January 2024 - Page 2 of 7 - Ramblin' with Roger

Lydster: LS’s 0th birthday redux

Carnival

Now that my daughter is almost post-teen, I had this splendid idea to take a Mixed CD I made called LS’s 0th Birthday and post it here. I found links and wrote a narrative. Then, I searched my blog for completeness’s sake and discovered I had already written it. So, I scrapped the post.

I wish I had not dumped it because almost none of the links worked. Oh well. As I noted, “Three months before our child was born, I made a mixed CD for the child. We didn’t know whether we were having a boy or a girl, so she was called Little Soul. Or, more accurately, my wife’s friend Alison, who was in our wedding, dubbed her as such.”

So this is a repost from 14 years ago, sort of. I found new links for all the pop tunes and have a workaround for the other. And I changed some of the descriptions. I may do this again in 2035, so I don’t want any complaints.

Part the first

1. Mr. Sandman – the Chorettes. I suppose it’s an odd choice if one listens to the lyrics, but it was based on my desire for her to sleep well, which did not happen early on.
2. Lullabye (Good Night, My Angel) – Billy Joel. In the mid-1990s, there was an NY SBDC state conference in Binghamton. An a capella group from the university sang this for us, which was great and sufficiently melancholy.
3. Dreamland – Mary Chapin Carpenter. Initially from a 1992 compilation album called ‘Til Their Eyes Shine. I have on her 1999 greatest hits album, Party Doll.
4. Good Night – the Beatles. It’s the last song on the white album, a Lennon tune sung by Ringo. I often sang it to my daughter before she went to bed
5. Lullaby for Sophia – the Beverwyck String Band. A lovely tune by our friend, violinist/vocalist Britney, and a couple of her friends, which does not appear to exist on YouTube or Spotify, though the album is for sale on Amazon and here. My friend Tim jerry-rigged it so that you can hear the song:

Part the 2nd

6. Alright For Now – Tom Petty. It’s from his first solo album, Full Moon Fever.
7. Sweet and Low – Bette Midler.
8. All Through The Night – Shawn Colvin. While I remember this song exceedingly well growing up, I am fascinated that my wife never heard it until I sang it to her. The last two cuts are from a 1997 benefit album for the rain forest called Carnival, which also features Saint-Saëns’ Carnival of the Animals.
9. Common Threads – Bobby McFerrin. It is a song from the great Medicine Man album, which I gave to a half dozen people for Christmas in 1990. This song without words is a transition to the instrumental portion of the album.

Part the 3rd

The ones below may not be the exact ones from the CD except the Moonlight Sonata.

10. Brandenburg Concerto #5 Affettuoso – Bach. The English Chamber Orchestra. This is similar to the mixed CD.
11. Pachelbel Canon – the English Chamber Music Orchestra.
12. Four Seasons: Autumn, Adagio – Vivaldi.
13. Four Seasons: Winter, Largo – Vivaldi.
14. Moonlight Sonata – Beethoven. Evelyne Dubourg.
15. Fur Elise -Beethoven.

Western/Madison/Allen intersection

US Route 20

I live near Albany, NY’s Western/Madison/Allen intersection. It isn’t straightforward to explain it. On the map, the red line is US Route 20. To the west, it’s Western Avenue. Where it makes the bend, it becomes Madison Avenue, but Western Avenue continues if you follow the straight line.

A “Getting There” column in the Times Union from 2015 contained this convoluted-sounding but utterly accurate question. “When coming north off South Allen Street and taking a left onto Western Avenue (you cannot take a left onto Madison Avenue) or going straight onto North Allen, there is most often confusion in the intersection. Cars coming south on North Allen can make a left onto both Madison and Western Avenues.”

Thus, WALK lights are needed to allow pedestrians to cross the streets safely. That is unless a driver is on Madison Avenue and makes an illegal right turn onto North Allen. And by “illegal,” I mean there is both a word and a graphic sign prohibiting it. Still, cars make that turn. Recently, three vehicles in a row did so.

Allen Street is but one lane in each direction. A red light came on when a fire truck was racing south down North Allen, so cars weren’t moving. Nor could they pull over because it’s a neighborhood with a lot of street parking. The truck passed eight vehicles, got through the intersection with sirens blaring, and went on its way.

What was audacious, and one of my neighbors saw it as well, was that the fifth car in line followed the fire vehicle. Since it did NOT have a siren, it almost caused an accident at the intersection.

Yield to the ambulance!

A few weeks later – last week – an ambulance was racing east on Western. It couldn’t travel straight onto Madison because cars stopped at a traffic light. So it had to head back to the common road area, then veer back onto Madison.

Meanwhile, a vehicle is heading west at Madison’s end, which normally would have had the right of way save for the approaching ambulance. Somehow, I waved the car down – the driver possibly thought I was daft – and it stopped. The ambulance veers back onto Madison, as I expected, and the crisis is averted.

It’s a weird intersection. In 2005 (!), I wrote The Streets of Albany Were Designed by Sadists. It’s more an issue of bad surveying, but the effect is the same.

The good thing is that the intersection is a major stop for the CDTA buses: the #10 Western, the #114 (it’ll get me to the train station); the #106 (circumnavigates the city), the #111 (UAlbany), and the new express #910.

Old cities have quirky aspects.

Calendar dates and multiplying to 24

Is that February 12 or December 2?

I love multiplying to 24. I’ll get back to that.

One of the fun quirks of the calendar that folks like to glom onto are interesting patterns. The last day of the last year is an example: 12/31/23. An outsized number of couples reportedly got married, with no excuse for not remembering their anniversary.

Of course, that doesn’t quite work unless your calendar is MM/DD/YY. If you use DD/MM/YY, like most civilised places, then 31/12/23 isn’t all that. Pi day works as 03/14, but not so much as 14/03.

At the beginning of each century, we had fun repeating numbers: 01/01/01, 02/02/02, all the way to 12/12/12, and the order does not matter. This means, though, that I’ll have to wait until 1 January 2101 for the next one, when I’ll be 147.

Meanwhile, I’m noting all the wonderful dates that multiply to 24. Since multiplication is communicative – changing the order of the factor does not change the product – it doesn’t matter which way you do your calendar.

01/24 or 24/01 is January 24, and the product equals 24

02/12 or 12/02. Is that February 12 or December 2? It doesn’t matter; it multiplies to 24. 03/08 and 08/03 are March 8 and August 3, which multiplies to 24. 04/06 and 06/04 are April 6 and June 4; multiply them and get 24.

That’s seven combinations. Is there any other year that generates more combinations? Does another year generate even as many? The years ending in 12 and 48 have six such dates each.

And if you’re a YY/MM/DD person, which a librarian will tell you is quite logical in file naming, you can divide.

Unrelated, 24 is the uniform number of my favorite baseball player ever, Willie Mays.

Note perfect

I hear numbers. It’s not unlike hearing music. You have whole notes, half notes, quarter notes, eighth notes. You can add a dot and extend the value by 50%.

This article from the American Mathematical Society quotes Pythagoras: “There is geometry in the humming of the strings; there is music in the spacing of the spheres.”

AMS notes – no pun intended: ” Counting, rhythm, scales, intervals, patterns, symbols, harmonies, time signatures, overtones, tone, pitch. The notations of composers and sounds made by musicians are connected to mathematics.”

Documentary review: Kelce

New Heights

After I had read that Philadelphia Eagles and NFL All-Pro center Jason Kelce was contemplating retiring from (American) football after the 2023-2024 season, I watched the Amazon film Kelce. It has become the most-watched documentary on Prime Video.

“Jason Kelce started documenting what he thought was his final year in the NFL “(2022-2023). “Instead, the film intimately captures the most epic year in Jason and Travis’s life.”

The viewer gets a detailed view of Jason’s life. His wife, Kylie, tells about their online meeting and strange first date.

During the offseason, Jason notes how beat up his body was. When he was a young man, his body bounced back quickly. Still, as an old man of 35 or so, with numerous broken and bruised body parts, he wonders whether he can recover well enough to play the game at an elite level.

And he is being paid a lot of money, an estimated $14 million in his 12th season, more than any offensive lineman in the NFL. Jason and Kylie have two young daughters, and he wants to be physically able to play with them. Then Kylie discovers she’s pregnant with their third child, due about two weeks after the Super Bowl.

What will Jason do if he retires? Real estate, farming? He asks some retired Eagles brethren, some of whom thrived while others struggled to find something nearly as rewarding.

Then, the brothers were offered the opportunity to “host the popular New Heights podcast with high-profile sponsors.” Jason has also appeared in various commercials.

Really?

Travis said something his older brother thought was BS, that once you win the Super Bowl and then lose the big game, your desire to win it again becomes even greater. Jason and the Eagles won the February 2018 matchup with the New England Patriots, 41-33. Travis and his Kansas City Chiefs beat the 49ers 31-20 in February 2020 but, a year later, fell to the Tampa Bay Bucs 31-9.

The Eagles and the Chiefs met at the Super Bowl in February 2023. This matchup, brother versus brother, made their mom, Donna, an instant celebrity. The movie was more interesting than I expected, given that the outcome of that last game was well-known.

Shaken a soda can

Pepsi, Coke – it doesn’t really matter

This will be oblique for various reasons, not the least of which, oddly enough, is protecting another soda can.

If you’ve ever shaken or dropped a soda can, you know the contents can spill everywhere when you open it.

Well, I am a soda can. And I have been spilling all over the place all this past week.

The item that triggered this episode had its roots over six months ago when someone else’s can of soda was so pressurized that it was spewing all over the place and ended up creating a dangerous, potentially lethal situation.

I waited for that one to get its act together and acknowledge its irresponsible behavior. When the other soda indicated that it may have needed my help with something, I looked forward to creating conditions whereby the situation might have been remedied. Alas, it did not happen.

So when that soda offered a linguistic correction about a third party, my soda can spewed everywhere. It wasn’t about the third party – although they might have thought so – but the shaking that had occurred months earlier.

To be fair, that soda can, and this one is now seeking rapprochement.

And what it did was to point out a whole level of disequilibrium that had been going on in other areas. Last week, my soda can was shaken by the slightest tremor.

Someone once told me you can break up the bubbles in a dropped soda can by tapping on the top. In my experience, this works nine times out of ten. I need to figure out how to do the tapping. Or find someone else to help to do the tapping, which has historically been a royal pain in the tuchas.