Daniel Van Riper Archives - Ramblin' with Roger

November rambling: Ham Sandwich

Vote for Rebecca Jade!

Can conservatives be allies against climate change?

Electronic waste is a growing problem globally.

Trump Proposes Imprisoning Journalists Who Don’t Name Sources

Political Attack Ads: Bad for You, Bad for America

Borowitz satire: Republicans Blindsided That People Who Vote Believe in Democracy

Cherokee delegate could be seated in the House of Representatives

John Aniston, ‘Days of Our Lives’ Star and Father of Jennifer Aniston, Dies at 89. I started watching DOOL, and the evil Victor, in 1990 for about three years.

KFC apologizes after its German Kristallnacht promotion

Our Kids Can’t Do the Math

The first anti-racists

The Rise of DISCMASTER

Russel Kwong, a student worker at Cornell Program on Applied Demographics, has updated New York State reference maps with names and locations of incorporated villages, cities, towns, and American Indian reservations. They are now based on 2020 Census geographies.

She Spent a Decade Writing Fake Russian History. Wikipedia Just Noticed.

How Do You Cope with Being Ghosted?

John Green: Instantly Debatable

The Hollywood Reporter’s Comedy Star of the Year: Quinta Brunson

Andy Borowitz satire: Elon Musk Accidentally Includes Himself in Latest Round of Mass Layoffs

The Oatmeal comic: Taking selfies from various angles, and I have firsthand experience with the undead

Jaquandor linkage

Now I Know: The Tale of Monkey Island and The Tiny Lie in Your Pantry and Why You Shouldn’t Piss Off The Architect and The Sugar Cereal Edition of Where’s Waldo and The Ultimate Fortune Teller? and The Original Chicken Dance? and Trick-or-Treating… But on Thanksgiving?

Abolitionists

Descendants and sponsors traveled from a dozen states to participate in the abolition symposia and inductions of three abolitionists to the National Abolition Hall of Fame and Museum in Peterboro, NY. Mary Liz Stewart and Paul Stewart nominated and presented Stephen Myers on behalf of the Underground Railroad Education Center (UREC) in Albany, NY. The UREC is located in the 19th C home of Stephen and Harriet Myers. Two descendants of the Myers joined the Stewarts on stage for the unveiling of the banner which will be installed in the Hall of Fame.

Also inducted were Rev. Robert Everett and Calvin Fairbank.

Incidentally, UREC is deactivating its Twitter account “in response to irresponsible decisions at its highest level. Tweets supporting unsubstantiated reports, allowing hate speech, and allowing accounts to be held by dangerous individuals are not acceptable.”

MUSIC

Rebecca Jade has just been nominated for Smooth Jazz Network’s 2022 “Breakout Artist of the Year”! You can vote DAILY from now until December 2nd! Vote HERE. Also, she will be joining Dave Koz and Friends for a very special 25th Anniversary Christmas tour from November 25 to December 23. Tickets HERE.

Drive My Car – Peter Sprague featuring Rebecca Jade

Music from The Story of an Unknown Actor by Alfred Schnittke

Coverville 1419: The Herman’s Hermits Cover Story II

A Big Black Lady Stops the Show – Capathia Jenkins from Fame Becomes Me, with Martin Short

This Must Be The Place – Ham Sandwich

Here’s That Rainy Day – Aubrey Logan

Man Of La Mancha – Richard Kiley and Irving Jacobson

Poet and Peasant Overture by Franz von Suppe on solo piano

The streets of Albany are weird

The surveyor says…

WAY back in 2005, during my first year blogging, I wrote a post titled The Streets of Albany Were Designed by Sadists. Maybe they’re just weird.

Then a few days ago, my friend Dan posted this chart on Facebook. He said it popped up on Capital District Urbanists, posted by Ian Benjamin. The source is Reddit. “I decided to trust it because I recognize most of these intersections as accurate.” And he is SO right.

I know some of these intersections well. The third one. I was taking a driving lesson in 1987. As directed, I was driving south on Watervliet Avenue, the up-and-down part of the K. He told me to turn left. So I turned onto Livingston Avenue (the upper part of the K), but he wanted me to have taken 3rd Street (the lower part of the K). Inexplicably, he started screaming at me. 3rd Street was a 90 left turn, while Livingston was more like 120 degrees.

The sixth one. I had a friend named Bill who lived on Madison Place, a street I didn’t even know existed until his party. My late friend Norm wrestled me into the baseline of Bill’s wall.

The eighth one. Manning Blvd., with its cousins, North Manning and South Manning, is a weird S of a street across most of the city. My wife and I lived near this intersection when we first got married.

The twelfth one. This is very close to our house. Thank goodness it has walk signals, the pattern for which I’ve managed to memorize.

The thirteenth one. If you’re on Manning, the crossing part of the A, heading south, you can be stuck in that tiny stretch between Clinton and Central for a while.

My old stomping grounds

The fifteenth one: FantaCo, where I worked from 1980 to 1988, was on 21 Central Avenue, the upper of the diverging streets, so right in the split between Central and Washington. As I wrote, “Get to Lark Street. The bulk of the traffic seems to be going at 1 o’clock, and that continues to be Route 5. But that’s not Washington Avenue; that’s Central Avenue. No, stay straight in one of the worst-designed intersections in any city.”

The nineteenth one: One of THE worst intersections for bicyclists or pedestrians.

Quoting a local historian of our acquaintance, Dan noted, “the western borders and roads leading west from Albany radiate from the center because back in the day they used a compass, but didn’t realize that magnetic north shifts every now and then. Several times in the 1600s and 1700s, surveyors went out and re-surveyed because they thought the last surveyors did it all wrong! They couldn’t move or remove a road that had been laid out decades earlier, so they laid out the next road or border ‘properly,’ which meant it wouldn’t be parallel to the older roads that were laid before the last shift of magnetic north. After the mid-1700s, surveyors developed the superior technique of laying out boundaries by the stars.

What would you change?

America Outdoors

intelligence is the ability to adapt to change. When I answered a question on Sunday Stealing recently, it was quite broadly worded. “What one event from your lifetime would you change if you could, and why?” I answered about a certain politician getting elected.

Then Dan wrote:
Let me ask you this: What event from YOUR life would you change? (Perhaps that is too intrusive and wrenching.)

I replied: “Now that is a harder question. I guess I’ll have to think on it>”

To which Dan commented:
Yes. I imagined having to answer that question for myself. Very quickly, my mind started looking for distractions.

Is anything too intrusive? I suppose so. I’ve seen items posted on social media, and I think, “Why are they posting THAT? Who wants to see THAT?” And it turns out, sometimes millions of total strangers. This is why I’ll never be a TikTok influencer, and I’m good with that. So it’s not intrusive, exactly. It’s more a modicum of good taste.

That said, I am cognizant of trying not to intrude on other people’s privacy. At least once in this blog, I wrote something about another person, and they took great offense. I made great care not to identify them by any characteristics. But they thought what I reported they had said was so wrongheaded that they stopped speaking to me. I felt terrible about it and still do, though it was close to a decade ago.

Beyond that, I thought about everything I’ve said and did or didn’t say or do. Sure there are plenty of things I regret. But in many cases, changing it would have changed the whole course of my life. If I hadn’t done X, I wouldn’t have met Y.

I’m saying no.

The great outdoors

Friend Catbird, who I’ve known for decades, wants to know:

Have you been watching “America Outdoors?” It’s on PBS and is hosted by Baratunde Thurston. I heard an interview of him on NPR (I think—or maybe it was the PBS NewsHour) about his recent book and PBS series and was intrigued.

I’m liking it! It appeals to my sense of fairness (a concept that’s been pretty scarce in our culture since its inception.

I don’t know how you feel about being outdoors … or, for that matter, what “the outdoors” means to you

But you might also enjoy this series.

No, I had not heard of it. I have tons of recorded but unwatched programming. Thank goodness JEOPARDY is off for six weeks (except reruns). It does sound intriguing.

I’m not big on the outdoors. Lions, tigers, and bears. OK, no lions and tigers, but we have had some bears even in the city of Albany in 2022. Also, bugs, and either sunburn or frostbite, both of which I have experienced.

March rambling: Believe in Freedom

Have a little heart.

Thanks for all of the birthday wishes!

Wrongful Convictions: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

Clarence Thomas and his ‘Shady Ties to Sprawling Network of Dark Money’

Ku Klux Klan on Long Island

Alice Green: We Who Believe In Freedom

Finally, Congress Passes Emmett Till Bill Making Lynching A Hate Crime

Pixar Employees Say Disney’s Statement on Commitment to LGBTQ Community Rang Hollow

Why Human Ancestry Matters: Crash Course Big History 205

North Korea Hacked Him. So He Took Down Its Internet

The Rise and Fall of a Prison Town Queen

How 25 Years of ‘Arthur’ Reflects the Legacy and Future of PBS Kids

Why do we still love The Dick Van Dyke Show? Celebrate the 60th anniversary of our favorite sitcom! by David Van Deusen

Yes, it’s settled, but don’t call the MLB lockout millionaires vs. billionaires; there were far bigger stakes and The 100 Best Baseball Books Ever Written

America’s fastest-growing sport is pickleball

The glee over the March 1 Wheel Of Fortune, er, misfortune irritated me. The contestants were harrassed, not only on social media but even by phone and in person. As host Pat Sajak said, “Have a little heart.” And as someone recently reminded me, “common knowledge” is less true now than it used to be.

*ABA – The Goodest Language Universal

How to find your lost gadget

Kelly Sedinger, fka Jaquandor, has been blogging for 20 years!

Wordle cartoon
Wordle 263 4/6

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Infinity cartoon

RIP

William Hurt (Broadcast News, The Big Chill, The Accidental Tourist, Altered States, The Incredible Hulk)

Tim Considine (My Three Sons, Spin and Marty)

Johnny Brown (Good Times, Laugh-In)

Alan Ladd Jr. (greenlit Star Wars, produced Braveheart)

Conrad Janis (Mork and Mindy, trombonist

Farrah Forke (Wings)

Sally Kellerman (Hot Lips Houlihan in MAS*H movie)

Emilio Delgado (Luis on Sesame Street)

50 years ago, 17 died when a plane crashed into an Albany home

Ukraine

Weekly Sift (March 7): Notes on the War

Fighting its War of Independence

Teaching About the Russian Invasion

Tucker Carlson wants his audience to forget about what he had said after “pivot”

KyivNotKiev

A Beautiful Resistance

Boston Globe culture columnist, Jeneé Osterheldt, created this to celebrate and center Black Joy and Black lives and the lives of other folks of color, too. Mental health resources compiled by Jeneé:

Good Grief – grief resources

Unmute – match with the right therapist for you

National Suicide Prevention Lifeline

The Boris Lawrence Henson Foundation -Mental Wellness Support Program

The Trevor Project – Supporting Transgender and Nonbinary Youth

Invitation

Friends & Foundation of APL National Library Week Luncheon
April 5, 2022, at 12pm

The Kitchen Table | 300 Delaware Ave | Albany, NY

Join us on Tuesday, April 5th to gather with friends old and new.
We will celebrate our past president, Holly McKenna, and wish her the best of luck in her next endeavors.
And we will remember our dear Friends, Paul Hacker and David Colchamiro, who passed away last year.

Now I Know

The Bad Reason It’s Not Treason

The Not So Stupid History of Dunce Caps

The Man With Dolphin Karma

The Golden Boxes of Cheerios

The Crappiest Way to Scare People?

MUSIC

Prayer for Ukraine from Clare College, Cambridge

Beyond Context by Svitlana Azarova

Telnyuk Sisters

Luminescent (new song!) and Sign Of The Times – Petula Clark

Coverville 1392: Green Day Cover Story II

Rock The Boat – Hues Corporation

The Circle of Life from The Lion King

COVID fix, professors, writing fiction

DNA/RNA

Diamonds and Rust Dan, the albanyweblog man, decided to confound me:

A Pharma Corporation called Inovid is trying to speed up production of COVID-19 vaccine. They take virus DNA, convert it to RNA, pick out the right bits of the RNA according to a computer program, then inject it into bacteria, which makes lots of virus DNA that can be used to stimulate antibodies in the human, thus making an effective vaccine. What I want to know is how do they convert the virus DNA to RNA on cue? They talk about this like it’s NBD.

As I understand it – and I REALLY DON’T –

So what’s COVID-19’s story? Is a hint in what normally binds the receptor?

Perhaps sometime in the past, a virus formed, or came to include, human DNA or RNA instructions for making an integrin, which is a protein that binds to ACE2. Integrins glue our cells to surrounding connective tissue. The viral spike masquerades as the integrin, grabbing our cells.
In other words, a viral epidemic may arise as an accident, of sorts, of biochemistry and evolution.

Vaccine!

One of the things I learned as a librarian is that sometimes I don’t understand what I’m passing along. It’s just beyond my comprehension. Check out this article, which may, or may not be useful.

Fiction

Carla, an old colleague of my wife’s, wants to know:

Roger, Have you ever thought of writing fiction; or do you write fiction?

I’ve thought to do it. But a long piece seems too hard. You have to have a consistent universe. See, e.g., this post by Jaquandor. And I haven’t loved the short pieces I’ve written.

But if I live long enough, I’ll probably write a roman a clef. Or two.

Kevin, from my home county and the Wind Sun News, wants to know:

Who was your favorite Professor at New Paltz?

Of the ones I had class with, probably Glenn McNitt in the political science department. He was very smart but easy going. I remember listening to Stevie Wonder at his house more than once. I also recall specifically hearing Simple Twist of Fate by Joan Baez from her Diamonds and Rust album. She did a wicked Dylan impression and I cracked up.

Of the ones I did not have, probably Pam Tate, the head of Innovative Studies. I knew her in part because I was on the Financial Council and some of our budget went to her program. I was the Education chair so her program was in my jurisdiction.