Ramblin' with Roger

N is for watching American network news

If I wanted to know what was trending on Twitter, I’d have gone to that platform.

I have been watching the network news for a long time, going back to the 1960s, with Chet Huntley and David Brinkley on NBC and Walter Cronkite on CBS. For you not from the US, these were legendary journalists.

Currently, I watch two network news programs. And by “watch”, I mean, record to view afterward. The reason? Commercials, the majority of which are for medicines that must be prescribed by a physician. They’re for all sorts of ailments that I didn’t know I had or that even existed until I saw the ads, diseases generally designated by initials.

First I watch CBS News. They used to have a solid anchor, Scott Pelley, now 61, but he was pushed out after six years for low ratings.

After an interim period, he was replaced by Jeff Glor, a forty-something guy with a boyish face from upstate New York. But the real change is now, at the top of the broadcast, they summarize the news in 60 seconds so you don’t actually have to watch it. And the network is still in third place.

Then I watch the NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt. He was the weekend guy who replaced Brian Williams when Williams was suspended for six months for “misrepresented events which occurred while he was covering the Iraq War in 2003.” I usually zap through the first half of the NBC news unless they’re covering a different story. They tend to differentiate more after the first commercial.

I gave up on ABC News years ago. It was my go-to network when Peter Jennings anchored before he died in 2005. But by the time Diane Sawyer was in the chair, the network was telling me what was trending on Twitter. If I wanted to know what was trending on Twitter, I’d have gone to that platform. I’ve not seen the broadcast since David Muir took over.

I watch other news and read other sources, and here’s why. Some people don’t believe the news at all and don’t watch. I have a healthy suspicion, so I watch/read a LOT of it, including a variety of online versions of the print news. I feel that, as a librarian, I cannot NOT be informed.

Arthur wrote a post which linked to a video, Why obvious lies make great propaganda. Hint: it wasn’t, initially, about DJT. He also cites an article, How Your Brain Tricks You Into Believing Fake News, and it’s totally credible. I’ve recently spent a good amount of time with such people; intelligent, basically kind, and believing things that were demonstratively untrue.

For ABC Wednesday

Community benefit dinner: September 30 fires

Benefit dinner: Thursday, October 11, 2018 at 5:30-8:30pm
First Lutheran Church of Albany, 646 State St, Albany, NY 12203

house fire On my way to church Sunday, September 30, I noted that Quail Street was blocked between Western and Washington Avenue. I could see buildings in the middle of the range still smoldering.

On my return trip, I saw a guy from the Capital District Transportation Authority and I asked why there was a bus parked at the corner of western and Quail. He said that CDTA often dispatches a vehicle to this type of disaster so that people displaced in the middle of the night have a place to stay warm.

It wasn’t until I got home that I heard there was ANOTHER multi-building fire, this one on Sheridan Avenue, about ten blocks away, but apparently unrelated. A total of a dozen buildings were heavily damaged or destroyed.

When I was a kid, there was a multiple-structure fire on Grandma Williams’ one-block street, Maple Street in Binghamton, NY. The four or five wooden structures were utterly destroyed. I don’t believe anyone was hurt, but naturally, many lives were disrupted. So that type of fire always makes me especially sad.

Among the actions being taken to help the September 30 fire survivors is a Community Benefit Dinner.

Thursday, October 11, 2018 at 5:30-8:30pm
First Lutheran Church of Albany
646 State St, Albany, NY 12203

Pay What You Can – Suggested Donation for Entry:
$5 for Students & Seniors
$10 for Adults
$15 for Families
There will be raffles and a silent auction and the opportunity to create cards for survivors.

Dinner will be an Italian Feast of Chicken Parm, Baked Ziti, Carmelized Green Beans, Tossed Salad, Desserts, Assorted Beverages

This dinner is sponsored by UAlbany Student Affairs, Pine Hills Neighborhood Association, and First Lutheran Church with support from Hon. Alfredo Balarin, Hon. Doug Bullock

If you can’t make it and want to donate:

* The United Way of the Greater Capital Region, Albany City Fires Fund. The mailing address is Albany City Fires Fund, PO Box 13865, Albany, NY 12212. All funds will go directly to the fire survivors.

* Any of CAP COM Federal Credit Union’s 11 branches in the Capital Region.

* The Catholic Charities Disaster Recovery – indicate Fire Survivors in the Comments Section. The mailing address is Catholic Charities of the Diocese of Albany, 40 North Main Avenue, Albany, New York 12203. Use the Donate Form to direct funds to fire survivors.

Contact Pine Hills Improvement Group at PHIGPineHills@gmail.com or 518-852-7878 with any questions.

More details are available on the Community Benefit Dinner event page on the Pine Hills Neighborhood Association Facebook Page.

Jackson Browne turns 70 (October 9)

“In a way, I don’t choose what I write about—my subjects kind of choose me,” Jackson Browne explained in 1993.

I’ve been following the career of Clyde Jackson Browne – Clyde? – for so long that it seems he’s always been around. Yet I’ve written about him relatively infrequently. And usually in relation to others, though I did a meme about him way back on 10 October 2005.

10/10? That’s one of the problems for me, that he has the same birthday, eight years later, as John Lennon, about whom I’ve written a LOT. His first claim to fame was that he wrote the bulk of Take It Easy, along with Glenn Frey, which became the Eagles’ first big hit.

The page noting his 2004 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: “He emerged in the early Seventies as a soul-baring young folksinger whose songs dealt with riddles of romance and existence. In his middle period, he became a more extroverted rock and roller.

“Later work grew more topical in nature as Browne sang of political and social realities within and beyond our borders. ‘In a way, I don’t choose what I write about—my subjects kind of choose me,’ this vanguard singer/songwriter explained in 1993. “It’s a healing thing, a way of confronting what’s important in my life at the time.'”

Here are interviews: The Nation (2014) and Forbes (2017).

In 2015, Rolling Stone listed him as the 37th greatest songwriter of all time in its list of “100 Greatest Songwriters of All Time”. I’ve never seen him live, save for a massive concert in June 1982. I do have a half dozen of his albums on vinyl, including the first one, whatever it’s called, and four on CD.

Listen to:

Very Best of Jackson Browne

Opening Farewell – Bonnie Raitt & Jackson Browne live

Kisses Sweeter Than Wine – Bonnie Raitt & Jackson Browne, from a Pete Seeger tribute album

Take It Easy – live with James Taylor

First Girl I Loved, from an Elektra Records tribute album, this track covering Judy Collins

I Love L.A. – Randy Newman’s 2013 induction into the Rock Hall, with Newman, Jackson Browne, Tom Petty, John Fogerty

Coverville 1236: Cover Stories for Steve Miller, Randy Bachman and Jackson Browne

NSFW section

A Piece of the Pie -JB’s live attempt of a Randy Newman song that namechecks him, which Newman explains here

You @$$#013 You

Talking about politics sucks: voter suppression edition

Talking about them exhausts me because nuance often gets lost.

There was this story a couple months ago about voter suppression in Tennessee being overturned. I was speaking about it to someone about how small court fines could disenfranchise a voter.

A party listening in, not part of the conversation, chimed in, “Well, then that’ll get them to pay their fines.” I realized, of course, that they hadn’t read the story.

“The case was about the state confiscating driver’s licenses of people who had been unable to pay court costs when appearing for various misdemeanors. Losing their licenses severely impacted their ability to find or keep employment which would have enabled them to pay later.

“In some cases, desperate people would drive even without a license in order to work, and when caught driving without a license would then face further court costs in a terrible cycle which seemed almost designed to keep people indigent (and also disenfranchised)… Taking away driver’s licenses from people who are too poor to pay court costs is, in a very real way, a tool of institutional voter suppression.”

I realized that some people actually believe that allowing a citizen to be disenfranchised essentially for being poor. Damn, that’s why the US got rid of the poll tax via the 24th Amendment. See Carol Anderson – “ONE PERSON, NO VOTE” & THE IMPACT OF VOTER SUPPRESSION – interview on The Daily Show.

Moreover, this idea IRRITATED me greatly, and I suspect that the interloper could hear the disdain in my voice. I have the same contempt for a Supreme Court that sided with vote suppressors in Ohio to remove more than two million voters from the rolls simply because they hadn’t voted recently. Check out this story from Virginia.

This is why I tend to WRITE these things. Talking about them exhausts me because nuance often gets lost. “They did something, so they should be punished” often runs smack dab into constitutional rights and the ability of life, liberty and that pursuit of happiness thing suggested by the Declaration of Independence.

It’s not that I CAN’T talk about these issues, but rather I believe I’m less EFFECTIVE at it than writing about it. I can rethink and edit without too much emotional involvement.

If I DON’T talk about it, and I have an opinion – occasionally I don’t – wait a few days, or maybe a few weeks – and I’ll send you my thoughts in a blog post.

Seven comic book covers I’m supposed to tout

The commercial and artistic success of the X-Men, specifically the issues done by Chris Claremont, John Byrne and Terry Austin, sucked me further into the Marvel Universe

fantasy_quarterly I’ve been nominated by Eddie Mitchell, the Renaissance Geek, to post seven individual comic book covers that are significant to me to promote reading.

The rules say, “They are offered without comment in no particular order,” but I’m not particularly compliant. I’m also supposed to nominate someone else to take up the challenge if they’re a-mind to. So I nominate YOU because you KNOW you want to.

Fantasy Quarterly #1 – this is the first appearance of Elfquest. It was on crappy newsprint. Wendy and Richard Pini were VERY disappointed in it and decided they could do better themselves. They started WaRP Graphics which began a successful run of DIY.

The Pinis came up from the Mid-Hudson to FantaCo, the comic book store where I worked in Albany, and did regular store signings, quite possibly every one of the original 20 issues. I have to think that the Pinis’ success in part motivated Tom Skulan in FantaCo’s publishing adventures.

X-Men 137 – the commercial and artistic success of the X-Men, specifically the issues done by Chris Claremont, John Byrne and Terry Austin, sucked me further into the Marvel Universe. So much so that when FantaCo decided to publish a magazine about comic books, the X-Men were the obvious premiere topic.

Moreover, I was the editor of the X-Men Chronicles, soliciting the articles and the artwork. That included carrying a still wet cover by the late Dave Cockrum home on a train.

I compiled an index of X-Men appearances under the pseudonym Arro Verti, difficult in 1981 and it’d be overwhelming now. And I had to get the late Raoul Vezina to help create a Smilin’ Ed story related to the X-Men at the 11rh hour.

Amazing Spider-Man #121 – my first Spider-Man comic book. I didn’t know that civilians died in these things. Reading back issues in Marvel Tales, plus the then-current issues. Spidey became my favorite Marvel character.

I bought every appearance he was in until in early 1990s, when Todd McFarlane was writing the title; mon Dieu, I HATED those stories and gave up after three or four issues.

Moreover, I edited the FantaCo Chronicles highlighting the webslinger, and I still believe it was the best issue I ever put together.

Luke Cage, Hero for Fire #1 – it was the first comic book I ever bought since I was a kid. Dragged to the local convenience store by some Piscean I still know, I was surprised to discover a black superhero. And since it was a #1, I didn’t need to learn the backstory.

Oh, I’m supposed to do seven of these? Maybe some other time. (I told you I wasn’t very good at following rules.)