obituary Archives - Page 6 of 7 - Ramblin' with Roger

December Ramblin’

Hit me with your rhythm stick/Je t’adore, ich liebe dich
Hit me with your rhythm stick/Das ist gut, c’est fantastique

I’ve enjoyed seeing composer Steven Sondheim, lyricist for West Side Story, A Funny Thing happened on the Way to the Forum, and many, many other musicals, a couple of times on television recently, promoting his book “Finishing the Hat: Attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines, and Anecdotes.” I’ve ordered the book if only for the lyrics themselves, and what he’ll have to say about them. I enjoyed hearing about the strong tutelage of family friend Oscar Hammerstein. He has appeared on Stephen Colbert‘s program and on The Newshour on PBS. Part of the latter interview is here:
JEFFREY BROWN: And the greatest focus is on words that rhyme…He uses an old rhyming dictionary and a 1946 edition of “Roget’s Thesaurus.”
STEPHEN SONDHEIM: A rhyme draws the ear’s attention to the word. So, you don’t make the least important word in the line the rhyme word. So, you have to — and also a rhyme can take something that is not too strong and make it much stronger…
BROWN: And…he believes words that are spelled differently, but sound alike, such as rougher and suffer, engage the listener more than those spelled similarly, rougher and tougher.
SONDHEIM: I think we see words on — as if they’re on paper, sometimes when you hear them. I don’t mean it’s an absolutely conscious thing, but I’m absolutely convinced that people essentially see what they’re hearing.
BROWN: Yes. So, I’m hearing rougher and suffer rhyme…then I quickly think…
SONDHEIM: And that’s a surprise… I have got a rhyme in “Passion,” colonel, and journal. Now, you look at them on paper, they seem to have no relation to each other at all. So, when you rhyme them, it’s, ooh, you know? It’s — it — I really may be wrong about this. It’s just something that has struck me over the years.

So what lyrics immediately, and I mean IMMEDIATELY, come to mind? Hit Me with your Rhythm stick by Ian Dury and the Blockheads, a staple on my favorite radio station of the late 1970s, Q104.
Specifically:
In the wilds of Borneo And the vineyards of Bordeaux
Eskimo, Arapaho, move their body to and fro

But also the foreign language rhymes:
Hit me with your rhythm stick/Je t’adore, ich liebe dich
Hit me with your rhythm stick/Das ist gut, c’est fantastique
Here are a couple of recordings HERE with some misspellings, and an odd ending and HERE, after an ad.

Jaquandor found this nifty cartoon that explains climate change.

Eddie shares this Go Go’s video. Eddie notes that Belinda Carlisle’s memoir states their repertoire was limited to the songs on the first album in
their early touring days. This confirms my recollection that when I saw them at JB Scott’s in Albany in 1981, or late 1980, around the time of their 1st album, they played every song on the album plus one non-album B-side.

The Playing For Change Foundation’s new Song Around the World – John Lennon’s “Imagine”

The Twilight Zone Marathon is on again. The December 31 lineup has been posted at syfy.com. But the Marathon will be interrupted for two hours that evening by one of those dopey wrestling shows.

How cats lap up milk, in slow motion

Painting Like Jackson Pollock

I’m afraid I cannot condone this abuse of perfectly good coconut creme pies. Well, maybe for a good cause.

STAN LEE is on their side! Spidey an agent of the Illuminati? Say it ain’t so, Stan! Say it ain’t so! Especially now that you’re 88, as Johnny Bacardi notes.

I mourn the loss of Matt Staccone, SBDC advisor, at the age of 55.

A friend of mine came across this eBay sale of ‘Two Decades of Comics’ fanzine booklet from March 1981; “Fantastic Brian Bolland cover art featuring Brother Power The Geek, Nightshade & Indian? looking at book with characters heads flying out: Storm, Man-Thing, Sgt Rock, Cain, The Demon, Howard The Duck, Metamorpho, The Spectre etc.
Very scarce – Book comprehensively views A-Z of comic book titles with fan-art – notably: Dave Hornsby “The Creeper” art 1pg, Nik Neocleous “Deathlok” art 1pg, Kev F Sutherland “Iron Jaw” art 1pg, Steve Whitaker “Red Wolf” art 1pg, Steve Lowther “The Werewolf” art 1pg, Eagle Awards 1976-1979 Results feature 4pg.” And boy, did that cover look familiar. As it turns out, FantaCo published it as an inside cover in our Chronicles Annual. That Annual was based on that same magazine.

Five Sci-Fi Children’s Books, including Kirk and Spock are Friends.

Wikileaks QUESTION

Ann Coulter is an idiot.

A friend of mine who follows my blog asked me about whether I was planning to write about the Wikileaks issue. And I wasn’t. I thought it was because I had been feeling rather sick the past week – missed church and a concert on Sunday, and work on Monday and Tuesday – and I just wasn’t up to formulating an opinion.

Apparently, though, that’s not it. It is that – and I find this difficult to believe myself – I don’t HAVE a strong opinion. It’s this, on one hand, but on the other hand, that. I listened to the 2political podcast, but Arthur and Jason had less than conclusive positions. Likewise, Tegan of Bloggity-Blog-Blog-Blog lays out an ambivalent line.

OK, there are a few things I do know:
1) Whether they needed to be secrets or not, the system that allowed one Pfc to access so much info is desperately flawed, and the chatter about him and Wikileaks Assange sometimes seem like a distraction from that breach in the system.
2) While Assange appears to be a rather unlikeable sort, the fact that he’s been charged with a sex crime, doing something (not using a condom) that is not criminalized in most jurisdictions makes him oddly sympathetic.
3) Ann Coulter is an idiot. Specifically, she used the Pfc.’s alleged homosexuality as a reason not to repeal “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”, as though that were an even marginally logical line of reasoning.

Thank goodness for SOME opinions! But what do YOU make of this whole situation?
***
As I noted, I blew off church on Sunday morning, with the intention of resting for the afternoon concert. Carol, Lydia and I were going with our friends Carol (yes) and Bonnie. But at 2 pm, I realized that no way was I going to enjoy the music. What to do with the spare ticket for a 3 pm concert? I called my friend Mary, who was just getting home, but she agreed to go.
Mary had never met Bonnie, but they discovered in conversation that, four years ago, Mary bought the house that Bonnie’s aunt used to live in! It was one of those bizarre Smallbany things.

Obits

I never liked the Dallas Cowboys. And they had a head coach named Tom Landry who I respected, but he just seemed like a cold fish. Which was why I found Don Meredith to be my favorite Cowboys quarterback; he seemed to really annoy Landry, who finally cut him loose. He ended up on Monday Night Football for a number of years, and he was entertaining in a VERY corny sort of way. He died this week.
***
Always loved the name Ron Santo. Great third baseman with the Cubs when I was growing up. I didn’t love the Cubs, but I loved Ron Santo. Later he became an announcer, but more than that, a symbol of a man with a lot of heart and courage. Salon did a nice piece on him, and SamuraiFrog associated him with his grandfather, which was very sweet. I’m of the opinion that there are certain people like Santo and Buck O’Neil whose cumulative baseball skills and service as ambassadors to the sport qualify them as Hall of Fame worthy.

If it was 30 years ago, why do I remember it so well?

“The Beatles, lead by John Lennon, created music that touched the whole of civilization.”

Unfairly or not, I always associate John Lennon’s death with the breakup of my girlfriend the week before. It was Monday, December 1, 1980, and, unlike all of those “grownup” breakups in the movies of that time, this was painful and acrimonious. About the only cinematic aspect of it was the line from near the end of the Woody Allen movie Annie Hall, delivered by Alvy Singer (Allen): “A relationship, I think, is like a shark. You know? It has to constantly move forward or it dies. And I think what we got on our hands is a dead shark.”

So when the FOLLOWING Monday night came around, it was incumbent upon me to do whatever I could that would be contrary to what I would likely be doing with her. The choice was clear: I needed to watch Monday Night Football. It’s not as though I never watched the game, but it was usually a bit here and there. This time I was going to watch the whole damn thing.

And, if I recall correctly, it was a pretty close game between the Miami Dolphins and the New England Patriots, when announcer Howard Cosell said at about 11:15 p.m., “One of the great figures of the entire world, one of the great artists, was shot to death horribly at the Dakota Apartments, 72nd Street and Central Park West in New York City. John Lennon is dead. He was the most important member of the Beatles, and the Beatles, lead by John Lennon, created music that touched the whole of civilization. Not just people in Liverpool, where the group was born, but the people of the world.”

Here’s a snippet of the broadcast after that point.

So the first thing I do is call my good friend Karen, who had written, for our sixth-grade newsletter, a fantasy story about winning tickets to a Beatles concert, and who, that very fall, was working for his record company and promoting his and Yoko’s album, Double Fantasy. But her line was busy. I called my ex-girlfriend and told her; she was appreciative of the fact that I told her. I called Karen several times after that, but the line remained busy. I began to listen to my favorite radio station, WQBK-FM, Q104, and listen to the requests pouring in. It was either that night or the next morning that I asked for, oddly, The End by the Doors, and they played the whole 11-minute version.

Eventually reached Karen at about 1:40 a.m. When she heard my voice, she just cried for 10 minutes. We talked the next day, when I went out and bought, at lunchtime, Rock ‘n’ Roll; there wasn’t a copy of Double Fantasy to be had.

And thinking about time period STILL fills me with a surprising amount of sadness.

JEOPARDY! factoid: Calling him a Revolutionary, in 2000 Fidel Castro dedicated a statue of John on the 20th anniversary of his murder.

I was watching LENNONYC this past weekend – it’ll be repeated on my local PBS station tonight – and it was a good portrait of John’s life from 1971 until the end. Much of the info I knew, but a few bits I did not, such as Yoko going back to the studio after John died to listen to his outtakes.
***
Denise Nesbitt remembers.

November Ramblin’

This is almost as funny in Old Elizabethan as it is in contemporary English.

I’m watching this brief video Jaquandor posted, and it suddenly reminded me of an incident from when I was a teenager. Our next-door neighbors were taking down a tree on their property. I witnessed my father going over and telling the adult male, “Hey, the way you’re chopping that, the tree is going to hit your house.” The guy said to my dad, “Why don’t you mind your own business?” So, naturally, next thing you know, the tree topples into the house, with large branches penetrating the roof. I can’t help but think that if he’d just hired someone who knew what he/she was doing – or actually LISTENED to my father – he could have saved himself a lot of money and grief.

(I blame Mike Sterling for getting the song Zoot Suit Riot stuck in my head.)

You may have heard about the woman on the game show Wheel of Fortune who solved a puzzle with only one letter revealed – see HERE. But I found it even more entertaining the way I initially viewed it, out of synch.

Actor and Author Steve Martin Will Be at a SOLD OUT Event at the CBS Broadcast Center in New York City, Sunday, Dec. 5 at 11:30 a.m. I’m hoping it will be subsequently broadcast. Meanwhile, a couple of his recent musical performances, of Atheists Don’t Have No Songs and the classic King Tut.

A wonderful putdown by George Takei.

What the 2010 elections meant; a mandate, indeed.

Shared from somebody who ordered something on Amazon.

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This is almost as funny in Old Elizabethan as it is in contemporary English:
Who’s on First works, especially after the first minute of setup. Of course, it maketh no sense unless you’re familiar with the original Abbott and Costello routine; I think the radio version works better than any of the video versions I found on YouTube, such as this one.

“Neil Young” and Bruce Springsteen

Harry Nillson on the Ghost and Mrs. Muir, a 1960s sitcom. A snippet of another 1960s TV show F Troop featuring future members of the band Little Feat.

The essence of Time magazine

Roger Ebert on loneliness. And, since he has an Eleanor Rigby video, how about, for no other discernable reason, its B-side, Yellow Submarine.

Death won’t stop this Democrat
***
Beautiful and haunting music and video of a piece by Henryk Gorecki, who died this month.

A couple seasons ago, there was this nighttime soap opera called Dirty Sexy Money. It…wasn’t great, but I watched it for the cast, which included Donald Sutherland and Peter Krause. But most of all, I watched it for Jill Clayburgh (pictured), who I loved seeing in Semi-Tough, An Unmarried Woman, and Starting Over in the late 1970s, but not much after that – Ally McBeal’s mom, a couple of episodes of The Practice – before DSM. I was surprisingly sad to note her passing at the age of 66 from cancer.
***
Ken Levine did a couple of great obits this month, one for George “Sparky” Anderson, baseball’s first manager to lead teams from both the National and American leagues to World Series titles. When Sparky Anderson was 30 he looked 75. And now that he’s passed away at 76 I still think of him as 30.

Levine’s sometimes partner announcing Seattle Mariners games, Dave Niehaus: He became the second most treasured icon in Seattle, right behind Mt. Rainier… Dave had something that so few announcers have today – SHOWMANSHIP. You were not just getting play-by-play, you were being told a tale by a master storyteller. Name me a better way of spending a warm summer night sitting out on the front porch.

An Open Letter to Andrew Carnegie from Ted Sorensen about libraries. Sorensen, JFK adviser, died this fall.

Publisher of Classique magazine Albany Annette DeLavallade died suddenly this month, a loss to the community.
***
DO NOT LEAVE ALCOHOL NEAR PUMPKINS!

Here Now The News

Now foreclosures are all being frozen, to check to see which ones are legit, which is hurting the financial markets, which, in turn, is hurting my head.

A lot of news stories have been really dominated my consciousness this month. And these aside from politics, which I reckon will require its own post soon enough.

One was the safe return of the 33 Chilean miners. The day of the rescue, October 13, there was a live feed on CNN, and I watched it, off and on, for hours. And it was always comfortingly the same, well-described by the Los Angeles Times: The rescue work had adopted a mesmerizing, rhythmic routine, the thin capsule shimmying down and up the narrow shaft that had been drilled to reach the chamber. Each appearance at the surface delivered a newly rescued miner into the arms of overjoyed family members, reunions that were still moving with every repetition. It had a sort of chant or Taize quality to it.
Yet there will always be the inevitable backlash.

I actually read, in a LOC, “Oh, it was no big deal; they were perfectly safe.” To that person, I feel like throwing him down a hole for two months and see what he’d miss. Not to mention that in the first couple of weeks, the miners didn’t know if they would even survive. Here’s a video about NASA’s assistance, which should help one understand the stresses those men experienced, as well as some of the engineering requirements required for the rescue.

Another storyline involves the GLBT youths’ suicide and the mostly heartening response. I’ve watched a number of moving videos, including one of a Fort Worth, TX city councilman, which was excerpted on ABC News recently. But it was actually GayProf’s prose piece about the abuse he suffered as a kid that got to me; well, that and his link to Tim Gunn’s touching “It Gets Better” video. Interestingly, SamuraiFrog puts at least some of the blame on the current President of the United States, and I’m not sure he’s entirely wrong about that, though I “get” what Obama’s trying to do: end DADT and make the military think it was THEIR idea; maybe Jon Stewart will ask Obama about it next week. Frog also notes your everyday schmucks as well that contribute to a climate of bigotry-driven violence.

Remember that story in Hungary about the alumina-coated waters rushing through towns and into the Danube? Well, it was newsworthy in the US as long as there were fresh pictures. Now it’s yesterday’s news – unless you happen to live in other parts of the world.

What HAS been a continual big story in the US is the foreclosure stories, not so much that there are homes being foreclosed, but the fact that they’ve been foreclosed illegally (and immorally), with financial institutions failing to even look at the paperwork. Now foreclosures are all being frozen, to check to see which ones are legit, which is hurting the financial markets, which, in turn, is hurting my head.

Is yoga pagan? Yeesh.

I found this rather sad: KCET, the PBS affiliate in Los Angeles, has decided to break away from the public broadcasting network and become an independent station. Station officials intend to replace such PBS series as “Charlie Rose” and “NewsHour” with news and documentaries from Japan, Canada, and elsewhere, along with old feature films.

Deaths I failed to note: Gloria Stewart (Sept 26 at the age of 100). When she was picked, at the age of 86, to be old Rose in the movie Titanic, James Cameron said he wanted to find someone he could age to 101 easily, and who could still stand upright.

George Blanda (Sept 27 at the age of 83). It’s funny to realize that his career with the Oakland Raiders (1967-1975), which I remember quite well, was just the last third of the football Hall of Famer’s 26-year career as a quarterback and placekicker.

Norman Wisdom (Oct 4 at the age of 95). He was in one of my favorite movies, The Night They Raided Minsky’s. Here’s What is Burlesque with Britt Eklund and PERFECT GENTLEMAN with Jason Robards.

Solomon Burke (October 10 at age 70). Inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2001. Here’s Everybody Needs Somebody To Love, a live performance from 2003. And Cry To Me from the movie Dirty Dancing, with Patrick Swayze & Jennifer Grey.

Barbara Billingsly (Oct 16 at the age of 94). She was the mom on Leave It to Beaver, a show I never really embraced. But I WAS a big fan of the movie Airplane, where she talked jive; she discusses the experience here.

Tom Bosley (Oct 19 at the age of 83) I watched him as the father on Happy Days, though I may have quit it before Fonzie jumped the shark. I’m not embarrassed to admit that I also saw him on Murder, She Wrote, but slightly chastened to admit that I also viewed The Father Dowling Mysteries.

On the subject of death, Biblical scholar’s date for rapture: May 21, 2011. Anyone knowing me well probably knows that I find these predictions not only silly but antithetical to true faith.