X is for Xylopolist

Consider this as my Christmas/Hanukkah/Festivus/Kwanzaa present to you!

christmas_tree

A xylopolist is someone who sells wood. Or, from Encyclo: 1. One who sells timber; a timber-merchant. 2. A dealer in wooden objects or one who sells various kinds of wood or wooden objects. I assume this includes someone who sells Christmas trees.

X is always tricky for ABC Wednesday participants. There are two common prefixes in English that start with X that folks have used quite often.

Xylo- refers to wood, while xanth- means yellow in color. Here’s a list of unusual words beginning with X; a number of words start with xeno- (strange, foreign) or xero- (dry).

If you are seeking other words, try plants, specifically these botany entries.

Look also at common Mandarin Chinese words.

Consider this as my Christmas Hanukkah Festivus Kwanzaa present to you!

abc15

ABC Wednesday, Round 15

Hack attack!

THE INTERVIEW Teaser PosterGiven the fact that I had, and still have, no interest in seeing the SONY picture The Interview, I am nevertheless saddened to see its theatrical release scuttled. As you probably heard, the film is about a couple of “tabloid TV show” journalists…

When they discover that North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un is a fan of the show, they land an interview with him in an attempt to legitimize themselves as journalists. As Dave and Aaron prepare to travel to Pyongyang, their plans change when the CIA recruits them, perhaps the two least-qualified men imaginable, to assassinate Kim.

SONY pictures’ computers have been hacked by cyberbullies believed to be tied to North Korea. Or maybe not. A load of internal data was released – more anon – but the most serious action was a threat that suggested people stay away from the theaters showing the film, lest some Sept. 11, 2001-type attack befall them.

The riffraff on the Internet who think that SONY created the threat as a way to boost buzz for the Interview I find odd The conspiracy theorists are tiresome; it spent $30 million on the film, and tens of millions on the promotion. In any case, the alert got several of the largest movie theater chains to decide not to show the film, scheduled to open on Christmas Day. SONY then decided to pull the film from release.

Naturally, the politicians have weighed in. Mitt Romney, the once and perhaps future Presidential nominee suggests that SONY stream it for free. The incumbent, Barack Obama, suggested that we continue to go to the movies, and told SONY that it made a mistake shelving the flick.

A small part of me is actually thinking that the hoary cliche, We’re letting the terrorists win, seems appropriate here. As the George Clooney petition, which NO one in Hollywood signed, there’s a lot of cowardice in Tinsel Town. On the other hand, as Mark Evanier noted: “We cancel airline flights if there’s even a vague threat. We evacuate buildings if there are suspicious packages. In a sense, the terrorists/hackers have already won this one.”

Some of the data breaches of SONY have turned out to be everything from merely embarrassing to so problematic that lawsuits are threatened; it has been very costly for the company, both fiscally and on a trust level. Some of the issues revealed:
Salaries
The script for an upcoming James Bond film
Tom Hanks used to check-in hotels under the name Johnny Madrid.
Alex Trebek considered quitting JEOPARDY! over a recent Kids’ Week kerfuffle
*Denzel Washington blacklist?

The journalism website Poynter has addressed the ethics of hacked email and otherwise ill-gotten information. It suggests:
Do additional reporting to verify the details. You must be sure it is accurate before you pass it along
Avoid distortion and instead ensure appropriate tone. This means watching your headlines, adjectives, and all the other details that give a particular piece of information a certain tone. When you add flavor to information, it needs to be appropriate.
*Add context, by seeking additional input or rebuttal from the relevant stakeholders. Context makes information more accurate.

A stocking stuffer for me: Ask Roger Anything

You can ask me ANYTHING, and I will answer. Promise.

One of those Facebook pictures has a message something like, “As I get older, I crave less for material presence and more for emotional presence.” A broad interpretation, to be sure, but pretty valid. Except for the Hess truck and a few other items, I’m not all that desperate for “stuff” this holiday season.

However, I continue to have a great need for something approximating personal reflection, the subtext of this blog. But doing it oneself is difficult. And limiting. I only tend to think about topics and questions that are within my comparative narrow purview.

That’s where YOU come in. You can ask me ANYTHING, and I will answer. Promise. And almost surely relatively soon, generally within thirty days. I’m STILL looking for the stumpers; I LIKE the stumpers.

I agree to answer your questions to the best of my ability and memory. Of course, memory is a tricky thing, self-selecting, imprecise. As always, a little obfuscation is allowed, just because I like the word obfuscation.

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, and note that you want to remain anonymous. Otherwise, I will cite you, or site you or sight you…

Consider this a Christmas/solstice/Kwanzaa/whatever present to me. And you KNOW it’s more blessed to give than to receive.

Reality hits hard (with apologies to fillyjonk)

One catalog company I ordered from called me to tell me my card had been declined.

hospital-bed-talk-with-doctorThe blogger fillyjonk wrote on December 15: ” I dunno. Locally and globally, sad and difficult stuff.” She was SO right.

*Her post began: “Someone took hostages in Sydney. In a Lindt chocolate shop.” Unfortunately, that ended with two of the hostages being killed, along with the gunman.

*About the same time, I’m listening to this story of a guy killing his ex-wife and five of his ex-in-laws at three different places in Montgomery County, PA, just north of Philadelphia, before turning the gun on himself. Worst of all, I awaken the next morning to the news of 140+ people murdered by the Taliban in western Pakistan, most of them children.

*Locally, and more recently, there was an Amber alert for a five-year-old boy near around here, then canceled 10 hours later when the boy’s body was discovered. The abduction story was a crock; his 19 y.o. cousin has been arrested. Meanwhile, eight children were slaughtered in Cairns, Australia.

*The Daughter complained of sharp pain on her left side, and we went to the ER at Albany Med on Saturday night, December 13. We were there from 8:30 p.m. until 2:30 a.m., and bed after 3 a.m. I SO don’t do 3 a.m. well anymore. Then I went to church in the morning. I’ve been on fumes all week.

*She has some infection in or around her kidneys, and she has to take an antibiotic. But halfway through the regimen, the hospital calls to say that the type of infection she has is resistant to the antibiotic she has been taking, so she needs to take a DIFFERENT one and start the regimen all over.

*The illness meant that I missed two days of work, one full day, and two half days, which feels actually worse than two full days because my work rhythm is off. I was going to go to a luncheon to honor people at SUNY Central who had reached milestone anniversaries. (Because we were switched to SUNY Albany for a time, both a colleague and I missed both our 15th and 20th-anniversary luncheons.) But I missed it, seeing my boss, a former colleague, and two long-time friends get awarded. Worse, the ticket I bought ($30) went to waste because we were so shorthanded. Because…

*Our office secretary left on November 5, so we – well mostly a library colleague and I – have been answering the main phones. One of our library colleagues, Amelia, had a baby at the end of November, which is lovely, of course, but she’s out on maternity leave until late February. So when one (OR MORE) of the five, currently four, librarians is out, it becomes a strain on the system. There were just two of us two Thursdays ago (snow and the flu kept the other two at home), and two on the day of the luncheon.

We usually have a week’s turnaround on the reference queue but, currently, it’s about 10 days. This will EVENTUALLY rectify itself as the demand slackens during the holidays, but looking at the list of questions undone is depressing and frustrating. And one of the librarians will be away for a week around Christmas.

*One of our choir members has been away much of the year getting treatment for cancer in Arizona. My mother’s first cousin Robert is now on dialysis. And while I didn’t know them, I mourn the loss of my friend Steve Bissette’s parents, his father in late October, and his mother in mid-December.

*We have lost our custodian at church a few weeks ago. The Wife chairs the Administration Committee until the end of the year, so this is a task that involves meetings, et al.

*All this busyness has made it difficult to concentrate on Christmas shopping. One catalog company I ordered from called me to tell me my card had been declined; what I didn’t notice in the pile of mail unread is that the bank had pulled one card as compromised and replaced it with another.

*Of course, it’s been havoc on blogging. I have a daily blog and write one post every two days. It’s not a lack of topics, it’s a lack of time. This will explain, in part, an increase in typos.

*I’ve had a deficit in not only sleep but good dietary habits and housecleaning effort. The house is messier than even my relatively low standards can bear. Where IS my cellphone? It’s in the bedroom, SOMEWHERE.

So, happy holidays, everyone. I’m told it gets better; sure hope so.

The Compact Disc and me

I had these shiny objects, and nothing on which to play them.

One of my first CDs

While listening to the Coverville podcast about legendary music producer Phil Ramone, who died a while back – I wrote about him, briefly – host Brian Ibbott noted that Ramone produced the first album, Billy Joel’s 52nd Street, “to be commercially released on CD when it went on sale in Japan” in the fall of 1978.

This got me thinking about my love/hate relationship with compact discs. I had 1200 LPs in the early 1980s, and I was quite resistant to this new technology. The music industry was working hard to get consumers to embrace the CD.

The Police’s Synchronicity album had an extra song, Murder by Numbers; ditto, Peter Gabriel’s So with This Is the Picture (Excellent Birds). But I had the LPs and wasn’t going to buy the music again. More odd was the Talking Heads’ Remain in Light, which had extended versions of some of the songs; I finally DID buy that on CD this century.

The first four CDs I owned were given to me by my friend Broome in 1987; they were the first four British Beatles albums, which, not incidentally, did NOT have extra material, and ran about 35 minutes each. There was much talk at the time about how they SHOULD put extra material on them, the singles of that period, just because the CD had a capacity of more than twice that. Heck, I wouldn’t have objected to “From Me to You” added to an early compilation. But it was not to be; I mean, they ARE the Beatles and people were going to buy them.

So now I had these shiny objects, and nothing on which to play them, and Broome knew that. Reluctantly, I bought a simple CD player. But I couldn’t justify having the hardware without more software, so I went out and spent $50 on CDs. I didn’t want to buy what I already owned, so I bought greatest hits by Billy Joel (the 2-disc set) and Elton John. I also got Dire Straits’ Brothers in Arms and some others.

Eventually, I had lots of CDs, some fortunately provided to me gratis, and a five-CD player, which became my music player of choice, before it broke down; I tried to get it repaired, unsuccessfully.

One of the things I’ve realized is that because the artist, or the record company, CAN put more music on a CD, they DO. And some 14-song, 70-minute albums are just TOO LONG. It’s even more true on rereleases. I was listening to Who’s Next one morning – my family was obviously away – and I LOVE that album, but the rest of the “Lighthouse” project, save for “Pure and Easy” I could have done without. Lots of albums have alternative versions, which are historically interesting but do not enhance the listening enjoyment of the album; the second The Band album, which I also love, falls in that category.

Still, the library file cabinet, which I bought when the local branch was renovating a few seasons ago, was a cool place to store them, I thought, although, even getting a few more occasionally means a laborious shifting around. The Wife, though, decided that we needed furniture to store them in, or maybe she didn’t think having a file cabinet in the hallway was as much fun as I do, or, did. But the two pieces of furniture hold no more music. I made it clear we were doing this, not out of some need of mine but of hers. When I first had LPs, I used orange crates.

I’m likely to keep the discs I have, if only because I LOVE reading the liner notes. New acquisitions, though, will be few and far between.

Ramblin' with Roger
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