Ramblin' with Roger

A Brief Halloween Meme

From SamuraiFrog:

1. What is the worst treat to get when trick-or-treating?

Black licorice. Hated it. Now RED; that was a whole ‘nother thing. Also, I’ve never been a NECCO fan either.

2. What character from any horror film would you most like to play?

Dracula. He is primal.

3. Would you rather be a zombie, alien, or psycho? (why)

An alien. Zombies are boring, psychos are too much work. Aliens allow for greater character development.

4. How many Halloween, Friday the 13th, or Nightmare on Elm Street movies combined do you have on DVD?

That would be zero. Not my thing. I’ve seen one Halloween movie. But, in the day, the store I worked at used to SELL them on VHS tape.

5. What is the scariest movie you have ever seen?

I was pretty freaked out by Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia. But THE movie that most terrified me was one I saw when I was nine or so, so it had to have come out in the early 1960s or before. Probably before, because it was a double feature with a Francis the Talking Mule movie, probably Francis in the Haunted House (1956). In the movie in question – I WISH I KNEW THE NAME! – there was this beautiful woman who men lusted after, but if they kissed her, she turned extremely homely. In order to regain her beauty, she had to bite the man on the neck, killing him, then blowing some powder. Seriously, my neck hurt for days.

6. Lamest costume you have worn on Halloween?

As a ghost, in a sheet.

7. Favorite Halloween treat?

Mounds bars, almost any candy bar without nuts or peanuts. I LOVE peppermint patties, or whatever they’re called.

8. Friendly-faced jack o’lantern or scary one?

Scary.

9. Have you ever had nightmares about a scary movie character chasing you?

Not chasing, but the aforementioned movie woman biting my neck.

10. The Best thing about Halloween?

The costumes. I used to really embrace costumes in the 1980s, when I was in my 30s, more than any other decade save for my childhood.

11. Strangest Halloween custom you’ve heard of?

Halloween lights. They’re like Christmas lights, only orange.

12. Person in your family who most likes Halloween (not counting yourself)?

Well, the daughter likes it. But the wife ALSO likes it because, since the daughter is allergic to peanuts, and I don’t particularly like them, SHE gets all the nut/peanut candy, sometimes with no effort.

13. Are you superstitious? If so, name at least one superstition of yours.

When I played baseball, I never stepped on the foul lines going to or coming from the field.

Music Copyright QUESTION

Martin Mull did a song called Licks (Off of Records), parodying the musical trend.

Two of my favorite topics are music and copyright law. When they converge, I’m utterly fascinated. Ann from New Zealand wrote about Kookaburra Sits In The Old Gum Tree, a children’s song I learned from a songbook in my elementary school. What I discovered from Ann was that the song was not in the public domain, as I had assumed, but was written in 1934 and is still under copyright. More to the point, the Australian group Men at Work have been successfully sued for lifting bits of Kookaburra and putting it on their 1982 international hit Down Under, where I first heard about vegemite.

But the theft wasn’t discovered until a judge on some TV music show misidentified Down Under as Kookaburra fairly recently. I find this hysterical because I recognized the flute bit as a swipe of Kookaburra right away, but I didn’t think it was substantial enough to be a copyright violation if in fact it was taken from a copyrighted song.

I hear a lot of licks off records, especially on live albums. In fact, Martin Mull did a song called Licks (Off of Records), parodying the trend.

Eric Clapton famously lifted Blue Moon and put it in the guitar solo on Cream’s Sunshine of Your Love, apparently without repercussions. Likewise, Bill Cosby swiped Purple Haze for the title song from his Hooray For The Salvation Army Band! album, apparently without legal action.

What songs have you heard that seem to steal from other songs without attribution, either music or lyrics? Note that Weird Al and MC Hammer, among others, always credited their sources.

Baseball on PBS

I’ve been watching Baseball recently. Not baseball, which I have viewed from time to time, but the TV “two-part, four-hour documentary film directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick,” BASEBALL: THE TENTH INNING. I’m a big fan of the original nine-part series and have even borrowed the expansive coffee-table book associated with it.

For me, I think the problem is that much of the information was a bit too recent, and the conclusions drawn generally unsurprising, which is to say, I noted to myself, “Yeah, I thought that, too.”. I remember watching, in real-time, the Braves vs Pirates NLCS, 1992 game 7 with former Pirate Sid Bream beating the throw from left fielder Barry Bonds. I recall well the 1994 strike, and how it almost destroyed the sport.

I remember the 1998 home run race between Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, which revived the sport; I’m sure I watched, again in real time, probably on FOX Sports, McGwire hit home runs 61 and 62. In fact, when I saw the show, I said, “Number 62 goes right down the left-field line, just over the fence.” I DID forget that at least a sports writer tried to blow the whistle on performance-enhancing drugs, but was ignored; and, of course, I do remember the steroid scandal. Don’t know if I’m projecting, but I sensed a bit of, if not sympathy, then at least understanding about what drew Barry Bonds to steroids. It makes the interesting, if unoriginal point, that by Roger Clemens sullied by the scandal, it made going after Bonds more palatable; Bonds is black, a position player from the National League, and sullen, while Clemens is white, a pitcher from the American League, and at least more civil.

My favorite parts involved, unsurprisingly, the information I did NOT know: the exploitation of the players from the Dominican Republic, and background on Ichiro Suzuki of Japan.

Still, the series may be more enjoyable for those less familiar with recent baseball history, or those with lousy memories. And I have to think that if I watch it a decade or more from now, it’ll become more interesting. Also, for those largely unfamiliar with baseball, the website does contain a great deal of information from the past 20 years. The Tenth Inning will be rebroadcast on November 8 and 15 on PBS.

I did not know this: former Yankees outfielder Bernie Williams has played with Bruce Springsteen.

Speaking of the Yankees, I will definitely have to watch the broadcast of Game Seven of the 1960 World Series between the Pittsburgh Pirates and the New York Yankees, when it will be broadcast on the MLB Network. Film of the game was recently discovered in the wine cellar of the late Pirates’ part-owner Bing Crosby.

Here Now The News

Now foreclosures are all being frozen, to check to see which ones are legit, which is hurting the financial markets, which, in turn, is hurting my head.

A lot of news stories have been really dominated my consciousness this month. And these aside from politics, which I reckon will require its own post soon enough.

One was the safe return of the 33 Chilean miners. The day of the rescue, October 13, there was a live feed on CNN, and I watched it, off and on, for hours. And it was always comfortingly the same, well-described by the Los Angeles Times: The rescue work had adopted a mesmerizing, rhythmic routine, the thin capsule shimmying down and up the narrow shaft that had been drilled to reach the chamber. Each appearance at the surface delivered a newly rescued miner into the arms of overjoyed family members, reunions that were still moving with every repetition. It had a sort of chant or Taize quality to it.
Yet there will always be the inevitable backlash.

I actually read, in a LOC, “Oh, it was no big deal; they were perfectly safe.” To that person, I feel like throwing him down a hole for two months and see what he’d miss. Not to mention that in the first couple of weeks, the miners didn’t know if they would even survive. Here’s a video about NASA’s assistance, which should help one understand the stresses those men experienced, as well as some of the engineering requirements required for the rescue.

Another storyline involves the GLBT youths’ suicide and the mostly heartening response. I’ve watched a number of moving videos, including one of a Fort Worth, TX city councilman, which was excerpted on ABC News recently. But it was actually GayProf’s prose piece about the abuse he suffered as a kid that got to me; well, that and his link to Tim Gunn’s touching “It Gets Better” video. Interestingly, SamuraiFrog puts at least some of the blame on the current President of the United States, and I’m not sure he’s entirely wrong about that, though I “get” what Obama’s trying to do: end DADT and make the military think it was THEIR idea; maybe Jon Stewart will ask Obama about it next week. Frog also notes your everyday schmucks as well that contribute to a climate of bigotry-driven violence.

Remember that story in Hungary about the alumina-coated waters rushing through towns and into the Danube? Well, it was newsworthy in the US as long as there were fresh pictures. Now it’s yesterday’s news – unless you happen to live in other parts of the world.

What HAS been a continual big story in the US is the foreclosure stories, not so much that there are homes being foreclosed, but the fact that they’ve been foreclosed illegally (and immorally), with financial institutions failing to even look at the paperwork. Now foreclosures are all being frozen, to check to see which ones are legit, which is hurting the financial markets, which, in turn, is hurting my head.

Is yoga pagan? Yeesh.

I found this rather sad: KCET, the PBS affiliate in Los Angeles, has decided to break away from the public broadcasting network and become an independent station. Station officials intend to replace such PBS series as “Charlie Rose” and “NewsHour” with news and documentaries from Japan, Canada, and elsewhere, along with old feature films.

Deaths I failed to note: Gloria Stewart (Sept 26 at the age of 100). When she was picked, at the age of 86, to be old Rose in the movie Titanic, James Cameron said he wanted to find someone he could age to 101 easily, and who could still stand upright.

George Blanda (Sept 27 at the age of 83). It’s funny to realize that his career with the Oakland Raiders (1967-1975), which I remember quite well, was just the last third of the football Hall of Famer’s 26-year career as a quarterback and placekicker.

Norman Wisdom (Oct 4 at the age of 95). He was in one of my favorite movies, The Night They Raided Minsky’s. Here’s What is Burlesque with Britt Eklund and PERFECT GENTLEMAN with Jason Robards.

Solomon Burke (October 10 at age 70). Inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2001. Here’s Everybody Needs Somebody To Love, a live performance from 2003. And Cry To Me from the movie Dirty Dancing, with Patrick Swayze & Jennifer Grey.

Barbara Billingsly (Oct 16 at the age of 94). She was the mom on Leave It to Beaver, a show I never really embraced. But I WAS a big fan of the movie Airplane, where she talked jive; she discusses the experience here.

Tom Bosley (Oct 19 at the age of 83) I watched him as the father on Happy Days, though I may have quit it before Fonzie jumped the shark. I’m not embarrassed to admit that I also saw him on Murder, She Wrote, but slightly chastened to admit that I also viewed The Father Dowling Mysteries.

On the subject of death, Biblical scholar’s date for rapture: May 21, 2011. Anyone knowing me well probably knows that I find these predictions not only silly but antithetical to true faith.

MOVIE REVIEW: Easy A

Maybe Easy A is trying too hard to be the next John Hughes movie.

The date movie with the wife for the month, Columbus Day, was Easy A, based on some positive reviews. High school student Olive Penderghast (Emma Stone, from the movies Zombieland and Superbad) finds herself invisible in high school. She ends up lying to her best friend Rhiannon (Alyson Michalka from some Disney shows and the current Hellcats) about going away for a weekend sex romp with a fictional college freshman, when in fact she barely left her bedroom. After the lie gets out, she finds that people ARE noticing her, for the wrong reasons. She then embraces her inner Hester Prynne from the book “The Scarlet Letter,” which she is currently reading in school.

I don’t see a lot of “teen comedies”, but I did enjoy this one, albeit with some reservations. I totally believed that one can get lost in high school, even someone as bright and attractive as Olive. Definitely bought the notion she could have a vapid BFF like Rhi, who she’s known since grade school. I can relate to the intoxication of sudden attention. When she agrees to help out a bullied gay friend, Brandon (Dan Byrd from Cougar Town) by pretending to sleep with him, her image rapidly goes downhill; that part is certainly believable, though played a bit loosely.

I also enjoyed Stanley Tucci and especially Patricia Clarkson, as Olive’s liberal and trusting parents, Dill and Rosemary, who occasionally offer TMI, though it sometimes felt those scenes were from another, better movie. And I really enjoyed Thomas Haden Church as her concerned English teacher, Mr. Griffith.

I was less impressed with the caricatures that the religious fanatics, i.e. born-again Christians, led by Marianne (Amanda Bynes, from What I Like About You) are portrayed. It’s not that I don’t think Christianity can’t be knocked, as this article seems to suggest. It’s just that they are painted with such a broad, and lazy brush. Also, a simulated sex scene is more slapstick than the rest of the movie, giving it an uneven tone.

Maybe Easy A is trying too hard to be the next John Hughes movie. Hughes gets namechecked more than once.

Let me say again: I liked the film. It didn’t drag, I didn’t want to check my watch, and I liked spending time getting to understand Olive’s motivation as her life gets spun around. And if the ending is a tad predictable. and maybe a little rushed, that was OK too.

Recommended for rental.