The 10th anniversary of this here blog

Today being the tenth anniversary of the start of the Ramblin’ with Roger blog, with new content every single day, I thought I would describe how I started blogging in the first place. I’m sure I’ve told bits and pieces of it before, but like some oft-told tales, the details either become clearer inr focus or muddier over time.

I had heard about this thing called the weblog – it was in all the standard press – in the early part of this century. However, I had not actually READ any blogs. Therefore, I concluded, without a single strain of evidence, the same thing that most “everyone” else was saying, that blogs were self-indulgent bits of drivel designed for people far more self-absorbed than I.

Then, in October 2004, I see my friend Rocco, who I knew from my FantaCo days. He says to me, “Have you been reading Fred’s blog?” Of course, I had not been reading what our mutual friend Fred Hembeck had been writing, and in fact I had fallen out of touch with him over the previous decade.

So I checked out Fred’s blog

Up on a rooftop, Beatles, quick.

Only recently did I realize that today is the 45th anniversary of the Beatles rooftop concert above Abbey Road studios. This was performed and recorded as part of some album/movie project, both of which would eventually be called Let It Be.

Here’s the 20-minute performance until the cops shut things down.

Of course, as Beatles junkies know

October Rambling: artist Indigo Anderson; Arthur and Nigel get married

Amen, 39.
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The Perfect Epitaph for Establishment Journalism: “In other words, if the government tells me I shouldn’t publish something, who I am as a journalist to disobey? Put that on the tombstone of western establishment journalism.”
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I just don’t have the energy to blast the jerks responsible for the 16-day US federal government partial shutdown. Fortunately, Dan is both willing and able to do so.
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Reader Wil: After our time as p.o.w.’s in Japanese concentration camps, we were liberated by the British. Two months after the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki we could escape a new danger.
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Arthur and Nigel got married today. Or yesterday – that New Zealand time zone stuff always confounds me. Arthur’s observations before the big day. (I still think it’s because of the broken stemware.) Congratulations!
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Amy’s Sharp Little Pencil wrote The Migraine Speaks (much to my dismay) and In the Palm of God’s Hand.
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Mark Evanier’s Tales of My Childhood #3, which made me cry.
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Leslie on setting boundaries as a teacher.
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Steve ponders The Things We Say When Drunk.
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Young Indigo Anderson is passionate about manga, anime, cosplay and making comics. “That is why when her tenth grade AP World History teacher asked for a paper about the relationship between North and South Korea, she requested to do it as a comic.

One overstuffed weekend: Roosevelt, Vezina, Hembeck

ER and FDR

For whatever reason, I wasn’t sleeping well a couple weeks ago. When I booked our hotel for our trip to the Mid-Hudson for the first weekend in August, in my fatigued fog, I totally forgot that my wife had told me to secure a place for TWO nights, and that she had even arranged for a cat sitter. I was just so happy that I finally remembered to book it at all. We had made this sojourn a couple hours south a few times, and it had always been one night. This time, though, we had added a couple elements, so the extra time would have been helpful.

Instead, we headed out Saturday and went to Val-Kill, Eleanor Roosevelt’s home. There will be much more on this.

Then to Hyde Park to visit the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum.

Friend Fred Hembeck is 60

This past August, my wife, my daughter and I got to visit Fred Hembeck and his wife Lynn Moss down in the Mid-Hudson Valley of New York State. This had been an annual event for three or four years, but it had been four years since we last came by. I’m quite sure of that because their daughter Julie was about to go to college the last time we visited, and now she’s graduated. She was also present.

Anyone who has been following Fred’s Facebook page will know, right before Father’s Day 2012, Julie’s left leg was run over by a mack truck! She went through a variety of treatments, including several different casts and at least three surgeries.

To add insult to injury, quite literally

FantaCon 2013 update

Michae

As some of you know, I worked at FantaCo, the comic book and film book store/publisher, et al in Albany, NY from May 1980 to November 1988, the second longest job I ever had. (The current one is #1.)

There will be a FantaCon in September 2013, the first one since 1990. I’ll be there, Allah/Yawweh willing.

You’ll note that Tom Skulan, the creator of FantaCo and FantaCon, has dedicated the show to the memory of three individuals. I KNEW THEM ALL.

Phil Seuling was one of those people that the term “bigger than life” was designed for.

The New TV Season

After careful consideration, here is the list of new shows I’m watching this fall TV season:

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Not a very long list; in fact, nada. Fact is that, while there were shows that have interested me, I have developed a higher standard for actually committing to a new show. I’m very suspicious of dramatic serials, because if the network decides to cancel it before it’s over, as ABC did with The Nine a few seasons back, it’s terribly frustrating.

I look at the ads for a program such as ABC’s Last Resort, about an an apparently rogue military operation, and it stars Andre Braugher, who I LOVED in Homicide: Life on the Streets. Yet

August Rambling: Punctuation, Crowdfunding

Listen to the KunstlerCast podcast #212: Health & Technology Update. James Howard Kunstler gives listeners an update on his recent health issues, and discusses the importance of advocating for oneself when dealing with medical professionals, rather than taking their word for it.

Keyboard Waffles. (But if they were REAL nerds, they would have spelled nerd’s correctly!)

My favorite new blog: Grammarly,

Blogoversary answers

Let’s milk this seventh blogoversary gig: in response to questions I get about blogging all of the time, both in person and online, I decided to answer some of them.

Why do you blog?

I’ve noted that I was inspired by my friend Fred Hembeck. Beyond that, though, there was stuff happening in the world and in my life that seemed to be worthy of noting, if only because they were important to me.

Some people write letters to the editor. I have, but I’m not very diligent about it. Some people write to members of Congress. Ditto. What I realized that I can do is write something in a blog, then send THAT to a member of Congress. And I have, a few times. Plus the piece stays out there is in the blogoverse.

But mostly, it was so I could maintain a modicum of sanity.

What was your goal in blogging?

Initially, I had only two.

Hembeck is 59

It’s interesting to me that, in the past year, the one guy who most influenced me in blogging, comic book artist/scribe Fred Hembeck, has seemingly left the blogosphere. He hasn’t posted a thing since April 10, 2011. He started FredSez on January 1, 2003, and for a several years wrote almost every day, an inspirational pace. But the output slackened in the last couple years before he stopped altogether. Hasn’t used his Twitter account very much anymore.

Seems that his chosen medium