Ramblin' with Roger

The Pretentious Blogging Meme 2

More navel-gazing via Sunday stealing.

12. How many drafts of potential blog posts do you have right now?

102. Some of them are for dates past. Will they become blogposts? Dunno. Some will, in all likelihood.

13. In what medium do you draft your posts?

In the Blogger thingy. It has an autosave feature, but I hit the save button frequently anyway. Occasionally, Blogger won’t save, and I end up copying and pasting the post in an e-mail to myself. Even my WordPress blog I do in Blogger, mostly because I never figured out how to size pictures in WP.

14. How often do you completely scratch or delete drafts or blog post ideas?

Maybe three or four times a year. What a pain, mostly because blogging time is so finite.

15. If you had to leave your blog in your will to another blogger, who would you choose?

There’s a woman in my office who used to blog. Her.

16. Are there other blogs that you feel are similar to yours in content, style, or voice?

Well, yes, no, maybe. Obviously I think my voice is unique, but that’s true of everyone. I think that there are elements of my blogging style in a number of blogs. I tend to think many other blogs are more singularly focused than mine. Maybe I should have five blogs or something, but I’d find it irritatingly compartmentalizing.
I pretty much hate most categories. The only categories I have for the bulk of my CDs are classical and pop. Classical is anything where the composer is above the title, whether that be Beethoven, Gershwin or Scott Joplin. Pop is everything else.

17. Has anything surprised you since you started blogging?

Yes, that I’m still doing it every day. That anyone reads it. That occasionally people are moved by what I write, often unexpectedly. That I have found it not just enjoyable but occasionally useful.

18. What are your goals or plans for your blog going forward?

Blog less. Or absent that, cloning.

19. Do you make any money from your blog? (optional) about how much a month?

No, though I’ve gotten some swag.

20. What blogging system do you use?

Does this mean Blogger? Or does mean chaos? Actually one of my blogs is in WordPress.

21. How did you come up your blog name?

From a radio guy called Rambling with Gambling. Oh, and my first name; I liked the partial alliteration.

22. How many blogs do you have? What was your peak?

Seven. Seven. Fortunately three are shared. Oddly, the most difficult one is the one for which I write once a month; more pressure, I think.

23. Are you having as much fun as when you started?

It ebbs and flows. Surely more than when I FIRST started when I had no idea what I was going to write the next day, or what my credo of blogging was. (I have a credo of blogging?)

24. Where do you find other bloggers like you?

Blog friends of blog friends.

25. What’s your one wish when it comes to blogging?

Steve Martin answered this long time ago here.

ROG

H is for Haiti

A couple weeks ago, during my church’s Black History Month celebration, we had a speaker talk about Haiti. He was a scholar on the topic and spoke for nearly 40 minutes, so I can’t bring you all that he shared. But I thought these points were particularly interesting.

Haitians fought in the American Revolutionary War on the side of the colonies. This became a source of great pride among the Haitian people. And the success of the the American example, and that of France c. 1789, was pivotal in the Haitians’ successful revolution (1791-1804).

Yet the United States was cool to the revolt on the island of Hispanola. “Could it be that…the specter of a revolution of slaves against white masters a revolution led by a former slave, Toussaint Louverture, who claimed for the former slaves a universal human right to freedom and citizenship made Americans cool to revolution?

“Thomas Jefferson, who readily accepted violence as the price of freedom in France, was not so relaxed about the black revolutionaries in Saint-Domingue as Haiti was called until its formal independence in 1804.

“Timothy Pickering, the irascible Federalist who served in the cabinets of both George Washington and John Adams…demanded of Jefferson, could he praise the French Revolution and refuse support for the rebels on Saint-Domingue because they were ‘guilty’ of having a ‘skin not colored like our own’?”

And fear of slave uprisings in the United States being inspired by the Haitian revolution was not entirely unfounded.

But it was the Haitian revolution which made Jefferson’s purchase of the Louisiana purchase in 1803 possible. The United States, who were only looking for access to the port of New Orleans got to nearly double its land. The French, who’d only reacquired the territory from the Spanish a few years earlier, got needed money and got to tweak Spain at the same time.

So why has Haiti been so poor for so long. Certainly a pair of reasons happened early on: boycott and reparations.

In 1806, fearful that the Haitian Revolution might inspire enslaved Africans in other parts of the Western hemisphere to rebel, the U.S. Congress banned trade with Haiti, joining French, Spanish and Portuguese boycotts. Global shipping originating in or by Haiti was banned from trading with or entering American and European ports of trade. This coordinated embargo effectively crippled Haiti’s export-driven economy and its development as a once prosperous Caribbean port… The embargo was accompanied by a threat of re-colonization and re-enslavement by the American-European alliance if Haiti failed to compensate France for losses incurred when French plantation owners, as a result of the Haitian Revolution, lost Haiti’s lucrative sugar, coffee and tobacco fortunes supported by slave labor…. Haiti spent the next 111 years, until 1922, paying 70% of its national revenues in reparations to France – a ransom enforced by the American-European trade alliance as the price for Haiti’s independence.

Many of these same points are discussed in this recent Daily Kos story.

I’m inclined to believe that rebuilding Haiti is not a moral imperative, it is economic justice that, if done correctly, could pay dividends for all concerned.

ABC Wednesday
ROG

Claudette Colvin

Claudette gave all of us moral courage. If she had not done what she did, I am not sure that we would have been able to mount the support for Mrs. Parks.

–Fred Gray, Alabama civil rights attorney

When I attended the Underground Railroad Conference at Russell Sage College in Troy, NY on February 27, the participants were treated to a performance by the group the Matie Masie Ensemble, who blended spoken word and song with African and jazz music. This particular series of story-songs included a narrative about a 15-year-old young black woman named Claudette Colin, who, nine months before Rosa Parks’ act of defiance, “refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery city bus the same and was arrested for violating segregation law, disorderly conduct, and assault.”

So, as the Matie Masie narrative asks, Why does Rosa Parks get all the credit? What about Claudette?

She wasn’t considered the right symbol. She was young, impulsive, occasionally loud, wore her hair in cornrows rather than straightening it. It didn’t help that she subsequently got pregnant from “what she said was a non-consensual relationship.”

Rosa Parks, by contrast, was a good middle-class woman of a certain bearing with the right hair and the right look who would be a much better symbol for the Montgomery bus boycott.

However Claudette is part of legal history. It was four women… — Aurelia Browder, Susie McDonald, Claudette Colvin and Mary Louise Smith — who served as plaintiffs in the legal action challenging Montgomery’s segregated public transportation system.

In their case — Browder v. Gayle — a district court and, eventually, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down segregation on buses.

There’s a 2009 book on Claudette Colvin by Philip Hoose which tells this underreported part of the story.
***
Civil Rights in America: Racial Desegregation of Public Accommodations
ROG

Condiments

So, today is my birthday. How the heck can I remember how old I am? It’s not as though it’s a round number.

Get a bottle of ketchup.

Ketchup? What will…

Brand name.

You mean like Hunt’s?

The other one.

OK, so what does…

Look at the bottle.

Hmm. What am… OH, 57!

57.

But what will I use NEXT year?

We’ve got time to work on that.

***
AP — Celebrity birthdays: March 7:
TV personality Willard Scott is 76.
Actor Daniel J. Travanti is 70.
Bassist Chris White of The Zombies is 67.
Singer Peter Wolf of The J. Geils Band is 64.
Actor John Heard is 64.
Keyboardist Matthew Fisher of Procol Harum is 64.
Guitarist Ernie Isley of the Isley Brothers is 58.
Blogger Roger Green is 57.
Actor Bryan Cranston is 54.
Actor Bill Brochtrup (“NYPD Blue”) is 47.
Comedian Wanda Sykes is 46.
Singer Taylor Dayne is 45.
Drummer Randy Guss of Toad the Wet Sprocket is 43.
Actress Rachel Weisz is 39.
Singer Sebastien Izambard of Il Divo is 37.
Singer Hugo Ferreira of Tantric is 36.
Actress Jenna Fisher is 36.
Actress Laura Prepon is 30.
ROG

Feeling Your Age QUESTION

One of the things I hated about some of the music of the 1990s was that it sounded like songs I knew, sort of. This wasn’t just a copyright issue (Hammer, for one, was very good at attribution of the original source). It was that I would be briefly lulled into the familiar, only to be jolted into…something else. P. Diddy’s music did that to me a lot.

(Though the Every Valley from Handel’s Messiah: A Soulful Celebration was a GOOD surprise.)

So my family was at the 60th birthday party of the colleague of my wife’s. And this song comes on. I think it’s Werewolves of London by Warren Zevon, a song for which I have deep affection. Turns out to be some popular tune by Kid Rock that I had somehow missed. And, just for the moment, I was feeling my age.

What makes YOU feel like, just maybe, you’re not still a kid?
***
Blue Is Frustrated from Blue’s Clues. Pray tell, what is Blue frustrated about?
***
GORDON’S BIRTHDAY TODAY.
ROG