March Ramblin'

Anyone out there on Posterous? I had never heard of it until very recently. I posted something the other day via e-mail, because I could. One can also post a variety of other ways. I’m not seeing the need, but then again, I didn’t get Twitter or Facebook initially either.
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It’s not coming out until May 25, but I’m looking forward to Interpretations: The British Rock Songbook by Bettye LaVette. This great singer who was in the Albany area recently – no, didn’t get a chance to see her – is covering a bunch of songs, many that I know well. It has a definite Beatles tinge.
1. The Word (Beatles)
2. No Time To Live (Traffic)
3. Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood (Animals)
4. All My Love (Led Zeppelin)
5. Isn’t It A Pity (George Harrison)
6. Wish You Were Here (Pink Floyd)
7. It Don’t Come Easy (Ringo Starr)
8. Maybe I’m Amazed (Paul McCartney)
9. Salt Of The Earth (Rolling Stones)
10. Nights In White Satin (Moody Blues)
11. Why Does Love Got To Be So Sad (Derek & the Dominoes)
12. Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me (Elton John)
13. Love Reign O’er Me (The Who – live from the Kennedy Center Honors)

That last song, sung to Pete Townsend and Roger Daltry, seemed to have them in tears, especially Townsend.

Check out Bettye’s website for her performances with Paul & Ringo, with Jon Bon Jovi, and her stellar Who cover.
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SamuraiFrog informs me that there is a Soul Train YouTube channel, which is very cool.
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I was listening to Les Brown this week. He had a big hit in the 1940s with Bizet Has His Day, an adaptation of Farandole from L’Arlésienne.
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Ever get a song stuck in your head, but you CAN’T REMEMBER the title? This happened to me the other day. I called up a librarian friend who wasn’t working that day. Then I called a violinist friend of mine; she knew the song I hummed, but couldn’t remember what it was either. She called her sister, and she identified it as In The Hall of the Mountain King from Peer Gynt, music by Edvard Grieg. Don’t think you know this piece? I’ll bet you do, especially if you play any of the three dozen versions from Duke Ellington, Erasure and ELO to Rick Wakeman and the Who. I’m rather partial to the ska version. Somehow, I have it in my mind that this music also inspired the Sugar Crisp commercial theme.
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As a reaction to the Tea Baggers, there is now a Coffee Party. I’m only slightly conflicted in that I really like tea and really don’t like coffee.
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Have I mentioned lately that I really love Betty White? I’ll even record Saturday Night Live on May 8, and I only watched it in 2008 for “Sarah Palin”.
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The greatest 9,331 movies of all time.
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Is my cellphone frying my brain?
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Don’t know why I do that March Madness thing. This year’s results have been worse than ever, thanks to the upsets. Yet I can still win.

For the games today and tomorrow:
I picked: Kansas over Michigan State.
Who’s actually playing: Northern Iowa and Michigan State.
I’m rooting for: Northern Iowa. Their colors are purple and gold, just like my graduate school alma mater. What the heck; I hope they get to the Final Four. Go Panthers!

I picked: Georgetown over Ohio State.
Who’s actually playing: Tennessee and Ohio State.
I’m rooting for: Tennessee. The leader in our group picked Ohio State to win the whole thing.

I picked: Syracuse over UTEP
Who’s actually playing: Syracuse and Butler.
I’m rooting for: Syracuse, who I have going to the Final Four.

I picked: Pittsburgh over Kansas State.
Who’s actually playing: Xavier and Kansas State.
I’m rooting for: Xavier.

I picked: Baylor over Villanova.
Who’s actually playing: Baylor and St. Mary’s.
I’m rooting for: Baylor, who I have in the Final Four.

I picked Louisville over Siena.
Who’s actually playing: Duke and Purdue (yikes).
I’m rooting for: Purdue. Actually, I’m rooting against Duke every round.

I picked: West Virginia over New Mexico
Who’s actually playing: West Virginia and Washington.
I’m rooting for: West Virginia, who I have winning the tournament over (oops) Kansas.

I picked: Kentucky over Cornell.
Who’s actually playing: Kentucky and Cornell!
I’m rooting for: Kentucky on my sheet, the upstate New York team in my heart.

ROG

ROG

Smokey is 70!

If William “Smokey” Robinson was known just for the songs he performed, he would be a memorable artist. But the fact that he has written over 400 songs, according to ASCAP, and probably hundreds more and is a producer as well, then you have a musical force.

The first song released by his group the Miracles was Got A Job, a response song to Get a Job by by the Silhouettes, written by Smokey, Berry Gordy and Roquel Davis.

Here are just a other few songs written or co-written by Smokey. The group listed usually is NOT the only artist who’s performed the tune:

You’ve Really Got A Hold On Me- the Beatles; also performed by the Miracles
My Girl-the Temptations
My Guy -Mary Wells; anyone who could write My Girl AND My Guy is the consummate songwriter
No More Tearstained Makeup – Martha & the Vandellas; a relatively obscure song with one of my favorite lines: No sponge has the power To absorb the shower Of what pancake and powder couldn’t cover
Who’s Loving You – Jackson 5ive. From the 1st J5 album, a cover of the Miracles tune. Isn’t Michael preturnaturally experienced in love in this tune?
Ain’t That Peculiar – Marvin Gaye
Tears of a Clown -the (English) Beat. But it was from the Miracles’ version that I first heard of Pagliachi, which led me to find out that the reference was to a Leoncavallo opera.
Don’t Mess with Bill – Marvellettes
The Hunter Gets Captured by the Game-Grace Jones, covering the Marvelettes’ tune
Get Ready -Rare Earth, a song I first heard from the Temptations
No More Water In The Well – the Temptations, with a relatively rare Paul Williams lead vocal, from arguably my favorite Temps LP, With A Lot O’ Soul, 1967.
Still Water (Peace) – Four Tops
Floy Joy – the Supremes

I suppose I should do a couple more Smokey songs. I pick the oft-covered Tracks of My Tears and I Second That Emotion.

So, happy 70th birthday to Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Songwriters’ Hall of Fame inductee, as well as 2006 Kennedy Center honoree, Smokey Robinson!

1993 photo of Smokey from LIFE magazine, for non-commercial use

ROG

ROG

T is for Three "Tender" Tunes

If you check only the Wikipedia post for the song Try a Little Tenderness, you’ll find the listing dominated by references to Otis Redding. While he did perform the benchmark version in the mid-1960s, a live version of which you can watch here, the song has a much richer history.

Here’s a version of the song, written by “Irving King” (James Campbell and Reginald Connelly) and Harry M. Woods, performed by Francis Albert Sinatra; click on the button on the upper right side of the page. Interesting that this version has an intro not generally used.

The Wikipedia notes a bunch of other folks who also recorded, including “on December 8, 1932 by the Ray Noble Orchestra (with vocals by Val Rosing) followed by both Ruth Etting and Bing Crosby in 1933.

But in my Top Pop Singles, under the Otis Redding listing for the song, it says: “#6 hit for Ted Lewis in 1933”, though the Wikipedia doesn’t note Lewis at all. Here’s the Ted Lewis version (song #8), with a lengthy instrumental before the lyrics come in.

Who IS this Ted Lewis? According to my Top Memories, 1890-1954 book, this song charted for him in February of 1933 for 10 weeks, getting up to #6. But he had 101 Top 20 hits between 1920 and 1934; Tenderness being the 92nd. Among his #1 hits:
When My Baby Smiles at Me (1920-7 weeks), All By Myself (1921-4 weeks), O! Katharina (1925-1 week), Just A Gigilo (1931-2 weeks; yes, the song later covered by David Lee Roth, formerly of Van Halen), In A Shanty in Old Shanty Town (1932-10 weeks), and Lazybones (1933-4 weeks).

Ruth Etting also charted with Tenderness on 3/18/33 for two weeks. She had 62 Top 20 Hits between 1926 and 1937, this being the 59th, with her biggest hit Life Is A Song in 1935 (2 weeks at #1).

Otis Redding’s version got to #25 in the pop charts and #4 on the rhythm and blues charts in December 1966. The song is listed in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and is #204 in a list of Rolling Stone magazine’s greatest songs. Otis’ biggest hit, unfortunately, was posthumous: (Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay in the winter of 1968, which went to #1 won a number of Grammy awards, as well as citations by Rolling Stone (#28), R&RHOF, RIAA, NPR and BMI

Before Otis, Aretha Franklin had a minor hit (#100 in 1962), and after Three Dog Night (#29 in 1969). But it has become a staple in the repertoire of many an artist.

Paul Simon’s second album after his breakup with Art Garfunkel was the eclectic There Goes Rhymin’ Simon, featuring songs such as Kodachrome and Loves Me Like A Rock. The 1973 collection also featured a lovely song called Tenderness, which Like Loves Me Like a Rock features the vocal stylings of the gospel group the Dixie Hummingbirds. (Unfortunately, all I could find is this cover version.) The album went to #2 and signaled a successful solo career to come, featuring albums such as Still Crazy After All these Years (#1 in 1975) and Graceland (#3 in 1986).

Paul Simon won the very first Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song in 2007, succeeded by Stevie Wonder and Paul McCartney.

The 1956 Elvis Presley hit Love Me Tender had a peculiar songwriting history, explained here. Briefly, it was written as Aura Lee nearly a century earlier. The adaptation was credited to Presley and the songwriting adapter’s wife, neither of whom actually wrote it. It was the title song of Elvis’ film debut.

I learned http://www.metrolyrics.com/aura-lee-lyrics-traditional.htmlAura Lee in grade school so found Love Me Tender as somehow peculiar. In fact, the school kids made up a song to Aura Lee, sung with the Elvis enunciation:

When you must take medicine
Take it orally
That’s because the other way
Is more painfully.

Orally, orally
Take it orally
That’s because…the other way…
Is more painfully.

Anyway, here’s the classic Presley tune, the fourth of a dozen and a half #1 hits in the United States. (The 31-song ELV1S album contained #1s in the US and/or the UK.)

ROG

ROG

Berry Gordy is turning 80

Back in 1998, when I went to Detroit, I visited 2648 West Grand Boulevard. No, “visited” is not the right word; I made a pilgrimage to Hitsville USA, the house that served as the recording studio for a great number of artists recording for Motown Records. It is a physically unimpressive building, even dowdy, but it was the launching pad for a great amount of music that I own, tunes by Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson & the Miracles, the Four Tops, the Temptations), Martha and the Vandellas, Stevie Wonder, the Jackson 5ive, and the Supremes, among many others. The visionary for all of this was Berry Gordy, Jr.

Gordy, whose Rock and Roll Hall of Fame bio you can read here, developed songwriters, artists, and underappreciated backup musicians to create music that was not marginalized as “race music” or “soul music”, but in fact became “The Sound of Young America.” This is astonishing: “In 1966, the company’s ‘hit ratio’ – the percentage of records released that made the national charts – was 75%.”

If you bought Motown ALBUMS, as opposed to singles in the 1960s, as I tended to do, you’ll note that not occasionally, the same songs would make it onto more than one artist’s LP. Famously, Gladys Knight & the Pips had a #2 single in 1967 (#1 on the R&B charts) with I Heard It Through the Grapevine; about a year later, Marvin Gaye had a massive #1 hit on both charts with the same song, albeit arranged quite differently, written by Barrett Strong and the late Norman Whitfield. It was the stable of songwriters, including Holland-Dozier-Holland, some of the singer-songwriters such as Robinson, Wonder and Gaye, and less well-known folks who may be the unsung heroes in the saga.

Another writer was Berry Gordy himself. Songs written or co-written by him include:
Do You Love Me by the Contours, covered by Temptations
Try It Baby by Marvin Gaye, covered by the Supremes and the Temptations
I’ll Be There by the Four Tops
You’ve Made Me So Very Happy by Brenda Holloway, covered by Blood, Sweat & Tears
Money by Barrett Strong, covered by the Beatles and many others
You’ve Got What It Takes by Marv Johnson
I Want You Back, ABC, The Love You Save, Mama’s Pearl, Maybe Tomorrow – all Jackson 5ive; songwriters billed as The Corporation (Gordy/Mizell/Richards/Perren)
Even pre-Motown, Gordy had written hits for the late Jackie Wilson, including Reet Petite and Lonely Teardrops

I refer you to this episode of the podcast Coverville, featuring the music of Motown and Berry Gordy; yes, the thank you in the notes (and the fulfilled request of Remove This Doubt by Elvis Costello, the cover of a song from The Supremes Sing Holland-Dozier-Holland album) is in reference to me.

Also check out this article celebrating not only 50 years of Motown records but also another milestone; Berry Gordy turns 80 on November 28, 2009. ROG

Picture from Life.com, “for personal non-commercial use only”

ROG

Talking withing Songs QUESTIONS

I was just listening to a Best of Sam and Dave album. In the intro to I Thank You, someone says:
I want everybody to get up off your seat
And get your arms together, and your hands together
And give me some of that o-o-old soul clapping
with the last three words practically sung.

An even better intro, though not a better song, is on their You Don’t Know What You Mean to Me, which has an almost preached “Eddie FLOYD wrote the song.”

Going back to the earliest days of rock and roll, there have been spoken lyrics within the context of a song. Some work for me, such as the corny Leader of the Pack by THE SHANGRI-LAS:
Is she really going out with him?
Well, there she is. Let’s ask her.
Betty, is that Jimmy’s ring you’re wearing?
Mm-hmm
Gee, it must be great riding with him
Is he picking you up after school today?
Uh-uh
By the way, where’d you meet him?

Others, not so much. There is a truly awful interlude in an Everly Brothers song called Ebony Eyes:
The plane was way overdue so I went inside to the airlines desk and I said “Sir, I
wonder why 1203 is so late?” He said “Aww, they probably took off late or they
may have run into some turbulent weather and had to alter their course.” I went
back outside and I waited at the gate and I watched the beacon light from the
control tower as it whipped through the dark ebony skies as if it were searching for
(my ebony eyes.) And then came the announcement over the loudspeaker-
“Would those having relatives or friends on flight number 1203 please report to the
chapel across the street at once.”

The original Supremes did it in Love Is Here And Now You’re Gone
You close the door to your heart
And you turned the key, locked your love away from me
AND
You stripped me of my dreams
You gave me faith, then took my hope
Look at me now
AND
My heart cries out for your touch
But you’re not there
And the lonely cry fades in the air
It’s OK, but not my favorite song from the group.

In fact, the LONGEST rap in the pre-rap era that I own has to be the album version of Stevie Wonder’s Livin’ For the City, all that about “New York City: just like I pictured it; skyscrapers and everything.”

So, excluding rap, or songs with rap elements, such as Blondie’s Rapture, how do you feel about songs with spoken lyrics. What songs do you like? What songs do you hate? You may also pick rap/hip hop songs as well, though I may (if we’re talking early rap) or probably won’t recognize the reference.
ROG

ROG

August Ramblin'

Tuesday night, I couldn’t sleep, so I got up to use the computer. I was startled by my wife entering the room – the fan drowned out any noise she made – and we decided to go downstairs to watch the NBC show The Office. We got through the March 19 episode where [SPOILER WARNING] Michael Scott quits Dunder Mifflin [end of warning]. This got me thinking about spoilers. There was a review of some sci-fi TV show, now on DVD, and the reviewer mentioned a significant character development. A commenter complained that he hadn’t seen the season yet, as he was waiting to watch it all on the DVD; the reviewer apologized. So what IS the rule for spoilers these days for a TV show or movie? Is it three months after the DVD comes out? What if the DVD NEVER comes out?

We’re now down to the last series we watch together. First we saw Scrubs, because we had all the episodes recorded. Then we got through 30 Rock; saw the season finale just last week, then a couple December shows in rerun that we’d missed when the DVR got fried in a late autumn lightning storm. I know what happens on The Office – chances are I read it in someone’s blog – but I have no expectation that the plot points remain a secret, though, in fact, my wife does not know, so DON’T TELL HER.

Since JEOPARDY! is in reruns, I’d decided to tape the Regis Who Wants to Be a Millionaire primetime episodes. A much better game with the 15-, 30- and 45-second clock. Of course, I saw the Patricia Heaton math meltdown; she really psyched herself out that she couldn’t get the answer to this question: “If a Euro is worth $1.50, five Euros is worth what?” Her choices are A.) 30 quarters, B.) 50 dimes, C.) 70 nickels, and D.) 90 pennies.
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I’m reading the New Yorker for August 7 online this week, when I come across this: It’s big news in France and Germany that Willy DeVille, a founder of the band Mink DeVille, died yesterday in New York. The death of the director, producer, and screenwriter John Hughes is unmentioned in the major newspapers there. Nothing travels worse than the local rites of adolescence.
I totally missed that story. I wasn’t a huge fan of the band, but I do own some Mink DeVille on vinyl.
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Yesterday, someone in my office was talking about the “famous” Doobie Brothers episodes of the show What’s Happening; I had no idea what he was talking about. But it was easy to find clips here and here and even each of the whole episodes on Hulu here and here. I DID see the series from time to time, but it was not appointment television for me.

Someone commented on why the show didn’t pick a black artist instead. I was instantly reminded of a 1977 Warner Brothers Loss Leader called Cook Book, “focusing on Warner’s black acts.” The only predominantly white act on the record was the Doobie Brothers. The song on the album was the same as the song on the What’s Happening episode of the same time frame, “Takin’ It to the Streets.” The Michael McDonald version of the group must have had some cred.
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From the July 7, 2009 Fortune magazine comes this review of the book Cooperstown Confidential, by Zev Chafets. It addreses the inconsistencies in the process of getting into the Hall of Fame. Reviewer Daniel Okrent writes:
Sure, numbers count — RBIs, ERAs, etc. — but Chafets demonstrates that cronyism, prejudice, and financial self-interest play a huge part as well.

He addresses a variety of factors that have influenced the people who make (and unmake and remake and unremake) the rules. In 2009, in the looming shadows cast by Clemens and Bonds, the rule that matters most is No. 5, the one about character. It’s been used to keep out witnesses to gambling (Joe Jackson) and gamblers themselves (Pete Rose) but has somehow not been applied to cheaters (Gaylord Perry), racists (Cap Anson), sociopaths (Lefty Grove), and cheating racist sociopaths (Ty Cobb). Nor to a quantity of drunks, drug users, and other lowlifes that could fill the reservation book at Hazelden.

About those druggies: Most people who follow baseball closely suspect that a large share of Hall members from the ’70s and ’80s got their games up with the help of amphetamines. But Chafets has turned up evidence that steroids go back as far as the 1950s.

I guess it solidified my sense that the hysteria over the latest revelation from the (supposedly secret) list of 2003 users of substances that would become banned in 2004 just doesn’t disturb me as much as it does others.
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And now, a message from movie maker Tyler Perry:
I’m back from Vegas and had a great time at the Hoodies, but I gotta give a quick WARNING to all my Facebookers, Twitters and TylerPerry board members: I’m so pissed right now!

I’m sitting in my den writing, minding my own business, when I get an email from my staff saying that someone put an ad up on Craigslist saying that I was casting a movie in L.A., and in order to be considered for this (FAKE) Tyler Perry movie, you have to join their club for $29.95. THAT IS A LIE, don’t fall for it. These folks are trying to rip you off. I hate for people to prey on people’s dreams and hopes. Why don’t people get a job and stop trying to steal folks’ hard-earned money….Ugh, that makes me mad; let me breathe.

Okay listen my dear folks, if anyone asks you to pay in order to do an audition or pay a fee to join a club to put you in a movie, please don’t fall for it. That’s not how it works in this business. It’s free to audition for any film. I’m calling my lawyers about these THIEVES! You’re my best help here, so please do me a favor and send this out to all your followers and friends.

Thanks,
TP

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ROG

ROG

Poison Ivy

A good friend of mine got a case of poison ivy last week. Of course, it itched liked crazy. after passing along my concern, my mind (as usual) went to music, specifically a song I heard when I was a kid. “I think it was the Coasters,” I thought, “and certainly it was written by Leiber & Stoller.” And so it was.

I checked out the Wikipedia post on the song, and according to the post, “the song’s lyrics are about sexually-transmitted disease”, rather than the diseases stated in the bridge of the song:
Measles make you bumpy
Mumps’ll make you lumpy
Chicken Pox’ll make you jump and twitch
Common cold’ll fool you
Whooping cough’ll cool you
Poison Ivy’s love’ll make you itch

I did not know that.

This song went up to #7 in the pop charts in 1959, and to #1 on the R&B charts.

I don’t garden – my wife does – and I’ve been lucky enough to avoid it while mowing the lawn.

(I HAVE used calamine lotion, though, after an allergic reaction to penicillin when I was 16; as Steve Stills said at Woodstock, “Three days, man, three days!)

The map below shows the native habitat for Toxicodendron radicans (L.) Kuntze ssp. negundo (Greene) Gillis, eastern poison ivy

ROG

ROG

M is for Money

Happy U.S. Income Tax Day!

Every year in the United States, the Social Security Administration sends out Your Social Security Statement to help me plan for my “financial future”. It provides estimates of your Social Security benefits under current law.” But for me, it’s a personal history lesson.

The first year I worked, 1969, I made $529 at the Binghamton (NY) Public Library. I worked six months at IBM in 1971 and made the most I would make until 1978. $50 in 1976 – really? I can always tell when I went to college, or when I was unemployed or underemployed.

I also received my 401(k) statement this week. I started putting money in this account because we were all warned that Social Security wouldn’t be there. My employer and I each contributed about $1000 each this past quarter. I managed to lose that plus an additional $5800. So much for retiring.

Let’s talk about music instead. There are two great songs called Money that I own and that come to mind. The first was written Berry Gordy, founder of Motown Records, when challenged by someone who complained that all he wrote about was romance. “What else do you care about, Berry?” Well, there was money.

The original version of Money was recorded by future Songwriters’ Hall of Famer Barrett Strong, who later teamed with the late Norman Whitfield to write I Heard It Through the Grapevine (a hit for both Gladys Knight & the Pips and Marvin Gaye), War (Edwin Star’s hit), and a bunch of late 1960s/early 1970s classics for the Temptations, such as Too Busy Thinking About My Baby, Papa Was a Rolling Stone, Just My Imagination and Ball of Confusion.

Barrett Strong’s version of Money went to #2 on the Billboard R&B charts for six weeks, and to #23 on the pop charts early in 1960. It’s #288 on the Rolling Stone magazine’s list of greatest songs, and was covered by a Liverpudlian band of some note, the Beatles.

The other Money song is by the British band Pink Floyd, by that point consisting of David Gilmour, Roger Waters, Rick Wright and Nick Mason. It appeared on the 1973 album Dark Side of the Moon, and though it spent but one week at #1 in the U.S., it spent a total of 741 weeks on the U.S. album charts, selling more than 15 million copies.

For those unfamiliar, it has one potentially ‘naughty’ word.

I’m still collecting the state quarters. Right now, all I need is a Missouri quarter from the Denver mint; I even have both District of Columbia coins. But I haven’t seen the Puerto Rico quarter yet from either the Philadelphia or Denver mints and other territories will be released this year. (And yes, I know DC and Puerto Rico are not states, but their coins are a continuation of the same series.) Meanwhile, I’m still looking for Denver mint coins for two of my co-workers.


Certainly it was the juxtaposition of Marilyn Chambers as wholesome Ivory Snow mom with Marilyn Chambers as, er, an actress that helped fuel whatever commercial success she had. No, though my name is Green, I’ve never seen Behind the Green Door or any of her other work. She died this week.
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And speaking of advertising, does Burger King REALLY think it’ll make money mixing SpongeBob Squarepants, Sir Mix-A-Lot, and “the TRUE (non-pirate) meaning of the word ‘booty'”, as my friend Fred put it in his April 13 post? And if the BK King is creepy in 30-second increments, he’s REALLY bizarre in the 2:30 segment Fred found.
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OK, so what other song about money am I thinking of? The clues are in this post.

ROG

ROG

Another Auld Lang Syne

In thinking about the year soon to pass, I can’t help think about some famous people who died that had some significance for me, such as Sir Edmund Hillary, who climbed Everest the year I was born, or Suzanne Pleshette, who appeared on a TV show ending screwed up b7y our local affiliate. An inordinate number of them were black musicians who passed in the latter part of the year. Isaac Hayes, who I wrote about in this piece last year; Miriam Makeba, Mother Africa; Odetta; the underappreciated Norman Whitfield, and of course, Levi Stubbs.
For Gordon and Tom the Mayor
LINK
Hey, if you have a chance, would you go to Dead or Alive and petition for the inclusion of Norman Whitfield and/or Odetta, please?

Then there were iconic characters such as Paul Newman and George Carlin, Tim Russert and Jim McKay. In an obit for McKay, it indicated that he made even the most “minor” of sports seem as important as the Olympics, and that’s why I appreciated him so.

A number of folks died this month I didn’t mention, such as Sammy Baugh, the first star quarterback of the NFL; Bettie Page, pin-up extraordinare; Mark Felt, who just didn’t look that much like Hal Holbrook who played Deep Throat in All the President’s Men; Majel Barrett, Gene Roddenberry’s widow, who played nurse Chapel in the original series as well as Deanna Troi’s mother in The Next Generation, and the voice of the Star Trek computer throughout the ST universe; Eartha Kitt, who sang rings around Madonna in her performance of Santa Baby, but who had a much more interesting bio than I had been aware of; possibly best known as a Catwoman in the old Batman series; and playwright Harold Pinter, whose death was sort of mentioned in the new movie Synecdoche, New York.

Mike Connell, the I.T. guru who help GWB steal the 2000 and 2004 election who went down in a plane crash.
LINK
Find out more about this case go here from December 18, 2008 forward.

A few of folks died too young for my comfort: Hayes (65); Gene Upshaw (63), Hall of Fame football player for the NFL Oakland Raiders and later Executive Director of the NFL Players Association; Bobby Murcer (62), the Oklahoman stuck following Oklahoman Mickey Mantle as Yankee centerfielder; Russert (58); Bernie Mac (50); and, of course, Heath Ledger (28).

I also recall someone you don’t know. Tom Siblo was a Socialist Worker’s organizer
on the campus of the State University College at New Paltz (NY) during the Vietnam war. Unusually for men at the time, he’d taken his wife’s name (as Siblo-Landsman)
and was permanently disabled because of a diabetic-related coronary condition. He was around my age.

I will remember.
ROG

ROG

T is for Thank You

I’ve said more than once before in this blog that the writing (or whatever it is I do) on this site and elsewhere helps me keep my equilibrium.

So, thank you for coming by.

And it does have its specific unexpected benefits. Just in the last week:
One blogger sent me this and wrote, This Made Me Think of You!
Another blogger has promised me secret swag.
And most incredibly, I commented about a musical group another blogger mentioned on Friday, and yesterday, an album from said same group arrived at my door! Thanks! I liked it on first hearing, especially Mission.

So, as my post-Thanksgiving (US) gesture, I have a few things I would like to send to you all, free of charge, just for the asking. Some of these I have offered before, but since there are new people that come by, I thought I’d make them available again.

Item 1: an annotated version of the United States Constitution. Quantity remaining: about two dozen. I’m an old political science major, and I think it’s important for folks to be aware of its content, instead of what they THINK it says.

Item 2: the book And don’t call me a racist! Quantity available: about six dozen. this was the sourcer of part of our church’s Black history month discussion last year. I’m fascinated by the story of the elderly woman who self-published this book.
I was reading an old ESPN the magazine this week. Someone commented that if people stopped talking about race, then racism would go away; I respectfully disagree.

Item 3: a button that reads Choose Peace. Quantity available: about ten dozen. It’s about 2 inches in diameter and is green with white lettering.

You can request as many as you want. I’m going to wait until Friday, December 12 and send them out. I’ll fulfill the ones with single requests of items (and by that, asking for one of each would be considered a “single” request) first, then parse out the multiple requests after that. So if, e.g. someone asks for all 24 Constitutions, I’ll give out the ones with the single request first, and the one asking for all of them last.

Your charge for postage – zero. Is this offer available outside the United States? Yes.

Know that I may throw in something extra, probably music related.

Send requests to rogerogreen (at) gmail (dot) com

Oh, and feel free to tell others.

Thank You (the Led Zeppelin song) – Lizz Wright
or here

I Thank You – Sam and Dave
or here

Thank You – Sly and the Family Stone
or here.


ROG

ROG