Ramblin' with Roger

PostSecret: teach something

Ask Here are some more of those PostSecret questions I stole.

If there was a biography of you, how would you want to be described?

As improbable and episodic.

What choice are you thankful that you did not make?

This is difficult, actually, because what usually comes to mind I are decisions I made that I’ve regretted. I suppose not saying something hurtful to people when they had hurt me first.

What is the best advice you remember from your father?

He bought me a wallet in Savannah, which was way better than having loose bills in my pocket.

Is there anything you wish you had said to someone but didn’t have the chance?

My sisters and I have talked about this at length. We wished, at some level, that we had asked our father about his growing up. But we didn’t want to embarrass him or cause him pain, so we never did. The weird thing is that we knew some details indirectly, from his wife and even his mother-in-law.

Can you teach me something?

Probably. At some level, the intention of this blog is to teach something. There are only 14 ways a calendar is presently devised. Estelle Axton belongs in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Here’s one thing at least three of my interns did not know. Use Ctrl-F to Find specific text in a document. I was shocked that they were not aware of that.

What is something you would like me to ask you?

Almost anything. I’ll let you know when you’ve overstepped.

What do you wish you would have spent less time worrying about?

Money, and the lack thereof.

What is something you deliberately did not tell me as a child and why?

Maybe I still haven’t…

What is the best part of your day? What makes you feel most alive?

Sometimes it’s when I wake up in the middle of the night, and the house is asleep except for the male cat. I check my email, and he puts his front paws on my left leg. He wants me to scratch him under his chin. Then he goes away, usually.

Who is Robert Redford? and other gaps

Pele

orson bean Writer Ken Levine recently complained on his blog in a post, Who is Robert Redford?

As you know I’m a devotee of JEOPARDY. But what amazes me more is not what these contestants know but what they don’t know. They can rattle off Egyptian mythological figures or obscure rivers in Tunisia or fourteen-letter words, but there are interesting black holes.

I base this not on wrong answers. I base this on no one ringing in. So clearly none of the three contestants were even willing to take a guess.

Now bear in mind these contestants tend to be from their mid-20’s to 40’s (although there are some exceptions). And they’re all remarkably bright. They’re not kids. They’ve seemingly been around.

But…

Then he rattled off questions people missed in the past several months. All of them I got right when I was watching. BUT I’m in my sixties. Levine’s in his sixties. And what fame is, and who is famous, changes over time.

The other factor here involves photos. They look big on your television screen. But when I was a one-day champ in 1998, I got a visual clue. Yet the monitor seemed damn small and far away.

“Born Dallas Burroughs in 1928, he’s the actor seen here.” The category was Beans, so I took an educated guess: “Who is Orson Bean?” That was correct. If he had had darker hair, as he did in his game show days, I suspect it might have been easier for me. (He’s the guy pictured, BTW.)

Where ARE the Black Hills?

Some local folks who were on JEOPARDY! were complaining about the game broadcast on March 13. I hadn’t watched it at the time. When I did, I noted, especially in the first round, questions that were Triple Stumpers, questions that no one got correctly, that I got right away.

ATHLETIC ACHIEVEMENTS

$200 From 1978 to 1990 this woman won 9 Wimbledon singles titles, giving her the most ever among both men & women
$400 Known as O Rei, Portuguese for “the king”, this man born in 1940 has the most men’s World Cup championships, with 3
$800 In 1939 this Yankee’s No. 4 was retired, the first number ever retired in major league baseball.

STATE THE PROBLEM

$200 The 1972 Black Hills flood claims more than 200 lives
$400 An 1893 hurricane devastates the island of Cheniere Caminada

FIRST NAMES OF FAMOUS PAIRS

$800 Burns & Allen

SMITHSONIAN AIR & SPACE MUSEUM
(Sarah presents from the Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum, Steve F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia.) There was room for two men–Frank Borman and James Lovell in the capsule used for their 2-week-long 1965 orbital mission in this program

Answers, please

The first was Martina Navratilova. They did make guesses: Billie Jean King, Steffi Graf, and Chris Evert.
No one guessed the Brazilian Pele.
The Pride of the Yankees, Lou Gehrig was unknown to them.

Nobody them knew the Black Hills were in South Dakota, although there were guesses of Montana and North Dakota.
The island I actually didn’t know, but the French name would have let me guess Louisiana.

Now, this WAS a generational question: they didn’t know George and Gracie.

And I reckon to guess Apollo, as opposed to the correct answer, Gemini, was a generational question too, although I thought the TWO-man crew was a giveaway.

On the other hand, I fail at most 21st-century pop culture references unless it’s so ubiquitous – The Sopranos, Orange Is the New Black, Game of Thrones, Mad Men – that I do fairly well with these. That despite the fact that I’ve never seen a single episode of any of those programs. If you watch the program enough, certain clues tend to show up regularly, such as the painting Blue Boy by Gainsborough.

“What do you do all day?” you ask

a week’s worth of newspapers

what do i do all day Since I retired at the end of June 2019, people come up me and ask, “What do you do all day?” It varies quite a bit. I decided to take a day when someone asked me that question – Thursday, December 12 – and answer it.

At 6:30 a.m., I’m waiting for a bus, watching a woman parked at the bus stop waiting for another woman and a child. They’re all standing at the corner – making it difficult to see if the bus coming. Then they all go out in front of the car. A guy is walking his whippet (dog). One of the women engages him in conversation. The guy had three whippets, but one died and the other didn’t want to go out.

Another guy with a small dog walks by. He jokes(?) that he ought to whip the two women because they had the child in the street. They were protecting the child from the whippet, they claim.

I take two buses to the Gateway Diner. It only took 11 minutes and I was early, so I circumnavigated the nearby CVS. It was too cold to stand around.

There were 19 of us at the Bible Guys’ breakfast. I talk to one guy, Bob, at length about genealogy. Someone noted that it was a year ago that Charlie Kite announced to the group that he was dying from cancer and that he would not see February; he was correct.

After Philip took me home, I deleted a bunch of emails while listening to the previous day’s news. Then I got all distracted on a genealogical search for my biological paternal grandfather. I’m about 80% sure that I know who it is, based on DNA matches I have on Ancestry.com that I can’t otherwise explain.

I called the Omaha Steaks people about problems with an order, a gift from my BIL. If their automated system offers to call you back, take it. One box was opened within the shrink-wrapped styrofoam. The human being who returned the call emailed me.

I took two buses to Delmar, I assumed to see my podiatrist, Dr. Manzi. But he has sold the business to a married couple. The male doctor treated me. I stopped at Dunkin’ and had one of those Bynd “sausage sandwiches. It’s not exactly the original, but it’s not bad. I take two buses home. En route, I got through a week’s worth of newspapers.

Ah, the kitchen counter needs cleaning. My daughter and my wife get home at roughly the same time, but my wife has a church meeting. We eat some leftovers before she goes. I gather the garbage to go out, and take a bus to choir rehearsal. BTW, I took seven buses today, but because of CDTA’s Navigator card, I only paid for the first three. (An unpaid, unsolicited plug.)

An hour and a half later, I get a ride home from Christy. I check my email and listen to that night’s news. In bed by 10 p.m. You’ll note that I didn’t work on the blog or do insurance stuff or see a movie or actually watch TV. Almost every day is different.

MLK’s “Drum Major Instinct” Sermon

converting people when he’s in jail

Martin Luther King Jr I’ve been looking at some documents from The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University. There are many pieces, some handwritten notes, telegrams, as well as some audio clips, and the like.

I glommed onto “The Drum Major Instinct.” It is his sermon delivered at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, GA on February 4, 1968. That was exactly two months before his death in Memphis, TN.

I won’t get into what he meant by the title. You can read that for yourself. But I found this section interesting:

“The other day I was saying, I always try to do a little converting when I’m in jail. And when we were in jail in Birmingham the other day, the white wardens and all enjoyed coming around the cell to talk about the race problem.

“And they were showing us where we were so wrong demonstrating. And they were showing us where segregation was so right. And they were showing us where intermarriage was so wrong. So I would get to preaching, and we would get to talking—calmly, because they wanted to talk about it.

“And then we got down one day to the point—that was the second or third day—to talk about where they lived, and how much they were earning. And when those brothers told me what they were earning, I said, ‘Now, you know what? You ought to be marching with us. [laughter] You’re just as poor as Negroes.’

“And I said, ‘You are put in the position of supporting your oppressor, because through prejudice and blindness, you fail to see that the same forces that oppress Negroes in American society oppress poor white people. (Yes)

Privilege

“‘And all you are living on is the satisfaction of your skin being white, and the drum major instinct of thinking that you are somebody big because you are white. And you’re so poor you can’t send your children to school. You ought to be out here marching with every one of us every time we have a march…'”

“And not only does this thing go into the racial struggle, it goes into the struggle between nations. And I would submit to you this morning that what is wrong in the world today is that the nations of the world are engaged in a bitter, colossal contest for supremacy.

“And if something doesn’t happen to stop this trend, I’m sorely afraid that we won’t be here to talk about Jesus Christ and about God and about brotherhood too many more years. (Yeah) If somebody doesn’t bring an end to this suicidal thrust that we see in the world today, none of us are going to be around…”

Anyway, you should read the whole thing. Let’s end with this idea from five years earlier in Transformed Nonconformist: “The hope of a secure and livable world lies with disciplined nonconformists who are dedicated to justice peace and brotherhood.”

Adagio for Strings – Samuel Barber

a movement of the String Quartet No. 1, Opus 11 (1936)

samuel barber It’s Lent. I’m not singing in church because COVID. And it makes me quite sad.

Now Lenten music tends to be melancholy, but it’s a good kind of sad, a reflective type of sad. For instance, give me a good requiem any time, but especially between Ash Wednesday and Good Friday.

The Adagio for Strings began as a movement of the String Quartet No. 1, Opus 11 (1936) by Samuel Barber (1910-1981). It was so effective that it was spun off on its own. Is there anything sadder than Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings? I don’t think so, But, with some reimagining, I could be wrong.

It was broadcast over the radio at the announcement of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death, and on television at the announcement of John F. Kennedy’s. Albert Einstein and Princess Grace of Monaco’s funerals featured the theme. It was performed at Last Night of the Proms in 2001 at the Royal Albert Hall to commemorate the victims of the September 11 attacks, and in Trafalgar Square following the terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo.

Listen

And it is such an adaptable piece, which has been arranged for solo organ, clarinet choir, woodwind band, and, as Agnus Dei, for chorus with optional organ or piano accompaniment, among others. It’s been used in everything from the movie Platoon to The Simpsons television show.

So, if it can also be modified to be dance music, I reckon that’s the strength of the composition. In most any iteration, as someone wrote, “There is a depth in such music that reaches deep down in human soul.”

Detroit Symphony Orchestra.

Eos Sextet – Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ. Not a string to be found.

Choral version of Agnus Dei sung to the theme. Performed by The Choir of Trinity College, Cambridge, UK.

Dover Quartet. Usually, it’s the final cadence of a piece that gets to me. But for the Adagio, it’s about 3/4 of the way through. In this iteration, between 5:30 and 6:00.