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.

What’s the frequency, English?

Americans have no idea what a fortnight is.

 

I used to go out with a poet, and she helped put out this poetry chapbook. It came out triannually, and that was the first time I knew that triannual meant thrice a year, rather than once every three years, which is triennial. Likewise biannually and biennially – twice a year and every two years, respectively. EXCEPT that, according to this dictionary, the second definition of biannual IS biennial. This both hurts my head and breaks my heart.

I KNEW this was a problem with biweekly, which means both twice a week AND every two weeks. This was a tad confusing when wanting to order comic books back in the day. We assumed, though, that a comic was going to come out twice a month, rather than eight or nine times a month. To avoid this confusion, I started using the term fortnightly for every two weeks. The problem with THAT is Americans have no idea what a fortnight is.

In the triannual definition, the usage note reads: “To avoid confusion between ‘triennial’…and ‘triannual’…, it is often better to substitute a less ambiguous phrase such as ‘three times a year’ or ‘every four months’. I suppose so, but often the phrase is far less elegant than a single, perfect word. Obviously, triannual has been rendered an imperfect word.

For twice a year, I use semiannually, but I don’t have a similar option for thrice annually.

Two of my favorite words denoting the passage of time:
Sesquicentennial – 150 years. Find more anniversary words here.
Lustrum – five years, which was tied to the census of ancient Rome.
***
What’s The Frequency, Kenneth? – R.E.M.

8 New Punctuation Marks We Desperately Need, says College Humor.

The official list of English words misused in EU documents.

To boycott or not to boycott; that is the question

The traditional idea that international sports events should be a place to create cooperation through competition is damaged by boycotts, as are the athletes that have trained for years for the opportunity to participate.

There is a movement to have the United States and other nations boycott the Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia in 2014, and I’m a bit conflicted about it.

One group wants to boycott because of the country’s highly repressive new law banning any speech that equates the social status of same-sex relationships with heterosexual ones. I agree with the intent of the boycott in this case. But we’ve had Olympics in repressive regimes before; the dissidents in Beijing were just locked away for the Summer Olympics in 2008, and let’s not even talk about Tibet.

Another group wants to boycott because Russia has given sanctuary to Edward Snowden, the leaker of all that NSA classified information that showed the United States has all this “metadata” on its own citizens. I heard Senator Lindsay Graham (R-SC) float that one while Snowden was still living in the Moscow airport, which was reason enough for me to be inclined to oppose it.

I’m also reminded that there was a boycott by African nations at the Summer Olympic Games in Montreal in 1976, having to do with New Zealand competing athletically with South Africa, which had been banned from the Olympics since 1964 because of its apartheid policies.

Then the United States and some of its allies boycotted the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow because of the USSR invasion of Afghanistan; the irony still resonates. In response, many of the Soviet bloc nations stayed away from the 1984 Summer Games in Los Angeles.

On the fourth hand, I think we’re at here, the traditional idea that international sports events should be a place to create cooperation through competition is damaged by boycotts, as are the athletes that have trained for years for the opportunity to participate. All the Games were diminished, even if the boycott rationales were worthy.

Right now, I’m leaning against the boycott. Circumstances could change that. And perhaps I can be persuaded. Lessee, Arthur’s ambivalent, too…

D is for Death

Death is such an uncomfortable subject, even though most of us will experience it eventually.


When someone significant in my life dies, I like to mention him or her in this blog. They don’t have to be people I actually met, but are usually people who inspired me in one way or another. The late Roger Ebert’s birthday was June 18, and I had a passing recollection of how well he wrote about issues other than movies in the latter stages of his life.

Paul McCartney, who shared a birthday with Ebert – both were born in 1942- put out an album in 2007 called Memory Almost Full. The penultimate song was The End of the End [LISTEN], which had these lyrics:
“On the day that I die, I’d like jokes to be told And stories of old to be rolled out like carpets That children have played on and laid on While listening to stories of old.” He said on the audio commentary disc to the album that the song was inspired by someone who said, “I wish you a good death.” This initially startled him, but then he started to think of the tradition of the Irish wake, and he gained a greater understanding of the sentiment.

Death is such an uncomfortable subject, even though most of us will experience it eventually. I’ve been to LOTS of funerals in my time, quite a few fellow church members from my last two churches. I’ve come to the conclusion that being there trumps almost anything one can say because almost anything said can be taken wrong:
“Well, she lived a long life.” True, she was 92, but they wanted her to be there at 93 and 95.
“He’s in heaven now.” Even if all the parties believe this – some don’t – I’ve seen it used as an attempt to shortcut the grieving process, some theological variation of “Get over it.”
“It’s for the best,” usually said of someone who passed after a lengthy and/or painful illness. While this may be true, it’s not for YOU to say. On the other hand, you can say, “If you want to talk…” And let THEM talk.

This article about former BeeGees singer Barry Gibb losing all of his “brothers without being friends with them” is very sad because it is not unusual. Someone dies and issues remain permanently unresolved.

Whereas I enjoyed the story about National Public Radio’s Scott Simon chronicling his mother’s last days on Twitter. I mean, I wouldn’t have done it, but given his mom’s show biz past, it was appropriate for them.

I really liked the poem included in this blog post, which also includes this narrative: “For a time, it feels like the whole world should stop, when a loved one dies. I remember experiencing that feeling so strongly… Perhaps the nicest thing you can do for someone who has lost a part of their world, is let your own world stop, if only for a moment.”
***
It occurred to me I never gave props to Helen Thomas, pioneering White House correspondent, mostly because I had nothing to add to what others said.

I’ll also mention John Palmer, NBC’s White House correspondent, and later, a newsreader for the TODAY show, back when it was still doing news.

Michael Ansara was an actor who “specialized in playing American Indians and aliens”; he was actually born in Syria and was married for a time to Barbara Eden.


ABC Wednesday – Round 13

The new old movies

McMurphy from Cuckoo's Nest
That Jaquandor fellow did this exercise: “For me, when I think of an ‘old movie’, my brain always defaults to Casablanca, which by the time of my awareness of its existence, had become a venerable classic movie. Now, when I was born, Casablanca was 29 years old. So here is a list of films that, as of this year, are as old as my brain’s canonical ‘old movie’.”

My problem is that my default ‘old’ movie was The African Queen (1951), only two years before I was born, because I saw it long afterwards. So the list generated would be too recent. I thought of 1939, but I’ve seen The Wizard of Oz so often, not to mention variations on it, it’s still new. So I finally decided on Birth of a Nation (1915); now that’s an old film.

1953-1915=38. 2013-38=1975

These are the movies of 1975, as old today as Birth of a Nation was when I was born:

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Tommy
Nashville
Love and Death
The Stepford Wives
Shampoo
Jaws
Dog Day Afternoon

Lots more, of course, but these jumped out at me as films that either reflected the era, or are timeless classics. And the latter two I’ve never seen.

Of magpies: WWII black veterans edition

I wrote a blog post, in part, about an Ebony article from October 1946 about black GIs in Germany after World War II, of which my father was one.

Dustbury noted that he and I have something in common: we are both magpies. As he put it: “The Eurasian magpie… is wicked smart, especially for a bird… I am not quite sure how “magpie” became a descriptor for humans who flit from topic to topic unless it has to do with the bird’s tendency to be attracted to Shiny Things, but I’m pretty sure I fit that description, and I have several readers who seem to do likewise.”

The problem with that is that I often move onto the Next Thing, less out of boredom, but the need to find something mentally Shiny, I suppose. Intellectually, at least, the phrase “Jack of all trades, master of none” is pretty true of me. I know very few things in depth, but I know a little about a lot of things.

Sometimes, people have suggested that I ought to focus this blog on one or two topics. There’s only one reason why I don’t: I don’t wanna. But it is interesting that people look to me for whatever expertise I might have.

When I stopped working at FantaCo, the comic book store in Albany, in 1988, and subsequently quit collecting comics, I figured that was the closed chapter of my life. Yet I find myself working on a FantaCo bibliography this month.

A few years ago, I wrote a blog post, in part, about an Ebony article from October 1946 about black GIs in Germany after World War II, of which my father (pictured above) was one. A German documentary filmmaker wanted a high-resolution scan of the story, and thanks to a Facebook request, I was able to get one.

Incidentally, one of my sisters is convinced that one of the guys pictured on this page of the Ebony story is my father. I’m not entirely convinced. What do you think?

In any case, even though I’m not an expert at much of anything, I can be rather useful.

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