Uncategorized Archives - Page 2 of 1167

You want to present a book review

or an author talk

I may have been too subtle, Capital District people. You want to present a book review at the Albany Public Library branch located at 161 Washington Avenue. You know you do. They take place every Tuesday at 2 pm when the library is open.

Unless you are a local author, in which case you want to give an author talk. You can even sell copies of your book. Feel free to use your social media to plug your talk.

The auditorium has a microphone and can show visuals on the screen. We’ll even reserve a parking space for the speaker behind the building. Please note the parking is BEHIND the Washington Ave branch, and Elk St is a one-way street heading west (towards Schenectady, away from the river), so you should turn on Dove Street near the Albany Institute, head north for one block, then turn left.

We intend to create an eclectic array of books. The organizers are always working well ahead of the date. We need to nail down the book title, author, speaker, and a brief speaker bio to get it onto the Albany Public Library calendar. Our July and August talks deadline is the last week in April.

In recent months, three of us have been securing speakers. Because of health issues, there are currently two of us. And our MIA comrade has a deep address book of contacts.

We’re also looking for people to put out snacks, make coffee, then clean up afterward. So, if this interests you, please let me know.

Upcoming

May 7 | Book Review | The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America by Jeffrey Rosen. Reviewer: Bill Shapiro, retired attorney & lifelong student of international relations.

May 14 | Book Review | Freeing Charles: The Struggle to Free a Slave on the Eve of the Civil War by Scott Christianson. Reviewer: Mara Drogan, Director of Community Engagement & Education, WMHT Public Media.

May 21 | Book Review | Dust Tracks on a Road by Zora Neale Hurston. Reviewer: Donald “The Soul Man” Hyman, teacher, actor, singer, writer, TV host/producer, & veteran.

May 28 | Author Talk | Susan Oringel discusses & reads from her book, Carnevale, a journey in poems through the lives & deaths of her parents (from Coney Island in the 1930s & 40s) & of her partner Don Howard — they all died between 2002 & 2007 — a journey also of trudging steps through grief back toward the living.

June 4 | Author Talk | Emily Sherman Marynczak, a childbirth educator & coach with a background in modern dance, discusses & reads from her book, Emily’s Birth Book: Your Guide to a Conscientious Birth.

June 11 | Book Review | A Tale for the Time Being, a metafictional novel by Ruth Ozeki. Reviewer: Alexis Bhagat, former executive director, FFAPL.

June 18 | Book Review | Blight: Fungi and the Coming Pandemic by Emily Monosson. Reviewer: P. Bryon Backenson, MS, director, NYS Department of Health, Bureau of Communicable Disease Control.

June 25 | Book Review | Our Moon: How Earth’s Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are by Rebecca Boyle. Reviewer: Sherrie Lyons, PhD, science historian & author of both From Cells to Organisms: Re-envisioning Cell Theory (2020) & Species, Serpents, Spirits, & Skulls: Science at the Margin in the Victorian Age (2011).

My wife could have been a doctor

WellNow

My wife, who has been a teacher and worked in the insurance industry, could have been a doctor. When I got an occasional cut or bruise, she would examine it thoroughly and attend to it with a degree of curiosity that was clinical.

She was so good at this that when my daughter’s college friend suffered an injury, the friend attempted to apply the bandage themselves, but it did not adhere. From watching her mother, my daughter knew how to wash the wound, dry it, apply the ointment on the bandage, and then the bandage to the wound, which stayed in place.

On April 11, my wife tried to squeeze in breakfast with her college friend at a diner before heading to work. Somehow, she gashed her right hand on a picture frame. There was a fair amount of blood for a deep but not too long cut. Yes, she’s had a tetanus shot relatively recently.

She called me to the bathroom. I got the antibacterial soap, she washed the wound, and I dried it. She applied two pads she had left over from her leg injury a year and a half ago. I taped the gauze tightly in two directions.

Will urgent care see her urgently?

She asked me to check the WellNow urgent care website to see if appointments were available at the Western Avenue center outside Albany. The first time listed as available was at 1:20 p.m., about four hours out, but we went anyway.

The protocol was that patients were supposed to scan the QR code inside the entryway. The screen suggested a four-hour wait, but it was less than an hour., a fact I explained to a few other patients when the receptionists were away from the desk. Of course, once my wife was called to see the physician assistant, it was another half-hour.

Still, the verdict is that my wife did not need stitches. The treatment that she had primarily administered herself had done the trick.

I don’t expect my wife to decide to prepare for medical school suddenly, but she could, and she probably would be good at it.

The Juice

get it out of my head

It was oddly unsettling. When I was traveling across New York State, anticipating the April 8 eclipse with my best friend from college, the subject of O J Simpson, The Juice, came up.

I could not remember why, but MAK noted that he had seen a boxy white vehicle that perhaps reminded him of a Ford Bronco involved in the slow-speed highway chase after Simpson was supposed to surrender to police.

So he asked if Simpson was out of jail. I was fairly sure that he was, which proved to be accurate. He was “released from prison in 2017 after serving about nine years of a 33-year sentence for a kidnapping and armed robbery in Las Vegas.”

As I noted, in 2016, I watched O.J.: Made in America, “a sprawling five-part documentary on the cable sports network ESPN,” which I still recommend. It’s still on ESPN and available on other platforms as well.

After I watched the series, I wrote: ” I concluded that 1) O.J. likely did the murders but that 2) the prosecution did not make its case due to the tremendous efforts of the defense team and some of the rulings of Judge Lance Ito.” The most angry I ever saw a mild-manned work colleague was when the not guilty verdict, watched by an estimated 95 million people, was announced.

So it was weird that a person whom I hadn’t even thought about in over six years until that trip died four days later of prostate cancer, the same disease that killed my father and which basketball legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is currently fighting.

Who are we?

On the trip, I said that the murder trial told a lot about America in terms of race, celebrity, media, and the justice system. Interestingly, Med Page Today touched on some of those in its story: “The public was mesmerized by his ‘trial of the century’ on live TV. His case sparked debates on race, gender, domestic abuse, celebrity justice, and police misconduct.”

Of course, there were countless comments after Simpson’s death. Caitlyn Jenner, “who married Kris Jenner shortly after the Kardashian matriarch’s divorce from Robert Kardashian, who was Simpson’s defense attorney during the murder trial, was among the first to react on social media. ‘Good Riddance #OJSimpson,’ she tweeted.”

I was more interested in the response by Ron Goldman’s family. They called Simpson’s death “a mixed bag of complicated emotions” tied to the civil case Nicole Brown Simpson and Goldman’s families filed in part to direct the proceeds of Simpson’s sort of confessional, If I Did It. They did not receive all they were due in the judgment. And the executor of Simpson’s willl says he’ll ‘do everything’ to ensure Goldman family gets ‘zero’ from the estate.

I’ve now purged the topic from my head. Probably.

April rambling: history on the road

The King of Canned Italian Food

**Used with permission. https://scarecrow.bar/comics/december-2-2021/ and https://www.instagram.com/scarecrowbar**

History on the Road: After decades of reading, writing, and teaching about the American past, Ed Ayers sets out to see how that past is remembered in the places where it happened.

American Visions: The United States, 1800-1860. There’s more to every story, and the making of America is no exception. Visions for a more perfect union—often originating from the margins of society—continue to shape our nation in profound ways. These original voices are resurfaced in the book American Visions and brought to life through short films, original sources, and visits to the places where history unfolded.

The Deadliest Infectious Disease of All Time | Crash Course Lecture (Tuberculosis)

Will the World Central Kitchen attack change anything?

What Updates to OMB’s Race/Ethnicity Standards Mean for the Census Bureau. They included Using a Combined Race/Ethnicity Question and a New “Middle Eastern or North African” Category

Food Delivery Apps: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

Today in book banning

djt: Stock Plummets (Literally) ft. Liz Dye and revealing his true abortion position: Lying to win elections and his mental health diagnosis was confirmed by a forensic psychiatrist. A Weekend Show Special

How a small change to U.S. quarters is part of a big trend in logo design. A subtle change on the front of the 2022 U.S. quarters mimics a shift in the design of corporate logos.

Basque has no known linguistic relatives.

Pop culture

The film fans who refuse to surrender to streaming: ‘One day you’ll barter bread for our DVDs’

TV Ratings: Men’s NCAA Basketball Final Falls Short of Women’s Title Game for First Time

Broadway Openings Crowd Theaters As Hopefuls Aim for Tony Nominations

Joe Flaherty, ‘SCTV’ and ‘Freaks and Geeks’ Actor, Dies at 82

Irwin and Fran (2013) | Full Documentary about comedian Irwin Corey and his wife of 70 years, Fran (Berman)

The King of Canned Italian Food, Chef Hector Boyardee, née Boiardi, and his spaghetti recipe

Carolyn by Mark Evanier

The tyranny of the algorithm: why every coffee shop looks the same

Now I Know

The Million Pound Cough and The Case of the Missing Space Tomatoes and The $0 Baseball Player With the Priceless Contract and The Birds That Didn’t Want to be Tracked and The Speeding Ticket That Sent a Judge to Jail and The King of the Solar Eclipse and But What Did Delaware?

MUSIC

Peter Sprague Plays Playground of the Gods featuring Rebecca Jade

English drummer Gerry Conway (1947-2024)

Mickey Guyton – Black Like Me

Come In From The Cold – Joni Mitchell

Coverville 1482: The Nick Lowe Cover Story II and 1483: The Richard Thompson Cover Story II

Linda Martell: Bad Case of the Blues

Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Second Concerto

Brittney Spencer: I Got Time

Favorite Songs By Favorite Artists: Modern English

Rhiannon Giddens: Don’t Let It Trouble Your Mind

K-Chuck Radio: Pass it on the left-hand side…

Franz von Suppe’s Poet and Peasant Overture

Ann Peebles: I Can’t Stand The Rain

Weird Al Yankovic: Polkas, Parodies, and the Power of Satire

Billie Eilish, Pearl Jam, and Nicki Minaj are among a group of 200 artists who penned an open letter to tech and digital music companies, expressing their concerns over the use of AI in music

Beyoncé fans say songs missing from Cowboy Carter vinyl and CDs

Sunday Stealing: How Far Will You Go?

naturalization

This week’s Sunday Stealing was provided by How Far Will You Go?

1. What have you been the most ignorant about in your life?

Cars. Specifically, a class of boxy vehicles looks virtually identical to me. They’re made by Toyota, Jeep, Chevy, et al. Many of them, including ours, are white, but I have no idea which one belongs to us until I look at the license plate.

2. What in the world would you most like to see protected?

Water. Plastics in our oceans, lakes, and rivers are distressing, especially microplastics.

3. How do you waste the biggest chunk of time each day or week?

I’m fretting about all the things I haven’t gotten done. A friend said we should have lunch if I get bored. I’m seldom bored, though I’m sometimes overwhelmed with a never-ending list of projects.

4. Who is the scariest person you’ve ever known?

I’m hard-pressed to come up with an answer. When I was in second grade, some sixth-grade bullies were scary, but I didn’t KNOW them.

5. What was the job you enjoyed the least?

This is tricky. Back in 2005, I wrote about a box factory. But I was there for only two weeks. It may have been being a customer service representative for Empire Blue Cross Blue Shield, which I did for 13 months before quitting without a job to go to.

6. What thing about your family are you the most proud of?

I had three great-great-grandfathers who fought in the American Civil War: James Archer, Samuel Patterson, and Daniel Williams. All of them survived the war when the disease was more likely to kill a soldier than gunfire. James did get sick but recovered.

Power To The People

7. What kind of power do you want most?

The power to allow others to discern BS.

8. What’s the best piece of advice you ever received?

Jendy, Judy, and Broome nagged me to go to library school.

9. What’s the thing you know the most about?

The difference between US and UK Beatles albums

10. When were you most moved by a ceremony?

I like naturalization ceremonies. One of my co-workers, Jinshui, experienced one in 2005. On a hot July 4, 2023, over two dozen folks were sworn In during an outdoor ceremony. Most of the participants were well-dressed but looked very uncomfortable.

11. What is the best gift you ever gave to someone?

When I was younger and less sore, I helped people move at least 70 times. I was also pretty good at packing vehicles.

12. What is the cruelest thing you’ve ever suffered?

It was work-related but not either of the previously mentioned jobs. It was my last job involving one particularly evil alleged human being.

13. What’s the single nastiest thing you’ve ever done to someone?

I was not present for something I should have been present for, although, to be fair, I didn’t fully understand the ramifications at the time.

14. What problem do you think is most common among friends your age?

Aches and/or pains, especially the joints.

15. What is the strongest craving you get?

I was in CVS this weekend and did not buy a mini York Peppermint Patties bag, but I was tempted.