October 2013 - Page 5 of 7 - Ramblin' with Roger

The Daughter’s homework keeps me awake at night

This is NOT her father’s fourth grade math, and not only do I love the subject, I am good at it; she, conversely, is learning to HATE it.

When I indicated I was having trouble sleeping, someone suggested telling myself a story. This doesn’t work for me, because my head is already filled with stories that I want to let out, i.e., blog about. But I have not the time to do this. And while there are a few reasons for my busyness, none of them has more of an impact than my daughter’s homework. It takes us, and I do mean US, an AVERAGE of 90 minutes per night.

So if I’m spending an hour and a half doing THAT, by the time I’ve washed the dishes and done other chores, it’s 10 p.m. Should I write or should I go to bed? If I write, I may get overtired; if I go to bed, the mind continues to write narratives that I can’t offload.

I’m writing this because I can churn it relatively quickly, but when do I write my feelings about FantaCon or the musical Ghost, both of which took place LAST month? Or the ABC Wednesday pieces that I USED to write three or four weeks ahead, but I only have the immediate next one written? Important anniversaries coming up, and remain unaddressed.

And much of the homework involves math problems from the so-called Core Curriculum, or Common Core that I think are quite challenging for a fourth-grader, especially since New York has deigned to start on the process BEFORE it really trained its teachers in the methodology.

You have questions asking about the number of footballs, when it’s told you about the total number of balls, and the number of baseballs, and that the number of basketballs is a certain number less than the number of baseballs. The process means one needs to subtract to get the number of basketballs, then add them to the number of baseballs, then subtract that sum from the total number of balls. And these are four- and five-digit numbers.

This is NOT her father’s fourth-grade math, and not only do I love the subject, but I am also good at it; she, conversely, is learning to HATE it.

Then one gets a question such as this one:
“In the 2010 New York City Marathon, 42,429 people finished the race and received a medal. Before the race, the medals had to be ordered. If you were the person in charge of ordering the medals and estimated how many to order by rounding, would you have ordered enough medals? Explain your thinking.”

I discovered, after talking with two colleagues, and after a couple of hours, that the second sentence is the source of the utter confusion, and by excising it, then what is being sought in the question becomes clear.
If one rounds 42,429 to the nearest 10, it’s 42,430 and you have enough medals.
If one rounds 42,429 to the nearest 100 or 1,000 or 10,000, it’d be 42,400 or 42,000 or 40,000, respectively, and it would be an insufficient number of medals.

This is not the only bad question, only the most egregious one. It’s become a challenge to motivate her to do the stuff that has actual value when it’s so heavily laden with rubbish.

Attacking these questions is perceived as not wanting to “challenge” or “enrich” the students. I think the IDEA is fine; it’s the EXECUTION that I think is faulty.

Book review: Peter Jennings – A Reporter’s Life

Peter Jennings was a sometimes a harsh taskmaster, but it was never about personal ego, it was about making the broadcast better, and it showed.

I used to watch ABC World News almost religiously and it was because of Peter Jennings. Now I find the program almost unwatchable, and I have to think that the late anchorman would probably feel the same way.

Of course, I was watching when he told us, on-air on April 5, 2005, that he had lung cancer. And I was a viewer when Charles Gibson announced he had died on August 7, and I felt a profound sense of sadness, grief that continues as the broadcast he put forth has turned, in large measure, into the infotainment that he could not stand.

Lynn Scher. ABC reporter contacted Peter’s widow, Kayce Freed Jennings, and suggested that the interviews conducted for the ABC News special, “Peter Jennings: Reporter” in August 2005 would make a good book. Kayce initially said no, so Lynn Scher did it anyway, just for the family and close colleagues, presented a year later. This convinced Kayce that a book WAS viable, not just to honor Peter, but to discuss journalistic values. The book, edited by Kate Darton, Kayce Jennings, and Scher, is a story told by some seven dozen colleagues, competitors, family members, friends, and newsmakers.

It relates his life, born in Toronto in 1938, the son of Canada’s Edward R. Murrow, Charles Jennings. Peter was smart, but a lazy student, dropping out of high school. But, because of his charisma and good looks, he finds himself in the family business in Canada. He joins ABC News in 1964, and in 1965, at the age of 26, becomes the anchor of the evening news, a job for which he was indisputably unqualified, especially against competition such as Chet Huntley and David Brinkley on NBC, and Walter Cronkite on CBS.

He becomes a field reporter, first in Rome, then Beirut. It was he who reported live from the Olympics in Munich about the kidnapping and killing of Israeli athletes.

In 1978, ABC News created this troika anchor chair with Frank Reynolds in Washington covering the government/politics segments, Max Robinson in Chicago on domestic news, and Jennings, now the chief foreign correspondent, dealing with international news from London. By 1983, he was the sole anchor, working out of New York City.

It is at this point that the broadcast started to get good. His exacting standards, his antipathy for the soft stories, made ABC News #1. He even eschewed the O.J. Simpson trial story until he became convinced it said something about the racial divide in the United States.

Jennings often fought for extended coverage of topics that, perhaps, people didn’t know they needed to know, about AIDS, Guantanamo, religion, racism, the Arab world, and much more. He had an insatiable curiosity, and seem to act as though everyone else did, or should.

He spent 24 hours ringing in the millennium, then was on air for over 60 hours after 9/11, including a wonderful program the Saturday after, trying to explain the event to children, which I watched too because I needed someone to explain it to me. Peter had a knack, a need to make sure the story was told well, including the context in which the events took place. He was sometimes a harsh taskmaster in this regard, virtually EVERYONE said, but it was never about personal ego, it was about making the broadcast better, and it showed.

I enjoyed the narrative, and the various remembrances, interspersed with words from Peter Jennings, made it a surprisingly interesting book to read.

I’m SO Tired

On the TV show Grey’s Anatomy. Meredith and Derek are exhausted with a new baby. On another show, Parenthood, there’s a couple with a new, crying-all-the-time, infant.

For reasons I mostly don’t understand, for the last couple of weeks, I have been going to sleep, waking up anywhere between three and four and a half hours later, and then being unable to go back to sleep. I stay in bed for as long as an hour, then finally get up and check my e-mail, or, rarely, watch TV for an hour, then go back to bed, pretty much in time for the alarm clock. I usually DO fall asleep in that brief time between when my wife wakes up and when she returns from the shower; I know this because I am likely to have quite vivid dreams.

The annoying thing is that I’m often too unfocused to write a comprehensible blog post, to even start one. Yet the IDEAS are still there, which is actually worse.

I’ve experienced this condition before, for a day or two, and I can operate OK in the short term. But in this extended bout, not so much. There was a First Friday event I plugged in this blog, and which I remembered at 2 pm Friday. But by 5:30, when it was time to leave work, I totally forgot, went home, and at 6:20, I was too tired to go back out.

In case you’re wondering, I’ve tried having a glass of wine, or having nothing to drink; different times of going to bed (yeah, I know you’re supposed to go at the same time, but that only applies when that’s working.) I had been staying off caffeine until the last few days when I feared dozing at my desk.

Saturday afternoon, with absolutely no energy, I watched a little of the TV show Grey’s Anatomy. Meredith and Derek are exhausted with a new baby. On another show, Parenthood, there’s a couple with a new, crying-all-the-time, infant. Then it hit me: the last time I was THIS tired was nine and a half years ago

I HATE using them, but, in desperation, I took one of those OTC medications that are supposed to let you sleep for 3 or 4 hours, and it DID work.

But my friend Jon said that had a better idea – 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 see hear feel. You open your eyes and note five things you see, 5 things you hear then 5 things you feel. Then 4, 4, 4, then 3, 3, 3, et al. Always worked for him. Well, not for me; I found that it was so focusing – where am I at, 4 hear or 3 feel? – that it made me alert, and even the pill didn’t help.

To boot, I must have slept wrong one night, because the back of my neck aches much of the time lately.

My problem is, paraphrasing John Lennon (whose birthday is today), I have a tough time turning off my mind, relaxing, and floating downstream.

Beatles songs:
I’m So Tired
Tomorrow Never Knows.

M is for Monsanto, modified foods and mischief

Monsanto uses “alarming legal and political tactics to maintain this monopoly [that] are the subject of worldwide concern, with baleful consequences for the world’s small-scale farmers.”

Monsanto, a large agricultural entity in the US, apparently needs protection, for the US Congress has passed, back in the spring of 2013, what has been dubbed the Monsanto Protection Act, which, critics claim, “effectively bars federal courts from being able to halt the sale or planting of controversial genetically modified (aka GMO) or genetically engineered (GE) seeds, no matter what health issues may arise concerning GMOs in the future”. The bill has been recently reauthorized in the House, but not the Senate. (Meanwhile, while supporting corporate welfare, the House GOP axes food assistance for millions of Americans.)

So what’s the issue with GMOs? It is believed that GMOs are not safe. “They have been linked to thousands of toxic and allergenic reactions, thousands of sick, sterile, and dead livestock and damage to virtually every organ and system studied in lab animals.”

Also, many scientists are calling for further study of a genetically modified bacteria which is used to create aspartame. Moreover, some fear that the use of the Monsanto product RoundUp will cause birth defects.

The desire among many, short of banning these products, is for GMOs to be labeled, but GMO manufacturers are even resistant to that unless they are voluntary. Worst-case scenario, once the FDA finalizes its GMO labeling guidance, the industry uses the FDA guidance to preempt state laws requiring mandatory labeling of GMOs. “Currently, states have the right to enact GMO labeling laws precisely because the FDA has not formally ruled on GMO labeling.”

It’s interesting that a whole lot of the world wants them banned. Activists in Chile are fighting Monsanto’s bid to patent food crops. Also, more than 1000 acres found to have been planted with genetically altered maize crops have been destroyed in Hungary. “The country has boldly banned GMO seed. Peru has passed a ban for at least ten years on GM foods, along with Italy, Greece, Spain, and Austria with their own bans, as well as many other countries.” Here is a list of countries & regions with GE food/crop bans.

According to The World According to Monsanto, which charts “documentary filmmaker Marie-Monique Robin’s three-year journey across four continents to uncover the disturbing practices of multinational agribusiness corporation Monsanto, it uses “alarming legal and political tactics to maintain this monopoly [that] are the subject of worldwide concern, with baleful consequences for the world’s small-scale farmers.” This parody piece from The Daily Show illuminates how litigious Monsanto is when farmers try NOT to use their patented seeds which need to be purchased every year, contrary to the agricultural practice of reusing seeds that go back millennia. And the US Supreme Court has supported Monsanto in 2013.

In the Philippines, GMO corn farmers are losing their land and going into debt, thanks to bait-and-switch pricing tactics.

There will a March Against Monsanto event on Saturday, October 12 around the world. The information is now on Facebook, after previously having been removed.

Some other links:
14-year-old girl stands up to Monsanto shill
The list of Monsanto-owned companies you may have seen on the Internet is probably wrong, such as this one, though it may be a fair reflection of companies using Monsanto products and techniques. Conversely, this list I believe to be correct.
Five GMO myths busted.
Leigh Erin Connealy, M.D. of Newport Natural Health – GMOs: Are Your Cupboards Filled with Frankenfoods?
Occupy Monsanto website.

ABC Wednesday – Round 13

Favorite albums of 1951-1960

I do have several albums from the decade, some of them quite well respected.

Sometimes you try something, for instance in this blog, and it fails. If SamuraiFrog, who was born in the late 1970s, could write so knowledgeably about the music of the 1960s, might not I, who was born in the early 1950s, be able to speak to the music of the period in which I was born? Any number of my friends who were born in the 1960s know the music of that decade.

The answer is: apparently not. I never owned that many albums of 1950s pop artists. I have them mostly on compilations, notably Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles, and Nat Cole. I do have several albums from the decade, some of them quite well respected, such as:

The Quintet: Jazz at Massey Hall/The Greatest Jazz Concert Ever (1953)
Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong: Ella and Louis (1956), and its follow-up; at some level, they blur in my mind
Count Basie: April in Paris (1956), though I DO love this particular version of the title song a LOT.: “One more ONCE.”
Billie Holiday: Songs for Distingué Lovers (1957)
The Original Broadway Cast: West Side Story (1957)

I do enjoy them. But truth is, there are only five I found that I respond to like some of the albums on my sixties list, where they’ve almost imprinted on my DNA:

5. Duke Ellington: The Nutcracker Suite (1960)
Described at length HERE.

4. Ella Fitzgerald: Ella Fitzgerald Sings the George and Ira Gershwin Songbook (1959)
Actually, Ella doing ANY of the songbooks might rate, if I owned them. One of my college friends played them constantly, but this was always my favorite.

3. Dave Brubeck Quartet: Time Out (1959)
‘Take Five’ is the classic, but ‘Blue Rondo A La Turk’ is even better, to me. I wrote about Brubeck HERE.

2. Harry Belafonte: My Lord What a Mornin’ (1960)
I mentioned HERE that I just bought this album for both my sister Leslie and me just last year; it was so important to my father.

1. Miles Davis: Kind of Blue (1959)
Which I linked to HERE. Always associate this album with my late friend Donna George.

It’s interesting, to me anyway, that much of my musical enjoyment comes from the experience of hearing something together. It’s not that I can’t appreciate something as a solitary experience, but music, it seems to me, ought to be shared.