December rambling: Fudge

Hanukkah in Santa Monica times 8

cold_complaints
From https://xkcd.com/2714/

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy Addresses Joint Meeting of Congress

Fueling Inequality, Earnings of the Top 0.1% in the US Have Soared by 465% Since 1979. The bottom 90% saw earnings growth of just 29% between 1979 and 2021, the Economic Policy Institute found.
Jewish Groups Say GOP Is Pushing Antisemitism
Alan Singer: Is Holocaust Education an Antidote to Anti-Semitism?

Did George Santos lie about everything? The representative-elect (R-NY), who allegedly made up his life story, explained.

Republicans turn final House hearing on far-right violence into a clown show

Arthur answers Roger: Ranking Choices (voting) and  Indepen-dunce

Should Doctors Warn Patients About the Downsides of Medicare Advantage Plans?

Census Bureau: LGBT Adults Report More Anxiety, Depression at All Ages

Book About ‘War on Ivermectin’ Distributed by Major Publishing House — “Infuriating to see misinformation mongers being taken seriously”

Celebrities Shilling Crypto Face More Than Just Mockery

Why Economists Study Demographic Change

Barbara Walters, Trailblazing Broadcast Journalist, Dies at 93 – I started watching her on the TODAY show.

Franco Harris, Pittsburgh Steelers’ legendary running back, dies at 72. He and I had the same birthday, albeit three years apart.

Soccer great Edson Arantes do Nascimento, Pele: 1940-2022

Paul Silas, 3-time NBA champion and longtime coach dies at 79

Walking Bishkek (Kyrgyzstan)

New VIP+ Special Report: Mobile Sports Gambling and  Media

How to be a helpful host to your friends with food allergies

John Oliver on  trash

Still not sure why a “door” nail, though . . .

Comics arrested onstage

What is the Democracy’s Library?

2022

Academy Awards releases its shortlist of 10-15 nominees in 10 categories

Celebrities who died in 2022 from Vanity Fair and TCM

Cory Doctorow: A Year in Illustration

SATIRE: Elon Musk Named Most Exhausting Person of 2022

FUDGE!
Orange crush

Trump still has no credible response to the Jan 6  report

He somehow avoided a Mandatory IRS Tax Audit for two years as President

David Whelan, Paul’s brother, gives him a tongue-lashing for his reaction to Brittney Griner’s release

His trading card images appear to have been lifted from catalogs and stock collections

‘His World Is So, So Small’: Former Adviser Says He Cracked  During White House Isolation

Music

Tell Me If You Still Care – Kevin Flournoy, ft. Phil Perry and Shannon Pearson, with Rebecca Jade on background vocals

Speaking of RJ: 2022 Year-End BEATS Magazine noted Breakout Artist: Rebecca Jade (p. 22) and Best Artist: Dave Koz, with whom Rebecca toured in December 2022

Hollywood Reporter Music Editor Picks the 10 Best Songs of 2022, most of which I have never heard of

AmeriNZ: 2022 pop music mashups

Eight versions of the Tom Lehrer classic Hanukkah in Santa Monica. It also includes the Maccabees ‘ Latke Recipe. which is to the tune of Shut Up and Dance by Walk The Moon, a song from 2014 that I managed to have missed.

Istanbul – They Might Be Giants

Dino Danelli, the original drummer of The (Young) Rascals, dies at 79

April rambling: shadow docket

1950 Census

John Roberts joins dissent blasting extremist Supreme Court conservatives for abusing the shadow docket

Ginni Thomas Debacle Is a Warning That Trumpism Lives On in the Halls of Power

Battle Against School Segregation in New Jersey

Weekly Sift: Elon and Twitter; will Elon regret the purchase?

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver:  Police Interrogations and
Data Brokers and Truckers and Harm Reduction

Florida Eliminates Disney’s Special District

He Was an Ex-FBI Serial Killer Profiler. Then His Lies Caught Up With Him

Viewers Feel Overwhelmed by Too Many Choices, Nielsen Survey Finds and What Happens When an Industry Becomes a Squid Game and Behind the Scenes of CNN+’S Stunning Fall

Lily Tomlin THR interview

Gilbert Gottfried, Comedian, ‘Aladdin’ Star Dies at 67 from a   condition called myotonic dystrophy. In the documentary called Life, Animated (2016), about a child who learned to communicate by watching Disney films, the young man Owen had a club and he invited Gilbert to one of their events. Gilbert was such a mensch.

Bobby Rydell, Pop Singer, ‘Bye Bye Birdie’ Actor, Dies at 79

Robert Morse, Two-Time Tony Winner, and ‘Mad Men’  Star, Dies at 90

Bruce Willis’ Aphasia

How Colorblind NHL Players See The Game

Comics For Ukraine

The Most Beloved Comic? How and Why Calvin and Hobbes Disappeared

The (Edited) Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto

Chuck Miller changes his name

Human connections light up This Brilliant Darkness by Jeff Sharlet

Making popcorn

The remarkable brain of a carpet cleaner who speaks 24 languages

How Come People Say ‘How Come’?

A poem about libraries

A puzzler from Presh Talwalkar.

That Old Twitchy Feeling – linkage to linkage

Information, please

The Census Is Broken. Can AI Fix It?

Fertility Rates: Declined for Younger Women, Increased for Older Women

Official 1950 Census Website

How Many Humans Have Ever Lived?

State Tax Collections per Capita, Fiscal Year 2020

Maps of Albany

Now I Know

Indiana Jones and the Porcelain Throne? and When Belgium Flipped the Coin at France and We Shouldn’t Forget Ignaz Semmelweis and Why Doctors Wear Green (or Blue) Scrubs and The Walls (and Book) That Can Kill You and The $64,000 Fake New York City Tourist and Why You Shouldn’t Hold in a Sneeze and An Initial Reaction to Disaster Relief?

MUSIC

Rebecca Jade was gearing up for San Diego Music Awards performance; she won two awards, Best Video; and Best R and B, Funk, or Soul Song for What’s It Gonna Be.

Possibly Neil Diamond’s most significant Sweet Caroline performance, Fenway Park in Boston, April 20, 2013.

Elmer Bernstein at 100

Rest in peace, C.W. McCall

Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor by Sergei Rachmaninoff, performed by Khatia Buniatishvili

Good Day Sunshine – MonaLisa Twins

Three Visions by William Grant Still 

Town Of Tuxley Toymaker

Le Palais Hante by Florent Schmitt.

Coverville:  1396 – Tribute to Foo Fighters’ Taylor Hawkins and 
1397 – The Elton John Cover Story IV and 1398 – The Hollies Cover Story II

Appalachian Spring by Aaron Copland 

Twelve cellists from the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra play the theme from The Pink Panther

 The Crown of India by Edward Elgar

Introverting – The Holderness Family

Amadeus clip

All By Myself – Eric Carmen

John Denver

K-Chuck Radio: You mean they’re not related?

 

March rambling: quotation marks

Support the Albany High School robotics team!

tractor_beam_2x
From https://xkcd.com/2579/

In a world-historic first, microplastics were detected in human blood

The Our World in Data COVID vaccination data

 How American conservatives turned against the vaccine

The Lancet: Paul Farmer

Cameroonians fleeing conflict are in dire need of Temporary Protected Status – cf.  Inside “the most diverse square mile in America”

What Caused the War? Ukraine and Russia in Historical Context

The Race to Archive the Ukrainian Internet

Ukrainian Actress Oksana Shvets Killed in Russian Rocket Attack

Non-war conflict

Hate and extremism

How did Christianity become so toxic?

The Interactive Theater of Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Confirmation Hearing

Addressing racial inequality in paid leave policy

Sara Jacobs, one of the youngest members of Congress, talks about sexism and ageism in politics. 

Writing Women into History

Women in medicine are running up the wrong side of the escalator

Where Does the Religious Right Go After Roe?

Sojourner Truth’s Battle to Free Her Son from Slavery

Actor Tim Reid on addressing racial issues on WKRP in Cincinnati

Texas’ New Voting Law Disenfranchised Thousands Of Otherwise Eligible Voters

The Tangled, Messy Roots of Fake News, long before it became djt’s favorite term

Ginni Thomas demanded Congressional Republicans take the fight to overturn the 2020 election to the streets

John Bolton admits that ‘it’s hard to describe how little [djt] knows’

I Know There’s An Answer

Climate Change Brings Uncontrollable Wildfires

 The Illinois town that got up and left

The 1950 Census is Coming: What You Need to Know

Timbuctoo Institute would build opportunities in the Adirondacks 

About Those Gas Prices

Concert  Tickets: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

2021 County and Economic Development Regions Population Estimates for NYS

Luka’s mural

Jobfished: the con that tricked dozens into working for a fake design agency

“They’re called ‘quotation marks’.”

Phobias. Aibohphobia is the (unofficial) fear of palindromes. Hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia is used to describe the fear of very long words.

The official Girl Scout cookie power rankings

The Result of a Rabbit Hole

Audience participation

GoFundMe page for the Albany High School Robotics Team to compete at the FIRST Robotics World Championship in Houston, TX on April 20-23. They placed 2nd in the New York Tech Valley Regional Competition.

Four Open Seats on Albany Public Library Board in May 17 Election. Nominations are due to the Clerk of the City School District of Albany by Wednesday, April 27, at 5 pm.

New York Bike Census

Now I Know

The Biggest Bread Soup in the World and Why Are My Baby Carrots Always Wet? and The First Computer Bug and The Phone Booth in the Middle of Nowhere and Beware the Ire of Caesar and Which Came First, The Algorithm or the Pi? and World War II’s Pre-Email E-Mail

MUSIC

Livinliv – Aleksandr Shymko

Irish tunes

K-Chuck Radio: The musical tree of Ida Red  and green songs

Holiday at Ferghana -Reinhold Gliere

Lullabye of Broadway from 42nd Street

Coverville: 1393 – John Cale and Velvet Underground Cover Story and 1394 – The Blink-182 Cover Story II and 1395 – The Smashing Pumpkins Cover Story II

December rambling: slowest rate

Nell Stokes, Rebecca Jade, Literary Legends, public domain

Photo taken by Wayne
Photo was taken by Wayne

U.S. Population Grew 0.1% in 2021, Slowest Rate Since Founding of the Nation and  Net International Migration at Lowest Levels in Decades

What State of Matter is Fire?

Frequency Illusion? What’s the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon?

Black mothers turning to doulas in light of the nation’s horrifying maternal death rates

Two Texas teens dressed as Klansmen tased their Black classmate

Solomon Northup’s “A Slave’s Christmas” 

Wreck of last US slave ship mostly intact on the coast

NEA Guide for Racial Justice in Education

Missouri Cop Pulls Over School Bus Driver For Wearing A Mask

147 New York dams are ‘unsound’ and potentially dangerous Thousands of dams have not been inspected in more than 20 years

The departed

Hidden Pentagon records reveal patterns of failure in deadly airstrikes 

Desmond Tutu, a cleric who campaigned against apartheid in South Africa,  dies at 90. “A moral beacon in a deeply troubled land, Tutu managed to irritate the African National Congress government that took power after South Africa’s first all-race elections, as much as he had riled the apartheid regime that had previously oppressed the country’s Black majority.”

Joan Didion, Literary Titan, Dies at 87;  Jon Avnet on Making ‘Up Close and Personal’ With Her

 TCM Remembrance of performers past

This Year, Hollywood’s China Relationship Finally Unraveled

After his performance in The Music Man, Hugh Jackman touts Broadway understudies, standbys, and swings. The role of Marion Paroo, the female lead, was supposed to be played by Sutton Foster, who tested positive for COVID. The role was covered by a swing named Kathy Voytko, who also covered seven other smaller roles in the production.

Flying from Honolulu to Buffalo just before Christmas

I Stopped Caring About My Kids’ School Grades. You Should, Too.

“She could never love me!” Comic books and disability cliches 

Chuck’s best blog moments of 2021, which includes me!

The Awakening – Albany’s first movie (1914)

See the movie short:  Seasoned Greetings (1933 Vitaphone). Lita Grey Chaplin w/ 7 Yr Old Sammy Davis Jr

Now I Know: A Brick That Broke The Glass Ceiling and The Amazing Spider-Man Coincidence and When It Feels Good to Pay More

Inspiring Quotes: If you can’t see anything beautiful about yourself, get a better mirror. – Shane Koyczan

Nominate the next Literary Legend!

Each year, the Friends and Foundation of Albany Public Library select a new outstanding person of letters to be honored as our Literary Legend. The FFAPL invites the public to nominate writers for the selection committee to consider.

Nominations must be received by January 9, 2022, for consideration by this year’s Selection Committee. The Literary Legends Selection Committee includes members of the FFAPL board, past Gala Chairpersons, and APL librarians.

Sound Treasures Enter the Public Domain

On January 1, 2022, 400,000 pre-1923 sound recordings will enter the public domain, thanks to a new U.S. law, the Music Modernization Act. To celebrate, you may attend a virtual event on January 20, “A Celebration of Sound.”

And it’s not just music! On January 1st, children’s classic Winnie the Pooh, Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, Rudolph Valentino in The Son of the Sheik, in addition to musical recordings such as Scott Joplin’s Maple Leaf Rag, and thousands more will all be free for creative reuse and sharing.

MUSIC
Hendrix.Nesmith.Tork
Hendrix.Nesmith.Tork found on Facebook

Am I Enough. Words: Nell Stokes. Vocals: CJay Philip, Nell’s daughter. Musical arrangement: Gail Sparlin. Piano: Larry Finke.

You Should Be Dancing – Dee Gees, who look a little like the Foo Fighters

Coverville 1382: Cover Stories for Patti Smith, Dido, and Britney Spears

New York State of Mind – NYCNext

Losing My Mind -Imelda Staunton, in a 2017 production of Follies by the National Theater

Tainted Love – Broken Peach 

Songbird -MonaLisa Twins

Dream On – Ann Wilson, live 

Stand By Me – Playing For Change

Mary, Mary, written by Michael Nesmith (30 Dec 1942-10 Dec 2021): Butterfield Blues Band Band, The Monkees 

It’s still Christmastide

Dave Koz and Friends // The Greatest Hits of Christmas – LIVESTREAM VIRTUAL CONCERT Recorded 12/12/20. With Jonathan Butler, Peter White, Kenny Lattimore, Michael Lington, Brian Simpson, and REBECCA JADE!

Have a sultry, soulful Christmas!

River – Joni Mitchell, Her first official video

J. Eric Smith –  Ten Songs You Need to Hear: Crimbo Version

May rambling: food and death

100 years since Tulsa, and one since George Floyd

vaccinated_2x
From https://xkcd.com/2460/

I’ve been thinking a lot about food and death. NOT death caused by food poisoning.

At my FIL’s funeral this month, someone told a story about how my parents-in-law met. They were both students at what is now UAlbany. She was a food server, he made deliveries of supplies. He came into the dining area, just as she was about to eat her fried egg sandwich. Instead, she offered it to him.

The next week, they went to the movies together. They lived happily for many years. It is a sweet story, but the telling was incomplete. The kicker is that he HATED fried egg sandwiches, but he ate it anyway.

My wife has discovered there were foods that were always in her parents’ house. One staple was spaghetti and meatballs. As it turns out, she HATES spaghetti and meatballs, but he liked them, so she served them. Now my wife has stopped buying them for her.

Arthur tells of taste obsessions and his late husband Nigel.

Some links

Generally, I have no energy for the Big Lie believers or the January 6 deniers who say those insurrectionists were tourists, blocking an investigation. But if Chuck wants to rant about Marjorie Taylor Greene – she’s beyond reprehensible.

Why Liz Cheney Matters.

We’ll Never Stop Trying to Cut Taxes for the Rich, Republicans Warn.

John Oliver: Stand Your Ground gun laws “exalt a white person’s fear over a black person’s life.” Also, sponsored product on the local news broadcasts.

I, too, rage America.

Avoiding Overtaxing Minorities When We Need Them Most.

100 Years: Remembering the Tulsa Race Massacre, which I wrote about here

What to make of Israel/Palestine?

Wage theft is a huge problem that requires a creative solution.

Restaurant Workers Say They Won’t Return to Work Without a Living Wage

If your compassion does not include yourself, it is incomplete.
– Jack Kornfield

And more

Working 55 hours a week can be deadly.

The Problem With Bitcoin

Comics writer and journalist David Anthony Kraft passed away.

In honor of Ms. Ruby Hughes.

Adam Ragusea on converting recipes in liters and milliliters to pounds and ounces, and Vidalia Onions.

It’s going to rain. Can you smell it?

How to Conduct an Address Search to Access Data for your Location. Census Reporter is an option to find your block group, state and Congressional districts, and more.

Why you need to have your ancestor’s New York death certificate.

The filing cabinet was critical to the information infrastructure of the 20th-century.

Are you getting robocalls purportedly – and clearly not – from the Social Security Administration saying your number has been compromised? I’ve gotten a few dozen on my landline and my cell this year, from several area codes, mostly the 30-second version. Annoying, but also really pathetic.

Now I Know: The Forest Man of India and How Elephants Communicate From Miles Away and The Circle of Life and The Secret Ingredient is Curiosity and The Reason Florida Disavowed Space Oranges.

Music

Spring Ain’t Here – Peter Sprague, featuring Rebecca Jade.

Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door – Afro Fiesta feat. Twanguero and I-Taweh.

Main themes from Laputa: Castle in the Sky – Joe Hisaishi.

Coverville 1358: Cover Stories for Dave Mason, Donovan, and Graham Gouldman.

Danse slav from the opera The Reluctant King by Emmanuel Chabrier.

We Love the Drums – Peter Sprague, featuring Duncan Moore.

I Fought the Law – Bobby Fuller Four.

The Hamilton Polka – “Weird Al” Yankovic.

Social media & sharing icons powered by UltimatelySocial