January 2025 - Page 2 of 7 - Ramblin' with Roger

Lydster: making my life brighter

office chair

lamps My daughter has been making my life brighter for two decades, but right after Christmas, it wasn’t merely a metaphor. My wife and I had gone out to see a Saturday matinee. When we got back, she had put together three lamps for the living room that Santa had brought for me.

The front of the living room was too dark, so I couldn’t read the spines of my CDs. The last time my friends visited for a hearts game, the room was too dark for them, so this was a really important addition.

That she did it all by herself was quite remarkable. She had wanted to do this earlier, but her parents were always around, so she had to wait until we went to the movies.

Better seating

She also brought an office chair upstairs and put it together. I had one that broke down. Then, I used a stationary chair, which was more comfortable but less easy to get in and out of—the office chair swivels. Additionally, the new chair makes it much easier to clean the room. The hardest task was taking the old chair to the attic; I was not strong enough to do it myself.

During the cleaning – I picked up, and she removed stuff – we also had a wonderful conversation about life. We talked about the friends she had when she was younger. She still has some of them, and others have faded away, but she keeps track of many. We talked about our friend Bonnie, who she believes is the first significant person in her life to die. She doesn’t really remember my mother; the last time she saw her was when the daughter was five. Also, we discussed other relationships each of us have had.

We talked about the time we deconstructed the rotting shed in the backyard, one of the great joys I had working with her. It was a wonderful evening.

Current KC Chiefs; 1950s NY Yankees

Go, Buffalo Bills!

Growing up, I was a New York Yankees baseball fan because we had a farm team in Binghamton, NY, a Yankees affiliate, the Triplets. But I knew many people around the country hated the Bronx Bombers because they were too successful. They won the World Series every year from 1936 to 1939, again from 1949 to 1953, and were in the mix most years between 1955 and 1964.

Moreover, they received disproportionate press coverage, even though two other teams, the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants, were located within the City limits for most of that period. Mickey Mantle was a bigger star than he would have been in Cleveland. Joe DiMaggio married Marilyn Monroe!

I spent much of last weekend watching four football games. As is usually the case, I did not watch them in real-time but recorded them and watched them later. It’s been clear that I’ve been rooting this season for the Detroit Lions and the Buffalo Bills. The Lions lost, alas, but the Bills won.

I’m pulling for the Bills, the only team that plays its home games in New York State. Moreover, I want them to get the monkey off their back as the only team to lose four consecutive Super Bowls (Jan 1991-Jan 1994).

No threepeat!

But I realized only recently that I’m also actively rooting against the Kansas City Chiefs, and I’m not the only one. They’ve won three Super Bowls in five seasons and are going for a threepeat this year. There are many articles about how they were the worst team in the league this season with a winning record. And some complain that the officiating favors Kansas City.

Maybe I’m tired of all the State Farm ads with quarterback Patrick Mahomes and coach Andy Reid or the ubiquitous presence of tight end Travis Kelce and his recently NFL-retired brother Jason.

I have no strong rooting interests between the Washington Commanders and the Philadelphia Eagles. They’re both in the NFC East, where I root for the Giants when they have a decent team. They aren’t the Dallas Cowboys, who I’ve despised for decades.

If the Bills win tomorrow, I’ll continue to support them in the Super Bowl. If the Bills lose, I’ll be cheering for the NFC team.

Don’t bet on it, at least online

But I won’t be wagering on any of it. Zvi Mowshowitz had previously been heavily [and successfully] involved in sports betting.” As he notes, The Online Sports Gambling Experiment Has Failed.

“When sports gambling was legalized in America, I was hopeful it too could prove a net positive force, far superior to the previous obnoxious wave of daily fantasy sports.

“It brings me no pleasure to conclude that this was not the case. The results are in. Legalized mobile gambling on sports, let alone casino games, has proven to be a huge mistake. The societal impacts are far worse than I expected.”

He links to others who are likewise loathe to tell others what they cannot do but make the same argument.

“You should need to go to a physical location to place fully legal bets of a non-trivial size, or at least interact with a human or bear some other cost or risk.”

Start Making Sense

Tribute to Talking Heads

In mid-December, one of my pastors emailed me: “I’m wondering—do you like the Talking Heads? I have two tickets to “Start Making Sense: A Tribute to Talking Heads “for Sunday, 12/29, at 7:30, which I would love to give to someone who would like them. Would that be you?”

It might be. I wrote about them here and several other times. I saw them perform on August 5, 1983, at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center (SPAC) in upstate New York. It was one of the two or three greatest concerts I had ever seen.

But what about Start Making Sense? The program at the Cohoes Music Hall notes the group “celebrates the entire Talking Heads’ catalog with a seven-piece band meticulously executing the sounds and iconic live visual elements in every performance. Together, these skilled and dedicated musicians enjoy bringing the unique, infectious energy of a Talking Heads live show that you know and love to the stage.”

I said yes to the tickets, though I was/am wary of tribute bands. My wife agreed to go with me even though she had to get up early the following morning. It was good that she and I had gone to see the movie Stop Making Sense in 2023, about the 1983 Talking Heads tour, because she was not nearly as familiar with the TH oeuvre as I was.

Our seats were in the front row of the balcony, which was a great place to watch the show. While some people were sitting on the lower level, many stood and danced up front.

Deja vu?

The show began like the 1983 Talking Heads concert, in which the lead singer (Jon Braun) performed Psycho Killer with the boom box. Next, a couple of songs with the bass player/singer (Jenny Founds) and the drummer (Jesse Braun), then the guitarist/singer (Brian Davis). Soon, others (Colin Miller – Percussion & vocals; Alex Ayala – Keyboards & vocals; Kate Desisto-/ Vocals) joined on stage.

I wondered whether this would be a replication of the movie, but then they did a song from after that period. There was a Tom Tom Club song in the second half, and then the lead singer came out in a large suit.

On their website was this message: “To all you listeners… This is an appropriate title — Start Making Sense. This band makes plenty of sense to me and is a great representation of Talking Heads’ music. So listen up and go check them out!” —BERNIE WORRELL, Rock & Roll Hall of Fame member and keyboardist for Talking Heads and Parliament / Funkadelic

Many audience members had seen them in the past decade and a half, including in Cohoes, yet I had been unaware of them. They were very good.

The group will tour Australia from January 23 to February 1. Then, they will embark on their Spring tour with the Ocean Avenue Stompers, “playing the music of Talking Heads, David Bryne, and more with a full Horn Section!!!” The first show will be at The Count Basie Theatre in Red Bank, NJ, on March 28.

Here’s a Reddit link, plus some videos on their Instagram feed, including a pair of COVID-era concerts.

Lillian Bakic; Don Ingram

music

I should note that two people I’ve known for a while—one for a few decades and the other almost all my life—have passed away in the past month.

Lillian Bakic, 96, who died on January 14, was the mother of Carol, one of my best and oldest (in tenure) friends from back in Binghamton, NY. From Mrs. Bakic’s obituary: “She was welcoming and inclusive to all of her children’s friends, often hosting parties and social activities. Several have shared that she was their favorite mom of all their friends’ moms.” I number myself in that category, and I’m sure I told her that more than once.

Occasionally, in the summer, Carol’s classmates all got to go to the Bakic cottage at a lake in northern Pennsylvania.

I knew she worked at the Broome County Board of Elections and she took pride in her work. She eventually became the Deputy Commissioner of Elections. We would, on occasion, talk about politics, not the partisan stuff, but rather the importance of the electoral process, which almost certainly informed my sense of the way things should work.

A few times, starting when I was 19, she said I could call her Lillian. No, thank you, Mrs. Bakic.

“Funeral Mass will be held on Thursday, January 23 at 10am at St. Cyril’s Church, 148 Clinton St, Binghamton, NY. The family will receive friends at St. Cyril’s Thursday at 9:00am.

A Celebration of Life will be held in her honor at a later date in the Spring.”

Organist

Donald Ingram, 92, died on December 29, 2024. Per his obituary, Don “was the organist and choirmaster for nearly 20 churches over his career.” Two of them, in temporary capacities, were the last two churches at which I sang in the choir, Trinity United Methodist and First Presbyterian, both in Albany. He was very good at what he did. Yet he was affable and occasionally very funny.

Every year that his birthday was divisible by five, he’d gather a bunch of singers he knew and play the Christmas section of the Messiah by Handel. His longtime partner Gene would sing some of the solos. I participated in this wonderful event at least thrice.

“Funeral and committal services will be held in the spring,” likely in the Albany area where he has lived for the past half century. “Dates will be announced at a later time. Interment will be in the columbarium at St. Paul’s Cathedral in Buffalo.”

Musing about social media

“your movement won’t be very popular”

I’ve been musing about social media recently. The Supreme Court recently allowed the effective end of TikTok, owned by ByteDance, in the United States, barring its sale to a non-Chinese company. Less than a day later, TikTok was back, at least for a time.

Of course, other media companies are busy figuring out how to poach those TikTok users, whether or not there’s a sale or other rescue.

I came across Cory Doctorow’s Billionaire-proofing the Internet. The subtitle spoke to me: “Scolding people for choosing popular services is no way to build a popular movement.”

He starts with the story of the record companies who sued users during the days of Napster, keeping the money for themselves rather than passing the proceeds to the artists they were allegedly “protecting.”

“What we didn’t agree on was what to do about it. A lot of us wanted to reform copyright – say, by creating a blanket license for internet music so that artists could get paid directly. This was the systemic approach.

“Another group – call them the ‘individualists’ – wanted a boycott. Just stop buying and listening to music from the major labels…

“Here’s what I would say when people told me we should all stop listening to popular music: ‘If members of your popular movement are not allowed to listen to popular music, your movement won’t be very popular.'”

Cost

“Which brings me to social media. The problem with social media is that the people we love and want to interact with are being held prisoner in walled gardens. The mechanism of their imprisonment is the ‘switching costs’ of leaving. Our friends and communities are on bad social media networks because they love each other more than they hate Musk or Zuck. Leaving a social platform can cost you contact with family members in the country you emigrated from, a support group of people who share your rare disease, the customers or audience you rely on for your livelihood, or just the other parents organizing your kid’s little league game.”

Indeed, I have been on Facebook for about a decade. I got on initially because my niece Rebecca, who lives in California, posted her activities on the site. Before that, I didn’t know what she was doing half the time as she traveled all over the country. Subsequently, I found people I knew in the world: old friends and formerly distant relatives. I joined interest groups.

“Hypothetically, you could organize all these people to leave at once, go somewhere else, and re-establish all your social connections. Practically, the ‘collective action problem’ of doing so is nearly insurmountable. This is what platform owners depend on… “

Yes, I joined BlueSky, but it’s like moving to a new school as a kid. You find your way eventually.

A solution

“There’s a way out of this, thankfully. When social media is federated, you can leave a server without leaving your friends. Think of it as being similar to changing cell phone companies. When you switch from Verizon to T-Mobile, you keep your number, you keep your address book, and you keep your friends, who won’t even know you switched networks unless you tell them.”

“There’s no reason social media couldn’t work this way. You should be able to leave Facebook or Twitter for Mastodon, Bluesky, or any other service and still talk with the people you left behind, provided they still want to talk with you.”

It explains a whole how-to that involves legislation and whatnot so that it won’t be easy.

Meanwhile, I want to clarify that I don’t think it’s bad if people decide to leave a site. I left Twitter not so much because I didn’t like Musk or think that X is a stupid name, as I had read that Twitter would use my information to train its AI bots.

It isn’t easy to leave some of these sites. Here’s a detailed article about how to get off Facebook, which is way more complicated than you would think. In case it’s paywalled, there are five steps from settings to finding deactivation, five more until you reach “please don’t go,” and five more after that.

“Almost certainly, in the future, this experience will be illegal, as emerging privacy laws require experiences continue to insist that companies like Facebook and Amazon make it just as easy to leave their experiences as to sign up. In fact, the FTC has already announced a rule that likely makes what you see above illegal in the United States, though it hasn’t come into effect yet. (We’ll see if that happens under the [FOTUS] administration, I suppose.)”