Ramblin' with Roger

Friday morning, I get the paper and go directly to the Life section; no story there. Then to the local section; nothing. It wouldn’t be in sports, would it? No. Finally, I take the first section, starting from the back. So it was rather amusing to discover that, on the front page, is a not small picture of me singing. Not surprisingly, my mouth is wide open.

Carol and I went out to breakfast that morning. There was a woman sitting at the next table reading the paper, apparently from the back to the front. At some point, she sees the front page, sees me, looks back at the paper, and then back at me like a bobblehead doll. She asked, and I confirmed, that I was the subject of the photo. I was hoping to have the photo, but alas, it is not to be, at least not yet.

This week, our church choir will be singing the Requiem by Anton Bruckner on Good Friday. Nothing like a good requiem to take away the blues. For me, that’s actually true. I like requiems; I’ve sung the Faure, Mozart, Rutter, probably others. Also “How Lovely Is thy Dwelling Place” from the Brahms Requiem.

I’ve been largely absent from church the last few weeks, partly due to things beyond my control, partly due to stuff in my own head. But there’s something about singing during Holy Week that gets a singer’s adrenalin rushing. Yet, it’s also exhausting, and it’s even worse for musicians who might have gigs with churches and synagogues this time of year – I know a couple of them.
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And while I’m plugging things, local-boy-makes-good Gregory Maguire, author of “Wicked”, is going to be at the main branch of the Albany Public Library Tuesday, April 24 at 7 pm. “Wicked”, based on “The Wizard of Oz”, but from the witch’s perspective, was turned into a Tony-winning Broadway musical. The talk is sponsored by the Friends of the APL. Since I’m a member of the Friends board, I’m happy to note it.

This is the last day of National Library Week, and I hadn’t mentioned it yet. I’ll get drummed out of the Librarians’ Guild if I don’t. It’s early this year, undoubtedly trying to avoid Holy Week.

I have four, count ’em, four library cards. One’s from my community library, one is an alumni card from my graduate school alma mater, one is from the New York State Library, and the fourth is from the New York Public Library in New York City. Now, given the fact that I live about 150 miles away from New York City, why do I have a card from there? Because it has cool databases. Also because I can: “A Branch Libraries’ card is free to anyone who lives, works, pays property taxes, or attends school in New York State. Others may apply, with payment of a $100 annual fee, for a nonresident library card.”

So, I’d love it if you’d answer these three questions:

1) For what, if anything, do you use the library? Borrow books, videotapes, DVDs? Access databases there? Access databases remotely? Go to events? To read quietly? To people watch?

2) Regardless of where you got it/them, what book(s) have you been reading lately? Which ones, if any, would you recommend? This can include graphic novels, and, since it’s National Poetry Month, even individual poems.

3) Regardless of the source, what books are on your reading list for the rest of the year?

But I’ve heard a lot of sermons. If I were giving a sermon last week, or maybe the week before, it would be directed to ministers and congregants and would contain these elements:

Don’t say during your Easter sermon, as you gaze over your unusually large congregation, “I expect to see you all of here NEXT week.” Most of them won’t be, and that joke won’t help. Besides you used it last year and the year before that…

Do not use the term C&Es. Ever. (C&E means Christmas and Easter.) Or any variant – I just heard Poinsettias and Lilies.

Make every attempt to make the service accessible, not just during the holidays but every week. Using responses that aren’t in the bulletin, and not even cited by the page number is a great way to make sure that the folks don’t come back. I once read Peter Gomes’ “The Good Book”, where he writes: “A regular churchgoer…said listening to the lessons in church was like eavesdropping on a conversation where the parties on whom you are listening are speaking fluent French, and you are trying to make sense of what they are saying with your badly remember French 101. You catch a few words and are intrigued, trying to follow, but after a while you lose interest, for the effort is too great and the reward too small.”

Welcome them for being there NOW. I get the impression from some church people that they believe they are BETTER than the other people. The scripture disagrees: “For ALL have sinned and come short of the glory of God.” I suspect, at some level, the regulars are a tad jealous of their more infrequent congregants.

Gomes goes into great detail about the sin of “proof-texting” the Bible to justify the sublimation of blacks, Jews, women and gays. Read the book, because my analysis will not do it justice. I will note, however, in the chapter “The Bible and Homosexuality”, his citation of Daniel Jonah Goldberg’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. “Goldberg argues that it was the cultural permission of Germany’s Christian anti-Semitism, based of course upon a reading of the Bible, that allowed the nasty work of the Holocaust to be done…by people whose attitudes were based upon centuries of Christian teaching.”

ITEM: The Homecoming Queen’s Got a Gun by Julie Brown, which I have on some Dr. Demento album. Funny? Used to be funny in a pre-Columbine country, but not anymore? Never funny? I still chuckle at “Throw down your gun and tiara and come out of the float.”

ITEM: A friend of mine, who’s Irish, referred to herself as a “mick”, but to her husband as “Italian”.

ITEM: Former Irish leader Mary Robinson was in Albany on Monday where she told this joke (again), according to a woman I met in the elevator who had attended the event. What was REALLY funny, though, is the fact that the woman in the elevator blew the punchline, and said, “Bono doesn’t think he’s God.” Now THAT was funny.

ITEM: There was a TV show about black America on TV Land a couple months ago. One (black) participant said: “I have an idea for a TV show. It would be called ‘Good Morning, Black America’. It would start at noon.” It got a big laugh from the other (black) participants. But I’ll contend that, say, Trent Lott ought not to try it.

One of the bloggers I know got a comment that said, essentially, that everyone should be able to say whatever funny thing they want, regardless of their race, gender, etc.
That is patently silly.
There are things that one can say to your tribe, whether it be your friends, family or however one defines that, which simply is NOT universal.
There was an episode of the TV show The Office in which Michael Scott was doing a Chris Rock routine (and badly), which led to everyone complaining to upper management about him as insensitive.

Some people engage in ethnic humor, or humor targeting the physically impaired or women or gays. If I object, and I’m told, “Oh, you just don’t have a sense of humor.” I reject that categorically. I like humor, but it should actually be funny.

I saw “Young Frankenstein” (“That’s Frankensteen”) when I was in high school, and literally fell out of my seat with laughter. I can watch the end of “Animal House” – from Belushi’s “Germans bomb Pearl Harbor” speech on – almost any time.
There are any number of episodes of the Dick van Dyke Show, the Mary Tyler Moore Show, Barney Miller (especially post-Fish), Taxi, and any number of well-written TV shows and movies I enjoy.

Conversely, I think that Punk’d type shows deal more in shock than in actual humor. (I always thought Punk’d was Candid Camera on steroids.) On one episode of an NFL pre-game show a season or two ago, someone stole a player’s expensive car. Surprise – he reacted with anger.

Seinfeld could be funny, but it could also be a pretty nasty show, never more so than when George seems gleeful when his fiancee dies from poisoned stationery. It was better for me when it really WAS about nothing, such as getting lost in a parking garage.

Benny Hill was just dumb, and I never understood why my father watched it.

Any statement, followed by “LOL”, is rarely funny, in my experience.

If America’s Funniest Home Videos is a reflection of what’s supposed to be humorous, then the terrorists really HAVE won.

And you don’t think that that last comment wasn’t funny, that’s just the point: it isn’t that people don’t have a sense of humor, it’s that what one person considers funny, another does not. This SHOULD be obvious, but the way the “must have a good sense of humor” mantra is bandied about, I’m not so sure.

Again, it’s so individualized. Funny Nazis? Hogan’s Heroes. Funny Hitler? The Producers. In fact, the only really funny thing I remember of Mel Brooks’ amazingly unfunny “History of the World, Part 1” was Hitler on ice skates. (The movie seemed to be full of urination jokes.)

Here’s a site with some pretty funny Photoshopped images, and a few…well, you judge.

The source of the photo above struck me as funny, for some reason.

One thing I can’t do is tell a joke. I can’t remember the punchline to any joke that I’ve heard since I was 10. Conversely, I remember all the jokes I learned when I was 10. They were all convoluted and ended with a terrible pun. Like this one:

An old man was out tuna fishing and discovered a couple porpoises in his net. They had the same marking as those he remembered from his youth. He turned them over to some biologists, and they confirmed that in fact, these animals were thousands of years old. So, the biologists took them to a secluded island, and put two nasty lions out front of the building to scare people away.
Some evil people heard about these remarkable aquatic creatures. They commandeered a boat to the island and took out dart guns to traquilize the ferocious felines that had been guarding the compound.
As they walked past the big cats, what crime were the evil folks guilty of?

(Block to expose.)
Crossing staid lions for immortal porpoises.

Gene Pitney died today at the age of 65. Damn.