blogging Archives - Page 12 of 23

Why the 70th birthday; and why did they rig the student election?

“THEY get away with all sorts of crap. Why shouldn’t we?”

Way back in 2012, Uthacleana asked:

What’s this “Turning 70” meme you’re promoting, Roger? Doesn’t anyone just turn 59 anymore?! ;-p

(I should note that he. and I, turned 59 that year.)

I started doing the 70th birthday thing because the Beatles (Ringo and John by then; Paul and George followed) were all turning the big seven-oh. Other folks I admired were heading towards a milestone. I noted at the time too that three score and ten was noted in the Bible as well (Psalm 90:10).

But it occurred to me only recently that it is also a way to keep track of what I’ve written. My buddy Greg complained when I noted Joe Cocker’s birthday, mostly because he doesn’t like Cocker’s voice. (BTW, that’s the beauty of a daily blog; if I write something not of interest today, maybe tomorrow will be more to your liking.)

Greg then suggested I should have noted Cher. But Cher only turned 68 in May. If I HAD written about Cher in 2014, what would I do for 2016? And would I have remembered that I had already done so? This way I have a couple more years to muse on what I’ll write about since I DON’T have much of Cher’s music.

Now there are people who turned 70 before I started the blog – Sophia Loren, Smokey Robinson, for two – so I’ll peg 80, which is mentioned in the same Biblical verse. And there are people I just plan missed, so I might do a 75th natal day, from time to time.

The best answer to “Why 70?” is that it is an organizational tool. One gets a 70th birthday only once, so I’m likely not to repeat myself too much.
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I wrote this post about The crooked student government elections at my undergraduate college, New Paltz in 1974. Dan Van Riper wrote:

Amazing that a college student election would be so blatantly corrupted with repeat voting. This is something you don’t see in real elections, as has become clear with all this rad-righty insistence with voting ID laws and limiting access to voting. So why were the… elections so corrupt, or maybe instead I should ask, why were your fellow students so irresponsible? Any ideas?

A few days later, when I had not replied, he e-mailed me:

Seriously, I want to know why the students at your college voted multiple times. What caused them to do that? You must have heard by now that voter fraud in the real world is virtually non-existent:

“There was not a single identified case of impersonation fraud at the polls – people showing up and pretending to be another voter – meaning that Schultz’s own investigation found no cases at all that would have been prevented with his proposed voter identification law.”

The idea that regular folks the voting process so much that they rarely try to cheat is somewhat counter-intuitive. We have been trained expect our fellow citizens to try and hurt each other selfishly at every opportunity, and here they are not doing so. I’m very interested in your opinion on the matter.

The answer, I’m afraid, is I don’t know, which is why I didn’t respond right away. I do have two competing theories, though:

1) The students really wanted all the parties and concerts that the winning coalition promised. This seems possible, but not likely.

2) The students did it because they could. Understand that there was considerable antipathy towards authority figures after the carnage of the Vietnam war, brought into our homes each night; the slow pace of racial justice, fractured by the deaths of Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy, and others only a few years back; and the government lawlessness that was Watergate, as the House of Representatives considered impeachment of President Nixon.

I think the voter fraud was a statement of nihilism. “THEY get away with all sorts of crap. Why shouldn’t we?” So they messed with The System because The System was corrupt and because they could do it easily.

Oh, I suppose there was a third possibility:

3) They were from Chicago, where the motto was: “Vote early and vote often,” and they were taking the joke seriously.

Almost on the BBC

International code 44 and all that on my message machine.

I had written this blog post on March 28 about the Adagio, attributed to Albinoni, which also appeared in my Times Union blog the same day. On the latter, I received this comment on April 4 at 7:30 a.m.:

Dear Roger,
I’m making a programme for BBC Radio 4, Soul Music about Albinoni’s Adagio. This series looks at those pieces of music that never fail to move us.
I would love to know more about your choir mom.
Please would you be kind enough to email me with your number so we might have a chat.
With many thanks
Lucy

ALSO, I had written this blog post on April 2 about Marvin Gaye, which again appeared in that day’s TU, and generated THIS comment, also on April 4, at 9:02 a.m.:

Hello Roger, Great article. I’m trying to get in touch with you for a radio programme I making- could you drop me a line please and I’ll explain more.
Milly

I wrote to both of them, letting them know that they had both contacted me, and where the posts had first appeared. Milly wrote back: “Yes I work with Lucy- sorry to trouble you twice! Thanks for getting back to me.” I replied, “I’m not ‘bothered’, just surprised!”

Then I received a telephone call from Lucy on April 6. International code 44 and all that on my message machine. Unfortunately, I was not home. I wrote her back the next day, but never heard back, I gather for time/logistical reasons.

I was only slightly disappointed, but then I thought: “I was considered by the BBC. Twice!”

Moreover, both the granddaughter and the daughter-in-law of Arlene Mahigian, my late choir mom, were touched by the piece.

So it’s all good.

Meta: the case of my missing blog

What was MUCH more upsetting was what would not be retrievable: about 170 items in some form of draft, including at least a couple dozen blog posts that were complete, but unpublished.

When I went to the dentist to get a cavity filled back on the morning of Wednesday, April 16, I knew I’d feel pretty crappy afterward, so I took off the whole day. That afternoon, I tried to get rid of an alarming amount of spam – 770 and growing every minute – caught in the Akismet, fortunately. Eventually, though, I couldn’t access my blog at all.

I had suffered an outage earlier in the month; the vendor said it was 18 minutes, but I believe it was longer. The NEW problem, though, was for what turned out to be 15 +/-2 hours. I knew at least a few people noticed that my ABC Wednesday link was not working.

This got me thinking: what if the server never came back up? I wasn’t particularly bothered by the loss of the items I had posted over the last nine years.

The first five years still exist at my old Blogger blog. My current blog exists on the Wayback machine, at least through February 8, 2014. Some of my recent blog posts I posted again on my Times Union blog. There would be loss, but it would be minimal.

What was MUCH more upsetting was what would not be retrievable: about 170 items in some form of draft, including at least a couple dozen blog posts that were complete, but unpublished. THOSE I could NOT get back.

This prompted me to restart my shadow blog at rogerowengreen.wordpress.com. I’d initiated it after I decided to give up my Blogger blog, but it wasn’t as pretty as I thought it’d be. Frankly, I didn’t think I could copy from a WordPress blog to another WP blog, or maybe that wasn’t an option five years ago. I figured out how to copy my entire rogerogreen.com blog to my rogerowengreen WP blog, despite the size maximum for such a transfer having been exceeded. Yay, me!

Now I compose in rogerowengreen WP and then copy it to my main rogerogreen blog. This is a bit of an annoyance, especially when I have to make corrections, but it isn’t as much a pain as trying to recreate a few dozen posts from scratch.

This also addresses the issue of what will happen to my blog when I die. As long as WordPress is allowing for free blogs, I guess it’ll reside there for whatever time we have before the electrical grid goes kablooey.

One last thing: I’m still generating a ton of spam in Akismet, several hundred every day. I used to look at the items in my spam folder when it was a dozen or two daily, but now it’s onerous. So if your comment didn’t make it to my blog – and it’s been years since I’ve blocked one – it probably got caught up in the electronic junkyard.

Blogging revolution #9

I try to let the blogging go, but then the heart will want what it wants.

Nine years of blogging, every day; nine trips around the sun. This is remarkable, or remarkably crazy; the line between the two is paper-thin. There were weeks this past year when I could write only one or two posts. It was almost never out of a lack of content ideas, but rather a lack of time. Then there’d be an outpouring, usually at 4 a.m., when my mind was swimming with the thoughts I wanted to write.

It’s rather like the pushmi-pullyu of Doctor Doolittle, described in Wikipedia as a “‘gazelle-unicorn cross’ which has two heads (one of each) at opposite ends of its body. When it tries to move, both heads try to go in opposite directions.” I just recalled that I had a little plastic pushmi-pullyu when I was in high school, for some obscure reason.

Sometimes I try to let the blogging go, but then the heart will want what it wants. I want/need to communicate, and I feel rather cranky when I have things I want to write but can’t seem to find the opportunity. So the subconscious wakes me in the middle of the night. Regular morning blogging is SO much better for my sleep patterns.

I’ll attempt one more year of daily blogging, and, as I noted last year, I’ll stop. I think I will. Maybe I’ll repost some things I wrote in my first year when no one was reading my blog anyway once or twice a week. Or not. We shall see. But stopping altogether is not an option, and in any case, that’s still 12 months away.

Oh, if you see a typo, feel free to mention it. There was a piece I wrote about the word tittynope last month. Even had a graphic of the word. And yet I typed tittymouse, undoubtedly affected by the word titmouse; fortunately, I caught it before it published. On the other hand, I might get all colloquial sometimes: “And I done so well in high school math” made sense to me, in the context.

Anyway, the obvious from the Beatles white album.

My first Facebook unfriend

I noted that I would be putting my Black History discussion up on this blog, NOT the Times Union newspaper blog. And someone asked me why. I said, “It’s just not a safe place.”

I expected that the first time I would bother to unfriend someone on Facebook would be because of some great, substantial, important issue. And it wasn’t. It was Because Facebook.

I wrote, on Facebook:

FACEBOOK wrote to me:
Why am I not seeing a movie?

If you aren’t seeing A Look Back movie when you visit facebook.com/lookback, it may be because you have not shared very many things on Facebook. Depending on how long you’ve been on Facebook and how much you’ve shared, you’ll see a movie, a collection of photos or a thank you card. (I have pics.) I am SO NOT disappointed.

And someone, who I friended, because she is a friend of a friend, wrote:

“And who gives a…”

It occurred to me, at least in Facebook World, maybe some people might have cared, since LOTS of people I knew and weren’t aware, were posting their “movies”, none of which I have actually seen yet. I wanted to explain why I had not. So the response didn’t anger me but annoyed me enough to zap her. It was just negative energy I didn’t want. I thought the CORRECT response to something on FB that was not of interest to one is to ignore it; I do it ALL THE TIME.

Whereas some I DO know passed along this nonsense about Obama having the flag lowered for Whitney Houston, but not for Shirley Temple. (In fact, Republican governor Chris Christie had the flags in New Jersey lowered for Whitney.) Because I had a relationship with him, I asked about it, and he only forwarded it because he was showing how ridiculous it was.
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I gave my Black History Month presentation at church, based on my February 13 blog post, and I noted that I would be putting it up on this blog, NOT the Times Union newspaper blog. And someone asked me why. I said, “It’s just not a safe place.”

I would undoubtedly, get more comments there than here, but a LOT more argumentative comments. I don’t mind discussion, but I loathe rants. And conversations about race almost inevitably turn into rants, usually having nothing to do with the original topic. Or, in the alternative, a twisting of one’s words. No thanks.
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Speaking of rants: OK, not really a rant, but this musician I follow on Facebook wrote:

Why do people take such pleasure in being ahead of me? That car that just HAS to nudge past me as we approach the Thruway tollbooth, that guy whose pace quickens as we both approach the door to Chipotle…are their lives so devoid of triumph that this registers as an accomplishment? Are they banking those eight saved seconds for a rainy day? Or is this some hardwired, ancient simian instinct, a fear that the monkey in front of them will get the last banana?

I so relate. I’ve noticed this when I’m trying to leave the bus and someone’s trying to push past me to get off first, not trying to catch a connecting bus.