Ramblin' with Roger

2009: A Blog Review

Gordon reminded me of this New Year’s tradition: “…go through the blog, randomly select one entry per month, and post it. It’s a great way to review the year…”

I used the Random Integer Generator and a formula too convoluted to explain here.

January – One review in particular irritated me: “The exceptional The Times of Harvey Milk won the Oscar for Best Documentary 24 years ago…. Yet, all this time later… Hollywood wants us to applaud its courage for finally–finally–telling this story?”

February – Ultimately, though it was a story of heroism, changing from a state of inertia to a state of action.

March – The 2010 Census is coming up and the Bureau will be using “American Indian or Alaska Native” as the designation for native peoples, just as it did in 2000.

April Both parts are recyclable, with a 1 or 2 in a triangle.

May – The makers of the indie hit Little Miss Sunshine also made this movie, right down to casting Alan Arkin as the grandfather; it’s a different role, but not so dissimilar that one couldn’t find it a variation on the theme.

June – It is true that one-third of all Americans now own an HDTV, putting market penetration at an all-time high.

July – 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.

August – When Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks spoke the truth about George W. Bush in March 2003, just before the US invasion of Iraq, and took a lot of heat, immediately, I ran out to the local Rite Aid and bought the Dixie Chicks’ then-current album.

September – Stories on both 60 Minutes (along with Barack Obama and Teddy Kennedy, FCOL,) and CBS Sunday Morning showed that the institution was finally getting its due, even if it was to sound its death knell.

October – Going back to the earliest days of rock and roll, there have been spoken lyrics within the context of a song.

November – But it wasn’t just the Muppets that appealed to me.

December – From my favorite Petty album, Full Moon Fever.

Interesting that 3 of 12 are movie reviews, as though I saw all that many movies. 2 of 12 (1 in 6) are of the ABC variety, which makes sense, since 1 in 7 of my posts are of that variety. Movies, music and television dominate – sounds right, though I watch less and less TV, and the music I listen to isn’t always the newest.
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Then, looking back, I noticed that I DID make resolutions last year. How did I do?
* to play more backgammon. That I did, playing an average of once every three weeks or so, perhaps an average of four games a session. Mich more satisfying than online.
* to play more cards, specifically hearts. Nope, 1 time.
* to see more movies. I haven’t tallied the movies that I saw; whatever I might have gained count-wise earlier in the year totally fell apart by mid-year.
* to play more racquetball. About the same, maybe slightly less.
* come spring, I need to BUY a bike to replace the one that was stolen. Done.
* read more books. Not done; more partials.
* listen to more music at home. Marginal improvement.

Good reason NOT to make any for 2010.
ROG

Battle Cry: Save the Y!

Since I last wrote about the possible plan to close the Albany YMCA on Washington Avenue, the place of my membership for over a quarter century, there have been some interesting developments.

The Times Union had a front page story YMCA’S PLIGHT STOKES EMOTIONS. The subtitle was “Albany site’s possible closing sparks accusation that organization is ‘abandoning’ its urban roots — a claim CEO hotly disputes”. Of course, disputing something, even hotly, doesn’t make it less true. That article and the previous piece led to at least three published letters, here and here and here in support of keeping the facility open. Also one current Y member accusing Y management of WILLFUL NEGLECT, a characterization I’m not willing to dispute. See also the Metroland piece.

But I do have a modicum of hope that I did not have before. The mayor’s representative has indicated the city’s desire to save the Y, and that’s nice. However, that’s not what gotten me stoked. I’m excited about the movement of ordinary citizens rallying over this issue through petitions at the Y and, interestingly, through Facebook; it is the Save the ALBANY YMCA Facebook group whose logo I have appropriated.

There are some specific strategies that seem viable to me in this battle. One will be a letter campaign to the national organization, I suspect, questioning the Capital District’s commitment to a core element of the Y mission, serving the urban community. I’m sure I’ll learn more when I attend the
DON’T CLOSE OUR Y! meting
Tuesday, JANUARY 5 at 6 pm
ALBANY PUBLIC LIBRARY, Main Branch

ROG

LOST Question

This has nothing to do with the ABC-TV show of the same name.

The scripture in the lectionary was that reading in Luke where Jesus is 12 and he gets lost. OK, he doesn’t think he’s lost. Mary and Joseph think he’s visiting other relatives, and travel a day before realizing he’s not with the other travelers. Frantic, they return to Jerusalem and look all over for three days before finally finding him in the temple. Jesus says, “Yeesh, mom and dad, you should have KNOWN where I’d be.” I always thought he was a little impudent. On the other hand, if they were in fact visited by angels before Jesus was born, maybe he had a point.

So my questions:

1. Have you ever been lost as a child?

I was at Ross Park Zoo in Binghamton, NY when I was four or five, maybe six. There were these huge culverts though the park and I wanted to know where they went. I got to the end, or at least as far as I wanted to go, and I came back. *I* didn’t think I was lost; I knew exactly how to get back. But my parents thought I was lost. I vaguely recall their combination of relief and anger.

2. Have you ever lost a child?

Well, no, but I have thought from time to time that I had. Lydia has this annoying habit of hiding, and she’s pretty good at it, too. So there have been a few times I Thought she was MIA, but fortunately, she was not.
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And speaking of lost, we lost Chas. Balun, horror film expert, a funny, irreverent, and generally nice bear of a man, to cancer at the age of 61. I started dealing with Chas. in my FantaCo days in the early 1980s when Tom Skulan came across one of his publications and we started it sell it. Later we were putting out the magazine he edited, Deep Red, and eventually we published books he authored, such as Horror Holocaust (1986) and The Gore Score (1987). My dealing with him as the person in charge of the mail order, I’d talk to him about the prosaic issue of how the items were selling. We always seemed to find some amicable banter, primarily about music.

Steve Bissette wrote a nice piece about Chas.

ROG

Reeling in the Years

I know historians banter about the most significant years in a given period, as do others. I’d have to pick 1917 (Russian revolution), 1945 (end of WW II), 1968 (unrest in US, Mexico, Czechoslovakia), 1989 (fall of Berlin Wall), among others, for the 20th Century.

But did you ever rank the years in your life? 1977, when I lived in three cities in two states, was pretty awful, but 1978, when, not coincidentally, I moved to Schenectady, NY, was pretty good. I was up in the attic this week, sorting stuff, and I came across a 1998 calendar, 100 Years of American Comics from the International Cartoon Art.

My, that was a good year.

I went to the movies. A lot.
Jan 16-Jackie Brown
Jan 19-Good Will Hunting
Jan 25-Titanic
Jan 31-Fast, Cheap and Out of Control
Feb 1-Amistad
Feb 10-The Tango Lesson
Feb 14-Mrs Brown; L.A. Confidential
Feb 15-Afterglow; Ma vie en Rose
Feb 16-The Apostle
And that was just the first two months.

I took JEOPARDY! test #1 on April 29.

I went on a two-week vacation in May. I don’t know that I’ve been on a two-week vacation since. I went to the Motown museum and a Tigers game in Detroit; and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland on one train trip. I visited the Capitol and other landmarks and took JEOPARDY! test #2 in Washington, DC on a second train trip. I love the train.

Saw LOTS of music in the summer. Many are local band (Burners UK, Hair of the Dog), but I also saw Maddy Prior, Cyril Neville, the Glenn Miller group, the Fabulous Thunderbirds, and Rickie Lee Jones. Then on August 9, I went to SPAC for the Newport Folk Festival, featuring Lyle Lovett, Joan Baez, Nanci Griffith, Bela Fleck, Bruce Cockburn, Alison Krauss, Marc Cohn, Lucinda Williams, and others; a great day.

I had two conferences in September. At the ASBDC conference in Savannah, GA, my father drove down from Charlotte, NC and hung out with me and a couple of my friends the first two days. THE best time I ever had with my father. Then the SBDC conference was in Niagara Falls; I love the falls. And I walked to NF, Ontario.

The JEOPARDY! broadcast party was November 9. Later that month, my attempts to re-woo Carol, which began in earnest in August, proved successful, and we got married the following May.

Music, movies, travel, love. Even a modicum of fame. That was a great year.

May your 2010, and mine, be as fruitful.

ROG

Should old acquaintance

There are lots of ideas that I come up with for this blog but eventually abandon. Things like, my favorite albums of the aughts or my favorite TV shows of the aughts. I just can’t wrap my head around the beginning and end points, I’d likely just forget a bunch of choices, and it’d be unsatisfactory for all involved. Especially me.

(Not to be confused with the things I start but haven’t finished yet. Sssh, we won’t mention THEM just yet.)

In fact, I don’t even note the significant deaths of the year, because everyone else has already done so. I do want to note some deaths I had not mentioned here, most of which did NOT make it into those annual lists in the magazines, because the magazines came out in the FIRST WEEK IN DECEMBER. No one dies in December, it would seem; ask James Brown.

Edward Woodward (11/16, age 79) – there was this show I enjoyed in the mid-1980s called The Equalizer on CBS that I enjoyed immensely. it was about a secret agent for the US government (Woodward) who quit and helped individuals in dire straits. Unfortunately, it was head-to-head, Wednesday at 10 p.m. with St. Elsewhere on NBC, one of my favorite shows, for most of 1985-1988. So I only saw it when the hospital show was in reruns, until The Equalizer’s last season, when St. Elsewhere had gone off the air.

Gene Barry (12/9, age 90) – the western Bat Masterson (1958-1961) was a little before my time, but Burke’s Law (1963-1965) was not. It about a millionaire L.A. chief of detectives (Barry, pictured above with Jaye P. morgan in 1984), who’d get driven in his limousine to the latest celebrity murder; he was always surrounded by beautiful young women. A great theme song. LOTS of guest stars in these shows. I loved it, yet didn’t follow Barry when the show segued into Amos Burke – Secret Agent in the 1965-1966 season.

Oral Roberts (12/15, age 91). When I was 12, his theology was right up my alley. By a decade later, it had become anathema to me. That clip that ABC News showed with Roberts proclaiming need for more money for the ministry, lest the Lord take him away, is one of the most vile pieces of “theology” I’ve seen.

Connie Hines (12/18, age 78). It must have be difficult for a working actress to be best known as the “mom” of TV horse Mr. Ed (1961-1966), especially since her character Carol didn’t even know the equine talked; only her husband Wilbur (Alan Young) did. An insidious theme song, which unfortunately I’ve known by heart for decades. She seemed to have left acting in 1971.

Brittany Murphy (12/20, age 32!) I saw her in the movies Clueless and Girl, Interrupted. But I enjoyed her most as the voice of Luanne in the cartoon series King of the Hill, the extended theme by the Refreshments which can be found here.

Arnold Stang (12/20, age 91) the voice of a lot of nerdy cartoon characters, plus one of my favorite cartoon characters, the cool and unflappable Top Cat. He also did some onscreen performances. Evanier has a piece or two. I remember THAT theme too, and in case you don’t, here’s a singalong version.
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The passing of the Spatula Forum blog, mentioned here only yesterday. I am sad but I understand. Sort of. There’s been a number of blogs that I followed that bit the dust this year: Delenda Est Carthago by Greg Burgas, though he still has the Daughter Chronicles; Tom the Dog; Tosy and Cosh. The latter two are on Twitter, but it just ain’t the same.
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So because it pleases me, A Charlie Brown Hey Ya Christmas. Hey, it’s only the seventh day of Christmas.

ROG