How 25 Years of ‘Arthur’ Reflects the Legacy and Future of PBS Kids
Why do we still love The Dick Van Dyke Show? Celebrate the 60th anniversary of our favorite sitcom! by David Van Deusen
Yes, it’s settled, but don’t call the MLB lockout millionaires vs. billionaires; there were far bigger stakes and The 100 Best Baseball Books Ever Written
The glee over the March 1 Wheel Of Fortune, er, misfortune irritated me. The contestants were harrassed, not only on social media but even by phone and in person. As host Pat Sajak said, “Have a little heart.” And as someone recently reminded me, “common knowledge” is less true now than it used to be.
Boston Globe culture columnist, Jeneé Osterheldt, created this to celebrate and center Black Joy and Black lives and the lives of other folks of color, too. Mental health resources compiled by Jeneé:
The Trevor Project – Supporting Transgender and Nonbinary Youth
Invitation
Friends & Foundation of APL National Library Week Luncheon April 5, 2022, at 12pm
The Kitchen Table | 300 Delaware Ave | Albany, NY
Join us on Tuesday, April 5th to gather with friends old and new. We will celebrate our past president, Holly McKenna, and wish her the best of luck in her next endeavors. And we will remember our dear Friends, Paul Hacker and David Colchamiro, who passed away last year.
Importance of NSF’s math and science education programs
In the Stats for Stories section of the US Census page, I discovered today is National Potato Chip Day. It contains statistics for NAICS 311919: Other snack food manufacturing (which includes potato chips).
In 2020, “Potatoes used for chips and shoestrings totaled 59.2 million cwt, down 1 percent from the previous year.” There are also links to potato groups, such as the National Potato Council.
Most interesting, though, was from the Lemelson-MIT Program: Historical Inventors, George Crum, Potato Chip. “Some evidence shows a man named George Crum, a cook and restaurateur was said to have come up with the idea for the tasty crisp.
“Born by the name of George Speck in 1824 in Saratoga Lake, New York, Crum was the son of an African American father and Native American mother, a member of the Huron tribe. He professionally adopted the name ‘Crum,’ as it was the name his father used in his career as a jockey. As a young man, Crum worked as a guide in the Adirondack Mountains and as an Indian trader. Eventually, he came to realize that he possessed exceptional talent in the culinary arts.
In the summer of 1853, he was working as a chef at Saratoga Springs’ elegant Moon Lake Lodge resort… Legend says Crum became agitated when a customer sent his French-fried potatoes back to the kitchen, complaining that they were cut too thickly. Crum reacted by slicing the potatoes as thin as he possibly could, frying them in grease, and sending the crunchy brown chips back out on the guest’s plate that way.
“The reaction was unexpected: The guest loved the crisps. In fact, other guests began asking for them as well, and soon Crum’s ‘Saratoga Chips’ became one of the lodge’s most popular treats.” See a one-minute video.
Oh, yeah, it’s Pi Day too
In another Stats for Stories piece: In 2009, the U.S. House of Representatives passed “H.Res.224 – Supporting the designation of Pi Day…”
“Whereas Pi can be approximated as 3.14, and thus March 14, 2009, is an appropriate day for ’National Pi Day’: Now, therefore, be it Resolved, That the House of Representatives—
(1) supports the designation of a ’Pi Day’ and its celebration around the world;
(2) recognizes the continuing importance of National Science Foundation’s math and science education programs; and
(3) encourages schools and educators to observe the day with appropriate activities that teach students about Pi and engage them about the study of mathematics.”
There are a lot of stats about STEM-related industries such as engineering and statisticians. Check out the links to short videos, events taking place TODAY, and teacher resources. Did you know Indiana Almost Made Pi Equal to 3.2? The horror!
Somehow, I had missed the word liminal until the last couple of years. One of my pastors used it in a sermon, more than once, referring to the liminal time we were in. And, I will argue, we’re still in it when it comes to COVID.
The word is an English adjective meaning ‘on the threshold’, from Latin līmen, plural limina.” In anthropology and religion, liminality is “the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of a rite of passage.” And in psychology, liminal experiences are “feelings of abandonment (existentialism) associated with death, illness, disaster, etc.”
Governor Kathy Hochul (D-NY) announced plans that the state mask requirement in schools would end starting on March 2, 2022. What that means is that people have the CHOICE whether to wear a mask in those settings or not. My wife, a teacher, is still wearing one. In fact, in addition to her own safety, she finds it important to model that behavior for her K-8 students. My daughter is also wearing her mask. She guesstimates that 75% of her high school colleagues are doing likewise.
Florida man
So the remarks of Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) surprisingly really roiled me. In 2021, he said, “It is prudent to protect the ability of parents to make decisions regarding the wearing of masks by their children,” and parents “absolutely have every right to equip their student with whatever types of masks that they want.”
Yet, at a Florida high school this month, “DeSantis on-camera Wednesday told the students, ‘You do not have to wear those masks. I mean, please take them off. Honestly, it’s not doing anything and we’ve gotta stop with this COVID theater.’ Clearly angry, he added: “So if you want to wear it, fine, but this is ridiculous.'”
So what happened to parental choice? He claimed he wasn’t bullying, only making sure that HE didn’t want people to think he was mandating their mask-wearing. Of course, I’m unsurprised, given his other policies.
As for me, I’m STILL wearing the masks indoors. Unlike Kelly, I don’t forget I’m wearing one, especially while singing at church. But at least I AM singing at church. And [crosses fingers] maybe that’ll go away soon.
It gets better
I was talking with my wife about how difficult going to the grocery store had been. There were arrows designating which lanes to go up and down. They were violated regularly, but they’d be coming in tandem the wrong way. Not only that but people who needed something where my wife or I were standing – and we didn’t shop at the same place – would reach over or even in front of us. Talk about lack of social distance. And this was WORSE in the pandemic. I theorize that people wanted to get in and out of the store as soon as possible. I seldom experienced the behavior either before COVID or in recent weeks.
My wish is that people show grace to each other in this liminal time. Let the masked be masked. And remember there are still places – some medical facilities, a lot of transportation, and individual business – that still require masks. Don’t be a donkey’s rear end.
When I was talking with my sisters earlier in the year, I asked them about the music of my parents, our parents. Were there tunes listened to and/or sung by both Les and Trudy? I have mentioned at length what my father listened to and sang.
My mom had 78s of Nat Cole and big band artists. I associate my mother’s LPs as soundtracks of movie musicals and Broadway plays, sometimes the originals, such as the movies West Side Story and The Sound of Music. But more often it was some off-brand version, some presented by Ed Sullivan, almost certainly including Pal Joey and Kiss Me, Kate. Here’s Always True To You In My Fashion from the latter album.
Mom also used to sing around the house. She had a pleasant voice, with a slightly Betty Boop timbre. One song she particularly must have liked was A, You’re Adorable, a 1949 #1 hit for Perry Como. Though her version was more like the take by Jo Stafford and Gordon MacRae, #4 in that same year.
I understand that, before she was married to my dad, Mom sang in the choir at Oak Street Methodist Church. As far as I know, she never sang at Trinity AME Zion, though my father did for years.
One year I bought Joe’s Jackson’s Jumpin’ Jive album (title song) for my mom. Soon thereafter, she asked me why on earth I bought her THAT. A miss.
Wes? Slam?
One suggestion of music my parents listened to together was Wes Montgomery, which I had put in my dad’s category. Here’s The Incredible Jazz Guitar.
My sisters also thought of Slam Stewart. While I don’t recall my parents hearing him together, he was well known in our hometown of Binghamton. His humming bass was very affecting. Somewhere in my attic, I have an LP that was recorded as a benefit for the Binghamton Sertoma Club. Here’s Slam Jam by Slam Stewart. I saw him perform at SPAC in the late 1970s or early 1980s.
Did they have “Our Song”? If they did, we never heard about it. I suppose I wish they had, like those folks in that Alexa commercial dancing to I Only Have Eyes For You by the Flamingoes, a song that BTW I greatly adore.
Ultimately, Les and Trudy Green would probably agree, the music they were most fond of was that of Les Green. My mother said often that someone needs to be in the audience, and she was an enthusiastic participant in that role.
My parents wed on March 12, 1950, and were married for 50 years before my father died.
In response to my Presidents Day post about knowing all of those guys – they’re all guys – in order, led to a couple of discussions.
One involved a friend of mine whose kid, who I’ve known since he was a baby, has “very strong feelings” about ranking the Presidents. I think we all should have a “resident political scientist” (RPS), in our midst, and a credentialed one at that.
I find the exercise interesting, as an old poli sci major would. Yet I’ve always been mildly conflicted between whether President was successful and how that success or failure turned out historically. (I have one specifically in mind; see below.)
Nevertheless, here’s a list, not the whole roster. The comparative rankings I’ll refer to is the overall 2021 C-SPAN Presidential Historians Survey, linked to here. I’ll not create a full list of my own.
So it begins
1. George Washington, #2. Does he get nicked for owning slaves? Of course, true of many of the early dudes. But as anyone who’s heard Hamilton knows, part of George’s greatness is not staying around too long.
7. Andrew Jackson, #22. Jackson has tumbled over the years. But not far enough for the RPS, who would put him third from the bottom, ahead of only Trump and perennial cellar-dweller Buchanan. As abhorrent as I think he was, I’m not ready to put him down that low. Among other things, he kept South Carolina from seceding and paid off the national debt. Conversely, the spoils system started with him. And he’s responsible for the Trail of Tears.
Surely, he should be off the $20 bill. Incidentally, some versions of his dollar coin are flawed.
9. William Henry Harrison, #40. Seriously? Why is this man even ranked? Some polls exclude him. His only major decision was to give a too-long inaugural speech. Then he died a month later.
10. John Tyler, #39. Can we count the stuff after he left office? I think we do anyway, and I have a couple of examples. This traitor sat in the Confederate Congress for a few months before he died in 1862.
Leading to the Civil War
11. James K. Polk, #18. I was helping my daughter with her history homework last year. The fact that he met every major domestic and foreign policy goal he had set during his single term was impressive. But he led the country into a nasty war against Mexico, which accelerated the divide between free and slave states.
13-15. Millard Fillmore, #38; Franklin Pierce, #42; James Buchanan, #44. Worser and worse, as they say. Shortly after Fillmore’s ascent to the presidency upon the death of Zachary Taylor (#35), he supported the odious Fugitive Slave Law, part of the Compromise of 1850. Pierce, who was recently featured on CBS Sunday Morning, signed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which fractured the Missouri Compromise more slavery in the territories.
Perhaps there was nothing for Buchanan to do. As JFK was quoted, “No one has a right to grade a president — even poor James Buchanan — who has not sat in his chair, examined the mail and information that came across his desk, and learned why he made his decisions.”
16. Abraham Lincoln, #1. Perhaps no President has been more analyzed, for good and ill.
17. Andrew Johnson, #43. What might Reconstruction have looked like if not for him? An oversimplification, sure, but…
18. Ulysses S. Grant, #20. Few have been more rehabilitated than USG. Yeah, the Panic of 1873, but Reconstruction helped. So did his book.
20th century
29. Warren G. Harding, #37. When I was growing up, only some of the Presidents around Lincoln fared worse than Harding, with Teapot Dome.
31. Herbert Hoover, #36. Another “worst ” President growing up.
32. Franklin D. Roosevelt, #3. New Deal, WWII. Conversely, internment camps for the Nisei. Plus many provisions of the New Deal actually harmed black people. Much of the positive energy of the administration came from his wife Eleanor.
33. Harry Truman, #6. The fact that the military desegregated under his administration is a BFD for me. Berlin airlift, and reining in MacArthur are pluses.
34. Dwight Eisenhower, #5. Even though he likely wasn’t in favor of the ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, he respected the process. So he sent in troops to desegregate Little Rock HS. He also created the armistice in Korea, despite opposition in his own administration. He initiated a massive interstate highway system. But he also gave one of the best farewells, warning us of the “Military-industrial complex.”
Ones I remember
35. John Kennedy, #8. I’d long thought that JFK was overrated, a function of his youth and being assassinated. He had that Bay of Pigs debacle, though the world DIDN’T go to war in ’62. He was coming around on civil rights in ’63. But I must credit him with the initiation of the space program that DID go to the moon in that decade.
36. Lyndon Johnson, #11. The most vexing President in my lifetime. On one hand, he pushed the civil rights legislation, sometimes in the name of his late predecessor. And he had a robust social welfare program. But the massive escalation in the Vietnam war was unforgivable.
37. Richard Nixon, #31. RPS’s mom would put Nixon in the lower echelon of presidents, “but maybe that’s just because I was in high school and college in the 70s.” I DESPISED Nixon politically when he was in office, over Vietnam response but also his war on drugs. The EPA was created, only Nixon COULD have gone to China, and a more robust health care COULD have happened except… Watergate, of course, was the public spectacle debacle that I watched on TV daily.
The unelected President
38. Gerald Ford, #28. ADD asked, “What are your thoughts about the one that was never elected President or Vice-President? That’s my favorite trivia question.” My favorite, “Which President was born Leslie Lynch King Jr.?” Now here’s my unanswerable question: would the Republicans push out Nixon if Spiro Agnew would have become President? I’ll acknowledge that I opposed Ford’s pardon of Nixon at the time, but I’ve softened on it.
His problem was that he was tasked with cleaning up messes: Nixon, but also Vietnam, inflation, an economic downturn. Ford’s social policies were liberal by today’s standards, notably his support of the Equal Rights Amendment, but he didn’t have a lot of political capital, especially after the 1974 Congressional elections, which brought in a wave of Democrats. He did the best that he could. His wife Betty, though: SHE was a force.
Oh, and his appointed Veep was Nelson Rockefeller, considered a liberal, but he ran with BobDole in 1976 and lost.
39. Jimmy Carter, #26. The Camp David between Egyptian president Anwar Sadat and Israeli prime minister Menachim Begin was a highlight. But the ongoing energy crisis was a drag. He had solar panels installed on the White House (and Reagan had them taken down.) Of course, the Iran hostage crisis sunk him.
A different job
40. Ronald Reagan, #9. I always thought Reagan should have been king. A cheerleader for America. He was good at that, actually. But his policies, from trickle-down economics to anti-union policies to a larger war on drugs to ignoring HIV/AIDS for years. But he knew how to sell it like an actor. Getting shot and coming back healthy certainly helped. He DID appoint the first woman to SCOTUS. The fact that he said to Gorbechev “Tear down this wall” and the Berlin wall came down a couple of years later means he gets to take credit.
41. George H. W. Bush, #21. Breaking his “no new taxes” promise helped to sink him.
42. Bill Clinton, #19. He had to face that horrendous wave of Contract On America tools such as Gingrich. Even at the time, I dismissed the idea that the Telecommunications Act of 1996 would be a boon to competition in local cable markets. His war on drugs was as bad as recent Republicans. He did select Stephen Breyer and RGB for SCOTUS. His impeachment was silly, especially given the behavior of some Republicans, such as Gingrich, which we didn’t know at the time.
21st century
43. George W. Bush, #29. Going into Iraq was the big debacle, though his Hurricane Katrina response was lousy. Oh, yeah, and the 2008 economic collapse. #29 seems high.
44. Barack Obama, #10. He signed the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) when so many others had tried and failed. He also backed the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act and ended Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. it appeared Obama was working hard on his economic stimulus program in response to the Great Recession even before he was inaugurated. Unsurprisingly, he talked a lot about race, which I thought was appropriate.
45. Donald J. Trump, #41. Tax cuts for the riches. His disturbing relationship with Putin in Helsinki and subsequently. Amazingly racist comments. His bromance with Kim Jung-un. His pathological need to try to undo everything his predecessor accomplished, from Paris climate change to the Iran nuclear agreement. He lied all of the time, even about things not worthy of the effort. His administration developed the COVID vaccine, but his messaging undermined its success. Still, it was the Big Lie over the 2020 election and his culpability on 6 Jan 2021 that truly puts him so low on my list. Twice impeached. . This is difficult, but my bottom five probably are Buchanan, Trump, Pierce, Harding, A. Johnson. Tyler, Hoover, and W would be in the next five.
In the Stats for Stories section of the US Census page, I 
Somehow, I had missed the 
38. Gerald Ford, #28. ADD asked, “What are your thoughts about the one that was never elected President or Vice-President? That’s my favorite trivia question.” My favorite, “Which President was born Leslie Lynch King Jr.?” Now here’s my unanswerable question: would the Republicans push out Nixon if Spiro Agnew would have become President? I’ll acknowledge that I opposed Ford’s pardon of Nixon at the time, but I’ve softened on it.