Month: April 2006

The first Pointer Sisters album I ever owned was the 1974 album That’s A Plenty. It was the most eclectic album I’ve ever heard, Beatles’ Revolver-type eclectic.

Bangin’ on the Pipes/Steam Heat: nostalgic/novelty jazz; the only song my SO at the time didn’t like
Salt Peanuts: rapid-fire vocalization of the Dizzy Gillespie song, featuring Herbie Hancock on the piano, which I remember them performing with Carol Burnett on Carol’s show
Grinning in Your Face: straight-up blues by Son House, featuring side guitar by Bonnie Raitt
Shaky Flat Blues: poppish slow blues
That’s a Plenty / Surfeit USA: Dixieland
Little Pony: a Lambert, Hendricks and Ross tune
Fairytale: the song won the group its first Grammy Award, for Best Country Performance by a Duo or Group
Black Coffee: a gorgeous torch song, later covered by k.d. lang
Love in Them There Hills: my favorite: the slow, percussive funk by Gamble & Huff, which I used to listen to the volume up and the lights down.
The album got up to #82 in the Billboard charts. That same year, the group got named to Mr. Blackwell’s worst dressed list, which I thought was silly; they were retro chic!

As they became more pegged as an R and B group, they had hits such as Fire and Slowhand. They really broke out with 1983’s Break Out, with Jump (for My Love), Automatic, Neutron Dance, and a rerecording of I’m So Excited.

But it’s that early album that really got to me. Wish I had it in digital form.

This trek into musical nostalgia was prompted by the news of death of June Pointer, the youngest sister, a few days ago at the age of 52. Sad.

In light of certain revelations, I was wondering about the mood of the people who stumble upon this blog. If you would be so kind, please answer these three questions:

1. Should the President be impeached? You may pick a letter (or more than one – the answers aren’t all mutually exclusive), or come up with an answer not provided.

A. The President acted appropriately in declassifying materials. There is no issue here.
B. You liberals couldn’t get him on some other issues, so now you’re trying this one on. Give it up!
C. The President is probably on safe legal ground, but listening to his Press Secretary describing the justification is rather like listening to Bill Clinton parce “is”.
D. It’s troubling, but don’t quote me. What’s the status of the USA PATRIOT Act again?
E. That conversation about censure might be appropriate about now.
F. Well, maybe impeachment is appropriate, but after the Clinton impeachment, the country cannot afford to be torn apart like that again.
G. I’ve been reading over the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, and I’ve concluded: Can’t we impeach the Vice-President first? After all he was still talking about WMDs “proven” to be in Iraq on Meet the Press four months after the Pentagon showed it wasn’t the case.
H. From my reading of USC 50,
“Protection of identities of certain United States undercover intelligence officers, agents, informants, and sources,” ITMFA.
(Now since this is a wholesome, family-friendly, column, I won’t tell you what that means. But if one were to go to ITMFA dot COM, one would be shocked, SHOCKED to find out.)
I. Who the heck is Valerie Plame?

2. Will either the President or the Vice-President ever be brought up on impeachment charges, and if so, how far will the charges go in the process?

3. Some retired US generals have been calling on Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to resign. Will he, and if so, when? Should he?

BONUS: Have recent revelations made you more cynical about the political process, you were already cynical about the political process, or you are more hopeful about the process because information has come to light?

My answers will be in the reply section, but I may wait a bit in order not to skew the results.
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Beatles set to join online music revolution. Beatles. Revolution. Seems that they had a song (or three) called Revolution.
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Someone calls this “the best 9-11 documentary I’ve seen” – I’ve only started watching it. (1 hour, 20 minutes)
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After the past week, I feel like the donkey in this video. Before AND after. (Only a couple minutes.)

When I returned to college at New Paltz in the fall of 1975, after having dropped out for a semester, it was a bit disorienting. Since I had been elected to the Student Government Association (SGA) Financial Council (by a handful of disputed votes – but that’s another story), I gravitated to hanging out in the SGA offices.
The SGA was not happy with the established student newspaper, The Oracle. It wasn’t that the Oracle was saying bad things about them; in fact, the paper was hardly saying ANYTHING about them, having been taking over by a bunch of folks who were concerned about prison reform and the United States policy re: Chile, to the near exclusion of local student issues. And there was one big issue that fall, the representation of students on some college governance committee that intended to cut student participation.
Because of its free speech concern, the SGA was loath to pressure the Oracle to write anything. Instead, it started a newsletter. A guy named David was the editor of the Wind Sun News, published every weekday. It was an odd name more suited to some environmental journal.
Soon, I started reading about some young woman I dubbed Candid Yam, for reasons I will explain some day, and her organization that opposed the governance change. I’d never heard of her, and I knew all the players in activist circles.
One day, I was in the office when Fran, the secretary, was talking to a young woman and called her by name. “So, YOU’RE Candid Yam!” I said. She was startled. Had she made some enemy from her newsletter exposure? No, and in fact we became fast friends.
Meanwhile, I got to be in charge of the events calendar for the WSN. The day before the big rally, I submitted the upcoming events. I was surprised to find that one of the events, some Bible study, I think, hadn’t made it into the galley copy. David took it out because it was taking place at the same time as the rally. I argued that we were the student newsletter and should put in everything that was submitted. This became an amazingly heated argument. Cheech, the Comptroller of the Financial Council, came in, took my side in the argument and shut down the WSN, effective after that newsletter.
The rally did go on that next day, with CY and I helping to lead the charge.
Later that semester, the WSN was reinstituted under the direction of my then and current friend Judy, and CY and I were staffers. It came out weekly, I believe.
For the following semester CY, a guy named Kevin, and I, nicknamed TR by CY, became co-editors of the WSN, which then came out every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Kevin named himself OP just so we could be collectively called CYTROP.
It was clear that CY was first among equals. She and I had a routine of working on the paper on Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday nights, taking it to the printer that night, then later picking it up MWF to distribute, then go out drinking that night. Ah, the hard drinking journalists. Actually, some of the material we did was pretty good. I wrote about riding around in a village police car with a cop, which I liked and the cops didn’t hate.
CY turned 20 that semester, and was freaking out. A friend of hers, Pam, took her out to dinner, and Kevin and I got the paper to bed early, that is by 11:30 (usually it was closer to 1 a.m.. Or 2. Or even 3.)
She came back to the paper around 11:45, groaned that we were all there, figuring on work for her, so we were able to surprise her with a party.
During some school breaks, I went to visit her home in Westchester County. Mostly we sang. Her father got very angry once when we pooh-poohed our singing ability.
Ultimately, I graduated, but we were in regular contact, with me even crashing on her sofa for a few weeks in the fall of 1977.
I attended her graduation in 1980, and we managed to keep in touch.
Then a few years later, I called her and got her answering machine. This happened several times. Finally, I did get her and she said she’d call me back. Something in her voice said that this was untrue, though I didn’t know why. But I waited a few months, tried calling her again.
Finally, irritated, I sent her back the elephant.
The elephant was this huge, ugly orange and green and white stuffed animal she got as a child, and which she gave to me fairly early on. I figured this would anger her or hurt her, but it would generate a reaction. Nothing.
It’s been a long time now. I did try to track her down through the college alumni association but by the time the book came out, her address had changed.
One of the gifts I got being on JEOPARDY! was something called U.S. Search. I was surprised to find how many people had the same name and date of birth. Anyway, today CY is having a significant birthday. I always remember the date, because it’s arithmetically significant. If she was freaking out at 20, Allah knows how she’s feeling about THIS one. Happy birthday, CY, wherever you are.

Abe Lincoln was shot April 14, 1865 and died the next day. So we do “celebrate” the Lincoln assassination by forking over our pennies (and $5s) to the government?

Unfortunately, that got me to thinking Kellyesque weird thoughts:

What have we done for James Garfield, who was shot on July 2 (in his first months in office) in DC but didn’t die until September 19? What did the country do? Chester Arthur was Vice-President, but the 25th Amendment, of course, hadn’t been passed. Did Arthur take over anyway? Inquiring minds want to know. I discovered that if one types in Garfield in Google Images, one finds several pictures of the cartoon feline.

Then there was William McKinley, the only President assassinated in the state of New York, or indeed, north of the Mason-Dixon line, shot September 6, died September 14, 1901, with our youngest President, TR, taking over.

Maybe we can have a joint Garfield-McKinley Memorial Day. Yeah, right – how many Americans can even identify Garfield as a U.S. president? At least McKinley had served a term and has a mountain named for him.

Of course, JFK ended up on the 50-cent piece (not to be confused with the former Curtis Jackson). They changed the name of Cape Canaveral to Cape Kennedy, in honor of his vision of going to the moon. Then they changed it back.
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Anyway, I didn’t mind filing my income tax, back in the day when I was just using the simple forms 1040A or 1040EZ. Since I’ve been married, though, it has meant itemizing, which never fails to mystify me. I STILL don’t know the difference between ordinary dividends and qualified dividends.

Then there is the Alternative Minimum Tax, allegedly designed to keep the rich from paying nothing, but which somehow has become the bane of the more moderate wage earners.

O.K. Question 45 is about the AMT, which requires that one needs to fill out a worksheet just to answer that one question:

2. Enter the smaller of the amount on Schedule A, line 4 or 2.5% (.025) of the amount on Form 1040, line 38.

But my favorite is this:

7. Enter the amount from Form 8962, line 2

What the heck is Form 8962? I went to the IRS website, but this wasn’t on the list of forms. Finally, I searched the site to discover that 8962 is a form for “Exemption Amount for Taxpayers Housing Individuals Displaced by Hurricane Katrina”. O.K. Bottom line, I spent nearly an hour figuring out one question, the answer of which is ZERO.

Every year is just slightly, maddeningly different. When they came up with the 16th Amendment, which is comprised of merely 30 words, did they envision the monstrosity that the tax code has become?

Fortunately, we have a few extra days to file because the 15th is on a Saturday. Those of us to send our returns to Andover, MA get yet ANOTHER day, because April 17 is Patriot’s Day in Massachusetts. And since I believe we’re going to end up paying, we’re going to s-t-r-e-t-c-h out the process as long as possible.
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You probably heard that Katrina was retired as a hurricane name, but four other names were retired as well. If memory serves, Stan hit Central America around the same time as the deadly earthquakes in Pakistan, so it didn’t get as much play as it otherwise would have warranted.
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In his post of April 11, friend Fred noted that I corrected him over Hugh Hefner’s birthday. In answer to that question I got, “How did I know THAT?”, let’s be clear here – I HADN’T marked Hef’s 80th natal celebration on my calendar; I just happened to see a piece on CBS Sunday Morning. Why, I don’t even BUY Playboy, not even for the interviews. And the next time I go to a Playboy mansion will be the first. Or doth he protest too much?

Despite what I said a few weeks ago, based on the ABC-TV website at the time, and contrary to what it says in this week’s PARADE magazine, the next episode of Commander in Chief will NOT be on next Tuesday, April 18 at 9 pm Eastern, it will be on TOMORROW (Thursday), April 13 at 10 pm Eastern.
Someone pointed out that the two actors who played Hawkeye Pierce, Donald Sutherland on Commander, and Alan Alda on West Wing, are now playing Republican members of Congress. It doesn’t seem to reflect their personal choices.