Jaquandor Archives - Page 14 of 49

January rambling #2: Robert Mueller action figure

Code Switch podcast from NPR: Intrigue At The Census Bureau

Three Holocaust survivors open up about the rising tide of anti-semitism

What’s Behind Our Obsession With Political ‘Likability’

Here’s the Robert Mueller action figure you’ve been waiting for

Weekly Sift: The End of the Shutdown and Extortion Tactics Have No Place in American Democracy

Research suggests his election has been detrimental to many Americans’ mental health

The Religious Left Is Finding Its Voice

Code Switch podcast from NPR: Intrigue At The Census Bureau (January 24, 2019)

Many Voters Think He’s a Self-Made Man. What Happens When You Tell Them Otherwise?

Impeach him

The World Economy Runs on GPS. It Needs a Backup Plan

The economy is great for billionaires, not for working people

Weekly Sift: My Wife’s Expensive Cancer Drug

Millions of Americans Flood Into Mexico for Health Care

My life after a heart attack at 38

In Newly-Found Audio, Bayard Rustin Says Coming Out ‘Was An Absolute Necessity’

Misty Copeland, Calvin Royal III and the rarity of a black couple dancing lead roles

Former Northwestern PhD student accused of stealing his own car settles with Evanston

Civility: #drawninpowerpoint – original comics, published occasionally by Craig Froehle. Creative Commons license “Attribution-NonCommercial”

Geographical dystopiary

RPI Model Railroad Club Getting Derailed?

The Christmas watch

A Girl Is Born

A Deadly Tsunami Of Molasses In Boston’s North End (1919)

How to rescue your car from two feet of snowbank

A profile of Mr. Eric Idle

Comic book artist George Perez retires; I hired him once, for the FantaCo chronicles for the Fantastic Four

Considering the new DC Universe streaming channel

Alan Alda Just Wants to Have a Good Conversation

Fallacies of composition and division

Now I Know: 150 Years After the Civil War, They’re Still Paying the Bills and How Tesla’s Death Ray Killed a Bill and The Intentionally Bad Novel That Became a Best Seller and Harry Potter and the Uniform of Temporal Distortion and The Man Who Inched Away at History

Becoming a digital near-native. Or not

MUSIC

Shed a Little Light – The Maccabeats and Naturally 7

Feed the Birds – Richard Sherman

Loving You With My Eyes – The Starland Vocal Band

Lola – Lake Street Dive

I Want You Back – Twice

Rimsky-Korsakov’s Cariccio Espagnol with the New York Philharmonic conducted by Leonard Bernstein

Sweet Child O’ Mine – Scary Pockets

Hazy Shade of Winter – Gerard Way, featuring Ray Toro

Running Up That Hill – Candy Says & Marc Canham

Coverville: 1248: Cover Stories for the Yellow Submarine 50th and Crash Test Dummies and 1249: Covering the 2019 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Inductees

K-Chuck Radio: Our Native Brothers and Sisters

Grammy-winning soul legend James Ingram dead at age 66

Land of Confusion – Genesis

The economics of streaming is making songs shorter

U.S. Vinyl Album Sales Grew 15% in 2018, Led by the Beatles, Pink Floyd, David Bowie & Panic! at the Disco

January rambling: quotidian stupidity

How Much of the Internet Is Fake? Turns Out, a Lot of It, Actually

The Impact of Climate Change on Language Loss

NBC’s Meet the Press devotes the entire show to climate change with no time for deniers

Saving American Democracy

Are powerful women likable?

A double diagnosis — cancer while poor

NOW I AM

Chronic lying and self-contempt

Why He Reigns as King Cyrus

He Is the Damn Emergency; Post-Speech

The wall speech v. the prediction; it is not about the wall

He Was Never Vetted

Celibacy isn’t the cause of the church sex-abuse crisis; the priesthood is

Comic book artist Batton Lash, October 29, 1953 – January 12, 2019

Former Yankees Starter, Pitching Coach Mel Stottlemyre Dies at 77 – I was there at the Stadium when they retired his number

Broadway legend Carol Channing dies at 97

Bob Einstein, R.I.P.

Arthur answers my questions about blogging stuff and gay conversion therapy and current gay issues and his parents

The Crimson Permanent Assurance (Monty Python’s)

Everyday smartness is definitely no match for quotidian stupidity

On books, and joy, and hoarding, and having too many books…

I Used to Write for Sports Illustrated. Now I Deliver Packages for Amazon

After 30 years, Elisa Streeter has retired from WTEN-TV 10 in Albany

Every The Dick Van Dyke Show Episode, Ranked

Review time! with ‘Planet of the Apes Visionaries’

Lady Cop: A 70s Comic that Tried (and Failed)

Disgusting Food Museum opens

What is Glitter?

Cookie Monster in the UK, interview by Melissa Nathoo and Cookie Monster visits the Ellen show

Now I Know: The Dog With Strings Attached and Meet Kelly, The Really Smart Dolphin and The Avengers Burial Ground and Why You Can’t Make a Phone Call with a Calculator and How to Beat Traffic in Moscow

11 foot 8 bridge

Archie Comics

2018/2019

In review

The Story that Really Mattered

Bringing out the dead

fillyjonk’s year

The Worst Political Predictions

35 years ago, Isaac Asimov was asked to predict the world of 2019

Dave Barry: What made 2018 so awful? A month-by-month look at the most outrageous highlights

MUSIC

Hope Is A Dangerous Thing For A Woman Like Me To Have – But I Have It – Lana Del Rey, and other songs

K-Chuck Radio: Sail on, Captain… (Daryl Dragon)

Emerson, Lake & Palmer – Fanfare For The Common Man (complete)

Winter Melody – Donna Summer

Getting Better – MonaLisa Twins

All Along The Watchtower – Playing For Change

Loving You Today – Amy Barlow

Downtown – Saw Doctors with Petula Clark

Lawyers, Guns and Money – Warren Zevon

Don’t Turn Away – Hollie Sue

Some People, from the Broadway show Gypsy, performed by several big stars

Safety Dance – Men Without Hats

Overture to Johann Strauss’s operetta The Gypsy Baron – Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra

22 Musicals In 12 Minutes w/ Lin Manuel Miranda, Emily Blunt, and James Corden

Year Of The Cat – Al Stewart

Nature Boy: Eden Ahbez and Annie Haslam and Sun Ra

Coverville: 1246: Cover Stories for Marilyn Manson and Foo Fighters and 1247: Cover Stories for Susanna Hoffs and Sade

Dawn over the Land – Night Breeze

I Just Want to Be a Star – Nunsense

Always Look on the Bright Side of Life – Sonny Vande Putte

Meow Mix – cats at a rave

Baby Shark went viral and hit the Billboard Hot 100

How one designer created the “look” of jazz

The End of Owning Music: How CDs and Downloads Died

Review time! with ‘Crossroad Blues’

2018 in review: learn to navigate

What kept ’em goin’ was a great belief
That they had to learn to navigate
‘Cause the human race was special freight

This is that thing that Jaquandor does on December 31, but I do on January 1.

Did you keep your New Year’s resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
I saw this article that said that talking about making changes will make them less likely to happen. Why you shouldn’t share your goals – “Other people’s taking notice of one’s identity-relevant intentions apparently engenders a premature sense of completeness regarding the identity goal.”

Did anyone close to you give birth?
No

Did you attend any weddings?
Don’t think so

Did anyone close to you die?
Yeah, and I listed four of them a couple months ago. Since then, Katy Fletcher, who, among other things, was the primary cook of the Black History Month at church with her excellent Caribbean cuisine, died this fall.

What countries did you visit?
None, but my passport is in order, just in case

What would you like to have in 2019 that you lacked in 2018?
Less despair

What was your biggest achievement of the year?
Help shepherd the merger between the Friends of the Albany Public Library and the Albany Public Library Foundation

What was your biggest failure?
Finding equilibrium

What was the best thing you bought?
A round-trip train ticket to see my friend Deborah

Whose behavior merited celebration?
A lot of people, actually, some of whom I mentioned on Thanksgiving, plus:
The comedians, including John Oliver, Seth Meyers, Samantha Bee, Trevor Noah, the folks at Saturday Night Live
Those who helped the people dealing with the weather disasters
Those who helped the people dealing with the human-made disasters

Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed?
Supreme Court justice Brett “Bart” Kavanaugh
The federal government, generally
The GOP, generally, particularly in Wisconsin, Michigan, North Carolina, Georgia, and the ones in DC: “As John Nichols put it… in The Nation, the Republican Party is no longer a political ‘party’ per se, but a mere vehicle, a conspiracy for seizing and holding power on behalf of a tiny sliver of the wealthiest among us.”
The White House liars-in-chief, such as Kellyanne Conway and Sarah Huckabee Sanders
What’s his face and his family

Where did most of your money go?
The house, though we had no big projects

What did you get really excited about?
The idea of retiring someday

Compared to this time last year, are you happier or sadder?
Sadder, for sure

Thinner or fatter?
About the same

Richer or poorer?
Richer, marginally

What do you wish you’d done more of?
Sleeping, writing, thinking

What do you wish you’d done less of?
Brooding

How did you spend Christmas?
Christmas Eve means singing at church, so that. Eventually, we go to the in-laws

Did you fall in love in 2018?
Sure

How many one-night stands?
Jaquandor: “Now, that’s not the kind of question a gentleman answers!” (Another stock response)

What was your favorite TV program?
CBS Sunday Morning, CBS This Morning Saturday, JEOPARDY!, Grey’s Anatomy

Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year?
Don’t know if hate is the right word. Enraged with, perhaps. But oh yeah. I certainly loathe the behavior of a whole lot of people; see above

What was the best book you read?
A Lucille Ball book I haven’t written about yet

What was your greatest musical discovery?
Some CDs I bought on Amazon years ago have extra songs I had never heard before if I listen to them online

What did you want and get?
The new Hess truck – surprise!

What did you want and not get?
Clarification of what I’m supposed to do about Medicare if I’m not retiring yet

What were your favorite films of this year?
In reverse chronological order: BlacKkKlansman, Leave No Trace, RBG, Black Panther, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

What did you do on your birthday?
I took off the day from work and…that was nine months ago!

How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2018?
Fashion is stupid

What kept you sane?
I continue to argue the premise of the question

Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?
Robert Mueller – he be stylin’

What political issue stirred you the most?
The way we’ve possibly eroded our environment permanently

Who was the best new person you met?
Some new church members

Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2018
The trouble with normal is it always gets worse (Same as last year)

Quote a song lyric that sums up your year
Lead Belly: “We’re in the Same Boat, Brother”
Lyrics:
Oh the boat rolled on through storm and grief
Past many a rock and many a reef
What kept ’em goin’ was a great belief
That they had to learn to navigate
‘Cause the human race was special freight
If we don’t want to be in Jonah’s shoes
We’d better be mates on this here cruise

Picture from Skin Horse by Shaenon K. Garrity & Jeffrey C. Wells is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at http://www.skin-horse.com

Book review: The Chilling Killing Wind

John Lazarus isn’t expecting “closure” with Roy Edgar Chalmers’ death.

There’s this guy in western New York named Kelly Sedinger who has been blogging regularly since early 2002. I have no real idea how I came across Byzantium’s Shores, but it would have had to have been after I started my daily prattling in 2005. For most of the time, he used the nom de blog Jaquandor, but much less so now.

Besides his now-tempered following of the Buffalo Bills football team, his exquisite knowledge of classical music, and his odd attraction to a pie in the face, Kelly’s driving force has always been the power of the written word.

In 2014, he not only wrote but published Stardancer, which he sent to me. I enjoyed it, but have not yet gotten to the other books in the Song of Forgotten Stars Trilogy.

Yet, when I read the prologue to his supernatural thriller, The Chilling Killing Wind, I was compelled to immediately buy the book, a Christmas present from me to me.

It is about a guy named John Lazarus, who had attended the executions of two of the murderers of his wife Michelle and was about to attend the third, and final, one, that of Roy Edgar Chalmers.

Lazarus is a professor and an ex-cop, now living with his fiancee, Ellen, still negotiating the relationship vis a vis the memory of Michelle.

John isn’t expecting “closure” with Chalmers’ death, any more than he felt it after the executions of Luther Mayhew and Raoul Serrano before. He doesn’t know how little closure until a string of murders rock the small Michigan town where he lives.

I received the book on a Friday and finished it by Tuesday. It was a compelling read. I don’t read murder mysteries, but my daughter has begun watching certain TV procedurals, and without getting too much into it, he seemed to follow the form without being formulaic.

Kelly seemed to think his YA sci-fi was something my daughter would enjoy, and she might if she gave it a chance. But I gather she’ll almost certainly enjoy The Chilling Killing Wind. There are minor issues I could note, including at least one typo, but I was glad to have read this.

I’m not sure where Kelly goes from here, though. He has proposed a John Lazarus series, and I’ll be curious how that will shake out.