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Sunday Stealing: afraid of the dark?

cartoons

Here’s another edition of Sunday Stealing.

1. Are you afraid of the dark?

The dark increasingly disorients me. If I had been driving, I’d probably would have had to give it up.

My wife and I stayed in a timeshare in May. Even though I knew the layout of the room, going to the bathroom in the middle of the night was a bit terrifying. I retreated to my side of the bed and got my phone. I didn’t even need the flashlight, just the light from the screen. Before I left the loo, I left the light on and then closed the door. That minimal illumination did not disturb my wife, who is sensitive to being awakened by light when she sleeps.

To that end, I’m Afraid To Come Home in the Dark (1904) by Arthur Collins.

2. Can you curl your tongue?

Yes, in both directions.

3. Can you wiggle your ears?

No, but I’m not distressed by it.

4. Did you ever participate in a talent show?

I wrote about this about eight months ago. When I was in high school, there was a Red Cross training event in Manlius, NY, near Syracuse. At the end of the week, there was a talent show, and somehow, a couple of guys, one a blues guitarist, asked me to play with them. I stood on stage, people expecting me to sing. Instead, I played the comb. The whole thing was about 3 minutes. I got a standing ovation.

Is JEOPARDY a talent show?

5. Do you have any piercings or tattoos?

No. And while I’m more okay with them on other people, I’m unlikely to ever get one unless I reach 100.

Computer loyalty

6. Do you prefer Mac or PC?

It’s not a matter of preference. All of my computers at work were PCs, so that’s what I got at home. Indeed, I never had an Apple phone until 2018 after I lost my previous one. I’ve since replaced that one before I went to France in 2023. BTW, I believe there’s merit to the DOJ’s legal proceedings against Apple.

7. Do you still have your wisdom teeth?

No, I had mine taken out in my early twenties. Not incidentally, my daughter will likely need to get hers taken out this summer. As she has no dental insurance, it will be a costly procedure.

8. Do you watch cartoons?

I often see the Best Animated Shorts that were nominated for Oscars. I’ve seen the films Chicken Run; Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs 1 and 2; Coco; Fantastic Mr. Fox; Finding Nemo; Finding Dory; Frozen; Howl’s Moving Castle; The Incredibles; Inside Out; Iron Giant; Isle Of Dogs; Moana; Monsters Inc.; Persepolis; Puss In Boots: The Last Wish; Ratatouille; Shrek 1 and 2; Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse; Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse; Spirited Away; Toy Story 1-4 Up; WALL-E; Wolfwalker; and Zootopia. And those are just the ones I can remember from the last 30 years or so.

Hospitalization

9. Have you ever been hospitalized?

An uncontrollable bloody nose when I was five and a half; the car accident in June 1972 for a day and a half; and sometime in the last 15 years when I thought I was experiencing heart irregularity, but I was okay.

10. Have you had braces?

No.

11. Were you ever a Girl or Boy Scout? (Or a brownie)

No. I was a Cub Scout for about a year. I was terrible at it. But I was very fond of our den mother, Mrs. Lia, and when her son Ray, who was in my den, got married in mid-October 1976, I was pleased to escort her to her seat.

12. What is one food you refuse to eat?

I would not say “refused” as much as I’d rather not eat anchovies.

13. What’s the most expensive item of clothing that you own?

Probably a suit.

14. What’s your favorite foreign food?

Recently, there was a story on CBS News about a South Asian restaurant that prided itself in NOT serving chicken tikka masala, which I thought was cool. Still, I’ll pick that.

15. Who’s your favorite fictional character?

Quite possibly, Peter Parker.

Country Best Sellers of 1954

Wake Up, Irene

The odd nature of the Billboard charts is that, for most of the 1950s, there were three different charts each for pop, country, and rhythm and blues categories.

So there was a Country Best Sellers of 1954 roster; the category (BS) began in May 1948. But there were also ones for JukeBox (JB), starting in January 1944, and Jockeys (JY- radio play) starting in December 1949.

As it turns out, the three biggest hits for the year spent multiple weeks in each category. These are all familiar names, probably from the nights listening to WWVA in Wheeling, WV.

I Don’t Hurt Anymore – Hank Snow, the Singing Ranger, and the Rainbow Ranch Boys, b20 weeks at #1 (BS 20, JB 20, JY 18)

Slowly – Webb Pierce, 17 weeks at #1 (BS 17, JB 17, JY 15) , co-written by Pierce

More And More – Webb Pierce, 10 weeks at #1 (BS 10, BS 9, JY 8)

The rest of the #1s topped the chart in only one metric.

Bimbo – Jim Reeves, 3 weeks at #1 (JY). In this usage, the title doesn’t mean what you might think it does.

Wake Up, Irene – Hank Thompson and His Brazos Valley Boys, 2 weeks at #1 (JB)

(Oh Baby Mine) I Get So Lonely – Johnny & Jack, 2 weeks at #1 (JY). The duo was composed of Johnnie Wright (1914–2011) and Jack Anglin (1916–1963). “Johnny was married to Kitty Wells and the duo’s 25-year career together ended in 1963 when Jack was killed in a car wreck while going to Patsy Cline’s funeral.”

Even Tho – Webb Pierce, 2 weeks at #1 (JY). Webb was the lyricist.

A single week at #1

I Really Don’t Want To Know – Eddy Arnold, the Tennessee Plowboy and his guitar (JB)

One by One – Kitty Wells and Red Foley (JB)

Interestingly, there is no overlaps in terms of the #1s on the pop, country and RB charts in 1954. This would prove to be untrue when we get to 1956. You can blame Elvis Presley and the wave of musicians who charted with him.

But the seeds were planted in ’54, as Elvis made his first Sun Records recording, and Johnny Cash made his move from Sun.

These are a few of my favorite words

FACE-TEA-US-LEE

A Facebook friend wrote, “Don’t you just hate when you forget to say certain things during an argument, and then you remember… like two hours later?” I replied with a link to my post about treppenwitz, one of my favorite words. German has a lot of wonderful words, mostly very long, and I don’t tend to remember them, but that one stuck.

A nice short word, ersatz, is also from the German. I found it in a book about Beatles and post-Beatles albums. Ringo put out Goodnight Vienna in the mid-1970s. John, Paul, and George all appear on various tracks, and the author described the collection as “an ersatz Beatles album.”

When Wendy and Richard Pini concluded the original 20-issue run, they mentioned that # 19 was the penultimate issue. How did I miss this word? And it was one of my favorite words until I discovered antepenultimate, the one before the next to the last.

Prefixes I didn’t know always make me happy. Sesquicentennial, meaning the 150th anniversary, is one, but oddly, I don’t remember what entity was experiencing that milestone.

French words I tend to love, such as rendezvous and reconnaissance. Those two, in particular, seem rather Bondian.

Some words I like because they’re fun to say: Onamonapia is cool because the word fits a niche in my brain. It is “the formation or use of words such as buzz or murmur that imitate the sounds associated with the objects or actions they refer to.” I can’t spell it, though.

I enjoy the word facetiously for two reasons. It has all six vowels alphabetically, and the pronunciation is not apparent. There are words I intentionally mispronounce privately to remind me how to spell them. FACE -TEA-US-LEE. There are others, but none are coming to mind presently.

In a rut

There are words I use way too often. Suboptimal pops up when a decision is required without enough data or when the lesser of two bad choices must be made.

Since October 7, 2023, the word fraught has popped up in my mouth too often. No matter what position one takes on the Israel/Gaza conflict, the chance that someone else will misrepresent their views is exceptionally high.

But my favorite word is one I created, or so I believe. Lunaversary “is the monthly recurrence of a notable event. It is far more accurate than ‘one-month anniversary,’ and far shorter to boot.” As I noted, I sent the word to the late William Safire, the New York Times columnist of On Language, who seemed to like it.

BTW, Safire was a speechwriter in the White House of Richard Nixon. He wrote “nattering nabobs of negativism” for Spiro T. Agnew in a 1970 attack on the press. I hate the sentiment, but admittedly, I love the vocabulary.

D-Day + 80 years

National WWII Museum

Today is D-Day +80 years. Since someone asked, D-Day stands for Day-Day. “D-Day and H-Hour are used for the day and hour on which a combat attack or operation is to be initiated.” June 6, 1944, “was so iconic that it came to be used solely when referring to the beginning of Operation Overlord.”

This year, I learned about the National WWII Museum in New Orleans. The site has several articles about the anniversary.

Surprisingly, the number of the war dead from that day is still in dispute. “Of the 4,414 Allied deaths on June 6th, 2,501 were Americans and 1,913 were Allies. If the figure sounds low…, it’s probably because we’re used to seeing estimates of the total number of D-Day casualties, which includes fatalities, the wounded, and the missing.

“While casualty figures are notoriously difficult to verify… the accepted estimate is that the Allies suffered 10,000 total casualties on D-Day itself. The highest casualties occurred on Omaha Beach, where 2,000 U.S. troops were killed, wounded, or went missing; at Sword Beach and Gold Beach, where 2,000 British troops were killed, wounded, or went missing; and at Juno Beach, where 340 Canadian soldiers were killed and another 574 wounded.

“The vast majority of the men who died perished in the very first waves of the attack. The first soldiers out of the landing craft were gunned down by German artillery. Once those pillboxes were destroyed and the machine guns silenced, the later waves of troops faced far better odds.”

There was a disastrous dry run 40 days earlier, so the success of the actual invasion was remarkable.

Albany is represented

From the Albany City School District website: “The Albany Marching Falcons officially kicked off their trip to France on Tuesday morning, loading their luggage, their instruments, and themselves onto two chartered buses bound for an evening flight from JFK International Airport to Paris.

“The group – some 50 City School District of Albany students from grades 6-12” -at least two of whom I know– “will be part of France’s official commemoration of the 80th anniversary of D-Day. They were accompanied by marching arts director Brian Cady and numerous chaperones and family members.

“Take a look at a Facebook photo album of the sendoff.

“Led by director Bryan Cady, the Marching Falcons will be one of only two bands from the U.S. invited to perform on Omaha Beach in Normandy. [The other is from the University of Florida.] The Marching Falcons will also perform at D-Day memorial concerts in Falaise, Saint Laurent-sur-Mer, and Paris before heading back to Albany on June 11.”

Pass

I watched this CBS News story about the WWII museum. A 99-year-old vet told the story of his deployment to kids eight decades his junior.

In the narrative, one teen asked his father to watch the movie Saving Private Ryan. That caught my attention because I decided in 1998 that I would not see the film. I saw previews in the movie theater and a brief clip during the Oscars.

Esquire magazine ran a story in 2023: 25 Years on, Saving Private Ryan’s Opening Scene Remains Cinema’s Most Brutal Depiction of War. Steven Spielberg’s Omaha Beach landings are not for the faint of heart. And that’s the point.

I guess I’m of the faint of heart.

“The 24-minute sequence captures war in a way that we hadn’t seen before, and hasn’t been matched since. It’s the nervous shakes that possess [Tom] Hanks’ hands. The vomit. The desperate surprise of soldiers drowning in the shallows, dragged down by their gear. The indiscriminate German bullets landing with a ‘puft’ in American chests. The relentless machine gun fire and explosions. The arms blown off, the guts hanging out, all of it captured by a cameraman running alongside the actors, instructed to pan to whatever part of the horror caught his attention.”

Some extremely small part of me says that I ought to watch it. Then the “hell, no” part of me wins out. Still, I’m glad it exists.

“To watch this opening salvo is to witness this veteran’s story transposed directly onto the screen. It’s a guttural, terrifying sequence that plays like something from a horror film. As it should; so realistic was this beach assault that it was reported to have triggered PTSD in veterans.”

Rather like war itself, no matter the cause.

End the subscriptions

Audible

**From https://www.aarp.org/home-family/personal-technology/info-2023/manage-unwanted-subscriptions.html**

Periodically, I check out my bills and decide whether to end the subscriptions for certain online and physical services.

For instance, I loved reading the print version of The New Yorker magazine. The problem was that it was so packed with items that interested me that it would quickly pile up. Every month or so, I’d toss the ones more than a half-year-old. Finally, I allowed the subscription to lapse.

The IDEA of Audible really appealed to me. I’m not reading enough books. Maybe if I could LISTEN to them, it would be more efficient. The problem is that I can’t really do anything else when I’m listening to dialogue. My wife listened to parts of How To Be An Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi while washing the dishes, e.g. She also listens to discussions on NPR.

I cannot. Instead, I stop what I’m doing to absorb the information. Conversely, I can clean while listening to music, even songs with lyrics. It’s challenging to do any tedious tasks or even write blog posts without music. (At the time of my writing, I’m listening to Head Hunters by Herbie Hancock.)

Audible didn’t work for me. Besides, I have enough paper books unread in this room to keep me busy for a decade or two.

When I was working at the NY SBDC, we paid to access specific databases. Some we almost HAD to have because our usage was high. We would discontinue others, which may not have been all that expensive because they weren’t helpful enough.

Netflix

Part of the reason I have never had a Netflix streaming subscription service is that I fear that I wouldn’t have time to use it sufficiently. Now, I did have Netflix when they used to mail me DVDs to watch and then send back. I wasn’t that good with that iteration, either. As I mentioned, I received the disc for the well-regarded movie The Hurt Locker. I returned it four months later because I couldn’t find a two-hour block to watch it.

Could I have watched it in two sixty-minute chunks? Well, yes and no. I had an hour here and an hour there, but I don’t think I would have done the film justice. I try not to watch movies like I watch TV. It might take me three days to get through the 90 minutes on CBS Sunday Morning, including ads.

It’s also true that Netflix bugs me. They put out movies that I CAN’T see at the cinema. Maestro was in theaters for less than two weeks before it reverted to the platform. Rustin may have played in New York City and Los Angeles, but I never had the opportunity to see it at the cinema.

To my mind, it’s akin to the Justice Department’s complaint against Apple’s smartphone. “Apple undermines apps, products, and services that would otherwise make users less reliant on the iPhone, promote interoperability…” (Indeed, when my sister Leslie had her bicycle accident in 2018, I COULD NOT open the photos. I now have an iPhone, but I resent the necessity.)