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#1 hits of 1974 part 1

Barry White

There were 35 of them on the pop charts! That’s why this is merely the #1 hits of 1974 part 1.

When I think of 1974, I think of Watergate. Richard Nixon, the only US President to resign, did so in August 1974. The Oakland Athletics won their third straight World Series that year. Musically, disco was starting up.

The Way We Were – Barbra Streisand (Columbia), three weeks at #1, two weeks at #1 AC (adult contemporary), a platinum record, received the Grammy for Best Song. It’s from the 1973 movie of the same name starring Streisand and Robert Redford, filmed partly at Union College in Schenectady, NY, in the Albany metro.

Seasons In The Sun – Terry Jacks (Bell), three weeks at #1, one week at #1 AC, gold record, a singsongy meh tune

The Streak – Ray Stevens (Barnaby), three weeks at #1, #2 for two weeks CW (country), #12 AC, a gold record, a novelty song.

(You’re) Having My Baby – Paul Anka with Odia Coates (United Artists), three weeks at #1, #5 AC, gold record. I’m not fond of several songs on this list, but this is my least favorite.

Kung Fu Fighting – Carl Douglas (20th Century), two weeks at #1, #1 RB in 1975, gold record.

A song for my cat

Billy, Don’t Be A Hero – Bo Donaldson and the Heywoods (ABC), two weeks at #1, #20 AC, gold record. While I’m not fond of the original, I have used it to sing to my cat: “Midnight, don’t be a dipwad. Don’t make a fool of your life. Midnight, don’t be a dipwad. Stop causin’ me such strife.”

Annie’s Song– John Denver (RCA Victor), two weeks at #1, three weeks at #1 AC, #9 CW, gold record. I was sad when John and Annie split in the early 1980s.

The Loco-Motion – Grand Funk (Capitol), two weeks at #1, gold record. This is the second time this song went to #1. The first was Little Eva’s version in 1962.

TSOP (The Sound Of Philadelphia) – MFSB with the Three Degrees (Philadelphia International), two weeks at #1 pop and AC, #1 RB, gold record. Instrumental.

I Can Help – Billy Swan (Monument), two weeks at #1 pop and CW, #6 AC, gold record. I liked the stroll delivery. This tune was used in a ServiceStar hardware store ad.

Rock Your Baby – George McCrae (T.K.), two weeks at #1 pop and RB, #19 AC—long version.

I Honestly Love You – Olivia Newton-John (MCA), two weeks at #1—the first of her five #1 hits, #1 for three weeks AC, #6 CW. It recharted in 1977 – #49 AC. A different version, with Babyface doing backing vocals, went #18 AC in 1998

A single week at #1 pop

Bennie and the Jets – Elton John (MCA), #15 RB, platinum record. This is the only song I own on vinyl, having purchased the Goodbye Yellow Brick Road album some years later—the official music video.

The Joker – Steve Miller Band (Capitol), gold record. What is “the pompatus of love”?

Then Came You – Dionne Warwicke and the Spinners (Atlantic), #2 for two weeks RB, #3 AC, gold record. Dionne added an extra letter to her last name for a time for numerological reasons. I love this song.

Love’s Theme – Love Unlimited Orchestra (20th Century), #1 for two weeks AC, #10 RB, gold record. An instrumental written by Barry White that was ubiquitous. Here’s an extended version. There’s also a version with The Three Degrees on vocals.

Show and Tell – Al Wilson Rocky Road),#3 AC, #10 RB, gold record.

I have the other songs I own on the greatest hits CDs: Streisand, Denver, Newton-John, Miller, and Spinners. This is NOT the case for the rest of the 1974 #1s, which I’ll post soon.

The summer of my discontent

home improvement

What did I do this summer? When I was growing up, summer was often a school assignment in September. Even though some really good things took place, it was the summer of my discontent for too long.

The complicating factor of this season was that my wife took eight weeks off from work, mostly unpaid. It was not without some work texts showing up on her phone anyway, even though she had spent weeks preparing for the summer program.

She did not take off any substantial time in the summer of 2023. That was to her detriment and the detriment of our household in general. This summer, we took trips to Chautauqua and Washington, DC. Everything else seemed to fill up the space quickly. We needed to talk to our new financial advisor, which involved preparing documents beforehand.

There were some medical issues to deal with. Also, our cat Midnight died.

Fixing the abode

But mostly, doing some major work on our house was necessary. There have been long-standing issues that needed to be fixed, such as a deficit of lighting in certain areas of the house. I am not handy, which is one of the reasons I had never aspired to be a homeowner.

Most importantly, our back porch desperately needs to be replaced. This became even more problematic when we discovered that the company insuring our home and automobile was experiencing serious financial difficulty. We need a new company to take over the policy by the end of 2024, which will involve a home inspection.

We tried to get our back porch torn down two years ago and replaced with a nice deck. A guy came to our house. Our friends recommended him, for whom he had built a very nice deck. He took the measurements, wrote down the information, and said he’d get back to us by the middle of September. Nope. He didn’t call, so I called him thrice, but nothing. One of my old friends told me that this is a fairly common thing they experience. I found this astonishingly irritating.

Crossing fingers

So now we have contracted with someone else to do a much less rigorous task, just replacing the porch and the steps so that we can get someone to inspect our house and get a new insurance policy by the end of the year. It’s a pain in the buttocks, but we had been in contact with the contractor before we got the word about the house. So we’re crossing our fingers, our toes, and any other digits we have.

Meanwhile, we’re cleaning the house, not just the obvious mopping and vacuuming, but also moving stuff that had taken root. My wife and I have different philosophical vents, so we must do much of it together. Do we want to keep X? Where should we move Y? (She suggested moving something to my office, which is already cluttered, while she had previously indicated that she wants to put items in my office once it becomes less cluttered, which I find… counterintuitive.)

Who has time for other things?

The complicating factor for the home renovation is that it eats up the time I might have been doing something else. It was true when I said at a meeting early in the summer that I didn’t have time for a task because I was “busy;” that said task had suddenly become much more complicated than I originally understood. If I had known about the changes earlier in the process, I could have made it much easier, but it was a bit of a bait and switch. Being told, “We’re all busy,” was unhelpful.

The task became undoable and sent me into more than minor despair. I had so many things on my “to-do” list that I felt paralyzed and could do almost nothing. That, of course, didn’t help the process either. Anything that took longer than it “should” have irritated me; “I don’t have time for that!”

It interfered with my book review at the library because I couldn’t even finish the book until three days before the talk, and it ran short. I vamped, but it ticked me off.

This spiral manifested itself in binge eating, which made me gain weight and made me sadder. I looked at getting help online, most likely Better Help, but I was too conscious that it would eat further into my time. Is that irrational? Yes. What’s your point?

I feel like I’m working out of that melancholy and despair, but this was a pain in the buttocks. It had exhausted me.

This will be revisited.

(Right after I wrote this, I came across a 2021 cartoon by British illustrator Gemma Cornell on Facebook. I can’t find the specific link, but this 2017 item will do. )

August rambling: maximum happiness

Unplugged

Our joyless quest for maximum happiness

The Unfathomable Mystery of Biracial Americans

Not All Racial and Ethnic Groups Are Aging At National Pace

AmStat article on Risks to Federal Statistical Data and a related speech by Adriana Kugler, a governor of the Federal Reserve

The West Bank: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

Utah ban of 13 books in schools and libraries; out-bloody-rageous

Inside the Texas Crime Lab That’s Cracked Hundreds of Cold Cases

Teaching the Bible in Public Schools: Biblical and History Response

He Took His 68-Year-Old Secret to Court and Finally Confronted His Ghost

San Diego Comic-Con 2024: download a PDF copy of the free souvenir book.

Aaron Sorkin Says If He Made ‘The West Wing’ Today, People Wouldn’t Recognize “Reasonable” Republican Party

162 lies and distortions in a news conference. NPR fact-checks djt

‘Especially a Woman!’: Fox Host Furious Kamala Harris Loves to Cook

Scott Meyer, one of the founders of the Spectrum Theatre in Albany and the Third Street Cinema in Rensselaer before that, dies at 73

Gena Rowlands, a luminous leading lady of independent film, dies at 94

Baseball trailblazer Billy Bean, who dedicated his life to inclusion, dies at 60

Chi Chi Rodriguez, Hall of Fame golfer, dies at 88

Mitzi McCall, Comedian, Actress and Sitcom Writer, Dies at 93

Is English just badly pronounced French?

A Bisectional Rainbow at the SUNY Admin Building, where I used to work

A Simple Tech Issue, and Unplugged, which links to ME.

COVID

As I mentioned, COVID is not dead yet. From August 12, 2024, LA Times (paywall likely): “California’s strongest summer COVID wave in two years is still surging, fueled in part by the rise of a particularly hyperinfectious FLiRT subvariant known as KP.3.1.1.

“There are a number of possible culprits, experts say. Heat waves kept many Californians indoors, most adults are well removed from their last brush with the coronavirus, or their last vaccine dose, and changes in the virus have also widened the scope of the surge.”

There was COVID among the athletes at the Paris Olympics.

From the New York Times: “Doctors say that many people may want to wait for the updated vaccines, which have been retooled to better protect against the current dominant strains of the virus…

“An upcoming vaccine from the biotechnology company Novavax will target JN.1, a coronavirus variant that accounted for the bulk of cases in the United States this winter. The Pfizer and Moderna shots coming this fall will target KP.2, a newer offshoot of JN.1 that’s been circulating this summer. The variants responsible for the largest share of cases in the United States right now, KP.3 and KP.3.1.1, are closely related to KP.2 and JN.1.

“Health officials are expected to issue guidance on how long someone should wait between vaccines when the new shots become available… Because the variants spreading this summer are closely related to one another, a recent Covid infection will likely offer substantial protection against the most common strains circulating now.”

ITEM: A federal court finds an upstate New York eye doctor and his practice illegally fired an employee who reported a lack of COVID protections to state health officials.

Now I Know

The Weird Snack Chip Trick That May Get You Fired and A Spiteful (But Funny) Way to Deal With Telemarketers and Please Be Quiet, We Can’t Hear the Martians and What Cheaters Should Watch Out For and The eBay Fact I Can’t Verify and Why We Wake Up With Crusty Eyes and These Shoes Are Made for Talking and The Great Minnesota Goose Scandal of 2017 and There Is No “Eye” in “Art”

MUSIC

Hymne à l’amour -Edith Piaf

The Lawyer or the Conman – A Randy Rainbow Song Parody

Jungle Love – The Time

How Bizarre – OMC

Shepherds of the Nation – The Kinks

Suite from Close Encounters of the Third Kind by John Williams, with Zubin Mehta conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic

The American Ruse – MC5

Coverville 1497: The Supertramp Cover Story II

Good Vibrations – Peter Sprague featuring Leonard Patton

Untitled – R.E.M.

Monkey Gone To Heaven – Pixies

Escapade -Janet Jackson:

Cuba – Gibson Brothers

Blue – The Jayhawks

Destination Sunrise – MonaLisa Twins

Out Here On My Own – Irene Cara

Favorite Songs By Favorite Artists: Clutch

Ichi – Ptychka

Rainbow Perfection– A parody tribute to Randy Rainbow by Jonathan Jensen

Hey, what a difference a month makes

Harris/Walz

What a difference a month makes. Like a lot of people, by the time the Republican National Convention was over, I was thoroughly depressed. When Joe Biden was running, he rightly pointed out the risk to democracy if his opponent were elected. Unfortunately, the Republicans said the same thing if the Democrats won.

Even as I heard the calls for Joe Biden to step aside, I couldn’t imagine how that would work out. Kamala Harris’ polling numbers weren’t much better than Joe’s. The pundits also noted that she never got any footing in the 2020 Democratic campaign season, which was true.

Do you know who else ran not one but two dismal Presidential campaigns? Joe Biden, who dropped out of the 2008 campaign after faring poorly in Iowa. Of course, Barack Obama then picked him as his running mate.

So, I am cautiously optimistic. In retrospect, I should have KNOWN that Kamala Harris and Tim Walz would be the Presidential/Veep candidates for the Democrats. I jest. But it feels so right.

The Republicans are currently on the defensive. A disoriented djt insists that the attendance at his “rally” on Jan. 6, 2021, before the storming of the Capitol, was larger than the quarter million on August 28, 1963, when MLK Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech. He has fantasized that Joe Biden might somehow snatch back the nomination. People around him say he’s been knocked off his bearings.

Uh-uh

Harris/Walz has pivoted to We’re Not Going Back. Some have criticized it as unduly negative, but I think it’s wonderful. It’s oblique. Go back to what? The time before Roe v. Wade? Before Jan. 6? It’s a counterweight to Make America Great Again, Again.

Now, the GOP candidate is considered ‘Too Old’ by a majority. “Mental Fitness Increasingly Worry Voters.” Like Biden, he can’t pivot to become younger, and touting his alleged prowess in basic cognitive tests isn’t helping. I only wish the press had been harsher on djt earlier, because he’s been saying crazy stuff for quite a while.

Also, several pundits have noted that the “weird” labeling is particularly effective. If one attacks djt on policy, he’ll say his position was misrepresented. But if one points out his mixing up California politician Willie Brown with another black man, and you say, “That’s weird,” you don’t have to ask if he’s losing it. After Hillary Clinton used “deplorable” to describe MAGA fans, they embraced it, but weird is a different thing.

I should write about tech bro JD Vance and how Silicon Valley owns him, but nah.

DEI

When Harris got down to her Veep candidates, you knew there would be a white man. That DEI! If you’re gonna have a black South Asian woman, you gotta have a white guy. Walz seems to be the least likely candidate. Gov. Roy Cooper (NC) looks like how a president would have been portrayed in many 1980s disaster films. Josh Shapiro, governor of Pennsylvania, looks like a policy wonk. US Senator Mark Kelly (AZ) looks like, well, an astronaut. Then there were the forty-somethings, Gov. Andy Beshear (KY) and US DOT Secretary Pete Buttigieg.

MN governor Tim Walz is the least telegenic, but he has a Midwestern genuineness and a great biography, which people are attracted to. “He tossed off multiple zingers about how ‘creepy and weird as hell’ the Republican ticket. Coach Walz’s sudden rise in the Democratic Party was no accident. And according to the satirical Borowitz Report, “in an extraordinary show of support from the furry mammals, America’s cats gave a full-throated endorsement to…Walz.”

Interestingly, according to an article published in the National Library of Medicine in 2023, “We vote for the person, not the policies: a systematic review on how personality traits influence voting behaviour.” The GOP candidates and most of their proxies are not very nice people. Their “stolen valor” attack on Walz is overblown, e.g., and is funny coming from the campaign of Captain Bone Spurs.

RFK, Jr.

When Biden was still poised to be the Democratic candidate, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. seemed to have the chance to be at least a spoiler. His stock is down now, and John Oliver’s skewering on Last Week Tonight didn’t help.

Worse, from Behan Communications: “Since ‘weird’ seems to be the word of the moment, we thought we’d hop right in with some news about… [the] presidential candidate of the Comic Relief Party.

“Where to begin? With his admission that he dumped a dead bear cub in Central Park 10 years ago? Or that he once had a freezer full of roadkill meat? Or that doctors told him he has a dead worm in his brain? Or that he somehow believes, according to testimony he gave this week in an Albany, N.Y., courtroom, that an intent to move somewhere is ‘the only requirement for residency?'” He has been “disqualified from the New York ballot over his false residence claim.” It’s likely to affect other states where he used that bogus address.

CHQ: Our Greatest Challenges

local news

chq The Chautauqua Institution has a series of lectures based on a theme. For instance, The Evolution of the Modern Presidency was the theme in week 1, June 22–29.

For week 5, when my wife and I were there, the topic was Our Greatest Challenges (That We Can Actually Do Something About). All of the events were at the amphitheater.

Monday: “Scholar, cultural critic, and staff writer at The Atlantic Thomas Chatterton Williams surveys the current American conversation on race, shares how he has evolved in his conception of race and societal division, and provides his perspective on creating a space for productive conversation and bridge-building. “

He was an organizer of what many called the Harper’s Letter, “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate” in 2020. It had several prominent signees, including Noam Chomsky, Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie, Garry Kasparov, and J.K. Rowling. It attempted to address what is loosely called “cancel culture.” (The Atlantic called it A Deeply Provincial View of Free Speech.) Openness, Chatterton Williams notes, is “a necessity in a free society.”

He also spoke on racial identity. His 23 and Me genetic test notes he is 59.6 European. His father had always been defined as black, but his daughters are so fair that they could pass in Stockholm as Swedish. As long as society imposes racial and other categorizations, he believes we are limited in terms of how we can truly communicate with each other. (I don’t know what that looks like, but that’s for another time.)

A free press

Tuesday: “Margaret Sullivan, the Egan Visiting Professor at Duke University, award-winning media critic and groundbreaking journalist will… evaluate the state of local journalism; offer models for re-establishing this critical community institution; and share ways that individual and community action can create solutions.”

Like many of a certain age, she was inspired by the reporting of the Watergate scandal. She started as an intern at the Buffalo News and eventually became its first female editor-in-chief.

At the time, newspapers were wildly profitable because advertisers had few ways to target their potential customers. But competition, first from Craigslist, hurt the bottom. Eventually, Facebook, Google, and others circulated the expensive-to-create news content for free and this gutted newsrooms.

This is most unfortunate. Sullivan cited the two Buffalo News reporters who broke the story about the root causes of the 2009 plane crash near Buffalo after the national press came, reported the incident, and then moved on to the next story. That type of investigative digging costs money and time.

The decline in regional news coverage means local officials are often not held accountable, and corruption is more likely. Also, when local cultural criticism is gone, replaced by wire services, what’s lost is the fabric that ties a community together.

Good news

The good news is that some entities, such as the Daily Mississippian, which often shares stories with dailies and weeklies in the Magnolia State; ProPublica, Investigative Journalism in the Public Interest; and others, are attempting to fill the breach.

Still, Sullivan, who has also held significant roles at the New York Times and Washington Post, suggests that the audience follow and pay for local news and contribute to “free” investigative sites such as the Guardian, et al. Read about Rebuild Local News.

Most importantly, she called people to be “engaged citizens at the local level. You can make sure you vote… If everyone who still believes in a reality-based press were to pitch in, I think we can restore the foundations of local journalism.”