Category: Uncategorized

Beatles Island Songs 53-44

When the Beatles held the top five songs on the Billboard charts on April 4, 1964, Can’t Buy Me Love was #1, the third Beatles #1 in a row, after I Want To Hold Your Hand and She Loves You.


JEOPARDY! answers (questions at the end)

TV HISTORY $600: The British invaded this show in 1964 as the Beatles appeared on Feb. 9 & the Rolling Stones on Oct. 25
DON’T QUIT YOUR DAY JOB $400: He quit as the Beatles’ bass player to become a painter in 1961
POP MUSIC $200: Feedback was first used in pop music in this Beatles song.
20th CENTURY HISTORY $200: A book by Jim O’Donnell chronicles July 6, 1957, the day these 2 Beatles first met
’60s ROCK $100: Bob Dylan & Dion were the only 2 other rock singers on the cover of this 1967 Beatles album
***
John Lennon and Jesus, 4 March 1966

Beatles Sons: Their musical histories and careers(Can you name the five Beatles sons?)
***
The rules of engagement

53 It’s Only Love from Help! (UK), Rubber Soul (US). This Lennon piece is the first song on the second side of the US Rubber Soul album, and I always hear it as such.  The repackaging by the American producers caused so much confusion among US listeners that, years later, there were two box sets of four CDs each of the Capitol Records the way we Americans first heard them; Rubber Soul was the last disc on the latter collection.
52 Magical Mystery Tour from Magical Mystery Tour. The McCartney song serves the same function as the title song to Sgt. Pepper; it’s ranked higher because it’s more realized as a song, rather than a snippet. Also appreciate the changing beat.
51 We Can Work It Out from A-side of single (UK), Yesterday and Today (US). The optimistic McCartney juxtaposed with the more plaintive Lennon middle 8 (“life is very short”). Great Stevie Wonder cover of this, BTW.
50 I’m Looking Through You from Rubber Soul. I always liked Ringo on the organ of this McCartney song.
49 I Saw Her Standing There from Please Please Me (UK), Introducing the Beatles/Meet the Beatles. The count in, the handclaps. McCartney, with Lennon.
48 Can’t Buy Me Love from A Hard Day’s Night (UK, US), Hey Jude album (US). When the Beatles held the top five songs on the Billboard charts on April 4, 1964, this McCartney classic was #1, the third Beatles #1 in a row, after I Want To Hold Your Hand and She Loves You.
47 Penny Lane from Magical Mystery Tour. I remember watching the videos for this McCartney song and Strawberry Fields Forever on a show called Where The Action Is, one of those Dick Clark shows on ABC. When it was rebroadcast, inexplicably at 8 a.m., I (cough) realized that (cough) I just wasn’t (cough, cough) feeling well enough to go to school that day.
46 Strawberry Fields Forever from Magical Mystery Tour. This Lennon song and Penny Lane were among the first prepared for the Sgt. Pepper album, but it was nowhere near ready, so the recordings became a Double A-side single. This was one of the songs that fueled the Paul is dead craze, when John says, “cranberry sauce,” but was heard as “I buried Paul.”
45 Nowhere Man from Rubber Soul (UK), Yesterday and Today (US). A most personally relatable Lennon song at the time.
44 When I’m Sixty-Four from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Yet another McCartney saloon tune, perhaps his earliest one, written when he was a teen, but the best realized. When Macca actually turned 64 in June of 2006, it was fodder in all the papers.

JEOPARDY! questions:
What was The Ed Sullivan Show?
Who was Stuart Sutcliffe?
What was “I Feel Fine”?
Who were John Lennon & Paul McCartney?
What was Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band?

H is for Her, in charge

Today is International Woman’s Day, designed 100 years ago this month as a “global day celebrating the economic, political and social achievements of women past, present and future.”

A whole JEOPARDY! category of WOMEN IN CHARGE (#6081, aired 2011-02-07)
$200: From 1966 to 1977 & from 1980 to 1984, she led the world’s largest democracy
$400: Vigdis Finnbogadottir led a theatre co. for many years before becoming this country’s president in 1980
$600: In 2010, before her term as president ended, Michelle Bachelet oversaw earthquake relief efforts in this country
$800: In 2009 Vilnius-born Dalia Grybauskaite became president of this country
$1,000 (Daily Double): President of the Philippines from 1986 to 1992, she passed away in 2009
Questions at the end of the post.

Countries that have had:
(yellow)Female heads of government
(dark orange) Female heads of state (including female representatives of heads of state (Governors-General and French Representatives of Andorra), excluding monarchs)
(light orange) Female heads of state and government (including female representatives of heads of state, excluding monarchs)

How many women are currently in the United States House of Representatives? How about the US Senate? I had to look it up. It’s 73 and 17, respectively, which puts the country 71st in terms of the number of women in national parliaments.

I’m a firm believer that progress towards equality, whether it be gender-, ethnicity-, or sexual orientation-based is not truly achieved until one can no longer keep track of the achievement.

And how many US Presidents who were female have we had? Lessee – take the square root of…oh yeah, that would be zero. Not even Petunia Pig.

This is fascinating to me because other countries have had female heads of state and/or female heads of government for decades. According to Wikipedia, the first female head of state was Khertek Anchimaa-Toka of the Tuvan People’s Republic, an independent state in Russia. The first one for a place I’ve actually HEARD of was Sükhbaataryn Yanjmaa of Mongolia, back in 1953. But the first woman who was head of government, generally a more significant role in most countries that separate the functions, was Sirimavo Bandaranaike of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) in 1960. The second and third are much better known: Indira Gandhi of India and Golda Meir of Israel.

Of those currently in office, the female head of government with the longest tenure is Angela Merkel of Germany (pictured above), followed closely by Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia (pictured right), who is the longest-tenured of those women serving as both heads of state and government. Cristina Fernández de Kirchner of Argentina, Laura Chinchilla of Costa Rica, and Dilma Rousseff of Brazil also currently hold both roles. Mary McAleese of Ireland and Tarja Halonen of Finland are the longest-tenured female heads of state; the latter, talk show host Conan O’Brien claims, looks like him.


Today is International Woman’s Day, designed 100 years ago this month as a “global day celebrating the economic, political and social achievements of women past, present, and future.” Here is the website, and here is a history of the event, provided by the United Nations.

From the Census: In the US, National Women’s History Month dates back to March 8, 1857, when women from New York City factories staged a protest over working conditions. But it wasn’t until 1981 that Congress established National Women’s History Week to be commemorated the second week of March. In 1987, Congress expanded the week to a month. Every year since, Congress has passed a resolution for Women’s History Month, and the President has issued a proclamation.

JEOPARDY! questions-
Who was Indira Gandhi?
What is Iceland?
What is Chile?
What is Lithuania?
Who was Corazon Aquino?

ABC Wednesday – Round 8

Natal day, again

On a birthday we do not say: “Thanks for what you did, or said, or accomplished.” No, we say: “Thank you for being born and being among us.”

I take my birthday off from work each year, and today is no exception. Likewise, the blog.

I have, in the past, and will again this year, quote a section from one of my favorite books, Here and Now: Living in the Spirit by Henri J.M. Nouwen, a Canadian theologian who died in 1996. (Copyright 1994, published by The Crossroad Publishing Company.)

I share this passage about birthdays, not only for my sake but, I hope, for yours as well:

Birthdays need to be celebrated. I think it is more important to celebrate a birthday than a successful exam, a promotion, or a victory. Because to celebrate a birthday means to say to someone: “Thank you for being you.” Celebrating a birthday is exalting life and being glad for it. On a birthday we do not say: “Thanks for what you did, or said, or accomplished.” No, we say: “Thank you for being born and being among us.”
…
Celebrating a birthday reminds us of the goodness of life, and in this spirit, we really need to celebrate people’s birthdays every day, by showing gratitude, kindness, forgiveness, gentleness, and affection. These are ways of saying: “It’s good that you are alive; it’s good that you are walking with me on this earth. Let’s be glad and rejoice. This is the day that God has made for us to be and to be together.

Comments policy

Don’t be a schmuck. If you act like a schmuck in the comments, as defined by me, I won’t post your comment and you will have wasted more of your time writing the comment than my time in deleting it.


Here I am, just a couple months short of six years of blogging, and I’m reading where Wayne John thinks all bloggers should have a blogging policy. He’s probably right, but I cannot get very excited about it; i.e, the topic bores me. In all the time I’ve been blogging here, including the Blogger iteration, I have deleted exactly ONE comment that wasn’t spam. It was a nasty remark about a picture of a dear friend I had posted; I didn’t like it, and I took it down.

The Akismet on the WordPress blog is really good at catching spam, and I approve every comment anyway these days; ultimately, it’s just easier. I receive an e-mail when I get a comment and respond as soon as possible. I also check the Akismet to make sure it doesn’t reject real posts; it used to do it a lot, especially to a couple of ABC Wednesday people. And particularly entertaining spam I just might let slip through.

Some bloggers rail against the one-line comment; I guess I’d rather people say one line they really mean than three lines trying to meet some arbitrary threshold.

Except through the spam, I just don’t seem to get a lot of irrelevant links that people want to post here.

Wayne John linked to this article, which reads in part: It is also a “responsibility statement”. It informs the reader of what you will allow on your blog, what you will not allow, and what they are allowed to do. It establishes publicly the responsibilities of each party involved.

In a related link, there’s a list of no-nos.
is abusive – well, OK, but then I have to go define that
is off-topic – on another blog I have people go off-topic all the time; actually, it can be quite informative and entertaining
contains ad-hominem attacks – same as “abusive”
promotes hate of any kind – I’m against hate, but I find the notion overly broad
uses excessive vulgarity – this would involve me having to definite both vulgarity AND its excess
is spam – previously addressed

OK. In the spirit of that paragraph, here is my policy:

Feel free to comment on my blog. I love it when you comment on my blog. Besides self-expression, that’s the reason I write a blog – to get reactions.

So don’t be a schmuck. If you act like a schmuck in the comments, as defined by me, I won’t post your comment and you will have wasted more of your time writing the comment than my time in deleting it.

That’s my policy. What’s yours?

And do I really need a paragraph (freely stolen) like this?
By submitting a comment on Roger’s blog, you agree to hold this site, its owner Roger Green, and all future subsidiaries and representatives harmless from any and all repercussions, damages, or liability. Roger reserves all rights of refusal and deletion of any and all comments and trackbacks. This policy may be amended at any time.

If so, then that, too.

On the other hand, I have actually made more money on this blog in 2011 than I had in the previous 5.5 years (which is to say, zero) from a small stipend I get from posting those infographics. Truth is that I would have likely posted them anyway, for nothing (and actually have), if not here then on another blog I write for. Still, in keeping with the spirit of the FTC disclosure rules, there it is.

Hitching a ride QUESTIONS

The Kunstlercast podcast talked about something called “slugging” which is a currrent organized hitchhiking experience in the metro Washington, DC area.


I was listening to a podcast called the KunstlerCast a couple of weeks ago. Writer James Howard Kunstler was talking with Duncan Crary about hitchhiking. Made me all nostalgic, but I thought, “I just talked about the topic a few months ago.” Turns out it was over a year and a half ago. And I didn’t ask YOU any questions.

First hitchhike: in 1970, from Binghamton to New Paltz, NY to visit my girlfriend at the time. One starts on a major highway (Route 17), but then take a series of lesser roads (Route 52, Route 209, Routes 44/55, then finally to Route 299)
Last hitchhike: In 1979, discussed previously. And by 1980, I was working regularly enough to afford the bus.
Easiest: discussed.
Scariest: ditto.
Hassled by the police: a few times. The one time that sticks in my mind was hitching from New Paltz to Philadelphia, maybe in 1976. I got stopped by the police in New Jersey and they asked me for my ID. As it turned out, and I didn’t know it at the moment, I had lost my wallet in a previous car I had ridden in. The one cop said he could arrest me for not having identification. I repeated that I had had ID but I had evidently left it in someone’s vehicle – even as my inner dialogue was saying, “Gee, officer, What do you want me to DO about it? I don’t have it, dammit!” Naturally, my outer voice was MUCH more polite, and they let me go. BTW, I DID get the wallet, mailed back to me, intact.
Who tended to pick me up: usually guys about 10-20 years older than I was. They often had hitched themselves, and most of them had been in the military, a few from Vietnam, but mostly Korean war and other post-WWII soldiers. Frankly, I was always surprised when women picked me up, at least one with children in the back seat.

Have you ever hitchhiked? What were your experiences in terms of when, where, and why? Did you ever pick up hitchhikers, and what were your experiences?

The aforementioned podcast talked about something called “slugging” which is a current organized hitchhiking experience in the metro Washington, DC area. People need rides because the train stops are too far apart. Car drivers need riders so they can get to work faster, on those lanes designated for cars with multiple passengers. Voila – using GPS and cellphones, people make a mutually beneficial connection. Very civilized.

I used this before, but here again, is Sweet Hitch Hiker – Creedence Clearwater Revival.

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