It’s 2016’s first Ask Roger Anything

you may ask me ANYTHING, or ask for advice, or whatever you’d like

It probably because I’ve gone to the well too often with this, but the last time I did ask Roger Anything, I got a lackluster response. Which is to say, none whatsoever.

The drag of that was a struggle to keep generating content. I’d become increasingly dependent on your collective curiosity to engage in answering questions that I would otherwise not have considered. Or maybe I’m just a lazy blogger who thinks he can continue to blog 365 days a year (except 2008 and 2012, when it was 366).

Perhaps I should look more to reposting from previous years; Ken Levine and Mark Evanier have done so from time to time.

To remind the masses: you may ask me ANYTHING, or ask for advice, or whatever you’d like, and I will answer, reasonably soon, generally within thirty days. I will answer, to the best of my ability/memory/flashback honestly, though if I didn’t do a little obfuscation, what fun would that be?

You can leave your comments below. If you prefer to remain anonymous, that’s OK; you should e-mail me at rogerogreen (AT) gmail (DOT) com, or end me an IM on Facebook (make sure it’s THIS Roger Green, the one with the duck) and note that you want to remain unmentioned; otherwise, I’ll assume you want to be cited.

Music Throwback Saturday: On Broadway

A young Phil Spector played the distinctive lead guitar solo on The Drifters’ recording.

ClaudeMckayI’ve been involved with an office JEOPARDY! game. A recent clue: “A hundred shouting signs shed down their bright fantastic glow” in Claude McKay’s “On” this NYC street. No idea, but because of a question I’d missed earlier, I take a guess, and it’s correct.

Here’s On Broadway by Claude McKay, a rather melancholy piece:
Upon the merry crowd and lines
Of moving carriages below.
Oh wonderful is Broadway — only
My heart, my heart is lonely.

Claude McKay was born in Jamaica on September 15, 1889, and became an early key figure in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s.

I wonder if the poem inspired a song a few decades later:

New York City-based composers Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil wrote On Broadway “originally recorded by the Cookies (although the Crystals’ version beat them to release)”…

“Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller liked the song but felt that it was not quite right [for the Drifters] and the four held an overnight brainstorming session which culminated in the better-known version of the song, now with a rock-oriented groove and with a more bluesy feel… A young Phil Spector played the distinctive lead guitar solo on The Drifters’ recording.”

LISTEN to On Broadway

The Cookies

The Crystals

The Drifters, #9 pop, #7 soul in 1963

Dave Clark Five

The Chipettes

Bobby Darin

Percy Faith Orchestra

Neil Young

George Benson, #7 pop, #2 soul

“George Benson’s version… from his 1978 album Weekend in L.A…. won a Grammy Award for Best R&B Vocal Performance. The song appeared in the films Big Business and American Beauty, and… was used in the 1979 film All That Jazz in a sequence that featured dancers on stage auditioning for a musical similar to Chicago. George Benson also performed “On Broadway” with Clifford and the Rhythm Rats for the 1994 Muppet album Kermit Unpigged.”

Disconnected

THAT’S why I didn’t read your blogs, or respond to your emails

time-warnerThat recent annoying 23-hour day, I was up early contemplating a blog post. Suddenly, around 8 a.m., the phone went out, as did the Internet. This meant I was feeling disconnected.

Oh, I have the cell phone, but it’s strange: it doesn’t work very well in this house. I can be walking down the street talking to one of my sisters on the phone, walk into my home, and the sound just drops out.

I’ve had enough experience troubleshooting the Time Warner box that I rebooted the who-zee-what’s-it. When it STILL wasn’t working, I called TWC on the aforementioned unreliable-in-my-own-house cellphone. They had no openings until the next day between 3 and 4 p.m.

I COULD have gone to the library, or the local coffeehouse to access my email, but I was tired. And I wanted the opportunity to see how well (or badly) we could operate sans connectivity. We did OK, but I must admit that the youngest of us was a little grumpier than usual not being able to get online.

At the very end of that one-hour window, the TWC guy showed. He had to go out to the street a couple of times, not merely fuss with the device. Within a half-hour, service was restored. My spouse asked, at my urging – I was still at work – whether the outage had anything to do with the TWC truck that was in front of our house just before the service went down. He was unwilling to say, of course, but when the inevitable customer service follow-up robocall came, I was happy to share my theory of the outage.

Anyway, THAT’S why I didn’t read your blogs, or respond to your emails or Facebook comments that day. If you called my landline, it didn’t work. And the world did not end. Still, as soon as I got to work, I quickly perused my 188 emails, all except about a dozen which I quickly deleted.

Lillian Yates Holland

The problem is time. It’s always time.

hollandRight after my mother’s death half a decade ago, I had this renewed interest in my family genealogy. For one thing, the family Bible had lots of information, some going back a century and a half. The matriarch of the clan was my maternal grandmother’s mother, Lillian Yates Holland.

This picture was reportedly taken when she was still Lillian Archer, and was sixteen, though she looks older to me.

She had five children, four of whom survived childhood: Gertrude, Edward, Ernest, and Adenia Yates. Gert, who married Clarence Williams, was my grandma and lived with Deana in the house I went to every day for lunch growing up. Ed lived up the hill from Gert and Deana. Ernie, the father of my mom’s four first cousins, died when I was an infant; apparently, I was afraid of him, because he reminded me of my pediatrician, Dr. Israel Rosefsky.

Lillian was married to Edward Yates, Sr., before he passed away circa 1910. She married again, to a man named Holland, who, according to various Census records, was from Texas. Or Mexico. There’s a lot of that contrary information in the minimal digging my sisters and I have done.

It’s clear that Lillian had a not-distant ancestor who was part Irish. Or English. I’ve not dug far enough back to ascertain this. I suppose I assume it was Irish because of the real-life story of a black man and Irish woman in the book The Sweeter The Juice.
holland.grave
Some people fret about what they would do when they retire. Surely one of my tasks would be to fill out the family tree more fully. It’s not that I don’t currently have the resources; I’ve had a membership with ancestry.com for at least a couple of years.

The problem is time. It’s always time.

The other thing my sisters and have vowed to do, sooner than later, is to get a headstone for Gert and Deana. Deana died in the mid-1960s, and Gert in 1983, but my parents, for whatever reason, never got a marker. They’re buried very near where Lillian was laid to rest, in Spring Forest Cemetery in Binghamton, NY, not two blocks from where Lillian, and Gert and her sibs, and my mother all grew up.

March rambling #1: wipe out cancer in a decade

Screen Shot 2016-02-14 at 10.52.08 PM

Louisville doctor says the breakthrough treatment could wipe out cancer in a decade. Even better, one of the subjects in the story is my friend Eddie, the Renaissance Geek!

Keefknight Cartoon: Colon. One of my brothers-in-law died from colorectal cancer in 2002, at the age of 41.

Why I Left the Right: How Studying Religion Made Me a Liberal.

The White House Welcomes Holler If You Hear Me: Black and Gay in the Church. See this powerful documentary in full (60 minutes).

The Disappearing Soldier.

Kintsugi: The Art of Embracing Damage.

K Troop: The story of the eradication of the original Ku Klux Klan.

Agrippa Hull, Thaddeus Kosciusko, and how Thomas Jefferson didn’t hold up his end of the agreement.

Nancy Reagan rejected Rock Hudson’s plea for help with AIDS treatment sent just months before his death.

Seattle Seahawks Kam Chancellor Wanted to Buy a Gym and Gym Employees Called the Cops on Him.

Formerly freewheeling Aubrey McClendon, now deceased.

Disney is screwing American families.

I was a telemarketer for four months back in 1977. If you hate telemarketers, you’ll love this robot designed to waste their time.

Dan Van Riper: Some crappy-looking old junk from my buildings.

Actor George Kennedy, RIP, who I remember from Cool Hand Luke, Earthquake, the Naked Gun movies, and a whole lot of episodic TV.

Making rubber bands and bagels. There’s a point in the processes where the two batters looks very much the same. Seriously.

shaft
TIME Magazine names male author Evelyn Waugh on female most-read list. (HT to Shooting Parrots.)

Why It Hurts So Much to Step On a LEGO. “Resistance, shiny hardness, and mega-strength.”

Study: Chocolate Makes You Smarter. Of course.

The long and tangled history of Alfred E. Neuman, of MAD magazine.

Russ Heath’s Comic About Being Ripped Off By Roy Lichtenstein.

Music

Billboard: George Martin, and Beatles – She’s Leaving Home, Strings Only (1967) and Dustbury’s favorite George Martin production, other than Beatles material.

The five best soul albums of all-time, according to St Paul & The Broken Bones

When I was in college, I played that first Emerson, Lake and Palmer album a lot. I could do a fair representation of the Moog ending of Lucky Man, sans instrument. Also, listen to Karn Evil 9 2nd Impression. Now Keith Emerson, ELP Keyboardist, Dead at 71.

With “A Group Called Smith”, Gayle McCormick was best remembered for her release in AUGUST of 1969 of Baby It’s You. She lost her battle with cancer and passed away in ST. LOUIS, on MARCH 1st, 2016 at age 67.

Joe Cuba – Bang Bang. #63 in 1966.

I think Rossini’s overture to William Tell is underrated because it’s so familiar.

Ramblin' with Roger
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