Ramblin' with Roger

Please come on Sunday to an evening of beautiful music for the Advent Season, including an original composition by First Presbyterian Church music diector Victor Klimash.

The Chancel Choir will present a Vespers Service of Music for the Advent Season on Sunday, December 4, at 7:30 p.m at First Presbyterian Church Albany. The program will include A Ceremony of Carols by Benjamin Britten with a harp interlude. Soloists include soprano Deborah Rocco, alto Fiona Lewis and harpist Karlinda Caldicott. Also to be performed will be an original composition and arrangement, All my heart this night rejoices, by music director Victor Klimash. The piece was written especially for the Chancel Choir.

The church is located at the corner of State and Willett Streets in Albany, at the northeast corner of Washington Park. willett is parallel to Lark Stret. There is limited church parking, so park on the street or iin Washington Park.

I know I feel compelled to chastize the MSM myself occasionally. This article about the new American Community Survey is so unnbalanced it would be laughable, except that it’s likely to be taken seriously. Where’s the stuff about the confifdentiality that Census folks are under? Or the fact that Census doesn’t really care about the individual response but rather the collective answers? Or that private industry IS interested in your individual private information that is far more invasive? To take one question, the time to work question is used for traffic maintenance, among other things, not to use to case someone’s house for a robeery.

I believe Polite Scott provides a great public service when he disects (as it were) the medicine in comic books and television shows. Really. My friend the Hoffinator thought he did a fine analysis of the medical show House, a program that she watches (and I don’t); there are people out there who take the medicine on fictional programs seriously. Also check out his post of 11/23, learn the meaning of the prefix yocto- and see Advent comic book covers.

You’ve probably read about the public service that Paul English has provided to get you to a human as quickly as possible on those automated phone systems most of us hate so much.

Marshall Brain has stats on consumer use of certain technologies.

Sometimes, the point of the blog is to be called out, in a most complimentary manner. Or in a mock confrontational manner as Sleestak and Mr. Hembeck seem to be doing over…Hayley Mills?

I find a lot of bloggers from Singapore, such as this one. Sure one finds the bizarre, or the blatantly commercial, on blogs, but perhaps also a greater understanding of the so-called global village.

For a variety of reasons, I’ve added a couple blogs to my list:
Big Fat Blog (BFB) was founded in 2000. “My original purpose with the blog was to point out just how insanely poorly fat people are portrayed in the media,” the author writes, but it’s expanded beyond that.
GayProf is a guy who just had a major breakup and REALLY wants to get out of Texas. I had this friend, Jennifer, who spent two or three miserable years in the Lone Star State. All of the straight men she met had gun racks, and she wasn’t a gun rack kind of woman. She’s now working for a great library in a great metropolitan area.
Finally, Church of Klugman– ya gotta love a guy with so much passion for the life of actor Jack Klugman.
Also added the TV.com website, with lists of shows old and new, audio interviews and local TV listings, that my late friend Tom Hoffman e-mailed me about…in 2001. Yet another Loganesque find.

I kept in sporadic contact with him over the years, then saw him again for the first time in a long time at his 20th high school reunion in 1990. Actually, I don’t know that he actually went, but the old group of us hung out together before and after the scheduled event. Vito, who was working behind the scenes in theater, both on and off Broadway, was extremely angry because he had AIDS. I’m happy to know that by the time he died the following summer, he was more at peace. Vito was the first person I knew personally who died from the disease, but was hardly the last.

Every year at this time, a part of the AIDS quilt comes to Albany, and I always go to see it. In fact, for three years, I was a “guide” at the event, helping people who might become emotionally distraught over seeing these representations of lives cut short. Today is the last of the three-day World AIDS Day Events at the Empire State Plaza Convention Center in Albany. The Memorial Quilt will be on display today from 9am-3pm, followed by closing ceremonies at 3pm.

Grammar is important

In 1994, I was separating from a significant relationship. I needed stuff, lots of that basic household stuff- kitchen utensils, bathroom items, a few household goods. So I went to the only Wal-Mart then in the area, in something called the Crossgates Common (or Commons). I must have spent over $90. It was only after I got home on the bus that I realized that I was missing a bag of material. I immediately called the store and they confirmed that, yes, I had left a bag at the register. It was five minutes before closing, so I told the person that I’d be back the next day at a specific time. I was told the package would be in the manager’s office.

The next day, I went to said Wal-Mart, and went to the office, only to be told to wait a few minutes, which turned out to be a half hour. Then I was told that the manager would be there shortly. That turned out to be another 30 minutes. Finally, I was told that they couldn’t find the bag, and that I could just pick up the stuff again. How I wish they had said that in the first place. So I wandered through the vast store again and found most of what I had gotten before or something comparable, but it took me nearly as long as the original trip. This so annoyed me that I vowed never to go again.

Subsequently, I learned more about how Wal-Mart has interfered with their employees’ lives and whatnot. But my original complaint is that they over-promised and under-delivered. In other words, bad customer service.