November 2024 - Ramblin' with Roger

Billboard Christmas Charts #1s

The Christmas Song, twice

The Billboard Christmas charts were very odd ducks. Quoting from the book Joel Whitburn Presents Christmas in the Charts, 1920 to 2004, “From 1963 through 1972 and from 1983 through 1985, Billboard published a seasonal Christmas singles chart and did not chart Christmas singles on the Hot 100.”

There were a couple of exceptions in 1984 when two Christmas songs landed on the Hot 100; one was Do They Know It’s Christmas, #13 pop. I don’t know what the other one was. “The charts varied in size from a low of three to a high of 38 positions. The charts from 1983 to 1985 consisted of 10 positions.”

All of these songs went to #1 on the Christmas charts. They may have previously appeared on pop, country, or rhythm and blues charts. The years designated the first time the songs appeared on this particular list.

Billboard put out a pair of compilations with the songs I marked with * on them.

The Little Drummer Boy*—the Harry Simeone Chorale (1964). We had the single when I was a kid, but it was rerecorded with a slower ending.

Snoopy’s Christmas – the Royal Guardsmen (1967). I have this on an LP.

White Christmas – Andy Williams (1963). I know the song and Andy, but not this combo.

Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer* – Elmo and Patsy (1983). I own the single. This, too, was rerecorded.

Merry Christmas Darling – Carpenters (1970). Only vaguely familiar.

The Christmas Song – Herb Alpert (1968). The album cover is very familiar. Did I own this?

The #1 Christmas singles artist

White Christmas* – Bing Crosby (1969). This is the 1947 remake, not the 1942 original. I own both. Bing is this book’s #2 Christmas album artist, behind Mannheim Steamroller.

Jingle Bell Rock* – Bobby Helms (1969).

The Christmas Song* (Merry Christmas to You) – Nat King Cole (1969)

Blue Christmas* – Elvis Presley (1964)

Santa Claus Is Comin’ To Town– the Jackson 5 (1970). Interesting Classic Motown animation; it was on a Billboard R&B CD collection.

Please Come Home For Christmas – Charles Brown (1972). it was on a Billboard R&B CD collection.

Jingle Bells – the Singing Dogs (1972). Not high in my rotation; at least it’s short.

Sleep In Heavenly Peace (Silent Night) – Barbra Streisand (1966). I didn’t know this version.

Step Into Christmas – Elton John (1973). I was unfamiliar with this song.

Santa Claus Is Comin’ To Town—Bruce Springsteen (1985). It was included on the first A Very Special Christmas benefit CD in 1987.

Bonus

Chuck’s 2024 CPKC Holiday Train Chase: The Montreal Concert

November rambling: Unmade beds

The Wonder of Stevie

Unmade beds and overdue books: Photographing the rooms of kids killed in school shootings

Preserving Culture Before It’s Lost Forever

Wildfires come for the Northeast.

TikTok Ban: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

A promising new treatment for PTSD

Remembering Ted Olson, a titan of the law

Civil War Toll Much Worse in Confederate States, New Estimates Show. An analysis of newly released 19th-century census records offers more insight into the conflict’s costs.

Census Bureau Seeks Public Comment on Proposed Updates to the Census Bureau’s Race/Ethnicity Code List

Genealogy: 8 Census Records That Hide Extra Information in Plain Sight

Share of U.S. Coupled Households With Children Declined in 2023

U.S. Volunteerism Rebounding After COVID-19 Pandemic

100 Notable Books of 2024

The New York State Education Department has released data showing outcomes from New York’s 2024 state assessment tests, taken by students in grades 3 to 8 last spring.

Psalms 3:16: The Photo

The thriving business of looking good on Zoom

What Kind of Crier Are You?

Follow These Do’s and Don’ts of the Apostrophe

Spring Training Countdown

A series about Western Publishing and Gold Key Comics

What Happened to the Celebrity Telethon?

Jim Abrahams, ‘Airplane!,’ ‘Naked Gun’ and ‘Hot Shots!’ Master of Mirth, Dies at 80

Chuck Woolery, Host of ‘Wheel of Fortune’ and ‘Love Connection,’ Dies at 83

If your dead wife tells you to give all your property to a medium, perhaps get a second opinion.

Now I Know: Grace and Typos (I TOTALLY relate!) and The Farmer Strikes Back and The Great Geraint Woolford Coincidence and The Mystery of the Third Shaker and The Historic Connection Between TV Dinners and Diarrhea?

Kolosocracy

Kakistocracy and Kolosocracy

Expert agencies and elected legislatures. Legislatures are entitled to their own (political) opinions but not their own facts.

Top djt picks have ties to Project 2025

Hide, Fido!

What to Know About Jay Bhattacharya, djt’s Potential NIH Pick— Stanford professor is most closely associated with the Great Barrington Declaration

What to know about AG pick Pam Bondi

Caligula’s Horse and Other Controversial Appointments (RIP, the Matt Gaetz choice)

Harris lost the war of “ambient information.”

The Congressional Penis Crisis

Please stop telling me there won’t be an election in 2026 or 2028

The far right grows through “disaster fantasies”

Populism, Media Revolutions, and Our Terrible Moment

How to Block djt From All Your Screens: A Guide

How to Delete an X (Formerly Twitter) Account Permanently

Four-Year Cruise Offered to Unhappy Voters Who Want to ‘Escape’

Babel

“The story of Babel is the best metaphor I have found for what happened to America in the 2010s, and for the fractured country we now inhabit,” writes social psychologist Jonathan Haidt in his 2022 essay for The Atlantic. [paywall] “Trump did not destroy the tower; he merely exploited its fall. He was the first politician to master the new dynamics of the post-Babel era, in which outrage is the key to virality, stage performance crushes competence, Twitter can overpower all the newspapers in the country, and stories cannot be shared (or at least trusted) across more than a few adjacent fragments—so truth cannot achieve widespread adherence.”

Haidt explains how social media, once widely viewed as a boon for democracy, devolved to a force that has exacerbated the dysfunction of American politics—and suggests three reforms that can help democracy remain viable in the digital age.

MUSIC

Young Lion – Sade Adu

Dance With Everybody – Drew Holcomb and the Neighbors

Coverville 1511: The Tim Rice Cover Story and 1512: The Bruce Hornsby Cover Story

Naturally Stoned – The Avant-Garde, written by group member Chuck Woolery, #40 pop in 1968

Mozart’s Symphony No. 41 in C Major, K. 551, sometimes called the “Jupiter”.

Graucha Max– DARKSIDE

K-Chuck Radio: Someone’s Covering the Will-O-Bees

Vocalise by Rachmaninoff

Favorite Songs By Favorite Artists: Joy Division, New Order and Killdozer

Fist City– Loretta Lynn

Time After Time – Hiroshi Yoshimura

Gemini – Haley Heynderickx

Bethlehem (Glimpse) – Laraaji

Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go – Wham!

Open Flair Gänsekapelle

The Wonder of Stevie is a new limited podcast series.

Thanksgiving time

Naps!

It’s Thanksgiving time. What am I thankful for? Gertrude Stein once said, “Silent gratitude isn’t much use to anyone.” It’s the usual stuff. I’m thankful for my wife, daughter, church community, and old friends (I mean OLD, for 50 or 65 years, some of them). Also, I’m thankful for reasonably good health, my knee notwithstanding, having Social Security, health insurance, and Medicare so far, and a primary care physician who hasn’t retired yet.

I was thinking about what I wanted to write for the holiday, and then I napped. I’m thankful for naps. Naps are wonderful.

After church earlier in the month, I told one of the choir members about a friend I used to work with at the NY SBDC library. They had been there longer than I had. I asked them how to use a particular database, and they said, “Oh, that’s easy.” It irritated me because, having been friends before I worked there, I felt she was dismissing the value of her skills and wisdom.

After I woke up from my nap, I realized that I needed to be thankful for the things about myself that I tend to take for granted. Yes, it feels slightly boastful.

Where’s the grape juice?

I’m thankful that I get to serve communion fairly regularly at church. I like it; it’s a low-stress gig that involves setting up before the church, serving during the service, and cleaning up afterward.

A person recently was preparing communion and had not done it very often, and they specifically asked me how to do the gig. I HOPE I did not say, “Oh, it’s easy.” Instead, I showed them how the table should be set up, where the bread and juice were, and whatnot. I felt thankful that I could be useful.

I’ve spent a lot of time, particularly this calendar year, fretting about all the things I’m unable to accomplish in the world without embracing the fact that I know how to do some stuff, and it’s not nothing.

I’m thankful that how I sing, apparently with great enthusiasm, gives some folks joy. According to total strangers who were at our church recently for a baptism, I sing with gusto, whoever gusto is. It used to embarrass me vaguely, but now I’m trying to embrace it.

So basically, I’m thankful that I can be a little bit kinder to myself and have value to others in little ways and maybe in a manner that I don’t even know. If that’s a weird Thanksgiving message, then so be it.

NFL

Oh, and since it’s Thanksgiving, which is my official day to begin caring about the National Football League, I am happy to note that my rooting interests for the Super Bowl, the Buffalo Bills (9-2), and the Detroit Lions (10-1), are doing quite well. However, Kelly’s point on the topic is valid; I don’t want either to lose. BTW, Buffalo is much closer to Detroit than New York City.

The grumpy post

more alike

Every once in a while, I need to write a grumpy post. This is a piece about things that make me irritable. The parameters are not directly related to politics. However, I will argue that everything is politics.

ITEM: When there’s a health disaster of some sort, such as the E. coli outbreak in some McDonald’s in Colorado and surrounding areas, or Boeing having a series of mechanical difficulties, such as a door blowing off, there’s always that language. Lawyers probably wrote it. “We take safety seriously” or “Safety is our utmost concern.” I give McDonald’s a pass on their bad supply chain onions. But when Boeing says that, I laugh. Oh, please.

ITEM: I have heard the mantra, “We are more alike than we are different ” a lot this season, so much so that it has become a cliche. Nora O’Donnell says it frequently on the CBS Evening News. I suppose this saying is a dilution of a Maya Angelou quote: “We can learn to see each other and see ourselves in each other and recognize that human beings are more alike than we are unlike.”

The first version is a platitude that allows one to say we’re all the same under the skin while ignoring or denying the notion of racism, sexism, homophobia, and the like. The other says we can work at it; we must learn to see each other. These are not the same sentiments at all.

Related: James Baldwin noted, “We can disagree and still love each other unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist.”

Not So Great

ITEM: A Facebook buddy wrote: “‘That’s a great question’ has become the de facto preamble to every response, in every interview, everywhere.” It’s not just interviews. It appears in a commercial for house gutter products in a faux Q&A situation.

Somebody told me a long time ago that when you say to one party, “That’s a great question,” and you don’t say that every single time, it suggests that those other people’s questions aren’t all that good. The truth is that generally speaking, almost none of these questions are all that particularly good, let alone great.

ITEM: My wife drove us through a grocery store parking lot in the proper lane. Somebody within a parking space started pulling out in front of us or into us, so my wife beeped her horn, ensuring we didn’t have a collision. The face of the other driver looked infuriated. After we went by, they came out behind us and lay on the horn. I don’t know why this bothers me, because bad drivers.

ITEM: I got this pin: “Young people are the solution, not the problem.” The former may be partly true, but it seems that the people who created the problem should help fix it.

When I went to Chautauqua in July 2024, environmentalist Bill McKibben talked about how old people can afford to get arrested more than young people because the consequences are less for them. They also have more money and political power.

This is JEOPARDY!

ITEM: In JEOPARDY! news: “The 2025 ToC will consist of 21 players, the top 20 champs from last April until December, and the winner of a 15-contestant Champions Wildcard. Also, like in past years, the ToC will immediately follow a Second Chance Competition for non-winners and a Wildcard for brief winners who didn’t make the cusp.”

Another Second-Chance thing? I got it when they did this during the writer’s strike. Now, it allows fewer people to get their chance on the Alex Trebek Stage.

ITEM: This sign is in front of 110 State St. in downtown Albany, NY, and I don’t see its purpose. If you carry many packages, does this mean you can’t use it because you’re not disabled? If I am using it, does this mean that I have to identify myself as disabled? It’s weird.

Lydster: the election

“You may need to grieve or scream”

My daughter texted me around 11:00 PM the evening of the election (November 5th) and asked me many questions about how the electoral process works regarding voter estimates. She wondered what would happen, and I said I had no clue. It was true, very true. The next morning around 6:30, she called on the landline, and she was upset. I was asleep, but her mother talked to her and made her feel better.

I know that she recognizes that some of her friends were feeling even worse than she was. They believe, not without cause, that the election results endangered their lives.

But her whole generation feels in peril because it seemed at the time, and even more so now, that the incoming administration will not be terribly responsive to climate change issues; a bit of an understatement, I suppose.

I’m unsure I found the right words for her because I’m still trying to find the correct words for myself. I muddle through, though it feels like walking through pea soup.

Rebecca Solnit

If I get a do-over, I will probably share these words with Rebecca Solnit. “They want you to feel powerless and to surrender and to let them trample everything, and you are not going to let them. You are not giving up, and neither am I. The fact that we cannot save everything does not mean we cannot save anything, and everything we can save is worth saving.

“You may need to grieve or scream or take time off, but you have a role no matter what, and right now good friends and good principles are worth gathering in. Remember what you love. Remember what loves you. Remember in this tide of hate what love is. The pain you feel is because of what you love.

“The Wobblies used to say, ‘Don’t mourn, organize,’ but you can do both at once, and you don’t have to organize right away in this moment of furious mourning. You can be heartbroken or furious or both at once; you can scream in your car or on a cliff; you can also get up tomorrow and water the flowerpots, call someone who’s upset, and check your equipment for going onward.

“A lot of us are going to come under direct attack, and a lot of us are going to resist by building solidarity and sanctuary. Gather up your resources, the metaphysical ones that are heart and soul and care, as well as the practical ones.”

Yeah, I probably should have said something like that. Or what Kellie Carter Jackson wrote to her kids: “I prepared my children for a Harris win. I did not prepare them for her loss.”