Ramblin' with Roger

So what did I think of the finales of Everybody Hates Chris, Scrubs, My Name Is Earl, The Office, and Gray’s Anatomy? I don’t know; I haven’t seen ANY of them yet, or indeed the penultimate episodes of ANY of those series (three back with Gray). Also, as is often the case, I watch the series finale of a show I used to watch, but then stopped. Previously, that’s included Friends and Seinfeld; this season, it was West Wing. Haven’t seen that either.

The only finale we DID watch was Gilmore Girls. I was disappointed. But then I read Tosy and I’ve totally changed my mind. Really.

I hadn’t read many of the bloggers until recently. I hadn’t seen Eddie’s review of my recent compilation or Lefty lifting heavy books or even Fred dissecting the Pen 15 club back on May 11.

I did answer Lefty’s question about boycotting musical artists. I tend to operate opposite of that. The Dixie Chicks are putting out a new album this month, and I’m most inclined to get it because of their troubles.

(Although now that I think of it, there IS one artist I did boycott, or more specifically the product she endorsed: Anita Bryant and orange juice, until her contract ran out.)

There’s a special on Springsteen and the Seeger Sessions on CMT that I’ve missed twice already, and will record tomorrow (Thursday) at 6 pm.

I almost forgot Pinkersterfest on this Saturday past (!) until my wife reminded me; it’s a VERY BIG DEAL around here. Maybe it was the gloomy forecast, but actually Saturday was the one day it DIDN’T rain – at least in daylight hours – in about a week.

One example: the death of Floyd Patterson. He was the first boxer I could identify by name. Additionally, this resonated for me because he was living in my old college town of New Paltz for years and because, like my father, he died from prostate cancer.
***
Someone asked me one day last week what I thought of the NSA domestic spying. Ever eloquent, I said, “Huh?” Then it was explained to me. Truth is, it didn’t surprise me all that much. Nor did it surprise me that 2/3s of the American people, according to some poll, thought domestic spying was a good idea. I figure they just didn’t understand the implications, that the spying could be on them.
But then, there was a follow-up question in which 2/3s of Americans wouldn’t mind if their own phone calls were intercepted.
ARE THEY CRAZY?
Do they really want other people to know about that a cyst they had that was found to be malignant, or the bill they didn’t pay because they were a little short? (I was going to write something about a married couple having bicoastal phone “relations”, but didn’t want to offend anyone’s sensibilities.)

Someone at one of the conferences told me that Americans were sheep. The context was Iraq. I was willing to play devil’s advocate about people being fooled by misleading/false information from their government. But this one? Bah! Or Baa.

Most fortunately, my father was, among many of his other skills, an amazingly good designer of weddings and other celebrations. So when Carol and I went down to Charlotte in April 1999, Carol and Dad dealt with color schemes – PLEASE don’t ask me what the color scheme of the wedding was – and decorations for the reception, while I concentrated on what I wanted in the service itself: the Scripture, the music, etc., with Carol’s input.

The wedding was a careful negotiation: one of my new brothers-in-law, John, as one of my groomsmen (hmm – his birthday was yesterday, but he died a couple years back) and I got to use my then eight-year-old niece Alex as the flower girl. Stuff like that.

The event turned out to be bigger than either of us had originally thought, and as I mentioned last year, at a church we longer attend, but all of that is temporal.

Baseball figures into our anniversary this year. I’m going to the Hall of Fame game in Cooperstown between Cincinnati and Pittsburgh…with my father-in-law. Then he, his wife, and my wife will rendezvous somewhere. She’s been a good sport about this.

My father was the disciplinarian when I was growing up. My mom actually tried to spank me once, but it was a half-hearted effort.

She had a lot of guilt about being a working mom; the correct verbiage now is “a mother working outside the home”, but we’re talking the late 1950s and the 1960s. We would go to her mother’s house at lunch and after school. My grandmother was a strange, paranoid woman who told us about bogeymen, “bad people” and the like in such terrifying detail that both sister Leslie and I tended to believe her, whereas baby sister Marcia saw through the BS.

So, my mom was upset that her children’s minds were being filled with so much rubbish, even a decade after the fact. We tried to assure her not worry, that we were OK, that none of us ended up as mass murders or committed other felonies.

We could really tease my mom. She was not a great cook, and in fact, my father was much better in the kitchen. But she tried. Once, she made something from a recipe she found. It had weird green specks in it that we thought were awful. There was a detergent at the time called Oxydol, which advertised having “green bleaching crystals”, and for years we made reference to this disastrous meal with “green bleaching crystals.”

I think one of my favorite times with my mother was when I was 12 and Leslie was 11. My father smoked at the time, but my mother never has. So we sat at the kitchen table and we all lit up. Then we all coughed our brains out. Neither Leslie nor I ever were smokers.

If some of it seems a tad cryptic, well, there’s a reason for that.

One of the things that makes transition easier is information. If there had been a real opportunity to ask questions, I would have queried why, when six units were moving to this space, why five of them had been attending meetings for a month, while the sixth was not even informed?

And I’m sure the building people have forbade us from having food at our desks, but it certainly can’t be true that someone has been assigned to check to make sure we don’t have hot plates at our desks, can it? That would suggest that we need to be treated like children, rather than the professionals we are, so I’m sure that’s just an ugly rumor.

And speaking of rumors, I heard that someone has forbidden any signage for individual workspaces, i.e., name plates. That can’t be right. Over 200 people from a half dozen programs going to a place with a standard look and feel would certainly require some differentiation. I have this old name plate from when I was a teller for about a month nearly 30 years ago just waiting to be dusted off.

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20001117/REVIEWS/11170306/1023 Sammy