December 2014 - Page 3 of 7 - Ramblin' with Roger

A stocking stuffer for me: Ask Roger Anything

You can ask me ANYTHING, and I will answer. Promise.

One of those Facebook pictures has a message something like, “As I get older, I crave less for material presence and more for emotional presence.” A broad interpretation, to be sure, but pretty valid. Except for the Hess truck and a few other items, I’m not all that desperate for “stuff” this holiday season.

However, I continue to have a great need for something approximating personal reflection, the subtext of this blog. But doing it oneself is difficult. And limiting. I only tend to think about topics and questions that are within my comparative narrow purview.

That’s where YOU come in. You can ask me ANYTHING, and I will answer. Promise. And almost surely relatively soon, generally within thirty days. I’m STILL looking for the stumpers; I LIKE the stumpers.

I agree to answer your questions to the best of my ability and memory. Of course, memory is a tricky thing, self-selecting, imprecise. As always, a little obfuscation is allowed, just because I like the word obfuscation.

You can leave your comments below. If you prefer to remain anonymous, that’s OK; you should e-mail me at rogerogreen (AT) gmail (DOT) com, and note that you want to remain anonymous. Otherwise, I will cite you, or site you or sight you…

Consider this a Christmas/solstice/Kwanzaa/whatever present to me. And you KNOW it’s more blessed to give than to receive.

Reality hits hard (with apologies to fillyjonk)

One catalog company I ordered from called me to tell me my card had been declined.

The blogger fillyjonk wrote on December 15: ” I dunno. Locally and globally, sad and difficult stuff.” She was SO right.

*Her post began: “Someone took hostages in Sydney. In a Lindt chocolate shop.” Unfortunately, that ended with two of the hostages being killed, along with the gunman.

*About the same time, I’m listening to this story of a guy killing his ex-wife and five of his ex-in-laws at three different places in Montgomery County, PA, just north of Philadelphia, before turning the gun on himself. Worst of all, I awaken the next morning to the news of 140+ people murdered by the Taliban in western Pakistan, most of them children.

*Locally, and more recently, there was an Amber alert for a five-year-old boy near around here, then canceled 10 hours later when the boy’s body was discovered. The abduction story was a crock; his 19 y.o. cousin has been arrested. Meanwhile, eight children were slaughtered in Cairns, Australia.

*The Daughter complained of sharp pain on her left side, and we went to the ER at Albany Med on Saturday night, December 13. We were there from 8:30 p.m. until 2:30 a.m., and bed after 3 a.m. I SO don’t do 3 a.m. well anymore. Then I went to church in the morning. I’ve been on fumes all week.

*She has some infection in or around her kidneys, and she has to take an antibiotic. But halfway through the regimen, the hospital calls to say that the type of infection she has is resistant to the antibiotic she has been taking, so she needs to take a DIFFERENT one and start the regimen all over.

*The illness meant that I missed two days of work, one full day, and two half days, which feels actually worse than two full days because my work rhythm is off. I was going to go to a luncheon to honor people at SUNY Central who had reached milestone anniversaries. (Because we were switched to SUNY Albany for a time, both a colleague and I missed both our 15th and 20th-anniversary luncheons.) But I missed it, seeing my boss, a former colleague, and two long-time friends get awarded. Worse, the ticket I bought ($30) went to waste because we were so shorthanded. Because…

*Our office secretary left on November 5, so we – well mostly a library colleague and I – have been answering the main phones. One of our library colleagues, Amelia, had a baby at the end of November, which is lovely, of course, but she’s out on maternity leave until late February. So when one (OR MORE) of the five, currently four, librarians is out, it becomes a strain on the system. There were just two of us two Thursdays ago (snow and the flu kept the other two at home), and two on the day of the luncheon.

We usually have a week’s turnaround on the reference queue but, currently, it’s about 10 days. This will EVENTUALLY rectify itself as the demand slackens during the holidays, but looking at the list of questions undone is depressing and frustrating. And one of the librarians will be away for a week around Christmas.

*One of our choir members has been away much of the year getting treatment for cancer in Arizona. My mother’s first cousin Robert is now on dialysis. And while I didn’t know them, I mourn the loss of my friend Steve Bissette’s parents, his father in late October, and his mother in mid-December.

*We have lost our custodian at church a few weeks ago. The Wife chairs the Administration Committee until the end of the year, so this is a task that involves meetings, et al.

*All this busyness has made it difficult to concentrate on Christmas shopping. One catalog company I ordered from called me to tell me my card had been declined; what I didn’t notice in the pile of mail unread is that the bank had pulled one card as compromised and replaced it with another.

*Of course, it’s been havoc on blogging. I have a daily blog and write one post every two days. It’s not a lack of topics, it’s a lack of time. This will explain, in part, an increase in typos.

*I’ve had a deficit in not only sleep but good dietary habits and housecleaning effort. The house is messier than even my relatively low standards can bear. Where IS my cellphone? It’s in the bedroom, SOMEWHERE.

So, happy holidays, everyone. I’m told it gets better; sure hope so.

The Compact Disc and me

I had these shiny objects, and nothing on which to play them.

brothers in arms.dire straits — One of my first CDs

While listening to the Coverville podcast about legendary music producer Phil Ramone, who died a while back – I wrote about him, briefly – host Brian Ibbott noted that Ramone produced the first album, Billy Joel’s 52nd Street, “to be commercially released on CD when it went on sale in Japan” in the fall of 1978.

This got me thinking about my love/hate relationship with compact discs. I had 1200 LPs in the early 1980s, and I was quite resistant to this new technology. The music industry was working hard to get consumers to embrace the CD.

The Police’s Synchronicity album had an extra song, Murder by Numbers; ditto, Peter Gabriel’s So with This Is the Picture (Excellent Birds). But I had the LPs and wasn’t going to buy the music again. More odd was the Talking Heads’ Remain in Light, which had extended versions of some of the songs; I finally DID buy that on CD this century.

The first four CDs I owned were given to me by my friend Broome in 1987; they were the first four British Beatles albums, which, not incidentally, did NOT have extra material, and ran about 35 minutes each. There was much talk at the time about how they SHOULD put extra material on them, the singles of that period, just because the CD had a capacity of more than twice that. Heck, I wouldn’t have objected to “From Me to You” added to an early compilation. But it was not to be; I mean, they ARE the Beatles and people were going to buy them.

So now I had these shiny objects, and nothing on which to play them, and Broome knew that. Reluctantly, I bought a simple CD player. But I couldn’t justify having the hardware without more software, so I went out and spent $50 on CDs. I didn’t want to buy what I already owned, so I bought greatest hits by Billy Joel (the 2-disc set) and Elton John. I also got Dire Straits’ Brothers in Arms and some others.

Eventually, I had lots of CDs, some fortunately provided to me gratis, and a five-CD player, which became my music player of choice, before it broke down; I tried to get it repaired, unsuccessfully.

One of the things I’ve realized is that because the artist, or the record company, CAN put more music on a CD, they DO. And some 14-song, 70-minute albums are just TOO LONG. It’s even more true on rereleases. I was listening to Who’s Next one morning – my family was obviously away – and I LOVE that album, but the rest of the “Lighthouse” project, save for “Pure and Easy” I could have done without. Lots of albums have alternative versions, which are historically interesting but do not enhance the listening enjoyment of the album; the second The Band album, which I also love, falls in that category.

Still, the library file cabinet, which I bought when the local branch was renovating a few seasons ago, was a cool place to store them, I thought, although, even getting a few more occasionally means a laborious shifting around. The Wife, though, decided that we needed furniture to store them in, or maybe she didn’t think having a file cabinet in the hallway was as much fun as I do, or, did. But the two pieces of furniture hold no more music. I made it clear we were doing this, not out of some need of mine but of hers. When I first had LPs, I used orange crates.

I’m likely to keep the discs I have, if only because I LOVE reading the liner notes. New acquisitions, though, will be few and far between.

The torture report

Antonin Scalia believes in the ‘24’ Effect to rationalize torture.

While I’ve had the intention of writing about the disturbing report that the Senate Democrats recently released about the United States and torture, circumstances have not allowed that. So here’s a bunch of links, with brief observations:

From The Implications of the Torture Report by Mike Lofgren, Truthout:

The present writer will take as a given the veracity of its three main findings: that the United States engaged in practices both legally and commonly definable as torture; that the actionable intelligence these practices produced was negligible; and that the practices tainted the moral prestige of the United States government in a manner that damaged its foreign policy. These assertions may be taken as true both because of the abundant evidence presented in the report itself and because of the flailing and hysterical reaction by our country’s national security elites…

[Secretary of State] Kerry: “Lots of things going on in the world; not a good time for disclosure.” But when is there ever not a lot of things going on in the world?

That would be my general view as well.

Another fair representation of my position: 5 Things to Understand About the Torture Report from the Weekly Sift.

I’m particularly intrigued by the Truth and reconciliation section, which almost certainly will not happen because America is AWESOME! and we’re a “let’s move on” people.

The Rank, Reeking Horror of Torturing Some Folks from Truthout:

“In my name. In your name. In our names.” The narrative was that, in the days after 9/11, the “American people” wanted the government to do “anything” to prevent of another one. Instead, the torture and imprisonment have eventually led to the hate-filled ISIS. That may be true, since a majority of Americans say the CIA tactics were justified, which makes me all sorts of sad.

CIA Lied About Torture, Senate Report Suggests from Newsmax:

All sorts of discomforting items therein.

What torture sounds like from BoingBoing.

Karl Rove Says Bush Knew About CIA Interrogation Program, Defends Rectal Feeding from the Huffington Post:

“Appearing on ‘Fox News Sunday,’ [former GW Bush adviser] Rove claimed the brutal forced rectal feedings — which the report said were not medically necessary — were used out of medical necessity.”

Physicians: “Anal feeding” of prisoners is sexual assault, has no medical use, from BoingBoing:

“What a sad world we live in, when a coalition of medical professionals has to issue a press release announcing this most obvious of obvious observations…”

Dick Cheney: ‘I Haven’t Read’ CIA Torture Report but It’s ‘Full of Crap’ from Mediaite:

He doth describe himself instead, and rather well.

Associate Justice of the Supreme Court Antonin Scalia’s spirited defense of torture from MSNBC:

“We have never held that that’s contrary to the Constitution. And I don’t know what provision of the Constitution that would, that would contravene.

“Listen, I think it is very facile for people to say, ‘Oh, torture is terrible.’ You posit the situation where a person that you know for sure knows the location of a nuclear bomb that has been planted in Los Angeles and will kill millions of people. You think it’s an easy question? You think it’s clear that you cannot use extreme measures to get that information out of that person? I don’t think that’s so clear at all.”

OMG, OMG. (Facepalm) Scalia believes in The ‘24’ Effect: Did the TV drama convince us that torture really worked? from Matt Bai at Yahoo! News. I stopped watching this show regularly after the first episode of the second season because I decided it was torture porn.

But sometimes, you just need a cartoon to break it down for you:
Tortured logic, from Tom Tomorrow in the Daily Kos
An Illustrated A to Z of Torture from Vice.com

Or satire:
Cheney calls for ban on publishing torture reports from the New Yorker

Baseball Hall of Fame: if I had a ballot

My final Hall of Fame vote was going to to Roger Clemens. But there’s a recent rule change.

Recently, the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum’s Golden Era Committee failed to select anyone to the Hall, with Dick Allen and Tony Oliva coming tantalizingly close, much to my chagrin, especially for Tony O., who was my favorite American League player not on the Yankees when I was growing up.

Once again, time for me to think about the players, who will be voted on by the baseball writers, the results of which will be announced on January 6. “To be enshrined, players must be named on at least 75% of the Committee members’ ballots.”

Here are the players on the ballot. Last year, three players were inducted – Tom Glavine, and Greg Maddux, pitchers for the Atlanta Braves, and Frank Thomas, first baseman for the Chicago White Sox. Still, there are lots of quality picks available. The sportswriters who vote can select up to 10 players, though, clearly, most do not.

These are my picks if I had a ballot:

1. Lee Smith, who had more saves than anyone when he retired in an era when relievers often pitched more than one inning. 13th year on the ballot. He got 29.9% of the vote last year, much worse than the year before. I’ve supported his selection for years.

2. Craig Biggio. Second basemen aren’t usually expected to be selected for power, but for defense. Yet thrice he won both the Gold Glove (for fielding) and the Silver Slugger (for hitting) in the same season. 3rd year on the ballot. Last year, he got 74.8% of the vote, when 75% was the threshold.

3. And if you put in one of the Astros’ B-boys, why not power-hitting first baseman Jeff Bagwell. Last year, he got 54.3% of the vote; this will be his fifth year on the ballot.

4. Mike Piazza. A good hitting catcher, who was never specifically accused of taking performance-enhancing drugs (PED), but everyone who bulked up in that period was suspected by some. There’s no reason to believe it so. Last year, in his second year of eligibility, he got 62.2% of the vote.

5. Randy Johnson, along with Roger Clemens, THE dominant pitcher of his era, mostly with the Seattle Mariners and Arizona Diamondbacks. Definitely should be elected on his first year on the ballot.

6. What the heck, his pitching com-padre with the Diamondbacks, Curt Shilling, who also won the World Series with the Boston Red Sox. For some reason, don’t much like him much, but it does not cause me not to support him. He got 29.2% of the vote last year, but I’m wondering if Johnson on the ballot will help him the third time out.

7. Pedro Martinez is another first-timer I’d support, a pitcher with the Expos, Red Sox, and Mets, among others. Usually the ace of the staff.

8. If he had been eligible last year, first-timer John Smoltz might have been picked with his pitching teammates Glavine and Maddux.

9. Now, we get to the Steroid Era players. No one would argue that Barry Bonds wasn’t the best position player on the ballot and in fact one of the best players ever. The steroids weren’t specifically banned at the time he probably took them. Last year, he got 34.7% of the vote, and in his third year, he’s likely to do no better.

10. My final vote was going to Roger Clemens. But there’s a recent rule change:

On July 26, 2014, the Hall announced changes to the rules for election for recently retired players, reducing the number of years a player will be eligible to be on the ballot from fifteen years to ten. Three candidates presently on the BBWAA ballot (Lee Smith, Don Mattingly, Alan Trammell) in years 10-15 will be grandfathered into this system and remain under consideration by the BBWAA for up to the full 15 years.

So, now Mark McGwire is not in the 9th of 15 years, but the 9th of 10, which seems like an unfortunate bait-and-switch. With 11% of the vote, it’s incredibly unlikely he’ll make it this year or next.

On the other hand, I wouldn’t vote for suspected PED user Gary Sheffield in his first year.

So I’ve left off Tim Raines (in his eighth year, who I supported last year), Jeff Kent and Mike Mussina (both in their second years), as well as PED-tainted Clemens and Sammy Sosa (both in their 3rd year).

Who would you pick?