Uncategorized Archives - Page 1138 of 1289

Roger Answers Your Questions, Shooting Parrot, Tom the Mayor, and Rose

Albany is the right size for me.

I’ve been to the blog of Shooting Parrots, and have yet to see any dead or maimed birds. Regardless, he asked:

With most blogs, you get a sense of a life, but not necessarily a sense of place, apart from hints here and there. Could you describe the area where you live, what you like and/or hate about it, its history, the places you like to visit and things you like to do? Pretty much a blank cheque really!

Yikes, this is tough! So open-ended. Well, OK.

Albany is the capital of New York State. One of the things that kinda annoys me about that is that people from other parts of the state say we have to “fix Albany” when they mean state government. It’s like “fixing Washington” when referring to the US federal government.

Not that there aren’t things to fix in the city itself. Part of it has to do with bizarre urban planning. There is something generally called the Empire State Plaza, or the South Mall, which was built in the 1960s, apparently, as a result of the then-governor, Nelson Rockefeller, a Republican, being embarrassed by Albany’s allegedly parochial look when some Dutch royalty was visiting. This involved tearing down dozens of houses, and made the city’s downtown less walkable and vibrant in many ways, though it did provide it with its distinctive skyline.

Of course, Rocky couldn’t have pulled it off without the support of the city’s mayor, Erastus Corning, a Democrat, who ended up being mayor for 41 years. This is STILL a one-party town and has been for nearly a century. I don’t think there’s a single non-Democrat on the Common Council (and if there is, it’s a Green, not a Republican). This makes the primary election all important.

There is a long-standing event every year called Pinksterfest or the Tulip Festival that goes on in Washington Park on Mother’s Day weekend in May. Washington Park, BTW, was designed by Frederick Law Olmstead, the guy who planned New York City’s Central Park, among many others. when I lived closer to the park, I didn’t mind not having a yard, because I had the huge yard that was the park.

This is a university town. I recently wrote about that.

Albany is often called, derisively, Smallbany, because there’s a good chance that, particularly in the arts/progressive community, you all know each other or know somebody a degree or two away. I HATE when, in describing Albany’s virtues, one notes that it’s three hours to New York City, Boston, or Montreal, as though its proximity to SOMEWHERE ELSE is its sole calling card. Also, Montreal is at least four hours away, unless you drive like one of my brothers-in-law.

It’s like those TV shows that tease – in the middle of the show, in the lower corner – the NEXT show, as though watching THIS show isn’t good enough to be watching. And it is. For all its flaws, I like Albany. It’s working hard to TRY to be a more livable city. The population is well-educated, in the main, and reasonably liberal.

Speaking of TV, the first TV program was broadcast around here. Really. I’ve been to the Schenectady Museum, where there’s lots of early broadcast equipment.

There are some lovely old buildings here. Coincidentally, just this month, I visited the state Capitol on a tour. The interesting thing is that when it was built, there were massive cost overruns and a four-year project took about 40 and was technically unfinished when Governor Theodore Roosevelt, one of four New York State governors to eventually become President, pulled the plug. So state government’s incompetence is not a recent phenomenon.

Albany is the right size for me. Not overwhelmingly large like New York City, or too small, like my hometown of Binghamton, NY has become. Because it’s the capital, there are usually events going on, some of them free, though not as many lately due to budgetary constraints.

Specifically, I live in a section called the Pine Hills, which has both homeowners and student renters, a good thing, I believe. I can walk to the post office, drug store, supermarket, and movie theater.

I like Albany because it’s an old city, founded in 1686. It has a history, which it sometimes undermines, but cannot entirely. In some newer cities, I’ve found lots of shinier buildings, but no THERE there.

What do I DO here? The wife and I try to go on a date once a month. It might be a restaurant, a movie (almost never at a theater in the malls), or the Albany Symphony, which plays in Albany and Troy. Used to go to Capital Rep theatre, but I think we’ve been there once since the child was born. There’s Proctor’s Theatre in Schenectady, a nearby city, an old revitalized vaudeville house that I happen to love. And not that far out of town, is Thatcher Park, with tremendous views.

Tanya Bayo came by to say: In the chinese culture, the autumnal equinox coincides with what we call the “mid autumn festival”. During this time we get together with close friends and relatives to play a dice game and give mooncakes to each other. Thanks for that, Tanya.

Tom the Mayor, with whom I worked at the comic book store FantaCo asked:
Did the fact that Fantaco was publishing some pretty gruesome, {and selling some even more gruesome}, books have a part in your leaving Fantaco when you did?

Well, sorta. We started selling books like that as early as 1981 when we published Splatter Movies. But it wasn’t the gruesomeness that turned me off, it was the fact that I was no longer even reading the products we were publishing, because of their gruesomeness, to be sure, that made me feel very detached from the place at a certain point. I was shocked to go through my journal from the summer of 1987 and see that I wrote that I would leave in a year; I didn’t leave until November 1988, but I knew I wasn’t going to stay there forever. And if the market had allowed us to do more stuff like the Chronicles, it might have been different.

Ironically, if I had stayed, I could have made quite a bit of money, because I was making a percentage of mail-order sales of goods that I just wasn’t that into.
***
Rose asked:
You recently switched from Blogger to WordPress, how do you like WordPress compared to Blogger?

It’s funny. I’m typing this in Blogger because I find it easier. Sometimes when I’m typing in WP, the screen jumps, especially when I’m trying to put in some simple HTML code. Also, Blogger will SAVE NOW automatically; maybe WP does too, but I’ve typed stuff, failed to save it, and lost stuff on WP; that made me crazy. And I still haven’t mastered the photos on WP. When I had my Times Union blog, before this one, I wanted to put in a picture of Dudley Do-Right, who I thought looked a bit like the former governor Eliot Spitzer, and the photo ended up twice the size of the page, so I put pictures in Blogger.

That said, I like the LOOK of the WordPress blog much better, I like the Akismet spam blocker, I like how I can reply to specific questions.

BTW, Rose’s question wasn’t an idle one. The blog I’m on now I won in a contest she held back in February, I think. Not incidentally, she’s holding another one.

Rose also asked:
Why did you choose to be a librarian?

I will refer you to the aforementioned Times Union blog, where I answered that very question just this month!

Scott, Anne-Marie, and anybody else, more answers on Monday!

September Equinox ASK ROGER ANYTHING

Now this does allow for me to engage in obfuscation – “depends on what the definition of ‘is’ is” – but I can’t duck it altogether.

Just recently, I was musing what to call it when the daytime and the nighttime are the same lengths. Used to be that, in March, I would describe it as the spring equinox in the Northern Hemisphere and the autumnal equinox in the Southern Hemisphere. In September, it would be reversed. But that meant too many words. Recently, though someone, I forget who, though I have a guess, suggested calling them the September equinox and the March equinox; brilliant in its simplicity! And it works as well for the June and December solstices as well.

Anyway, this is an occasion when I get REALLY lazy. I decide, “Hey, I write this thing every day; the LEAST my vast 😉 audience can do is help me along with the content once in a while.” It is not entirely selfish, either. If I ask you, and you respond, then I answer, I am giving the people what they want. It also gives my fellow bloggers the opportunity to retaliate for the nasty questions I ask them.

Here are the rules: you get to ask me (Roger) any old thing you want to. No boundaries, no limits. Moreover, I have to answer it, and I must do so honestly. Now this does allow for me to engage in obfuscation – “depends on what the definition of ‘is’ is” – but I can’t duck it altogether. You may ask in the comment section or, if you’d rather, e-mail me. I will say that responses to e-mails of people who wish to remain anonymous will probably be murkier than those from people who own their requests.

I will begin replying next week. Here’s a recent example; yes, I promise I won’t take two months to reply.

J is for Just large enough, and Jupiter

My father painted, right on the ceiling in my room, the solar system!

When we were growing up, we lived on the first floor of a small two-story house, which was owned by my maternal grandmother; my paternal grandparents lived upstairs. On our floor was the master bedroom and kitchen in the back; the parlor, bathroom, and another bedroom in the middle; and the living room in the front.

I had two younger sisters, so they eventually slept in bunk beds in the second bedroom. To make a room for me, my father built a wall in the parlor that ran from the kitchen entrance about 2/3 of the way into the room, then another wall at a 90-degree angle from the first, leaving about an entrance to my room the size of a standard door, though I did not actually HAVE a door. Then he built a solid piece of wood – think one large shelf – held up by the two new walls and the existing wall to serve as the frame for my “bed”. On top of that was actually a foam mattress.

I did have room for my stuff under the bed, including a very low dresser. Around the corner was my bookcase, filled with my Golden Book Encyclopedias, my World Almanac, and other books.

In one of those books was a description of the solar system, and it gave relative sizes of the sun and the planets. The sun was a beach ball, Jupiter was a grapefruit; I forget the rest. So my father painted, right on the ceiling in my room, the solar system! This huge sun, and the various planets, including their known moons at the time. I specifically remember that according to the book: Jupiter had 12, Saturn 9, Neptune 5, Uranus and Mars 2 apiece, Earth and Pluto, 1 each.

And since the walls my father built didn’t go to the ceiling – there was a single ceiling light that illuminated the parlor, now essentially a hallway, and my room – anyone coming to visit us who came into the kitchen or bathroom was likely to see at least this massive star on the ceiling.

Incidentally, my father painted on the walls a lot. In my sisters’ room, there was a very good Tinker Bell and the head of Felix the Cat. In the living room, on one wall, was a stark snowy mountain scene. On the other was a marketplace in Europe done in the style, as I think back on it, of Monet.

Oh, yeah, Jupiter, named after the Roman god. It now has over 50 satellites; some may actually be asteroids, pulled in by the planet’s massive gravitational force. It appears that Jupiter has lost a stripe fairly recently, having something to do with dissipating gases. From a NASA Voyager recording, you can actually hear Jupiter. The planet 11 times the size of Earth was, on September 20, 2010, only 368 million miles away, as close as it will get for 12 years.

Finally,

Jupiter’s Two Largest Storms Nearly Collide, storms larger than the diameter of the planet Earth (Credit & Copyright: Travis Rector (U. Alaska), Chad Trujillo (Caltech), et al., Gemini Obs., AURA, NSF)

ABC Wednesday – Round 7

Change of Season MEME

At the bar sits a priest, a rabbi and a minister. A ten foot duck walks into the bar right afterwards. I know the perfect drink to order.

This is the welcome to summertime post from Thursday Thinks from the beginning of summer, but that’s largely irrelevant. I wonder if the site is defunct?

1. What’s your favorite part of winter?

The first measurable snow. Eventually, I tire of it, but early on, I like to walk in it, and don’t even mind shoveling it.

2. What was your worst summer vacation ever?

My father always took us camping. This is camping with a tent and Coleman stove and lantern, not in some fancy RV. One particular place had a bathroom that was so infested with flies that I literally killed seven with one blow with a rolled-up newspaper.

3. Tell us about the best job that you ever had.

Excluding the current job, it’s a toss-up between working at the Schenectady Arts Council (1978-79), where I ostensibly did the books, but got to be the partner for the choreographer when she needed a partner to teach the school kids disco, plus go sing at old folks’ homes with the secretary; and FantaCo (1980-88), where I got to write and do lots of different other things. SAC had the advantage of me never burning out because it ended too quickly when the funding ran out, whereas FantaCo was better for a much longer time, even though I needed to leave by the end.

4. Who is probably talking a load of crap about you right now?

Some guy who visits another of my blogs.

5. An alien appears and offers you the opportunity to repeat one year of your life. You will still know everything that you know now. He explains that no matter what you do differently when you are returned to the present nothing will have changed. What year would you pick and why?

Well, it’d be 1978, because it was a really fun year (SAC, among other things), after the VERY not great 1977. But what’s the point if I don’t get to change anything?

6. Name three things you have on you at all times. Explain why.

Bus pass, wedding ring, keys. Because.

7. When was the last time you wrote a letter to someone on paper and mailed it?

Wow. Probably to one of my sisters a couple of years after our father died in 2000 to clarify some issues.

8. If you could have everyone in the blogosphere read just one of your posts, which post would you pick and why?

I’m fond of my ABC Wednesday posts. How about E is for English language?

9. I recently read that the music industry continues to decline at an alarming rate. In the last year, it said the sales of Michael Jackson’s and The Beatles’ music are the only artists whose sales continue to climb. The article stated that the two are holding up the industry. Have you bought a CD or mp3 of either artist recently?

Actually, I bought a Michael Jackson greatest hits CD last year, and my wife got me the Beatles mono box for Christmas 2009.

10. What radio ad right now do you find so annoying that you’d rather have a tooth drilled than hear it again?

The great thing about not listening to the radio very often is that I have no answer. Though I must say that the Alan Chartock pledge drives on WAMC, one of our public radio stations around here, I find particularly unlistenable (sorry, Alan).

11. Berleen walks into a bar on a hot Minnesota day. At the bar sits a priest, a rabbi, and a minister. A ten-foot duck walks into the bar right after Berleen. What drink do you think Berleen orders?

A White Russian. I’ve read that ducks like milk, and having a drink named for a part of the former Soviet Union may signal detente amongst the clergy.

12. There is a knock on your door. It can be anyone in the world. Who would you want it to be?

There are about a half dozen people I’ve known, from college or later, but who I have totally lost track of.

13. What would be the worst entertainment or sporting that you could be forced to watch?

Extreme wrestling. I don’t care that other people watch it, but for me, no thanks.

Talk Like a Pirate Day

Those Hall of Fame Pirates must be rolling over in their graves.

Yeah, it’s Talk Like A Pirate Day. And fans of the team have reasons to go arrrrgh!

Here’s a list of players (with links) who played most or all of their careers with the Pittsburgh Pirates and who are now in the Baseball Hall of Fame:
Jake Beckley
Max Carey
Fred Clarke
Roberto Clemente
Ralph Kiner
Bill Mazeroski
Willie Stargell
Pie Traynor
Arky Vaughan
Honus Wagner
Lloyd Waner, pictured right
Paul Waner, pictured left

The Pittsburgh Pirates, a team with a long and storied history, has had 18 losing seasons – in a row. During that stretch, the Pittsburgh Penguins won the Stanley Cup and the Pittsburgh Steelers won the Super Bowl -twice.

The team has long used the excuse that it is a “small market” team that needs to keep its payroll down, and indeed, the Pirates do have the lowest payroll in Major League Baseball. But look at the next lowest team, San Diego Padres, who spent only $4 million more and are fielding a competitive team.

This article explains it all: Joe Sheehan: Don’t blame the Pirates, blame MLB’s revenue-sharing system (08.25.2010)
There’s nothing wrong with a baseball team turning a profit. What is wrong is a baseball team that cries poor while posting 18 consecutive losing seasons turning a profit. This difference is why the Pittsburgh Pirates, whose financial data from 2007 and 2008, the 15th and 16th of those seasons, was made public on Monday, are the target of such recrimination. While positioning themselves as the victim of “the system” and trading away an entire starting lineup, the Pirates have been one of the most profitable teams in MLB, pocketing $29.3 million in 2007 and ’08 combined, years in which they cashed revenue-sharing checks for a whopping $69.3 million.

The fans have rightly charged ownership with malfeasance for failing year after year to field a competitive team. If I were in Pittsburgh, I’m not sure I would continue to support such an organization. Those Hall of Fame Pirates must be rolling over in their graves; well, except Kiner and Maz who ae still alive.