Roger O Green

June rambling: Earthrise

all of the Tony winners

William Anders, Apollo 8 Astronaut Who Captured Iconic ‘Earthrise’ Photograph in December 1968, Dies at 90 in a plane he was flying

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration: surging CO2 levels in a year that is very likely to have the largest and most extreme series of weather events ever

EU elections: Far-right makes gains in Germany, France, Austria

Indian elections: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

Scottie Scheffler Arrest is a True Crime Documentary

Nine witnesses in the criminal cases against djt have received significant financial benefits, including large raises from his campaign, severance packages, new jobs, and a grant of shares and cash from his media company.

The War on Rule of Law

The Federalist’s Erika Andersen thinks Dolly Parton isn’t really Christian and Newmax’s Greg Kelly worries that Taylor Swift fans are practicing “idolatry”, which “is a sin.”

Beef Days

Eating an 11,000-Year-Old Fruit

How ancient Egyptians tested for pregnancy

Linkage, including Man or Bear

How Many Young and Older Adults Lived Alone

NOW I KNOW: Survey Says: Guilty and Flood For Your Right to Party? and The Problem With Flying With Marshmallows and The House Made Out of Smartphones and especially, The School With Solar Powered Salaries

Kelly’s Sunday Stealing

Opposite snakes

Show Biz

Tonys Roundtable: Rachel McAdams, Kelli O’Hara, Leslie Odom Jr., Sarah Paulson, Daniel Radcliffe, and Eddie Redmayne on Broadway Paths, Parts and Pet Peeves

All of the TONY Winners

Janis Paige, Star of ‘Silk Stockings’ and Broadway’s ‘Pajama Game,’ Dies at 101

Jerry West and the Burden of Being the Logo

An oral history of Roger Corman’s unreleased Fantastic Four movie

Pat Sajak’s Final Spin: ‘Wheel of Fortune’ Host Signs Off After Four Decades

How MAD magazine was written and drawn

SCOTUS

The Supreme Court lets CFPB funding stand. Yay! This allowed the entity to regulate Buy Now, Pay Later companies as credit card companies, create a registry of habitual corporate criminals, and fight “fine print deception”

Fix the Court published a tally of all the gifts accepted by the SCOTUS justices who served during the last 20 years. Of the $4.7 million total, more than $4 million went to Clarence Thomas.

Samuel Alito’s Contemptuous Opinion in a 2022 Christian Flag Case Flies in the Face of His Recusal Refusal

MUSIC

El amor brujo by.Manuel de Falla

Wrecking Ball – Emmylou Harris

Coverville 1490: The Lenny Kravitz Cover Story II and 1491: The Alanis Morissette Cover Story III

Mr. Tambourine Man, music composed by John Corigliano

Scenes from an Italian Restaurant – Middle Aged Dad Jam Band feat “Weird Al” Yankovic

Symphony No. 6, “Celestial Gate” by Alan Hovhaness

Born Under A Bad Sign – Peter Sprague, featuring Leonard Patton

Give Me One Reason – Tracy Chapman

Time After Time – Cyndi Lauper

Favorite Songs By Favorite Artists: Korn and Max Eider

Wide Open Spaces – The Chicks

This Land Is Your Land – Pete Seeger and Bruce Springsteen

Best Albums of 2024 (First Half)

Talk about my generations

Samuel Walker

Talk about my generations. This is a photo of Samuel Walker and his grandson, Leslie H. Green. The baby Samuel is holding is Les’ first-born, who is me. Everyone in the family called Samuel Father, including me.

Samuel was born in Virginia in 1873. I am not certain who his parents were. A hint from someone else’s tree on Ancestry suggests that his father was Robert A. Walker, born 28 April 1817 in Brookneal, Campbell County, VA, and died in 1889 in Pittsylvania County, VA. Or maybe he was the son of Richard Walker of Virginia.

Likewise, another hint suggests his mother may have been Julia Cousins, a black woman born c. 1835. She had seven children aged 25 to six, all but Sam with the surname Cousins. This likewise requires more investigation. There was also a Julia Walker associated with Sam Walker.

What is clear is that Samuel married Mary Eugenia Patterson in Pennsylvania in 1899. The couple lived with one of her sisters in 1900.

Samuel and Mary Eugenia had at least nine children. Loren, b. 1906, and Mildred, b. 1919, died in infancy.

The family moved to Binghamton by 1920. The 1930 Census listed Samuel, a janitor; Mary Eugenia; Agatha H., my grandmother, b. 1902; S. Earl (1904-1961), Stanley E, b. 1910; Vera, b. 1912; Melissa C (1914–1955); Jessie Garnett, b. 1916; Morris S, b. 1918. And Wesley (b. 1926).

Mary Eugenia died in 1944, so I don’t recall her.

Agatha’s siblings

I remember all of Grandma Green’s siblings who reached adulthood except Melissa. All of them in their 40s and 50s were terrified of this little old man in his 80s. But Wesley, who was really Leslie – the Census taker must have gotten it wrong – was actually Samuel and Mary Eugenia’s grandson, fathered by Raymond Cone. Maybe there was a bit of prevarication there. Les was NOT afraid of his grandfather, at least when I saw them together.

While McKinley Green married Agatha in 1931, they were apart as much as they were together before my father’s 18th birthday in 1944, even though Mac adopted my dad and officially took his last name before then.

So, Samuel/Father was very much a father to my dad, probably more of a benevolent one than he was to his own children. Samuel Walker died in June 1963, less than a year before my grandma Green passed away.

Sunday Stealing: most important

West Side Story

Another Sunday Stealing.

1. What is most important to you?

Holding the door open for someone. I mean that literally, sure, but I also mean it metaphorically. In the law of the conservation of energy, it “can neither be created nor destroyed – only converted from one form of energy to another.” So if the door is already open, it doesn’t require additional energy to keep it open and let others in.

2. Your best trait.

I observe. Then I do stuff to make a situation better, or more often, less bad.

3. A movie that makes you happy.

I haven’t watched it in a very long time, but Young Frankenstein (1974). “Pardon me, boy, is this the Transylvania station?”

4. Something that excites you.

Music excites me because, shockingly often, I play something that I had listened to dozens of times yet I hear something new. Then there are the bits that almost always excite me.

5. Something that worries you.

As a librarian, it’s the proliferation of false information that is becoming less discernable, from AI-generated photos to other deep fakes.

6. Actions you admire.

There are a lot. I’ll pick this fact: The Tony Awards & Carnegie Mellon University Present The 2024 Excellence In Theatre Education Award To CJay Philip Of Baltimore, daughter of my buddy Nell Stokes of Albany.

Annus mirabilis

7. What year has been your best so far?

Maybe in 2023, when I went to France and Las Vegas. Perhaps in 2019, when I quit my job; I mean, retired.

8. Who do you trust?

A few people I met in 1958, 1968, and 1971. There are others.

9. A Song from Your Childhood.

Here are the end credits for the movie West Side Story (1961). When I was a kid and heard that bit at about 4:30, it made me weep. And it still does.

10. What you wore today?

I wear essentially the same thing every day, a shirt, and pants, usually black or navy blue. A hat or cap, depending on the season. Even this past Sunday, when the choir wore T-shirts, I wore a long-sleeved T-shirt underneath to cover my arms, which has splotchiness from vitiligo.

11. A book you are currently reading

The Undertow: Scenes From A Slow Civil War by Jeff Sharlet. After I heard him and others speak in Albany one evening in November 2023, he and I had breakfast the next morning.

12. What do you want less of?

Stupid social media stuff posing as “news.” On CBS Mornings this month, one of their Talk Of The Table segments was of a woman on a social media platform ranting that she would NOT be returning her shopping cart to a collection area because she thought someone would go to her car and snatch her children. My thought: so she doesn’t bring it back. So what? Why should I care and why is CBS spending three minutes on a non-story?

Orange you wondering?

13. A question that needs to be asked.

Is the presumptive Republican candidate for President unhinged? At a rally this month in Las Vegas, he talked about being aboard a hypothetical electric-powered boat. “He posits that the battery would be so heavy that it would cause the craft to sink, and he relates his purported conversation with a knowledgeable mariner about this scenario.”

“I say, ‘What would happen if the boat sank from its weight, and you’re in the boat, and you have this tremendously powerful battery, and the battery’s now underwater, and there’s a shark that’s approximately 10 yards over there?’

“By the way, a lot of shark attacks lately, do you notice that? Lot of sharks. I watched some guys justifying it today: ‘Well they weren’t really that angry, they bit off the young lady’s leg because of the fact that they were not hungry but they misunderstood who she was.’ These people are crazy. He said, ‘There’s no problem with sharks, they just didn’t really understand a young woman swimming.’ No, really got decimated, and other people, too, a lot of shark attacks.

“So I said, ‘There’s a shark 10 yards away from the boat, 10 yards, or here. Do I get electrocuted if the boat is sinking, water goes over the battery, the boat is sinking? Do I stay on top of the boat and get electrocuted, or do I jump over by the shark and not get electrocuted?’ Because I will tell you, he didn’t know the answer.

“He said, ‘You know, nobody’s ever asked me that question.’ I said, ‘I think it’s a good question. I think there’s a lot of electric current coming through that water.’ But you know what I’d do if there was a shark or you get electrocuted? I’ll take electrocution every single time. I’m not getting near the shark. So we’re going to end that, we’re going to end it for boats, we’re going to end it for trucks.”

WHAT? And he’s told a variation on this story before.

Home

14. The best idea you’ve had this week.

I decided NOT to go on a trip next weekend. I’ll be able to see a barbershop quartet this Friday at my church, then to visit with a friend I’ve only known since 1958 on Sunday or Monday.

15. How are you creative?

I was at a choir party this week, and I apparently know the bass vocal to Good Night, Sweetheart by The Spaniels.

Orange is the new orange

people aren’t feeling it

He’s guilty, guilty, guilty! Lock him up! Orange is the new orange!

Having gotten that out of my system, why do I still believe that djt, who turns 78 today, will be President on January 20th, 2025, his conviction on 34 counts in a Manhattan courthouse notwithstanding?

It’s not just his Svengali-like pull he has over his MAGA supporters. Or his uncanny ability to try to delegitimize any transaction that doesn’t go his way. Before the 2016 election, he claimed that the system was rigged. (The League of Women Voters believes the system that year WAS rigged in favor of voter suppression.)

Of course, he made the same claim before and after the 2020 vote. Already, his followers feel Biden can’t win in 2024 unless the fix is in.

But this is de rigeur for djt. Why should the Manhattan trial be any different? He and several conservative news media members and lawmakers “on the right have spread false and misleading claims about the Manhattan case.” It bothers me greatly, as it undermines democracy, but it’s his script.

I’m more appalled by the vast majority of the Republican party that has become his sycophants, On January 7, 2021, most of them derided the attack on the Capitol as an assault on American democracy. Now, too many are, “Well, maybe it wasn’t SO bad.”

Cf. 1974/2024

I compare this with 1974, a mere half-century ago. Richard Nixon had been re-elected with a huge majority only two years earlier. Yet when it became clear that Nixon was deeply involved in Watergate, the Republican Party of Barry Goldwater and many others told RMN that it was time for him to go. The party believed more in the rule of law than they did in holding the presidency.

The Republicans of 2024, with far too few exceptions, have become apologists for a corrupt, vulgar, and potentially fascist presidency to maintain power. It’s disappointing and astonishing, but not surprising how morally bankrupt people like Nikki Haley and William Barr, both of whom served in djt’s Cabinet and have since pointed out the flaws of their former boss are nevertheless going to support him in the general election.

A Boston Globe opinion piece notes: “The fact that Trump’s running mate decision has morphed into a perverse version of his former reality show — call it ‘The Authoritarian’s Apprentice’ — is cause for alarm. If Trump wins and then becomes unable to serve for some reason (death, incapacitation, incarceration, whatever it may be), the winner of that race will ascend to the highest office in the land. It was bad enough when the criteria to hold such a consequential position was whether or not the candidate hailed from a swing state. Now, the test seems to be who can swing a sledgehammer at democracy as hard as Trump can.”

Pardon?

I was intrigued by Sen. Mitt Romney’s declaration that President Joe Biden should have pardoned djt. “Romney, who was the Republican presidential nominee in 2012, [said] that if he had been President, he would’ve pardoned Trump after a federal grand jury indicted him in connection with attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.”

“‘You may disagree with this, but had I been President Biden, when the Justice Department brought on indictments, I would have immediately pardoned him,’ Romney said. ‘Why? Well, because it makes me, President Biden, the big guy and the person I pardoned a little guy.'”

Likewise, per Newsmax, “former Democrat presidential primary candidate Rep. Dean Phillips, D-Minn., is calling on New York Democrat Gov. Kathy Hochul to pardon presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump ‘for the good of the country.’

“‘Donald Trump is a serial liar, cheater, and philanderer, a six-time declarer of corporate bankruptcy, an instigator of insurrection, and a convicted felon who thrives on portraying himself as a victim,’ Phillips wrote on X. ‘@GovKathyHochul should pardon him for the good of the country.'”

In a normal universe, I might be inclined to embrace this. In 1974 President Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon after he left the White House. If the Senate had convicted djt after his second impeachment, the pardon might be on the table. But they chose not to because he was no longer in office. Like a corroded penny, djt is back. A pardon would only “prove” to djt and his sycophants that the prosecutions were “political.”

My fear

Seven months ago, I thought Biden was vulnerable to defeat. Many people believe the United States is in a recession. It doesn’t matter that we’re not, and most people cannot define one.

A New York Times article, A ‘Laundry List’ or a ‘Feel’: Biden and Trump’s Clashing Appeals to Black Voters epitomizes the tension, and not just among that demographic. Biden “methodically ticked through more than a dozen accomplishments, executive orders, appointments, investments, and economic statistics.” djt says “African Americans are getting slaughtered.”

“Ashley Etienne, who worked on the 2020 Biden campaign… worried that the Biden campaign had yet to translate how the president’s agenda has actually improved the lives of most Black voters. ‘What is the message beyond a laundry list of accomplishments?’ If people aren’t feeling it in your lives, you can say it all day — it doesn’t penetrate.'”

“‘It’s a feel,’ said Ja’Ron Smith, one of the highest-ranking Black officials in the Trump White House, in explaining the former president’s appeal to Black voters. ‘They know what it’s like to live under a Trump economy rather than a Biden economy.'”

And there are plenty of similar articles. “Because of recency bias — a tendency to focus on recent events instead of past ones — people typically feel their current problems most sharply. And they tend to have a warmer recall of past experiences, which can lead to a sense of nostalgia. Like past presidents, Mr. Trump has enjoyed a higher approval rating of his time in office in retrospect.”

A clip from 1994 of Robert Reich is shown here as part of a larger conversation. djt is not the cause of the upheaval in the country; he is merely exploring it.

The only way Biden wins is if enough people are terrified by despotism. “To stop fascism, unite around the old guy.”

Apple Music 100 Best Albums

Express Yourself

I checked out the Apple Music 100 Best Albums list. Often, I’m fascinated by various musical rosters, but not as a gauge of their “rightness.”It’s rather interesting in terms of how I align with the gestalt of the times, or more likely, fail to. Let others kvetch how Michael Jackson’s Off The Wall belonged on the list rather than some 21st-century album I don’t recall.

31 albums were released since 2000, sending some folks into a tizzy. Whatever. I own but two of them, #8, Back To Black by Amy Winehouse (2006) and #15, 21 by Adele (2011). A handful of the others, including Arctic Monkeys and, of course, Taylor Swift, are familiar.

Of the 23 albums from the 1990s, I own five. There’s #1, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill by Lauryn Hill (1998); #9, Nevermind by Nirvana (1991); #12, OK Computer by Radiohead (1997); #31, Jagged Little Pill by Alanis Morissette (1995); and #58, (What’s The Story) Morning Glory by Oasis (1995).

The 1970s are represented by 18 albums, 17 of which I own. Only #71, Trans-Europe Express by Kraftwerk is not in my collection.

I don’t have three of the ten albums from the 1960s. Not in the collection: #54, A Love Supreme by John Coltrane (1965); #60, the eponymous The Velvet Underground and Nico (1967); and #88, I Put A Spell On You by Nina Simone (1965), though I have at least four of her albums.

I own all one of the albums from the 1950s, #25, Kind Of Blue by Miles Davis.

1980s

This leaves the 1980s, which is closest to 50/50. And I figure I’ll pick a song from each one.

#2, Thriller by Michael Jackson (1982), YES. I believe it was constitutionally mandated that we own this album in the day. Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’

#4, Purple Rain by Prince (1984), YES, and I saw the movie at the time. I Would Die 4 U

#34 It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back by Public Enemy (1989), YES. Bring The Noise

#42 Control by Janet Jackson (1986), YES, and I saw Janet live in 2018 at SPAC. What Have You Done For Me Lately

#43 Remain In Light by Talking Heads (1980), YES, and I saw the group live in 1983 at SPAC. Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On)

#48, Paul’s Boutique by the Beastie Boys (1989), NO. Shadrach

#49, The Joshua Tree by U2 (1987), YES. I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For

#50, Hounds of Love – Kate Bush (1985), NO. Or I don’t think so. When some of my friends were getting rid of their vinyl, they’d give some of it to me, and I have a vague recollection of this entering my collection. Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God) which went #3 pop on the 2022 Billboard chart.

And more

#51, Sign o’ the Times by Prince (1987), YES. Starfish and Coffee, which I watched Prince sing on The Muppet Show.

#52, Appetite for Destruction by Guns ‘N’ Roses (1987), NO. Sweet Child O’ Mine

#56, Disintegration by The Cure (1989), NO. Pictures Of You

#65, 3 Feet High and Rising by De La Soul (1989), NO. Me Myself and I

#66, The Queen Is Dead by The Smiths (1986). NO. I Know It’s Over

#69, Master Of Puppets, Metallica (1986), NO. Master Of Puppets

#70, Straight Outta Compton, N.W.A. (1988), NO. Express Yourself, which borrows heavily from Express Yourself by Charles Wright & The Watts 103rd. Street Rhythm Band (1970)

#77, Like A Prayer by Madonna (1989), YES. Express Yourself

#90, Back In Black (1980), YES. Back In Black

So that’s 9 (or 10) out of 17 in the 1980s, and 41 (or 42) out of the 100. BTW, I own some other Kate Bush, Guns ‘N’ Roses, Cure, and De La Soul albums, as well as two by Morrissey of The Smiths.