Not Dead

In that I don't have fotos specific to today's topics, I show some pix of the Newark Public Library from February of last year, plus a foto of a flyer I received in the mail Saturday about this year's Black History Month programs. NPL is a place filled with a jumble of information, ideas, and images that librarians have somehow reduced to a semblance of order. The Dewey Decimal System goes only so far, tho, and there are many visual materials on the walls and in display cases, all within a magnificent building in a great location.

Gaetano complained by email yesterday about my not having posted anything here since the 15th, and asked: "Are you Dead?" I replied, over multiple emails:

I'm in semi-hibernation.... I have done some drafting, but the mood has not struck me to finalize things. This week I'll be more active, because there are ART events on the 26th and 27th. I'm sure you look forward to my art mentions. [Gaetano complains about my spending too much time on 'artsy-fartsy' matters.] * * *

Another problem is that some of the materials I have are lengthy, or too short. Or I don't have pix. For instance, last Wednesday, Wendy Williams had Queen Latifah on her show, and they spoke about how far they go back, and that they are both from "Jersey". Wendy asked Dana (Owens, QL's real name) how long it's been since she was back in Newark, and QL said Christmas. She hesitated a moment, as tho her family is not really in Newark proper anymore, but that could mean they were in 'Greater Newark' -- Irvington or the Oranges or something.

Most of the text in this flyer is probably not readable at this resolution, but you can find a complete listing of this year's Black History programs at the Library's website.

To make a longer post, I want to bring in the discussion of jury service, mine and your experiences. Because when I was there, the orientation mentioned that Wendy Williams served a few weeks earlier. I think she lives in Verona now, tho she is originally from Ocean Township, near where my grandmother lived for decades, and then others lived for several years. I have fotos from the parking structure (Veterans Courthouse garage) and of the Courthouse entrance that I have not yet used. But putting all these things together might make the post too long and complicated. So I either have an item that is too short, with no fotos, or too long, with fotos.
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I have some things to talk about in connection with a conversation I had with an elderly black gent (about my age, that is to say) who lives in Irvington and pays more than twice my property tax on a lot about the same size. He also bought into that con of buying insurance for the water pipe between the curb and house, which I wanted to warn people not to waste money on.
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Then there are several education-related issues I could draw together, such as a course being offered on why Newark schools have not been returned to local control despite improvement in test scores; the pointlessness of school advisory board elections in any form; nonpartisan elections without statements of attitudes; etc. I have lots of pix for that discussion, but unless I break it into several parts -- which I suppose I could do -- it will go much too long.

That made Gaetano think of this:

I went to a lecture the other day at One Day University and a famous Prof. Anne Nelson from Columbia talked for an hour on several topics of Journalism and Print -v- On-line Media and pros/cons of both. She mentioned how one famous report -- I forget now -- had to cut its articles from 800 words to 200 words as they were not being read, and showed scans of where people's eyes focused on-screen when reading articles and they are in the shape of an F pattern so lots of words get lost! Interesting stuff.

Centennial Hall, where the opening reception for Black History Month, "Langston, We Love You Madly!", will be held Wednesday, February 1st, from 6-8pm.

I then further remarked:

One reason I use a lot of fotos, [and try to place] about one per screen, is to keep people interested in reading on. To the extent the fotos are worthy in themselves, people get some value from the pix if not from the text.

Also yesterday I got an email from someone I hadn't heard from in a long time, Dan C. of NYC, asking "What kill[ed] the Daily Newarker"? I replied:

I don't know why The Daily Newarker went out of existence. It was never really daily, but you'd think that a GROUP of people would be able to maintain a website. I've been pressed by other matters in the past week -- and it's been cold, so I am semi-hibernating -- so haven't updated my own blog, tho I have drafted some things that I might finalize [for Monday]. But I am one person. You'd think that there would be enuf interest and energy in a small group to keep The Daily Newarker going.

This and the next three fotos show portions of the James Brown African American Room.

I've been distracted by financial matters, reorganizing some things in my house (which has produced problems remembering where things are now!), posting to my political blog about topics raised in this primary season, thinking about repairs necessitated by water damage to my house (I think there may be some home-repair programs I, being "elderly", can qualify for, but to find them, I need to do some research, which takes away from other matters), drafting language and adding to appendixes for a book I am gradually writing about spelling reform, etc. There's only one of me, and I tend to lose focus since I have so many things to address. It all merges together, in stream-of-consciousness fashion, like so:

Wendy Williams and Queen Latifah; Wendy was raised in Ocean Township, near West Allenhurst, where my grandmother lived and then my father, one brother and one sister, and mother (my parents were then separated but my mother moved into a big house my brother massively enlarged to accommodate everyone, to help with my father in his last months of terminal cancer). I think Dad was born at home and died at home — different homes, in adjoining states. He used to like us to drive him to Manasquan Inlet to watch the boats coming and going, and the seagulls flying overhead. Ocean Township doesn't actually touch the ocean. Newark does, tho we don't generally think of Newark Bay as an arm of the Atlantic Ocean. We have seagulls as far as Bergen Street, at least. Last nite on The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show on Antenna TV, Harry Von Zell offered a joke about gulls flying over someone, and George cut him off with the punchline about how could he see at that distance if they were gulls or boys. Queen Latifah was born in Newark but raised in East Orange, and has lived in Colts Neck (tho I don't know where she presently resides), which adjoins Middletown Township to the north only a few miles from where I lived during high school. Now my high-school class (MTHS Class of '62) is planning its 50th Year Reunion, and I'm helping a tiny bit. Wendy lives in the Newark Vicinage and did jury service in Newark. Gaetano and I were, separately, also called. I liked talking to a guy from Irvington, and should discuss the issues that conversation raised, and things I think should be done differently as regards jury service in Essex County.

Speaking of dead, one of last nite's episodes of Too Close for Comfort on Antenna TV (channel 11-4) concerned the main character, "Henry Rush", turning morbid after his father died, and realizing that he has very few current friends. Who will give the eulogy at his own funeral service? Ted Knight, the actor who played "Henry Rush", was actually dying at the time, and succumbed at age 62. I'm 67. Will there be a memorial service for me when I (finally) go? Who would organize it? My family is scattered over several states, and some of my friends have died. Most older people have very few "friends", and fewer as years go by and they start to die. Most people make their closest friends early in life, in high school, college, or the military (in the case of "Henry Rush"). They move away, you lose touch. Antenna TV has lots of "classic" TV, and just about everybody you see in those shows has died. Last nite, Ted Knight appeared in a bit part in an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents on the same channel an hour or so after the morbid episode of Too Close for Comfort.

I should add to my gay blog more often. Should I also start a spelling-reform blog? Would I have time? Energy? I have kept up my "Simpler Spelling Word of the Day" website for 7½ years, starting June 1st, 2004 (2,792  days); my political blog even longer, tho fewer entries (1,163 posts, starting April 15, 2004), and my Newark blog for almost as long as my polblog (1,644 posts, starting May 11, 2004). But I've been very lax about adding to my gay blog (only 61 posts since August 24, 2005), since there is still so much wrong with the gay world and gay media that addressing all the changes that need to be made is discouraging.

This is the James Brown for whom that room is named, not the famed soul singer, nor the Paterson artist who has exhibited in Newark and has at least one large painting in the Newark Museum a few blocks away.

Maybe I'd be better off just using most of my 'spare' time (that is, apart from my work for this blog), working on my spelling-reform book (probably to be published in Kindle form) and its many appendixes, one of which is to be the 40,000 most common words in English, respelled phonetically. And I should do that at the same time as I create a Listener's Wordfinder that shows all the accepted pronunciations for those 40,000 words, which can be as many as 6 for the 5-letter word "atoll". Maybe I can get help with some of my projects, such as making a really useful website from my skeletal TourismNewark.org website and spelling out all these different pronunciations. That reminds me of my project, "English Everywhere", which would send out American college and even high-school students for a year or more abroad, during which they would create the texts for English street signs, business signs, plaques in museums, etc., so that travelers from all over the world could travel more comfortably and understand more of what they see.

I saw a teaser on one of the evening news shows about people who volunteer to help with intellectual projects, but I can't remember which network it was (since I switch between the evening newscasts, in English and Spanish, during commercials or when a given segment doesn't interest me), to see if it would be of help to me, nor do I know what search term to type to find that story on the network-news websites. Getting back to Antenna TV, why does the opening of Maude show the drive up the West Side Highway in NYC and across the GWB to NJ, when the Findlays are supposed to live in Tuckahoe, which is in Westchester County, on the east side of the Hudson? And what about the horrible words of the opening theme, "Joan of Arc[,] with the Lord to guide her[,] She was a sister who really cooked"? Why was there no outrage nor controversy about saying of a woman who was burned at the stake that she "really cooked"?

And on, and on, and on. One thing leads to another and another and yet another. What I separate into different projects and blogs starts as one long interconnected internal conversation. I try to do written To Do lists and topic lists, in tables I can sort on various fields, but it's hard for me to separate things that seem to me linked, and to prioritize which I should deal with when. How do I divide a long discussion of school issues? Do I address all of them in the same week or spread them over two or three weeks?

On June 27th, I made a list of 27 topics for this blog. 13 (and a fraction of those topics) remain unaddressed. And that doesn't speak to other topics that have arisen since then. I created a table of topics and where fotos I might use in connection with them are stored on my computer, but I haven't updated that in a couple of months. I have a separate table, also not updated recently, of fotos I need to take. Then there is the issue of whether to backfill as I find the time, focus, and energy to produce blogposts, or just leave the gaps in the past and march only into the future.

Now you have an idea of the jumble of things I deal with. It doesn't help that I have no regular sleep cycle, but can wake up at 7am one day and 7pm another. Dismal gray days make me want to stay in bed, since the desk in my home office faces windows out onto the weather, and the sky is a very big part of the view in Newark. When I was living in Manhattan, the sky was hemmed in and small. But here, it's a large part of the view, so when the sun is shining, my view is glorious. When we have a stretch of dismal, short gray days, followed by long nites, I can get a little dismal myself. (My brother Alan moved to Las Vegas, and is surrounded by brite sunshine almost every day. He says it's the best move he ever made.)

On any given day, even with coffee and hot chocolate to jazz me with caffeine, I can never get done more than a small portion of that day's To-Do List. And it doesn't help that I'm 67 years old, so my ambitions exceed my energy. I might still work 12 hours on the computer for my various projects, and make meals, feed the cats, and do a little housework on one day, but the next day I might work only 4 hours on the computer, and that's nowhere near enuf to make a significant dent in what I have to do.
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It's little short of amazing to me that I ever do manage to stick to one topic and get anything done at all.

Downtown Newark needs more residents to enjoy the Library at their leisure, to wander the halls and read the plaques in the display cases. The skyscraper beyond the Library, above, is supposed to be turned, eventually, into residences for married Rutgers students. When is that conversion going to begin?