blog Archives - Ramblin' with Roger

My blog can drink legally in every state

Dustbury, ABC Wednesday, Forgotten Stars, AmeriNZ

My blog is so old that it can drink legally in every state. So I decided to credit (or blame) 21 people (more or less) who facilitated that. Some I’ve mentioned before.

Won – Rocco, my friend and fellow employee of the comic book store, ran into me in the autumn of 2004. He asked me, “Are you reading Fred’s blog?” I said, “I don’t read ANY blogs.”

Too – So I started reading the blog of Fred Hembeck, the somewhat famous cartoonist with Marvel, DC, FantaCo, et al., which had started in January 2003. He wrote every day, or nearly every day, and he wrote a LOT. Eventually, I started emailing him with ideas for his posts. I know he noted Herb Alpert’s 70th birthday at the end of March 2005, and he credited me.

Tree – Mark Evanier, the guy who was an assistant to Jack Kirby, wrote cartoon shows, and a bunch of other things, appeared on Fred’s extensive linkage page. ME wrote a LOT, though not nearly at the word count of FGH.

For – I don’t know if I came to Steve Gerber (d. 2008) via Hembeck or Evanier. In any case, his pledge to write every day, which he stuck to until he got sick, was the final push to get to start my own blog.

Fie! -When I first started blogging, I was also looking at a number of blogs from Fred’s roster. A fair number of the bloggers seemed to be somehow connected to one Chris (Lefty) Brown. I got involved with a mixed tape exchange, OK, mixed CDs. The group included Eddie Mitchell, SamuraiFrog, Thom Wade, Johnny Bacardi, Mike Sterling, and others, including…

Cease – Greg Burgas, who still writes about his current consumption of pop culture, as well as My Daughter Chronicles.

The game show

Sen – So what would I write about? One of the topics, I suppose, needed to be about JEOPARDY, the game show I appeared on in November 1998. Six and a half years later, I figured I had better write about it soon. So I’ll attribute this angle to Adenia Yates (1908-1966), my mother’s maternal aunt, whom I would see at lunchtime each weekday. She turned me onto the game. I suppose Merv Griffin and his then-wife, Julann, who designed the game’s format, Art Fleming, and Alex Trebek, should get a piece of the credit.

Ate – As I admitted repeatedly here, my wife and I got one or two of those baby books, in which one is SUPPOSED to write down all of those milestones (first step, first tooth, etc.) that the Daughter reached. Well, I SUCKED at this. So I vowed to write about her every month on the 26th. And I have.

Nein – Ken Levine was a writer on TV shows I used to watch, such as MASH, CHEERS, FRASIER, THE SIMPSONS, and DHARMA & GREG. He started his blog shortly after I did. He would solicit Friday questions. I’d ask some, and he answered most of them. He eventually started a podcast. At some point, he stopped blogging and limited his posts to podcasts. Those ended in 2023. You can find the blog – though not the audio for the podcasts – here.

The Times Onion

Tin – In the late 1990s, Mike Huber was involved with these community webpages, housed on the Times Union website. Then he was in charge of the community bloggers on the TU site. Since I was posting every day, he wanted me on the TU blog farm. I resisted for a couple of years, but in 2008, I relented. I wrote about that experience here; the TU community blogs died in 2021.

Leaven- One of the TU bloggers was Chuck Miller. He’s also an everyday writer. After he left the TU blog farms, he has lifted up other local (or local-adjacent) bloggers every Saturday

Too well – J. Eric Smith, once a TU blogger, is now in Arizona but still on Chuck’s roster. Among other topics, Eric writes a lot about music and film. He mentioned me kindly a couple of times.

Thirsty -Charles Hill, a/k/a Dustbury, was a legendary blogger from 1996(!) until he died in 2019. He commented on my blog almost daily, and I enjoyed the interaction. I’m extremely sad that his stuff wasn’t captured by the Internet Archive. I still follow my fellow Dustbury acolyte, fillyjonk.

Every week

Fortran – I came across one of those groups, an abecedarian meme called ABC Wednesday, where one participates with others, literally from around the world, in sharing a picture, a poem, an essay, SOMETHING with the various letters of the alphabet. It was run by Denise Nesbitt. My first post there was in October 2008 in Round 3, letter K. By the end of Round 5, I was assisting her. And from July 2012 to July 2017, I ran the thing, assisted ably by Leslie from British Columbia and others. Then, from that date until the end of 2019, I helped Melody.

Iffy- Arthur Schenck. I found AmeriNZ, a blog and podcast by a US expat now in New Zealand, via the demographically similar Nik Dirga. (How I found Nik, I have no idea.) Anyway, I’d comment on Arthur’s platform and steal, er, borrow ideas.

Cistern – I didn’t even know what a Byzantium Shores was, but I started following Kelly Sedinger regularly. Even my wife, who doesn’t read these things, knows that Kelly is the overalls guy from the Buffalo area. He moved the site to Forgotten Stars about five years ago. He’s a real writer who’s published books! HE’s a budding photographer! But he STILL hasn’t done a pie to the face in far too long.

Severed teen -Alan David Doane was one of those FantaCo kids whom I really got to know when he was an adult. Among many things, he convinced me that I could write about comic books on a now-defunct platform. It was challenging and fun!

Irwin Corey’s brother-in-law (really)

Ate teen – Arnold Berman was a kind of relative. Charlotte, one of his sisters, married my maternal grandmother’s brother, Ernie. Arnold’s fascination with his genealogy has made me more interested in mine, which has become a recurring theme on my blog. He died a couple of years ago.

Nein teen -Ken Screven – The legendary CBS 6 (WRBG-TV) newsman was a TU blogger after he retired. He turned out to be more pointed than he was on the air, which probably influenced me to be a little more direct in my opinions. He died in 2022, and I miss him.

Too Auntie – Steve Bissette, the great artist of Swamp Thing and a whole lot of other stuff, met at FantaCo in 1987, I believe. He was doing some horror art, and I did, among other things, the mail order and shipped out items he helped create. We fell out of touch, but reconnected when I found his blog in 2008, which I wrote about here.

Too Auntie One – Amy Barlow Liberatore is Sharp Little Pencil, a blogger from near my hometown of Binghamton, NY.

Sunday Stealing — Rise and Shine!

“Snap, what a happy sound.”

Welcome to Sunday Stealing. Here we will steal all types of questions from every corner of the blogosphere. Our promise to you is that we will work hard to find the most interesting and intelligent questions. Cheers to all of us thieves!

This week we once again turn to husband-and-wife bloggers, Jeff and Charli, who are getting our week started with a meme inspired by one they stole from Jennine.

Morning Meme: Rise and Shine!

1) What do you typically have for breakfast?

Usually, I get up and make oatmeal while my wife is showering. She comes down and we eat. The trick is that each of us has our own milk; I have 1%, my wife has almond milk, and if our daughter joins us, she has oat milk, though she is often on a different sleep schedule. It’s sometimes difficult to keep track of because when I buy the almond milk from one store, the packaging is of a specific color scheme, and when my wife buys it from another store, it’s totally different. I only remember that almond milk is for my wife because her middle initial is A.

Cereal killer

2) What was your favorite breakfast cereal when you were a kid?

I liked several pre-sweetened cereals, such as Froot Loops, Sugar Smacks, which they now call Honey Smacks, and Alpha Bits. But we also had Shredded Wheat, Wheaties (Breakfast of Champions), Cheerios, and Rice Krispies, which had the best theme song. I wrote here in 2006: “Personally, I like to mix my non-presweetened cereals. They must differ by grain and by shape.” In 2012, I noted my favorite cereals, but ate very few of them by then. I own Kellogg’s cereal bowls.

3) Orange juice, tomato juice, or cranberry juice?

Actually, my favorite thing is a mix of half orange juice and half cranberry juice. It makes the cranberry juice less tart and the orange juice less ordinary. I blend a lot of foods.

4) What time is your alarm clock set for?

I don’t use an alarm clock. That’s the whole idea behind being retired. Unfortunately, my wife sometimes uses an alarm clock.. It can be set for as early as six or as late as seven. Usually, I get up when she does. Sometimes, after she goes to work, I go back to bed.

Morning Has Broken

5) Do you have any tips for preventing stress and making the morning go more smoothly?

The morning goes most smoothly when I wake up before my wife does. I post my blog to Facebook and BlueSky and then start writing something. If my wife goes for a walk, I’ll work on a blog post. But if she’s in a hurry and must shower right away, I’ll make breakfast. Then she’ll go to work, and I’ll finish writing the blog post.

Writing in the morning is much better than any other time of the day, and it makes my morning much better when I feel like I can check something off my list. I also like to read the paper first thing in the morning, although sometimes they pile up, and I don’t get to them until three or four days later. It doesn’t take long to read. I also tend to empty the dishwasher in the morning while waiting for the oatmeal water to boil, and then reload the dishwasher after breakfast.

Thank you for playing! Please come back next week.

Manic depression

backyard

I’ve been experiencing what they used to call manic depression. My highs can be really high and often unexpected. But my lows might be rage-fueled tantrums.

In music, which I’ve listened to dozens of times before, I’m often struck by how emotional I will get. Familiar pieces can bring me extraordinary joy – or great contemplation. An example of the former: The Concerto in F by George Gershwin is a recently heard example.

This tale of a memorial service brought me familiar recognition.

Here’s a wonderful bio piece about first niece Rebecca Jade for a concert she performed last week.

I loved the clue on a recent JEOPARDY so much that I stopped the recording – I watch almost nothing in real time – to point it out to my wife. 3 CONSONANTS IN A ROW, $800. “The comical coinage aibohphobia describes the fear of this type of word.” What is palindromes? I should have gotten it because it was used before, in 1999. PALINDROMES, $1000. “The whimsical coinage ‘aibohphobia’ means this.” What is fear of palindromes? It was a triple stumper both times.

I am bemused and more than slightly amused by how much the Jeffrey Epstein issue is the hill that MAGA people are willing to die on. Besides knowing that Epstein was dreadful, I’ve thought of nothing about him. Given all the other things happening in the country, he took no space in my brain.

Won’t get fooled again

I got an e-mail from what purported to be the company that hosts my blog saying that the payment didn’t go through. Given my technological difficulties a few weeks ago, this was a reasonably possible situation. So I went to the login page, but it wasn’t my provider’s URL, though it looked like their page. I contacted my provider, and they asked me to resend them visuals, as I must not have properly understood. So it was with GREAT JOY when they indicated they’d gotten enough complaints on this topic from others that I didn’t need to send them anything else—something off my plate.

Our backyard has a shed that holds our bicycles, lawn chairs, grill, etc. We could no longer lock it because some gophers or other rodents had undermined the shed’s base. This was a great concern because there’s a neighbor boy about 12 who would wander into our backyard; our next-door neighbor came to our house to express concern about the kid. We started putting cinder blocks in front of our yard gate, but that’s suboptimal. So I was pleased when one day we came home and suddenly the shed door locked; it must have been our contractor, whom we had contacted several days earlier. It gave me a sense of real joy.

Conversely

The news in the country made me not just disappointed but furious, enraged. No recent story ticked me off more than ICE being able to access information from CMS about 79 million Medicaid users, including home addresses and ethnicities, information being passed along so that they could “root out fraud.” It infuriated me so much that – and my wife can verify – I was spewing invectives to no one in particular. “Don’t those F***ing SOBs know about HIPAA privacy laws? Their ethnic bigotry knows no end!”

Then I read about the US Secretary of State’s plan to burn 500 metric tons of emergency food aid that had “expired” because the State Department failed to distribute it when it took over USAID.

The EPA says it will eliminate its scientific research arm and “begin firing hundreds of chemists, biologists, toxicologists, and other scientists, after denying for months that it intended to do so.”

And this, on top of the other crappy things, such as Congress codifying the cuts of previously allocated funds to PBS and NPR, and authorizing health cuts that would have prevented people from dying, really broiled me. Oh, former criminals need more access to guns!

It is a ‘State of Emergency’ for Civil Rights.

Me, me, me

You may have seen David Brooks share Alistair McIntyre’s explanation of FOTUS in The Atlantic magazine: He “doesn’t even try to speak the language of morality. When he pardons unrepentant sleazeballs, it doesn’t seem to even occur to him that he is doing something that weakens our shared moral norms. [He] speaks the languages we moderns can understand. The language of preference: I want. The language of power: I have the leverage. The languages of self, of gain, of acquisition. [FOTUS] doesn’t subsume himself in a social role. He doesn’t try to live up to the standards of excellence inherent in a social practice. He treats even the presidency itself as a piece of personal property he can use to get what he wants. As the political theorist Yuval Levin has observed, there are a lot of people, and [FOTUS] is one of them, who don’t seek to be formed by the institutions they enter. They seek instead to use those institutions as a stage to perform on, to display their wonderful selves.”

And it makes me think of less than charitable thoughts… So, some joy, some rage. The rage turns into the melancholy of One More Damn Thing.

Song

August rambling: unchallenged

new Red Cross guidelines

Voters in Ohio reject GOP-backed proposal that would have made it tougher to protect abortion rights. Poor Mike Huckabee complains that “the secular progressive left.. got one step closer to bypassing the legislative process and overturning pro-life, pro-family, and pro-God policies passed by duly elected representatives of the people.”

The Evidence Against djt is Unchallenged. Here are the latest indictments (well latest before Georgia…)

The Heritage Foundation’s scary Mandate for Leadership 2025 will likely be a handbook for the next Republican administration.

Barbados, American Slavery, and Racism

How a Grad Student Uncovered the Largest Known Slave Auction in the U.S

The Black History of the Montgomery Brawl Folding Chair

Fishing While Black

White Mom Accused of Trafficking Biracial Daughter Sues Southwest: Based on a ‘Racist Assumption’

Global child sexual abuse probe that was launched after two FBI agents were killed led to almost 100 arrests

A Hollywood Insurrectionist’s Path to Extremism

A Pathogen Too Far: How the 1918 Pandemic Revolutionized Virology

On August 7, 2023, the American Red Cross implemented the FDA’s updated final guidance regarding an individual donor assessment for all blood donors regardless of gender or sexual orientation. This change eliminated previous FDA eligibility criteria based on sexual orientation. Here’s a Blood Donation Map.

New Buffalo Bills stadium cost overruns approaching $300M, AP sources say

The Biggest Weirdest Telescope We’ve Ever Built – Hank Green

I Would Rather See My Books Get Pirated Than This (Or: Why Goodreads and Amazon Are Becoming Dumpster Fires)

There Will Never Be Another Second Life

Library staff closes the book on the missing money mystery after a patron leaves $1,200 in a novel she returned.

William Friedkin, Acclaimed Director of ‘The French Connection’ and ‘The Exorcist,’ Dies at 87. I’m pretty sure I saw The French Connection in Poughkeepsie.

Arthur Schmidt Oscar-Winning Film Editor on ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit’ and ‘Forrest Gump,’ [and a bunch of other noted films], Dies at 86

Paul Reubens, Comic Behind the Madcap Pee-wee Herman, Dies at 70

Robbie Robertson, 80, Dies; Canadian Songwriter Captured American Spirit

Rodriguez, Musician, and Subject of ‘Searching for Sugar Man,’ Dies at 81

A review of emo songs

Now I Know: The Woman Who Found Herself and An Odd Way to Celebrate Valentine’s Day and Christmas in August, Wisconsin Edition and How Atomic Bombs Blew Up the Counterfeit Art World and How Photography Stopped Disney’s Rollercoaster In Its Tracks and The Triple-X Law Firm

The blog was down

My blog was down for a couple of hours on the evening of August 3. I have this program called Jetpack that lets me know. This wasn’t very pleasant, but whatever. What made me someone crazy is that it went down at least four more times in the next three hours, anywhere between three and twenty minutes.

Then it was down for seven hours on the morning of August 12. Though I have the info backed up, it made me cranky. Should I be looking at other companies, and if so, which ones?

MUSIC

Somewhere Down The Crazy River – Robbie Robertson

The Weight – Featuring Ringo Starr and Robbie Robertson | Playing For Change

Gambia – Sona Jobarteh

Rock N Roll Heart – Lucinda Williams

In Your Love – Tyler Childers

Coverville 1452: Cover Stories for Robert Cray, Rush and A Flock of Seagulls and 1453: The Gamble & Huff Cover Story

Overture to a suite of incidental music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream by Mendelssohn

The Wizard and I – Ariana DeBose

Overture to The Magic Flute by Mozart

She Loves You – MonaLisa Twins

Having a green website

Website Carbon Calculator

I received an email this month from Yoast about having a green website. No, we’re NOT talking about my surname. I only vaguely knew that a green website was a thing.

“Did you know the tech industry is responsible for nearly 4% of global CO2 emissions? That’s similar to the travel industry! Shockingly enough, this number is only growing. It’s time to take action and reduce our ecological footprint. Luckily, there are some things you can do to make your website greener!”

The article notes that you can save energy by blocking bad bots. GameSpot, a news site about video games, produced the most significant amount of CO2. Conversely, “the cleanest and greenest: Google. They only produce 5,480 grams per year. Which isn’t surprising when you consider their net-zero target in 2030. Google’s sustainability efforts range from machine learning to help cool data centers to smart thermostats that conserve home energy.”

Whole Grain Digital offers 20 ways to make your website more energy efficient. Among the suggestions are SEO, choosing fonts carefully, and reducing images and videos.

Calculating carbon

Yoast pointed to a Website Carbon Calculator. I nervously put in my URL. “Hurrah! This web page is cleaner than 90% of web pages tested.” I’m not sure exactly what I’m doing correctly other than using YouTube links instead of videos. It’s probably primarily my provider’s doing. DreamHost is #3 on Sustainable Business Toolkit’s best green web hosting.

I checked out some of my blogging colleagues. Sharp Little Pencil from Amy was 88% cleaner. The blog of Chuck Miller was 85% cleaner. Diana De Avila, whose site is quite graphically intense, is 65% cleaner. Dan’s largely abandoned albanyweblog is 63% cleaner. Forgotten Stars, the site of Kelly Sedinger, was 60% cleaner.

Some of the other ones I checked fared less well. My most recent employer’s report: “Uh oh! This web page is dirtier than 69% of web pages tested.” Census.gov is 81% dirtier.

Hmm. I still have my old Blogspot site, which I used for my first five years. “Hurrah! This web page is cleaner than 55% of web pages tested, ” same as Albany Public Library, coincidentally.

Flooding

The website 1440 reported, “South Florida was hit by heavy rainfall [recently], causing widespread flooding and shutting down schools and the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport. Fort Lauderdale recorded a once-in-1,000-year rainfall of 20 inches [50.8 cm] within six hours. The city’s 24-hour total of 25.9 inches [65.8 cm] set a record for the rainiest 24 hours in the state’s recorded history.

“The floods come as extreme rainfall events are becoming more common worldwide. Experts say for every 1.8-degree increase in global temperature, the amount of atmospheric moisture increases by 6%-7%, resulting in more intense and frequent precipitation (see more on the Clausius-Clapeyron equation).”

Whatever we can do to stem the tide of global warming is vital.