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.

Lillian Bakic; Don Ingram

music

I should note that two people I’ve known for a while—one for a few decades and the other almost all my life—have passed away in the past month.

Lillian Bakic, 96, who died on January 14, was the mother of Carol, one of my best and oldest (in tenure) friends from back in Binghamton, NY.  From Mrs. Bakic’s obituary:  “She was welcoming and inclusive to all of her children’s friends, often hosting parties and social activities. Several have shared that she was their favorite mom of all their friends’ moms.” I number myself in that category, and I’m sure I  told her that more than once. 

Occasionally, in the summer, Carol’s classmates all got to go to the Bakic cottage at a lake in northern Pennsylvania.

I knew she worked at the Broome County Board of Elections and she took pride in her work. She eventually became the Deputy Commissioner of Elections. We would, on occasion, talk about politics, not the partisan stuff, but rather the importance of the electoral process, which almost certainly informed my sense of the way things should work. 

A few times, starting when I was 19, she said I could call her Lillian. No, thank you, Mrs. Bakic. 

“Funeral Mass will be held on Thursday, January 23 at 10am at St. Cyril’s Church, 148 Clinton St, Binghamton, NY. The family will receive friends at St. Cyril’s Thursday at 9:00am. 

A Celebration of Life will be held in her honor at a later date in the Spring.” 

Organist

Donald Ingram, 92, died on December 29, 2024. Per his obituary, Don “was the organist and choirmaster for nearly 20 churches over his career.” Two of them, in temporary capacities, were the last two churches at which I sang in the choir, Trinity United Methodist and First Presbyterian, both in Albany.  He was very good at what he did. Yet he was affable and occasionally very funny.

Every year that his birthday was divisible by five, he’d gather a bunch of singers he knew and play the Christmas section of the Messiah by Handel. His longtime partner Gene would sing some of the solos. I participated in this wonderful event at least thrice. 

  “Funeral and committal services will be held in the spring,” likely in the Albany area where he has lived for the past half century. “Dates will be announced at a later time. Interment will be in the columbarium at St. Paul’s Cathedral in Buffalo.”

Musing about social media

“your movement won’t be very popular”

I’ve been musing about social media recently. The Supreme Court recently allowed the effective end of TikTok, owned by ByteDance, in the United States, barring its sale to a non-Chinese company. Less than a day later, TikTok was back, at least for a time.  

Of course, other media companies are busy figuring out how to poach those TikTok users, whether or not there’s a sale or other rescue.

I came across Cory Doctorow’s Billionaire-proofing the Internet. The subtitle spoke to me: “Scolding people for choosing popular services is no way to build a popular movement.”

He starts with the story of the record companies who sued users during the days of Napster, keeping the money for themselves rather than passing the proceeds to the artists they were allegedly “protecting.”

“What we didn’t agree on was what to do about it. A lot of us wanted to reform copyright – say, by creating a blanket license for internet music so that artists could get paid directly. This was the systemic approach.

“Another group – call them the ‘individualists’ – wanted a boycott. Just stop buying and listening to music from the major labels…

“Here’s what I would say when people told me we should all stop listening to popular music: ‘If members of your popular movement are not allowed to listen to popular music, your movement won’t be very popular.'”

Cost

“Which brings me to social media. The problem with social media is that the people we love and want to interact with are being held prisoner in walled gardens. The mechanism of their imprisonment is the ‘switching costs’ of leaving. Our friends and communities are on bad social media networks because they love each other more than they hate Musk or Zuck. Leaving a social platform can cost you contact with family members in the country you emigrated from, a support group of people who share your rare disease, the customers or audience you rely on for your livelihood, or just the other parents organizing your kid’s little league game.”

Indeed, I have been on Facebook for about a decade. I got on initially because my niece Rebecca, who lives in California, posted her activities on the site. Before that, I didn’t know what she was doing half the time as she traveled all over the country. Subsequently, I found people I knew in the world: old friends and formerly distant relatives. I joined interest groups.

“Hypothetically, you could organize all these people to leave at once, go somewhere else, and re-establish all your social connections. Practically, the ‘collective action problem’ of doing so is nearly insurmountable. This is what platform owners depend on… “

Yes, I joined BlueSky, but it’s like moving to a new school as a kid. You find your way eventually.

A solution

“There’s a way out of this, thankfully. When social media is federated, you can leave a server without leaving your friends. Think of it as being similar to changing cell phone companies. When you switch from Verizon to T-Mobile, you keep your number, you keep your address book, and you keep your friends, who won’t even know you switched networks unless you tell them.”

“There’s no reason social media couldn’t work this way. You should be able to leave Facebook or Twitter for Mastodon, Bluesky, or any other service and still talk with the people you left behind, provided they still want to talk with you.”

It explains a whole how-to that involves legislation and whatnot so that it won’t be easy.

Meanwhile, I want to clarify that I don’t think it’s bad if people decide to leave a site. I left Twitter not so much because I didn’t like Musk or think that X is a stupid name, as I had read that Twitter would use my information to train its AI bots.

It isn’t easy to leave some of these sites. Here’s a detailed article about how to get off Facebook, which is way more complicated than you would think. In case it’s paywalled, there are five steps from settings to finding deactivation, five more until you reach “please don’t go,” and five more after that. 

“Almost certainly, in the future, this experience will be illegal, as emerging privacy laws require experiences continue to insist that companies like Facebook and Amazon make it just as easy to leave their experiences as to sign up. In fact, the FTC has already announced a rule that likely makes what you see above illegal in the United States, though it hasn’t come into effect yet. (We’ll see if that happens under the [FOTUS]  administration, I suppose.)”

Movie review- Mufasa: The Lion King

Very leontine

I’m steeped in the Lion King mythos, so that’s why my wife, daughter, and I saw the Mufasa movie at the Spectrum Theatre in mid-January. My wife and I saw the original 1994 animated film, as did our daughter subsequently. The musical production at Proctor’s Theater in Schenectady, which my wife and I saw twice, once with our daughter.  The daughter was in the production at church. I saw a junior high school production, and I suspect there’s another. But I didn’t see the 2019 live-action film.

The reviews for Mufasa have been mixed, with only 56% positive on Rotten Tomatoes. A positive review: “A remake of ‘The Lion King’ was an unnecessary move from a cinematic point of view, but a masterstroke from a business point of view.”

A couple of negative takes: It “would have been perfect if its characters had fewer lines, and if the songs were in the background rather than emerging through the mouths of clearly computer-generated figures.” “The songs fall flat, the story is basic, and the movie falls for all of the prequel tropes we’ve grown tired of.”

Profitable

I agree with all of that. It is a Disney money grab, for sure, and a successful one at that. While the animals were rendered wonderfully, it was a bit difficult to distinguish some of them, particularly the lions.

Watching them sing was a bit distracting. Some of the songs were exceptionally cutesy. Although I had forgotten he was involved, a few,  in particular Bye Bye, immediately sounded like Lin-Manuel Miranda’s signature style. Interestingly, listening to them without watching the action was less distracting.

We were surprised that the film suggested, albeit off-screen, incredible violence as the vultures headed towards what had to have been a killing field.

But I think the film got better as it centers on five characters, three lions and two others. There was an interesting lesson at the end, which I suspect some people will think is a bit too “woke” for their taste, but which I thought was true. By the end of the movie, I’d given into the storyline.

 I got enough out of it that it wasn’t a waste of my time, but your experience may differ.

Cognitive dissonance

MLK/djt

I’m experiencing a tremendous degree of cognitive dissonance. Today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and it’s also the inauguration of someone who doesn’t seem to understand what MLK was about.

During the 2024 campaign, he supported a truly dreadful candidate for governor of North Carolina, Mark Robinson, a black man. 45/47 said that Robinson was Martin Luther King “on steroids.” The Tar Heel is a guy who left messages on a “porn site’s message boards more than a decade ago in which he referred to himself as a ‘black NAZI,” among other failings. Fortunately, he lost badly in a state that Orange won.

There were many online posts claiming that djt was never accused of being racist until he decided to run for president. Well, no. This AP story notes otherwise. Most of it is not new to anyone paying attention. 

“In 1973, for example, the Justice Department sued the real estate tycoon and his father for their alleged refusal to rent apartments in predominantly white buildings to Black tenants. Testimony showed that applications filed by Black apartment seekers were marked with a ‘C’ for ‘colored.’

“The lawsuit ended in a settlement in which the Trumps acknowledged they “failed and neglected” to comply with the Fair Housing Act, though they were never required to explicitly acknowledge discrimination had occurred.

“In 1989, Trump infamously took out full page newspaper ads calling for New York state to reinstate the death penalty as five Black and Latino teenagers were set to stand trial for beating and raping a white woman in Central Park.” And he doubled down on this long after they were exonerated, so they sued him in 2024 for defamation. 

HUD

djt includes many of his former rivals in his cabinet and his inner circle, including people of color. He named Doctor Ben Carson the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development; even though Carson had no experience in this area, it was convenient for him.

“Carson has allowed his family members to be involved in the operations of the department in ways that could benefit them. In particular, Carson’s son, Ben Carson Jr., and his daughter-in-law, Merlynn Carson, appear to have exercised an unusual amount of influence over certain government businesses. Emails uncovered by American Oversight and analyzed by news outlets reveal that both Carson Jr. and Merlynn Carson may have attempted to use their influence at HUD to advance their own private interests.” This shows that when he hires grifters, he doesn’t discriminate.  

Black voters

Yet more black people voted for djt than ever before. Kamala “Harris appears to have won 80 percent of the Black vote, according to an exit poll by The Associated Press. But that’s a drop of 10 percentage points compared with 2020, when the current president, Joe Biden, won nine of 10 Black votes.

“The beneficiary? Trump, who won 20 percent of the Black vote this time, according to the exit poll. He had won 13 percent of the community’s vote in 2020 and 8 percent in 2016 — which in itself was the highest level of support by Black voters for any Republican since George W Bush in 2000…”

“Why? Today’s Black voters operate a bit more independently from previous generations, especially young Black voters, analysts say.

“Historically, the Democratic Party’s legacy with the civil rights movement is what kept it popular with Black voters. However, younger Black voters do not have those same civil rights legacy attachments…

“‘…this rising percentage of Black voters [is] taking a different look at the Republican Party in general and are exploring some curiosities with Trump despite his racial baggage.’”

I have no great insight here. The 47th president has the magic elixir that allows him to do things that I, as an old poli sci major, have never seen anyone else pull off. I hope that the country survives.

I will lean into the fact that, in the tradition of the MLK holiday, we act locally to make our country a better place despite what might happen at the national level. This isn’t easy, I know, but it is probably necessary. Here’s a Letter from a Birmingham Jail by MLK in 1963.

ARA: How’s Ken Jennings doing on JEOPARDY

pressure cookers

Ken JenningsKelly, who lives near Buffalo, asks an Ask Roger Anything question, wanting to know:

Ken Jennings: he’s been there a while now, so how’s he doing?

He’s doing fine. I could leave it at that, but his arc has been tricky. As you probably know, he was asked to be the first guest host after Alex Trebek died, and Alex had intimated that Ken should be his successor.

Ultimately, after all of the guest hosts made the situation a bit zooey, producer Mike Richards picked himself, but soon the hosts were Mayim Bialik and Ken. They seemed to get along, but fans either liked him and hated her or vice versa. At the time, I hated the big gap between the contestants’ responses and her saying it was correct or incorrect; my wife found it oddly endearing and suspenseful. No, I argued, it took longer, so the chance of the contestants clearing the board was lessened.

Matt Amodio, who won 38 games on the show, said that Mayim “was a great person to be around on the stage. Very nice, very fun. [But she] clearly is not the Jeopardy! fan that Ken is, and was just unable to bring that same level of knowledge and energy. As an experienced player like myself, it’s a little frustrating when the host doesn’t know to do something that I would have known just as a viewer of the show.” I agree with the sentiment.

Practice

Ultimately, when Mayim Bialik chose not to cross the picket line during the writers’ strike – even though it was not required  (different union) – Ken got more repetitions as host. This made him better at the job, so they eventually squeezed Mayim out.

Most of the comments I read now are people complaining about whether a pronunciation or spelling should have been accepted. During the Trebek era, much of that was under the producers’ and judges’ purview. There have been a few cases when I thought they were pretty lax.

I didn’t know until recently that Ken Jennings talks to the contestants before the show, while Alex Trebek would never do that. This made Alex more imposing but may also make Ken more relatable. When I was on, I only heard Trebek before the games when the local press in Boston interviewed him.

Too many tournaments

I have to admit that I hate the Second Chance Tournament on JEOPARDY! This was a direct result of the writers’ strike when they chose to use previously selected questions. People didn’t win a game, but they brought them back one more chance at becoming a champion, and then three of them had a two-game final.

This happens for two weeks, and those winners, in turn, go to the Champions Wild Card tournament, which predates the Tournament of Champions. It’s way too many tournaments for my taste! Moreover, most of Ken’s contestant questions are of the “What did your friends say after your first appearance/how did you prepare for this appearance” mode; astonishingly boring.

One of the things Ken has done that some people think was really sweet is that the people who participate in the Second Chance Tournament on the second of their two days during the final get to thank people for supporting them in their JEOPARDY effort. This was something that Alex Trebek did near the end of a Tournament of Champions or another substantial tournament.  Doing this during the Second Chance tournament frankly feels undeserved. It bugs me a little, but he’s doing it because Alex used to do it in the ToC.

Boom!

People have told me that “old-school” pressure cookers were terrifying appliances. We never had one. Did you, and if so, were they as scary as all that?

I’ve seen a  few of them, but if we ever had one growing up, I don’t recall. I never owned one as an adult because of the stories I had heard, such as this comment from a 2023 post: “Old-time pressure cookers could be dangerous. They had several knobs and locks to secure the lid. If things weren’t lined up and tightened correctly, there could be an explosion when the pressure got high enough.”

So, I can totally see myself mucking that up. No, thanks.

Ramblin' with Roger
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