Roger O Green

More Sunday Random Meanderings

Day o’ rest:

RELIGION

I was reading my parents-in-law’s Guidepost magazine (March 2005) when I came across the name Len Wein. He was described as a “comic book writer and creator of the new X-Men.” I don’t have the magazine, but Googling, I found this quote attributed to him: “A friend is someone who is there for you when he’d rather be anywhere else.”

I saw spray-painted on the wall of a church parking lot last weekend: “Blinded by Patriotism, Silenced by the Dollar.”

On a church sign on Route 28 between Oneonta and Cooperstown: “There’s no point being a pessimist, because it won’t work anyway.”

TRUTH

A radio talk show pundit said on the air that he thought that the reference of Karl Rove as Turd Blossom in Doonesbury was verisimilitude, when in fact W actually DOES call Rove Turd Blossom.
Verisimilitude. I love that word.

Someone recently turned me on to the The Borowitz Report. Where else could you read:
July 28, 2005 KIM JONG-IL DEMANDS IPOD
Latest Twist in Nuke Talks Raises Eyebrows, Concerns
July 27, 2005 DEBRIS FALLS OFF CHENEY
Scientists Study Videotape of Vice President Disintegrating
July 24, 2005 SWIFT BOAT VETS MISS ATTACKING KERRY
Life Without Negative Ads Devoid of Meaning, Vets Complain
July 21, 2005 ROBERTS PROMISES STRICTER CONTROLS ON FOUR-YEAR-OLD SON
Child’s Rampage Through D.C. Prompts Nominee’s Conservative Stance
July 18, 2005 NEW HARRY POTTER BOOK DESTROYS PRECIOUS RAINFOREST
652-Page Tome Ignites Ecological Catastrophe, Sierra Club Warns
Of course, these are “humorous” stories, but they COULD be true! They have verisimilitude!

These postcards ARE supposed to be true.

SEX

I went on a “next blog” meanering. Usually, they’re new sites that pop up, but this week I came across the blog of Marshall Brain. He is the founder of one of my favorite websites, How Stuff Works. He has some insights into porn. And it’s clean! Honest!

NOT CLEAN: One of my least favorite people is U.S. Senator Rick Santorum. The readers of sex columnist Dan Savage came up with a new term, and they named it after the junior senator from Pennsylvania. You may find it crude, but it seems to have caught on.

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

I saw this on a news program, and then Brother IH sent me the info:
Store the word ” I C E ” in your mobile phone address book and against it enter the number of the person you would want to be contacted “In Case of Emergency”.
In an emergency situation, ambulance and hospital staff will then be able to quickly find out who your next of kin are and be able to contact them.

Remember that Mars is getting closer. If the Martians are going to launch the invasion, this would be a good time.

Blogger Greg seems to think the current President isn’t all that bright. I mean he REALLY thinks W is dumb. I don’t know how he could say such a thing. Just last month, he acknowledged that global warming exists and that it is at least partially a function of human behavior, only a year after his own administration had reached that conclusion, and only several years after just about everyone else had.
So this is what I’m trying to figure out:
If global warming is human-made,
and if global warming heats the oceans,
and since hurricanes thrive on warmer waters,
so that more hurricanes will occur,
are hurricanes still acts of God or, increasingly, acts of human insensitivity to our environment?

Which takes me back to
RELIGION, which is where I started this.

3 Ramblin’ ?s-Baseball

I was going to give you even more statistical stuff, but the hot weather precludes it.

Rafael Palmeiro was suspended for 10 days for failing Major League Baseball’s steroid use policy. Allegations about use by Mark McGwire and Barry Bonds have also been made.

Palmero is only the fourth player, after Hank Arron, Willie Mays and Eddie Murray, to hit 500 home runs (he has 569, in 9th place all-time, passing Reggie Jackson and closing in on Harmon Killebrew) and get 3000 hits.
McGwire had 583 career home runs, and practically saved baseball in 1998 with his exciting home run race with Sammy Sosa in 1998, after the disasterous strike of 1994.
Bonds not only has 703 homers, but the 7-time MVP was intentionally walked more last year than some teams; he’s been out with injuries all of this season.

Every eligible person (retired five years) who has hit 500 or more home runs has made it to the HoF.

So, I’d like to know:

1. Will Barry Bonds make it to the Baseball Hall of Fame, and should he?
2. Will Mark McGwire make it, and should he?
3. Will Raphael Palmiero make it, and should he

Bonus question:
And what about the chances for Sammy Sosa, who is now #5 on the HR list, behind only Aaron, Ruth, Bonds, and Mays, passing McGwire and Frank Robinson this year?

JEOPARDY!, Part 11 (and last)

Continued from Saturday, July 30.

Some people from my church, with assistance from folks at work, were planning a JEOPARDY! watching party for Monday, November 9. I could have refused, but it seemed ungracious. For some reason, I am almost as nervous about this as I was as I was being on the show; totally irrational, I know.

Unfortunately, two of my co-workers were laid off on the Friday before, and they were understandably not that interested in the party. Luckily for me and three of my colleagues, our jobs were saved. (Two others had already found new jobs.)

Sunday morning, the day before the show aired, I called Amy Roeder in Merrimack, NH. She was very helpful in putting things into perspective. Her friends who had been at the taping gave her a hard time about giving Saigon rather than Hanoi as the Final response, but I thought it was impressive that all three of us got the right country. I told her she was a great opponent, and that if she weren’t so close in score to me, I wouldn’t have bet so much, and therefore wouldn’t have won so much.

We also talked about the consolation prizes. Tom had ended up in second place and won a trip to a resort in New Jersey. (No commentary needed.) Amy, in third, got a credit card with $2500 on it. She and I agreed that she got the better deal.

The day of the show, I went to work for a half-day, then went over to the Channel 10 studios to watch the feed for the show that comes in about 1:30. I had arranged this beforehand, but no one seemed to know I was coming, though they eventually did let me in. I was SO glad to have seen the show before the party.

At the church, there were about 35 people. I was seated in the front, just to the left of the set. At the first commercial break, I made a point to go to the bathroom and not make it back until after my gaffe in OT Women.

After it was revealed that I won, I could answer all of those questions people had wanted to ask, many of which I’ve addressed, but also questions I thought were odd, such as:
“Did you know the categories beforehand?” “No.”

By the time I got home, I had over a dozen messages. My sister Leslie in California must have sent a huge e-mail distribution telling people that I was going to be on (and apparently suggesting that I lost, from my non-committal response to how well I did.), for she forwarded congratulations from people I did not know.

The next day total strangers talked with me on the street about my JEOPARDY! win. And this went on for the next 35 days.

That second night I was on my mother called me at 7:30, letting me know that she was sorry that I lost. The shows aired at 7 pm in Charlotte. The show aired at 7:30 in Albany. I never saw the second show until several days later.

Even after that 36th day, when no one commented, I got lots of comments, especially at a January 1 wedding I DJed and a Midwinter’s party I attended.

Almost immediately after the show aired, I received letters, at least six, wanting me to buy their 45s and LPs; I must admit that I never wrote back. One guy, though, wanted me to identify some half-remembered songs from his childhood. I didn’t know most of them, but I did give him a lead to the song with the lyrics “Open up your heart and let the sunshine in.”

Oh, I can’t forget the parting gifts I received, over a two-month period: a case (12 large cans) of sweet potatoes (they were quite good, actually), OTC vitamins and other products including Centrum, a rather lovely lap blanket, a US Search coupon to try to find anyone in the United States, Pop Secret popcorn, and TWO hair curlers (!), which I didn’t need and gave away. I also got a home version of Wheel of Fortune, not JEOPARDY!

In January 1999, I got engaged to Carol. On St. Patrick’s Day, I received a check (FINALLY!) for $17,600.

A couple of days after we got married on May 15, Carol and I flew to Barbados via New York City. I never realized how far south Barbados was. We spent money to park the car at the airport, spent money on the speeding (Are we gonna die?) cab ride from the airport in Barbados to the resort, and we spent $26 to get out of the country (some sort of fee.) Everything else we needed to do was paid for: the hotel, the food, the drinks, the ride back to the airport; all courtesy of my second-place finish on JEOPARDY! For some reason, we even got bumped to first class on the return flight.

Since that time, JEOPARDY! has abandoned the prizes in favor of $2000 to the second-place contestant and $1000 for third place, I believe because of the logistics involved with the prizes; I had to call a few times before our trip was booked.

For a time, I made a point to call Albany-area winners. I talked to one guy named Greg who had won $3400, and he was disappointed; he thought he’d do better. I said, “You won, and that counts!” But I stopped when I called another guy and I got the sense that he thought I was a stalker.

I was amazed that people continued to recognize me, no more so than in October 1999, 11 months after the show aired, and I was at a conference in Florida when some folks I had never met from the Department of Labor in DC recognized me.

My pal Dave, used to head the Albany YMCA before he got kicked upstairs to the administrative side, went to a comedy club in Boston in 1999 or 2000, and in the entryway was a picture of three people, one of whom was me. It turned out that the performer was Amy Roeder, my worthy opponent on the show.

Winning on JEOPARDY! is a peculiar phenomenon. It’s epitomized in this story:
I was at a party talking about my work as a librarian. I had recently done a question about alpacas and I noted that they are much nicer in temperament than llamas. However, a woman I knew said: “You Don’t Know What You’re Talking About!”
I believe she thought I was suffering from Male Answer Syndrome, where a guy will ALWAYS have an answer to every question, no matter how little he actually knows, often stating opinion as fact. Then wife Carol let it be known that I was on JEOPARDY! “Well, maybe you DO know what you’re talking about!” Answering a question as a librarian, someone with a Masters degree in Library Science didn’t cut it, but an appearance or two on a game show did.

There are people to this day who expect that I know stuff, even if I don’t, which is definitely a double-edged process. All in all, though, it’s good to be able to put on the resume: “JEOPARDY! champion.”

Hope you enjoyed this little trip down Memory Lane. Now when people find out that I was a JEOPARDY! champion, as they did at a reunion last month, I can tell ’em, “Just go check out my blog!”

Mushroom cloud

I had this great teacher in sixth grade named Paul Peca. Among other things, he had us write in our journals about our thoughts. We also discussed the issues of the day, such as the 1964 general election between Lyndon Johnson (the peace candidate, in retrospect, ironically) and Barry Goldwater (who was depicted in one very effective commercial which ran but one time as the guy who would lead the world to a nuclear holocaust.) We held a mock election in which LBJ beat AuH2O 13-3. It was clear that Mr. Peca preferred Goldwater.

We had this great debate about the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. His position was that the dropping of those bombs (and the threat to drop others, even though we didn’t HAVE any more) ended the war sooner than continuing to fight a conventional war. He also noted that there were greater deaths in battles such as Dresden, Germany (130,000) than in either of the Japanese cities (120,000), which was the conventional wisdom of the time. (Dresden’s deaths in February 1945 are now estimated to have been 25,000 to 60,000.)

What we argued was that the effect of the atomic bombs was not just limited to its immediate destructive force but the anguish that was suffered by future generations. How well that was understood at the time the bomb was dropped versus what was learned subsequently about the devastating effects of nuclear radiation was also discussed.

I don’t remember if we talked about the fact that the only uses of of the atomic bomb were on people of color, or whether that was a conversation of a later class.

There is a movie called Atomic Cafe, which I saw when it came out about 25 years ago. It was a history of the A-bomb from the 1940s to the early 1960s, told in clips (“duck and cover”, Prersidential announcements) and song (“Jesus Hits Like an Atomic Bomb”, “Atomic Cocktail”). It was funny (in parts), but also quite sobering. I used to play the LP every year so that I would never forget the insanity of nuclear war. (I’ve never seen the soundtrack listed, though several of the songs appear here, an inferior product, so I’ve read.}

As we mark the 60th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb this week, I note that we’ve never used it again on people. This suggests (perhaps foolishly) that we’ve learned from our history.

Haven’t we?

Haven’t we?

Spring 1975

I’m having an Alice’s Restaurant moment.

By that, I mean that I want to tell you a story. But first, I need to tell you ANOTHER story. In the Arlo Guthrie song, he talks about 7 minutes about, well, Alice’s Restaurant, and garbage. But then he says: “That’s not what I came to tell you about. Came to talk about the draft.” Now, my second story, I’ll write about eventually, but probably not for this week.

At the end of the fall 1974 semester at the State University College at New Paltz (NY), I broke up with the person who would soon be my ex-wife Nona. She moved to Philadelphia for reasons that were unclear to me then, and certainly no clearer 30 years later. The primary relationship issues were religion and money.

I drifted to Binghamton, my hometown. In January 1975, my sister Leslie and I kidnapped my 75-year old grandmother and took her by train to Charlotte, NC, where her daughter (my mother) had moved the year before. Gram was getting lame. She had a coal stove and it would have been dangerous to get up and down the stairs to get it. Nor could she walk up the steep street on which she lived.

13 Maple Street

When we came back a couple of weeks later, I didn’t have any idea what to do next. So I ended up living in my grandmother’s home. Funny thing, though; as often as I had seen her tend to the coal fire in my childhood, I could not keep it going at all. I suffocated it, essentially. Even got help from a friend; no success.

Eventually, the pipes froze. It was an old wood house with old wiring, so I could either run the refrigerator or run the space heater. Given the cold of the house, I opted for the latter.

In February 1975, I spent virtually the whole month in bed watching television. My grandmother’s TV only got one station, the VHF station Channel 12. So I watched the soaps, Hee Haw, and whatever was on CBS that month. It was undoubtedly the deepest state of melancholy I’d ever been in.

The space heater was on the ground and, of course, I had every cover I could find. One night, a blanket, handmade by Nona, fell off the bed in front of the space heater. Fortunately, the acrid smell woke me up and I was OK. My sister Leslie told me later that my mother (in NC) THAT NIGHT woke up from a dream in which I was surrounded by fire, and stayed awake for a time. Perhaps my mother woke me up, six states away. I don’t dismiss that out of hand.

Occasionally, I’d go to the library to listen to music on the record player and headphones there. I remember once listening to the Beatles’ Abbey Road. The song that ended the first side was “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)”. During the dirgelike instrumental ending, I cranked it up louder and louder. So when the instruments suddenly stopped, I really thought for a half-second that I had died.

Now and then, I’d visit my friend Carol, which is where I got cleaned up.

The janitor gig

I didn’t have a phone, so I missed at least a couple of opportunities to get a job. Eventually, though, I got a position as a janitor in Binghamton City Hall. There were 4 or 5 of us covering the building. I used to empty the wastebaskets from the desks of the police officers and also clean the holding cells, as well as wash windows, buff the floors of the common areas, and other tasks. Two of the guys started calling me Flash because I would get my work done by the end of the sixth hour of my eight-hour day, at which point I’d hide in the bathroom or a storage room and read. It wasn’t that I was so fast, it was that they were very slow.

I really liked the police captain, and we would occasionally have erudite conversations about issues of the day or my future (which seemed bleak to me, but I’m sure I didn’t say that.) The police officers, however, were a more hostile lot in general, and I often felt that they would intentionally make a mess so that I would have to pick it up.

Now there were folks who ABSOLUTELY were making a mess that I had to clean up, and they were the prisoners. These were holding cells they were in, and the detainees were usually there only one night before being arraigned in the morning. So they thought nothing of taking a lighted match and melting the paint from the walls. More than once, they would take their own bodily wastes and smear that on the walls. Perhaps they thought that they were getting back at “the system,” but all they were doing was making more work for a college dropout.

As the weather warmed, my spirits brightened somewhat. I started going out with this woman named Margaret, but it was a classic rebound situation, and that lasted about a month. At the same time, I ended up doing a play. And in the fall, I successfully returned to school at New Paltz.

It was one of the more difficult periods of my life, and I figured that if I could survive that, I could survive just about anything.

But that’s not what I really wanted to write about. I wanted to write about homeownership…