Ramblin' with Roger

My Life In ABCs

So why do some people call me George?

This seems like a suitable abecedarian follow-up to ABC Wednesday, which I did on Tuesday. Here is something from a Thursday Thunks from a few months ago, which I’m actually doing on a Thursday, which is unusual.

“This week is going to be easy… just one question. Ok, well maybe not so easy. Take each letter of the alphabet and describe something in your life… don’t skip any!”

A – Apples. I like them, especially McIntosh and Macoun, which is a cross between the McIntosh and Jersey Black; not as tart as the Mac.
B – Beatles. My wife got for me the Mono box for Christmas; it’s only in the later albums, Revolver and the white album in particular, where I really hear the difference between that and the standard recordings.
C – California: almost certainly the state I have flown to the most. When I visited my parents in North Carolina, I sometimes have gone by car or train. But seeing my sister in San Diego, it’s by air. Also flew to my niece’s graduation from Berkeley a few years back.
D- The Defenders. One of my favorite Marvel Comics (Dr. Strange, Sub-Mariner, the Hulk, and others) and one of my favorite TV shows (E.G. Marshall and a pre-Brady Bunch Robert Reed as father-and-son attorneys).
E – I like eggs poached, fried, scrambled, deviled, boiled, or in an omelet. The salmonella scare hasn’t reached New York state – yet.
F – French. the language I took in high school. By my third year, I was pretty bad, so my skills are rather rudimentary.
G – Green. Last name, also a favorite color.

When I’m giving my name, I say “Green, like the color,” and about 30% of the time, I’ll get the response, “Is that with an E?” which is really confusing, because it actually has two Es. What they mean is whether there is an E at the end. NO, it’s LIKE THE COLOR.
H – Hockey. I actually saw it played once live, in Albany. It was an exhibition between USA and Sweden, i think. It’s a much better sport in person than on TV.
I – Ice cream: strawberry is my favorite. I’ll generally pick vanilla over chocolate.
J – Jigsaw puzzles: I have an amazingly little patience for them.
K – I know way more Kellogg’s cereal commercials than anyone has a right to.
L – My father AND my sister are both named Leslie. This caused ME some difficulty. Since people knew my father had a child named Leslie, they would assume it was me, and folks at church called me Little Les, which irritated me greatly.
M – Mourning. I went to more funerals between September and November 2004, three, than I have in some whole years.
N – Night. I used to be a night person before I started going out with my now-wife; now 10:30 p.m. is really late. Can’t even make it to midnight on New Years Eve anymore.

O – Odetta is the late folk singer who, along with Harry Belafonte, Joan Baez, and Pete Seeger, had a large effect on my father’s music.
P – Paris. If I had a chance to go to one foreign city, it would be Paris.
Q – I usually did well on surprise quizzes in school as a kid, especially in math.
R – Roger. My name. So why do some people call me George? Just a couple of weeks ago, a colleague who’d known me for years asked for George Green. It must be the J sound, the common letters; oh, I don’t know. Also, even my grandfather spelled my name Rodger.
S – I have two sisters, no brothers. I used to wonder what it’d be like if I had had a brother, though not for a long time.
T – I like tea, but I don’t drink coffee. Actually, i don’t drink tea that much either unless it’s cold out.
U – There is this couple from my old church that returned to Mongolia, then came back to the United States. She works for the United Nations, maybe 160 miles away, but I haven’t had a chance to see them again.
V – “Villain” is one of those words I have to think about, lest I spell it incorrectly, as “villian”. “Nuptials” is another, which I want to spell “nuptuals”.
W – When people come up to me on Wednesday morning and tell me, “Well, the week’s half over, we’re over the hump, it’s almost the weekend,” I cringe inside. I’m more receptive on Thursday morning, though I do worry about people wishing their lives away.
X – I believe the first X-rays I ever got, aside from dental, were on my left knee in 1994 when I had torn my meniscus.
Y – I have no particular skills with the yo-yo, or for yodeling.
Z – The only zoos I recall going to were in my hometown of Binghamton (NY), the Bronx (NY), and San Diego (CA).

30-Day Challenge- Day 21 – Favorite Movie Quote

I used to BE a Census taker, so maybe I take it personally.

I love the movies, and I love movie quotes. When the American Film Institute presented its list of 100 Top Movie Quotes, you know I had to be watching. The Wizard of Oz is a particular yeasty source of quotes.

The one I may have actually used most often in real life is #27, from Midnight Cowboy: “I’m walking here! I’m walking here!” when Ratso Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman) almost gets run over by a cab. I hear Hoffman explain that he almost DID get run over by that cab, who was supposed to be blocked off while the crew filmed the scene.

The one that creeps me out the most: A census taker once tried to test me. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti; I used to BE a Census taker, so maybe I take it personally. That line’s from The Silence of the Lambs, which I never actually got all the way through, spoken by Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins).

Ultimately, though, the all-encompassing quote is what I need to go with: Davis (Steve Martin) saying in the movie Grand Canyon: “That’s part of your problem: you haven’t seen enough movies. All of life’s riddles are answered in the movies.” I’m not 100% sure that’s true. But it might be.

G is for Green Wedding

My father and sister sang at our wedding reception. I think I did too.

When I married Carol Powell on May 15, 1999, it was not only a blending of families, it was a mixing of family sizes. My family is very small, while hers is ginormous. Since both of my parents were only children, and all of my grandparents, by that point, were deceased, this was pretty much it on my side of the ledger: (L-R) my niece Rebecca, her mother/my sister Leslie, Carol, me, my mother Trudy, my late father Les, my niece Alexandria, and her mother/my sister Marcia.

Whereas my new wife had LOTS of relatives. My mother-in-law had seven siblings, my father-in-law two. My wife had three brothers and over 30 first cousins. I, of course, had no first cousins since I had no uncles or aunts.

So when they wanted a picture of my side of the family, you might wonder: who ARE all of these people? Most of these are direct descendants of my late great aunt Charlotte, the little woman in the front right of this photo above.

My mother’s mother Gert had three siblings that reached adulthood, but only one, Ernest, who married Charlotte, had children while my mother was growing up. So even though they were a decade or more younger than my mother, my mother’s first cousins by Ernest, who died back in the 1950s, and Charlotte, were the closest child relatives she had. And even though they lived in Queens, New York City, Charlotte’s grandkids were the closest child relatives my sisters and I had, besides each other, likewise 10 years or more younger than we were. Charlotte, BTW, was the sister-in-law of Professor Irwin Corey.

So the folks in the photo are one of Charlotte’s sons (and spouse) near the center of the photo, two of her granddaughters (plus a spouse), and a couple of her great-grandkids, along with the folks in the first picture. Whereas the picture on my wife’s side was a virtual mob scene by comparison.

This is the Yates side of the family that showed up at my niece Rebecca’s wedding to Rico in 2005. There was some difficulty between the bride’s mother and the groom’s mother, who wondered why the first cousin of the bride’s grandmother should be indicated in the program. As I described here, ultimately the extended family was listed, though the bride’s uncle, i.e., I, was inadvertently left off.

Oh, at Carol’s and my reception, my father and sister sang. I think I sang one song with them, Rebecca probably performed a number or two, and even niece Alex sang Yellow Submarine with her young cousins. Leslie also sang at the wedding.

I’ve been thinking a lot about weddings because my daughter is going to be in her first one this coming month, the Pakistani event of her babysitter, which will be an elaborate affair. More on that after the fact. If you’re also planning to tie the know with your soulmate soon, you’re probably already trying to find those tungsten wedding rings for him.

The website of niece Rebecca’s band, Siren’s Crush.

ABC Wednesday – Round 7

Monday Monday; no, wrong Mamas & Papas song

I’m listening to the Coverville podcast a few months ago, as I usually do a couple of times a week. Brian was doing the Mondegreen episode, a term that, if I had heard it, I had forgotten. The definition, which I stole from somewhere: “Misheard lyrics (also called mondegreens) occur when people misunderstand the lyrics in a song. These are NOT intentional rephrasing of lyrics, which is called parody.” There are whole websites devoted to this issue.

The last song on the show, not only had I gotten wrong for years, but have SUNG it incorrectly when performing with my sister.

The correct lyric is:

stopped into a church
I passed along the way
well, I got down on my knees
and I pretend to pray

Yet all these years, I had been hearing:
and I began to pray

To be fair to me, many other people of my vintage heard it the same way. I know this because I asked a number of them. And it is noted as a common error in Kiss This Guy, named after a misheard line from Jimi Hendrix’s Purple Haze: “Excuse me while I kiss the sky.”

I never misheard that Hendrix lyric or this line from California Dreamin’ offered up by Am I Right?
Misheard Lyrics:
You know you’re preaching like the Pope.
Original Lyrics:
You know the preacher likes the cold.

But the one I DID mishear I’ve thought about a number of times since. Seems that the fact that the verse has three verbs in the past tense (stopped, passed, got) tunes the ear for a fourth (began) rather than a present tense verb such as pretend. They COULD have sung “pretended” and I don’t think it ruins the scansion. Here are the complete lyrics.

BTW, what linguistic tool is being used when you speak in the present tense about things that happened in the past? “So I go to the store. I see an item I want. I buy it.” Past action, but present tense verbs.

Anyway, HERE is a version of the hit song that only went to #4 in the US charts in 1966 by the Mamas and the Papas, and HERE is another. The song is attributed to John Phillips and Michelle Gilliam.

John eventually married and divorced Michelle. John performed this version on his album Phillips 66, which was released posthumously in 2001; he would have been 75 today. Michelle Phillips is the remaining survivor of the Mamas and the Papas.

What lyrics have YOU misheard, and how did you finally figure it out?

August Ramblin’

Daniel Schorr was possibly best known for his coverage of Watergate for CBS News.

In July, David Warren, inventor of the flight data recorder, or “Black Box,” passed away at 85. His prototype was not warmly received, and as an employee of the Australian government at the time, he made no money from what is now considered a critical invention. He did, however, receive a rather nice obituary in The New York Times.

That gave me a bit of perspective. Looking at multiple news sources does that for one, too.

The big news in this neck of the woods is that New York State got some federal education money. But this is the same story in the Los Angeles Times:
California loses bid for Race to the Top federal education grant
California has fallen short in its efforts to secure a federal Race to the Top school-reform grant. The winners of the controversial federal grant program, just confirmed by federal officials, are Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Rhode Island, and the District of Columbia. If California had been chosen, it could have won as much as $700 million in one-time funds.
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It’s been five years since Hurricane Katrina. Initially, before I got a sense of the true measure of the devastation, I understood it as how it was affecting our wallets. We were traveling from Albany to New Jersey and Pennsylvania and weren’t really watching TV. We could not help but notice, though, how the price of gas jumped from about $2.65 per gallon when we left just before the storm to about $3.25 when we returned less than a week later.

Only when I got home and got to watch the news did I recognize the full impact of the destruction, and our government’s inability to cope with it. Bless the victims of Katrina, many of whom are STILL dealing with the aftermath.
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I understand why people tire of politics, I really do. From the open letter to Lincoln, to Who let the dogs out, it can be a pretty awful game. But I’m inspired by more positive stories:
Is FOX News Stupid or Evil?
The Australian Time Warp (you don’t have to be from Australia to appreciate)
Target boycott flash mob; great video.
Glenn Beck is NOT Martin Luther King Jr.. Not even close.
2009 National Environmental Scorecard “illustrates the extent to which the Obama administration and the 111th Congress began to move our nation towards a new energy future”

Besides, despite my protestations, I’m a political junkie at heart. Which reminds me, a couple journalists covering politicians died in the past 5 weeks.
Daniel Schorr (July 23), possibly best known for his coverage of Watergate for CBS News, and discovering, on air, that he was on Richard Nixon’s enemies list. One of my journalistic heroes who was most recently on National Public Radio.
Whereas James Kilpatrick (August 15) I thought was almost always wrong. From his defense of segregation to his appearances on TV shows such as 60 Minutes’ Point/Counterpoint segment to Agronsky & Company, which I watched religiously, I loved to disagree with him. He did seem to mellow in later years.
A couple of pols died:
The former powerful chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, Dan Rostenkowski (August 11), like a predecessor in that office, Wilbur Mills, and a successor, Charles Rangel, all had Congressional legal troubles.
Ted Stevens (August 9), former US Senator famous for wanting a “bridge to nowhere” for his state of Alaska was lauded by the Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association as a great champion of the sports industry. He predicted his death by plane, which is how his first wife perished.

While I’m thinking of the recently deceased:
Jack Tatum (July 27) – a nasty football player.
Mitch Miller (July 31) – watched a LOT of Sing Along with Mitch, even as I thought he was rather “square”. No more so than in this cover of Give Peace a Chance.
Patricia Neal (August 8) – I cannot recommend enough A Face In The Crowd, also starring Andy Griffith. Here’s the trailer.
Abbey Lincoln (August 14) – underappreciated jazz singer-songwriter and civil rights activist.
Bobby Thomson (August 16) – The shot heard ’round the world when “the Giants win the pennant” in 1951 after the baseball team was so far behind the Dodgers in August.
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The Fantastic Four As A Model For Gay Acceptance

An 83 song setlist coming to Rock Band 3. Not that I play, of course.
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Things that struck me as funny and/or weird:

For a smile, you can send a Hug-Egram. Unfortunately, you can also read the URL as “huge gram”; make of that as you will.

My favorite spam comment of the month: “Next time you should condense your post, try to leave out the parts that people skip.” Not incidentally, 25 Ways to Stop Spam

OMG WWII on Facebook! A modern adaptation of World War II for the American teenager.

What Cigarette companies don’t want us to know… (hate that phrase): “Direct E-Cig is a revolutionary electronic smoking device designed as a better smoking alternative to traditional tobacco cigarettes.” Video interesting, as it shows mixed results for the product, which according to a story I read in the Wall Street Journal this week, has NOT been approved by the FDA.

When I was looking up things for my English language post this month, I found this NOT in the least bit SAFE FOR WORK video about the versatility of a popular English language word that begins with the letter F. (Don’t say I didn’t warn you.)