music Archives - Page 218 of 264 - Ramblin' with Roger

June Rambling: an atheist’s prayers, and stillness of the soul

101 Ways to Say “Died” that appeared in early American epitaphs

Useful phrases for the surveillance state.

Long-lost diary of Nazi racial theorist and Hitler confidant recovered.

George Takei remembers the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII, which included himself.

Why three states dumped major private prison company in one month. I’ve long been suspicious of private prisons with them “extracting guarantees of 100 percent occupancy.”

Cereal bigotry, Arthur’s response to the Cheerios ad controversy.

SamuraiFrog feels this is the most eloquent and exact statement about fat-shaming ever. And Lefty’s wanting to shake his disease.

Gay Men, Male Privilege, Women, And Consent.

In the literally OMG category: Christian Domestic Discipline… is a movement that seeks to carry out God’s will. “Which specific plan of God’s? Oh, you know, just that all women obey their husbands fastidiously — a dynamic that CDD thinks is best maintained through doling out corporal punishments.”

An atheist’s prayers.

Awkwardneϟϟ, Ken Jennings at his son’s elementary school for the annual “Festival of the Famous.”

Astronomy Picture of the Day: June 18 – A Supercell Thunderstorm Over Texas.

Steve Bissette Working On A Book About Alan Moore, Asks People To Publish His 1963 Stories Online For Free.

Meryl expands on the New York Times Magazine, “Who Made That?” article.

American and British pronunciation of Spanish (loan) words.

How Bugs Bunny saved Mel Blanc’s life.

Shooting Parrots likes to write about roguish folks you’ve never heard of – I’VE never heard of – such as Eugène François Vidocq and Ignáz Trebitsch-Lincoln. Interesting stuff.

To Parents of Small Children: Let Me Be the One Who Says It Out Loud.

Mark Evanier on the wealthy Zukors, the sweet but terrified Stearns, and his compassionate father, who worked for the IRS, part 1 and part 2.

My buddy and former neighbor Diana’s Lean In story.

Melanie: harp lessons, Italian rain, and traveling the world from home. Also, how stillness is a quality of the soul.

I wrote Love and cheating, and what I don’t understand.

Little by little things are disappearing from my house.

According to IMDB, Richard Matheson wrote 16 episodes of the TV show Twilight Zone, which included the “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” segment that was also used in the Twilight Zone movie.

101 Ways to Say “Died” that appeared in early American epitaphs.
to me

There’s a great new documentary out called 20 FEET FROM STARDOM. The movie is about backup singers – those incredibly talented musicians who you rarely hear about but are on all your favorite records. Coming to the Spectrum in Albany on July 5 – I WILL see it.

How a maudlin song became a children’s classic.

Great Coverville podcast honoring Cyndi Lauper, who won a Tony AND turned 60 this month; oh, I might have suggested it. Dustbury celebrates as well.

I’ve been ear wormed by Our State Fair, the opening song from the 1962 film ‘State Fair’, not a great movie, but the first non-kiddie film I ever saw.

In honor of summer, a visual representation of The Rite of Spring.

Tom Lehrer singing about The Elements, then and THEN.

K-Chuck radio: “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and cover songs and songs about Superman.

And speaking of the guy from Krypton: Superman was promoted at the 1940 New York World’s Fair. But who played him? It is a mystery! Also, Original ‘Superman’ Co-Star Interrupts ‘Man of Steel’ Conversation in Movie Theater Restroom.

Get Up, Stand Up

“Never be bullied into silence. Never allow yourself to be made a victim. Accept no one’s definition of your life; define yourself.” – Robert Frost.

There was an education rally in downtown Albany on June 8. My wife, who’s not prone to activities such as mass demonstrations, attended; so did her mother, and her brother and sister-in-law, which she didn’t know about until she ran into her brother quite by accident. New York in particular was one of two states that has opted to mandate these idiotic standardized tests for its students even sooner than the rest of the country. This despite the fact that the teachers, by and large, hadn’t been trained in it. I’ve said this before: the tests were a waste my daughter’s education time. (Here’s a defense of education spending.)

I get notices for rallies of one type or another, many of which I agree with philosophically, but if I attended them all, that would be all I do full time. Maybe if I ever work downtown again, or retire (as if)…

When I was younger, I went to countless events for civil rights and against the Vietnam war. No single event may have made a difference, but one felt that the collective effect of these actions might have had an impact.

The demonstrations against the Iraq war, in which I participate, obviously had no effect in preventing it. The Occupy movement, which I didn’t much involve myself with, may have had a longer-term impact than its critics have suggested; among other things, it’s gotten the term “the 1%” in the conversation. Whether that will lead to economic reform, though, is still an open question.

Maybe what we need right now is some mass demonstration against the massive government overreach that are these two sweeping U.S. surveillance programs of our phones and e-mail, in the US and abroad, just to make sure President Obama is quite clear that we don’t his benign analysis of our government’s intrusion. Theoretically, something could change; socialist Bernie Sanders and the Tea Party’s Rand Paul seem to be on the same side of the issue. (This is at least the second time this year I’ve agreed with Paul; the last time was on drones.) I certainly support the ACLU lawsuit against the Obama Administration Over NSA ‘Dragnet’ Surveillance.

Do you know who is gutsy? Rev. Stephen Heiss, a United Methodist minister in Binghamton, NY, my hometown, wrote a letter to his bishop admitting to actions that may cost him his job: “In the last few years I have officiated at several weddings for brothers and sisters who are lesbian or gay. One of those weddings—the highlight of my ministry—was for my own daughter and the woman who is now her wife. They are so happy!”

But these are BIG concerns. When I first started writing this, it was inspired by a much smaller issue in the grand scheme of things, an unreasonable, bullying landlord who [UPDATE – initially seemed to have relented, but the fight goes on.]

Whether the issue is international in scale or merely a neighborhood concern, this quote does seem appropriate: “Never be bullied into silence. Never allow yourself to be made a victim. Accept no one’s definition of your life; define yourself.” – Robert Frost. Now that’s WAY easier said than done, but it is something to aim for.

LISTEN to Get Up, Stand Up by Bob Marley, as relevant now as it was 40 years ago.

V is for Vanessa L. Williams

The discussion from some nattering nabobs of negativism, though, was that she won only because she was a light-skinned, green-eyed black woman.

If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then “our ideal,” as Bert Parks used to sing at the Miss America pageant, the event about which he crooned, was, let’s say, limited in hue. In fact, until the early 1970s, “non-white women were barred from competing, a restriction that was codified in the pageant’s ‘Rule number seven’, which stated that ‘contestants must be of good health and of the white race.'”

Some of the more prominent winners were Bess Myerson (NY-1945, the only Jewish winner), Lee Meriwether (CA-1955), Mary Ann Mobley (MS-1959), and Phyllis George (TX-1971).

The result of this overt racism was the institution of the Miss Black America pageant in 1968.

Then in 1984, the first black Miss America, Vanessa Williams of New York was crowned. The discussion from some nattering nabobs of negativism, though, was that she won only because she was a light-skinned, green-eyed black woman, that she was not “black enough.” Then the terrible news that she was compelled to resign because of some pictures she had taken a few years earlier had found their way into Penthouse magazine. The mortification among many black people I spoke with at the time was quite great. Interestingly, the last seven weeks of that term were completed by Suzette Charles of New Jersey, yet another black woman.

One might have thought that the scandal would have snuffed out the career of Vanessa Lynn Williams before it started; it did not. She has reached stardom as both as a singer (her debut album in 1988 was The Right Stuff) and actress (Into the Woods, on Broadway; Ugly Betty and Desperate Housewives, on TV), thus earning her “multiple Grammy, Emmy, and Tony Award nominations. She is arguably the most successful Miss America winner in the field of entertainment.”

My favorite song of hers – yes, it’s out of season – is What Child Is This [LISTEN].

ABC Wednesday – Round 12

D-Day, as in discovery

Finding myself agreeing with Scalia: “Make no mistake about it. Because of today’s decision, your DNA can be taken and entered into a national database if you are ever arrested, rightly or wrongly, and for whatever reason.”

There’s a blogger called Altonian, who is writing a lot about The War Years in England, most recently: “Alton received its fair share of evacuees during the war, most of which came from London.” With my life proceeding as it has, I had not sought to follow any more bloggers. But I saw him comment on the blogs of both Berowne AND Sharp Little Pencil; both of them I met on ABC Wednesday, which, BTW, you can join too.

Berowne, BTW, generally takes a movie or play, changes it up, and sees if you can recognize it. For his current entry, I must admit, I didn’t recognize the movie until he gave a vital hint. Only then was it obvious to me. (I never saw the movie, having fallen asleep watching it on video.)

Amy at Sharp Little Pencil has been writing a string of great poems: a political rant -I don’t rant nearly so well; her manic depression, which she has dealt with; surviving sexual abuse, which she has also dealt with; and a celebration, all in this calendar month.

Appreciated LoveSong: SamuraiFrog and Rainy Days and Mondays on Splotchy’s site. Even without his obsession for Paul Williams, I got to the same place with the song.

Re: ABC Wednesday, I had to deal with a load of spam on the site, all fairly recent. It was a pain; yet its removal felt very cleansing, not as irritating as you would think.

I was struck when Melanie wrote: “It isn’t easy to be still- even when you are sick and can’t move much! That’s because stillness is also a quality of soul.”

I realized, as much as anything, the recent Supreme Court ruling, which states that police can routinely take DNA samples from people who are arrested but not yet convicted of a crime, operates the efficiency over justice model. Finding myself agreeing with Antonin Scalia: “Make no mistake about it. Because of today’s decision, your DNA can be taken and entered into a national database if you are ever arrested, rightly or wrongly, and for whatever reason. But the proud men who wrote the charter of our liberties would not have been so eager to open their mouths for royal inspection.” Faster – when it tramples on the Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable search and seizure – is not better.
***
Some recent passings:

Frank Lautenberg, the Last of the New Deal Liberals. The New Jersey Democrat was the last WWII soldier left in Congress. Interesting that Governor Christie has called a special election in October, rather than saving the taxpayer dollars money, by holding it in November. Interesting political calculation.

There would be no ALL IN THE FAMILY without Jean Stapleton.

I used to love to read the syndicated column of Andrew M. Greeley: Priest, Author, Scholar, Scold.

David “Deacon” Jones was the original sackmaster of the National Football League. When I think of the original Fearsome Foursome on the LA Rams, I recall Jones, who the Hall of Fame defensive end who later had his own foundation to help kids; the late Merlin Olsen, who eventually showed up on Little House on the Prairie and other programs; and the still living Rosey Grier, who also played for the NY Giants, and liked to knit. Always seemed to forget the late Lamar Lundy, for some reason.

May Rambling: Faraway fire; faux news; second chances

I was noting in particular two Billy Joel songs, ‘Get It Right The First Time’ from 1977 and ‘Second Wind (You’re Only Human)’ from 1985, and how I prefer the latter sentiment.

Chuck Miller has taken on the task of promoting the work of his “fellow Times Union community bloggers, until that day when the Times Union itself will restore the ‘Best of Our Blogs’ feature to the print edition of the paper.” And one of those “well-written articles” was mine. Merci, Chuck.

The specter of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory looms over the garment factory that collapsed last month in Bangladesh, killing more than [1100] workers… But the world is smaller than it was 102 years ago. Tragedies of this sort in the Third World aren’t engendered only by forces in their proximity, and they won’t be averted unless the responsibility for change is embraced globally. Also, Is Rana Disaster Bangladesh’s Triangle Fire? I wrote about the Triangle fire HERE.

Meryl’s quite reasonable concern: ‘truth’ is becoming ever-more elusive with advancing photoshop technology and our modern vehicles of ‘news resources’ and communication. Related: Since Twitter hasn’t built a correction feature, here are 3 things journalists can do instead. And Who’s The Biggest Liar?

Howard Kurtz’s Belated Comeuppance: The Media Critic’s Firing Comes After a Long History of Journalistic Abuses.

For New York State, I thought the effects of hydrofracking was only an upstate problem, but it appears Manhattan will have its own issues.

In What Ways Does The Culture Of Comics Have An Impact On How Business Is Done? Also, The Library of American Comics at 75 Titles (and counting): Moral rights, reprint rights.

Boston Marathon Runner & Psychiatrist Shares Personal Story of Patriots’ Day 2013; written by a cousin of a co-worker.

Harriet Quimby – the 1st US woman to get her pilot’s license.

Space Oddities and Sensations: Inspiring Teaching and Learning , featuring Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield.

Rare footage of Helen Keller speaking with the help of Anne Sullivan.

I was playing my Billy Joel’s Greatest Hits, Volumes 1 & 2 on a car ride recently; his birthday is in May. I was noting in particular two songs, ‘Get It Right The First Time’ from 1977 and ‘Second Wind (You’re Only Human)’ from 1985, and how I prefer the latter sentiment. Melanie writes about the second time around. Also, practicing in pieces.

Richie’s road of death.

Ken Leviner.php — **Sitemeter for Ken Levine’s blog, Taken 1:46 pm, May 8, 2013**

I’m less interested Ken Levine won’t give Zach Braff one dime for his Kickstarter movie project than the sudden surge in his blog, from about 5000 hits a day, +/- 2000, to over 620,000 after that article, and over 96,000 for the followup. Levine also dissed the Veronica Mars movie Kickstarter, one that SamuraiFrog supported, BTW. There were a number of folks who dissed Braff, but supported the Veronica Mars effort, which otherwise could not have been made. Here’s Levine’s last word on the project, now that Braff has secured alternative funding. Also, another story on the controversy. Fascinated by the fact that this is what is considered controversial these days.

Al Capp: The Shame of Dogpatch.

Cathy Rigby played Peter Pan in Schenectady in April, and we declined to go. Now that I know that she’s retiring from the role after 3000+ performances, I wish I had gone.

Why McLean Stevenson quit MAS*H.

Ray Harryhausen, master of stop-motion animation, died this month. Mark Evanier has a nice Harryhausen story. Also, Ray was Steve Bissette’s hero. And here’s a short video you may recognize.

Don Rosa and the late Steve Gerber have been selected to receive the 2013 Bill Finger Award for Excellence in Comic Book Writing. Both are heroes in their field, and it was Gerber’s blog that prompted mine.

K-Chuck Radio: Rest in peace, George Jones.

Mark Evanier is dealing with the first Mother’s Day after his mom died much better than I did with mine.

The newspaper misspells its own name in an article about winning awards.

Dustbury speculates why the IRS “Where’s my refund?” site was down last weekend.

2001: A Space Odyssey – Howard Johnson’s Children’s Menu (1968).

The technology that links taxonomy and Star Trek.

How ‘Star Wars’ Nerds sold Lucasfilm to Disney.

These re-made Disney DVD covers are scarily accurate.