September 2023 - Page 6 of 6 - Ramblin' with Roger

Movie review: Golda

Henry Purcell

Right after we got home from church, my wife said we had to go NOW if we were celebrating National Cinema Day with $4 tickets. I didn’t know that she’d selected a movie to see at the Spectrum Theatre in Albany.

I knew nothing about the film Golda, except that it was about the late Israeli prime minister and starred Helen Mirren.

After a cursory history of Israel (formed in 1948 and fought the Six-Day War in 1967), we heard a discussion among Israel’s military leaders about what turned out to be the Yom Kippur War of 1973. There were disagreements about strategies in anticipation of Egyptian and Syrian military buildups; a preemptive strike by Israel would have been unacceptable to the US leadership of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger.

What I learned in the film is that Golda Meir smoked cigarettes. She smoked a LOT of cigarettes. Smoking cigarettes was hazardous to her health.

Meanwhile, the battles far from Tel Aviv seemed at arm’s length, hearing about defeats and victories via audio transmissions.

I was not engaged in the film until about halfway through when Henry Kissinger (Liev Schreiber) arrived. There’s subsequently a good scene with multiple phones and a few others. But it was too little, too late.

Wanted more

Golda Meir, the person, is intriguing; she was born in Kiev/Kyiv in 1898, immigrated with her family to Milwaukee, and then emigrated to Palestine with her husband in 1921. She became the first female head of government in the Middle East.

Golda, the movie, is, according to critic Todd Jorgenson of Cinemalogueone” “.. .uninvolving as a political thriller and incomplete as a recap of Golda’s background and rise to power. It remains emotionally detached while struggling to penetrate her steely gaze.” I’ll buy that. It was 51% positive with the critics, though 89% with the audience on Rotten Tomatoes.

Music

One thing I loved was the outro music. It was from Henry Purcell’s opera Dido and Aeneas, specifically Dido’s Lament from the aria “When I am laid in earth.” Conductor Leopold Stokowski wrote a transcription of the piece for the symphony orchestra.

Here’s a version conducted by Stokowski. The video has too much background hiss, but I love that the conductor announces that it’s a piece “we all know.”

Listen to a version from the 1995 Proms, conducted by Andrew Davis.

One last thing: to the woman whose cellphone rang at least four times during the film- Grawlix.

Willingness to strike

Labor Day 2023

I am always heartened to see labor succeed in what I perceive to be a hostile environment. In the Truthout story from early August 2023, UPS Workers Disproved Corporate Media’s Narrative That Strikes Are Harmful. The subhead: It was UPS workers’ willingness to strike — not corporate kindness — that earned them a new tentative agreement.

The story speaks not just to the particular negotiations but the issues that labor everywhere in the USA confronts. “One thing seems undeniable: Any significant gains won by Teamsters against a reluctant employer will have come about because rank-and-file workers showed the company that they were prepared to strike…

“But you wouldn’t know this if you only paid attention to the corporate media’s reporting, which has mostly contained doomsday scenarios on the potential strike that mimic the boss’s talking points. From CNN to The New York Times, from Fox News to MSNBC, the refrains have been constant: UPS workers will disrupt the economy by striking. What if a strike causes a recession? UPS Teamsters already have it pretty good. A strike will hurt the company and benefit competitors. What about the consumers!?…

“Moreover, the corporate media’s criticism of strikes are not uniquely applied to UPS drivers. They’re deployed whenever workers threaten to strike. Teachers, nurses, railroad workers, screenwriters: they’ve all faced these attacks.”

Indeed, “What about the patients?” or “What about the children?” has been the mantra, not just of management but the news coverage. I have heard it often. To which the nurses rightly push back, “What about patient care when nurses are overextended?” Educators ask, “How can teachers teach when they need to work a second job to make ends meet and still take money out of their pockets for school supplies?”

Fair deal

“More than half of UPS’s workers are part-time. Some currently earn as little as $15.50 per hour. In 2022, thousands of part-timers saw their wages slashed, even as the company took in record profits. According to the statement released by the union, the new agreement includes a wage increase of $2.75 more per hour in 2023 and $7.50 per hour over the length of the five-year contract for existing part-time (and full-time) workers…

“Meanwhile, UPS CEO Carol Tomé raked in over $45 million in total compensation in 2021 and 2022. She holds 33,076 shares in UPS stock, worth over $6 million. In 2021, UPS’s CEO-to-worker pay ratio was 548-to-1, meaning a UPS worker making the median wage at the company would have to work well over half a thousand years to earn as much as Tomé.”

From Market Business News (MBN), “According to Glassdoor.com, a job search website, the CEO-to-worker wage ratio in the USA in 2015 was 204:1. In other words, the average CEO pay was 204 times the average worker pay. CEO pay averaged $13.8 million per year, while that of workers was $77,800.”

As recently noted, “The phenomenon of firms with overpaid CEOs and employees is not new.” The ratio should be closer to 20 to 1, lest managers experience “resentment and falling morale.”

DOL

I’m a bit of a labor nerd. I get notices from the US Department of Labor. I received these on August 3.

Department of Labor recovers $350K in back wages, damages after finding Spokane-based supermarket chain denied 602 workers overtime pay.

US Department of Labor obtains judgment ordering Indiana home care agency to pay $188K in back wages, damages to 83 workers denied overtime.

Federal court sentences South Carolina labor contractor, operators after investigation finds fraud, labor trafficking, abuses of farmworkers – This after “a U.S. Department of Labor and multi-agency investigation found the employers subjected migrant farmworkers to exploitative labor, confiscated passports and housed workers in unsafe and unhealthy conditions.”

Federal inspectors again find ergonomic hazards and inadequate medical care exposing Amazon fulfillment center employees to safety and health risks.

These are just a few examples of the government doing good for its workers rather than management.

Sunday Stealing: Storyworth

Watergate

The Sunday Stealing this week is by Storyworth.

1. Did you ever have a commercial you really liked?

I used to watch the Super Bowl ads fairly religiously. Someone put together the 25 best ones, and I remember liking 1, 2, and 7.

2. How did you learn to ride a bicycle?

I have no idea. When I was 16, I rode someone else’s bicycle from Binghamton’s First Ward to the South Side. I was crossing the bridge from Riverside Drive, gaining on my friend Carol, but I couldn’t stop. So I put my foot down, tumbled, and severely scraped my left arm, a wound I had for another three and a half decades. I had never had a bicycle with hand brakes, having always stopped by essentially trying to pedal backward.

3. How did you celebrate your 21st birthday?

It was a Thursday, and I was a political science major in college. Six days earlier, a “grand jury in Washington, D.C., indicted several former aides of President Richard Nixon, who became known as the “Watergate Seven”—H. R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, John N. Mitchell, Charles Colson, Gordon C. Strachan, Robert Mardian, and Kenneth Parkinson—for conspiring to hinder the Watergate investigation. The grand jury secretly named Nixon as an unindicted co-conspirator.”

There is no doubt that Watergate was the source of gleeful conversation since the first three in particular were contemptible sorts.

4. What fascinated you as a child?

The World Almanac. I received it every year from when I was 10 to 60. The longest rivers, the most significant cities, and the sheer number of Canadians in the list of Famous Personalities, folks like Lorne Greene of Bonanza.

5. What was one of your favorite playground games?

I always liked slides and still do.

6. What things matter most to you in life?

Survival of the species, justice, equality.

Time travel?

7. If you had to go back in time and start a brand new career, what would it be?

I’m not sure that I would. Maybe I would have become a librarian sooner. Conversely, my experience working at FantaCo, a small business, was extremely useful in being a small business librarian.

8. What do people get wrong about you?

They think I’m an extrovert. I have written about this a lot, most recently here.

9. Do you believe that people can change? Why or why not?

Most people can change because the species would not have survived this long.

10. What is some of the best advice your mother ever gave you?

My mother was not great with useful advice. It tended to be a lot of platitudes. To be fair, she might have agreed with that assessment if asked.

11. If you could see into the future, what would you want to find out?

Nothing.

12. How has your life turned out differently than you imagined it would?

Occasionally, I was directed to make a plan in work and non-employment situations. What do you see yourself doing in five years? Except for retiring, this has never been at all useful or correct.

13. What is the longest project you have ever worked on?

Quite possibly, this blog. 18 years, four months. Unless you consider owning a house a “project.”

14. What have been some of your favorite restaurants through the years?

Little Caesar’s in Binghamton, NY. Lombardo’s in Albany. The former is still operating.

15. What is one of the best shows you’ve ever been to?

The reunion show of The Temptations and the Stop Making Sense tour of Talking Heads.

1983 #1 songs with an Arthurian twist

Weekend Diversion

I am going to list the 1983 #1 songs. But this post will have an Arthurian twist. Arthur Schenck, the AmeriNZ, who I may have mentioned once or twice in this blog, is the reason.

He wrote in April: “As last year was winding down, I wanted to come up with some blog posts I could easily prepare in advance, hopefully increasing my overall output. The first thing I thought of was reviving ‘Weekend Diversion’ posts, but how?…

“I’ve done posts about older music many times, and I suddenly realised that this year I could focus on the Number One pop songs of 1983.

“The thing about 1983 isn’t (merely) that it was 40 years ago, it’s that it was my first full year living in Chicago, and it’s when I established what my life would be up until 1995 when I met Nigel and moved to New Zealand. 1983 was a very significant year for me.”

I remember 1983 exceedingly well too, in no small part because it was the year FantaCo artist Raoul Vezina died in November.

“The idea for these posts is loosely based on a series of posts Roger Green did as artists turned 70. Like his posts, these wouldn’t necessarily be every week because pop songs are often Number One for weeks in a row. Even so, the specific dates are fixed, so I could do the posts well in advance. As a bonus, the Number One dates for 1983 are all Sundays this year—almost like it was planned.

“That’s when it all fell apart: I completely forgot all about it. In fact, I only remembered it because I ran across some links I saved at the end of last year, but that means I’m already behind schedule.”

The songs

But he got caught up. His first post includes Maneater , which I wrote about in my 1982 post.It went to #1 for four weeks beginning on 12/18/82 so was #1 for two weeks in EACH year.

The hyperlink to the title will be the link to the song. The hyperlink to the artist will be the link to Arthur’s commentary. As he finishes up the year, I’ll come back and add those last half-dozen connections.

Every Breath You Take – The Police, eight weeks at #1, gold record

Billie Jean – Michael Jackson, seven weeks at #1, platinum record. MTV made Michael Jackson, and Michael Jackson made MTV.

Flashdance… What A Feeling – Irene Cara, six weeks at #1, gold record

Say Say Say – Paul McCartney, six weeks at #1, platinum record. That friendship fractured.

All Night Long (All Night) – Lionel Richie, four weeks at #1, gold record

Total Eclipse of the Heart – Bonnie Tyler, four weeks at #1, gold record

Down Under – Men At Work, four weeks at #1, gold record

Beat It – Michael Jackson, three weeks at #1, platinum record

Islands In The Stream – Kenny Rogers with Dolly Parton, three weeks at #1, platinum record

Baby, Come To Me – Patti Austin with James Ingram, two weeks at #1, gold record

Maniac – Michael Sembello, two weeks at #1

A single week at #1

Let’s Dance– David Bowie, gold record

Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) – Eurythmics, gold record

Tell Her About It – Billy Joel

Africa – Toto, gold record

Come On Eileen – Dexys Midnight Runners

Buying a new cellphone redux

Unlocked or locked?

I was exhausted. That was literally true. While I’ve indicated that I hate shopping, I despise buying things I don’t understand and repurchasing them. That’s about four hours I spent buying a new cellphone redux.

On August 5, I bought my daughter a preowned Samsung Galaxy S20+ from Best Buy for about $320. It was coming from the warehouse and was scheduled to arrive at the store by August 10; it came a day early.

There was a problem. The “unlocked” phone was, in fact, locked. My daughter took it back to Best Buy. They said she had to take it to AT&T because they could unlock it.

Well, no. The message from AT&T: “We can’t unlock this device until the former owner removes it from their AT&T account.” So, Best Buy sold a phone that was tied to another account?

“Buy your device through a second-hand reseller? We can’t unlock it until the former owner removes it from their AT&T account.

“When the device is removed from that account, you can submit a new request. If the device meets the rest of the eligibility requirements, we’ll approve the unlock request.”

The cavalry

The daughter called, exhausted and exasperated. I totally get that. So her daddy came to the rescue. I eventually talked to a Best Buy customer service rep who immediately called a manager.

I showed the manager an alternate Samsung phone, but they said it was a step down from what we already had. What do I know? So they recommended a new phone over $235 more expensive, but they could take off $100. Sure, whatever.

I walked from Best Buy to the store where my daughter worked, some 900 steps each way, five times to get more info, such as her Samsung password. Then I needed to wait at Best Buy for the info to be transferred from the old phone to the new phone, then to zap the info from the old phone.

Oh, and while I could pay for the original phone charge over 12 months at zero interest, the additional $135 was not treated the same way because it was less than $300. So when THAT portion of the bill comes due, I’ll have to pay that whole amount plus the 1/12 of the original amount.

It wasn’t my plan for the day, but I’m the “retired” guy. She needed a working phone before returning to college. As my wife put it, I took one for the team.

Naturally, the case for the old (Aug 5) phone doesn’t fit the new (Aug 21) one, and my daughter had decorated the extant holder. [Shrugs yet again.]