The Baker’s Meme

Lobster for breakfast, banana split for lunch…

From Sunday Stealing. I thought there would be something about food prep, or at least 13 questions (a baker’s dozen.) Nah, it’s named after someone named Baker.

1. If you could interview anyone on your blog (alive or dead) who would you chose and why?

Thomas Edison. I’d be interested to find out what he thought about how his innovations in illumination, music, and film have evolved.

2. What do you feel is your strength as a blogger?

Dogged consistency. 5 years and 9 months, every day. Of course, some of the posts are ones like this one, but as Elwood Blues once said, “What do want for nothin’, rrrrrrrubber bisCUITS?”

3. Can you share a little bit about yourself that you have not already mentioned on your blog?

It becomes more and more difficult. Either I already did, or I don’t want to. Or I forgot about it. Or it’s not worth mentioning – my great crush on my 12th grade English teacher, who was out of college only a year or two – yawn. Or, it’s not time yet. I’m already thinking about my blog for 2012, and there will be four posts (in February, May, August, and October) about things that happened in 1972, 40 years earlier. I COULD tell you now, but what fun would THAT be?

4. If you were forced to change the name of your blog, what would you change it to? Why?

I Am Not Ashton Kutcher. Because I’m not.

5. What do you think is the most fulfilling part of being a blogger?

Meeting all sorts of wonderful people, and a couple of weirdos to boot. Sharing with my actual friends that I’ve met my thinking process.

6. What would you do with your last day if you found you had only one more day to live?

Actually, thought about this a lot. Lobster for breakfast, banana split for lunch, write a bunch of codicils for friends to read later, spinach lasagna for dinner, and skydiving for dessert.

7. You’ve been doing medical research for decades and have finally found a cure. What was it that you found a cure for and why did you choose this particular ailment?

My father died of prostate cancer. My brother-in-law died of colon cancer. One of those.

8. What is your most guilty pleasure?

Guilt is highly overrated, and I don’t buy into the premise. But even assuming that, according to some arbiters of taste, there is some music I shouldn’t listen to, a TV show I shouldn’t be watching, book or magazine I shouldn’t be reading, because it’s not cool, I don’t have time to read about what I shouldn’t be doing.

9. Answer only one. What is your favorite book, movie, or TV show?

The Billboard Albums – endless entertainment with obscure pop music info.
Annie Hall, over West Side Story, which is a lesser movie but has great music. The Dick Van Dyke Show, over The Twilight Zone – gotta go with series over anthology.

10. What do you think is the very best smell in the world? The one smell that can take you back to a time and place of a very vivid memory in your past?

Baking bread, which my grandmother used to do.

And I get to experience that same smell two or three times a month in front of the building where I currently work. I assume it’s from the Freihoffer bakery a couple of miles away, so the wind must be blowing just right. And I never know WHEN I’ll smell it, coming to work or at the end of the day; it’s always a glorious surprise.

HA! I made it about baking after all!

Roger Answers Your Questions, Demeur, Anthony, Gordon, Scott, ChrisJ, and Dorothy

What would I teach? The problem is that I know a little about a lot of things, but I’m too ADHD to do anything at the level of depth that I would require of myself.

I’ve managed to confound ChrisJ of Flamblogger, one of those ABC Wednesday bloggers:
My question to you is actually highly personal to me. Where did the name “The Lydster” come from for your blog? Also, is it the name of your blog? I’m confused. My maiden name was Lidster, highly unusual for over here, though as I understand it, there are plenty of Lidsters in Northumberland. But we know next to nothing about that side of the family.
Just wondering.

The Lydster is what I call my daughter Lydia in this blog, just as my family used to call my eldest niece Becky the Beckster.
No, the name of my blog, for good or ill, is Ramblin’ with Roger.
***
Near-twin Gordon from Blog This, Pal! wants to know:
Since I know you’re a big Rod Serling fan (like I am), wanted to ask you this question:
Are you a fan of NIGHT GALLERY? If so, is there a particular script of Serling’s from that show that you enjoy?
(Knowing what I know about NG – that Serling had no creative control – I thought his scripts were OK, but nothing to write home about. Except maybe THEY’RE TEARING DOWN TIM RILEY’S BAR)

Gordon, I may not have watched most of the episodes of Night Gallery, except perhaps the earliest ones. The second season was my freshman year in college and I didn’t have a TV. By the time I DID look in on it, in that third season, I found it wildly uneven. Moreover, I knew that Serling wasn’t happy with it, so, almost in solidarity with him, I just quit watching it altogether. In any case, I haven’t seen any shows since, and unlike episodes of the Twilight Zone that I saw but once yet still remember, no specific episode ever imprinted on me. I mean, I look at the synopses and say, “Oh, yeah, right.” But not like I would with other shows of that era.
***
Scott of the Scooter Chronicles, who has more in common with me than he possibly knows, inquires:
Since you mentioned the choir, and I haven’t seen you mention it, what part do you normally sing?

I normally sing baritone. This is to say that if there is a divided bass part, I sing the upper part. Occasionally, when there is a divided tenor part, and I sing the lower bits.

I am reminded of this tenor section leader we had at my old church. His name was Sandy Cohen, and he was a great guy. But he wasn’t a particularly healthy guy. He had a heart attack during service once, and he refused to leave until the service was over, because he had to “finish the gig”, his words. Well, on December 24, 1990, we were at a choir gathering prior to the midnight service, and we got a call that Sandy had had a fatal heart attack. Talk about awful. For a few months after that, I sang tenor until we got another tenor section leader.

What was the most enjoyable song you have sung with the choir?
My goodness, that would be really difficult to narrow down. That said, I’m a sucker for a good Requiem – I’ve sung Mozart, Rutter, Faure, parts of the Brahms, I’m sure there are others.

What was the toughest song you ever sung with the choir?
This is invariably true that difficult stuff I tend to block out of my mind. Not saying there hasn’t been tough stuff, but I tend to just enjoy the end product. I guess it’s sort of what women sometimes say about childbirth.

Is there a song that you are tired of singing?
Not really. But I REALLY hate singing in unison. I find it boring. I tend to hear harmony in almost everything.

Is there a song that you wished any choir you were a part of would sing that haven’t?
There’s this song I did in high school called The Creation that I’d actually love to do.
One of my colleagues once suggested that we do “Til I Die”, the Beach Boys song from the Surf’s Up album. A lovely song, but of dubious theology.
***
Dorothy Turk, a displaced librarian, asks:
Have you watched the musical Scrooge w/Albert Finney or A Tuna Christmas?
And are you a Capricorn?

I probably saw the Finney Scrooge the very year it came out, c. 1970, but not since. I saw A Tuna Christmas at Capital Rep in late 1995, almost certainly with my girlfriend at the time, Carol, who I’m now married to.

I’m reminded that Kris Kristofferson had an album called Jesus was a Capricorn, even though he probably wasn’t. And neither am I; I’m a Pisces.
***
Demeur, “The remover of nasty things. I deal with stuff you wouldn’t consider touching,” wants to know:
Why is it that most if not all librarians require a master’s degree?
My mom was a librarian and she only had a high school eduction, but then again that was back when high school requirements were closer to what’s taught in college.

Here’s an answer to that question that I found:
“Actually, there is a wide range of library jobs, some of which don’t require a degree and are done by paraprofessionals. But the title of librarian is usually reserved for someone who has a master’s degree in library and information science from an American Library Association (ALA) accredited institution. Many academic librarians have two master’s degrees, one in LIS and another in their speciality discipline.”
In other words, the ALA set the bar for professionalism and the states followed. I’m sure it’s true in your line of work that the associations or guilds have set standards for the profession, and the states, yielding to the greater expertise, have followed.
Librarians can have a wide range of undergraduate degrees. The graduate school provides a background in a wide range of skills, from reference and cataloging to the business of doing more with less. And in some venues, such as colleges, the librarian is equivalent to a teacher or professor, for which we require advanced degrees.
***

And speaking of libraries, and teaching:
Anthony of The Dark Glass asks:
When did you know you wanted to be a librarian, and what particularly interests you about this field. Is there anything you don’t like about being a librarian or the field of library science in general? And, has any other vocation ever crossed your mind? For whatever reason, I imagine you would be a good teacher. Has that ever crossed your mind, and if so, what would be your field?

It’s not that I ever wanted to be a librarian; it’s that it has always called me. From being a page at Binghamton Public Library; to organizing the tracks of my compilation albums by artists on 3 by 5 cards; to working at FantaCo and going to the library, only a block away, to track down publisher information in Books in Print, my mind always went that way. It is, I suspect, like you and theology; you didn’t choose it; it chose you.

BTW, there WAS a recent ad to be a librarian at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame; if they move it from Cleveland to Albany, I’m applying. And the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown I’d definitely work at.

What I like about being a librarian: I learn new things almost every day. What I don’t like: when I am doing some rote thing one more time – not a restaurant startup AGAIN. My basic problem in life is the fear of boredom. Part of the salvation in this job, besides the varied questions, is the changing technology, from 4 or 7 of us using one CD-ROM drive to having it on a LAN to the Internet, from printing pounds of paper to doing PDFs. Oh, one other downside: we LOVE to be able to answer the question, but when we’re given incoherent or totally unanswerable questions, it gets mighty frustrating; it’s against our nature to say no.

If I weren’t a librarian, I would have to be someone training others to do customer service. I have mentioned this before, but I requested and received, a phone at my desk in my office so I can answer the main phones when the office manager is away. It’s not my job, but a regularly unanswered phone in the middle of the day is NOT good customer service.

I’d hate being a teacher, which is what my wife does, BTW. I’d hate the anxiety over prep. I’d hate the “performance” of the classroom. I’ve done occasional workshops, but those are one-off things. I LIKE one-off things. They’ve been about government and other resources for small businesses, primarily.

What would I teach? The problem is that I know a little about a lot of things, but I’m too ADHD to do anything at the level of depth that I would require of myself. What do I know that lots of others don’t know better? The history of FantaCo? The recording history of the Beatles? Well maybe, but there’s not a lot of call for that.

This is why I blog, BTW. I write about myself, and even I’m surprised by what I find. And I am singularly unable to focus this blog on one or two areas. It’s all over the place because I’M all over the place.

2010 blog year in review

I must say that the random posts were pretty representative.

This is one of those exercises I think I got from Gordon some years back. In any case, the idea is to pick one sentence from each month’s worth of blog posts. I used a random number generator for this purpose; the number 22 showed up three or four times, FWIW.

January: David Paterson [now former NYS governor] follows the Working Families Party [on Twitter], an actual political party in NYS.

February: I still feel more affinity for the heartbreak songs than the “true love” tunes. From my Valentine’s quiz.

March: Well, sometimes [stealing], but finding topics is not the problem; the problem is a lack of time to write coherently about certain topics. From a meme, blogging about blogging.

April: Thirty-five years after Vietnam and we’re still fighting the war.

May: West Virginia is the answer to the trivia question: “Which state east of the Mississippi River was the last to join the union?” From an ABC Wednesday post.

June: Paul [McCartney] hadn’t been that controversial since he recorded Give Ireland Back to the Irish back in 1972. On Paul’s birthday.

July: I suppose this refers to the cat who goes up on a hovercraft that reminded both my wife and me of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Review of the musical “Cats”.

August: Even less frequently, I have mentioned Raoul Vezina, the house artist who also worked on publications for FantaCo (Smilin’ Ed, X-Men Chronicles) and others (New Paltz Comix, Naturalist at Large). FantaCo’s birthday.

September: Yes, don’t hear as much about them lately, but the birthers, who claim President Obama is not eligible to be President, are still out there. Constitution Day.

October: I have to blame US Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell (R-Delaware) for my need to reread the 38th chapter of the first book of the Bible. Both a religious post and one for which I suggested might be better suited for more mature audiences.

November: One of my primary functions on weekdays is to get Lydia to school on time. My monthly Lydia post.

December: Joy from A Raft of Apples requested that I send her something not on the [giveaway] list.

I must say that the random posts were pretty representative, hitting on ABCW; memes, and quizzes; holidays, anniversaries, and birthdays; Beatles (well, at least a Beatle), and music generally; religion; blogging; personal history and politics. So if one were to ask you what this blog was about, read ’em the previous sentence.

Roger Answers Your Questions, Denise, Tom, Shooting Parrots, Jaquandor & dogs

I have no “traditional Christmas dinner menu”. Over the years, it’s been ham, chicken, turkey, duck, lamb, lasagna, probably roast beef, even Chinese takeout.

What a great bunch of responses to my request!


Ginger, Buddy and Shadow proving doggie wisdom from Pawprints in the Sands of Time ask the fundamental question:
Alright, here’s for your wish…Why do u want us to play this game of questions and answers this Christmas?

Because I learn so much, both about the person, er, entity, who is asking, and more, about myself as I think about things that might not have otherwise occurred to me. In other words, it’s an exercise in self-reflection.
***
I “know” Denise Nesbitt – and “know” is such an interesting term for someone you have never actually met, but it’s accurate nevertheless – through her creation of ABC Wednesday. She also can be found at Mrs. Nesbitt’s Space.

OK, What did you buy your wife, mother, and daughter for Christmas Roger?

There was this Medieval Faire every year at the Cathedral of All Saints in Albany, NY for about 30 years. And while I was going out with Carol, I sometimes -thrice, she tells me – would buy her a hand knit wool sweater from this particular woman. Then the faire stopped for about eight years. I’d buy her a sweater from LL Bean, and once from this Irish shop across the river in Troy, but it just wasn’t the same. Then last year, the faire was backe…I mean, back! Unfortunately, this particular vendor couldn’t make it, as she had another commitment. Bummer. But this year, she was back, Carol hinted heavily what she wanted, we walked away, but later, I came back and bought. There was also this teddy bear that she lost, that was given to her by her late brother; I found not quite a replica, but close.

Lydia got a lot of things: books, clothes, an enhanced version of the old game Twister, with CDs rather than a spinner; the big thing was this expensive doll she wanted, complete with wardrobe. In fact, her mother and I had purchased SO many items, we held some back for her birthday, three months hence. At that same Faire I mentioned, there was a soap in the shape of a seashell that Santa discovered she wanted.

My mother has been difficult to shop for for years. If you ask her directly, she’ll either say, “Oh anything” or “You needn’t bother.” Unhelpful to be sure. But my sister tells me that she really likes these puzzle books. I ended going to the CVS Pharmacy, found a couple of those, plus a lap blanket and a bathrobe – it’s been COLD in North Carolina lately.
***
Shooting Parrots, who provides “random thoughts in a random world”, asks:
What was the best ever Christmas present you received? And which was the worst?!
I think the best is the unexpected: my father helping me on my Sunday paper route on Christmas morning in 1966, or our first color TV in 1969, or the free tree my then significant other and I got on Christmas Eve 1991 from Sears, and took home on a city bus.
Worst?

Haven’t a clue. I mean, I groan when my wife gives me clothes, but it really isn’t a bad gift. Maybe it’s because I’ve mastered the art of regifting, long before I’d ever heard the term.
***
Tom the Mayor I know from my time at FantaCo, though I actually met him when he worked at the Albany YMCA on Washington Avenue (RIP).
Do you ever feel any bigotry in your neighborhood in Albany? Do you think that Racial attitudes have changed since you first moved to Albany?

Interesting question. I always wonder how it would have been growing up in Albany. But I didn’t get here until I was 26 and already with the receding hairline. And some people know who I am here, a couple recognizing me from my Times Union blog just this week.

I’m not saying that my life in Albany has been incident-free. More than once, people have yelled racist comments, usually from moving vehicles. But that hasn’t happened in at least a decade.

I recall that in the early 1990s I got unsolicited lectures (at least twice) about the problems of miscegenation, not for the adults involved, but for “the children” that might arrive. So I’m curious how this will play out for my daughter, whether she’ll be subjected to that. It was really important for us that Lydia go to a diverse daycare, and she had friends who were black, white, and Asian. I have cautious hope that things are indeed better.
***
Buffalo’s finest blogger, Jaquandor at Byzantium Shores asks:
1. You are ordered to design a new menu for your family’s Christmas dinner…with the one stipulation that you use none of the dishes that are currently featured in your traditional Christmas dinner. What’s the menu?

Here’s the problem: I have no “traditional Christmas dinner menu”. Over the years, it’s been ham, chicken, turkey, duck, lamb, lasagna, probably roast beef, even Chinese takeout. So I would have to go with hot dogs, hamburgers, fish filets, French fries, and grilled cheese sandwiches. What, no veggies? Again, it’s been all over the map, so it’s either a vegetable I’ve had, or do not like.

2. Are there any current “reality” shows that you would actually consider auditioning for?
If by stretching the definition to include game shows, “Who Wants To Be a Millionaire”, maybe. My antipathy for reality shows isn’t just with the game, it’s the editing to make the program more dramatic.

3. If you ran into Bill O’Reilly somewhere on the street on, say, December 19, would you tell him “Happy Holidays!” just to see him get angry? (I know I would!)
Yeah, except it’d be “Happy holidays, Bill,” so he knew I knew who he was.

4. Do you have high hopes, medium hopes, or not much hope at all for Governor-elect Cuomo?
Medium-low. I thought he ran a lousy campaign, he was not very forthcoming – his financials didn’t come out until weeks after the election – and I just don’t much trust him. The only reason he won is that he was running against a nutcase. I didn’t even vote for him. (No, I didn’t vote for Paladino, I voted for Howie Hawkins on the Green Party line, because it was evident that Cuomo was going to win anyway.)

Of course, to be fair, I’m not sure what ANYONE can do about this state and local government crisis. Did you see that 60 Minutes segment? ALL the states are in big fiscal trouble.

Well, next time out: Demeur, Anthony, Gordon, Scott, ChrisJ, and anyone else who wants to play.

My Water Use Pet Peeves

The optimal thing for the consumer would be for pharmacies to take back expired medicines, lest they get into the hand of unintended users, but this not happening on a large scale.

Today is one of those Blog Action Day things, which I do or do not, depending on whether I actually have something to say. Regarding water, one of their bullet points is this:

The average American uses 159 gallons of water every day – more than 15 times the average person in the developing world.
From showering and washing our hands to watering our lawns and washing our cars, Americans use a lot of water. To put things into perspective, the average five-minute shower will use about 10 gallons of water. Now imagine using that same amount to bathe, wash your clothes, cook your meals and quench your thirst.

Pet peeve #1 is that damn American obsession with the lawn. The sprinklers, on in the middle of a hot summer day, when they are least efficient, and about 30% of the water ends up on the sidewalk rather than the grass.

Pet peeve #2 involves flushing prescription medicines down the toilet or pouring them down the drain, where they end up in the municipal water supply. There are still drug companies who recommend this method on their packaging. The optimal thing for the consumer would be for pharmacies to take back expired medicines, lest they get into the hand of unintended users, but this not happening on a large scale. Seems to me that the best way to dispose of them, between any local collections – the Albany College of Pharmacy conducted one recently – is to dissolve, if possible, any excess pills in water, then put them in non-consumable items, such as coffee grounds or kitty litter. But I don’t drink coffee and don’t have a cat, so I’ve just tossed them in the trash. Do you have any better suggestions?

The Beach Boys- Cool Cool Water
The Beach Boys -Don’t Go Near The Water
The last song on Sunflower, followed by the first song on Surf’s Up.

Change.orgStart Petition

 

Social media & sharing icons powered by UltimatelySocial