Things that bug me a little

very LOUD

After going to NYC, I started pondering a few things that bug me a little. Maybe a bit more than a little. I’m listing from most to least annoying.

Motorized bicycles are a hassle to avoid in Albany, especially the lunkheads, who insist on riding on the sidewalk.  But in Manhattan, they ride in the designated lanes, yet often don’t yield to pedestrians, ignoring traffic signals.

As someone who has been going to the City since 1971, I have found that car drivers have been, in the main, more aware of pedestrians. I had to scowl at only one car, and naturally, it was a taxi driver turning left and heading toward me as I was in the middle of the walkway.

Snow removal is something I excel at. Before I went to church on January 7, I shoveled the walk. The WHOLE walk. Then, just before dark, I shoveled again. There was a dusting the next morning, which I planned to get to, but the sun took care of it.

On the 9th, the absentee landlord for the property next door, Tick, and his long-suffering wife were trying to clear that sidewalk, which had mainly turned to ice by then. Not that he asked my opinion, but he might be better served to engage one of the tenants to shovel for a monetary consideration. Heck, I’d do it myself if he paid me enough.

Bathroom etiquette

I put the toilet seats down. There’s a sign in the all-access bathroom at my church asking people to lower the seat, yet twice in 2024, the seat was up. When I grew up, I was in a household with three females and one other male.  I live with two females currently.

A few years ago, I mentioned this topic to a guy who was quite perturbed. He gave me a diatribe about how women are liberated. “Why should men have to touch the filthy toilet seat?” I had no pithy response, so I just walked away. And I still put the seat down, but don’t tell him.

Hands-free cell phones bug me because the person walking down the street yakking is often very LOUD. That said, sometimes, it’s entertaining. One guy seemed to be pumping himself up when he said, “I’m ready to take on whatever they think I can do.” Another guy muttered,  “I don’t know what the f*** they’re talking about.” A woman was delighted to share, “I  was kind of lying telling people that Disney is involved.”

The photo, BTW, is one in a series of failed attempts to take a decent picture of the moon with my phone. I sort of like it because it looks like the moon lit the porch.

Pigskin conversation

On the other hand, I enjoyed this conversation immensely. On January 14, my wife and I ate dinner at a local Italian restaurant for our lunaversary. A television showed the Green Bay Packers playing at the Dallas Cowboys. The Pack was leading 27-0 until the ‘boys scored a touchdown just before the half.

I told my wife, ” I hate the Cowboys.” The woman at the next table, dining with her husband, said, “I can’t help but overhear what you said. I hate the Cowboys, too.”

While eating and watching the game during the second half at our respective tables, we discovered that our fathers and we were all New York Giants fans. She had one sister, and growing up, they both watched the games on Sundays with their dad. Since her family lived in Delaware County, NY, adjacent to Broome County, where my hometown of Binghamton is, we all watched the games on WNBF-TV, Channel 12, the CBS affiliate that carried the games locally.

I know a great deal about this person, including the fact that she is two years younger than me, except for her name. It was fun for us to do a running commentary of the game. At one point, I noted that Dallas, then down by 24 with about 20 minutes left, could tie the game if they scored three touchdowns AND two-point conversations. Fortunately, GB beat DAL 48-32. Our spouses were very patient. 

Fill-in for Sunday Stealing

FantaCo photographs

Roger.cartoonThe Sunday Stealing is a fill-in.

1. I am currently obsessed with old photographs. I used to work at a comic book store in Albany called FantaCo from 1980 to 1988. Specifically, my old boss Tom is looking for old photos from that period. As it turns out, I took a bunch of pictures with cheap cameras. They are in photo albums, in some semblance of order. I will wade through the photo albums and mail them to him. He will digitize them, then send the pics and the digitized files back.

BTW, if you have some FantaCo or FantaCon pics, feel free to email them to me or send them via Facebook. If you can identify any people, that would be great.

Simultaneously, I’ll be hunting for photos of an ex-girlfriend to give to someone who knew her in the same time frame.

2. Today I am happy because I’m going to see some theater, not just today but eight productions over the next ten months.

3. The age I am is apparently inappropriate to some people. The age I feel depends on the part. For instance, my head is about fifty, but my left knee is about 100.

4. My favorite place may be my office. It has 70% of my books, and I have a device on which I can play music.

5. Something I have been procrastinating on is creating a Wikipedia page for my late friend, the artist Raoul Vezina, who worked at FantaCo. I have enough material, but I’ve never done one of these things before.

6. The last thing I purchased was almost certainly recorded music.

Books!

7. The thing I love most about my home is the built-in bookcases in my office.

8. My most prized possession – IDK. Maybe the metal file box with all of my important papers.

9. If I could be one age for the rest of my life, I would want to be 37; it’s a prime number.

10. My outlook on life tends toward the pessimistic. Global warming, gun violence, and certain political philosophies are involved.

11. If you want to annoy me, be a poor listener.

12. I am completely defenseless when it comes to bubbles.

13. The bravest thing I’ve ever done was run out into traffic to scoop up a toddler who had wandered out there.

14. Something that keeps me awake at night is: See 10.

15. My favorite meal in the entire world is lasagna.

What the heck is Zoosk?

I am not a 5’5″ Gemini

ZooskOh, dear. A message indicates my photo has been removed from Zoosk. But one question. What the heck is Zoosk? “Zoosk Inc is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Spark Networks SE, a NASDAQ MKT Company (LOV).”| Ah, it’s an online dating service.

Here’s the email I got.

Hi rogerogreen,

Your photo was removed for not following Zoosk’s photo guidelines. To help your new photo go live…

· Make sure it’s clear
· Be alone in your photo
· Don’t include nudity

Wait a minute. I didn’t send them a photograph. This person isn’t even me!

The guy in question is:

Gender: Male (true), but he’s more than a half-decade younger

Interested In: Women (well, not just ANY woman)

Sign: Gemini (not me)

Height:5’5″ (way shorter than I)

Ethnicity: White / Caucasian (nah)

Relationship History: Separated (that’d be news to my wife)

Children: Has children, not at home (singular child, still at home)

Education: Attended college (actually, I have a BA and an MLS)

Religion: Christian – Catholic (I tend toward Protestantism)

Smoking: Smokes regularly (no way in heck)

Industry: Military (not me)

Oh, and he’s in the different Northeast area. I figured this because the four women Zoosk suggested are from around there. And they’re all non-smokers.

I was going to just reply to the email and say this ain’t me. But one of my sisters suggested it could be some sort of scam, though I’m not sure how that would even work. I will say the Zoosk security kinda SUCKS.

Response

So I blocked the messages. But it was still unsettling that MY email was used in this manner, especially when I got a couple of responses.

Then I wrote to their customer service folks. “Thank you for contacting our Zoosk Customer Care Team.

“This is an automatic email to confirm that we have received your request and have forwarded it on to the appropriate department for review. Here is your ticket reference number… To add additional comments, please reply to this email.

“Once your account and request have been reviewed, you will receive a response. We will try our very best to reply to you within the next 48 hours.”

While waiting for a reply, I came across this site for dissatisfied customers.

But Zoosk did get back to me, and in less than 24 hours: “Thank you for getting in touch and alerting us to this situation.

“We have blocked the profile connected to [my email]. This means that it has been removed from our website. It does not appear in Search, and it can no longer be logged into or used. Moreover, it is not possible to create another profile with this same email address in the future.” Thank you for that.

But right afterward, I got unsolicited ads from Match.com and SilverSingles. Meh.

Lydster: balancing act- what to share

more photos!

The primary balancing act in this here blog involves my daughter. When she was really young, I would put photos of her. Eventually, though, that seemed to be potentially unwise because people are strange.

Even early on, it was also true in the written content. I wasn’t about to write something that would potentially embarrass her years later. Of course, it’s always tricky to ascertain what will mortify a teenager.

I have several photo albums of my life prior to getting married in 1999. But I have none of the pictures from this century in books. However, I do have the pictures. Hundreds of them. Maybe thousands.

My daughter was allegedly helping me to clean the office when she got distracted by the photo books. My, she could be brutal about a pose I made, or a look I had back in the day. It was humbling, to say the least.

But she can be rather unforgiving of the way she looked when she was younger. I think she’s very cute. So does her mother. But she seems to think otherwise. Who’s right here, her or her totally unbiased parents?

Clean up time

In the months before I left work, I found a treasure trove of emailed photos there. I sent them to my personal account. Now, in the midst of purging said emails – from 10,7000 down to 4,000 so far – I’ve decided to use some of those pictures here, each month because I can. They’ll be in no particular order.

The photo below is from July of 2007. We were visiting a married couple in the Binghamton, NY area. She was in our wedding in 1999. We were in their wedding in 2002. That’s our kids playing in the sprinkler, my daughter to the left.

I think the picture above was in Oneonta later that summer. Perhaps at Brooks BBQ? Maybe somewhere else? It doesn’t much matter. The kid’s cute, though, right?

Dad and his three kids on Father’s Day

“Everything looks better in black-and-white.”

My sister Marcia posted a picture on Facebook. It was all pinkish, and I couldn’t even see her in the photo. So I asked Arthur the AmeriNZ guy, who must be related to Annie Sullivan, because he’s a miracle worker, if he might have a go at it.

He noted, “The original photo appears to be a low-resolution scan of the photo, and that means there’s not much to work with. If it was a higher-resolution version, I’d have more to work with.

“The pinkish cast to the photo is because of natural deterioration in photos from the 1940s through the 1960s and 70s. The dyes used turned out not to be stable, and photos taking on a reddish hue is common.” Yes, I do have a few of those in photo albums.

I suspect the original negative from 1958 is long gone, and a higher-resolution scan seems to be beyond the capacity of my sister’s machine.

He actually did three versions, one “with the colours lightly corrected”, another with “a little more intense colour correction, with the focus on making the skin tones a little more natural (which makes the background even worse)”, and the one I chose, “a black and white version, with some of the dust and defects caused by the low-resolution cleaned up. This version, because the colours in the background aren’t weird, is a little less distracting.”

Yeah, that’s what I was thinking. As Paul Simon, in his corrected lyrics, once said, “Everything looks better in black-and-white.”

I have only a vague recollection of this photo. I’m sure I saw it at the time, but that was long ago. I assume my mother took the picture, and based on the baby’s size, probably on June 15, 1958. This is the only one I recall with just these four people, Dad, Roger, Leslie and Marcia.

Happy Father’s Day to you, and to me.

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