Ramblin' with Roger

Like father, like daughter: to the E.R. again

The lesson relearned – no food where peanuts or nuts are processed.

When we last saw our intrepid little family, the father of the household was getting a ride home from his overnight hospital stay Friday afternoon by his lovely wife. Saturday, he was still exhausted; he didn’t sleep well Thursday night, and Friday night’s rest was insufficient. He muddled through Saturday, doing a minimum of vacuuming and dishwashing, and not much else.

Even Sunday morning, there was a sense of fatigue within him. But since almost everyone knew about the hospital incident, he wanted to show up to prove he was still among the living. Fortunately, all the songs the choir sang he had performed before.

At the coffee hour, somehow the Daughter had gotten permission (not from her father) to eat some coffee cake, despite being unclear about its origins. Apparently, it’s one of those items that had that warning that it may be processed in a plant that used peanuts or nuts. She is allergic to peanuts, and peanuts and nuts are often processed in the same place.

Shortly after consuming it, she got very upset. Was it a belated sense of fear? Her father took her into a quiet room and tried to calm her down. She was OK for a bit, but by the time she got home, she had a stomachache, and eventually upchucked. This was actually a good thing; the first time she had an allergic reaction, when she was three, that was how her body responded. So the family thought it was in the clear.

A couple of hours later, the Wife noticed, above the knees and below the neck hives over about 30% of The Daughter’s body. It itched greatly. After a call to the pediatrician, another trek to the E.R.

It’s much less busy Thursday at 8:40 a.m. than Sunday at 5:30 p.m. She got some Benedryl, stronger than the OTC we had given her. Then the family stopped at the McDonalds; the Wife seems to believe going inside is faster, an unproven premise, but staying in the car would have meant avoiding the rudest, vulgar-language customer; “Where’s my f@#$ing food?” , more than once, among other things.

The Daughter was asleep by the time the family got home. she got through dinner then was practically carried to bed; the Wife stayed home with her on Monday.

The lesson relearned – no food where peanuts or nuts are processed. I hadn’t heard the rule had changed…
***
That evening, there was an ambulance in front of our house. It was actually called for our next-door neighbor’s house. The father of one of the college kids had been drinking a couple bottles of beer with the guy when he was having some difficulties – I didn’t get the details. Turns out e had food poisoning; glad it wasn’t worse.

Loss of data

I was putting together my monthly list of links, when it struck me that some of the pieces were of a type. They were all about information of one form or another and how sometimes, it goes away.

JEOPARDY! wiz Ken Jennings – he won 74 games in a row – gave a TEDx talk at Seattle University in February 2013 called The Obsolete Know-It-All. It runs about 18 minutes, in which he discusses the JEOPARDY! competition with Brad Rutter (human) and the IBM computer named Watson, as. He talks, among other things, about how a part of the brain shrinks when one uses GPS, or uses the cellphone to look up your friends’ numbers. This is one of those issues I respond to viscerally. Looking it up on Google may be more “efficient,” but it doesn’t compare with knowing stuff.

If the technologies fail us – power grid crashes, computers compromised by cyberattacks – what will we still know? What does it all mean in terms of our human interaction? By contrast, 5 ways robots can improve accuracy, journalism quality.

Andy Marx writes about the day he and his grandfather Groucho saved the television show ‘You Bet Your Life’ from ending up in a Dumpster. If he hadn’t answered the phone, the shows would have been lost forever. In the comments, there was an interesting link to a story of how much of our cultural history depends on one person’s decision to preserve something instead of throwing it away.

Speaking of TV, Ken Levine’s comment about the late Bonnie Franklin, and her TV show ONE DAY AT A TIME falling between the cracks prompted the question about why some shows remain perennially popular while others fade out. “It doesn’t necessarily seem to be question of quality.” Interesting responses in the comments section.

Mark Twain Captured on Film by Thomas Edison in 1909. It’s the only known footage of the author.

Finally, since Jaquandor inspired this with his lazy linkage, I appreciated reading what he has to say: When going back to edit your writing, how do you determine what to keep and what to weed out? I imagine novelists in particular whether to exorcise a scene, or just save it for another book.
***
My first thoughts about the end of this year’s Boston Marathon. Probably not my last.

N is for Nutcracker

The NY Philharmonic plays a section from Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker followed by the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra playing the Ellington/Strayhorn arrangement of the same section.

You are almost certainly familiar with the music from The Nutcracker, a two-act ballet, with “a score by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. The libretto is adapted from E.T.A. Hoffmann’s story The Nutcracker and the Mouse King. It was given its première at the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg on Sunday, 18 December 1892… Although the original production was not a success, the twenty-minute suite that Tchaikovsky extracted from the ballet was.” Jaquandor shared a link to all the music.

The Nutcracker Suite is also “an album by American pianist, composer and bandleader Duke Ellington recorded… in 1960 featuring jazz interpretations of ‘The Nutcracker’ by Tchaikovsky, arranged by Ellington and Billy Strayhorn.”

Overture
Toot Toot Tootie Toot (Dance of the Reed-Pipes)
Peanut Brittle Brigade (March)
Sugar Rum Cherry (Dance of the Sugar-Plum Fairy)
Entr’acte
The Volga Vouty (Russian Dance)
Chinoiserie (Chinese Dance)
Dance of the Floreadores (Waltz of the Flowers)
Arabesque Cookie (Arabian Dance)

I discovered on YouTube a “Live From Lincoln Center special called ‘Nutcracker Swing’ featuring both the New York Philharmonic conducted by Leonard Slatkin, and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis that originally aired on PBS in December 2001.” The compiler said: “As far as I know this special never aired again, nor has it ever been made available to purchase anywhere…The way it works is that the NY Philharmonic plays a section from Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker followed by the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra playing the Ellington/Strayhorn arrangement of the same section.

“The special starts with four sections from Wynton Marsalis’ “All Rise,” [parts 2-5], introduced here by Leonard Slatkin [part 1].

There are several other iterations of The Nutcracker, but I’ll deal with just one more. Nutrocker, a rock version of The Nutcracker March, was recorded by B. Bumble & The Stingers, released in February 1962, and went to # 23 in the US and # 1 in the UK. Emerson Lake and Palmer performed it live about a decade later.

These variations show how rich the original music is.

Of course, “the complete Nutcracker has enjoyed enormous popularity since the late 1960s and is now performed by countless ballet companies, primarily during the Christmas season, especially in the U.S.” In the Albany, NY area alone, there were at least six different companies performing it in December 2012. On December 16, I watched the Albany Berkshire Ballet performance at both 2:30 (so my daughter could see it) and 6:30 (the performance my daughter was in, as an angel). THAT was a lot of Nutcracker for one day!
***
American Ballet Theatre’s Paloma Herrera in the Nutcracker with Gennadi Saveliev

ABC Wednesday – Round 12

My second novennial visit to the hospital E.R. for chest pain

Evidently, the afternoon nurse was not on the ball, according to the evening nurse, because the former had orders to take blood from me, and it did not happen.

Back in 2004, I was having some chest pains, though not on the left side, where my heart is located. Still, I called my primary care physician’s office, and her office suggested I go to St. Peter’s Hospital and get it checked out. I don’t much remember the details, except that I spent about eight hours there before I went home.

Thursday, April 11, I’m getting the Daughter ready for school when I felt a real tightness on the upper right side of my chest; had it been on the other side, I would have thought it was a heart attack and would have called 911. Still, it was most uncomfortable, and I wasn’t doing anything more strenuous than clearing the breakfast dishes. Using the previous advice, I took the bus to St. Peter’s Hospital; it was a straight shot from my house, a little more than a mile away. I COULD have walked there, actually, especially in the time I waited for the ride, but I just wasn’t feeling up to it.

Got to the ER about 8:40 a.m., got seen right away by a nurse. The ER room very…gray; gray walls on most sides, speckled gray walls on the other. They hooked me up to various contraptions that monitored my heart rate, my blood pressure, my oxygen capacity, and other vitals. I saw in turn, at least two nurses, and two doctors, interrupted by long periods of not much.

For some reason, speaking to the primary ER doctor – I knew she was primary because there was a series of pictures of attending physicians that she gave me, her photo circled – I’d been there just long enough that my brain had temporarily fallen asleep. She asked what medicines I was taking, and I was giving her a list of what I was allergic to. Realizing this, I stopped, but could remember what I had taken, by brand name or dosage; eventually, they got better info from my primary care doctor.

There was an older woman, 81 by her own description, who was some sort of hospital aide, and she asked me if I needed anything. I noted that a phone would be nice.

It occurred to me that I ought to contact my wife. Only one thing; I didn’t know how. She is a teacher of English as a Second Language who works for this multi-county entity called Capital Region BOCES. In any given week, she might be in one of five schools in three school districts, one in each of three counties, and it alternates somewhat from week to week. So I called my friend and colleague Alexis at work and asked her to track down my wife, but for her not to worry. She found my wife’s supervisor, and the supervisor called my wife to pass on the message.

Meanwhile, Alexis came to the ER, gave me a bunch of magazines to read, and stayed until my wife arrived. Alexis told me that my terse message on the call-in number at work, which meant that everyone knew I would be out made one of our co-workers quite nervous. “That was the shortest message he ever left; it must be serious!” I had eaten nothing, so someone got me some dry chicken sandwich; it was better than nothing, barely.

The hospital had decided that I should stay for “observation,” which in medical speak means I was going to be admitted! I was still in the ER only because there were no rooms available at the moment. Finally, around 2:30 p.m., I got wheeled to a room. It was a nice room, as hospital rooms go. I wasn’t exactly relaxed – I had oxygen in my nose for a time, and all sorts of cathodes (is that what they are called?) stuck on my chest, so that movement was limited.

The Wife left for a time but came back with The Daughter. My child may have been more worried than I. I told her that I’d always love her. She asked, “What if you die?” I noted that I’d STILL love her, from heaven. The three of us had dinner. My hospital meal was chicken, which wasn’t bad, and beans, which were rubbery. The family brought their own grub. We played a few hands of UNO together before they left.

I watched the news on TV, and a couple of other things, yet doing nothing is tiring. I tried to go to sleep around 9:15, but I was cold. So I got what the hospital called a blanket, which was barely helpful until they closed the door to my room about 11 p.m. That also muffled the sound of a bunch of monitors beeping from the nurses’ station and/or other people’s rooms.

Evidently, the afternoon nurse was not on the ball, according to the evening nurse, because the former had orders to take blood from me, and it did not happen. So I got blood drawn at 8 p.m. and 4 a.m.; I was awake already for the latter, but still. I was also awake at 4:40 a.m. when they weighed me, something that was supposed to have happened earlier.

Interesting that my temperature (c. 36.5) was given in metric units. Apparently, that’s the world standard, although the US has been SLOW to convert. 36.5 C is about 97.7 F; my temperature tends to run 1F low. I also know that my BP is excellent (115/65 +/- 5 over time), my heart rate is fine 9c 64/bpm), and my oxygen is good (98 to 99%).

In the morning, I’m tired but can’t sleep. Alternatingly watch CBS Morning News, the Weather Channel (tornadoes in the southeast, snow in the Midwest), ESPN, and some other sports news. I discover that every sports analyst said the exact same thing about some San Diego Padres player who got hit by a 3-2 pitch, charged the pitcher’s mound to tussle with the Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher, the end result of which is that the pitcher broke his collarbone. No, the Padre won’t be suspended as long as the Dodger pitcher will be out, as the Dodgers manager wants; it’ll be 5 to 8 games. I watched a little of the first round of the Masters’ golf tournament. At least I avoided the Jodi Arias wall-to-wall live trial coverage; I STILL don’t know who she is, or what she allegedly did.

Shortly after breakfast (pancakes – but they forgot the syrup – fruit cup, and some of the worst oatmeal I’ve ever attempted to eat), someone took my lunch order, which got me to thinking I’d be there for a while. About 11 a.m., though, a physician assistant asked me a bunch of questions; my answers meant I could be discharged. This was followed by a doctor essentially making sure the PA did her job, the technician taking all those cathode stickers off, and the nurse disconnecting everything else attached to me.

Their timing was a bit too bad; I was actually enjoying watching the talk show The View, with Harrison Ford and Chadwick Boseman talking about the new movie about Jackie Robinson, 42. Also was discharged before the lunch, which sounded really good; and in any case, they were going to bring me tea, rather than the coffee I’d been getting and don’t drink.

So, if I did not have a heart condition, what DID I have? Dunno, but this is my working theory: I have started riding my bicycle part of the way to work and back, putting on the CDTA the rest of the way. This involves lifting the bike, which isn’t light. My left elbow has been troubling me for a few weeks, for no known reason, so I may have been overcompensating on my right side when I would lift up the bike; my occasionally sore right shoulder suggests that. So I had some sort of spasm that affected my upper right chest area.

In any case, I’m seeing my primary care doc in a couple of weeks to revisit this issue.

The Tom Skulan FantaCon interview

The very first FantaCo t-shirt also featured this rat in a spacesuit on a light blue shirt. Raoul was the one who named the character Ed after we both got tired of constantly calling him “the rat in the spacesuit”. From Ed, Raoul then blended him with a 1950’s children’s show personality and began calling him Smilin’ Ed. He then lost the spacesuit and started his own adventures.

FantaCon, once an Albany tradition for fans of comic books, fantasy, and in its later incarnations, horror films, is returning after a brief, two-decade hiatus. FantaCon 2013, operated by its original creator, Tom Skulan, will be held Saturday, September 14 and Sunday, September 15 at the Marriott Hotel on Wolf Road in Albany. Ticket for the related Three Nights of Horror at the Palace Theatre on September 11-13 in Albany, will be available from the Palace Theatre box office, starting on February 13.

FantaCo, the store/mail-order company Tom started, operated from 1978 through 1998 at 21 Central Avenue, Albany, NY. I worked there from May 1980 to November 1988, worked at the first five FantaCons, and attended the sixth.

Incidentally, Skulan is pronounced like the third word in Led Zeppelin’s Whole Lotta Love.
***
Tom, when you owned FantaCo, you ran seven FantaCons, in 1979, 1980, 1981, 1983, 1988, 1989, and 1990. But you had a store, and often, publications to use in cross-promotions. You have a FantaCon planned for September of 2013, after a twenty-year hiatus. Why FantaCon, why now?

There are three reasons that come to mind. First, I have always wanted to do another FantaCon when I wasn’t preoccupied with the store, the publishing, and the mail order. I have always wanted to see what that would be like!
Second, time is creeping up on me and these old bones have only so much time left where I can handle the demands of the show. And finally I like the numbers of doing the show the weekend of Friday the 13th in 2013.

What is the theme of the upcoming convention? What guests have you lined up so far?

The theme for this show is to try and recreate all the FantaCons all at once. Some shows were strongly comic-oriented and some shows were strongly horror-oriented. This show will be both at once. I want to create a party atmosphere for all the original attendees AND the new attendees too.

The guest line up confirmed at this time is Steve Bissette, Ari Lehman, John Russo, George Kosana, Russ Streiner, Judy O’Dea, Judith Ridley, Geri Reischl, Belinda Balaski, Kyra Schon, A. Michael Baldwin, Kevin Eastman, Richard Brooker, Michael T. Gilbert, Jason Moore, Jarod Balog, Dennis Daniel, Bob Michelucci, Mark Martin, Bill Anderson, Jim Whiting, John Hebert, Herb Trimpe, Dustin Warburton, Jeff Lieberman, Fred Hembeck and a few other surprises to be announced. You can read all about each guest at our website at www.fantacon.com.

Let’s go way back in time, to the mid-1970s. When I first met you, you were working at a comic book store in New Paltz, NY, halfway between New York City and Albany. Tell me about the Crystal Cave and its owner, Peter Maresca.

The Crystal Cave started as a little shop in a second-floor walk up on Main Street in New Paltz. It was run by Peter and his then-wife Rita. It was one of the first 100 comic book stores in the US. Peter was definitely a fan more than a business person whereas Rita was a business person more than a fan. The combination worked for a while. I hightailed it to that little shop the moment I saw a flyer for it hanging in the Ariel Bookstore. I preceded to visit it every time I got out of a class. I devoured the newest issues of TBG and started advertising myself. Eventually, I hounded Peter into giving me a job. The Crystal Cave then moved across the street to a ground-level storefront where it established itself. A couple of years later it moved to a much larger location off the beaten path. My years spent working at the Crystal Cave during the development of the comic market are fond memories for me.

You were going to school at the State University College at New Paltz to be a teacher. How long did you teach, and how did you like it?

After doing my student teaching in Carmel, NY I was asked to stay on and fill in for a teacher on maternity leave. I taught junior high school in the morning sessions and high school in the afternoon. I taught for one full school year.
I met David Greenwood and Gerry Michalak who would become friends. I enjoy teaching. I DIDN’T enjoy the administrative aspects of it, though, and that spun me around to doing my own thing.

A couple of years later, I would run into you selling comic books at small shows. Then on August 28, 1978, which you insist was NOT keyed to Jack Kirby’s birthday, you opened FantaCo. What did the name mean to you, and why in Albany?

Oh, what a search it was to find a location for the store!! I started in Danbury CT, which was near Carmel, and looked at all kinds of storefronts in all kinds of locations. I then moved up and through NY state and ended up with three possible locations in and around Albany. 21 Central was the last location I looked at and it was the 55th time I had inspected a storefront. The large front window sold me as did the location.

The name means either the Fantasy Company or the Fantastic Company. I used both interchangeably when I was thinking it up.

In 1979, you held the first FantaCon at the Empire State Plaza, called FantaCon ’80 to confuse future historians. What are your recollections of that first convention?

It was a whirlwind!!! From conception to the actual show was only a few months!! I do remember drinking obscene amounts of coffee, staying awake for days on end, and ultimately stumbling into the Convention Center on a bright August morning and labeling the tables. The lift started bringing up dealers and then the show was on! I remember that everyone we had brought in was a trooper and did a great job. By the way, you can thank Kevin Cahill [now a New York State Assemblyman] for calling the first show FantaCon ’80. HE convinced me that it would make the show sound futuristic!!

The cover of that first FantaCon program was drawn by the late Raoul Vezina. Raoul was, in many ways, the face of the Crystal Cave, and in the early days, the face of FantaCo. What was it about Raoul that made him suitable to be the guy everyone saw in the front of the store?

Raoul was a super popular artist and musician in New Paltz. And as soon as he did the window mural for the Crystal Cave he became known for that as well. Everyone liked Raoul!
So considering that I had worked with him for years at the Crystal Cave it was logical for me to ask him to come to Albany and help me with the new store. The earliest days of FantaCo very much mirrored the Crystal Cave in that Raoul did our first window and he was the frontman for the store. I took care of the finances and ran the mail order which carried over from my own mail-order business. Most people thought that Raoul owned the store.

Who was the original Smilin’ Ed, and how did the rat become the emblem for FantaCo?

Fortunately, the absolute original first Smilin’ Ed character exists in about 50,000 copies of the 1979 Overstreet Price Guide as a full-page ad announcing the new store. Anyone can pull out a copy and see the original character.
The way it went was this: I had reserved a full-page ad in Overstreet timed to come out just after the store opened. I had laid out the page and written the copy I wanted it to say but I had no central comic character so I asked Raoul if he could draw a rat in a spacesuit. I figured that was different enough from all the other characters. So Ed began as an advertising character. The very first FantaCo t-shirt also featured this rat in a spacesuit on a light blue shirt. Raoul was the one who named the character Ed after we both got tired of constantly calling him “the rat in the spacesuit”. From Ed, Raoul then blended him with a 1950’s children’s show personality and began calling him Smilin’ Ed. He then lost the spacesuit and started his own adventures. So I came up with the basic rat character but it was Raoul who gave the “rat in a spacesuit” a personality and a name. It was a good blend of ideas and I really think we could have continued the comic series until it caught on.

Smilin’ Ed was the star of four comic books, created by Raoul and you, and published by the company in 1980-1982. It was never particularly commercially successful, unfortunately. Why do you think that was?

At the time we were publishing Ed, independent comics were in their infancy. They were B&W and cost more than color comics. Fans wanted a superstar artist on the series to make the relatively high cover prices palatable. All we had was good art and good stories. That was not enough at the time.

What’s your favorite Phil Seuling story? [Among other things, Phil pretty much invented the direct market for comic books. His company, Seagate, was FantaCo’s distributor of comic books and was early in carrying FantaCo publications. FantaCon 2013 is dedicated, in part, to Phil’s memory.] ]

OMG!! How long is this interview??? I have SO many Phil stories I could go on forever. Probably “the pact”, which lasted many years right up to his death, is my favorite. At some point during a particularly slow show in Boston, Phil and I decided that we were going to eat out way through the cuisines of the world. ALL of them, no matter how obscure were there to be tasted. We did this at conventions and on my weekly visits to his home in Seagate. After several years we really started hitting the obscure. One of the last places we ate together was a Cuban-Chinese restaurant (which was wonderful by the way). Later Hank Jansen and I would go there too.
The other part of the pact was that whoever left the country had to send the other one a postcard saying “I’m in (fill in the country) and you’re not!! I have a lot of those cards and sent a lot too!!

The first artist FantaCo published was Fred Hembeck. It was Fred’s second book, Hembeck 1980, which actually came out in February 1980. Fred has been quite clear that FantaCo didn’t “steal” him from Eclipse Comics, who had put out the first Hembeck issue. What’s your recollection of the story?

My recollections were that Dean [Mullaney] had a big hit with his Sabre book. It had gone through some 3 printings with 30,000+ copies. I think that Dean wanted (expected?) the Hembeck book to sell just as many copies and when it did not he kinda lost interest in it. It was nothing against Fred and certainly, we NEVER stole the book away. It was offered to us.

Hembeck did a total of seven books for FantaCo, but three new items plus an expanded reprint of issue 1 just in 1980. Wasn’t that an ambitious schedule?

Yes, looking back on that it was ambitious. If you remember at the time one of the biggest complaints about the independent comics was that they were always late. Fred was fast so we tried to keep up a steady schedule. It worked.

How the heck did you get John Caldwell, who had done work for National Lampoon, to do Mug Shots with FantaCo in 1980?

I hand that miracle off to Kevin Cahill who convinced John to do the first several FantaCons. At each show, John would organize a group drawing by all the guests and then auction it off for charity.
At some point, I think that Kevin mentioned to John that we were publishing and the idea snowballed from there. Unfortunately, we did not lay out the book the way John wanted it and he was quite disappointed. I wish there had been more communication as that book could have been a nice seller in book stores over a long period of time.

In many ways, I was a bit surprised that you had a store primarily focused on comics since you were much more interested in film and music. Were comics a toehold, a recognizable store genre, you used to eventually do what you REALLY wanted to do, such as the horror film books and magazines?

Well, it was, has been, and still is a Catch-22 for me. I started my interest in this specialty market from horror-oriented products: Mars Attacks cards, Famous Monsters, Gary Svehla’s Gore Creatures fanzine, Steve Ditko’s Fantastic Giants comic, Creepy, Eerie, and others. I would always choose a horror comic over a superhero comic. Fantastic Four #19 was the first superhero comic I ever read. Much later in 1968, I bought all the first issues that Marvel was putting out that year- Silver Surfer, Iron Man, Hulk 102, etc., etc. It was then I caught the superhero bug and waited for every issue. It was also when I began buying multiple issues for later resale. So that is my messy answer!!
***
Xerox Ferox, John Szpunar’s forthcoming book, with a cover created by Steve Bissette, will be premiering at FantaCon.

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Photos, taken by Roger Green (top to bottom):
Tom Skulan, 1982 or 1983; founder of FantaCo and FantaCon
Steve Bissette, 1989 FantaCon; contributor to various FantaCo publications, a guest at FantaCon 2013
the late Raoul Vezina, 1982 or 1983; co-creator of Smilin’ Ed comics, FantaCo front of the store guy
Bill Anderson, 1989 FantaCon; contributor to various FantaCo publications, worked at FantaCo, a guest at FantaCon 2013, the guy who scanned all of these pictures and about five dozen more