April 2013 - Page 2 of 6 - Ramblin' with Roger

Flashback to footwear

While we were in Portland, Maine, we stopped at Freeport at the L.L. Bean store.

I’ve been occasionally complaining about the quality of the customer service of certain businesses. So I thought I’d share a more positive story.

But first a bit of personal history. I was on the game show JEOPARDY! on November 9 and 10, 1998, which was recorded on September 16 of that year. I’ve quickly noted that I won $17,600 in the first game. I was less effusive about my second game. I was in a distant third place going into the last question. I had $2,200, Jim had $5,500, and Robin, $9,200.

The Final JEOPARDY! category was FAMOUS NEW ENGLANDERS: The clue was just a picture of a guy dressed rather like the guy here. I wagered $1,800 and got it right (LL Bean) ending with $4,000. Jim bet $3,800 and got it wrong, and finished with $1,700. Robin bet $2,500, which was incorrect but won the game with $6,700 in cash. Both of them gave Sears as the answer. Jim won a Panasonic DVD player; and I, a trip to Almond Beach Resort, Barbados, which Carol and I used on our honeymoon in May 1999.

In March 1999, my then-fiancee, Carol, took me to Portland, Maine on vacation. While we were there, we stopped at Freeport, ME at the L.L. Bean store; they weren’t all over the place as they are now. In the entryway was the exact same photo I had seen while taping the game show about six months earlier. We got snowed in at Portland and had to stay a couple of extra days.

In March 2013, I was wearing a pair of LL Bean boots when the sole separated from the rest of the shoe. My wife took them to the local LL Bean store – which did not exist in 1999 – who sent them to the repair unit.

The repair unit, though, could not fix them. But they would give me a credit for what I paid for them, as part of some lifetime guarantee I was only vaguely aware of. When did I buy them? I had no idea. “Had to be 1998 or 1999.” Well, in that case, it HAD to be March of 1999 [though I didn’t actually remember buying them, since I had not yet received the $17,600; the check arrived on March 17, 1999]. I explained that I had to make a pilgrimage to the store because it got me a trip to a far-away island. The repair guy loved the story.

A Boston marathon of random thoughts

I made the most unfortunate error of listening to the news all afternoon on Friday, April 19.

* I have been to Boston several times in my life, though not in the past five years. I had an ex whose family lived near there. I loved the mass transit in the region.

* My very good friend Karen used to live in Somerville, which is just north of Cambridge, part of the area where a lot of the activity on Friday took place. Her sister, who I have known for decades, still lives in that section, and I was wondering how much she had directly affected by the shutdown.

* I won $17,600 on JEOPARDY! in Boston in 1998, with friends Karen and Judy, and Judy’s son Max in the audience.

* Some talking head wondered if the bombing in Boston would make Americans more sensitive to the ravages of war that take place in Afghanistan, Syria, and elsewhere. My guess is no.

* A lot of bad info from CNN, who had reported a bomber had been captured on April 17, then awkwardly walked back its own story on-air later that afternoon.

* Amy’s poem Boston Meltdown reminded me why I stopped watching ABC News; it was the cult of personality – “Diane Sawyer’s my friend!” – which rankles me.

* Some news analyst referred to the M.I.T. cop who was shot and killed as the Officer Tippit of this case; I remembered who that was, amazingly. He was the police officer shot and killed by Lee Harvey Oswald after the JFK assassination. That’s rather arcane stuff, but when you’re filling the news cycle 24/7, that’s what you’ll get.

* Tried very hard not to listen to all the speculation about the identity and motivation of the bombers before they were identified, and assiduously avoided other people’s blather on the topic.

* Tegan is quite right that crowdsourcing looking for the bombs and bombers can be a dangerous trap.

* As terrifying and awful as the Marathon bombing was on Monday, April 15, the shootout, manhunt, and capture on April 19 was tenser in that one knew what COULD happen with the remaining suspect. My daughter in particular was tense over the fact that the Watertown neighborhood looked like a war setting.

* I made the most unfortunate error of listening to the news all afternoon on Friday, April 19. Tried listening to NBC but it kept reloading on my computer. Listened to four hours of CNN, expecting the door-to-door search would surely glean the suspect. No go. Then CNN timed out on my computer. Paying attention gave me a terrible headache.

* Yet then listened to CBS News when the announcement that the suspect was not captured but that the lockdown was over (wha!), but had gone to dinner when the capture of the alleged second bomber took place.

*Still, there were two interesting threads in the interviews of the suspects’ families. Their uncle in Maryland, who called the young men “punks,” wore the ethnic badge of shame, that their alleged actions brought shame to the Chechen people, that was very much like all of South Korea seemed to feel after it was revealed that the Virginia Tech shooter was from there. I’d forgotten that the VT massacre (32 dead, 17 wounded) was this time of the month (April 16, 2007).

* The mother and father, back in the former USSR, and the aunt in Canada, conversely, seemed to think the younger son was incapable of such heinous actions. The aunt, who is a lawyer, was particularly fond of the theory that her nephews were framed. One CNN reporter suggested the mother was “deluded”; a mother not believing her son was a killer seems understandable. The classmates of the younger suspect, who survived the shootouts, expressed great surprise as well.

* Even before this, I had pretty much decided that I wasn’t a big fan of large crowds such as New Orleans at Mardi Gras and Times Square on New Year’s Eve.

* Must admit this made me laugh.

* Mark Evanier tweeted: “America’s currently debating whether a guy who can’t talk should have been informed that he has the right to remain silent.” Of course, the issue isn’t just about one hated individual, but whether a naturalized US citizen can be considered an enemy combatant, and thus not subject to his Miranda rights. It’s good that he’ll be tried in civilian court.

* The family went to see West Side Story at Albany High School Sunday afternoon. It was quite good, especially the young woman playing Anita. I wonder, though, if the decision to have a sign on the front window, which said they would be taking extra precautions as a “result of Boston and other recent events,” was a function of the violence in the musical. Everyone was wanded.

* The lectionary scripture for this past Sunday included the 23rd Psalm. the choir sang The Lord Is My Shepherd from the Rutter Requiem [LISTEN], which I love.

* In the sermon, the pastor noted she had scrapped what she was thinking about in terms of her sermon after Monday afternoon. She noted that times were also difficult when Psalm 23 was written: “Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I will fear no evil, for you are with me.”

* Cheri collected some sporting events videos from this past week appropriate to the topic.

*I happened to have had the eponymous Boston album in my desk at work, even before the events, reason enough to LISTEN to it.
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Allan Arbus, best known for his dozen appearances as the sarcastic psychiatrist Maj. Sidney Freedman on the TV series MASH died at the age of 95. Here are three minutes of Sidney’s best quips. Read what Ken Levine, who wrote for Arbus on MASH, has to say.
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Richie Haven was only 72 when he died on Earth Day. He was forced to become the opening act at the Woodstock concert in 1969 because no one else could get there and ended up playing three hours, covering every song he knew. Here’s a story by Albert Brooks about being the opening act for Richie; NSFW.

O is for Our Bodies, Ourselves

Our Bodies, Ourselves was listed on the conservative Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s ’50 Worst Books of the Twentieth Century’. The book’s website saw this as newsworthy and accepted the designation gracefully, even posting the text of the review.

For a number of reasons, I have long had a copy of the book Our Bodies, Ourselves on my bookshelf. It was a bible of women’s health at a time – the early 1970s – when there was a lot of misinformation about the same. I had a lot of women friends who might use it as reference material.

From this PBS story from December 2012 entitled American Voices: Judy Norsigian-

The Library of Congress recently named Our Bodies, Ourselves as one of 88 books that shaped America. It’s had a profound impact on our consciousness, on the ability of women to see the importance of asking questions, not to just take whatever a doctor says.

Back in the late ’60s and early ’70s…there was so little information, even college-educated women knew very little about our bodies, about pregnancy, about birth, about birth control.

And it was out of that dire need to educate ourselves that we created what was a wonderful self-help project. It was simply women coming together, acknowledging our ignorance, and saying, “We’re gonna do something about this.”

As the book evolved over the years, it began to tackle other areas of women’s health. If you’ve ever read medical studies from the 1950s or before, you would notice that most were done on men, and assumed to also apply equally to women. We know now that it often isn’t the case.

In the past year or so, there has been a move to send copies of Our Bodies, Ourselves to members of the United States Congress. Obviously, there is STILL a bunch of misinformation, or disinformation, out there. The prime, but hardly only, example was when then-Representative, and Senate candidate, Todd Akin of Missouri proclaimed on August 19, 2012: “From what I understand from doctors, [pregnancy from rape is] really rare. If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”

From Wikipedia: “Our Bodies, Ourselves was also listed on the conservative Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s ’50 Worst Books of the Twentieth Century’. The book’s website saw this as newsworthy and accepted the designation gracefully, even posting the text of the review.”

The 2005 edition, I believe, is the ninth iteration of the book, and there is now a 2011 version; don’t know if there was a version in the interim.

This was, BTW, the book my wife bought for herself last fall, after hinting around about me getting it for her, much to my chagrin. Since I had already purchased it, I gave it to one of my colleagues for Christmas instead, and it was well-received.

ABC Wednesday – Round 12

Obsessive ecology

The Wife and I are rather obsessive about recycling; we just can’t stand throwing away items that can be easily salvaged.

When our family travels by car, bus, or train, I usually bring a stack of unread newspapers to read through. Why look at old news? Because, even a couple of weeks after the publication date, I usually find some story that I did not know about. It’s also when I finally discover that my Times Union blog has been excerpted its print edition.

Auto travel usually means eating at chain restaurants. We’ve discovered, unfortunately, that it’s easier to ascertain at those places whether the food on the menu is peanut-free; the Daughter has allergies. That’s how we discovered that Applebee’s, at least the one we stopped at in central Pennsylvania, had a notice that it could not promise that the food was prepared in a manner that was safe for her. We bemoan the fact that too many plastic milk cartons and salad bowls, e.g. get thrown in the trash because the locales don’t have a recycle bin.

The Wife and I are rather obsessive about recycling; we just can’t stand throwing away items that can be easily salvaged. All those newspapers I’m done with get thrown in the trunk of the car or collected in my luggage. It will be recycled our next chance, at our destination or back at home.

Likewise, we will travel many miles with used plastic food containers from, say, McDonald’s, rather than tossing them in the trash. We’ll rinse them out, and then recycle them when the opportunity presents itself.

We can’t stand throwing away items that will end up in some city dump when that can easily be avoided. I see people put even returnable bottles and cans in the trash, which is literally throwing money away.

Happy Earth Day! Maybe, as someone said of me in another context, I AM a neurotic intellectual.

Oh, so THAT’S how you do it!

My wife kept talking pictures with her digital camera, confident that, SOME DAY, we would figure it out how to access them.

My birthday week (last month) became quite busy, though entertaining. On my birthday itself, my wife and daughter took me out to go bowling. I used to love to bowl, going back to when I was in a league when I was just ten years old. My game was definitely off, but it HAS been over five years.

That evening at choir, we had a dearth of tenors, and I was requested to sing in that section, rather than with the basses. Fortunately, the parts aren’t TOO high, or too difficult. The snow that fell that night was wet and slippery but was largely over the next day.

Friday night and Saturday morning, I helped with the setup of our church’s participation in the Giffen School Book-and-Author event, then worked the event, as did The Wife and The Daughter.

Came home and played hearts with friends Jendy, Broome, and Orchid. At the end of the play, there was some desire to take photos. We took a picture of Broome, Orchid, and me, Jendy already having left. They said, “You can send that picture to us, right?” My wife and I had to acknowledge sheepishly that while we could TAKE pictures on my wife’s digital camera, we didn’t know how to SEND pictures.

It was after a wedding of a friend of my wife’s on July 28, 2007, that she expressed interest in greeting some sort of digital camera, and I bought it for her in either December 2007, for Christmas, or July 2008, for her birthday. It stayed in the box for well over a year, before she tried to figure it out. After some technical difficulties, partly based on a dying battery, she started taking pictures in the summer of 2010 at Lydia’s ballet class. She could even take videos. But moving these from camera to another medium was not in our skillset. Among other things, the manual was MIA. If there was some sort of cord attachment, it was missing as well. Yet, my wife kept talking pictures, confident that, SOMEDAY, we would figure it out.

Apparently, some cameras can send pictures through the wireless Internet, though ours was from an earlier generation. But Broome popped out the little drive and uploaded it onto my daughter’s laptop. So, over the next several months, or years, you’ll see the output; after all, we have 2.5 years of pictures previously inaccessible, including some short videos.

How did I put pictures on this blog in the past? I used to take photos with a one-use camera and get them made into a CD-ROM. Not quick, or cheap, but it worked. These aren’t necessarily great photos here – the first and last (so far) taken by my wife – but you’ll see some really nice ones over time.

That problem no solved, it’s time to use the Kindle my wife got for her birthday back in July 2011.