Month: June 2015

How has being a parent changed me?

When I say to her, “I love you,” she replies, “Of course you do.”

fathers-day-multiple-languagesA few weeks ago, a single mom I knew was trying to get her daughter to wear a coat, lest she be cold. The daughter balked. One could see them both digging in their heels. I told the mom – not at all thinking of Frozen – “let it go.” An hour later, the mom thanked me, realizing it wasn’t a fight worth engaging in.

Before I was a dad, I wouldn’t have interjected my opinion. Not only would I have thought my observations have been perceived as uninformed, but that would also have been a correct take. It is annoyingly true, at least for me, that you just don’t know what it’s like to be a parent until you’re a parent.

This was actually an issue even before The Daughter was born. I guess The Wife wanted some verbal assurances from me that I was ready to be a father. Heck, I STILL don’t know THAT, but I knew I was willing to try my best. It appears that I continue to fake it reasonably well.

I like that there are things The Daughter and I tend to do alone together, such as bicycle riding, spelling, and math homework. I’m the one to wake her up, though I wish she’d go to bed earlier and do it herself.

Speaking of bicycling, sometimes my offspring can be stubborn. She balked at doing soccer this season, I suspect because her parents thought that she needed to go to the weekly practice as well as the game, that she could use the practice, would more likely get more playing time, and get better. Yet, on the bicycle, we had this particular circuit, which involved a short, but steep, incline. She came back to it every day until she could master that little hill.

When I say to her, “I love you,” she replies, “Of course you do.” At least she’s not yet at the totally-embarrassed-to-be-around-me stage.

Like many kids, she’s much more polite outside the home. Her teachers adore her, especially the current one. She gets very good grades, 4s in everything the last marking period except for music, where she got 3s. Her participation in the play at church this year leads to her participating in the Mother’s Day service.

Being a dad has made me more optimistic, by necessity. Despite abundant information to the contrary, I HAVE to believe the world will be better for her, and, to that end, try to find ways to facilitate that.

I write this every year, but every year it’s true: I wish MY dad had had a chance to meet her, and she, him.

Music Throwback Saturday: Why Can’t We Live Together

timmy-thomasBack in the day, I might buy a whole album just for one song. I know I did this for the title track of the 1972 album Why Can’t We Live Together by Timmy Thomas.

The song went to #3 on the US pop charts, #1 on the US soul charts, and #1 on the UK charts. The rest of the album was fine, but there was just something magical about this tune.

The introduction of the 2014 Evangel Pacific Radio interview reads:

“In 1972, Timmy Thomas was watching the evening news hosted by Walter Cronkite. Mr. Cronkite was reporting on the Vietnam war and the thousands of American and Viet Cong soldiers that had died in battle. Timmy thought ‘Why Can’t We Live Together’. This thought became a song that was embraced by millions.”

But it’s not just the message, it’s the instrumentation.

The song is notable for its sparse, stripped-down production, which featured only a Hammond organ, percussion from an early rhythm machine and Thomas’s passionate, soulful vocal. Thomas first sang it as an improvised number on his own nightclub… Timmy recorded a demo…

TK Records staff producer Steve Alaimo listened to the demo of the song and was going to re-cut it with a full band, but then decided the song was already finished the way it was.

The song has been covered by many artists, including… Sade (1984)…, Joan Osborne, Steve Winwood (2003) and Maria Muldaur (2009).

Here’s a bit of music history I did not know:

Mike Anthony, an American DJ/producer based in Belgium at the time, recorded his discofied version of the song in early 1982 but while it had reached the Belgian and Dutch charts, he was sued by the owners of the original Timmy Thomas recording for using elements from the original recording.

A judge ordered a re-recording of the song with all the original parts removed. This ruling marked one of the first court cases in which the use of original samples in new recordings played a role, as a precursor to the many court cases in the 1990s and 2000s.

Still, it has been sampled frequently.

Some info about Timmy Thomas (b. 13 November 1944) from Soulwalking.

Timmy Thomas had a massively UNsuccessful attempt with a Kickstarter campaign, “We Can Live Together” Help Us Save Our Children! in 2014.

Listen to the song Why Can’t We Live Together HERE or HERE.

ABC Wednesday is coming again, but not forever

ABC Wednesday will conclude, but not until the end of Round 20

abc 17 (1)It’s now EIGHT years ago that Denise Nesbitt from across the pond in England created a meme called ABC Wednesday. People, literally from around the world, post an item – pictures, poems, essays – that in some way describe each letter of the alphabet, in turn. I’ve been participating since the letter K in Round 5.

Denise recruited a team of her followers to do some of the intro writing and visiting, which eventually included me because doing it all was too exhausting.

Three years ago, she ceded the role of administrator to me. This means that I assign who reads which posts, making sure somebody is writing the introductions (and writing them myself, when necessary) and inserting the link that allows everyone to participate.

The Netiquette for the site is this:

1. Post something on your non-commercial blog/webpage having something to do with the letter of the week. Use your imagination. Put a link to ABC Wednesday in your post and/or put up the logo.

2. Come to the ABC Wednesday site and link the SPECIFIC link to the Linky thing. It’ll be available around 4 p.m., Greenwich Mean Time each Tuesday, which is 11 a.m. or noon in the Eastern part of the United States.

3. Try and visit at least 5 other participants, and comment on their posts. The more sites you do visit, the more comments you will probably get.

Now, as the cliché goes, all good things must come to an end, and Denise and Roger have decided that ABC Wednesday should conclude, for a variety of reasons. The good news is that it won’t be until the end of Round 20, or four more trips through the alphabet.

We have discovered that there are folks who participate in a round, then drop out for a bit. Others start a round, but don’t complete. We think this will be an opportunity to invite those folks to participate once again.

Or maybe you have friends who have THOUGHT about tying ABC Wednesday but have not. THIS would be a good time to start.

Here’s a deep, dark secret: you don’t HAVE to participate every week. I think it’s advantageous to do so – it generates a lot of comments for me, but then again, I visit practically everyone who posts.

Bloggers, consider giving ABC Wednesday a try, if this sounds interesting. The A comes up the week of July 13, so you have some time to think about it. Write to me a rogerogreen (AT) gmail (DOT) com for more details.

MOVIE REVIEW: Tomorrowland

tomorrowland-movieIf it’d been up to me, I might have passed on seeing it. Tomorrowland was beset by middling reviews.

Worse, the (not unusual) manipulation of the Disney audience to see the film was quite impressive but really irritating. “Get your backstage pass” to this great film, the network promotion machine hawked on several programs The Daughter watches.

Its box office (relative) failure – as of June 14, 2015, domestic box office of $83,607,000 and foreign box office of $93,500,000, against a production budget of $190 million – put the kibosh on more Disney science fiction.

Still, The Wife, The Daughter, her friend Kay and I went on a hot Sunday afternoon to the Spectrum Theatre in Albany.  The movie was down to two showings a day, and rightly so; there was only one other person in the theater, a middle-aged woman.

If I say I didn’t hate it as much as I thought I would, it’d be damning with faint praise. In fact, I did like good chunks of it.

For one thing, the film looked really cool, a function, I assume, of director and co-writer Brad Bird, best known for fine animated films such as Ratatouille, The Incredibles, and The Iron Giant. The 1964-65 New York World’s Fair, which I attended, is where a boy named Frank (Thomas Robinson), a would-be inventor, gets invited by Athena (Raffey Cassidy) to be a part of the REAL title place.

Sometime later, teenager Casey Newton (Britt Robertson), a saboteur for good, ends up with a button that seems to, briefly, provide a gateway aid fabulous-looking place… oh, heck, read the narrative HERE.

I liked that this movie was attempting to be an antidote to all the dystopian rhetoric that does seem to dominate popular culture. Perhaps the best part of the narrative may be a speech by Nix (Hugh Laurie, of the TV show House, MD) in the latter stages of the film.

It asked some important questions, more than occasionally in a ham-fisted way, such as none of the teachers answering Casey’s questions about the issues they’ve laid out. Still, the Daughter was inspired by Casey, who almost never gave up, and who even inspired the much older Frank (George Clooney) to keep trying as well.

The actors, including Kathryn Hahn and Keegan-Michael Key as the shopkeepers, were entertaining, and especially young Raffey Cassidy. It is true, though, that Britt Robertson, in the middle stages of the film, looked a lot like someone attempting to react to a blue screen.

If the story didn’t make complete sense, generally blamed on cowriter Damon Lindelof, the showrunner for the TV program Lost, I wasn’t as bothered by it as some. It was more coherent than the first two hours of Interstellar, which may be a low bar.

I’m musing over the complete, and therefore bloodless, annihilation of some people in this film, not to mention the intense fighting with the bad guys, which really warranted a PG rating, as opposed to a PG-13. Maybe I’m just overthinking this.

Anyway, it’s not a great film, clearly. Still, parts of it will likely stick with me, so it wasn’t a waste of time.

I side with Bernie

TWICE in the past week, I’ve seen Bernie Sanders referred to as the governor of Vermont; he is not.

sanders.imageI took a couple of those I Side With quizzes. Nothing particularly surprising, except that my affinity with the Republican Party was worse than I thought.

I did take exception to a handful of the answer choices besides YES and NO being counted as the same as mine. For example: “Should National Parks continue to be preserved and protected by the federal government?”

Republicans: Yes, but allow limited logging, drilling, and mining. Your similar answer: Yes. Well, that’s not similar at all, to my mind. This USUALLY is not an issue, but it may skew some results.

Candidates you side with… (links are to the Weekly Sift stump speeches, a work in progress)

92% Bernie Sanders, Democrat (US Senator from VT, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats) on domestic policy, environmental, social, immigration, foreign policy, and healthcare issues. Incidentally, TWICE in the past week, I’ve seen Sanders referred to as the governor of Vermont, once on a network news program, once on the local Time Warner Cable News.

68% Hillary Clinton, Democrat (former US Senator from NY; former Secretary of State) on domestic policy, economic, and foreign policy issues.

28% John Ellis Bush, a/k/a Jeb!, Republican (former governor of FL) – no major issues.

21% Chris Christie, Republican (governor of NJ) on environmental issues. I have SERIOUS doubts that Christie said that thing about a Viagra-like pill for women.

17% Rand Paul, Republican (US Senator from Kentucky) on foreign policy issues.

15% Mike Huckabee, Republican (former governor of AR) – no major issues.

8% Ben Carson, Republican (doctor) – no major issues.

4% Scott Walker, Republican (governor of WI) – no major issues.

3% Rick Santorum, Republican (former US Senator from PA) – no major issues.

3% Marco Rubio, Republican (US Senator from FL) – no major issues.

1% Carly Fiorina, Republican (former corporate head) – no major issues.

1% Ted Cruz, Republican (US Senator from Texas) – no major issues.

I’d be curious how I would have fared vis a vis former governor George Pataki (R-NY), or the other two Democrats in the race, Martin O’Malley and Lincoln Chaffee.

Parties you side with…

98% Green Party on domestic policy, economic, environmental, social, foreign policy, immigration, and healthcare issues.

95% Democrats on domestic policy, economic, environmental, foreign policy, social, immigration, healthcare, and education issues.

94% Socialist on domestic policy, economic, environmental, social, foreign policy, immigration, and healthcare issues.
And in case you wonder if I’m freaking about that designation, not especially.
From Daily Kos:
Bernie Sanders went on to express irritation with the way journalists slap the “socialist” label on him, as if his embrace of policies common in the democracies of western Europe makes him a radical outlier.
“It is not a radical agenda,” he said. “In virtually every instance, what I am saying is supported by a significant majority of the American people. Yes, it is not supported by the Business Roundtable or the Chamber of Commerce, or Wall Street. I may be old-fashioned enough to believe that Congress might want to be representing a vast majority of our people … and not just the Koch brothers and other campaign contributors.
“He suggested that if the media are going to refer to him as a socialist, journalists also should affix the label of ‘capitalist’ with every mention of his rivals.”

43% Libertarians on foreign policy issues.

37% Constitution Party on domestic policy issues.

4% Republicans – no major issues.

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