Ramblin' with Roger

Blogging is not dead, cousin Lisa

THE MOST EGREGIOUS ERROR I believe I have EVER made in this blog is in a post three months ago.

My cousin Lisa was one of the grandkids of my late great-aunt Charlotte and great-uncle Ernie Yates. Since I had no aunts, uncles, or first cousins, my closest relatives were the children of my mother’s first cousins, the eldest of whom are Anne and Lisa, Frances’s kids.

(BTW, Fran recently had her 75th birthday; belated happy birthday to her!) Anne and Lisa are about a decade younger than my sister Leslie and I.

Lisa had been living and working in the Washington, DC area for a number of years. She came to my mother’s funeral in February 2011. When Anne had Thanksgiving dinner at her house just north of New York City in 2013, which my family attended, Lisa was there as well.

At the end of 2014, Lisa quit her long-term job in the DC area and bought a one-way ticket to Paris. She is blogging about her experiences. Anne’s job has taken her to France as well, so they get to see each other more often than they did in the US. Incidentally, they were both born in France.

But recently, Lisa wrote: “One of my closest and oldest friends, someone I love very much, suffered a massive stroke that has left her hospitalized and her survival, according to the Dr’s, unlikely. I’m devastated and frantic because I can’t get information as it develops. If I was home, I’d be at her side, but I’m not, because I’m here and I can’t leave.”

Wondering what I could do for Lisa an ocean away, I asked Arthur the AmeriNZ from Chicago, who has lived in New Zealand for a couple of decades, to write to her, and he did, which she found helpful. And I would not have been able to suggest that had I not been reading his blog regularly for the last seven or eight years, learning his journey, knowing that he’s thought about those issues of being far away from America, even though he’s quite content with his life in Kiwiland.

Dustbury quoted James Lileks, who noted: “Andrew Sullivan announced he was retiring from blogging today, and given his longevity, this was seen by some as one of the great tent poles of the Golden Age of Blogging toppling over.”

But Lileks continues: “The notion of individual sites with individual voices has been replaced by aggregators and listicles and Gawker subsites with their stables of edgy youth things… But there will always be a place on the internet for individual sites like this one because there is nothing from stopping all the rampant egotists from braying bytes over this matter or that. I’ve always been a diarist, and this iteration happens to be public.”

Dustbury has been blogging for about 18 years, Jacquandor started in 2002, SamuraiFrog’s hit his tenth anniversary of blogging. None of them seem to be ready to retire.

And neither am I, even when I make mistakes. And THE MOST EGREGIOUS ERROR I believe I have EVER made in this blog is in a post three months ago, when I celebrated 8.5 years of blogging; it SHOULD have been NINE AND A HALF. This means it’s now about nine and three-quarters years.

D is for Driving

The recent hybrid models had depreciated so little, there was no real advantage to buying a used vehicle.

I enjoy reading The Oatmeal Newsletter. A recent article, 6 Things I Learned from Riding in a Google Self-Driving Car, particularly tickled me.

“1. Human beings are terrible drivers.
We drink. We doze. We text. In the US, 30,000 people die from automobile accidents every year.”

As a regular pedestrian, I recognize this as irrefutably true. Even in the car, I see it. Recently, the Wife was waiting in the right lane on Holland Avenue in Albany, which was the straight lane. The driver of golden New York license FCW… was in the left turning lane. When the light changed, he blasted the horn and passed us going straight. THEN he went through TWO red lights.

“5. I want this technology to succeed, like…yesterday.”

The writer points to the need for disabled people to be able to get around.
***
Oh, and speaking of cars, I never mentioned that we got a new car last year, a 2014 1/2 Toyota Camry hybrid. The Wife was looking to get a 2011 or 2012 car to replace our 2003 Toyota Avalon, which we got in 2006. When it started stalling out regularly, and the non-regular maintenance costs started to skyrocket, a change became inevitable.

She wanted a hybrid because she drives a lot as an itinerant teacher. However, the recent hybrid models had depreciated so little, there was no real advantage to buying a used vehicle. Plus, the Wife negotiated a good price.

The first thing to get used to is how quiet it is when it starts up. It almost seems as though it’s stalling out when it stops at a traffic light. And it’s the first car we’ve had where one can see the vehicle behind when we park.

We’re getting nearly 40 miles per gallon, which is twice what we were getting from the Avalon.
***
Amy Biancolli hates cars.

ABC Wednesday – Round 16

Mom, 40 years ago: taking care from far away

This is the fourth anniversary of my mom’s death today.

After my sister Leslie and I left my grandmother in Charlotte, NC with my parents and my sister Marcia in January 1975, I went back to Binghamton, NY, and stayed in my grandmother’s house. She had a coal stove, and I had SEEN her operate for years. But seeing and doing were two different things, and soon, the fire went out, and the pipes froze.

I was pretty depressed after the breakup of my marriage to the Okie, so I mostly watched television. I mean hours at a time. My grandma’s set got only one station, WNBF-TV, the CBS affiliate. So I watched the soap operas As the World Turns, The Edge of Night, Guiding Light, and Search for Tomorrow. Don’t remember watching any game shows except Match Game. Viewed the bulk of the CBS nighttime schedule, except perhaps the movies. And, heaven help me, I watched Hee Haw, which by that point was in first-run syndication. I told you I was depressed.

Usually on Thursday evenings, and occasionally other nights, I’d visit my friend Carol (not to be confused with my wife Carol), washed up, watched TV at HER house (The Waltons). The then-current travails of her life probably kept me sane.

Occasionally, I’d walk downtown to the library, if it wasn’t too cold. Don’t remember reading books, though I did read the newspaper. I DO remember listening to the LPs on the record player. One time I was playing the first side of the Beatles’ Abbey Road, and I cranked up the volume louder and louder. The song I Want You (She’s So Heavy) ends abruptly, which I knew from plenty of previous plays; at that moment, however, I thought briefly that I had died.

The electricity at my grandma’s house was spotty. I had a space heater that I could not run with the refrigerator, lest I blow the circuit. Didn’t matter; the house was so cold, I didn’t NEED the refrigerator. I DID need the space heater, though, and the colorful quilt that kept me from freezing.

One night in February, I woke up with a start. The quilt had caught fire, having fallen on the space heater. It generated an acrid stretch, which might have killed me, if the fire, which I was somehow able to smother, hadn’t.

A day or two later, I called my mom in North Carolina and told her this story. And she told me that she knew this had happened. She woke up from a dream, or a vision, and called me mentally to wake up, and I did. This is NOT the type of tale my mother generally told, so I believed her, believe her still.

This being the fourth anniversary of her death today, I want to say, “Thanks, Mom. I love you, too.”

Ruby Bridges: civil rights icon

Ruby Bridges went to a school by herself; well, except for U.S. Marshals dispatched by President Eisenhower.

Here’s the thing: there are so many iconic people in the Civil Rights movement that are etched in my brain that, sometimes, I forget they are not seared in everyone else’s. So during the month, I’m going to mention some folks you may have heard of, or possibly not.

RUBY NELL BRIDGES, who turned 60 on September 8, 2014, was the first black child to attend an all-white elementary school in the American South. She attended William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans, Louisiana, starting in 1960. Ruby appeared on the cover of LOOK magazine, a very popular publication in the day, portrayed in this iconic picture by Norman Rockwell entitled The Problem We All Live With.

She notes: “Though I did not know it then, nor would I come to realize it for many years, what transpired in the fall of 1960 in New Orleans would forever change my life and help shape a nation.

“When I think back on that time and all that has occurred since, I realize a lot has changed… I also know there is much MORE to be done… That fateful walk to school began a journey, and I have now developed a vision to continue moving forward.”

Ruby was born in Tylertown, MS, but her family moved to New Orleans when she was four. In response to a request from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), her parents volunteered her to participate in the integration of the New Orleans School system, Ruby passed the test that determined whether or not she’d be allowed to attend William Frantz. Five other black kids also passed the test, but either decided to stay at their old school or transferred to another black school.

Ruby Bridges went to a school by herself; well, except for U.S. Marshals dispatched by President Eisenhower. As she described it, “Driving up I could see the crowd, but living in New Orleans, I actually thought it was Mardi Gras. There was a large crowd of people outside of the school. They were throwing things and shouting, and that sort of goes on in New Orleans at Mardi Gras.” Former Marshal Charles Burks later recalled, “She showed a lot of courage. She never cried. She didn’t whimper. She just marched along like a little soldier, and we’re all very very proud of her.”

Read about her from Biography.com and watch the 1998 TV movie.

January rambling: broken spaghetti

Has America gone crazy? “It’s hard to know why we are the way we are, and — believe me — even harder to explain it to others.” Plus ignorance as a virtue.

Barack Obama’s 2015 State of the Union address: annotated. And the official website for House Republicans has posted on YouTube a doctored version of the SOTU address which cuts out comments where the President was critical of Republican rhetoric on climate change.

How Expensive It Is to Be Poor.

Iraq Veterans Against the War.

Dustbury writes: “Depressed? ‘Buck up,’ they say. ‘Smile a little.’ They are, of course, full of crap.”

Last year Roger Ver renounced his US citizenship to avoid paying US taxes. “Now he’s upset that the ‘tyrants’ in the US government won’t give him a visa to visit Miami.”

From Forbes, hardly a liberal bastion: Bibi Netanyahu — aka ‘The Republican Senator From Israel’ — May Have Made A Fatal Political Mistake.

Solving homelessness in Salt Lake City.

Hetero privilege: holding hands. Also, SCOTUS takes up marriage equality. I too would have cited Loving v. Virginia, because I do that.

Remembering Auschwitz: 70 Years After Liberation. Also, Auschwitz Survivor Gena Turgel Walked Out of Gas Chamber Alive and the BBC flew a drone over Auschwitz.

Research Finds That Guns Do Indeed Kill People.

The strike that changed Milwaukee by Michael Rosen.

Eddie’s cancer updates. Then, Ronald Keith and Michael Edward get married in Chicago, “an event 25 years in the making!”

Ursula Le Guin on the future of literature.

A Pharmacist’s tongue-in-cheek guide to patient etiquette.

Major progressive New Testament scholar Marcus Borg has died.

How Lakes Can Explode Like A Can Of Soda.

Why you can’t actually break spaghetti in two: “Invariably a third piece is formed, and sometimes a fourth.” And speaking of broken: a copy of one of the largest check I’ve seen.

Dustbury’s memory does not serve him well. Sounds like me.

Burger Math and Cereal Killers and the smallpox boat and 8-6-7-5-3-0-….

Yitang Zhang solves a pure-math mystery, involving prime numbers.

Steampunk in New Zealand.

Uthaclena goes off the tracks.

My favorite haiku of the month.

Operation Downfall.

Why Are Some People Better at Drawing than Others?

Cartoonist Jorge Gutierrez interviews Sergio Aragonés.

In honor of the first anniversary of Pete Seeger’s death, check out the January 2015 issue of the Monthly Review.

Paul McCartney describes his feelings re: the fact that the band’s music is now being used as a point of focus in college-level popular music courses.

Paul Simon and John Lennon co-presenting the GRAMMY for Record Of The Year at the 17th GRAMMY awards.

K-Chuck Radio: You can go, but we’ll still have hits….

Muppets: Yorick and Zizzy Zoomers. Also, the very significant I Love My Hair and The Color of Me, plus Nick McKaig’s rendition of the theme from The Muppet Show and how Jim Henson worked and a long interview with Frank Oz.

How Yogi Bear’s collar revolutionized television, plus Daws Butler on You Bet Your Life; the cartoon voice artist was quite short.

SamuraiFrog pointed me to The Way They Was: Six Totally Different Shows The Simpsons Has Been.

The Origin Of “The Trix Rabbit”.

What the Marvel Super-Heroes looked like on Saturday mornings.

Ken Levine on hosting this month’s Friday Night Spotlight series on Neil Simon for TCM. And Mark Evanier makes some corrections to those intros.

NO “BLAH BLAH BLAH”.

The NFL finds that Patriots used underinflated footballs. Perhaps coach Bill Belichick can’t help but channel his inner Richard Nixon. Go, Seahawks!

The TV show Parenthood just went off the air. I watched it religiously. From PARADE: What I Learned About My Family From Parenthood’s Braverman Family.

Why local social media goddess Kristi Gustafson Barlette took a break from social media.

From the Onion News Network: Judge Rules White Girl Will Be Tried As Black Adult. And from the Onion: I Don’t Vaccinate My Child Because It’s My Right To Decide What Eliminated Diseases Come Roaring Back.

GOOGLE ALERTS (me)

I am described as a Kirby Delauter Super Fan, which made me LOL, literally. I have witnesses.

The page turner.

Arthur on Mario Cuomo.

I asked Arthur about Facebook quizzes. Here’s one he did: What Is Your 2014 Anthem. He got Taylor Swift’s Shake It Off. I got John Legend’s All of Me: “Wowzers, what a year right? 2014 may have held some special things in it, but this isn’t your first nor your last rodeo. People like you who give their full efforts here on this planet are rare, so anytime you need a reminder of how important you are let this legend from John ride and just reminisce. Thank you for putting so much love, positivity, and good vibes into the atmosphere… it may not seem like too much out of the ordinary for you, but Picasso didn’t know he would grow to be Picasso while he was painting either. We appreciate it, so just stay committed to giving all of yourself (into the right situations of course) in all your endeavors!” Positivity?

GOOGLE ALERTS (not me)

Cole Memorial Hospital’s maternity unit announces that Potter County (PA)’s New Year’s baby on Jan. 1 at 2:20 p.m. Roger Bradley Green.