books Archives - Page 13 of 23 - Ramblin' with Roger

Dinosaurs, candy, kissing, travel

It was this red shoestring licorice we bought about two blocks from the school

Got a bunch of questions, great questions. Gracias. I’ve been thinking about them, some of them A LOT, but some are going to require longer answers than others, and I’ll have more time in the next week or two (I hope).

In the meanwhilst, here’s a few from New York Erratic:

Were you ever into fossils or dinosaurs? What is your favorite dinosaur?

Not in any kind of systematic way. I mean they were collectively cool, but I didn’t study them very thoroughly. I got frustrated that several of the ones I knew as a child have totally different names, and theories as to their origins are different. Some are now birds that were thought to have been reptiles, etc. Rather like the planets of our solar system, where I once knew how many moons each planet had, but no longer. I’ll pick T-Rex; always liked Bang A Gong [LISTEN].

Have you ever had your IQ tested? When? What was your IQ?

Yeah, at least a couple of times, but they never told us. Once in fifth or sixth grade, some of my classmates discovered our scores but no names were attached. Someone was in the 140s, and we all figured it was friend Carol (not my wife Carol). There were three or four in the 130s, which we surmised were friends Karen, Bill, and me. But we really had no idea.

Did you ice skate as a kid?

I don’t believe so. I have no recollection of it. And not as an adult except once, and it involved wooing Carol (my now-wife).

How do you memorize skits for plays? (This one is fairly urgent… 😛 )

Repetition, optimally with another person, or persons, reading the other parts. But I HATE doing long speeches, soliloquies because I have a hard time memorizing them. Unless they’re poetic, and I can make a song out of them.
***
SamuraiFrog wants to know:

At what age did you feel like you became an adult?

62. (Not entirely false.)

I suppose it was when I bought a house, and I was 47. Not sure I like this growing-up stuff.
***
Jaquandor, who is in the midst of answering MY questions to him, wants to know:

You’re given enough money for a road trip someplace in the US…not enough to fly anywhere in the world, but enough that you can pay for gas, food, and lodging someplace in this country. Where do you go?

I’d do a bunch of baseball parks by train. But if we’re talking a single location, I’ll pick Juneau, Alaska, because it’s the farthest state capital one can get to by land. If I’m limited to the continental US, then Seattle, WA, or Portland, OR, because I’ve never been to either of them, and they are in states as far from me as possible.

***
Tom the Mayor, my FantaCo colleague, asked:

What was the first comic you remember reading? And the first book?

The first comic I have no idea. It may have been Archie, or Richie Rich, or some other Harvey Comic. The first superhero comic was almost certainly DC, Legion, or maybe Justice League.

I had these Golden Books, but I don’t quite remember them individually. I also had the Golden Book Encyclopedias, and those I remember reading voraciously.

What was the first movie your parents took you to?

Not sure. Can’t remember seeing any movies with my father except for the drive-in. Maybe it was the 1960’s version of State Fair; or did I go without my mother? 101 Dalmatians? Early on, it was West Side Story.

What was your favorite candy as a kid?

It was this red shoestring licorice we bought about two blocks from the school, right across the street from friend Bill’s house.

Do you Kiss your wife and daughter in public? Did your parents kiss you in public?

Yes, and The Daughter still lets me! Not that I can recall, and I don’t know if they kissed my sisters either.
***
You can still Ask Roger Anything.

Houses and dogs and books…

In all likelihood, you will pour every dime into the purchase, so that inevitable first repair of something you did not expect, you probably can’t afford.

Let me answer the rest of the questions from New York Erratic:

What would you say is the most difficult part of buying your first house? Is there something that you wish people would have told you?

I didn’t own my first house until I was 46 when I moved into the house my bride had purchased seven years earlier.

“Everyone” said that you’re “supposed” to own a house. I was never that interested in doing so.

My parents didn’t own a home until I went away to college. So I had no models in this area. While having to move every few years could be a pain, it was less of an encumbrance than a house.

In 2000, we bought our current home AND we were landlords; I HATED that. It was enough to take care of the living abode, but going over to mow the lawn and shovel the snow off the roof – it had a flat roof – was a royal pain. We sold it in 2004, shortly after The Daughter was born.

So to the question:
1) You DON’T have to buy a house.
2) If you do, it would be helpful to be handy with tools, which I am decidedly not.
3) In all likelihood, you will pour every dime into the purchase, so that inevitable first repair of something you did not expect, you probably can’t afford.
4) This will almost inevitably lead to buyers’ remorse. “How did I not notice that the dryer has a capacity of four shirts?” (This is true in our case, BTW.)
5) If you DO buy a house, you may spend lots of money on stuff that nobody can see. I was visiting my cousin Anne at Thanksgiving, and she told of the thousands of dollars spent to avoid flooding in the basement, expenditures no visitor or future purchaser will ever see. Some of our similar improvements involved spending thousands of dollars having a hole dug in the front yard to dislodge a tree root from the plumbing, lest we have sewage in the basement.

A LOT of investment in a house is all but invisible, and that can be REALLY discouraging. If I had it to do over again, I doubt I’d buy a house at all.

The single advantage is that people seem to think you are a “grownup” when you own a home.

Have you ever owned a dog?

Yeah, I was around 10, maybe (give or take two years). We had an Alaskan husky called Lucky Stubbs; I have no idea who named him, but it wasn’t I.

Anyway, he would nip me. I would say BITE but it didn’t draw blood or anything, so nip. But then he nipped one of the daughters of our minister. THEN my father gave him to a farmer where he’d have more room to roam than our tiny city back yard.

PS: after that, I was rather wary of dogs for years.

What’s your favorite spice?

Scary Spice.

OK, I jest. Cinnamon.

Old used books or brand new never read books?

Usually new, unless they are vintage. Books are like cars in that when they’re about 20 years old, they’re just old, but at some point they become VINTAGE. I have a hymnal from 1849, and another book from that period called Verdant Green, and THOSE are, as the kids used, are COOL.

Reluctant, late BOOK REVIEW: Escape from Mr. Lemoncello’s Library

The premise of the book is that the town had lost its library, and that the 12-year-olds had gone their entire lives without ANY library.

The intrepid New York Erratic asks:

What’s the most recent fiction book you’ve read?

You ask a simple question, and I have a simple, then complicated, answer.

The book was Escape from Mr. Lemoncello’s Library by Chris Grabenstein, which became a New York Times Bestseller.

Lucky Kyle wins a spot as one of the first twelve kids invited to a gala, overnight library lock-in filled with of fun and games. But the next morning, when the lock-in is supposed to be over, the doors remain locked. Kyle and the others must follow book-related clues and unravel all sorts of secret puzzles to find the hidden escape route if they want to win Mr. Lemoncello’s most fabulous prize ever.

Which I’m not sure is quite accurate, from the book I read, but no matter.

It’s gotten good press.

I received a review copy of this book in February of 2013 and read it in a couple of weeks. Then I was trying to write that assessment of the book, but I just couldn’t. The reason was that there were elements of the book that just irritated the heck out of me, and I didn’t know if I were being overly critical, or that Young Adult fiction just wasn’t my genre. Nah, I’ve read other YA books and didn’t have that reaction.

OK, the things that bugged me:

1. The premise of the book is that the town had lost its library and that the 12-year-olds had gone their entire lives without ANY library, but then the benefactor, the toy guru, builds this beyond state-of-the-art structure. I know it’s pretending, but could not this guy had SOME temporary structure operational in the interim?

2. For young people without a library, they know astonishing detail about the Dewey Decimal system, far more than this librarian could glean off the top of my head.

3. The conflict that Kyle had at home was actually quite appealing, but once he got into the library, he wasn’t that interesting a character to me.

4. A minor point, but this was supposed to be a game designed by a toy and game guru. Yet there was a reference to the real game SORRY, with a character going back three spaces. There’s no such card in SORRY; one can go back four spaces with a 4, or one space with a 10. Took me right out of the match.

5. The relationship of one of the other 12-year-olds with a famous librarian was just too convenient for me.

6. There were rebus puzzles that I simply did not understand; it may have been rectified in the actual store printing, but what I saw confounded me.

This obligation to write this review hung over me for months, with the publisher’s representative periodically nudging me, and me trying to write it without finding a satisfactory angle that wasn’t negative.

It wasn’t that it was all bad, though a tad convoluted, but it just didn’t engage me enough, and I couldn’t tell if it were the book or me. And the review hanging over my head prevented me from reading ANY book for three months, figuring if I started reading something else, I’d NEVER write the review. Finally, I gave up.

When there is a nonfiction book for general audiences, or a music album, or a movie, or any number of other items I could be asked to review, I could do it. And if I had LOVED this book, I probably could have written something about it, too. Dissing it, though, when I didn’t feel versed enough in the genre was just not something I was comfortable with.

And, NYE, if you hadn’t forced the issue, I STILL would not have written about it. (The pain and pleasure of Ask Roger Anything.)

I am a collector, part 2

My rationale for owning that much music involves the notion that I should PLAY that music, and I do have an arcane methodology of listening to at least most of my CDs once a year.

In addition to the previously stated items:

Buttons: by which I mean those types of buttons that politicians give out. Some of them are from political races; I think the first is for a guy named Bill Burns, who was an unsuccessful candidate for mayor of Binghamton, NY, my hometown, in 1969. A lot are from various events, such as an anti-nuke rally in June 1982. Some have no political agenda at all, such as series of buttons of famous cartoonists.

I’ve been collecting for a long time, but not in any organized fashion. One button I had in high school was “Kiss Me, I’m Germ Free.” My friend Jon took a liking to it, so I lent it to him, but I never got it back. He decided to wear it on the seat of his pants, some teacher reported him to the principal, and the principal confiscated it; bummer.

Books: I was reading somewhere that people like to judge people by the types of books they see in their living rooms when they visit. If that is indeed the case, then we might be judged as largely illiterate, for there are only about a dozen books on the first floor of our house.

However, in the office on the second floor, there are built-in bookshelves that take up about half the wall space, and they are filled with tomes. To my left and right are my wife’s books teaching guides and classic literature. In front of me as I write this are my reference books for film, music, television, sports, plus my Marvel Masterworks and other comics-related items. Behind me are texts on religion, history, biography; a lot of my Beatles-related books are there. In the attic, more Beatles, TV, and comic book stuff, in bookshelves, not in boxes; this is why the lengthy repair of the attic was so frustrating – lack of access to some of my books.

I’m actually loath to consider my books a “collection,” though I suppose others might think so. I was watching CBS Sunday Morning last month, and I saw that Doris Kearns Goodwin has hundreds of books about Presidents. My ex-girlfriend Susan had several thousands of books, at least for a time. Now THOSE are collections.

Music: as I’ve noted, I started collecting records, i.e., LPs, since about 1966, maybe 1965. When I stopped collecting them in 1989 – last purchase was some Ray Charles album – I had about 1,200 of them. Since then, though, the number has grown as people, switching over to compact discs, dumped their collections on me. I dare say the collection has doubled, with a relatively small number being duplicates.

For a brief time, I was collecting cassette tapes, but I discovered soon that they wore out too quickly. Still, there is music that I only have in that form. BTW, I NEVER owned an 8-track player, so I avoided those altogether.

I got my first CDs in 1987, and I probably still get a half dozen CDs each year, for my birthday and Christmas at least. My CDs number more than 1,500 because I started putting them in new furniture my wife wanted me to get – it wasn’t MY idea – but they didn’t fit. Some of them are on the Amazon Cloud, which doesn’t FEEL like a collection at all.

My rationale for owning that much music involves the notion that I should PLAY that music, and I do have an arcane methodology of listening to at least most of my CDs once a year. I’m sure I’ve even described the process in this blog, though I know not where, but if you REALLY want to know, you can Ask Roger Anything later this month.

Book review: Peter Jennings – A Reporter’s Life

Peter Jennings was a sometimes a harsh taskmaster, but it was never about personal ego, it was about making the broadcast better, and it showed.

I used to watch ABC World News almost religiously and it was because of Peter Jennings. Now I find the program almost unwatchable, and I have to think that the late anchorman would probably feel the same way.

Of course, I was watching when he told us, on-air on April 5, 2005, that he had lung cancer. And I was a viewer when Charles Gibson announced he had died on August 7, and I felt a profound sense of sadness, grief that continues as the broadcast he put forth has turned, in large measure, into the infotainment that he could not stand.

Lynn Scher. ABC reporter contacted Peter’s widow, Kayce Freed Jennings, and suggested that the interviews conducted for the ABC News special, “Peter Jennings: Reporter” in August 2005 would make a good book. Kayce initially said no, so Lynn Scher did it anyway, just for the family and close colleagues, presented a year later. This convinced Kayce that a book WAS viable, not just to honor Peter, but to discuss journalistic values. The book, edited by Kate Darton, Kayce Jennings, and Scher, is a story told by some seven dozen colleagues, competitors, family members, friends, and newsmakers.

It relates his life, born in Toronto in 1938, the son of Canada’s Edward R. Murrow, Charles Jennings. Peter was smart, but a lazy student, dropping out of high school. But, because of his charisma and good looks, he finds himself in the family business in Canada. He joins ABC News in 1964, and in 1965, at the age of 26, becomes the anchor of the evening news, a job for which he was indisputably unqualified, especially against competition such as Chet Huntley and David Brinkley on NBC, and Walter Cronkite on CBS.

He becomes a field reporter, first in Rome, then Beirut. It was he who reported live from the Olympics in Munich about the kidnapping and killing of Israeli athletes.

In 1978, ABC News created this troika anchor chair with Frank Reynolds in Washington covering the government/politics segments, Max Robinson in Chicago on domestic news, and Jennings, now the chief foreign correspondent, dealing with international news from London. By 1983, he was the sole anchor, working out of New York City.

It is at this point that the broadcast started to get good. His exacting standards, his antipathy for the soft stories, made ABC News #1. He even eschewed the O.J. Simpson trial story until he became convinced it said something about the racial divide in the United States.

Jennings often fought for extended coverage of topics that, perhaps, people didn’t know they needed to know, about AIDS, Guantanamo, religion, racism, the Arab world, and much more. He had an insatiable curiosity, and seem to act as though everyone else did, or should.

He spent 24 hours ringing in the millennium, then was on air for over 60 hours after 9/11, including a wonderful program the Saturday after, trying to explain the event to children, which I watched too because I needed someone to explain it to me. Peter had a knack, a need to make sure the story was told well, including the context in which the events took place. He was sometimes a harsh taskmaster in this regard, virtually EVERYONE said, but it was never about personal ego, it was about making the broadcast better, and it showed.

I enjoyed the narrative, and the various remembrances, interspersed with words from Peter Jennings, made it a surprisingly interesting book to read.