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Sunday Stealing: February

walking without tripping

The first question in this iteration of Sunday Stealing is about the second month. It should be the 12th month, but we won’t get into that.

1. What are your plans for February?

There will be an Olin Family Reunion online on February 3. I’m involved with the John Olin Origin Project. We know he came across the Atlantic in the latter 17th century on an English ship, but was he English? Welsh? French? BTW, I am the spouse of John> Joseph> Joseph> Reuben> John> Earl> Orva> George> Ann> Carol.

Two Death Cafes are taking place online in February. I’ve written about them here, among other places. Although I wasn’t a part of the originating group, I’ve been recruited to run one of the break-out rooms, making sure everyone who wants to has the opportunity to speak, take notes for when the group gets back together, and basically try to keep things on track. Some college students will be joining in.

Also, Valentine’s Day will be Ash Wednesday. They coincided in 1923, 1934, and 1945, which I don’t remember, and 2018, which I do. It will happen again in 2029, but not again in the 21st Century. My hot V-Day date with my wife will be going to church.

2. Did you ever have or go to sleepovers as a kid?

No sleepovers at my house, at least for me and my friends. I have some vague notion of going with one or both of my sisters to someone else’s house when I was eight or ten, having a mad crush on a girl from the host family.

Readathon

3. Which books would you pick for a book binge?

There’s a shelf in this office of books I purchased in the past two years at the author talks at the Albany Public Library that I’d grab. I’d probably start with Roosevelt Sweeps Nation by David Pietrusza.

4. What features do you love most about your home?

It’s the built-in bookshelves in this room, the contents of which I had to reorganize.

5. How often do you try something new?

I watched this recent Vlogbrothers video by Hank Green. I’ve concluded that every day I do something new when I write this blog because I’m synthesizing my experiences. And the experiences are new, whether seeing a movie or reading a book. I only went to France last year so I’d have blog fodder. (KIDDING, Deborah!)

6. What type of sushi is your favorite?

I don’t really know sushi, and I seldom consume it. California roll, I suppose.

7. Do you prefer to relax or go on adventures during vacation?

I don’t have a great need to go somewhere in order to relax. It is not as though I like sitting on the beach, in no small part because of my vitiligo, but even before I developed it two decades ago, I never saw the attraction.

8. Which colors look best on you?

I look marvelous in everything! You should ask someone else. Blue, I guess?

9. Do you like brunch?

As opposed to not having brunch? Sure.

Er…ah…

10. Do you get stage fright?

Apparently so. I was in two different musicals at church in the past decade, and I knew my songs cold in rehearsal but forgot a line in one song and failed to make an entrance in another.

11. Which podcasts do you like at the moment?

There are approximately one zillion podcasts, and I’ve heard a few that seemed intriguing, but I haven’t the time. I can’t listen to one while doing something else. (This is true of audiobooks as well, BTW.) So I’ve been listening to three: Coverville by Brian Ibbott since 2008, Hollywood and Levine by Ken Levine since c. 2016, and AmeriNZ by Arthur since… actually, I haven’t a clue, but for a long time.

12. One thing that immediately makes your day better

When the cats are in a good mood and want to purr on my lap.

13. Which family members are you closest to?

My wife, my daughter, and my two sisters.

14. Something you practice often

Choral music, near-obsessive self-reflection, walking without tripping over the cats.

15. Are you a light sleeper or a deep sleeper?

Deep sleep, not necessarily for very long, but often enough time to have vivid dreams.

Academy Awards nominations et al.

baseball, The Daily Show, JEOPARDY!

As I’m sure I mentioned once upon a time, I pay attention to the Academy Awards nominations. In the early 1990s, I’d listen to the radio at work and jot down the major selections. Now I can wait ten minutes and find it online.

The issue of an awards snub currently seems particularly energized. Academy Award winner Whoopi Goldberg denies it happened this year but one of her The View costars says otherwise. A guy on my Facebook feed says no, and is accused of mansplaining.

THR writes: “One irony of the backlash to the Barbie snubs is that it has attempted to pit women against women. (Barbie Land would never!) One column has been excoriated for appearing to diminish the performances of the nominated actresses in defense of [Margot] Robbie.”

For me, it’s clear I need to see more performances. There are five women Best Actress in a Leading Role:

Annette Bening (Nyad)
Lily Gladstone (Killers of the Flower Moon)
Sandra Hüller (Anatomy of a Fall)
Carey Mulligan (Maestro)
Emma Stone (Poor Things)

I’ve seen only Mulligan.

Likewise, these folks were nominated for Best Directing:

Justine Triet (Anatomy of a Fall)
Martin Scorsese (Killers of the Flower Moon)
Christopher Nolan (Oppenheimer)
Yorgos Lanthimos (Poor Things)
Jonathan Glazer (The Zone of Interest)

I’ve seen only Oppy, so I can’t say of Greta Gerwig was snubbed or not.

Best pics

Ten films were selected as Best Picture nominees. The ones I’ve seen I’ve starred:

*American Fiction (Ben LeClair, Nikos Karamigios, Cord Jefferson and Jermaine Johnson, Producers)
Anatomy of a Fall (Marie-Ange Luciani and David Thion, Producers)
*Barbie (David Heyman, Margot Robbie, Tom Ackerley and Robbie Brenner, Producers)
*The Holdovers (Mark Johnson, Producer)
Killers of the Flower Moon (Dan Friedkin, Bradley Thomas, Martin Scorsese and Daniel Lupi, Producers)
*Maestro (Bradley Cooper, Steven Spielberg, Fred Berner, Amy Durning and Kristie Macosko Krieger, Producers)
*Oppenheimer (Emma Thomas, Charles Roven and Christopher Nolan, Producers)
*Past Lives (David Hinojosa, Christine Vachon and Pamela Koffler, Producers)
Poor Things (Ed Guiney, Andrew Lowe, Yorgos Lanthimos and Emma Stone, Producers)
The Zone of Interest (James Wilson, Producer)

Time to get to the theater, where these films have either shown up for the first time or have made an Oscar nom return.

I won’t be seeing these films, though. Razzie Awards: ‘Expend4bles’ Leads Nominations. ‘Exorcist: Believer’ and ‘Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey’ also nabbed multiple mentions.

MLB HOF

I’m happy Adrián Beltré, Todd Helton, and Joe Mauer were selected for the Baseball Hall of Fame. But I’m sad that, in his 9th try out of ten chances, reliever Billy Wagner came up five votes short.

Gary Sheffield: HE was snubbed, falling off the ballot after receiving 63.9% of the vote, with 75% needed.

Next year’s ballot will include Ichiro Suzuki and CC Sabathia. Both should get in on the first ballot, with Ichiro, the only MLB player I know to have his first name on the back of his jersey, a mortal lock.

I’m sad to read that Chicago Cubs Hall of Fame infielder Ryne Sandberg has been diagnosed with prostate cancer and has begun treatment. Part of it is that my father died of the disease.

NFL playoffs

Go, Detroit Lions! General Motors is delaying a shift on Sunday so that their workers can see the Lions’ NFC title game completion against the San Francisco 49ers.

Like the return of Michael Jordan to the Bulls

I’m glad Jon Stewart is back on The Daily Show, even if it’s once a week on air, plus serving as executive producer, at least through the election. TDS veterans are thrilled. I liked the top-secret intrigue in luring him back.

J!

To my surprise, I found this season’s Celebrity JEOPARDY more interesting than the previous iteration. It’s also a lot more fun than the regular game’s interminable Champions Wildcard, where they bring back players from the past three seasons. That said, I’m rooting for Martha Bath, who won back in 1972 when Art Fleming was the host and then won again a couple of years ago.

Celebrity J! fans criticized ABC for revealing the winner ahead of the final tournament: ‘Thanks for the spoiler.’ An ad for Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night program featured the winner. (If you’ve recorded it without watching it, I’M not going to provide a spoiler.) Luckily for me, I watched it fast-forwarding through the commercials.

Lydster: LS’s 0th birthday redux

Carnival

Now that my daughter is almost post-teen, I had this splendid idea to take a Mixed CD I made called LS’s 0th Birthday and post it here. I found links and wrote a narrative. Then, I searched my blog for completeness’s sake and discovered I had already written it. So, I scrapped the post.

I wish I had not dumped it because almost none of the links worked. Oh well. As I noted, “Three months before our child was born, I made a mixed CD for the child. We didn’t know whether we were having a boy or a girl, so she was called Little Soul. Or, more accurately, my wife’s friend Alison, who was in our wedding, dubbed her as such.”

So this is a repost from 14 years ago, sort of. I found new links for all the pop tunes and have a workaround for the other. And I changed some of the descriptions. I may do this again in 2035, so I don’t want any complaints.

Part the first

1. Mr. Sandman – the Chorettes. I suppose it’s an odd choice if one listens to the lyrics, but it was based on my desire for her to sleep well, which did not happen early on.
2. Lullabye (Good Night, My Angel) – Billy Joel. In the mid-1990s, there was an NY SBDC state conference in Binghamton. An a capella group from the university sang this for us, which was great and sufficiently melancholy.
3. Dreamland – Mary Chapin Carpenter. Initially from a 1992 compilation album called ‘Til Their Eyes Shine. I have on her 1999 greatest hits album, Party Doll.
4. Good Night – the Beatles. It’s the last song on the white album, a Lennon tune sung by Ringo. I often sang it to my daughter before she went to bed
5. Lullaby for Sophia – the Beverwyck String Band. A lovely tune by our friend, violinist/vocalist Britney, and a couple of her friends, which does not appear to exist on YouTube or Spotify, though the album is for sale on Amazon and here. My friend Tim jerry-rigged it so that you can hear the song:

Part the 2nd

6. Alright For Now – Tom Petty. It’s from his first solo album, Full Moon Fever.
7. Sweet and Low – Bette Midler.
8. All Through The Night – Shawn Colvin. While I remember this song exceedingly well growing up, I am fascinated that my wife never heard it until I sang it to her. The last two cuts are from a 1997 benefit album for the rain forest called Carnival, which also features Saint-Saëns’ Carnival of the Animals.
9. Common Threads – Bobby McFerrin. It is a song from the great Medicine Man album, which I gave to a half dozen people for Christmas in 1990. This song without words is a transition to the instrumental portion of the album.

Part the 3rd

The ones below may not be the exact ones from the CD except the Moonlight Sonata.

10. Brandenburg Concerto #5 Affettuoso – Bach. The English Chamber Orchestra. This is similar to the mixed CD.
11. Pachelbel Canon – the English Chamber Music Orchestra.
12. Four Seasons: Autumn, Adagio – Vivaldi.
13. Four Seasons: Winter, Largo – Vivaldi.
14. Moonlight Sonata – Beethoven. Evelyne Dubourg.
15. Fur Elise -Beethoven.

Western/Madison/Allen intersection

US Route 20

I live near Albany, NY’s Western/Madison/Allen intersection. It isn’t straightforward to explain it. On the map, the red line is US Route 20. To the west, it’s Western Avenue. Where it makes the bend, it becomes Madison Avenue, but Western Avenue continues if you follow the straight line.

A “Getting There” column in the Times Union from 2015 contained this convoluted-sounding but utterly accurate question. “When coming north off South Allen Street and taking a left onto Western Avenue (you cannot take a left onto Madison Avenue) or going straight onto North Allen, there is most often confusion in the intersection. Cars coming south on North Allen can make a left onto both Madison and Western Avenues.”

Thus, WALK lights are needed to allow pedestrians to cross the streets safely. That is unless a driver is on Madison Avenue and makes an illegal right turn onto North Allen. And by “illegal,” I mean there is both a word and a graphic sign prohibiting it. Still, cars make that turn. Recently, three vehicles in a row did so.

Allen Street is but one lane in each direction. A red light came on when a fire truck was racing south down North Allen, so cars weren’t moving. Nor could they pull over because it’s a neighborhood with a lot of street parking. The truck passed eight vehicles, got through the intersection with sirens blaring, and went on its way.

What was audacious, and one of my neighbors saw it as well, was that the fifth car in line followed the fire vehicle. Since it did NOT have a siren, it almost caused an accident at the intersection.

Yield to the ambulance!

A few weeks later – last week – an ambulance was racing east on Western. It couldn’t travel straight onto Madison because cars stopped at a traffic light. So it had to head back to the common road area, then veer back onto Madison.

Meanwhile, a vehicle is heading west at Madison’s end, which normally would have had the right of way save for the approaching ambulance. Somehow, I waved the car down – the driver possibly thought I was daft – and it stopped. The ambulance veers back onto Madison, as I expected, and the crisis is averted.

It’s a weird intersection. In 2005 (!), I wrote The Streets of Albany Were Designed by Sadists. It’s more an issue of bad surveying, but the effect is the same.

The good thing is that the intersection is a major stop for the CDTA buses: the #10 Western, the #114 (it’ll get me to the train station); the #106 (circumnavigates the city), the #111 (UAlbany), and the new express #910.

Old cities have quirky aspects.

Calendar dates and multiplying to 24

Is that February 12 or December 2?

I love multiplying to 24. I’ll get back to that.

One of the fun quirks of the calendar that folks like to glom onto are interesting patterns. The last day of the last year is an example: 12/31/23. An outsized number of couples reportedly got married, with no excuse for not remembering their anniversary.

Of course, that doesn’t quite work unless your calendar is MM/DD/YY. If you use DD/MM/YY, like most civilised places, then 31/12/23 isn’t all that. Pi day works as 03/14, but not so much as 14/03.

At the beginning of each century, we had fun repeating numbers: 01/01/01, 02/02/02, all the way to 12/12/12, and the order does not matter. This means, though, that I’ll have to wait until 1 January 2101 for the next one, when I’ll be 147.

Meanwhile, I’m noting all the wonderful dates that multiply to 24. Since multiplication is communicative – changing the order of the factor does not change the product – it doesn’t matter which way you do your calendar.

01/24 or 24/01 is January 24, and the product equals 24

02/12 or 12/02. Is that February 12 or December 2? It doesn’t matter; it multiplies to 24. 03/08 and 08/03 are March 8 and August 3, which multiplies to 24. 04/06 and 06/04 are April 6 and June 4; multiply them and get 24.

That’s seven combinations. Is there any other year that generates more combinations? Does another year generate even as many? The years ending in 12 and 48 have six such dates each.

And if you’re a YY/MM/DD person, which a librarian will tell you is quite logical in file naming, you can divide.

Unrelated, 24 is the uniform number of my favorite baseball player ever, Willie Mays.

Note perfect

I hear numbers. It’s not unlike hearing music. You have whole notes, half notes, quarter notes, eighth notes. You can add a dot and extend the value by 50%.

This article from the American Mathematical Society quotes Pythagoras: “There is geometry in the humming of the strings; there is music in the spacing of the spheres.”

AMS notes – no pun intended: ” Counting, rhythm, scales, intervals, patterns, symbols, harmonies, time signatures, overtones, tone, pitch. The notations of composers and sounds made by musicians are connected to mathematics.”