Some of those other people named Roger Green

Roger L. Green the legislator, of course, worked in Albany, which is one of the reasons I tend to use my middle name.

 

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Ken Levine, the “Emmy winning writer/director/producer/major league baseball announcer” wrote about other guys named Ken Levine. That was such a swell idea that I thought I’d follow suit. Well, not EXACTLY; I thought I’d use my OWN name instead. Let’s start with Wikipedia:

Roger Green, the Welsh professional rugby league footballer of the 1930s, was born before 1915, which makes him very old.

Roger (Gilbert) Lancelyn Green “(2 November 1918 – 8 October 1987) was a British biographer and children’s writer. He was an Oxford academic who formed part of the Inklings literary discussion group along with C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien.”

Roger Curtis Green (15 March 1932 – 4 October 2009) was an American-born, New Zealand-based archaeologist. He was very accomplished, and I was actually sad when he died.

Roger Green (born 2 June 1943) is a Canadian former sailor who competed in the 1968 Summer Olympics.

Roger L. Green (born June 23, 1949) is an American legislator who served in the New York State Assembly for 26 years, from 1981 to 2007 (with a brief interruption in 2004), parts of the New York City borough of Brooklyn. More on him later.

Additionally, there is

Roger Green‘s Feng Shui Professional Certification Program

Roger Green founded Roger Green and Associates, Inc. (RG+A) in 1991. He serves as President and Chief Executive Officer. Over the past twenty years, Roger has worked to design marketing research methods, insights, and modeling tools that promote a greater understanding of what drives value in pharmaceutical markets.

Roger Green makes custom guns, including rifles and shotguns, does metalwork, stockwork, inletting, and sells pedigree gun dogs.

Roger Green, a co-founder of one of the first alternative medicine centers in Australia, served as director of the Australian School of Healing from 1985 to 1999.

There are more, surely.

Roger L. Green the legislator, of course, worked in Albany, which is one of the reasons I tend to use my middle name, t distinguish myself from him. Moreover, he’s black, and sometimes when I’d be introduced to people, they’d ask if I were in the Assembly; heck, no, I’m MUCH taller than that guy, by three or four inches at least.

One day, I came home from work, and there was a phone message from WCBS-TV in New York City, asking me to call them. They wanted to know if I had a comment about the death of Yusuf Hawkins in Bensonhurst. I hadn’t seen the news yet, so I had no idea who Yusef Hawkins was, quite possibly until the next morning. But, naturally, they didn’t want MY comment, they wanted Roger L. Green’s, who represented that part of Brooklyn.

Too many state legislators in New York State have been involved in illegal activities, and Assemblyman Green was no exception: “Green resigned his seat in June 2004, after pleading guilty to petty larceny in connection with $3000 in false travel reimbursement claims. As part of a plea deal, he served three years’ probation, was fined $2,000, and had to pay $3,000 in restitution. Later that same year, he ran and was re-elected to the same seat.”

But he ran for Congress a couple of years later and lost, so isn’t in Albany anymore.
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Happy half birthday to me.

On raising the minimum wage

If other people are getting less screwed over than they had been, it should be a cause for celebration, not disdain.

minimum_wage_1018The junior senator from my state of New York, Kirsten Gillibrand (D) noted that she will co-sponsor a bill to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour. That’s something I support, for a lot of reasons; Robert Reich delineates some of them.

More better, as they say, is Jaquandor’s Keeping Ahead of the Smiths: Random Thoughts on the Minimum Wage from late July 2015, which he describes as a “collection of thoughts.”

It’s Labor Day weekend, so I feel no need to work too hard on this post. Yet there are a few points in Jaquandor’s piece I want to emphasize:

“Gee, I’ve never made fifteen bucks an hour.” The latter is often coupled with a description of the jobs one has done, obviously intended to make clear that my work should pay more than theirs. And these sentiments aren’t brand new, either, born of shock that burgerflippers (said with appropriate voice filled with disdain) are going to make that kind of money…

So why, then, so much resentment toward a group of workers who banded together and through various means of legal redress seem to have won a kind of victory for themselves? Why are so many people so eager to see in this another screwing of themselves by the system, instead of an example of what might be done elsewhere? If you’re so convinced that your line of work is deserving of better pay, than why not band together and do your own self-advocation?

In other words, if other people are getting less screwed over than they had been, it should be a cause for celebration, not disdain.

But THIS is the heart of the argument, for me:

After nearly forty years of unending tax-cutting and deregulating… all we have to show for it is wages that are stuck in neutral and money flowing ever, ever, ever upward in a pattern that can only be described as redistributive (albeit in the exact opposite way that that term is usually deployed by libertarian-types). The biggest problem most Americans face, economically, is not what the government is taking out of our paychecks. It is what our employers are not putting into them in the first place.

The recovery after the Great Recession has been tepid, NOT because employers are paying too much, but because they are paying too little. The minimum wage, if tied to inflation, should be over $20 an hour. Instead, US workers’ pay plummeted 4% over the past 5 years.

$15/hour is NOT too much.
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A History of Labor Day.

Music Throwback Saturday: Israelites

Israelites was among the first ska tunes to reach the US top ten.

DesmondDekkerIsraeliteListening to the now out-of-print Island Story 1962-1987, I was reminded of the song Israelites by Desmond Dekker and the Aces, written by Dekker and music producer Leslie Kong.

The lyrics were often misheard. Because of Dekker’s thick Jamaican accent, I didn’t really know what the song was about either.

Fortunately, he explained in 2005:

“I heard a couple arguing about money. She was saying she needed money and he was saying the work he was doing was not giving him enough. I relate to those things and began to sing a little song – ‘You get up in the morning and you slaving for bread.’ By the time I got home, it was complete.”

I assume the song is tied to the Rastafarians and is related to their claim to be a lost tribe of Israel, thus the title.

The single was among the first ska tunes to reach the US top ten. “In June 1969 it peaked at #9 on the [US] Billboard Hot 100 singles chart. It hit number one in the United Kingdom [the first ska number to do so], Netherlands, Jamaica, South Africa, Canada, Sweden and West Germany.”

Listen to Israelites HERE or HERE or HERE

V-A-C-A-TION

Next year we’ll be away at least 11 days, and I’m actually looking forward to it. And dreading the return.

in the golden siummertime.vacation_season_1_eJaquandor asked his readers: “How do you allocate your vacation time?

“What I mean is this: suppose you get, say, three weeks of vacation time a year. Do you take three entire weeks off? Or do you scatter the days off throughout the year by taking a three-day weekend here, a four-day weekend there, and so on?”

Here’s the truth: vacation is difficult for me.

When I worked at FantaCo (1980-1988), I always felt that if I left for too long, I’d come back to chaos. So when my boss insisted I use some of my time, I took off eight consecutive Wednesdays.

Taking off a day in the middle of the week actually had real advantages. I took care of banking, going to the post office, and other weekday stuff difficult to do on the weekdays. I saw a lot of movies. And the weekends were my own.

I have taken some vacations of a week or more in my current librarian job. But the last time I took off two full weeks was in 1998. The first week I visited my friend Sarah in Detroit, saw the Henry Ford and Motown museums, and saw the Tigers in their now razed stadium. I also went to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland.

Week two, I was GOING to stay home, do a major cleaning and paper purging. But I ended up going to Washington, DC, trying out for the game show JEOPARDY! and ended up seeing a lot of the sights there.

I had a four-day weekend recently, and it was fine, but returning to work on Tuesday was DIFFICULT.

This past week, I was away with my family from Saturday-Thursday in Vermont. Yet I went to work on Friday (today), instead of attaching it to the following three-day Labor Day weekend, because coming back to the potential of 1,000 work emails was too daunting.

But next year, we’re trekking to northern Ohio, to go to a family reunion. The Daughter wants to go to the Rock Hall, which I wouldn’t mind visiting again. I want to go to see the Football Hall of Fame in Canton. It’ll be at least 11 days away, and I’m actually looking forward to it. And dreading the return.

BTW, per The Wife’s wishes, which make sense to me, I don’t mention when we’re going away on social media, only when we’ve returned.

Vacation – GoGo’s
Vacation-Connie Francis

Craven, Dyer, Sacks

I lived in four different cities, in two states, in 1977 alone.

musicophilia-1-194x300If there is a more descriptive title than The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, by Oliver Sacks, M.D., it’s not coming to mind. I know both The Daughter and I, on separate occasions, have mistaken a coat rack that was placed in a different part of the hallway, for The Wife.

I never read any of Oliver Sacks’ books, but I did peruse some of his articles in the New Yorker magazine, where he wrote about people “coping with and adapting to neurological conditions or injuries” this illuminating “the ways in which the normal brain deals with perception, memory and individuality.”

My distant recollection of the 1990 movie Awakenings, based on Sacks’ book, is quite positive, especially the performance of the late Robin Williams, who played a character drawn from Sacks’ life.

Oliver Sacks died on August 30 at the age of 82.
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wes cravenI’ve never seen a Wes Craven film, none of the Scream films or Nightmare on Elm Street. Wait a minute- he directed Music of the Heart with Meryl Streep? I DID see that.

Back in my FantaCo days, I became aware of his popularity through all the books and magazines we sold. Moreover, there were those annoying popular Freddy Krueger masks and gloves, the latter complete with plastic “blades”, that were primarily purchased by our mail order customers in disturbingly large quantities. It was one of the reasons I eventually quit the job.

Wes Craven died on August 30 at the age of 76.
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Wayne-DyerAfter I finished college in 1976, I bounced around a lot, without any focus, or particular goals. I lived in four different cities, in two states, in 1977 alone. While I was crashing with Uthaclena and his then-wife in early 1978, I read the best-selling book Your Erroneous Zones by Dr. Wayne Dyer.

If you’re plagued by guilt or worry and find yourself falling unwittingly into the same old self-destructive patterns, then you have ‘erroneous zones’ — whole facets of your approach to life that act as barriers to your success and happiness. Dr. Wayne W. Dyer can now help you break free!

If you believe that you have no control over your feeling and reactions, Dyer reveals how much you can take charge of yourself and manage how much you let difficult situations affect you. If you spend more time worrying what others think than working on what you want and need, Dyer points the way to true self-reliance. From self-image problems to over-dependence upon others, Dyer gives you the tools you need to enjoy life to the fullest

Yeah, that sounded like me, a lot. But you know how newly born-again Christians, or alcoholics who are now sober, get a tad carried away with the message? That was also me after reading the book, where I went from directionless and dysfunctional to a bit too cocky and perhaps arrogant, before I was able to regulate the emotional thermostat.

Still, reading Dyer, at that critical moment, at least turned the thermostat ON, and that was a very good thing.

Dr. Wayne Dyer died on August 29 at the age of 75.
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Dean Jones died at the age of 84 on September 1. Saw him in lots of Disney fare, such as That Darn Cat! and The Love Bug, as well as a slew of TV appearances.

Ramblin' with Roger
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