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I was trying to catch-up on what I did during the rest of April before going on a vacation. Obviously, I didn’t succeed in doing that, so I am writing this now that I am back from my trip.

Celebrity Death Watch: Ed Koren was a cartoonist for The New Yorker. Charles Stanley was a televangelist. Barry Humphries was an Australian comedian, best known for his portrayal of Dame Edna Everage. Robert Forrest-Webb was a British writer who wrote a book with the intriguing title And to My Nephew Albert I Leave the Island What I Won off Fatty Hagan in a Poker Game. Carolyn Bruant Donham accused Emmett Till of whistling at and/or touching her, leading to his lynching. Ralph Humphrey was the drummer for The Mothers of Invention. Pamela Turnure was Jackie Kennedy’s press secretary. Tim Bachman played guitar for Bachman-Turner Overdrive. LeRoy Carhart was one of the few physicians who continued performing late term abortions after the murder of George Tiller. Vincent Stewart directed the Defense Intelligence Agency from 2015-2017. Mike Shannon played for the Saint Louis Cardinals in the 1960’s. Ralph Boston was an Olypmic champion long jumper. Newton Minnow was the FCC Chairman in the early 1960’s and is famous for calling television a vast wasteland. Sean Keane played fiddle for The Chieftains. Don January was a PGA champion golfer. Heather Armstrong was a blogger, known as Dooce, mostly famous for losing her job for blogging about her coworkers and company and then becoming one of the first successful mommy bloggers. Jacklyn Zeman was a soap opera actress.Chris Strachwitz founded Arhoolie Records, a major specialist in roots and folk music.


Rick Riordan was the mayor of Los Angeles from 1993-2001. He was a Republican but he went on to back Democrat Antonio Villarigosa in the 2005 general election. He was also well known for owning the Original Pantry Cafe downtown and Gladstone’s in Malibu.

I hope you don’t need me to tell you about Harry Belafonte. He popularized Calypso music in the United States, but was equally significant as a civil rights activist.

Harold Kushner was a reconstructionist rabbi and is best known for his books, such as When Bad Things Happen to Good People.

Jerry Springer hosted a tabloid television show, as well as having been the mayor of Cincinnati in the late 1970’s.

Gordon Lightfoot was a singer-songwriter. I particularly remember his songs “If You Could Read My Mind” and “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.”

Vida Blue was a pitching phenom for the Oakland A’s in the early 1970’s. I particularly remember him as a nemesis against the Mets in the 1973 World Series.

Storyteller Death Watch: Michael Parent died last week. It wasn’t a big surprise, as he had been dealing with Parkinson’s Disease for some time. I first saw him perform back when I lived in Los Angeles and I found his stories of his French-Canadian heritage warm and enjoyable. He was also a kind and generous man and I have a particularly fond memory of him seeking me out at the National Storytelling Conference in Richmond and his coming to see me tell my Jeopardy story there. I am glad that our mutual friend, Katy, was able to be with him in his final moments.

Non-celebrity Death Watch: I just heard that Faith Klein died on April 11th. I knew her from the Jewish Genealogy Society of Greater Washington, where she managed the genealogy library at Beth El Hebrew Congregation in Alexandria. She was in her late 80’s and led a rich and productive life.

I knew Charles Kunz from FlyerTalk and saw him at numerous events over the past 12 or so years, most recently in February in Tucson. He and I shared several interests besides travel, such as atrocious puns and baseball. I was completely shocked to learn he took his life in mid-April. I thought he seemed happy with his wife and daughter. I guess you never know what demons someone is wrestling.


Angels in America: I saw Angels in America, Part One: Millennium Approaches at Arena Stage on April 21st. For those unfamiliar with this play, it is a chronicle of the early years of the AIDS crisis, told primarily through the eyes of a few people. Louis is a Jewish man whose mother has just been buried and who is in denial about the failing condition of his partner, Prior Walter. Joe Pitt is a Mormon man, married to a woman with a drug problem. He is in denial about his homosexual feelings and works for the closeted politico Roy Cohn. The script is interesting, with more humor than one would expect given the subject matter. The performances were quite good, with Edward Gero as Roy Cohn being particularly notable. I had debated seeing it mostly because I have some issues with Tony Kushner and, indeed, I found the depiction of the rabbi at the funeral at the beginning to be somewhat offensive. But I’m glad I did go.

Hexagon: On April 22nd, I braved a horrible rainstorm to drive to darkest Maryland to see this year’s Hexagon show. This is political satire and their annual show is a long-standing Washington tradition. The theme this year was The Sedition Edition and songs included “Mine is Bigger Than Yours” (with Trump. Biden, Pence, and Santos singing about the size of their piles of classified documents), “Pickleball U.S.A.” (to the tune of “Surfin’ USA, about nude pickleball in Florida), “AARP” (to the tune of “YMCA”) and so on. Some of my favorite jokes included:


  • I got a Life Alert bracelet. It’s set to go off if I get a life.

  • Conservatives want to get rid of taxes. Liberals want to get rid of Texas.

  • Donald Trump was just indicted for tearing off a mattress tag in 1997.

  • What do Winnie the Pooh and Alexander the Great have in common?

    They have the same middle name!

  • 95% of all electric cars ever sold are still on the road. The other 5% made it home.



National Museum of African American History and Culture: On April 23rd I went to the National Museum of African American History and Culture with an old internet friend. Sharon and I didn’t pin down exactly where we knew each other from, other than it would have been somewhere on Usenet back in the late 1980’s. But we did get along just fine in person. She’s a digital nomad these days, largely for political reasons, and was in D.C. for a little while. We only had enough time to cover maybe 80% of the History Galleries, and none of the Culture and Community Galleries. We thought the information was interesting, though it wasn’t particularly well laid out. For example, most of the text was placed low enough to require people to crowd in to read it. And there should have been arrows showing the best flow through the galleries, as we had to backtrack a few times. Still, it was worth a few hours. Afterwards, we met up with her partner and had lunch at the Elephant and Castle.

iPhone Battery Replacement: On April 24th, I got my iPhone battery replaced. It hadn’t been holding a charge well for a while and I thought it best to have that taken care of before going on vacation. It wasn’t too painful, but it took about a half hour longer than they’d said it would. The main thing I wanted to mention was that the tech who worked with me is deaf and he used a phone line which connected him to a sign language interpreter. He signed and she talked to me. Then I talked to her and she signed to him. I thought this was fabulous - a great example of how to accommodate a worker with a disability.

Grimm Keepers: The April discussion was on The Singing Bone. There was a lot to think about. But my main takeaway was that this theme of magical objects (bones or reeds or whatever) revealing a secret, often a murder, is surprisingly common. And I think it might be interesting to play with the idea of an orchestra of such instruments. Yes, I am weird.

NYPL - Yiddish New York in the 1900’s: This was a lecture put on by the New York Public Library. It mostly had to do with the Yiddish Daily Forward and the rent strike of 1917-1918. It was fairly interesting, but a bit too brief.

JGSGW Meeting: On Sunday April 30th, there was a hybrid meeting of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Greater Washington. I would normally have driven to Rockville for it, but the weather was crappy and I had another meeting later that afternoon (kind of a post mortem on the Women’s Storytelling Festival, i.e. what worked and what didn’t and what we want to change for next year). Jennifer Mendelssohn gave an excellent talk on DNA and how to get around some of the problems associated with endogamy. As usual, there is more that I need to find time to work on.


Still to Come: April prompts, my Kentucky Derby cruise, things I’ve done since I got back
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I had a couple of technical frustrations today.

Well, one of them was actually yesterday. For some reason, the NY Times crossword puzzle wouldn’t work correctly on my phone. (I prefer solving on paper, but I end up solving on my phone a lot because it feeds my obsession with keeping track of my solving time statistics.) This seemed to be only the Thursday puzzle. I finally went and did it on my laptop because I wanted to see if there was a more general problem with that puzzle. It worked fine, though solving on the laptop is annoying because the scrolling is not really well-designed with respect to screen size. Anyway, that problem is resolved.

The other problem, which is resolved only as of about 2 minutes ago, involves trying to “buy” mystery hunt swag. I have a code for the item I want, so I just have to pay the shipping. But their shopify site says that credit and debit card payments are not available right now. But it doesn’t offer me any other way to pay. I finally decided to try it from my phone and that worked fine.

I also had some difficulty attempting to book a trip on-line. In that case, I called up the company involved and it turned out that the cruise I was interested in was sold out for this year. (It’s a once a year thing - a steamboat cruise that includes the Kentucky Derby. You may or may not recall that I had been scheduled to do a Road Scholar trip that included the Kentucky Derby in 2020, which was a casualty of the pandemic.) I went ahead and booked their 2023 cruise, because, well, why not? Both a steamboat cruise and the derby are things I’ve wanted to do for a while and by booking this far in advance I got a break on the price. I am normally not a big fan of telephones, but the booking agent I talked to was very helpful and enthusiastic.

Finally, my nextdoor feed continues to be a source of astonishment. This evening there was a post with the title “Breaking News - Serial Killer in Fairfax County.” It had a link to a news story and admonished people to lock their doors. Apparently the poster had not actually READ the news story, which was about a serial killer being captured. And he had killed women he met on-line who agreed to meet him at a motel. If you are dumb enough to meet a stranger at a motel, admonishments to lock your doors aren’t going to help you. (I don’t mean to write off the seriousness of this case. But they’ve got him locked up and the concern is that he many be linked to more than the 4 murders they know about.)
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I looked at previous introduction posts I did for Holidailies and decided they were not particularly interesting. So you’re just going to get what I would normally be writing about and you can figure me out from there.


I have a list of things to do that is longer than your average CVS receipt. About the only productive things I did today were finishing reading the Sunday Washington Post and signing a contract for a storytelling performance. The latter involved a certain amount of wrestling with technology, as I can’t figure out how to get the scanner feature of my multi-function printer to work my Mac. In the end, it didn't matter because I did succeed in figuring out how to sign it electronically. (The major issue there was “writing” in a reasonably straight line on the trackpad.) I could have stuck a paper copy in the mail, but this was, obviously, faster.

Speaking of storytelling, I belong to a discussion group for the Grimm Fairy Tales. It was quite appropriate that the topic for a meeting shortly after Thanksgiving was “Clever Gretel,” which involves a cook and two chickens. That’s actually a story I tell, since it fits in two of my themed folktale shows - one on Fortune, Fools, and Fowl and one on Wise Women and Gutsy Girls. Interestingly, at least three people knew the story primarily from a Danny Kaye recording I had not been familiar with.

Speaking of food, I went out to dinner last night with a couple of friends at Mason Social in Alexandria. The mahi mahi sandwich I got was okay, but nothing really special. I had a drink called an Aviation, which was interesting. It had gin, creme de violate, maraschino liqueur, and lemon. Supposedly this is an old classic that has been revived with the past few years, but it was the first I ever heard of it. By the way I had good metro karma getting to Alexandria but not so much getting home, when I had a 20 minute wait at Rosslyn for the Orange Line.


I had another zoom presentation early this evening which, alas, was rather dull. (It was MIT related and had to do with an Equitable Resiliency Framework. There was a somewhat interesting example about the Seaport District in Boston, but, overall, I didn’t find the presentation exciting. I was happy when it finished and I could go play Codenames with my friends.
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American Community Survey: This is a long form that the U.S. Census Bureau does every year and my address got randomly selected for this year. You answer a lot of nosy questions on-line. They claim it should take 40 minutes to do. Ha! It takes me more than 40 minutes to find my last gas bill and electric bill (the amounts of which they want to know) because I pay those automagically and only look at them a couple of times a year. And isn’t January a silly time to ask about your income last year and how much you got in interest and dividends, given that most documentation of that stuff comes at the very end of January and into February? I also don’t know things like how many units are in my condo complex and when it was built and what my real estate taxes are without doing a lot of searching. Well, I gave it my best guesses, but it was annoying.


Around the Neighborhood – Work Edition: While I was away, more places near work closed. Cosi is the biggest loss, as it had been the closest place to get something to eat without having to go outside. Apparently, another eatery reachable by indoor paths also closed, but I haven’t gone down that way since I’ve been back. The library branch had always been a pop-up, as had one take-out food place. But the key point is that there are fewer and fewer options around.


Around the Neighborhood – Home Edition: On my way to book club last week, I noticed a new Indian grocery store on Route 50. I’ll have to find some time to check it out.


Matchbox: I went out to dinner with flyertalk friends last night at Matchbox in Pentagon City. I got an Aslin Trite (nicely hoppy and slightly herbal beer) and a salad with seared tuna. That was a pretty good meal. But several people got pizzas, which looked extremely good, so I’ll keep that in mind if we go there again. We also had lots of travel-related conversation.


New Work Phone… NOT: They’re doing a hardware refresh and we are supposed to get new iphones. The previous time they did this, they sent out detailed instructions on what to do in advance. This time, they sent a completely useless link, which essentially said that it is okay to back up your photos to the cloud. (I actually back up my iphone photos to google photos, but that is beside the point.)

What I hadn’t realized is that the default for back-ups does not include messages. This is a simple thing to fix, had I but known. Anyway, in the course of trying to transfer my messages from the old phone to the new one, various things went wrong, eventually resulting in the new phone getting bricked. So I will have to go through this whole ordeal again some time next week.


Good Political News: Virginia has ratified the Equal Rights Amendment!


Fun Fact of the Day: The Space Force is prohibited by law from having a band. (Basically, Congress doesn’t want to have to pay Space Saxophonists and Space Trumpeters and so on. Given that my great-uncle did his World War II military service in an Army band in New Jersey, I am particularly amused by this.)
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There’s this meme re: electronics making the rounds. I was about ready to do it, but I realized I could simplify the questions and just write about a few topics.

Cell phones: I knew a couple of people who had them earlier, but I never really saw many cell phones until the late 1990’s. They were more popular in South Africa than they were in the United States. I didn’t really see any reason to be that reachable.

I finally got one (a Kyocera flip phone, pay as you go with Virgin Mobile) in 2007, when I bought my condo. It made moving easier. For a long time, my major use of the cell phone was calling Verizon when my land line was screwed up. (They had messed up hooking up my FIOS and not disconnected a copper wire, so I had all these interference issues until I persuaded them to come out and they fixed it in about 35 seconds.) I still have that pay-as-you-go flip phone.

I do have an iphone from work, which my boss insisted on when I took my current job. I have mixed emotions about it.


Television / video: We did not have cable when I was young. I don’t think cable even existed then. Because I grew up in a suburb of New York, we had a good variety of channels. My father watched the downstairs television and mostly watched major sports. My mother watched the upstairs television and favored game shows, sitcoms, and junk sports (bowling, golf, demolition derby). I watched baseball games and sitcoms.

I should probably mention that we got color TV about when I was 10 or 11. One of our neighbors had color sooner and we used to go across the street to their house specifically to watch Lost in Space.

My parents got a VCR when I was in college. I got one some years later – maybe when I started working? I know that during part of the time I lived in L.A. I rented videos a lot. I still have that VCR and should really see if it still works.

As for DVDs, I’ve never had a dedicated DVD player, but I’ve watched lots of them on a laptop. I still own a fair number of them.


Music: My parents bought LPs. My father brought home a new record – usually a Broadway cast recording or a comedy record – and we’d all listen to it. He graduated from a portable record player, which my brother and I then took over, to what was called a hi-fi.

We also had a reel-to-reel tape recorder. We’d gather around it in the evening and my brother and I would play piano, my Mom would play guitar, and we’d all sing, with my Dad acting as emcee. My grandfather used it a lot, too. But we moved on to cassette recorders. I think my brother and I got our own about when he was getting ready for his bar mitzvah. We had transistor radios, too, and would tape lots of songs off the radio.

I bought a lot of cassette tapes in college and still have many. I also still have a cassette player in my car, because my car is ancient (as am I). I never went in for 8-track tapes, though I am not sure why not. I did eventually migrate to CDs, though I still lave LPs and cassettes and plans to digitize them. I listen to CDs a lot on my stereo, when I’m home. I do also listen to a lot of stuff on youtube and some on itunes. And I listen to either pop music or oldies on the car radio, depending on where I am.

Things with Keyboards: I had an Olivetti portable typewriter I think I got for college. I’d used my mother’s heavier typewriter before that. I never took typing in school, but Mom taught me to type. Dad told me not to let people know I could type or they’d expect me to. I used that typewriter through college and probably part of grad school, though I used computers more in grad school

I had access to computers at school and work, but didn’t get one at home until the late 1980’s. I think it was an IBM 286. I later decided macbooks were less hassle and am on my third of those.

As for printers, I had a dot matrix one first.


Internet: I first got email around 1986 or so. I had already gotten on the internet when a college friend introduced me to usenet and got an account on the notorious gryphon.com, which Greg Laskin started to prove that he could put a PC on the net. (There was a whole big story about us being a company called Trailing Edge Technologies, which was founded to create an aircraft wing without a trailing edge. Since that is impossible, we spent all our time posting to the net. The gryphraff accounted for an astonishing percentage of usenet traffic.)

I started writing Areas of Unrest in 1997, when I was getting ready for my midlife crisis trip (overlanding in Africa). I started using Livejournal in 2007 and Dreamwidth in 2011, I think. I was using Dreamwidth only for backup until the whole crisis over the LJ terms of service pushed a lot of people away. Now, I write stuff on DW and let it cross-post to LJ.

I started using Facebook in 2009. I have never had a twitter account, as I don’t see much point to it. I do look at a few things on twitter from time to time – mostly weather forecasts and locations of food trucks.

I don’t use streaming media much (see above, under music). Well, that isn’t quite true as I do watch movies and TV on Amazon Prime. And I read things on paper.


Summary: I am old and not really an early adapter.
fauxklore: (storyteller doll)
This is one of those catch-up posts. What can I say? I do a lot of stuff.

Celebrity Death Watch: Arthur Anderson was the voice of Lucky the Leprechaun, telling us about cereal being magically delicious. Doris Roberts was a character actress, who I first took notice of when she played a guest role on St. Elsewhere. Ben-Zion Gold was the rabbi at Harvard Hillel during my years at the superior institution up the street.

You don’t need me to tell you about Prince. And you’d be better off asking somebody else about him, anyway, since his music wasn’t really my thing. Billy Paul, who sang "Me and Mrs. Jones," was more to my taste. But the musician whose death I really want to highlight is Papa Wemba. He was a major figure in the world of Afropop, which is very much my thing. If you can listen to his music without dancing, you may want to consult a doctor to make sure you aren't dead yourself.

Made in Space: As I mentioned previously, the theme of this year’s MIT Club of Washington seminar series was space. This talk was not actually part of the series, but many of the same people were there. The speaker was Andrew Rush, the President of Made in Space, which has demonstrated (in a very limited way) additive manufacturing in space. For example, they used a 3-D printer to produce a tool on the International Space Station. Their plans are a lot more ambitious. I grasp the benefit of not needing things to survive the launch environment, but he didn’t address having the manufacturing equipment survive the space environment. For example, what are the impacts to electronics of energetic charged particles? And he didn’t really talk about the economics at all, since certain components (mostly electronics) would need to be stockpiled in the manufacturing facility. Still, it was an interesting talk. And, as a bonus, one of the people there was someone I was very friendly with as an undergrad and hadn’t seen in close to 36 years!

Book Club: The major reason to belong to a book club is to force yourself to read books you might not choose otherwise. This session’s book was Minaret by Leila Aboulela. It was an interesting book, with a somewhat unsatisfying ending. It would have been helpful to know a little more about Sudanese culture – and clothing, as I had to google what a "tobe" is. (It turns out to be more like a sari than like a burka, which is what I had been envisioning. One thing I continue to find amazing is other people’s limited views of the world. That is, except for the Tajik woman in the group. Of course, they probably think my view of the world is weird - e.g. my scale of how much a country is likely to be a basket case based on what colonial power dominated it.

Speaking of the Basket Case Scale: The worst colonialists were the Belgians. It isn’t clear that there’s an adequate sample size, but I wouldn’t want more countries to be as screwed up as the Congo is.

The Dutch were horrible colonialists, but, fortunately, were usually kicked out by the French or British before they could do too much damage. There are, however, no excuses for the basket cases they made of Indonesia and New York City.

Former Portuguese colonies are, in general, doomed to an eternity of civil war. The only mitigation is that they tend to have great music.

Former French colonies are also doomed to be basket cases. On the plus side, the French are sometimes willing to come back in and help them out. And they tend to have good bread and good coffee.

Former English colonies are a mixed bag. They tend to have some level of democratic government, but may have lasting ethnic tensions. Quality of food and music is more variable.

Former German colonies seem to end up with suspiciously long serving leaders, but, again, it isn’t clear if the sample size is adequate to judge. On the plus side, they tend to have good roads.

Surprisingly, former Spanish colonies may be the most functional. Admittedly, the lifetime of a President for Life may be measured in days, but the periods between junta rule are often reasonably free politically.

Innovation Reception: I had an MIT-related reception to go to on Monday night, which was kind of a pain in the neck since, being Passover, I couldn’t eat much of the food. (They did have some raw veggies.) The talk was fairly interesting, with an emphasis on nano-technology. I have to admit to a certain level of skepticism about the emphasis on nano, largely because of my experience with the technology valley of death. That is, the overwhelming majority of technologies fail to make it from research to operations (or, in this case, commercial viability). Academics are always way too optimistic about this, but it affects the riskiness of technology investments.

Pierre Bensusan: My very favorite musician on the planet playing at a place just a couple of miles from my home? Of course, I was going to be there. I’ve seen Pierre perform live numerous times and I continue to be blown away by his guitar virtuosity.

Passover: I have been somewhat unenthusiastic about Passover this year. The only significant cooking achievement was a frittata with asparagus and mushrooms from the farmer’s market. And, frankly, that is as much a shopping achievement as a cooking one.
fauxklore: (storyteller doll)
I bought a tablet. Specifically, the Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 7.0. I have not played with it yet enough to figure out how much I like it. Mostly, I downloaded a few games.

I went with this because I like the 7 inch footprint, the price was good, and (most importantly) it allows adding storage via a micro-SD card. My intention is to use it largely as in-flight entertainment when I have to deal with CO dba UA 737s with their blasted DirecTV or the AA S80s with no entertainment system at all. It will also be useful for checking email while traveling.
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Suppose one has an older television, with only an analog input. And one does not spend money on cable or FIOS television or such because one watches no more than 2 hours of television a week most of the time. (Baseball can be an exception, but that is what sports bars are for.)

Is there any reason why a DVD-R/VCR combo with a built-in digital tuner could not also function as the digital converter box for such a TV? That is, one would leave the TV tuned to channel 3 and always watch through the DVD-R/VCR.

My motivation for asking is that this would take up less room than having a separate convertor box. And I can probably get a good price on the DVD-R/VCR right now with Circuit City closing.

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