Ramblin' with Roger

Paul Weinstein (1963-2022)

a good dad

I had to do the math. It was only two and a half years at the most between the time I met Paul Weinstein, and when his then-wife Nikki invited us to Paul’s surprise 50th birthday party in the early spring of 2012. That has to be right because his daughter and mine were classmates in first grade.

I remember that party exceedingly well, given how long ago it was. It was at a very nice wine bar in downtown Albany, closed to the general public. Paul introduced my wife and especially me to a lot of his friends.

Paul was one of those people who was fully engaged in caring about who he was talking with. That said, he was always highly complimentary of how smart I was, sometimes to my slight embarrassment. Part of that might have been the JEOPARDY effect. But some of it was our separate times in Binghamton, me growing up there, him going to college at the university.

He also wished the best for our daughter, often recommending extracurricular activities for her to try, such as archery, which his daughter participated in. I’m not sure we ever took any of his suggestions.

There were quite a few dads who participated in activities at the elementary school, such as Walk Your Child To School or preparing simple breakfast snacks at the school. Paul was always the most enthusiastic.

At West Lawrence and Madison

Generally, I’d see Paul Weinstein in the neighborhood, a lot. It was often at a corner two blocks away, whether he was on foot or in his car. The last time I saw him was there and he suggested we get together. Right after I retired in 2019, he recommended we go biking together. As is often the case, these things never happened.

My wife and I had the same reaction to the announcement of his sudden death. We can’t believe it. He appeared healthy and happy and engaged in life. My condolences to his two kids, who seemed to adore him. And also to his ex-wife. Even though they couldn’t live together – and I believe they tried – it seems that they still had a love for each other.

The watching sports report

Week 18?

I grew up loving watching sports on television. Not just baseball and football, either. I grew up with the Wide World of Sports. Not so much in 2021.

Oh, I caught some innings of a few baseball games, but almost nothing from beginning to end. Yet I would READ the box scores and stories about the previous night’s games. I was particularly fascinated with Shohei Ohtani, who GQ profiled. “Not since the days of Babe Ruth has one of baseball’s greatest hitters also been one of its finest pitchers.”

Maybe it was the fate of the New York Mets, who looked as though they might get to the World Series but ended up not even getting to the playoffs. Or the New York Yankees who were streakily great, followed by being terrible and were eliminated after one playoff game.

Perhaps it’s my antipathy for some of the teams. Both the 2017 Houston Astros and the 2018 Boston Red Sox were nicked by a cheating scandal. The Astros also yanked their team affiliation from our local Tri-City Valley Cats. More parochially, the Dodgers beat the Yankees in the 1963 World Series; I hold a long grudge.

Gridiron

As usual, I didn’t watch the NFL before Thanksgiving. I saw bits of one of those Turkey Day games, then nothing else in 2021 unless the CBS game ran late, delaying 60 Minutes.

But then there was week 18. Week 18? There used to be 17 weeks in which the teams each played 16 games, with one week off. Now there is a 17th game. And, perhaps related to the expansion of the eligible playoff teams to 14, it seemed that almost every team that didn’t play their home games in New Jersey still had a chance.

Such as the Pittsburgh Steelers. Chuck Miller described what happened. But that Raiders-Chargers game that ended in the final minute of overtime was edge-of-my-seat exciting. The following week there were a couple of close games which I saw. However, I will acknowledge that I watched almost the entire Buffalo Bills beating of the New England Patriots, 47-17. Seven touchdowns in seven possessions!

Soured

Only one of the annoying things about COVID is that sports figures who you felt neutral or mildly positive about managed to act in a disappointing manner. Aaron Rodgers of the Green Bay Packers spread some malarkey about his vaccine status.

More irritating, though, was Novak Djokovic, the tennis star who got booted out of the Australian Open because that country actually wants to take the disease seriously. Then the Serbian president blasted Australia. Now, Djokovic may not be able to play in the French Open in May if he isn’t vaccinated. I had no strong opinion about Novak, beyond admiring his considerable talent, but now he’s rather ticked me off.

Torturing others with Barry Sadler

1966

I had a grand time after church in late October. And I had S/Sgt. Barry Sadler to thank.

A group of us were talking about music. For some reason, the truly awful song The Men In My Little Girl’s Life came to my mind. Pure treacle. It was sung by Mike Douglas, the TV host. The very title made my companions shriek. I remember it went to #6 in ’66. – sign of the devil. So yeah.

One of my buddies was talking about how they had gone through all of the songs that had reached #1 on the pop charts. The discovery was that some of the ones before the rock and roll era weren’t very good.

I wondered if The Ballad of the Green Berets by Staff Sergeant Barry Sadler was an outlier, but they didn’t remember it. This surprised me because it’s so different than most of its contemporary tunes. I confidently said it was the #1 tune of 1966, which was true if being #1 for five weeks is the measure. We Can Work It Out, Soul and Inspiration, Monday Monday, Summer In The City, and Winchester Cathedral all topped the charts for three weeks that year.

But they were young and didn’t understand its impact until I asked someone younger than I, I think, but older than them about the song. She immediately launched into “Fighting soldiers from the sky…” This generated a look of utter disbelief, and I had to laugh. You did not need to be a supporter of the Vietnam war to have that song stuck in your head for decades without having heard it again.

A new verse?

The song was so ubiquitous in the day that I could have, but didn’t, recite the lyrics of the last verse.
Back at home, a young wife waits
Her Green Beret has met his fate
He has died for those oppressed.
Leaving her his last request…

I knew the song was controversial at the time, of course. What I didn’t realize until recently is that there is a new, more inclusive version that has this verse:

Delta Force and CIA
SEALs and SOCOM
They clear the way.
Covert missions are now in play
These special ops
like the Green Beret

Some in the military apparently hate the additional words. I think they’re clunky.

I blame Chuck Miller for getting the original song stuck in my head. On his radio show, he played the B-side of Ballad of the Green Berets, a song called Letter from Vietnam, right before that church discussion.

The movie

Oh, yeah, I also saw the movie The Green Berets (1968), starring John Wayne, and fresh off the TV show The Fugitive, David Janssen. It also starred Jim Hutton of Binghamton, NY as Sgt. Petersen, which may have been a factor in me seeing it at the time.

Janssen’s character, George Beckworth, was a newspaper reporter cynical about the war until seeing Col. Mike Kirby (Wayne) and his troops in action. That’s a little oversimplified, but so was the film, which was pilloried by the critics as a WWII film.

What ordinal number is your favorite band’s best album?

Is the first the best?

Bridge over Troubled Water My buddy Greg, whose various blogs I’ve been following only since about 2005, posed the question above. What ordinal number is your favorite band’s best album? He mandated that I do likewise.

So naturally, I misread this as a CARDINAL number and started musing about Led Zeppelin III, 4- Foreigner, and Chicago so many digits I’ve lost track. No.

“I have a theory that bands release their best albums early in their careers. Bands tend to burn brightly but briefly…, and so they crank out great music early and, if they survive, begin to coast later in their careers. This isn’t a hard and fast rule…”

Maybe there is something to be said for this. I know the band Boston had at least four albums, but I must admit that I have just the first one. This doesn’t mean albums #2 and #3, both of which went to #1 on the album charts, aren’t as good…

It seemed, though, that a lot of my favorite albums of a group were their second outing. The Band’s eponymous album with the brown cover, Disraeli Gears by Cream, and Abraxas by Santana are among my favorite albums in my collection.

I have a good friend who is a big fan of Chicago Transit Authority, the band Chicago’s first album before they became very popular. Likewise, he only likes the first Blood, Sweat, and Tears album, Child Is Father to the Man, with Al Kooper, and hates the ones with David Clayton-Thomas on vocals. But I got the eponymous second albums – what is it with these self-titled sophomore albums? – first, and so favor them.

Motown

Conversely, there isn’t a major Motown artist whose first few albums I would peg as their best, except one.

Supremes: Beyond their hits, they were also putting out albums to show how diversified they were; A Bit of Liverpool; Sing Country, Western, and Pop; Sing Rodgers and Hart. My favorite is either The Supremes Sing Holland-Dozier-Holland. (about #11 of 24 with Diana Ross as lead vocalist), or maybe Love Child (#17).

Temptations: With A Lot O’ Soul #6 of 40-some, is a transitional one from being produced by Smokey Robinson to Norman Whitfield. Puzzle People (#14) is their second produced entirely by Whitfield after David Ruffin left the group and Dennis Edwards joined. (These numbers are approximate, counting the crossovers with the Supremes and a live album, but not a greatest hits collection.)

Stevie Wonder: He didn’t come into his own until the 1970s. Songs in the Key Of Life (#15 of 27) is considered the masterpiece, but the three albums before that, Talking Book, Innervisions, and Fulfillingness’ First Finale are all excellent.

Marvin Gaye: As great as his singles were, he never had a great album before What’s Going On, #13 of 20-something. (Marvin was repackaged posthumously a lot.)

Jackson Five. Those first two albums, Diana Ross Presents and ABC, are arguably their best.

Other stars

Aretha Franklin: Well, not her early Columbia work, but I’d pick any of her early Atlantic albums. I’m partial to Lady Soul (#7 of about 40), but Amazing Grace (#16) is, well, amazing.

Simon and Garfunkel: I’m partial to their last album, Bridge Over Troubled Water, which is their 5th, or 6th, if you count the soundtrack to The Graduate, which I don’t.

The Beatles: somewhere between Rubber Soul (#6) and the white album (#10), unless you’re counting the American albums

I could do others but won’t, for a few reasons. Some albums are universally acclaimed that they’re on EVERYBODY’S list. or should be, e.g., Peter Gabriel’s third album (Melt). Other artists, I just can’t really pick their best; Neil Young is a real peaks and valleys guy. Still, other artists, I didn’t come to chronologically, but rather scattershot: Weird Al Yankovic is a prime example.

A year in the life of Joe Biden

overturning Trump policies

joebiden A year in the life of Joe Biden. Well, he did ask for the job. I’m just going to touch on the points that most resonated with me. So it won’t cover EVERY SINGLE THING he did in the past 365 days. First, the good.

He named “literally thousands of talented and diverse appointees… the ambassadorial corps, and the leadership of numerous regulatory agencies – most of whom have already effected huge and positive federal policy shifts in everything from student loans to toxic chemicals to human rights.”

Specifically, he’s gotten 40 federal judges approved. “80 percent are women and 53 percent are people of color.” His predecessor got half that many approved in that first year and received huge praise.

Also, there’s the $1.9 trillion Covid relief deal, which kept many American families afloat.

Biden reinstated the pause on the federal death penalty. The previous guy ended a 17-year pause on federal executions and 13 people were put to death between July 2020 and January 2021.

Indeed, much of what he accomplished, particularly early on, involved undoing what had taken place in the previous four years.

But beyond that, I feel that he’s a fundamentally decent person, prone to gaffs as he has been for decades, but not inherently nasty.

The mixed

Sure, the trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill was passed in November, AFTER the election, when it was uncoupled from the Build Back Better bill. All old poli sci folks know that politics is the art of the possible. Personally, I would have preferred passing an infrastructure bill in August and working on the passable components of BBB in separate bills.

The US rejoined the Paris climate accord which Biden’s predecessor had left. I’m not sure what the 2021 event accomplished…

72 percent of American adults were fully vaccinated, a little later than the target. Which means a whole lot of people are not. The US rate still trails much of the world.

The unemployment rate has dropped dramatically, but so has the workforce.

The bad

I think most of his problem has been overpromising, creating extraordinarily high expectations, and underdelivering on them.

In July 2021, he said that the withdrawal from Afghanistan would in no way look like the 1975 pullout from Saigon, South Vietnam. As noted, I supported the action, but the failure to get more people out before the pullout was a blunder.

Biden declared that we would be free of the COVID by the 4th of July. Of course, he didn’t anticipate the delta and omicron variants. But one could see the sluggish growth in the number of vaccinated, despite the mandates, and the ill will they generated. The administration needed to do better making the testing kits available much sooner.

No voting-rights legislation was passed and his recent plan to end the filibuster, despite his fiery rhetoric, was never going to happen.

The ugly

A lot of the economic strains have been baked into the system. An increase in wages has been long overdue; the federal minimum wage is STILL $7.25. Now there is some leverage for higher wages.

The “just in time” supply chain, with so much manufacturing from outside the United States, has long been one pandemic, one large war away from the crisis that took place in 2021. As Reuters notes: “The economy is experiencing high inflation as the COVID-19 pandemic snarls supply chains.” Some like to call it Bidenflation, but I’m not sure what he could have done to prevent it.

He IS the oldest US President, and I believe the stiffness of his “ambulatory gait” over the past year allows some to write him off with a Let’s Go, Brandon meme.

The unfixable?

Here’s a larger question, though. Is the United States governable? The New York Times asked that very question a year ago. It quoted Julie Wronski, a political scientist at the University of Mississippi.”When two people playing a game cannot agree on the basic rules and layout of the game, they cannot play. When groups within American society believe in two different sets of rules on how to play the game of democracy, it cannot be played and we become ungovernable.”

So when Biden promised to work “across the aisle” to pass legislation, and some in the GOP deign to actually work with him, they’re dubbed RINOs (Republicans In Name Only). They are threatened with primaries, backed by 45. Nate Silver of 538 posits that Jan. 6 strengthened Trump’s hold on the Republican Party. It’s sad, but I have to agree.

I’m not sure what Biden can do about the fact that most Republicans continue to believe in the Big Lie, that the 46th President was not legally elected. Perhaps America is heading to a place where it can no longer call itself a democracy.

Buttons

Right after the 2020 election, when it was clear that Biden had WON, I ordered a half dozen buttons. Two of them are Biden/Harris. One said, “Unity over division” – not happening yet. “Hope over fear”; fear seems pretty strong. “Trust over lies”; lies are still winning. “Science over fiction”; it would be nice.

If you’re more optimistic, PLEASE let me know.