Ramblin' with Roger

My Periodic Need for a Non-Thematic Post, January 2007 Edition

DEAD PEOPLE

I’ve seen saxophonist Michael Brecker playing somewhere. Maybe it was backing Joni Mitchell in Philadelphia in 1981, or maybe on one of his solo jazz excursions. He appears in that “Hot Tub” segment of Saturday Night Live I linked to when James Brown died last month. In any case, you’ve almost certainly have HEARD Michael Brecker, who played with Paul Simon (Still Crazy, among others), Bruce Springsteen (Born to Run), Frank Zappa, and zillions more, including the aforementioned James Brown, and who died of leukemia this week at the age of 57.
***
Art Buchwald, whose wonderfully acerbic column I used to read, was probably best known for not dying when everyone, including himself, thought he would. That and the lawsuit over the Eddie Murphy movie Coming to America.
***
I would have said something about the passing of film producer Carlo Ponti, except that I might have accidentally revealed my grand crush in high school (and later) of his wife, and it seemed unseemly, so I won’t.

MYTHS
…DEBUNKED

HIV/AIDS attacks

AND NOT A MYTH: (A LITTLE) TAX BREAK

A SPECIAL ONE TIME TAX CREDIT ON YOUR 2006 TAX RETURN

When it comes time to prepare and file your 2006 tax return, make sure you don’t overlook the “federal excise tax refund credit.” You claim the credit on line 71 of your form 1040. A similar line will be available if you file the short form 1040A.

This is about the federal excise tax that’s been charged for long-distance calls on phone bill for years, based on the distance and length of the calls. When phone companies began to offer flat fee phone service, challenges to the excise tax ended up in federal courts. The IRS has now conceded this argument. Phone companies were given notice to stop assessing the federal excise tax as of August 30, 2006.
But the challengers of the old law also demanded restitution. So the IRS has announced that a one-time credit will be available when you file 2006 tax returns. However, the IRS also established limits on how BIG a credit you can get.
If you file your return as a single person with just you as a dependent, you get to claim a $30 credit on line 71 of your 1040.
If you file with a child or a parent as your dependent, you claim $40.
If you file your return as a married couple with no children, you claim $40.
If you file as married with children, you claim $50 if one child, $60 if two or more children.
In all cases, the most you get to claim is $60 – UNLESS you have all your phone bills starting AFTER Feb 28, 2003 through July 31, 2006 – which I certainly don’t – then you can add up the ACTUAL TAX AS IT APPEARS ON YOUR BILLS AND CLAIM THAT FOR A CREDIT. If you do that, you’ll have to file a special form number 8913 and attach it to your tax return. Individuals using the form 1040EZ will have to attach this form 8913 also.

One final point – this credit is a refundable credit. That means you get this money, no matter how your tax return works out. If you would end up owing the IRS a balance, the refund will reduce that balance you owe. If you end up getting a refund, the credit will be added and you get a bigger refund by that $30 to $60, depending on how many dependents are on your return.

WAR AND PEACE

January 27-29 gathering in Washington, DC, “to remind the new Congress that we elected them to end the war in Iraq and to bring the troops home now.”

LIBRARIAN HUMOR, NOT AN OXYMORON

Conan the Librarian
A REAL library’s take on Madonna’s Ray of Light
***
A Biblical Understanding of Marriage
***
Finally, watch Tom the Dog on 1 Vs. 100 (square 81) AGAIN tonight on NBC, at 8 EST. Carlo Ponti,

I’m Cold

It was 71 degrees less than two weeks ago; yesterday morning it was 3. By mid-January, I’ve usually gotten used to the cold, but I think my blood’s too thin with all of this mild weather.

Sunday past, we had black ice. I started out for church, almost wiped out four times before I got to the third house, and I returned home. I fared better than my good friend Janna, who stepped onto a curb and somehow broke her foot. Monday at 8 a.m., it was fine, but by 9:30, when I’m coming back from the Y, and Carol’s taking Lydia to day care, freezing rain made sidewalks feel as though they’d been Zambonied.

This weather always reminds me of a song I wrote when I was in college. Yeah, I know the rhyme’s a little imprecise. There’s a third verse, but it’s filthy; it ends with the same couplet as verse two. Let your imaginations go wild.

Inspired by Billy the Kid by Aaron Copland. Or was it Billy Joel?

I’M COLD

CHORUS
I’m cold, I’m cold, I’m cold (X2).

VERSE 1
I was ridin’ down the Owen Trail.
My horse had an accident; lost its tail.
A dangerous criminal I’m s’posed to find.
It was 30 below; I changed my mind.

CHORUS

VERSE 2
Next day, sheriff caught the fella.
He said, “What’s wrong? You turnin’ yella?”
I said, “It’s not that I lack gumption,
But when it’s cold, I just can’t function.”

CHORUS 2
I’m cold, I’m cold, I’m cold (X2).
If there is a hell below,
It won’t be too hot, it’ll be too cold.
I’m cold, I’m cold, I’m cold (X2).

"The Greatest" is 65

When I was growing up, it seemed that everyone knew who Miss America and the heavyweight champion were; I couldn’t tell you either/any of the current ones at this moment. As a kid, I became mildly obsessed with memorizing the heavyweights, starting with John L. Sullivan. In my lifetime, Rocky Marciano was the first (and retired undefeated) heavyweight champ, but I don’t remember him directly, followed by Floyd Patterson. I vaguely recall Patterson losing to Ingemar Johansson in 1959, but recall with clarity Patterson defeating Johansson in the 1960 rematch. A couple years later, it was a bear of a man named Sonny Liston who had the crown.

In late 1963/early 1964, I kept seeing this guy, nicknamed by the press The Mouth or the Louisville Lip, named Cassius Clay, who would be taking on Liston for the title. I don’t think that anyone took him too seriously as a contender, even though he’d won a gold medal in the 1960 Olympics in Rome as a light heavyweight. But he beat Liston and became the heavyweight champion.

Then he changed his name to Muhammad Ali. This seemed peculiar, foreign to most Americans, black and white. Indeed, many fighters, including Liston and Patterson, as I recall, kept referring to him as Clay, as much as a taunt as anything. (I always gave props to the late ABC Sports commentator Howard Cosell, for during their sometimes contentious relationship, he always referred to the boxer by the new name he had chosen.)

I was intrigued by this new champion, who hung out with the Beatles:

although John Lennon indicated that he preferred Liston.

What REALLY caught my attention, though, was when, after being reclassified 1-A, Ali, for religious and personal reasons, refused military induction. As a result, he was unable to box in the United States, and was stripped of his title for three years, starting in 1967. This seemed to me at the time hugely unfair of the boxing commission. But it was him daring to challenge the US government (and ultimately winning), thus challenging the conventional wisdom of naturally going to fight in an American war, that radically changed my whole mindset about war, and led to my pacifist leanings. I was also affected by Martin Luther King’s eloquent opposition to the Vietnam war in 1967, that famous “betrayal” of Lyndon Johnson.

Ali would regain the title against George Foreman in 1974, but by 1978, boxing had become an alphabet soup of competing boxing commissions, and I stopped paying that much attention. Still, I was thrilled, and startled, to see Ali light the flame at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, and I truly enjoyed the piece the late Ed Bradley did on him for “60 Minutes”, when Ali feigned narcolepsy, during which he jabbed at the reporter. When the joke was revealed, Bradley laughed heartedly, and Ali had an infectious grin.

Happy birthday, Muhammad Ali.

You Don’t Call It Christmas Swag, Do You?

It occurred to me that I got a lot of stuff for Christmas, much of which I asked for. Seeing it piled up on a chair behind me, for the purpose of this post, leaves me feeling a bit guilty, actually.
CLOTHES:
mostly pants and T-shirts
FOOD:
various stuff
MUSIC:
LOVE-the Beatles
Phillips 66-John Phillips
Songs from the Labyrinth-Sting
When Carol returns that James Taylor Christmas album, I get to pick the replacement
plus some mixes from KY and elsewhere
BOOKS:
Library: An Uneasy History by Matthew Battles, which I have started reading
Leonard Maltin’s 2007 Movie Guide
Television without Pity by Ariano and Bunting
The All Music Book of Rock, which I use as part of my weight training
And of course, the 2007 World Almanac. Since it’s really a book about the events from mid-October 2005 to mid-October 2006, except for the November elections, it always misses those end of the year bombshells, such as the deaths of JB, Prez Ford and Saddam.
For some reason, I always look up the weather from two years ago: The high temperature in Albany for 2005 was 94F on June 26, lowest for that year was -16F on January 28. One of the local meteorologists said last week that there were no days in 2006 when the temperature went below zero.

And yet, with all of that, I almost always end up buying for myself the CDs I didn’t get. There was only one I REALLY wanted, and that was Highway Companion by Tom Petty, recommended by both Lefty and Nik. However, I SO hate paying postage on Amazon packages, so I also ordered Corinne Bailey Rae’s debut album, based on a couple co-workers’ recommendations, and Other People’s Lives by the Kinks’ Ray Davies, based entirely on Lefty’s recommendation. If/when I get to Borders with that JT return, I’ll get whatever strikes my fancy at the moment. I’ve listened to Petty and Rae once each, and at work, not always the most conducive venue, and Davies will shed the shrink wrap today.

Not so incidentally, I was more than mildly disturbed by the Wikipedia write-up on Rae (linked above), because of the racial taunting she had to endure when she was younger. I suspect she’ll show up in my blog in June.

"January Is Black History Month"

I’m reading this educational newsletter that my wife subscribes to, and there, on page seven, along with drawings of Ida B. Wells-Barnett and George Washington Carver and a teacher pointing to a portrait of an unidentifiable man to a couple students is “January is Black History Month.” And maybe it is. Maybe it starts on MLK Day and runs through February 28 (or 29). Six and a half weeks trying to talk about race and racism and power and prejudice in a way were everybody feels all right.

Don’t want to talk about slavery. “My people never owned slaves; they came to this country after the Civil War. How is that relevant? Besides, slavery is so 1865.”

Don’t want to talk about white skin privilege; that makes too many people uncomfortable, as one debates whether it even exists.

Don’t want to talk about prejudice. “The Civil Rights Movement took care of that. Besides, that was mostly in the South anyway, wasn’t it?”

Don’t want to talk about obscure black people “nobody ever heard of before. If they were REALLY important, they’d be in the REAL history books.”

Sure the heck don’t want to talk about reparations.

I know: we’ll do something with music and dance and food, which will make everyone feel good.

I recall reading recently someone suggesting that we have a REAL dialogue about Iraq in this country, as though we haven’t (and our leaders ignore us anyway, but that’s another matter.) Yet I don’t know what a real dialogue about race would look like in the 21st century.

If I sound a little peevish, in a Morgan Freemanesque sort of way, well, maybe I am. But I’m not of the “I am going to stop calling you a white man and I’m going to ask you to stop calling me a black man” school of thought. Race matters, still.

My wife and I were watching ABC’s World News a couple weeks ago, and we saw how a young filmmaker named Kiri Davis had replicated Dr. Kenneth Clark’s black doll/white doll experiment of a more than a half century before in a movie called A Girl Like Me; also, here. It was Clark’s study that helped bring about Brown vs. Board of education. When we saw the ABC piece, we both wept.

So, as we start the 45-day “month” of Black History, think about how people of different ethnicities can get real without rancor. And please let me know what that looks like.

Happy Martin King, Jr.’s Birthday. Oh, and see if you can find OTHER writings/speeches of the good doctor BESIDES “the “I Have a Dream” speech. Coincidentally, I’ll be talking about another one this very week.