Happy 115 Dad

Here's a repost for Dad's 115th birthday. I'm dedicating my church service this week to him. 

So short a time together; enough jokes to last a lifetime. When I see Brigid draw a Shelbert cartoon, or Matt make a good pun, or Tom impersonate a store customer, or watch my funny little grandbabies, I know it's in their souls to spread sunshine in a world that needs it more than ever.

Miss you Dad.

Brian

Monday, September 20, 2010

Happy 100th Birthday Thomas Black

Dear Dad:

Happy 100th birthday. We spent a lot of time with Mom over the weekend doing little things to help her in her new apartment. One of the last times I saw you twenty-five years ago, you said to take care of her, and I hope we're all doing a good job at that.

Any time we see anyone who emigrates to America and talks her down because she's not perfect yet, I think of the patriotic Irishman who came here when he was 12, loved his new country, and worked two jobs on two phlebitic legs and a bum ticker to support a family of six. I never heard you complain much, except maybe to "stop that roughhousing" when the boys and I were fighting on the second floor. Sorry if we ever woke you up from a well-earned sleep.

your son,

Brian 

Comments:

Brigid

Very well said.

September 20, 2010 at 4:19 PM

Optimum/Cablevision fading away; the joys of taped sports

Optimum? Nah

I'm down to one cable box and basic service because Mrs. 1OTT insists on not canceling the whole thing. We get some use out of the one box left in the living room and the music channels that you can also stream on the TV and phone. My gut and the bros from reddit made me wary when I had returned the second box in August that Optimum would screw me on the bill. They were right. If I hadn't checked the new bill and called them, I would have been paying for the second box from now til doomsday.

Cable is still good for:

• News 12 Brooklyn (which is also available in some form for free on a FAST channel on the Samsung TV).
• CBS network shows that move to channel 10 when channel 2 runs a local show (Jet football).
• CBS local shows (Jet exhibition football) that move to channel 10 when channel 2 runs a network show.
• Stingray music channels.
• Weather outages: My over-the-air digital signal glitches now and then. It's rare.
• C-SPAN.
• Local public access (kidding).
• Lazy limited channel surfing.
• Antenna TV: Ironically, channel 11 is playing with their signal with ASTC 3.0, so I can no longer view Antenna TV via an antenna on the Tablo. I can get the channel 11's subchannels thru the Samsung OTA and thru cable, but I can't tape it.

The Joys of Taped Sports

I tape the Jets OTA and can watch a game in about 2 hours. Three-hour game minus half-time (13 minutes) and commercials (50 minutes) makes that possible. But the word on the street is that the broadcasters want to add a poison pill to the signal to block taping. Eventually they may charge us for all signals, like the BBC license fee. Please don't do that. It's unAmerican.

Upwork

Upwork had a good thing going but it's going, going, gone. You met clients in a forum where they see your skills and you see their needs. With raised fees and new fees for what had been free, they must be run by the NY City Council, who loves to tax and fee things to death and can't figure why that hurts the business, resulting in lower total receipts (Uber; expensive permits that encourage noncompliance; et al.). Upwork had been the third part of my triangular business strategy of client sources. The money was not great, but the jobs were more fun than the other clients I work for. Now Upwork has dropped to number 4 of 3 on my list. I go there when I have nothing to do, which is usually by choice.

World Show Business Exclusive on Old Song Lyric

Just saw Sting at the Brooklyn Paramount. Great show. One note: I think I heard new lyrics to "Wrapped Around Your Finger." He changed the lyric "servant is your master" to "servant has surpassed you." I can't find any confirmation for this except from my own ears. 

Looks at Books: The Aurora Revelations by Michael F. Walker

A Ghoulish Tale of Aliens, Monstrosities, and Mad Science

Walker has crafted an entertaining novel of what-ifs, positing a unified theory of aliens, a 20th-century mad genius, and things that go bump in the night. A wise-cracking team of paranormal enthusiasts unearths a long-dormant mystery in a Texas cemetery, entering a hellscape of hillbilly horror and a monstrous mindscape of things to come (or will they?). Read it and find out. The paperback is a neat production, and I speak from several decades in New York publishing, trade and academic. The text is also very well edited.

https://www.amazon.com/Aurora-Revelations-Paranormal-Mystery-Novel/dp/B0D99JH15Z/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

Reading the Bible

I’m still working through the Old Testament after reading the New Testament some years ago.

I keep a beautiful leather-bound of the New Revised Standard Version on the lamp table. The volume was given to me when I joined Marble.

On my Kindle phone app I read the Holman Christian Standard Bible. Great for train trips and waiting on long lines at Walgreens.

And because my eyes tire easily, I’ve also been listening to a great podcast on Spotify called Bible: Beginning to End, a straight reading from the New Living Translation with questions (but no answers) for thought after every chapter or so.
I used to think that reading the Bible was something I would do when I finished reading everything else important. Or watching everything on Netflix. Or when I was fully retired. But now that I’m immersed in it, I wish I had done it sooner. My father told me that there is something on every page of the Bible that is good for you. He was right.

The Great Jon Stewart

Jon Stewart, who returns to the Daily Show tonight, is the Sesame Street of smart politics. If Sesame Street worked as it was supposed to in 1969, we should be on our second or third generation of people who are good at reading and understand math. That didn't happen. All reading and math scores are down compared to 1969. The smart kids picked up the learning, and the rest watched it for the shiny colors and pretty songs. Stewart had to be disappointed that his years of insightful comedy still led up to Trump winning. He's fact-preaching to the choir and the few fence sitters that are left. The alternate reality folks can't be swayed.

Learning to read in the 1960s

 Interesting article in today's NY Post about a failed reading theory that is being discontinued. A person named "B. Black" commented:

In the 1960s, Mom taught me the alphabet and that b + at spelled bat. From there I figured out cat, fat, hat, etc. My father taught me math using coins. By the time I entered 1st grade, I was miles ahead thanks to pencil and paper, a pocket full of change, and Mom and Dad (neither of whom went to college).

https://nypost.com/2023/09/17/columbia-quietly-closes-down-teachers-college-project-that-ruined-countless-lives/?spot_im_scroll_to_comments=true&spot_im_highlight_immediate=true

Yay AI!

 ChatGPT may work out well for me. There are suddenly appearing many job requests for copy editors to humanize books that were generated by ChatGPT from authors' input, but the copy needs humanizing. The conclusion is that more books are going to be written in general. So rather than a threat to my copy editing business, it's a boon.

Call Me Kat Canceled

This is not a flame but an honest review of why Call Me Kat failed. The source material, a BBC classic, featured a comic giantess, Miranda Hart, who viewers either love or hate. Her love interest in the show was very believable, whom US viewers might recognize as Welshman Tom Ellis of Lucifer fame. A lot of humor was mined from the largeness of Miranda compared to most everyone, including her diminutive friend and co-worker, Stevie. Miranda's gangliness must have been part of at least a half-dozen gags per show. Miranda's mom was a major funny force, trying to get her married off (a concept that can't play anymore in the US).

Now to CMK. In the US you can't do any body-shaming humor, so casting a gangly lady was not in play. Kat's shortness was also out of play for laughs. Kat's best friend is . . . nobody I can tell. Kat's mother is played by Swoosie Kurtz, whose terrifyingly thin appearance takes the edge off her comedy. Kat's love interest is played by Cheyenne Jackson, a talented Broadway performer who has no chemistry with Bialik. The loss of Leslie Jordan was curtains for Kat. He was the comic soul of the show.

The bottom line is that the US show is about a humorless independent woman. The UK show has a pathetic woman with room for growth, which does happen (spoiler alert). So watch the UK show, skip the US. And Jim Parsons, hire a casting director next time you produce. You're never going to get Maddie-and-Dave- or Rob-and-Laura-level sizzle, but maybe at least Cheers?

Gordon Lightfoot RIP

 Watched a lot of old CBC footage on YouTube last night. Saw a great odd clip of the iconic Anne Murray introducing Dylan inducting him into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTP8RIRaFNQ

Mrs. 1OTT always gets upset by "If You Could Read Mind" when she thinks I'm mad at her. Not many songs can do that.

Add to the lookalikes: young Gordo and actor Chris Pratt.

Drinking with pals Al and Ken, there was a song we made up about the legendary exploits of Al--the taxi driving, the hejira through Texas and the South, the women, the barber chair in the apartment. We made up heroic lyrics to the tune of The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. So much fun. 

And, Liza Minelli's medley of If You Could Read My Mind/Come Back to Me. It will infuriate and delight. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6muweIFQmM

Johhny Cash brings it back to earth in one of his very last recordings.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6b1NwbdOLQ

One takeaway, if true, was that he wasn't happy as just a songwriter. He had to crack the US market. He finally did. Then he went home.

Tom Holland Biopic of Astaire Has a Director

 Paul King, director of Paddington, is onboard the biopic of Fred Astaire starring Tom Holland. 

They have guts even thinking about it. I like the idea of focusing on a period of his life rather than doing 80 years in two hours with corny montages to show the passing years. If it's a hit, it could be a trilogy: 1. the years with Adele from childhood through the 1920s; 2. the years with Ginger in the 1930s; 3. post-Ginger, the dawn of television, the amazing final years of productivity.

His young widow is taking the money. As rotten as that sounds, the silver lining to the silver pieces is the exposure to this generation of what talent is. I worked with Ted Mann, the father of Off Broadway, on his autobiography. The widow of Eugene O'Neill took a play to Mr. Mann and disregarded her late husband's will, which specified that his unperformed play, Long Day's Journey Into Night, not be performed until 50 years after his death due to its painful autobiographical nature. If she had respected her husband's wishes and not taken the play to Mr. Mann, the play would not have come out until 2003, when it would have had little impact as the subject matter was old hat by that time. So, the Widow Astaire may trigger a great cultural revival with this film, which I think Fred might approve of.

If they should bar wars . . .

Mrs. 1ott needed to see the Elton John farewell to N. America (residencies, town halls, and county fairs excepted) so I signed on for a month of Disney+, which means I finally saw The Rise of Skywalker. It played like every other Star Wars movie, with a borrow from every other science fiction series. Hunting for the spice planet? C'mon, man! Death is very low stakes, at least for the charismatic leads, when you can talk to ghosts. There appear to be two categories: 1. real ghosts who can interact with our world with some effort and 2. mind ghosts (scene between Han Solo and Kylo Ren). There's mumbo-jumbo to explain this, but esthetically this is very jarring. It's like a character on stage pouring water from a pitcher, taking a drink, then leaving thru a doorway. Then another character mimes pouring water, mimes drinking from the invisible glass, and mimes opening a door. You wonder what the heck is going on?

Jumping the metaphorical turnstile

The story below from the NYT 11/13/22 is the definition of entitlement:

Dear Diary:

Caro and I spent that college summer back home in Hoboken, traveling to our internships via Port Authority each day.

My internship was unpaid, but it came with the stellar consolation prize of an unlimited monthly MetroCard. I got a monthly bus pass, too, and bounced happily around the boroughs to see friends on weekends. Some days, I crossed the Hudson four times since all the rides had already been paid for.

I planned to spend the last weekend of that July out of town, and I promised Caro my MetroCard before I left so that no free ride would go unused.

But while waiting at Port Authority for a bus to take me upstate, I realized I had forgotten to make the handoff. I decided to hide the MetroCard somewhere at the terminal.

I went to Duane Reade, found the cheesiest greeting card in the racks there and stashed the MetroCard between the third and fourth envelopes behind it. I texted Caro the details of the hiding spot (sending a picture would have been too easy).

On the way home from the city two hours later, Caro found my gift: three days’ worth of free subway rides.

Total bliss.

— (name withheld)

Somebody should tell this sprited young lady that she may have committed petit larceny, as my father taught us about the use of his pass. His unlimited train/bus pass, given to MTA employees and retirees, was for his use only. He said that a lot of people thought that transit workers abused this privilege by letting family members use it, but I know we didn't. Pay your fare!

And to explain the concept of "free" rides, or "free" anything for that matter, take the total budget and divide by the number of rides. Studies show that the subway fare is subsidized by sources outside the rider's cost of a MetroCard for $1.05 per ride. In other words, your fare does not pay for the entire ride. So when you abuse a "free" card, you steal $2.75 (your cost) + $1.05 (subsidy) in theft of service. But in a city that won't prosecute chronic fare beaters, I guess it's all moot.

Lawsuit Against Lies

Could radio be next?: The NY Times reports this a.m. that the owner of voting machine company Smartmatic "sent scathing letters to the Fox News Channel, Newsmax and OAN demanding that they immediately, forcefully clear his company’s name—and that they retain documents for a planned defamation lawsuit. He has, legal experts say, an unusually strong case." His lawyer claims, “We’ve gotten to this point where there’s so much falsity that is being spread on certain platforms, and you may need an occasion where you send a message, and that’s what punitive damages can do in a case like this.” You can't lose your license because of speech (Stop the Steal, COVID Hoax, Pizzagate), but you may have to sell your license to pay damages. 

When I posted mid-March regarding the chance of losing your license over broadcasting fake news, there were over one hundred dead in the US from COVID-19. The pandemic generating an individual or class action suit against a talk radio station owner on behalf of one person or the +300,000 dead is not so far-fetched now.

Why I Didn’t and Won’t Vote For Trump

I would not trust him to run my business, pay me if I painted his house, be faithful to me in marriage, give me medical advice, or be respectful of my disability. He is not immoral—someone who makes bad moral choices. He is amoral—a person outside the system of morality. He is a pagan who lives for what happens in his own lifespan. He used the Word of God as a political prop. He is a moral idiot, not a stable genius.

The Silk Roads; learning words and expressions

Finishing up the Peter Frankopan epic, The Silk Roads. Especially distressing is the 21st century coverage of the Levant and surrounding neighborhood. The lessons of history are that no one except scholars and autodidacts studies history. You get the occasional Churchill, but for the most part leaders are muddlers who play checkers on a chessboard.

I'm adding "the Levant" to the list of words and expressions that I have had to make an extra effort to learn and glue to the old hippocampus. Other words that I have made an effort to learn over the course of life include palimpsest, quotidian, phlegmatic, mote. I also had had a hard time defining "irony" until I heard a character in a movie define it. "Laconic" was hard until I read it as applied to Coolidge. Sanguine: I can remember the second definition about bloodiness, but I often have to relearn the first definition. Reading William F. Buckley's newspaper column and Gore Vidal's novels and essays improved my sesquipedalian ambitions. 

WGN America News Nation—3 hours of Straight News Every Night

The Nexstar Media Group, owner of WGN Radio in Chicago—and the largest owner of US TV stations—is launching News Nation tonight, September 1, on cable, satellite, streaming, and app (including audio news updates from WGN Radio). The website slogans with “NO BIAS AT ANYTIME” and “It inspires you to think, not how to think.” Rob Nelson, formerly of WABC-TV weekend morning news, is one of the co-anchors. Many questions: Will this be 1010 WINS with pictures? Could ratings success spark a centrist trend that could spill over to talk radio? Will there be enough audience at 8 pm for info over opinion? They can draw from both extremes who have their fill of Rachel or Sean for the evening or from folks who form opinions from facts (as opposed to crafting facts from opinions). It’s a crazy concept, like CNN in 1980.

Mom Diplomacy

My mother stayed neutral when it came to disputes that occurred between any of her four children and their respective spouses. My wife compares her to Switzerland. Mom had a strong identity as a mother and resented any denigration of the office. For example, she hated the character of Ray's mom on tv's Everybody Loves Raymond for many reasons, most obviously her meddling in Ray's family but especially the idea that a mother could favor one child over another. She resented Saddam Hussein for saying that the Gulf War would be the "mother of all wars," and she hated the vulgarity of the expression "mother of all {fill in blank}," which became a meme. She didn't like the expectant mother (with whom she shared a room in the maternity ward) who was disappointed when the baby she delivered was the opposite of the sex she was hoping for. 

As Lincoln said,

As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master.

My mother felt the same way about meddlers. This was summed up by her favorite Family Circus comic (by Bil Keane), which hung on her refrigerator. An old biddy sees the mom with four small children and says, "How do you divide your love among your children?" The mom replies, "I don't. I multiply it!"

A future post will cover specific famous folks my mother could not stand: Frank Sinatra and his song "Something Stupid," Oprah, Nixon (the New Nixon when he became president), Jeannette MacDonald, Alex Trebek (a love/hate thing), Buddy Hackett (when he worked blue), and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. 

Today v. the 1930s: Opportunities

Women today have it pretty good compared to 1930 or 1970. I was watching Mrs. America on FX on Hulu and got to thinking about the frustrations expressed subtly by Mom from as far back as I can remember.
One example involves my first bank account, safely ensconced in the old Hamburg Savings Bank on Fulton Street in Cypress Hills, Brooklyn. In the 1960s, when bank interest was 5% (not a typo), if you left 100 bucks in your account you found 105 bucks (and more, depending on compounding interest daily or monthly) after one year. My mother would bring our bank books to the bank to have the teller run them through the printer and show the interest accrued over the fiscal quarters since the last time it was updated.
The first entry in each of the three books (myself and my two brothers) showed $300. I asked Mom where the money came from. She said that she had cashed in her War Bonds to start the accounts. During World War II, the government sold bonds to finance the war, unlike practices after the war such as tax surcharges or budget increases adding to the federal deficit.
Printed at the top of the first page of the book was her name followed by the words "In Trust For [my name]." I asked her what "In Trust For" meant. She said that it was her money (which was true) and that I could not have my own account until I turned 18. She said many times up until I was 18 and many times thereafter, "You know I could cash in all your accounts and go to Hawaii." You hear this when you're little and it's a joke. As I got older, I realized it was my mother feeling trapped—being smart, wanting more, and having no way to get it.
Flash forward to the 21st c. when she was in her late 90s. I wanted to help her out with her checking account when she was having a harder time balancing the checkbook and just writing out a check. I thought power of attorney was a good idea for me to have. Even better and more practical was a joint account, so advised a bank officer, with her name and my name, allowing me to write her checks for her and conduct any bank business as if it were my own.
So, after 40 years or more there we were, together again on the same bank book.