernin and Talia Suskauer. The pair is charged with embracing the Franks’ rough edges—his aloofness and her initial desires to cling to her privileged life and flee the hardships of her husband’s trial—and eliciting empathy.”

They are a Jewish couple in the nineteen-teens Atlanta. He’s from Brooklyn, but she’s a native of Georgia. He runs a pencil-making factory. A young female employee is killed, and Leo is suspected.

Variety asked about the 2023 revival: “Will audiences take to a disturbing but captivating musical that deals with racism, antisemitism, and injustice?” Newspapers superimposed on the stage area ensure the audience knows the outcome before the production begins.

It’s very well done and important. While having a downer of an arc, it’s not all depressing, and it was worthwhile. My wife and I attended the January 11 program. It will be touring throughout the country through September 7. 

Made in Korea

Two days later, my daughter and I were in Manhattan working on a project. We contacted one of my nieces and her Significant Other. They secured four rush tickets for Maybe Happy Endings at the Belasco Theatre for January 13. The show opened on November 12.

“Inside a one-room apartment in the heart of Seoul, Oliver (Darren Criss, probably best known from Glee) lives a happily quiet life, listening to jazz records and caring for his favorite plant…

“When his fellow Helper-Bot neighbor Claire (Helen J. Shen) asks to borrow his charger, what starts as an awkward encounter leads to a unique friendship, a surprising adventure, and maybe even…love?”

The Will Aronson and Hue Park musical reminds us that “love is never obsolete.” It was delightful, not just because of the storyline, dialogue (“She’s a 5” was particularly funny), songs, and performances, which included lounge singer Gil Brentley (Dez Duron) and James and others (Marcus Choi).

Maybe Happy Ending uses specially made video projections, plus a fantastic physical space. “The musical exists in the relatively constrained spaces of the Helperbot retirement home, but there are also a series of flashbacks to Oliver’s time working with James in his house and Claire’s time working for her owner. Then, when the two robots eventually leave their apartments, there’s an entirely new landscape and horizon to contend with. And all of this takes place in a single unbroken act…”
Technology
Laffrey’s solution was to create a “machine that moved us through this world.” He used a “giant mechanism that encompasses the whole stage and fills it with moving pieces. For most of the show, the audience’s view is comprised of one or two boxes, one for each of the robot’s rooms—those boxes can slide horizontally, meaning there’s occasionally a single room and, more often, two side-by-side. The stage also has a central turntable, upon which some sets (James’ house, for instance) rotate.

“Simultaneously, Laffrey designed four huge black panels trimmed with neon. These panels, which are positioned in front of the stage where a curtain would be, slide up and down and side-to-side in order to act like a camera lens’s iris, opening wide to show the whole stage or narrowing to focus on a single piece of action. It’s a tool that occasionally makes the musical feel more like cinema than theater—the audience is seemingly viewing the play through a giant lens.”

A Korean-language version of Maybe Happy Ending opened in Seoul in 2016, and its English-language premiere was in Atlanta the following year. The show was very enjoyable, though sitting in the fourth row of the balcony, I had difficulty seeing some limited action in front of the stage.

Diversity washing

DEI

Here is a story about how far we have come in America, from January 2025, also featuring an earlier piece about diversity washing: 

These 12 major companies caved to the far right and stopped DEI programs

“Companies scaling back diversity, equity, and inclusion programs have started a trend.

“Right-wingers have been railing against DEI for a while now, and one of the loudest is Robby Starbuck, a failed filmmaker and failed congressional candidate. He objects to companies sponsoring Pride events, supporting transgender employees, taking action against climate change, and more. Oh, and he thinks toxic chemicals turn people queer and that the COVID-19 vaccine is what killed Matthew Perry.”

Climate change advocates are DEI killjoys?

“But the anti-DEI movement is bigger than just Starbuck. ‘Business experts have told CNN that Starbuck’s activism alone does not fully explain these decisions, and some companies’ commitments to diversity and inclusion were thin to start.” 

“Diversity washing” is the new greenwashing (2023)

“What’s that? According to this paper authored by academics from several institutions, including Chicago Booth and the Rock Center for Corporate Governance at Stanford, there are a number of companies that actively promote their commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion in their public communications, but in actuality, their hiring practices, well, don’t quite measure up. 

“The authors label companies with significant discrepancies—companies that discuss diversity more than their actual employee gender and racial diversity warrants—as ‘diversity washers.’ What’s more, the authors found, companies that engaged in diversity washing received better ratings from ESG rating firms and were often financed by ESG-focused funds, even though these companies were ‘more likely to incur discrimination violations and pay larger fines for these actions.'”

Everything is the fault of DEI.

From what I’ve seen in right-wing media, DEI hires caused the fires in Southern California to expand, even as the Los Angeles fire chief has two decades of fire fighting experience.  

 Strangely enough, DEI seems to have nothing to do with all the annual hurricane damage in locations like Texas, Florida, and Speaker Mike Johnson’s Louisiana. That’s why we need “standards.” Before we give money to those blue-state people, they’ll have to fix whatever systems they broke. But those folks on the Gulf of Mexico should receive help immediately.

FOTUS instantly blamed DEI and Biden for the mid-air collision over the Potomac River on January 29, saying that standards for air traffic controllers had been too lax, including the FAA hiring people with “severe intellectual” and “psychiatric” disabilities. However, he cites no evidence because he likes saying stuff.

The clear message is that if the person in charge is black or a woman or gay, and they falter, they must have only gotten the job because of “reverse discrimination.” When you are a competent person, this tension can be exhausting, but this is nothing new. Read the description of the 1969 novel The Spook Who Sat By The Door by  Sam Greenlee. 

Nasty (and not in a good way)

Kelly hit on something. “They aren’t looking to reverse progressive policy because they disagree with it. They are looking to pass as much harmful policy as possible because they are angry with America for ever having passed it in the first place, and they want to punish Americans for it.”

There are SO many examples. I’ll pick one from MedPage Today about the CDC removing certain pages:

“In addition, tools to estimate and reduce the risk of HIV were also down at the time of writing, as was a page on CDC’s efforts to address racism as a driver of health disparities.”

So, as I understand it, DEI is the problem, even though it wasn’t applied as rigorously as some people seem to think. We should be selecting competent folks like Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. Hah! Jonathan Chait wrote in the Atlantic [paywall] that FOTUS “is promising a return to meritocracy—while staffing his government with underqualified loyalists.”

The Britannica definition notes, “Perhaps the most formidable criticism of meritocracy is that, far from bridging social divisions, it engenders a new ‘performance’ elite whose initially earned advantages serve to sustain their dominance.”

I will posit that not being in favor of DEI isn’t inherently racist/sexist/homophobic, though I could make a case for its value. Conversely, blaming everything that goes wrong on DEI is precisely racist, sexist, and homophobic.

DEI is

From a post on Facebook, which I pared down somewhat: What DEI Is :

-ramps and sidewalk curb cuts
-subtitles & captions (TV & phone)
-family restrooms
-pay equity & transparency
-parental leave (time & pay)
-not having to just accept workplace harassment
-work accommodations for a variety of disabilities
-flexible work arrangements
-various food options for vegetarians/vegans/kosher/gluten-free/etc at medical facilities
-non smoking areas/end of smoking indoors
-large print materials
-materials in different languages
Some of What DEI isn’t:
-hiring an underqualified person for a job just because they’re a person of color
-hiring based on race just to meet diversity goals (this is illegal)
 -a  new fad or buzzword. DEI work has been going on for many, many years, under different names

Now that DEI has driven from parts of corporate America and the federal government, inequality has been quashed! Yeah, right.

All in graphics

A friend of mine needed a new computer monitor. I went to a store, bought a 27″ LG, and took it to their house. I opened the box at their place and looked at the instructions; they were all in graphics! No words of direction whatsoever. I stared at them for 10 minutes and realized I had no idea how to set it up, much to my friend’s disappointment.

But then I contacted someone I knew who was amazing at absorbing this sort of thing. They came to my friend’s place to set up the computer monitor in about 15 minutes.

This is another reminder to me of how we absorb information differently. The New York Times Connections puzzle generally “groups words that share a common thread,” four groups of four words. But recently, instead of finding words, they had 16 graphics. People had a dreadful time on this one. This was five out of five in difficulty. Are they mice or rats? My wife and I did get the puzzle with no errors, but it was not obvious. Hank Green worked on this particular puzzle and produced a video here.

Increasingly, I’ve noticed that when I have to get ahold of people, I have to remember which way is the best for that particular individual. Some people only do e-mail. There’s a small minority who require a telephone call.  Others are like that character in the Weird Al Yankovic video: “Don’t they know how to text?”

Moi

I tend not to use my phone, particularly when I’m home. It becomes too tempting to doomscroll on Facebook. When on my laptop, I tend to stay on task, working on tasks such as blogging or reading/responding to emails.

If people text me while I am home, I probably won’t see it until I go out, which irritates some people greatly.  But when I’m on the road, even in town, I usually have my phone available, although I turn it off during church, theatrical performances, and the like. 

Email is probably the best way to reach me because I check it regularly. I do notice items on my Facebook Messenger because something pops up on my screen.

Ramblin' with Roger
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