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Albany school district facilities vote Tuesday

One of the frustrations about living in the city of Albany these past several years has been paying for a number of charter schools that have failed.

I’m voting in favor of the two propositions on the ballot on Tuesday, January 10. The school district notes that “enrollment from prekindergarten through eighth grade has grown 26 percent – about 1,400 students – over the last eight years. It is forecast to continue to grow well into the next decade.”

Proposition #1 is a $6.5 million package of updates, providing an “equitable learning environment” for students at 50 North Lark Street, in advance of September’s opening of the new middle school to serve students on the city’s north side. About 400 students will attend in the 2017-18 school year. This will reduce crowding in the city’s other middle schools, one of which my child attends.

The facility at 395 Elk Street, the subject of Proposition #2, would become the “new home of the district’s alternative-education programs. If voters approve the purchase Tuesday, the district also would save nearly $170,000 in rent for the remainder of the current school year.”

That building cost $15 million to build when it was constructed as the since-closed Brighter Choice charter school six years ago. “The City School District of Albany’s proposed purchase of the building for $4.1 million represents an investment of just 27 cents on the dollar for an almost-new school building.”

One of the frustrations about living in the city of Albany these past several years has been paying for a number of charter schools that have failed. Those children then have to be reabsorbed into the “traditional” system.

Neither proposal in Albany school district facilities vote “would have any impact on taxes for homeowners or businesses, and both are part of the City School District of Albany’s long-range enrollment and facilities planning. Please visit www.albanyschools.org to read more about both proposals. Polls will be open from 7 a.m.-9 p.m. Tuesday at 15 voting locations city-wide.”

David Bowie would have been 70

David Bowie did not “go with the flow of the times.”

Right after David Bowie died, almost a year ago, I went to buy his then-new album Blackstar on Amazon. But it was SOLD OUT. Bowie’s first #1 album in the United States, which I purchased a couple of weeks later, is a fitting ending to an eclectic career.

About a month following his death, I was doing some research on how to market oneself as an artist. I came across this article about David Bowie. Well, more his response to comments about his previous article about David Bowie.

A commenter wrote that Bowie is “one of the most brilliant marketers in the history of rock ‘n’ roll,” adding, “He is all about the money and he goes with ‘flow of the times.'” And the writer largely agreed: “Bowie tailored his music to fit each era, embracing styles from folk to glam rock to soul to electronic music and ‘drum and bass.'”

That didn’t sit well with me at all. He did not “go with the flow of the times,” he helped INVENT the flow of the times, which is why he was revered and is missed.

Here are 16 Bowie songs. The fact that many are in a different order than the last time I put together such a list shows how fluid my affection is for different songs, depending on what I heard most recently. Links to all, #s indicate US Billboard highest position. .

16. Let’s Spend the Night Together (From Aladdin Sane, 1973) – I like how reads the title lyric, compared with the Rolling Stones original
15. Starman, #65 (The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, 1972) – my favorite album, still
14. Life on Mars? (Hunky Dory, 1971) – from the first Bowie album I ever got, won from WNPC radio station in a phone contest
13. TVC15 (Station to Station, 1976)- because I like the vocal

12. Rebel Rebel, #64 (Diamond Dogs, 1974) – love the guitar on this
11. Suffragette City (Ziggy Stardust) – the dialogue is the first hook
10. DJ (Lodger, 1979)- “I am the DJ, I am what I play” used to mean something
9. Lazarus (Blackstar, 2016) – such an honest final statement

8. Fashion (Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps), 1980)- beep, beep
7. Young Americans, #28 (Young Americans, 1975)- I believe he performed this on Soul Train. “Do you remember your President Nixon,” whose birthday, BTW, is tomorrow.
6. Fame, #1, and #21 soul (Young Americans) -the original, not the lesser Fame ’90 remix that I have on the Pretty Woman soundtrack. Co-written by John Lennon. LOVE the scales of “fame, fame, fame, fame…”
5. Panic in Detroit (Aladdin Sane)- “looks a lot like Che Guevera”, plus great background singing

4. Star (Ziggy Stardust)- rock and roll!
3. Golden Years, #10 (Station to Station)- the kids on Soul Train didn’t know what to make of the Thin White Duke, but they liked the song
2. Changes, #41 (Hunky Dory)- even my college roomie Ron liked THIS song
1. Space Oddity, #124, then #15 in 1973 (David Bowie – in the UK; Man of Words/Man of Music, 1969) – this song became more acutely painful after Bowie’s death

Oh, and in its own category: Under Pressure, with Queen, #7 in 1981 – a bass line so good, even Vanilla Ice sounded (relatively) good…

Music Throwback Saturday: The Creation

The salesperson wondered if I meant the Haydn piece; no, that’s not

Many, many years ago, I was a member of the choir at Binghamton (NY) Central High School, and we sang something called the Creation. The text is based on the first three verses of the Book of Genesis in the Bible.

When we performed this, the presentation was very dramatic in that the lights would dim as the lyrics “and darkness fell upon the face of the deep.” At the point where we sang, “And God said, Let there be light: and there was light,” all the lights came on. We used to memorize the music we sang.

I have never sung The Creation again, and I had never heard anyone else perform it. Nevertheless, I was pretty sure I could still sing most of the bass line, nearly fifty years later.

I couldn’t look at the piece, though, because I didn’t remember who the composer was. When I went to a local sheet music store, now defunct (alas!), and tried to replicate the sound, the salesperson wondered if I meant the Haydn piece; no, that’s not it.

Fortunately, my sister Leslie, who I’m sure could still sing the alto line, recently found a copy of the music. It was written by Willy Richter (1914-1984). She directs a choir part-time and wants her group to perform it. I’d crash her choir except for the fact that she’s 3000 miles away.

Though I sang it with males and females, there are arrangements for men only as well.

Listen to The Creation by Willy Richter

USD Chamber Singers

The NJHSA Chorale at Pascack Bible Church

Luther College Collegiate Chorale

Gary D. Gardner/Michiana Male Chorus

Listen to

THE CREATION (Franz Joseph Haydn), which is a very long piece. From 7:45 to 10:30 – it matches the scripture covered by Richter. Do you hear any musical similarities?

Next week, back to pop tunes.

The Internet domain of Colombia

Rafael Correa, Ecuador’s leftist president, seemed to bask in Assange’s bad-boy glow.

Chris asked in the previous round of Ask Roger Anything, albeit not until December:

Have you ever wondered why Assange is in the Ecuadorian embassy or all those fake news places are registered to Columbia? Don’t those seem like weirdly arbitrary choices?

Why Ecuador’s embassy?

Let’s take the Colombian connection first. The two-letter Internet domain for Colombia is .co, which looks a whole lot like .com or some new generic top-level domain. Go Daddy has put on the big push advertising these new domains, at least in the past.

Some countries restrict the use of their domain to registrants who are in, or are from, their country. Colombia does not. Thus, one gets sites such as wsj.com.co or nbcnews.com.co out there to try to fool the user, and often succeeding.

There are some interesting country code top-level domains that are more open:

.fm for the Federated States of Micronesia, an independent island nation located in the Pacific Ocean. “Except for reserved names like .com.fm, .net.fm, .org.fm and others, any person in the world can register a .fm domain for a fee, much of the income from which goes to the government and people of the islands. The domain name is popular (and thus economically valuable) for FM radio stations and streaming audio websites

.io for British Indian Ocean Territory, treated as “a generic top-level domain (gTLD) because ‘users and webmasters frequently see [the domain] more generic than country-targeted.'”

.nu for the island state of Niue. “It was one of the first ccTLDs to be marketed to the Internet at large as an alternative to the gTLDs .com, .net, and .org… Commonly used by Danish, Dutch, and Swedish websites, because in those languages ‘nu’ means ‘now’.”

.tv for Tuvalu. “Except for reserved names like com.tv, net.tv, org.tv and others, any person may register second-level domains in TV. The domain name is popular, and thus economically valuable because it is an abbreviation of the word television.

.ws for Samoa. “The .ws domain is an abbreviation for ‘Western Samoa’, which was the nation’s official name in the 1970s when two-letter country codes were standardized. While there are no geographic restrictions on registration of most second-level .ws domains, .org.ws, .gov.ws, and .edu.ws registration is restricted.

“The .ws country code has been marketed as a domain hack, with the .ws purportedly standing for ‘World Site’, Web Site or Web Service, providing a ‘global’ Internet presence to registrants, as it supports all internationalized domain names

In other words, Colombia is the country for the faux sites because of the stroke of fortune that the Internet domain for Colombia is .co, and because there is money to be made.

As for Assange, this Washington Post article from October 2016 explains it well:

Ecuador treated Julian Assange like a trophy in 2012 when it opened the doors of its London embassy to the WikiLeaks founder, sheltering him from extradition to Sweden over rape allegations and, possibly, to the United States.

Rafael Correa, Ecuador’s leftist president, seemed to bask in Assange’s bad-boy glow, which gave the small South American nation a big role in a global drama. Protecting the WikiLeaks editor also gave Correa a way to poke Washington in the eye and look like a champion for press freedom even as he cracked down on journalists back home.

Correa embraced Assange’s mother at the presidential palace in Quito, Ecuador’s capital, and championed the Australian “hacktivist” as an anti-imperialist comrade-in-arms.

Now he’s treating Assange like a bad tenant who won’t leave.

There may be other factors in play here that I’m not aware of, but I don’t think it’s some odd South American conspiracy.

My parents, and my career choices

Did we HAVE scheduled meetings with guidance counselors?

My good friend Carol, who I’ve only known since kindergarten, has some follow-up questions about the Lydster’s career choices, which were really about My career choices.

Two questions based on this… why did you not go into law?

Because I did very poorly in a pre-law course at New Paltz. I loved the subject, but Bill Dunn didn’t love my answers. Or maybe it was because it was an 8 a.m. course and I was late sometimes. This failure threw me into a tizzy, because that was my intended life path, and then I had NO idea what I wanted to pursue.

Do you wish your parents had made more suggestions, not along the lines of pushing as much as of possibilities?

Not really, because it just wasn’t in their skill sets. My mother was not one to push us, because that was not her nature in much of anything. She was a “go along to get along” type.

She was very good with numbers and was a bookkeeper or teller for most of her adult life. But she didn’t really think of it as a skill much as, say, her husband arranging flowers or playing guitar or painting or doing all sorts of things. I dare say that he could be a bit intimidating.

For his part, my father, according to his military record, had only three years of high school. I think that part of the friction that I had with him was that I was not very good at working with my hands, the things he excelled in. But I was book smart – would you accept that analysis, Carol? – and he was not as adept, but figured things out as he went along. He was outwardly gregarious, and that wasn’t me.

We did have some areas in common: watching sports together, especially the minor league baseball Triplets and the NY football Giants; playing cards, particularly pinochle and bid whist; and most especially, thank goodness, music.

So he was not likely to offer me career advice because, and I say this without a lot of remorse, he wasn’t always understanding me very much at that time. He certainly didn’t grok what motivated me, and this became even more acutely true in my early twenties when we didn’t talk, at all, for nearly six months, before I relented. This is odd in some ways because my antiwar, and other, activism was molded in no small part by his civil rights activism.

I said two but here’s a third – do you think as I do that our HS counselors were useless?

I actually have no recollection of ANY HS guidance counseling whatsoever, except one passing conversation with Allan Cave, who was the assistant principal at the time, and that only because I knew him from church. Did we HAVE scheduled meetings with guidance counselors, because if we did, I never received the memo?

Just as an aside you wrote about a few math/science awards Lydia received but there’s no mention of any options related to those. Is she just not interested?

Actually, it has determined what level courses she has in 7th grade, and that could lead to courses she could take in 8th grade that could get her high school credit. So it puts her on a more rigorous academic track in several subjects than she might be otherwise.