Tag: blogging

Sunday Stealing – Let’s Blog about Blogging

alternative facts

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’s meme is swiped from If By Yes, a Canadian blogger who describes herself as a “left-wing left-hander with two left feet.” It’s a shame she doesn’t update her blog anymore. Anyway, she participated in a meme that she tells us was popular way back when.

About Blogging

1. When are you at your blogging best – a.m. or p.m.?

Absolutely in the morning. At some level, if I have an idea about a post, I sleep on it, and often I have at least an approach mapped out in the morning. The only time I work on the blog after about noon is doing something mechanical, such as adding links to articles and music posts.

2. How many blogs do you have? Please include the links in your answer.

This is it, at least publicly. The rogerogreen.com blog content morphed from the rogerowengreen.blogspot.com on May 2, 2010. The old content from those first five years is here, but not all comments have been moved, so there’s that. My old work is defunct, as are a bunch of others I’ve participated in. I had a blog on the Albany Times Union from 2008 to 2021, but that ended; the content is uploaded here.  

The rest is silence

3. Do you prefer silence when you compose your posts and write your comments?

Absolutely not. I write to music, and it doesn’t matter if it has words or not. I am listening to Rossiniana by Ottorino Respighi, which Kelly posted. But usually, I listen to compact discs of artists whose birthdays are in the current month, such as John Hiatt, Joe Strummer (The Clash), and Robert Plant (Led Zeppelin). Indeed, I can’t do very much without music. I use it when I’m cleaning or filing.

Conversely, I can’t listen to talk, such as the NPR news shows my wife likes to listen to. Sidebar: I’m very sad/angry about the death of the CPB— the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

4. What’s the grossest thing you’ve ever spilled on your keyboard?

Probably Diet Coke.

What’s the use of getting sober…

5. Ever posted while intoxicated?

I don’t generally write on Facebook immediately. I might write a blog post and then post that, but that requires time, thought, and a cooling-down period. The only immediate things I have posted on FB and BlueSky lately are public service announcements about accidents and severe weather.  

I don’t even post immediately when ticked off, but let the thoughts simmer. These recent examples bother me as a librarian because they are not fact-based decisions. The FBI redacted djt’s name from several references in the newly released Jeffrey Epstein files. The Smithsonian said it restored a display to an earlier version, which notes that “only three presidents have seriously faced removal.” djt accused the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), Erika McEntarfer, of faking jobs numbers, directing his team to fire the former President Biden appointee. These are, to quote a former White House staffer, “alternative facts,” which are bad for democracy.

But see how c-c-c-alm-m-m-m I am? And sober. 

 Thank you for playing! Please come back next week.

My wife was reading my blog

a whoa moment

Much to my surprise, my wife was reading my blog. She mentioned to me in last week of June, she perused the post about our daughter coming back from South Africa, and also the next one.

Then, on Saturday morning, June 28th, I heard music from her office.  Usually, if she has any audio entertainment, it’s either talk from NPR or classical music, but this was distinctly not that. No, she was listening to links from my post about the #1 country songs in 1955. This is fascinating because I’ve been writing for two decades, and that hasn’t always been the case.

I remember the days when we would visit my friend Fred Hembeck and his wife and child. Fred and I would talk about things we had in our blogs. My wife is trying to understand what we were talking about. 

FGH

In fact, I wrote about it here in 2008: Fred, “our wives and I also had a philosophical conversation about blogging. My wife chastised me for saying that she should look at my blog, rather than me having to explain what I had written. I noted that it isn’t just the information in the blog that I was trying to convey, but the style and manner in which I said it.” Ultimately, I resigned myself to making inadequate bullet points if she asked.

She intellectually knew that I always wrote about her on her birthday and our anniversary, and occasionally on Mother’s Day, though our anniversary and Mother’s Day are very close together. 

Now she’s reading the blog, at least sometimes.  I’d taken it as a matter of faith that she’s not reading it, so the change is a whoa moment.

Anyway, today is her birthday. She’s taken off work for the summer, though I know at least a few work-related calls. This means that all things she can’t get done during the rest of the year are going on. My wife had to go through that stuff after her mother moved from one retirement facility to another, smaller location. 

Things are already better. She’s cleared off the dining room table of the material that had been there since we filed our taxes in April. (Why didn’t I put it away? Because our filing systems are mutually confounding.) She probably has more projects to do than time to do them in the next four weeks, but she’ll use the time well—she likes morning walks—and I’m sure I will be enlisted to work on many of those projects.

Happy birthday, dear. I love you.

Where does the blog go?

repost

Where does the blog go? Some say, “I really like that piece” or “I don’t enjoy that post.” I’ve never thought my blog could be fairly represented in a given blog post or even a handful, but rather the body of work.

Somebody tells me that they like the music or hate the quiz; that’s fine, I shrug. I have zero capacity for writing to the audience, except when they Ask Roger Anything. I write what I need to write.

In Februarys in the recent past, I haven’t spent much time writing about Black History Month. But, oddly enough, even though I didn’t announce as such, I probably wrote more about the topic in 2025. It was, maybe subconsciously, a reaction to the reactionary anti-DEI nonsense.

In fact, I would just as soon never write about race or politics at all, a strange thing, I suppose, for a political science major. Unfortunately, politics define the allocation of precious resources. When the political leadership is… let’s say problematic… not saying something suggests my agreement with the status quo.
Process
I’d be in real trouble if I had to look at a blank screen without knowing what I was going for. This is why I tend to lean into events: my birthday, family birthdays, anniversaries, and major holidays. That’s about 20 posts each year.

I also tend to want to do a musical piece once a week. In 2025, I will write at least one post a month for the years ending in five in the 20th century. The R&B and country charts also started in the 1940s, and the adult contemporary chart in the ’60s. So that’s a total of 28 posts. Let’s add at least 4 Christmas music posts. I throw in a few Ask Roger Anything, plus linkage, and that’s another 28 posts. All I have to do is figure out what the other 285 will be:  easy peasy, right?

I’m trying to figure out how to continue the blog. Certain posts I can write quicker than others, and I can free-associate on quizzes. The music pieces need links, and opinion pieces require links to verifiable sources.

One thing that occurred to me is that I will need to write shorter pieces and maybe even use some graphics, as The Post. This violates my self-imposed rule of at least 300 words, but I need more time to work on The Project.

I might want to make a few more deliberate attempts at having a repost of a couple of items each month or so. It’s not that I’ve never done a repost before. I reposted information about being in JEOPARDY and the derivation of the word lunaversary.

I always tackle Emmett Till quinquennially. The interesting thing about Emmett, whose death was 70 years ago this year, is that there’s always new information about the event or a greater understanding of how it played out.
I repeat myself when under stress.
There are a few pieces I want to, at least one in May, because when I first started blogging on the Blogger/blogspot platform, I didn’t know how to do pictures or graphics. Yeah, there was this software – I think it was called Picasa – and I followed the instructions, but could not get the images to work regularly. So a lot of my early posts don’t have graphics at all. I was also unaware of things such as SEO. I need page breaks and descriptors. The truth is that I don’t care much about that stuff, but it’s probably good blog hygiene, whatever that means.

Writing about the daughter has gotten a bit harder because I’m trying to figure out the line between telling an interesting story and her privacy. I desire not to embarrass her too much, but I have to bug her a little because it’s the joy of parenting. I had a lot of pictures of her early on, but I haven’t used a contemporary image of her for more than a decade.

20 years a blogger

over 7,300 days

20 years a blogger. Am I out of my mind? Quite possibly. For two decades, every day, I have posted something on this blog or its predecessor, which is now included in this blog.

For a while, it made sense to me to try to get my thoughts down. But now, it’s become a bit of a sport. Can I keep doing this, and should I?

It was 20 years ago today.

The first Monday in May

I decided to start a blog

Stumbled into going whole hog

I’ve told how I started blogging before, but it’s anniversary time, so I can share it again. Back in September 2004, I ran into my friend Rocco Nigro. He says to me, “Are you following Fred’s blog?” Fred is Fred Hembeck of comic book fame but not that much fortune.

I said I didn’t know Fred had a blog, and I had never read anybody else’s blog, so the answer was No. I started reading it from the beginning on New Year’s Eve 2002 to the then-current day. As he went on, Fred used to write very long posts daily. I liked it.

I commented to Fred about things in his blog and started contributing ideas after a while. Specifically, I remember that I told him that Herb Alpert of the Tijuana Brass fame and A&M Records was going to have a 70th birthday at the end of March of 2005, so he wrote about that.

Steve Gerber

I was taken by the initial blog post by Steve Gerber, a Marvel comic book writer who scripted The Defenders and Man-Thing. As I noted early on, he posted on April 4, 2005: “I make my living as a writer. There is only one characteristic that distinguishes writers from non-writers: writers write.

“(That’s why there’s no such thing as an ‘aspiring writer.’ A writer can aspire to sell or publish, but only non-writers aspire to write.) Anyway, writing for a living requires writing every day. Writing every day requires discipline. Discipline requires enforcement.

“I’ve lost the habit of writing every day. I need discipline. I need enforcement. You’re looking at it.

“I intend to post something on this blog every day. If I fail to do so, that failure will be very public, and I’ll be embarrassed by it. I don’t enjoy being embarrassed. So maybe, just maybe, making this obligation will help transform me into a habitual writer again.”

Looking back at this, the peculiar thing is that I didn’t necessarily fancy myself a “writer,” but I did need to write to make sense of the world. So I started writing a blog post, and then I wrote another one.

Logistics

At the beginning of May 2005, there was a bit of pain in the neck. Unless I misunderstood the technology, I couldn’t save a blog post for the first three years to publish the next day when I was on Blogger/Blogspot. Specifically, I was at a work conference in Lake Placid, NY, and I did not have Internet access at the hotel. So I would run down to the public library, write a blog post at lunchtime, post it, and then run back to the conference. This was when I could run. What a chore.

Why?

As I noted, there were two reasons I started writing a blog. I was on this TV show called JEOPARDY; the episodes were recorded in September 1998 and broadcast on November 9th and 10th. I realized that if I didn’t write this down soon, I would totally forget the experience. I documented what I could recall about 6 1/2 years after the fact.

Again, as I noted, the other thing was that my daughter was born in 2004. We had one of those books that cues you to note when her first tooth comes in or when she takes her first step or the like. I had every intention of doing so, but I failed miserably, so I decided to write about my daughter on the 26th of every month, and for 20 years, I have kept that.

I really liked some of the blog posts I wrote for ABC Wednesday, which was initially started by a woman named Denise Nesbitt. One would write based on an alphabetical cue. I did that for about 7 years, once a week; I even ran it for a time.

One of my favorite series of posts was an alphabetical tour of all the groups with some family ties, like the Wilson brothers of The Beach Boys or the Wilson sisters of Heart. I managed to get every letter except two; one I couldn’t find was Q for quirky (ABBA). But I did find the one for X, which was for the group X with John Doe and Exene Cervenka, who used to be married.

In some cases, I find that things I’ve written have triggered people’s interest long after I’ve written them, many of which are about genealogy. So, I guess I’ll keep doing this for a while.

Hey 19: that’s Roger’s blog years

in my not so humble opinion

Hey 19?! It seems unbelievable to write, but this is the 19th anniversary of my blogging for Ramblin’ with Roger. And I’ve posted daily, which is insane. Or I’m insane.

I’ve noted in the past how I started blogging. However, I may not have written why I keep on writing. It’s all about Aristotle. And  Socrates. Of course.

Per this article: “Aristotle writes, ‘It is owing to their wonder that people both now begin and at first began to philosophize.” Philosophy and psychoanalysis alike began in wonder, wonder about the nature of reality and being, about the self, about knowledge, and about the meaning of our experiences.'”

That’s an excellent way of putting, “I’m just trying to figure it out.” The more I do it, the more it’s satisfying. I might list some songs that were hits in a given year, which you could find elsewhere. So, I try to explain why I think those songs captured the public attention and are interesting, weird, or disquieting. 

“Socrates famously said, ‘The unexamined life is not worth living.’ Both psychoanalysts and philosophers are committed to examining and giving meaning to human experiences. By keeping a sense of wonder alive, we are all engaged in thinking about how we might live and what makes life worth living.”

Keep learning

I come to an issue with my history and my biases. But I try to leave room for the possibility that there is another way to think about a topic. At the turn of the past millennium, I worried that perhaps Black History Month, which sometimes became hoary recitations about Rosa Parks and  MLK, Jr., was not all that interesting.

But a quarter century ago, I didn’t know about Tulsa or Wilmington or the Red Summer. Or pilot Bessie Coleman,  the women in Hidden Figures, or half the people on this list.  So, the movement to stifle people learning about this history because someone might feel bad about racism confounds me. (One is SUPPOSED to feel bad about racism, IMNSHO.)

To some degree, I see this in a theological light. There’s something called the liturgy, which the church gets through a portion of the Bible every three years. The idea is that you’ll hear scripture from 36 months earlier and, because of your lived experiences, perceive it in a new way. “Love your neighbor as yourself” might mean your friends and family in one reading, but you might cast a wider net in a subsequent perusal.

Returning to some mythical “good old days” is unappealing. Maybe you want the US in 1984 when the country won many medals at the Summer Olympics in Los Angeles (because the Soviet bloc boycotted in response to the West’s refusal to participate in Moscow in 1980.) But would you want to go back to 1984 technology?

Writing this blog is an education to me. I hope it’s of some use to you as well, at now and then.

A Steely Dan song

Ramblin' with Roger
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