Last Run

As I’ve probably alluded to, my wife Carol has been away at college for a couple weeks. Last summer, she did two intense weeks of intensive study, and she had to read a half dozen books and write a half dozen papers before she even got there. Then this past school year, she had a 600-hour internship. Now she’s back at college for another two-week stint, after the preparatory reading and writing.

This has meant that I have been calling her every morning between 6:30 and 6:45, her only free time, just before breakfast. I was about to call her one day last week when I see an e-mail from her, titled: “Sleeping late Wed 7/29”

“I am turning off my alarm clock to sleep in in the morning because I am just getting back to my room now. If you get this message, don’t call me in the morning. I’ll call you later to catch up during the day at work and then again in the evening so I can talk to Lydia.”

My wife is an early riser, so this was quite curious.

“There was a bus accident tonight when MCLA was returning from Tanglewood. I was not on the bus that ran off the road and am OK, but tired. I was on the bus that was following the one that ran off the road headlong into a ditch so we were right there. It looks as though the driver of that bus had a seizure and lost control of his bus. Two coaches got off our bus, opened the back emergency door, and tried to give the unconscious driver CPR and then the AED but got no response, and the driver was pronounced dead. I helped the rest of the adults climb out of the back of the bus. Five were taken to the hospital for minor (as far as we know now) injuries.

“MCLA classes are canceled for Wed. morning and will probably resume after lunch. They are getting counselors to talk to us if needed.”

It turned out that the bus driver had a heart attack. The 70-year-old man had just come back to work after bypass surgery. Carol could hear her bus driver talk to this guy, and he indicated that this particular drive would be his “last run” for the night. Ironically accurate.

Carol and I agreed that it would probably be better not to mention the bus accident to Lydia, since it might make her worry about her mother and/or worry about taking the bus on the field trip that very day.

I never did talk to Carol on Wednesday, but I did on Thursday and subsequently; she is fine.

One curiosity about the media coverage is that the Times Union, the local paper, had a reported a school bus accidents in Pittsfield involving five students. Since it didn’t mention the school, it gave the impression that the students were of the K-12 variety, rather than graduate students. ROG

Your Sew Vein QUESTION


I went with the child to another child’s fifth birthday party last weekend. This was at one of these combo bouncy/bounce arcade places in a mall in Clifton Park, northwest of Albany. On one of the bouncy things, there was a handwritten sign – neatly done, I must say – that read “This is ONlY for those three years and younger.” One of my great pet peeves is the use of the lower case L in the midst of otherwise all capital letters. I see it a lot, and except as a space saver, I don’t understand it at all.

In the space designated for our group to eat, there were three signs, all manufactured, on an inside door:
NO ADMITTANCE
FIRE PANNELS
ELECTRICAL PANNELS
First off, why they designed the space so that this door was in a patron area, I don’t know. Beyond that, though, were these very professional-looking signs with the word PANELS misspelled – twice. I wish I had my camera.

In fact, I think I’ve become motivated to carry a camera so I can do an occasional piece on bad signage. That’s part of the portfolio of the NYC-based blog Your Sew Vein, from which I purloined the picture above. If you don’t see the two errors, go to the May 2, 2008 post.

So what makes you buggy about signs YOU see? I’m bothered by excessive apostrophes where none are needed and no apostrophes where one is required. I’ve actually seen Jone’s as the possessive of Jones; this so hurts my head. Also, excessive quotes – You must be “18” is an example in the Your Sew Vein blog.

What signage errors bother you?

Amy favorite websites/blogs that track these trends? Any favorite sites that make these errors?
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Not quite the same thing, but Arthur at AmeriNZ has a screen shot of a map on a TV “news” program that’s a scream.

ROG

July Ramblin’

When the swine flu – I’m sorry, the H1N1 virus – was first announced in the spring, I was feeling bit peevish about the pundits who seemed to think that the government – actually world governments – were making too much of the disease. Frankly, i think it was due to lack of understanding of the nomenclature. We don’t know what a Level 6 (pandemic, declared weeks ago) feels like. We understand gradations of temperature, the difference between a Category 1 and category 3 hurricane or a 3.6 earthquake vs. a 6.6. Anyway here’s John Berry’s 2009 WHITE PAPER ON NOVEL H1N1 (PDF). Barry wrote the book The Great Influenza about the 1918 flu epidemic: “Three of the preceding four pandemics, 1889, 1918, and 1957, show clear evidence of some fairly intense but sporadic initial local outbreaks scattered around the world.

“The novel H1N1 virus seems thus far to be following the pattern of those three pandemics, and it seems highly likely that it will return in full flower. If the virus is fully adapted to and efficient at infecting humans, this would occur soon, possibly during the influenza season in the southern hemisphere or possibly a few months later in the northern hemisphere. The 1918 and 1957 viruses both exploded in September and October in the northern hemisphere, even though this is not the influenza season.

“If the virus needs further adaptation to become fully efficient in infecting humans, that could be delayed, quite possibly a year or two later. It seems very unlikely that this virus will peter out.”
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Got this e-mail: Black Male Teachers – Do you know any Black males who are seniors in high school who want to go to college out of state for “FREE” ? Several Black Colleges are looking for future black male teachers and will send them to universities/colleges for 4 years FREE .

The ‘Call Me MISTER’ program is an effort to address the critical shortage of African American male teachers particularly among South Carolina ‘s lowest performing public schools . Program participants are selected from among under-served, socio-economically disadvantaged and educationally at-risk communities…

Visit here for more details and the online application or call (800) 640-2657.

But if you GO to that page, you’ll ALSO read “Please read this memo regarding an email hoax that provides misinformation about our program.”
It has been brought to our attention that an erroneous e-mail, rife with inaccuracies and misinformation about the Call Me MISTER Program, is making its way around the country. Said e-mail makes such false claims as “South Carolina HBCUs offer FREE TUITION” and our program is for “African American MALES ONLY”, neither of which is true. While we do offer tuition assistance and book support, plus a small stipend to defray other associated costs of attending college, we DO NOT now offer, nor have we ever offered, a full scholarship.
Myths need to be debunked.
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Lean times in L.A. County leave no money for the dead. This is a story about more people opting for cremation. As someone heavily influence by Jessica Mitford’s The American Way of Death, I applaud the trend, even if it’s being done out of economic necessity.
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On a lighter note, from Yahoo! Food: 5 Summer Food Mysteries Solved. I KNEW the ice cream one to be true.
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My wife and her class saw the movie The Yes Men last weekend. “Shocking and funny,” she described it. as it turned out there was an article in the local paper about the movie’s follow-up, now playing on HBO and perhaps coming to a theater near you.
***
Paul McCartney returns to the Ed Sullivan Theater as he appears on Letterman, 45 years after his first appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” Paul at Citi Field, NYC.
***Amusing and even educational. Church Advertising
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This video was made in the Antwerp, Belgium Central (Train) Station on the 23rd of March 2009. With no warning to the passengers passing through the station, at 08:00 am a recording of Julie Andrews singing ‘Do, Re, Mi’ began to play on the public address system.” As the bemused passengers watch in amazement, some 200 dancers begin to appear from the crowd and station entrances.
***
A final goodbye for S. Palin, YouTube fodder from last year, but what they hey.

ROG

Poison Ivy


A good friend of mine got a case of poison ivy last week. Of course, it itched liked crazy. after passing along my concern, my mind (as usual) went to music, specifically a song I heard when I was a kid. “I think it was the Coasters,” I thought, “and certainly it was written by Leiber & Stoller.” And so it was.

I checked out the Wikipedia post on the song, and according to the post, “the song’s lyrics are about sexually-transmitted disease”, rather than the diseases stated in the bridge of the song:
Measles make you bumpy
Mumps’ll make you lumpy
Chicken Pox’ll make you jump and twitch
Common cold’ll fool you
Whooping cough’ll cool you
Poison Ivy’s love’ll make you itch

I did not know that.

This song went up to #7 in the pop charts in 1959, and to #1 on the R&B charts.

I don’t garden – my wife does – and I’ve been lucky enough to avoid it while mowing the lawn.

(I HAVE used calamine lotion, though, after an allergic reaction to penicillin when I was 16; as Steve Stills said at Woodstock, “Three days, man, three days!)

The map below shows the native habitat for Toxicodendron radicans (L.) Kuntze ssp. negundo (Greene) Gillis, eastern poison ivy

ROG

Irwin Corey is 95


“If we don’t change direction soon, we’ll end up where we’re going.” – Professor Irwin Corey
Irwin Corey – I’m related to him! (Well not really, but sorta. Pay attention: the quiz is brutal.)

My maternal grandmother (Gertrude Yates Williams) had a brother, Ernest Yates.
Ernie married Charlotte Berman.
Charlotte’s sister was Frances Berman.
Frances was married to Irwin.
So Irwin is my great aunt’s brother-in-law.

I need to explain that Aunt Charlotte was one of my closest relatives, not biologically but in terms of the effect she had on my life. My mom, who was an only child, really didn’t know the relatives on her father’s side until after her mother died in the 1980s.

Gertrude had three surviving siblings (one died as a child). Deana had no children, Ed had children much later in life. So it was Ernie’s four kids, Raymond, Fran, Donald and Robert, who were my mother’s first cousins, her closest relatives. And until the mid 1950s, when Ernest died, they all lived near Binghamton. So Aunt Charlotte was a pivotal character in my mother’s life, and the lives of my sisters and me, as we (with my father) would go down to their large house in Queens at least a couple times a year. Since my father was ALSO an only child, my sisters and I have no first cousins, and it was Charlotte’s grandchildren who were the closest thing to contemporary cousins, even though they were 2nd cousins once removed (I think).

For reasons that I can no longer remember, I was at Irwin Corey’s house on the Island (that’s Long Island to you) when I was a kid. Irwin and Fran weren’t there. While we thought Charlotte’s house in St. Albans was large, I recall that Irwin’s house was huge, at least to my mind.

We always made a point of watching Professor Irwin Corey, The World’s Foremost Authority, when he appeared on various TV variety shows. I wasn’t sure that it was a shtick; Irwin really DID seem to know an great deal, and would explain things in convoluted ways. I’d run into Irwin at various family functions of the Berman tribe, such as weddings and funerals.

The last two times I saw Irwin was at Charlotte’s 80th and 88th birthday parties, in 1994 and 2002, respectively. He could be funny, but also coarse, vulgar and a bit obtuse. He gave a toast at the 80th birthday party and rambled on about Richard Nixon (not favorably), among other things, and no one could really stop him. When we met for Charlotte’s 88th birthday – Charlotte died few years ago, before reaching her 89th – Irwin started pontificating again, but this time, a couple of the relatives cut him off with a “Thank you, Irwin”; he must have lost a step.

Irwin and Charlotte both were part of that 1930s Socialist tradition and never truly strayed from it.

Here’s some Irwin monologue and a 2008 New York times article. This is a great picture; note especially the hat. Have a listen to Irwin.
ROG

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