Ramblin' with Roger

Events calendar for December 2025 (mostly)

Nov 25| Book Review | Everything is Tuberculosis by John Green. Reviewer: Roger Green (moi)

The events calendar for December 2025, and a bit before, includes me! All book reviews/author talks at Albany Public Library, 161 Washington Avenue, at 2 pm, EXCEPT the holiday concert on December 16, which will be at 12:30 pm.

November 25| Book Review | Everything is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection by John Green. Reviewer: Roger Green, business librarian, retired from the NY Small Business Development Center. (Not related to John.)

December 2 | Book Review | The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom by Don Miguel Ruiz. Reviewer: Ezra Scott, Jr., MA, MBE, is a native of Niagara Falls, NY, a public servant, an educator, & the proud father of Khari C. Scott & Exra P. Scott III.

December 9 |Author Talk | Roselee Blooston, author of four other books, both memoir & stories, discusses & reads from her book of personal essays, Including the Periphery.

December 16 | Holiday Concert with the Albany High School Choir, directed by Brendan Hoffman. THIS PROGRAM WILL START AT 12:30 PM, unlike our other programs.

December 23 | Book Review | The Treeline: The Last Forest and the Future of Life on Earth by Ben Rawlence. Reviewer: Jonathan Skinner, PhD, retired statistician & amateur classicist.

December 30 | Book Review | Nadja by André Breton. Reviewer: Dan Wilcox, peace activist & noted local poet.

Art at APL Opening Reception

Friday, December 5, 2025, 6:00 pm–7:30 pm

Pine Hills branch of the Albany Public Library, 517 Western Avenue

Countenance: The Contemporary Portrait, December 5- May 9, 2025

Nuveen Barwari, Judith Braun, Maggie Halloran, John Hampshire, Phil Knoll, Mark McCarty, Philip J. Palmieri, Winosha Steele, Felicia van Bork, Oliver Wasow

More info HERE.

Sunday, December 14

Join us for an afternoon of music and history in support of the Underground Railroad Education Center. Arias in the Afternoon: Lifting Every Voice

Join MC Rex Smith for the beauty of Handel’s Messiah with a performance by Daniel Pascoe Aguilar alongside the Smithsonian’s Voices and Votes exhibit, as we confront our complex history and continue the fight for education and truth.

December 14, 2025
1 p.m. to 3 p.m.
New York State Museum
4th Floor Terrace

AND

Ballad of the Brown King – Margaret Bonds

Seven Carols for Christmas – Alice Parker

December 14, 2025

2:30 Art display
3 p.m. Concert (see poster above)
First Presbyterian Church at the corner of State and Willett in Albany, NY

Sunday Stealing Goes Back To The Well

not as bad as it was

Welcome to Sunday Stealing. Here we will steal all types of questions from every corner of the blogosphere. Our promise to you is that we will work hard to find the most interesting and intelligent questions. Cheers to all of us thieves!

This week, we’re once again stealing from Steph, aka Cry Baby. She loves Taco Bell and asking questions like these.

Revisiting Steph – Sunday Stealing Goes Back To The Well

1) Has anyone ever told you “I love you,” but you didn’t say it back?

This happened at least 48 years ago. This young woman and I were buddies, not even really close friends. We were hanging out somewhere outdoors, and she said that. I thought it came out of nowhere, and I felt terrible. When I didn’t respond in kind, she seemed really crushed. I reflected on the vibe I was giving off to her. I hadn’t thought about that in a long time.

2) Do you consider yourself organized?

I think that there’s more than one way to be organized. In some ways, I am, and in other ways, definitely not. My blog writing has a system: I know what I’m gonna write, but I leave room for inspiration. I go through my email, which is my organizational tool for triggering specific behaviors, such as paying bills. My cell phone helps me remember my medical appointments and other irregular events.

Conversely, my office is a mess. It’s not as bad now as it was a couple of days ago. I was having trouble getting Internet connectivity, and I knew someone from Spectrum was going to come into my office at 8 a.m., so I woke up at 4:40 without an alarm clock and moved stuff around for about 2.5 hours.

Pathway

Now there’s a path from the entryway to my desk, so the worker could, as it turns out, replace the modem I just got a month ago with one that actually works.

3) Where do you look first when you go clothes shopping?

I should note that I loathe going clothes shopping. Last time I went, I needed a new winter coat, so I got one at Lodge’s, the oldest store in downtown Albany. I also bought some socks because I can always use more socks. Usually, my wife buys me shirts from L.L. Bean.

4) Do you often reflect on your past in terms of eras or milestones (“it’s been 10 years since X happened”)?

Not exactly, but I do recall anniversaries. I note famous people’s 70th birthdays, my parents’ birthdays, and death dates, my sisters’ birthdays, etc.

The only time I reflect is in end-of-year posts, when I’m mainly looking back on the previous 12 months. The only milestone demarcations I suppose I have are before the daughter and after the daughter, and my previous church versus my current church.

5) Were you more recently ill or injured (flu vs. twisted ankle)?

Challenging to say. I’m often in a state of mild injury. I wrote about pain in my left knee some months ago. The last time I was sick was probably when I had COVID in August of 2022, and honestly, because I had gotten shots, it wasn’t all that bad.

Thank you for playing! Please come back next week.

Songs that mention other songs

Rick Astley?

In popular music, there are approximately 10 zillion songs that mention other songs in popular music. One of my favorites is Sly and the Family Stone’s Thank You, which references several Sly songs:
Dance to the musicAll night longEvery day peopleSing A Simple Song
The Beatles appear frequently in this list. Glass Onion mentions several songs by the group. All You Need Is Love lifts a snippet of She Loves You; similarly, the Rutles’ Love Life echoes Hold My Hand. John Lennon famously mentions Sgt Pepper and Yesterday in his How Do You Sleep? Harry Nilsson’s You Can’t Do That references several Beatles songs.
Perhaps my favorite linkage is the one that starts with Neil Young’s Southern Man, which is name-checked in Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Sweet Home Alabama, which in turn is quoted in Play It All Night Long by Warren Zevon.
That Rockpile guy
However, one that I somehow managed to miss is Nick Lowe’s All Men Are Liars. I have the album Party Of One, on which it appears. But until Lowe’s birthday at the end of March, I managed to miss this particular reference:

Do you remember Rick Astley?He had a big fat hit that was ghastlyHe said I’m never gonna give you up or let you downWell, I’m here to tell ya that dick’s a clownThough he was just a boy when he made that vowI’d bet it all that he knows by now

Some other songs:

Tom Petty’s “Runnin’ Down a Dream” (Del Shannon’s Runaway)

The Kinks’ Destroyer (The Kinks’ Lola and All Day and All of the Night

The Stills-Young Band’s Long May You Run (The Beach Boys’ Caroline, No)

Arthur Conley’s Sweet Soul Music (a bunch of soul classics by Otis Redding, Jackie Wilson & the Miracles)

What are your favorite songs that namecheck other songs?

Thankful month, part 1

friends from kindergarten

I decided to write a blog post for thankful month. Lazily, I picked November 2025. I’m not including the Thursday night choir rehearsals or Sunday morning church services, both of which would qualify. Then the exercise appeared to run too long. So this is part one. I realize it’s rather diaryish, but that’s how it wrote itself.

DATE: Monday, the 3rd. Back in April 2021, I had lunch with three of my oldest friends—I’m talking KINDERGARTEN at Daniel S. Dickinson in Binghamton, NY — Carol, Karen, and Bill, along with Karen’s old friend Michael, whom I’ve known for a good while. That first lunch in Latham, NY, after we had gotten our COVID shots, was replicated at a diner in Albany. It’s strange when you have friends for 67 years, I suppose. But some memories diverged, which is expected after so many years.

DATE: Tuesday, the 4th. I had already voted the previous week. Before early voting, I would get up extremely early and be the first or second person in line. I miss it a little, but not enough to return to the tradition.

At the FFAPL author talk, Peter Balint discussed his memoir, The Shoe in the Danube: The Immigrant Experience of a Holocaust Survivor. This was a fascinating book. His father, a Hungarian Jew, died in the Holocaust; he, his older sister, and his mother, a German Catholic, survived. There’s a lot about personal identity that I found relatable.

I got to see one of my housebound friends. After I dropped off some prescriptions, we had another lovely conversation.

The shopping cart

Then I went to my local Market 32 Price Chopper to buy some food and get a new shopping cart. My existing transport was beginning to wear out. I did not realize that the cart required assembly. So at the end of the counter, I’m struggling to put this thing together. The cart was made in China, as were the instructions.

The young man who had rung me out was trying to help me, but he also had customers. He asked if he could turn off his aisle light, and he helped me assemble it. Or so we thought. As I was rolling it out of the store, filled with groceries, the doohickey holding the back tires together sprang off. The young man came and helped me tighten those whatchamacallits, with some advice from the security guard, who had been busy protecting the produce.

DATE: Wednesday, the 5th. I participated in a community reading of a William Kennedy book for the third time. Two years ago, it was for the book Ironweed, and last year for Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game. This year, we are reading Legs, the fictional account about the very real gangster Jack “Legs” Diamond, who lived in Albany and was murdered in the 1930s.

This year, the event made the New York Times. Participating in this event makes me feel more Albanian; that’s pronounced ALL-bah-nee-an, not AL-bah-nee an. Michael Huber, the communications guy for the New York State Writers Institute, and a truly swell guy, wrote: “In a time of desperate need, this marathon reading of Legs raised $1,605 for the food pantry at Sacred Heart of Jesus Roman Catholic Church, which was Kennedy’s childhood parish.”

Zooming to France

Then I went home and talked with my dear friend Deborah, whom I met in NYC in the summer of 1977, on Zoom. My wife and I went to Deborah’s and Cyrille‘s wedding in western France in May 2023.

DATE: Friday, the 7th. I attended a lovely flute and piano concert by the Hardage Chirignan duo, featuring two women named Mel, for First Friday at First Presbyterian Church in Albany.

DATE: Sunday, the 9th: I attended a meeting to learn more about how to address ICE activities. Zoom call with sister Leslie. I was going to write about the Northeast blackout of 1965 on my blog, but I forgot; at least I touched on it in 2005.

DATE: Monday, the 10th. It was 50 years since the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. Someone I know thought the event had taken place long before then. Kelly wrote about it.

My wife went out with her friends for dinner, so I went out and had a lovely conversation with a member of my church choir, which touched on some similarities and at least one revelation.

More on Thanksgiving.

Tobacco treaty wrestles with new nicotine products

Global Report on Trends in Tobacco Use

In honor of the Great American Smokeout, I am linking to a Lancet article from 1 November 2025: Tobacco treaty wrestles with new nicotine products.

“When the 11th Conference of the Parties (COP11) to the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) convenes from Nov 17–22, 2025, in Geneva, Switzerland, delegates from 182 countries and the EU will mark the 20th anniversary of the entry into force of WHO’s first global health treaty.

“The FCTC is credited with driving down tobacco use worldwide, and the COP is intended to oversee its implementation, but the emergence of new nicotine products has renewed disagreements over how best to end the epidemic of tobacco use.

The WHO Global Report on Trends in Tobacco Use 2000–2024 and Projections 2025–2030 shows that the proportion of adults using tobacco decreased from 33% in 2000 to 19.5% in 2024. Although the total number of 1.2 billion adult tobacco users is 120 million fewer than in 2010, this decrease is still short of the 30% reduction target set for 2025 …

“According to WHO, more than 100 million people now vape, including 86 million adults and at least 15 million adolescents aged 13–15 years, with children nine times more likely than adults to vape. ‘E-cigarettes are fuelling a new wave of nicotine addiction… They are marketed as harm reduction but, in reality, are hooking kids on nicotine earlier and risk undermining decades of progress.’

“Tobacco use has fallen to historic lows, yet one in five adults still consumes tobacco or nicotine products.”

Why is the Great American Smokeout important?

Although cigarette smoking rates have been declining for decades in the United States, cigarette smoking remains the most preventable cause of serious illness and death.

Smoking and exposure to secondhand smoke cause more than 480,000 deaths in the US every year.
Smoking cigarettes increases the risk of at least 12 different cancers.
In the US, cigarette smoking causes about 3 of every 10 cancer deaths.

I’ve mentioned this before, but there is definitely a demographic component. When you see enough people at bus stops pick up cigarettes to smoke, you believe it. “Some groups of people smoke more heavily or at higher rates.” These populations face healthcare barriers and inequities in multiple areas.

My paternal grandmother, Agatha Helen (Walker) Green, died from cigarette smoking at the age of 62. Though he eventually quit after many years of smoking, I expect that smoking shortened my father’s life, as he died at 73.

Here is a commercial with Yogi Bear and Boo Boo urging folks not to smoke.