His Name is Raoul

This is Part 3. Part 1 is here and Part 2 is here.

Monday morning, November 14, 1983, Tom Skulan calls me at FantaCo and asks me whether Dee had called me. I thought this was a peculiar question. Dee, who was Raoul’s ex-girlfriend but still friend, had never called me to that point. Tom told me Raoul had died the day before, and I said, “Okay” and went back to work. About 10 minutes later I decided I should call my ex-girlfriend Susan and tell her. After letting her know, I realized, “Oh my God, Raoul died,” and I never mentioned it again that day. You would think that would be difficult, given the fact that I was going to be working the front of the store that day, but Raoul was working a Tuesday to Saturday schedule, and most people would not have expected him on Monday. They didn’t ask; I didn’t bring it up.

The next day we were faced with how to let people know that Raoul was deceased. While he was actually on vacation, most people would figure he was scheduled to work. Fortunately, his obituary had appeared in that morning’s newspaper. So as I sat at the front counter and people invariably asked me where Raoul was, I could point to the obit which I had taped to a piece of black construction paper and had hung on the wall opposite the counter.

Invariably, the first thing that came out of almost every person’s mouth was “You’re kidding!” Naturally, they didn’t mean that literally, but I heard that phrase a whole lot that day. It was so much easier just to point than to have to say the words again. But I attempted to comfort the customers who needed to process this awful news. Later that day, Raoul’s mother Betty and Raoul’s sister Maria came into the store along with Maria’s boyfriend. Maria hugged me for about four minutes, which felt like a LONG time. She and her mother asked Tom and me to be pallbearers at the funeral.

Raoul’s Nostromo Cap poster, recently discovered by Bill Anderson
Thursday evening was the wake. Fantaco employees Broome Spiro, Bill Anderson, and a number of others went over to the funeral home in Troy. Open casket. Damn. Eventually I made a quick pass at the lifeless body, but mostly talked to people as far away as I could from that part of the room.

Friday, the store was closed, of course, as we attended the funeral. The priest gave a homily that, while pleasant enough, didn’t seem to have anything to do with the Raoul we knew. He talked about Raoul drawing pictures of Christ and other fiction. But worse, he kept getting his name wrong. He repeatedly referred to him as Ralph. Ralph did this, Ralph did that. We all grimaced. Finally someone, and I didn’t even know then who it was, yelled, “HIS NAME IS RAOUL!” The priest continued, but at least he got the name right. After the ceremony, I went with a number of people from the band Blotto to a restaurant in Troy and we swapped tales about our friend Raoul.

ROG

ROG

Q is for Quadricentennial


Q turned out to be one of the easier letters for me, for 2009 marks the 400th anniversary of a trip taken by Henry Hudson which directly led to the founding of Albany, NY, where I’ve lived for the past 29 years. In 1609, Hudson was looking for an easterly passage to Asia, commissioned by the Dutch East India Company.

After crossing the Atlantic Ocean, his vessel, the Halve Maen (Half Moon), after first sailing down to the Chesapeake Bay with a sister ship, eventually traveled into New York Harbor and proceeded up what is today called the Hudson River. It made it about 150 miles, as far as what is now Albany before he was forced to turn around by waters that were too shallow. He realized that the river that would come to eventually bear his name was not a westerly passage to Asia.

Eventually, on the western shore, a settlement was established in what became the cqapital of New York State.


But this is not just a celebration of one city but of an entire region. Check out this site, or better still, this one for a list of events during the upcoming quadricentennial year. Also, check out this video, which will explain things somewhat.

ROG

ROG

Fallen soldiers, fallen leaves

I associate the raking of falling leaves with Veterans Day. Some of this is at the mundane level. One November 10, I raked the leaves so well, and then the next day, more dropped so that it appeared that I had made no effort at all. It seems that the leaves all fall almost at once. I can tell it was last Thursday in the front of my house, with leaves covering up half of the windshield of the car.

The linkage, however, is also more subtle. One rakes the leaves early on, and one feels a sense of accomplishment. In that second and third pass over the same terrain, though, the law of diminishing returns kicks in. Is it REALLY worth the effort to go over that ground again?

War must feel like that. In the beginning, everyone, at least everyone who’s in charge of executing the war, must have a sense of the rightness of their duty. As the war drags on, though, do doubts settle in?

I always wondered about extremely long wars. In year 37 of the 100 Years’ War, do the leaders remember what the point was. By year 73, all the leaders are most certainly dead, and all there is to hold onto is an abstraction. “For England!” or whatnot.

I came across this video about World War I, the end of which we are celebrating its 90th anniversary today. It’s not all gunfire, as the first minute or two might suggest, but has music of the period.

As you may know, WWI was so awful that it was thought that it must certainly be the “war to end all wars.” The League of Nations was formed and the world lived peacefully ever after, or so the script read. Here’s a list of wars most of them since 1918, with casualties when available.

I guess we’ll keep on trying for peace, regardless of our inability to achieve it.

ROG

The JEOPARDY Anniversary


It’s been 10 years this week since the episodes of JEOPARDY! on which I appeared aired. I’m not going to do a play-by-play of that time, which you can find here, but to make some observations about what it’s meant to me. Oh, and give my Alex Trebek rant.

I should note that I wasn’t the first JEOPARDY! winner from the Capital District, or even the first champion in 1998. That honor goes to Linda Zusman, an Albany teacher.

Nor was I the most successful JEOPARDY! player, even in my own neighborhood. That honor goes to Paul Glaser, who won five games and made it to the Tournament of Champions in 2007. (Say, wasn’t that his wife Amanda who as on in October 2008?)

I did, however, have one advantage that added to my local notoriety, and it’s that old real estate credo: location, location, location. My shows were taped in September in Boston, rather than in southern California. This meant that WTEN-TV, Channel 10 in Albany, sent a reporter and crew to interview me. Some of the piece was shown in September, the rest in November when the JEOPARDY! show actually aired. The reporter, by the way, was Bianca de la Garza, who, perhaps not coincidentally, is a reporter in Boston.

After I was interviewed by Bianca before I taped my episodes, I figured I was done. But no, Sharman Saccetti of Channel 18 in Elmira also wanted to talk with me. That station showed JEOPARDY! in Binghamton, my hometown. Sharman, who played a mock game of JEOPARDY! with Bianca and another reporter and appeared to be winning, subsequently had a stint at WTEN in Albany as well. I ALSO spoke to a reporter from Plattsburgh.

JEOPARDY! in Boston was also a big deal for both the program and Boston. The program set up a special area on its webpage, now partially defunct. Meanwhile, the Boston papers, including the Christian Science Monitor, all did stories. The September 19, 1998 Boston Globe story by M. R. Montgomery, “A Chance At Fame For $100, Alex: N.H. Woman Finds It’s Not Easy Being In ‘jeopardy!'” noted that 3,200 citizens roared for the new “Jeopardy!” set, for the assistant producer”. It also featured two photographs of me, one with two of my competitors, including the New Hampshire woman, Amy Roeder, and one with Amy, me and a JEOPARDY! staffer.

JEOPARDY! out of the house was so much a big deal that I discovered shells of Internet Movie Database posts about it in English and Italian.

After the shows aired – I’ll say this: I started a round thrice in my two games – I got mentioned in the paper along with Linda Zusman. then I got mention AGAIN as a run of Capital District residents succeed at the game. I even called a few of them.

Then I got quoted in the local paper a couple times. Once was during the Ken Jennings run. I said it at the time, and I haven’t changed my mind – the abolition of the five-day rule, while great for Ken Jennings and a few others, had a deleterious effect on the game. The season Jennings won most of this games, there was a three-game winner in the Tournament of Champions, and that was just WRONG. I also got quoted in a story about American Idol when a local contestant had to keep a secret about the results for over a month; I LOVED keeping the secret for seven weeks. But I wish that they had doubled the values of the clues a few seasons earlier.

Anyway, I’ll never say the word “charisma” ever again. Oh, yes: I work for the New York State Small Business Development Center. I’ve taken 10 years of grief for not mentioning THAT on the show.

My Trebek complaint: most contestants have pictures of themselves with Alex Trebek; my pic is a solo. And the reason is this; for reasons known only to him, he did the rabbit-ears thing with his fingers behind me! I know his only because I caught us in a monitor. I think it annoys me more now than it did then.

One of the perks is that people now think that I know stuff, whereas when I was merely a librarian with a Masters in Library Science, not so much. I wish future contestants well, especially a couple from the Albany area I know who have tried out; you know who you are.


Photo of the Wang theater in Boston used with permission of Brian C. Dominy.

ROG

ROG

Chaos Never Dies Day


This is Chaos Never Dies Day

But What is Chaos?
Chaos is a tricky thing to define.
I had read that the term at sixes and sevens referred to chaos.
Chaos is a quarterly journal devoted to increasing the understanding of nonlinear phenomena and describing the manifestations.
Here’s a trailer for the movie Chaos Theory.
Jefferson Airplane › We Can Be Together
We are forces of chaos and anarchy
Everything they say we are we are
And we are very
Proud of ourselves

ROG

ROG
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