Ramblin' with Roger

Unconscious Mutterings (Sunday Stealing)

no matter what

The Sunday Stealing for this week is Unconscious Mutterings. “There are no right or wrong answers. Don’t limit yourself to one-word responses; just say everything that pops into your head.

“I say … and you think …?”

Hurry!: Reflectively, it irritates me because it’s usually from someone who either 1) procrastinates until it’s almost too late or 2) tries to pack too much in.
Dumb: Usually uttered by someone arrogant.
Fudge: A perfectly good alternative for a specific vulgarity.
Sturdy: One of those Soviet women from those 1984 Apple ads.
Printing: Gutenberg. A good thing, all in all.

Itch: A craving.
Creaks: Our stairs and my knees.
Paste: That gooey stuff from grade school.
Waste of time: Some usually harmless, occasionally inspirational tasks that person B is doing that annoying person A can’t imagine doing. Also, a reference to a Marshall Crenshaw song.
Let down: Heartbreak.

Cancellation: Something one does with postage stamps.
Suspect: Still innocent until proven guilty.
Fireplace: I wish ours worked.
Spring: Stravinsky.
Commute: Something I don’t have to do.

Places: “There are places I’ll remember
All my life though some have changed
Some forever, not for better
Some have gone, and some remain”

1984

Fraud: Doublespeak. “To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself—that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed.”

Adoption: When it comes to new technology, I’m a late adopter.
Election: Something I participate in every time, no matter what, and despite the travails.
Moving day: I have written about it a few times. Helping others isn’t bad; I’ve done it about 70 times. For myself, moving sucks!

The tiny bunny

What was the meaning?

On Tuesday, there was a tiny bunny in my front yard. It was so small that when my wife and daughter left for school, they didn’t see it. It was roughly the coloring of the picture shown.

I went out to investigate. It appeared to be dead. I got my snow shovel to remove it, only to discover that the creature’s nose twitched. Ah, so it’s alive, but it’s not moving. A healthy rabbit would have quickly scampered away. I imagine that it wasn’t attacked by an animal. Most likely, it was hit by a car and either flew or hobbled over to our grass.

I let it be for a few hours, then checked out the creature again. It was still lying on its side, with a couple of flies hanging around it. Dead for sure, right? I manipulated the shovel and could stabilize the bunny enough so that it could, more or less, sit up. It started nibbling on the grass, which, oddly, gave me a bit of joy.

I never had a rodent as a pet. No hamsters or white mice. We had cats and one dog. Some short-lived goldfish, I think. So I became surprisingly fascinated by this visitor. Why did it appear on MY lawn?

The next day, it appeared to be still hanging on as I went to donate blood at Albany High School, time #176; thank you very much.

I checked on the bunny after lunch, but it had died. So I carried it to the backyard, where I buried it. It was my “pet” for about a day, and yet I felt sad about its passing. Though I knew its injuries were so severe that it wouldn’t last for long.

Judy Garland would have been 100

“Forget your troubles, c’mon get happy”

Since Judy Garland was about to turn 100, I decided to see The Wizard Of Oz at Albany’s Spectrum Theatre in early April, and my wife accompanied me. We had never seen the film in a cinema before. There were only the two Tuesday showings, at 4 and 7 pm, so I figured it would be packed; there were less than ten of us there at the latter.

My wife said more than once afterward, “She could really act,” and I concurred. Her performance was vivid on the big screen. Of course, I had seen the movie on CBS-TV annually for several years in the 1960s, though only the last two times on a color TV. I had missed the “horse of a different color” joke.

My, those ruby slippers really sparkled when she ran. I did not know that one of the iconic dresses was missing until 2021. Nor was I aware that there was a black and white dress for the Kansas scenes and a blue and white dress for Oz. Movie magic.

It was strange, though. In the same timeframe that I’m watching the teenage Judy, I’d also see her on her eponymous show (1963-1964) or guesting on Ed Sullivan or another program. Also, I’m sure I watched the television special Judy and Liza at the Palladium (1964). Liza, of course, was her daughter Liza Minelli, about 18 at the time. (Liza’s 1972 movie Cabaret was shown at the Spectrum the week after The Wizard of Oz.)

Only two score and seven

I never paid much attention to the tabloids at the time, so I was very surprised when Judy Garland died in 1969 at the age of 47. I’ve viewed documentaries about her life since, though I never saw Judy, the 2019 biopic with Renée Zellweger.

One last thought. When I was in the play Boys In The Band in 1975, there was a specific cue for the lead character Michael to be playing the Judy Garland track Get Happy. So that song has had a soft spot in my heart ever since.

Here’s a clip of early films from when Frances Gumm was seven until Judy Garland turned 17.
Waltz With A Swing/ Americana -Every Sunday, 1936
Zing! Went The Strings Of My Heart -Listen, Darling, 1938

Somewhere Over the Rainbow – The Wizard of Oz, 1939; plus a discussion of the isolated vocal
Our Love Affair, with Mickey Rooney
The Trolley Song – Meet Me In St. Louis, 1944
Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas – Meet Me In St. Louis, 1944

Get Happy – Summer Stock, 1950
Happy Days Are Here Again/Get Happy , with Barbra Streisand, 1963?
The Judy Garland Show with Peggy Lee and Jack Carter (November 1963)
By Myself, 1964

She was accidentally slapped at the 1954 Oscars

Judy Garland would have been 100 today.

What the heck is Zoosk?

I am not a 5’5″ Gemini

Oh, dear. A message indicates my photo has been removed from Zoosk. But one question. What the heck is Zoosk? “Zoosk Inc is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Spark Networks SE, a NASDAQ MKT Company (LOV).”| Ah, it’s an online dating service.

Here’s the email I got.

Hi rogerogreen,

Your photo was removed for not following Zoosk’s photo guidelines. To help your new photo go live…

· Make sure it’s clear
· Be alone in your photo
· Don’t include nudity

Wait a minute. I didn’t send them a photograph. This person isn’t even me!

The guy in question is:

Gender: Male (true), but he’s more than a half-decade younger

Interested In: Women (well, not just ANY woman)

Sign: Gemini (not me)

Height:5’5″ (way shorter than I)

Ethnicity: White / Caucasian (nah)

Relationship History: Separated (that’d be news to my wife)

Children: Has children, not at home (singular child, still at home)

Education: Attended college (actually, I have a BA and an MLS)

Religion: Christian – Catholic (I tend toward Protestantism)

Smoking: Smokes regularly (no way in heck)

Industry: Military (not me)

Oh, and he’s in the different Northeast area. I figured this because the four women Zoosk suggested are from around there. And they’re all non-smokers.

I was going to just reply to the email and say this ain’t me. But one of my sisters suggested it could be some sort of scam, though I’m not sure how that would even work. I will say the Zoosk security kinda SUCKS.

Response

So I blocked the messages. But it was still unsettling that MY email was used in this manner, especially when I got a couple of responses.

Then I wrote to their customer service folks. “Thank you for contacting our Zoosk Customer Care Team.

“This is an automatic email to confirm that we have received your request and have forwarded it on to the appropriate department for review. Here is your ticket reference number… To add additional comments, please reply to this email.

“Once your account and request have been reviewed, you will receive a response. We will try our very best to reply to you within the next 48 hours.”

While waiting for a reply, I came across this site for dissatisfied customers.

But Zoosk did get back to me, and in less than 24 hours: “Thank you for getting in touch and alerting us to this situation.

“We have blocked the profile connected to [my email]. This means that it has been removed from our website. It does not appear in Search, and it can no longer be logged into or used. Moreover, it is not possible to create another profile with this same email address in the future.” Thank you for that.

But right afterward, I got unsolicited ads from Match.com and SilverSingles. Meh.

International Business Machines

company town

Those of you of a certain age KNOW that International Business Machines, or IBM, was not just a large corporation, but, if you could get in there, a career. This article specifically addresses the import and outsized significance of IBM to the Triple Cities of Binghamton, Johnson City, and Endicott.

“The company was founded in 1911 as the Computer Tabulating Recording Company (CTR) and took up residency in Endicott, where the three companies that merged to form CTR had been based.” The buildings of the company dominated Endicott, taking up 150 acres of real estate. “At its height, IBM Endicott employed 19,000 people in the region and the majority of the population of the city.”

While there were undoubtedly many places that were “company towns”, Endicott, and the surrounding Broome County, were the first and foremost.

Les at IBM

When my father needed a job in the early 1960s, he was considered lucky to get into IBM Endicott. I had guesstimated that he had worked there for six years, but now I am uncertain. In the 1963 Binghamton City Directory, he was listed as working at the Interracial Center at 45 Carroll Street, but in ’64, at IBM. It’s probable that he was working at IBM in ’63. Could he have been working at both in ’62, since the IBM job was at night? IDK.

I DO know that he hated the job. It was mind-numbing boring for him, I’m guessing, moving materials around on forklifts from one area of the massive campus to another. He had been a trucker in his past, so I imagine that he was good at it.

It was only in retrospect that I realized how much I missed him. He did try to compensate by cooking waffles on Saturday mornings, and spaghetti Saturday nights, since we didn’t see him that much during the week. As I learned from him, the secret to a great spaghetti sauce is cooking it for hours.

Perks

Occasionally, we all went to the IBM Country Club. I have this vague recollection of seeing an exhibition game between the New York Knicks and the Boston Celtics there. I could be misremembering the venue, but getting tickets was somehow a perk of him working there.

In this blog, I have told at least a half dozen times, how my 9th-grade homeroom and biology teacher, Mr. Joseph told me straight out that my father was “CRAZY” for leaving his job at IBM. This was “especially for a position with Opportunities for Broome, an OEO government job (where he thought he was making a difference). Government jobs come and go, but once you’re in the IBM family, you were set for life.”

Eventually, that became less true. In 1978, IBM moved 1,000 families from upstate New York to the Charlotte area, where, coincidentally, my parents and baby sister had moved four years earlier. That was the first big influx. (Charlotte pizza, before the Northerners came, was AWFUL.)

Me at IBM, first time

I graduated from Binghamton Central High School in January 1971. After looking for a few weeks, I got a job, of course, at IBM Endicott. I wrote about it here.

“My job was to do these three processes. The first was to put this laminated coating over these circuit boards. The second (and the most difficult) was to bake them in these ovens, making sure not to bend the pins or have the coating get on the pins. The third task was to bake this plastic holder onto the circuit boards.

“Irritatingly, the first shift did a lot of the first task, leaving the second task to me. And I really had to do it, because the coating would start riding up the pins if they weren’t baked within 10 or 12 hours. They didn’t like me because I would do the first task so fast that the company raised the rate for that job, something from 60 to 80 boards per hour. That WAS a tactical error on my part.

I was on the second shift, which ostensibly was 5:12 p.m. to 2 a.m ., with a 48-minute lunch. But I hardly ever worked that. It was usually 5:12 p.m. to 4 a.m., and then from 12 noon to 6 p.m. on Saturday…I saved a lot of money for college because of the 16 hours of overtime per week… Because I was generally too tired to go out – I managed to lose 30 pounds because I was too tired to eat…”

Give blood

“First time I ever gave blood was while I worked there because I could get paid at work while taking of the hour to donate.” When I left, my manager was disappointed, but I needed to go to college.

I made $3,371 in a little less than six months working at IBM before I went to college. “This would be the most money I would make until 1978. I made enough to pay for my college expenses and to lend my parents $1500 for the down payment on a house. Tuition was cheap, and I had a Regents scholarship to SUNY New Paltz.”