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.

Lisa thinks I’m a Liebster?

Honesty, integrity, and sleep.

So Lisa decided that I “deserve an award for being darling; beloved, liked very much, favorite, pre­ferred above others, liked or loved above others.” And who am I to argue with her?

The rules are simple … post 11 random things about myself, and answer 11 ques­tions the sender asks, then tor­turetag 11 blog­gers and give them a set of 11 ques­tions to answer. The goal is to drive each other crazy help others dis­cover new bloggy friends. And we all need more friends, right?

11 new random facts that haven’t already been cov­ered (as far as I know):

1. I know lots of odd facts. But The Wife will almost always ask something about it and I’ll have no idea. For instance, I read about a couple married 81 years, and my wife will ask, “Where are they from?” I have not a clue. But I remembered he was over 100 and she under. (He’s 102, she’s 98, and they are from Connecticut.)

2. I don’t complain about the cold. But I don’t put myself in situations of being out in the cold – skiing, sledding – beyond the necessary stuff, such as shoveling snow, clearing the car off.

3. The Wife, the Daughter, and I like living near the bus route, even though we do have a car. When we got snowed in one Sunday, we got to church anyway.

4. I hate doing webinars. Talking in front of people is OK, but talking to headphones with no sense of how people are reacting is not my thing. Probably why I won’t do a podcast, besides my inability to learn the technology.

5. I try to seek out people at parties and similar events who seem not to have people to talk with.

6. I prefer having a watch to looking up the time on some electronic device I have to pull out of my pocket. Faster, more elegant, IMHO.

7. Having been on food stamps in the late 1970s for a few months – back in the days they had the actual paper coupons, not a plastic card – cuts to food stamps, leaving the food pantries even more to do, rather ticks me off.

8. I tore the meniscus in my left knee 20 years ago. STILL hurts.

9. My work computer was replaced in October, and it was disastrously installed by some techie, and I had buggies that made work hellish for a few months until our internal techie fixed it.

10. When I get back to a database I haven’t used in a while, I can never remember the password.

11. In fact, there are databases I’ll join and forget I’ve done so until I try to register for it again.

11 ques­tions to answer from Lisa

1. What’s been your biggest sur­prise about blog­ging?

People I know personally don’t read my blog. People from halfway around the world DO read my blog.

2. What is your favorite book and why?

Top Pop Singles from Billboard. I read the titles and I can recreate the tunes in my head.

3. What do you do to relax and recharge your internal bat­teries?

On the last Monday of the month, I take off from work. I pay my bills, catch up on the newspaper and/or TV, write a blog post or three, then go to the monthly meeting of the Friends of the Albany Public Library. If I’m caught up, see a movie. Actually, when that is disrupted, as it has been too often recently, I feel like I’m constantly behind.

4. What do you miss about being your child­hood?

I miss very little about my childhood. The geographic closeness of a couple of friends, and my sisters, but I wouldn’t want to go back.

5. What is your most favorite smell in the world and why?

Baking bread, and that does not need a reason.

6. Have you ever done a random act of kind­ness? If so, what was it?

Ever? I hope that I do so regularly, whether it be a surprise back massage, or help push someone’s car that’s stalled out of the middle of the street, or buy some hungry guy a slice of pizza. But I’m not really keeping track; I hope that it has become second nature.

7. If you could design a tee-shirt/coffee mug/bumper sticker saying, what would it say?

Happiness runs in a circular motion.

8. What did you learn about your­self last week?

That, at least on Facebook, I can avoid being baited by some schmuck.

9. Are you a planner or more spon­ta­neous in your approach to your day?

Well, ya know it depends. I like to plan to get to the movies, take public transportation on time, or early. But I don’t plan out much else, except as it applies to other people i.e., the schedules of The Wife and The Daughter.

10. What is the biggest obstacle you’ve over­come in life?

Don’t know that I’ve overcome it as much as learned to fake it, but acute shyness

11. What are the three most impor­tant things in your life?

Honesty, integrity, and sleep.

I’m supposed to come up with questions for other people and tag those others. Ain’t doing the latter – but do it if you would like – and I have no inspiration of questions. So hey, YOU, answer the questions Lisa answered.

1. What is your dream vaca­tion spot and why?
2. Where did you come up with the name of your blog?
3. How do you define blog­ging suc­cess?
4. What is your favorite type of “going out” enter­tain­ment?
5. How many states (name them) have you lived in?
6. What is your favorite hol­iday and why?
7. What’s your favorite number and why?
8. What would be your dream vehicle to own?
9. What is your favorite hobby?
10. How do you try and keep your blog fresh?
11. Where do you do your best thinking?

Houses and dogs and books…

In all likelihood, you will pour every dime into the purchase, so that inevitable first repair of something you did not expect, you probably can’t afford.

Let me answer the rest of the questions from New York Erratic:

What would you say is the most difficult part of buying your first house? Is there something that you wish people would have told you?

I didn’t own my first house until I was 46 when I moved into the house my bride had purchased seven years earlier.

“Everyone” said that you’re “supposed” to own a house. I was never that interested in doing so.

My parents didn’t own a home until I went away to college. So I had no models in this area. While having to move every few years could be a pain, it was less of an encumbrance than a house.

In 2000, we bought our current home AND we were landlords; I HATED that. It was enough to take care of the living abode, but going over to mow the lawn and shovel the snow off the roof – it had a flat roof – was a royal pain. We sold it in 2004, shortly after The Daughter was born.

So to the question:
1) You DON’T have to buy a house.
2) If you do, it would be helpful to be handy with tools, which I am decidedly not.
3) In all likelihood, you will pour every dime into the purchase, so that inevitable first repair of something you did not expect, you probably can’t afford.
4) This will almost inevitably lead to buyers’ remorse. “How did I not notice that the dryer has a capacity of four shirts?” (This is true in our case, BTW.)
5) If you DO buy a house, you may spend lots of money on stuff that nobody can see. I was visiting my cousin Anne at Thanksgiving, and she told of the thousands of dollars spent to avoid flooding in the basement, expenditures no visitor or future purchaser will ever see. Some of our similar improvements involved spending thousands of dollars having a hole dug in the front yard to dislodge a tree root from the plumbing, lest we have sewage in the basement.

A LOT of investment in a house is all but invisible, and that can be REALLY discouraging. If I had it to do over again, I doubt I’d buy a house at all.

The single advantage is that people seem to think you are a “grownup” when you own a home.

Have you ever owned a dog?

Yeah, I was around 10, maybe (give or take two years). We had an Alaskan husky called Lucky Stubbs; I have no idea who named him, but it wasn’t I.

Anyway, he would nip me. I would say BITE but it didn’t draw blood or anything, so nip. But then he nipped one of the daughters of our minister. THEN my father gave him to a farmer where he’d have more room to roam than our tiny city back yard.

PS: after that, I was rather wary of dogs for years.

What’s your favorite spice?

Scary Spice.

OK, I jest. Cinnamon.

Old used books or brand new never read books?

Usually new, unless they are vintage. Books are like cars in that when they’re about 20 years old, they’re just old, but at some point they become VINTAGE. I have a hymnal from 1849, and another book from that period called Verdant Green, and THOSE are, as the kids used, are COOL.

Z is for Zero

Helping to working on my daughter’s homework, I get to rediscover centimeters to meters (100), milliliters to liters (1,000), and grams to kilograms (1,000).

Zero has fascinated me for-practically-ever. I saw this article in BoingBoing, which led to this piece in the Guardian:

“Only [India] introduced a symbol, 0, and treated it as if it was a normal digit just like all the others from 1 to 9. The invention of the number zero was possibly the greatest conceptual leap in the history of mathematics.

“But why did the Indians make this leap and not China or Babylon? …

“India made another contribution to world culture as well as zero: the idea of nirvana, the transcendent state of “nothingness”, when you are liberated from suffering and desires.

“In fact, the word used in philosophical texts to mean nothing or the void, is “shunya”, the same word later used to mean zero.

“For George Gheverghese Joseph, a maths historian at the University of Manchester, the invention of zero happened when an unknown Indian mathematician about two thousand years realized that “this philosophical and cultural concept would also be useful in a mathematical sense.” …

“In the modern world, it is common to see religion and science as always in conflict. Yet in ancient India, one cannot untangle mathematics and mysticism.”

I read Thinking in Numbers, On Life, Love, Meaning, and Math by Daniel Tammet this autumn. He wrote about Shakespeare’s Zero, how the Bard wrote a lot about nothingness and was “one of the first generations of English schoolboys to learn about the figure zero.”

For zero means nothing, but, combined with other numbers, can represent an incredible size, e.g., a one, followed by a zero (10), or two zeroes (100), or many more. Helping to work on my daughter’s homework, I get to rediscover the relationship of centimeters to meters (100), milliliters to liters (1,000), and grams to kilograms (1,000).

Of course, we often make a big deal about a birthday or anniversary when it contains a zero in the one’s place, and more so when it’s in both the ones and tens place. Read the Wikipedia piece about zero.
***
The Myth of ‘I’m Bad at Math’

How many is a billion?


ABC Wednesday – Round 13

The days of whine and hosers

whining copyThis will be a breakfast blog* post, just for my friend Dan:

30 December 2013: Took the bus to work early so that I could get my monthly allergy shot and not miss much work. There was a woman on the bus who was complaining about everything, sitting near the front of the bus. She was fairly loud, and about every fifth word was a vulgarity, no exaggeration. Worse, there were two or three women in that section who were listening to every perceived slight or projected hassle with rapt attention. After I got off the bus, I was SO relieved. My working theory is that some people LIKE to listen to others complain – I suspect they also watch those argument-driven reality shows such as The Real Housewives of Peoria, or wherever – but I found her exhausting.

31 December 2013: We went an hour southwest to Oneonta, NY. Two years ago, for First Night, it was about 50F (10C) at 5 pm. Last year, it was 34F (1C). This time, it was 14F (-10C).

First, we went to the new home of my parents-in-law. I mean, it’s new to them, and it’s nice, though they are still in the midst of unpacking. Sometime after I got there, I tried to post my blog post on ABC Wednesday, but I couldn’t GET to my blog. But I didn’t have time to investigate.

The trip to the motel was an adventure, with this sudden snow squall popping up. Do you know how there’s a covering at motel entrances? We were getting pelted by snow and wind WHILE WE WERE UNDER THE COVERING. It probably looked cool to watch, if one weren’t IN it.

Finally, after the wife and I got to the motel, I called the blog service provider. The blog problem wasn’t on his end; it was the dumb blogger who failed to update the Akismet, and my blog was under attack from Chinese spam. 20 minutes later, it was all fixed. Thanks, Shawn, and sorry!

That evening, went to venues with The Daughter, while The Wife went with her mother, and her father was off on his own. Among the acts were these Indonesian dancers, a woman and two children, whose music was not loud enough in the large room, AND who competing with the fire eaters just outside.

There were also belly dancers, and I was impressed, not only by their skills, but by the fact they didn’t have perfect bodies but put themselves out there; only one you would call slim. One of the young woman in particular, who my wife had seen months earlier, had particular confidence and charm. If there were snarky remarks, I didn’t hear them.

1 January 2014 (very early): The Wife and I stayed at a hotel, went to sleep c. 11 pm. Around 4:30 a.m., some folks were pounding on a door down the hall, complaining in a too loud voice about the fact that they had been locked out of the room. This went on for at least ten minutes.

Then it came to me: the absolute perfect putdown for these clowns. “You know that resolution you made not to be an a**hole this year? Well youve already broken it!” These things NEVER come to me in the moment.

But then I thought, in my foggy, exhausted haze, “Do I want the very first thing I say in the new year to be cursing out some strangers?” Instead, I opened the door, and said, in the most polite voice I could muster, “Hey, there are people trying to sleep here!” The crew mumbled some apologies, and eventually, we went back to sleep.

2 January 2014: Back in Albany a day early in anticipation of a snowstorm, which came. Shoveled a couple of times. The landlord next door hasn’t provided his tenants with a shovel, so they are always borrowing ours.

Went to the grocery store, listening to someone talking joyfully about being fired from her job, and from her retelling, I could see why. Everything was THEIR fault. She didn’t even bother sitting through the exit interview: “Am I fired? Then I’m outta here!”

3 January 2014: Shoveled the walk for the third time in the morning, when it was a balmy-2F (-19C). Got to work, and my computer would not connect to the network, so I couldn’t use it at all. Apparently, I’m at least the third person in my office to experience this. But the guy who could fix the problem was on vacation. His assistance came over in the afternoon, and after a few hours got me into my own computer at about 3 pm. My wife had TOLD me to stay home…

*Dan claims Ramblin’ with Roger is a breakfast blog, one a person reads at breakfast. I initially thought he was suggesting that I write about what I had for breakfast – I seldom do – but now, when I have a bunch of little bits that don’t warrant individual posts, I refer to those as breakfast posts. Like this one.

MOVIE REVIEW: American Hustle

American Hustle is a very fine movie, about crime and ambition and loyalties.

Neither the Wife or I had not been to a movie designed for grownups since July. The autumn was WAY too busy for our liking, and we missed Gravity and Saving Captain Phillips, a couple of movies we might have otherwise seen. Finally, during Christmas break, we got a child sitter so we could go out to the Spectrum 8 Theatre in Albany.

Frankly, at that point, I would have seen ANY of the films playing there except The Hobbit (didn’t see the first one, so seeing the second in a trilogy made no sense.)

My spouse picked American Hustle. I knew little about this except that it featured some of the same folks from Silver Lings Playbook, actors Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence, Robert De Niro, and director David O. Russell, who also co-wrote this screenplay with Eric Warren Singer.

Do you remember ABSCAM? It was an FBI “sting operation… in the late 1970s and early 1980s.” American Hustle took the framework of that real event and made it into something else entirely. This couple (Christian Bale as Irving, whose combover should be nominated for something, and Amy Adams as Sydney, who was in Russell’s The Fighter) click as successful con artists until caught by the law and forced to work scams to entrap other bad guys by their overzealous FBI handler (Richie, played by Bradley Cooper.) What’s going on betwixt the gumshoe and the moll? Gumming things up further is Irving’s needy and largely abandoned wife, Rosalyn (Jennifer Lawrence, who almost steals the movie).

Without giving away too much, this is a very fine movie, about crime and ambition and loyalties, which is at least a couple of times laugh-out-loud funny at lines that, on paper, are not that humorous. Other great performances by Jeremy Renner as a New Jersey politician, and Louis CK as a mid-level FBI guy. De Niro plays that De Niro role, which is just fine for these purposes.

At least some of the critical complaints involve the fact that some of the characters have positive outcomes, which certainly doesn’t seem like such a terrible thing, given the complicated schemes and definite peril they find themselves in. In fact, the plot was occasionally SO convoluted, The Wife wasn’t always quite sure what was going on, which did not diminish from her enjoyment; I THINK I had it all figured out, eventually.

Rated R, but I’d say, in the grand scheme of American cinema, a soft R, in my book.

Ramblin' with Roger
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