Ramblin' with Roger

Ring Doorbell Camera

Police Surveillance Technology

In the New York Times, Emily Keegin offered Welcome to My Museum of America. She put together “a collection of 25 objects that reveal something special about us.” Along with the $4.99 Costco Rotisserie Chicken, the Plastic Lawn Flamingo, and Personal Injury Lawyer Advertisements (for sure), she offered up the Ring Doorbell Camera.

“Have we always been so scared of strangers? And when did we, as a country supposedly built on individual liberties, become so enthusiastic about Big Brother-style surveillance? Maybe we are still haunted by the ghost of Michael Wigglesworth and the Massachusetts Puritans who looked out from their chapels and saw only ‘a waste of howling wilderness.’ Maybe we still believe that safety can be found only beneath the eye of a benevolent and omniscient lord. The Puritans had God. We have Jeff Bezos. In a nation plagued by loneliness, perhaps it’s time to start answering the door.”

My wife and I had a couple of passing conversations about them. She thought that if we had had one, we would have captured the late Nick, the absentee landlord of the property next door, when he damaged my wife’s car more than once. But my discomfort was great.

Mass surveillance

And it got worse when I saw Last Week Tonight with John Oliver’s segment on Police Surveillance Technology. “In recent years, the prevalence of local mass surveillance systems has exploded thanks to cheaper technology and increased funding from the federal government. And this all tends to get presented as a boon to public safety. Local news loves to cover cities’ real-time crime centers…

“Here’s one in Cooper City, Florida. And in that story, the town’s then mayor offered this upbeat assessment. ‘Everyone is being watched. And if you’re doing nothing wrong, it doesn’t matter what you’re doing, but when you’re doing something wrong, we’re going to find out. We’re going to have the wherewithal to come and get you. We’ve got essentially Big Brother on steroids.'”

Oliver got into how the technology is used as a “digital form of stop and frisk, ” often hooked into surveillance cameras. “Increasingly, they’re able to use those owned by private businesses or homeowners. There are an estimated 85 million in this country, and police now routinely request access to them.”

Oliver has also noted the technological shortcomings. “The way Shot Spotter works is it basically sets up microphones all over a city, which alert police if they sense a loud noise that could be a gunshot… Unfortunately, the technology seems nowhere near as good as you’d want it to be for that kind of response. An AP investigation found the systems can miss live gunfire right under their microphones or misclassify the sounds of fireworks as gunshots. While other reports found Spotter being activated by cars backfiring or even people using a nail gun.”

ALPRs

“And there is a similar issue with… automated license plate readers or ALPRs. And cops will claim that they’re a way to find stolen cars or those engaged in suspicious activity.

“The most popular are made by a company called Flock. And here is how they work. Flock license plate readers don’t just scan tags looking for stolen cars or vehicles on a hot list. The cameras take a photo of every car that passes, stamped with the precise time and location. The more cameras you pass, the clearer the picture of your movements. All of that data is saved in a database for 30 days, shared with connected police departments, allowing the government to go back in time to see where your car was and when. No warrant required, whether you’re suspected of a crime or not.

“A randomized trial in Vallejo, California, found that 37% of all ALPR hits from fixed readers like those attached to a street light, and 35% from mobile ALPRs, like those on cop cars, were misreads, which is an astonishingly high error rate. And that has had real consequences.”

CBS News has had several stories like this one in several jurisdictions: Privacy groups raise red flags over police misuse of Flock cameras, usually for personal use. The Oliver story touches on that as well. Common Cause is advocating to tell Congress: Defund Flock’s surveillance cameras nationwide.

From the NYT: Flock Cameras Can Track Every Car in America. Police Love Them. Citizens Don’t. “In Texas, there’s one thing liberals and conservatives agree on: They don’t want cameras trained on their cars.”

Atlas of Surveillance

Oliver pointed to the Atlas of Surveillance, Documenting Police Tech in Our Communities with Open Source Research. It shows Albany County, NY using Flock, and the state using other technologies.

Oliver: “It is worth remembering, even when these systems work perfectly, they can still be wildly invasive. Cameras and license plate readers can track your movements wherever you go, which means they could find out if you, say, attended a protest or visited an abortion clinic.”

“And some departments can then use all the data fed into them to engage in our final and maybe dumbest use of this tech. It’s called predictive policing. Basically using all that data to figure out which areas or individuals might be likely sources of crime.

“Shot Spotter and license plate readers are disproportionately used in communities of color. And cameras are often associated with

You should watch the whole thing. It may have you think differently about your Ring Camera. I’ll pass, thank you.

1976 Hot Country Singles of 1976, part two

Conway Twitty

Here are the 1976 Hot Country Singles, Part Two. They were all #1 for a single week, in part a function of market manipulation.

It’s fascinating to me that I know many of the artists, but not the music, at least in this decade: Bill Anderson, Ronnie Milsap, Conway Twitty, and Tammy Wynette, to name a few.

You’ll Lose A Good Thing – Freddy Fender

Till I Can Make It On My Own – Tammy Wynette; her stated personal favorite among all that she had written and recorded.

Drinking My Baby (Off My Mind) – Eddie Rabbit

Together Again – Emmylou Harris, a 1964 Buck Owens song; I think I own this on vinyl

Don’t The Girls All Get Prettier At Closing Time – Mickey Gilley

My Eyes Can Only See as Far As You – Charlie Pride

What Goes On When The Sun Goes Down – Ronnie Milsap

After All The Good Is Gone – Conway Twitty. He broke through in 1955. He died during surgery in 1993 at the age of 59. Conway was inducted into the Tennessee Sports Hall of Fame.

I’ll Get Over You – Crystal Gayle; my greatest hits albums of hers I’ve got from my late FIL’s collection

All These Things – Joe Stampley

The Door Is Always Open – Dave and Sugar

Golden Ring – George Jones and Tammy Wynette

Say It Again – Don Williams

Covers

Bring It On Home To Me – Mickey Gilley. Yes, the Sam Cooke classic from 1962

If You’ve Got The Money, I’ve Got The Time – Willie Nelson, a #1 hit for Left Frizell, who co-wrote it, in 1950

Here’s Some Love – Tanya Tucker

The Games That Daddies Play – Conway Twitty. He didn’t write every one of his hits, but he did pen this one

Among My Souvenirs – Marty Robbins. This was a $1 song by Paul Whiteman in 1928!

Cherokee Maiden – Merle Haggard. Bob Wills had first recorded this song in 1941:

Movie review: Reading Lolita in Tehran

Gatsby”/Lolita/Daisy Miller/Pride and Prejudice

My wife recommended that we go to the Spectrum 8 Theatre and watch the movie Reading Lolita in Tehran. I’m almost always interested in seeing movies unfamiliar to me, so we attended on a Thursday afternoon; alas, only one other person was present.

I will admit that I was unfamiliar with the non-fiction book by Iranian author and academic Azar Nafisi, published in 2003. It is based on her own experiences while teaching English literature at the University of Tehran during the Iranian Revolution.”

The film seems to hew closely to the book, but it does not necessarily follow its chronology. After the fall of the Shah of Iran, Azar (Golshifteh Farahani) and her husband Bijan (Arash Marandi) return to their homeland, expecting more freedom.

Unfortunately, the rise of Ayatollah Khomeini meant a different change. She gets pushback, initially from a young man in her class, who thinks there was nothing redeeming about The Great Gatsby because of the moral turpitude of the main couple – adultery! The country increasingly becomes more restrictive.

“Gatsby” for 1979 was the first piece, followed by “Lolita” (1995), Henry James’s “Daisy Miller” (1988), and Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” (1996).

The professor ultimately gets fired from her position. Society requires the hijab. Her ultimate response was to teach these classes – for women only for a variety of reasons. It’s in those discussions, shown in much brighter hues than much of the rest of the film, that allow great insights about liberation.

My favorite involved Pride and Prejudice, where the professor explains how conveying dialogue and even flirtation in the midst of regimented dance.

Pretty good

This was a good, not great movie. One is already in the movie’s corner going in. The episodic nature of the film didn’t always gel. It was still worthwhile, because, as Peter Travers noted in his 2.5 stars-out-of-4 review, “Today, the book banning strikes a raw nerve in America, the country the women once regarded as a haven for freedom seekers.”

(A recent example: South Florida State College fired an English professor after she assigned a story about a teacher who talks about sex with her students. Now the professor is suing. “The instructor, Vinita Prabhakar, said in an interview that she had taught the story in her classes for nearly a decade without incident.”)

Rotten Tomatoes gave the movie an 86% positive rating, but not enough audience patrons viewed the film to comment.

The film was made in Italy, and some narratives were fictionalized to protect some of the real people portrayed. It was released originally in 2024, but didn’t make it to the US until July 2026.

“The “authentic home-grown folk singer”

Les Green, my dad

Here’s an article about my father, Les Green. It’s a column by Tom Cawley, a longtime staffer at the (Binghamton, NY) Evening Press from Friday, 2 June, 1967.

There were quite a few articles about Dad in the Binghamton papers between about 1959 until he, my mother, and my baby sister moved to Charlotte, NC, in 1974. Several of the narratives were about his civil rights activities, a bunch were about his musicality, and a few were about his other volunteer efforts.

This one is curious for a few reasons. Cawley is relying on the reporting of another person. I found Jerry Handte’s commentary somewhat limiting. That said, Les Green being “the authentic home-grown folk singer of the town he was born” with great stage presence, et al., is right on target.

Incidentally, by 1968, my father QUIT working at IBM, because the job was mind-numbing. My homeroom/biology teacher at Daniel Dickinson, Mr. Joseph, told me that my father was crazy. I happened to believe that driving materials around on forklifts was making him pretty miserable. My mother and sisters didn’t see him much during the week for that five or six years.

He ended up working for Opportunities for Broome, and Office of Equal Opportunity (OEO) more in line with his passions

But I read that he WROTE a canal song? And he was going to perform it? This is something I seem to have totally forgotten.

That he was going to perform it at the American Civil Association is not a surprise, since he volunteered there frequently. (My 16th birthday party in March 1969 was held there.)

My father died August 10, 2000, in Charlotte, NC, ostensibly from prostate cancer, at the age of 73. Hmm, I’M 73.

Les Green

Sunday Stealing Asks, “Why Not Just Meme?”

BCHS

Welcome to Sunday Stealing. Here we will steal all types of questions from every corner of the blogosphere. Our promise to you is that we will work hard to find the most interesting and intelligent questions. Cheers to all of us thieves!

This week’s meme is inspired by Bragger, a blogger who enjoyed memes “so I don’t have to think” about a topic for her posts. She stole this one from Tense Teacher, sadly, who took her blog down.

When You Can’t Think of Anything to Blog About … “Why Not Just Meme?”

1) Describe your typical weekend, and tell us how this weekend has been different.

My typical weekend involves creating answers to this quiz, catching up on reading the newspapers, cleaning, attending church, and doing ZOOM with my two sisters. The thing is, there is ALWAYS “stuff” that pops up, whether it’s someone’s crisis, an unexpected phone call, or something that goes wrong and needs to get fixed in the house. I’d like to go to the movies, if it fits in the schedule.

2) What food hits your bliss spot?

The combo of grilled chicken, mashed potatoes, and peas. I was on a train with my wife, and I said, “THAT’S what I’d like to have.” Maybe today?

The timeshare

3) Where did you stay on your last vacation (hotel, Airbnb/Vrbo, friends/family)?

That would be this past Wednesday-Friday. The long boring story would be that my wife has been spending months and mucho dollars trying to convert my MIL’s timeshare package to my wife’s name. It FINALLY took place, so my wife and I decided to go to New York City with no particular plan in mind, if only to burn some points before September 30. My wife and daughter will do likewise in a few weeks.

4) If you had a personality eraser, what part of yours would you erase?

Easy peasy – melancholy.

5) Think of your friends. Tell us about the first one who popped into your head.

KD. We’re planning to go to our high school reunion in September. Understand that we went K-12 together, starting in Daniel Dickinson in Binghamton for K-9, before we graduated from Binghamton Central High School! They texted me to see if I could find another one of our K-12 pals. I had an email from 2023 that still worked, and that friend, along with one or two others, is also attending.

Thank you for playing! Please come back next week.