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Emergency blogcast system

Camping was something I HAD to do as a kid

This is a test of the Emergency blogcast system. If this had been an actual emergency…

As some of you know, my blog transitioned from one carrier to another the last week of March. I’ll get into more details soon – probably on my 12th anniversary, coming up in May. But the bottom line was that:

1) The blog was down over 24 hours right after the spring equinox, which meant…

2) I got far fewer comments about my ABC Wednesday post – about my amazing now-teenaged daughter! – than I have in years

3) I got NO responses to my most recent Ask Roger Anything, for which you are supposed to, you know, inquire about stuff from me. You still can, BTW .

This means that I had to make a cataclysmic decision. I’m going to:

Do a Facebook meme

Hey, it’s fast.

Learn 40 things about your friends and let them learn 40 things about you.

1. Do you like blue cheese? I can eat it, but like it, not so much.
2. Have you ever smoked cigarettes? Maybe 25 in 1977.
3. Do you own a gun: No.
4. What flavor Kool-Aid? Haven’t had it in years. Probably grape when I was a kid.
5. What do you think of hot dogs? Most of the ones I eat tend to be turkey. I like them when they’re cooked outdoors on a grill.

6. Hamburgers? Please, If it’s not too late, Make it a CHEESEBURGER.
7. What is your favorite movie? Probably Annie Hall.
8. What do you prefer to drink in the morning? Water. Then mixed orange juice and cranberry juice.
9. Can you do a push-up? Probably not.
10. What’s your favorite piece of jewelry? Not my thing. All I have is the wedding ring.

11. What is your favorite hobby? Is singing in choir a hobby?
12. Do you have ADD? Possibly. And I’m good at subtraction too. But don’t ask me about Birthday probability.
13. Do you wear glasses? I have for decades.
14. What was your childhood favorite TV show? TOUGH! Perry Mason. Or The Millionaire.
15. Name your current thought? Worrying is highly overrated.

16. Current worries? See #15
17. Name three things you did today – work, blog, created world peace
18. Current hate? the current regime’s policies
19. Favorite place to be? I’m really getting into sleeping. I’d had such difficulty, and the noise machine helps a LOT.
20. How did you bring in the New Year? In Oneonta for First Night with the in-laws.

21. Where would you like to go? Everywhere – Italy, France, UK, Japan, Do one of those DNA things and add some more.
22. Name three drinks you drink regularly. Iced tea, water, hot tea
23. Do you own slippers? Yes, but I’m not sure where they are.
24. What color is your shirt? Red checks.
25. Do you like sleeping in satin sheets? Never tried ’em.

26. Can you whistle? Yes. Anyone Can Whistle.
27. Where are you now? Not quite here.
28. Would you be a pirate? Sure, the Pirates are probably my favorite MLB team not based in New York State.
29. Favorite food? Lasagna
30. How many different states have you lived in? two, both 2-word states starting with the letter N

31. Do you have a passport? Yes. Just in case.
32. What’s in your pocket? A very folded $1 bill, coins, a plastic spoon, keys
33. Last thing/person that made you laugh? Peter Shickele, who discovered PDQ Bach
34. What’s your favorite animal? Cats
35. What’s your most recent injury? My left knee

36. How many TVs in your house? 1 that works to get TV, 1 that the Daughter uses for DVDs
37. Worst pain? Broken rib
38. Do you like to dance? Not a whole lot.
39. Are your parents still alive? No.
40. Do you like camping? No. It was something I HAD to do as a kid, and putting up the tent was something I sucked at EVERY SINGLE YEAR. Also hated the bugs.

Oh and this: One of those memes on FB directs one to pick the sentence on the fifth line on page 56 of the nearest book. I did this once and page 56 was left “intentionally blank”! “In the typical sample of a political poll, the laws of probability dictate that 95 times out of 100 the reported results will be within 2.5% of what would have been found if the entire population were interviewed.”

Best of our former TU independent bloggers: One for Thursday

“I never dreamed that I would have this much support.”

Good news for Chuck Miller fans: chuckthewriterblog.com is now working! It will just have the new stuff, but it’ll be easier to find previous pieces over time.

And chuckthewriterblog.wordpress.com will have his new and old posts. Well, most of them, eventually. For some reason, the posts between 25 December 2016 and 1 April 2017 did not get loaded automatically, so Chuck has to add them manually, which is tedious. He’s added the only Collarworld story from that period, and a couple others. If you’re one of the 700+ people who have signed up, you’ll likely get notifications of the repopulating as well as his new pieces.

I asked the man to write something: “Hey everybody… just a quick note of thanks to all of you who took a stand in the past few days. I never dreamed that I would have this much support, but boy am I glad that it’s there. I’d love to get one more get-together with all of you at some point in time, let me know if there’s an available date or dates we can do this. – Chuck”

Music Throwback: I Will Survive

So you think librarians are dull? From the Library of Congress:

“The Library of Congress presents ‘Library of Congress Bibliodiscotheque’ (April 12-May 6, 2017), an unprecedented exploration of disco culture, music, dance and fashion represented in the national collections. Disco’s influence on popular music and dance since the 1970s will be in focus through film screenings, performances, interviews, and a symposium.

“The diverse lineup of programs features appearances by disco icon Gloria Gaynor, whose ‘I Will Survive’ is recognized in the National Recording Registry, fashion guru Tim Gunn, Good Morning America host Robin Roberts, photographer Bill Bernstein, scholars Alice Echols and Martin Scherzinger, and legendary disco ball maker Yolanda Baker. Gloria Gaynor and her band perform in the Great Hall of the Thomas Jefferson Building on May 6th, followed by a late night disco dance party presented in association with Brightest Young Things, The Recording Academy, and the District of Columbia Library Association. Experience the Library of Congress like never before.”

I Will Survive, written by Freddie Perren and Dino Fekaris, was originally released as the B-side to a cover version of the Righteous Brothers song Substitute, which only got to #107. That flip side got to #1 for three weeks on the Billboard pop charts in early 1979, though only up to #4 in the soul charts, and was also went to the top in the UK. “While Gaynor’s hit may, on a surface level, be about a bad breakup, the song has been adopted as a gay rights anthem and a battle cry during rough political times.” The Library of Congress deemed Gaynor’s original recording to be “culturally, historically, or artistically significant” and selected it for preservation in the National Recording Registry.

LISTEN to I Will Survive

Gloria Gaynor: here or here (official), who can save your life

Emma Stone, Natalie Portman, Amy Adams, Chris Pine, and Taraji P. Henson: here

From the movie Man in the Moon: here

Rex, you got some ‘splainin’ to do

I have mentioned Chuck Miller’s departure from the Times Union community blogs, as a result of an April Fools joke, and him starting his own blog. He was doing fine, with over 700 subscribers in the first four days, far better than he fared on the Times Union platform. But then:

Last night, I received my Times Union archive of blog posts from the past eight and a half years of blogging for them. I thought everything would be fine, I simply would upload my files and combine old blog posts with new.

Unfortunately, the second I did this…

My chuckthewriterblog.wordpress.com site went crash. Locked me out for violations of terms of service.

Bottom line: chuckthewriterblog.com is currently populating, and will be up soon. But as I know from recent personal experience, it is NOT instantaneous.

What I DIDN’T get into before was the harrumphing of the Times Union. As quoted by a non-TU blogger named Sylvia:

“A community blog hosted by timesunion.com falsely reported Saturday morning that Kellyanne Conway, a senior advisor to President Trump, would be the commencement speaker at the University at Albany. As soon as we were alerted to the post, we removed it from our site and suspended the blog. We apologize to anybody who was misled by this post, which was not written by a Times Union staff member. Even on April Fools’ Day, there’s no place for fake news under the Times Union banner.”

TU editor Rex Smith, who I’ve met IRL, and even sang with once, noted on Twitter: “Not funny. The Times Union regrets this violation of the the principle of accurate reporting. This is not TU content.”

And the WAMC Roundtable on 3 April was likewise SHOCKED. The “bogus link” they referenced was Chuck’s senior year on the local TV quiz show for high schoolers, which he’d written about ad nauseum.

Yes, I am humming, “It’s a scandal, it’s a outrage.”

Yet it was only a year earlier that Chuck had written on his TU blog, “Uber reaches agreement to come to Albany!” which made the Washington Post’s April Fools’ Day pranks: 2016’s comprehensive, updating (and upsetting) list. The TU seemed to enjoy hitting on the zeitgeist.

If memory serves, Chuck did NOT slap an April Fools label on that 2016 post the first day, though the next day he did, to avoid the story staying on the Internet under false pretenses. This was fine then for the TU, and one would have expected it would have been fine this year, instead of suspension and blocking him from his site.

Meanwhile, there is another TU community blogger who wrote in March, apparently in all seriousness, that the White House has been closed to visitors since 9/11 until 2017. I won’t link to her because she’s guano crazy. But Heather Fazio mentions her.

Since he’s done a joke blog EVERY YEAR for 8 YEARS, I’ve been forced to conclude that there is something else at play here with Chuck Miller’s suspension. I have to think he got under the TU’s skin once too often. He often advocated for more recognition for the community bloggers, including appearances in the paper, which went away and then came back, as a direct result of his nagging. Early in my tenure as a TU blogger, the TU ponied up for pizza for its unpaid community writers, but no more.

Perhaps the tipping point was him pointing out some oblivious remarks, such as he did on Thursday.

In her blog last Monday, TU staff blogger Kristi Gustafson Barlette wrote a piece about certain thoughts in the Capital District, a “When I think of…” recap…

The part that irked me? This portion.

“When I think of great blogging, I think of Amanda Talar (who is coming back to the east coast). I also think of Matt Baumgartner and really, really miss his blogging.”

Wow. When Kristi Gustafson Barlette thinks of “great blogging,” she references two people who haven’t blogged for the TU in YEARS. Not taking anything away from those bloggers – they have written amazing posts in the past – but it totally ignores the fantastic writing and observations of the Times Union’s current bloggers and raconteurs and observers and writers. Whether you agree or disagree with their topics and thoughts, they at least deserve your attention and consideration.

Maybe if Kristi Gustafson Barlette took a few moments and actually read these blogs, she might indeed find some new favorites. Some new “great blogging” examples.

I wonder if THAT was the last straw for the TU, with his ANNUAL joke – and I will say, Kellyanne, by definition is NOT funny – was just the excuse they were looking for. Or the TU can explain that how it punishes an obvious attempt at humor and tolerating this 4/1 piece while supporting actual fake news on its community pages. If SHE writes fiction, why blast Chuck?

See, here’s the thing: this story isn’t really about Chuck anymore. It’s about a BS response from the TU to him which affects the integrity of the TU organization. The thought that, as an unpaid community blogger, if the TU doesn’t like what you write, you can get kabonged without even so much as an appeal process, in direct contrast to what we were originally told. It’s also saying that the TU accept racist, xenophobic, untrue and vacuous stuff under their banner, but only selectively.

What’s the real story? See the posts by Judd Krasher, Fran Rossi Szpylczyn, Heather Fazio, and Aaron Bush.

Martin Luther King: Millions in his firing squad

“Every two-bit politician or incompetent editorial writer found in him, not themselves, the cause of our racial problems.”

Mike Royko was a columnist for the Chicago Daily News, and later, the Chicago Sun-Times, and the Chicago Tribune. His column was syndicated, for I remember reading him, even as a child.

His 1997 obit in the New York Times – he died at age 64 of an aneurysm – called the 1972 Pulitzer Prize winner the “Voice of the Working Class.”

“In his column of Sept. 23, 1981, Mr. Royko sought to explain President Ronald Reagan’s policies of ‘hacking away’ at Federal programs for the poor ‘while spending more and more on the military.’ ‘Contrary to popular belief,’ Mr. Royko wrote, ‘it’s much wiser to take money from the poor than the rich.'”

He published “Millions in his firing squad,” this column of April 5, 1968, the day after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Read the whole thing here.

It’s useful because it speaks to today’s conservatives who seek to co-opt Dr. King’s message:
***
Millions in his firing squad

FBI agents are looking for the man who pulled the trigger and surely they will find him.

But it doesn’t matter if they do or they don’t. They can’t catch everybody, and Martin Luther King was executed by a firing squad that numbered in the millions.

They took part, from all over the country, pouring words of hate into the ear of the assassin.

The man with the gun did what he was told. Millions of bigots, subtle and obvious, put it in his hand and assured him he was doing the right thing.

It would be easy to point at the Southern redneck and say he did it. But what of the Northern disk-jockey-turned-commentator, with his slippery words of hate every morning?

What about the Northern mayor who steps all over every poverty program advancement, thinking only of political expediency, until riots fester, whites react with more hate and the gap between the races grows bigger?

Toss in the congressman with the stupid arguments against busing. And the pathetic women who turn out with eggs in their hands to throw at children…

They all took their place in King’s firing squad.

And behind them were the subtle ones, those who never say anything bad but just nod when the bigot throws out his strong opinions.

He is actually the worst, the nodder is, because sometimes he believes differently but he says nothing. He doesn’t want to cause trouble. For Pete’s sake, don’t cause trouble!

So when his brother-in-law or his card-playing buddy from across the alley spews out the racial filth, he nods…

The bullet that hit King came from all directions. Every two-bit politician or incompetent editorial writer found in him, not themselves, the cause of our racial problems.

It was almost ludicrous. The man came on the American scene preaching nonviolence from the first day he sat at the wrong end of a bus. He preached it in the North and was hit with rocks. He talked it the day he was murdered.

Hypocrites all over this country would kneel every Sunday morning and mouth messages to Jesus Christ. Then they would come out and tell each other, after reading the papers, that somebody should string up King, who was living Christianity like few Americans ever have.

Maybe it was the simplicity of his goal that confused people or the way he dramatized it.

He wanted only that black Americans have their constitutional rights, that they get an equal shot at this country’s benefits, the same thing we give to the last guy who jumped off the boat.

So we killed him…

Last Sunday night the President said he was quitting after this term. He said this country is so filled with hate it might help if he got out. Four days later we killed a Nobel Peace Prize winner.

We have pointed a gun at our own head and we are squeezing the trigger. And nobody we elect is going to help us. It is our head and our finger.