Be It Resolved...

For the New Year, the group shares a memory of Jimmy Carter, welcomes some classics into a new year of public domain status, mulls over New Year’s resolutions, and Rob remembers his Scrabble® matches with his mom, with a shout out to Nigel Richards (New Zealand).

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Transcript

JIM (voice-over): It’s a brand new year, 2025, straight out of the box, and so we gathered for what we had planned to be a chat about New Year’s resolutions. Do we make them? Do we keep them? Are we going to give it another try this year? As we were making our way, however, we ran into a couple of scenic overlooks and quite a few detours that made the journey somewhat serendipitous. Here’s a snippet from Jan to give you a preview of where we went.

JAN: “If I remove myself from your life over politics, it is not because we disagree. It is because your values and beliefs are a threat to the existence of people I love.”

JIM (voice-over): Yesterday, Vice President Kamala Harris presided over the certification of the 2024 election without incident, signaling a peaceful transfer of power that we as a nation have accomplished 46 times out of 47 attempts. Here now is some happy, upbeat music, and then a memory of someone recently in the news.

[Music]

JIM: On the old show, “What’s My Line?” you would come in, sign your name on a chalkboard, sit down, they would show the audience who you are, and then the panel would start to ask questions and try to figure it out.

ROB: Right.

JIM: Sometimes they’d have a celebrity guest and they would come in, sign in, but the panel would all be blindfolded. Right?

ROB: Ah, yes.

JIM: This person walked in, there were no blindfolds, and he just puts an X or the signature and then they start asking him questions, and this and that. You know, “Do you provide some sort of a service?” “Is this” - Arlene Francis - “Is this service for women?” He says, “Oh yes, but not nearly enough.” Finally, they realize he’s in government service and it’s Jimmy Carter, and of course that would have come up on the YouTube feed recently because it’s Jimmy Carter and no one knew his face. So, this was I guess before he was president.

In 1976 election, just before election night, dad’s high school band played for Gerald Ford, and then Gerald Ford lost that election to Jimmy Carter. Then in 1980, dad’s band played for Jimmy Carter…

JAN: That’s correct.

JIM: …and Jimmy Carter lost that election. Then I told dad in 1984, “Whatever you can do, get that band to wherever Reagan is and play for him.”

JAN: Yes.

JIM: I’m gonna name some books and see if you can tell me what these might have in common. Okay?

JAN: Okay.

JIM: William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury. Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own. John Steinbeck, Cup of Gold, which was his first novel.

JAN: I never read that one.

JIM: Anything ring a bell yet?

JAN: Well, they’re all American.

JIM: Okay, all right. Here’s something else. The first Marx Brothers feature film called The Cocoanuts. A cartoon from Disney Studios called The Skeleton Dance.

ROB: Are they all banned?

JIM: No. That’s a very good guess. Musical compositions, Singing in the Rain, Ain’t Misbehavin’, An American in Paris, Bolero by Maurice Ravel. Any ideas of what those all have in common?

DEE: Paris?

JIM: No, I’ll give you a hint. They were all released in 1929.

DEE & JAN: Oh.

JAN: Well, that’s foreboding. Okay.

JIM: Which is just over 95 years ago.

ROB: The crash?

JIM: That’s pretty good. No, January 1st is known as Public Domain Day.

JAN & ROB: Oh.

DEE: I was gonna say they would be public domain today.

JAN: They’re public domain.

JIM: I know, we are all - That was - That’s the next thing everyone is gonna say. These works are now in the public domain.

JAN: Tip of my tongue.

JIM: Mickey Mouse last year famously entered the public domain with his Steamboat Willie version, but not other versions. Now, he comes in with his first talking appearance in The Karnival Kid. That’s now available. So, that means you can use it any way you want. So, A Farewell to Arms, you can rewrite it now.

ROB: The image of Popeye, too.

JAN: Popeye is... 

JIM: The first Popeye. The pre-spinach Popeye. Yeah.

JAN: Public domain. Many people don’t know what that means, I found out.

DEE: Really?

JIM: What does it mean?

DEE: We educated our music students on public domain.

JAN: Yeah.

JIM: Well, we did. It was actually in the…

DEE: Curriculum.

JIM: …Sunshine State Standards for elementary school - does it happen in, also in High School?

DEE: Yes.

JIM: - where we’d have to talk about copyright and what that means. And basically, in elementary school, that’s not going to land very well, but you have to talk about that things are not free. Just because you can copy it doesn’t mean that it’s right to copy it. So, we would have a little lesson about that. But what is public domain? What would a research librarian explain to someone coming in who wanted to Xerox anything they could find in the library? What would you say is public domain?

JAN: It is copyable. It is past its copyright age. What’s kind of cool is there’s an online collection of books that are public domain called Project Gutenberg, and it’s a source that you can go to to read and download all kinds of materials to any device.

JIM: It doesn’t cover everything that has been created with that since then.

JAN: Right.

JIM: For instance, there’s the song “Singin’ in the Rain,” but that doesn’t mean you can copy the movie. But, public domain day. 

ROB: What’s the time for copyright? Is it set by the author or is it just?

DEE: No, it’s just..

JAN: No; it’s set by Congress.

ROB: Oh.

JIM: It’s ninety - like a publication - it’s ninety-five years after that. A sound recording, it has to be - like, the sound recordings that are available this January 1st had to be 1924 or before. So, January 1st is often the time where people will make New Year’s resolutions and I’m going to just kind of canvas the table here and see if we’ve made any New Year’s resolutions this year ever. How do you feel about them? Have you made any resolutions this year, Dee?

DEE: Not really.

JIM: Okay, Jan?

JAN: [laughing] She has more to say.

JIM: Oh, I’m sorry.

DEE: Although…

JIM: Somehow I didn’t read that.

ROB: Although.

DEE: It isn’t a resolution. It’s - I want to get more regular being on my treadmill, and I’m going to be more conscious of what I’m eating, what I’m intaking. I’m going to - and I’m going to try and cut out as much caffeine as possible.

JIM: Now, you see, when you and I talk about this, you say, “I don’t like to make resolutions because then I set myself up for failure,” and it’s always like, “What - look what I didn’t do.” But if a resolution is simply, like, a brand new year goal-setting thing, you set goals for yourself all the time. I don’t see you failing at them.

JAN: I know what you mean though

DEE: Yeah.

JAN: If there are people that say, “I’m going to lose 50 pounds,” if you don’t make the 50 pounds, but you make 40, do you fail or something?

DEE: Right, yeah.

JAN: So, that’s what’s kind of - those are difficult for me and they don’t last for most people.

DEE: Yeah.

JIM: So, you’ve got some wellness that you’re attending to.

DEE: Yes. I mean, I’ve done it before and I blame COVID.

JIM: I remember what triggered it. You went to the doctor and the doctor said your cholesterol is a little bit off and you decided, “I’m not going to go into a medication thing. I’m going to take care of this,” and you became a jogger.

DEE: Mm-Hmm.

JIM : And you’d put in a good four miles…

DEE: …miles a day.

JIM: You worked up to that and you stuck with it, and then COVID sort of closed us down, and that’s when we get the treadmill in the house so we can do that. So, all right, that’s good. Jan, do you do resolutions? Are you a resolution type person?

JAN: No. I’m more like Dee. I’m going to say, “I want to do more of this. I want to do less of this,” and, yeah, they’re not so specific. I know there are some people that say if they’re not measurable, maybe they’re not really goals, but to me, it’s a mindset. So, I’m going with that, and uh...

JIM: So, when you look at this coming year, okay, you’ve got travel things you want to attend to, you’ve got things around the house you want to attend to, you’ve got health things you want to attend to, where are you thinking, “Ah, my new year, I know I’m going to...”

JAN: This is a little bit deep, but a lot of what I am kind of setting my mind toward goes back to the election, and what happened, and how my perspective on the values I thought would hold has changed. So, to me, where I’m in a different country now than I was, and how am I going to respond and keep my sanity and um, have a voice.

JIM: People talk about leaving the country. “I didn’t leave the country. The country left me.”

JAN: Well, it’s kind of like that. I just will say, I never expected the things that worked in this campaign to work. I have a shirt that says Facts Matter. It comes from... It’s an NPR shirt. And I’ve lived that... My whole kind of existence has been based on “facts matter,” as a librarian, as all those things. And I’ve come to realize that they don’t as much as I thought they did. And so now what do I do with that information? And I’ve had to reevaluate many things, how I talk about things, and how I think about things, knowing that facts don’t change minds. So.

DEE: No, society is dumbed down. It is. It is not intellectually competent. I mean, you have a society that is into reality TV. What is it? Housewives?

JAN: Conspiracy theories. All of that.

DEE: That’s all they care about watching. They’re not interested in intellectual thought. And so they are trained to want to say, “Oh, I want to be entertained.” And I’m going to say it, the society and voters are stupid.

ROB: There’s a great line in the newsroom. One of them is talking to the lawyer and saying, “You know what it says on the box of an iron? It says, ’Do not iron clothes while wearing them.’” And then he says, “Do we really have to slow down for these people?”

DEE: Yes.

ROB: And that’s how I feel, too. I mean, I’ve got to the point where stupid, I don’t have time for stupid.

DEE: No.

ROB: Now.

JAN: Yes, Mr. McMahon?

ROB: I don’t have really a resolution, but I know I need to be more patient. Somebody told me that and she will remain nameless, but I have to work on my patience. At the same time, I have to think, “Do I really have to slow down for these people? Do I?” I mean, my patience with stupid - do I have to be patient with stupid? That’s my question.

DEE: No.

JAN: Just to be clear, are you putting me in the stupid category?

ROB: No. No, no, no, no. But I know what you’re talking about, but it’s just all around me. I see it and it’s like, why do I have to be okay with this? Boy, this took a turn, didn’t it?

JAN: [laughter] How we doin’? Okay.

ROB: Jim, do you have...

JIM: There’s a lot to say there. Jan’s going to say something more right now.

JAN: Just quickly, I’m going to say there’s a nerve touched here because we’ve all spent a lot of time, I would say, all of us, trying to understand other people’s positions. And there’s a point at which there is no understanding anymore. And so now what do we do with it? So that’s what causes this angst right now. So, okay, Jim, what’s your resolution?

[Laughter]

JIM: I was called in a conundrum. I wanted to declutter my life. I had too many New Year’s resolutions that I was trying to hold on to - breaking. So, I made a New Year’s resolution one year until I had broken all my New Year’s resolutions, I was not going to make a new one. And then, logically, I was stuck because if I accomplished that, then I didn’t break the one that I had just made.

JAN: Oh, good one, Jim.

JIM: Right? So, that’s the problem. It was a bit of a Russell’s paradox, but I don’t want to get into that part. I noticed that things get cluttered over time. If I were to walk into my garage right now, I know, that because we had to prepare our house quickly for a lot of guests and a lot of things that were stored in all these other bedrooms ended up in the garage, all the Christmas decoration boxes ended up in the garage, and if you were to walk into the garage right now, you would say, “The only solution is to just burn this place down and build a new one and start again.” And that’s one reaction to it. But the other is, “Well, it was cluttered one piece at a time over time, maybe I can keep things neat every time I leave a room, fix something, pick up the coffee cup I left on the table, take it into the kitchen, put a book away, just do it one thing at a time.” If I look at the whole job that I’d have to do to clean out the garage, it’s overwhelming. And then I would get into the mindset of, “Oh, just throw the whole thing away,” right? But there’s a lot of good stuff out there that I want to keep.

I’ll circle back to the politics thing of, you know, someone came in and said they were going to drain the swamp. Well, that rang with a lot of people. Yeah, no, there are thousands of excellent federal employees working to make our lives better. They’re doing an excellent job, creative job, a job with integrity. And you don’t just say, “Throw - vote them all out.” “Vote them all out” is the thing of, “I don’t know how to fix things. It’s too overwhelming for me.” Well, we do know how to fix things. You just do it a piece at a time, make the job manageable to say, “Wait, I - no one came in and professionally cluttered my house as if it was a puzzle I had to solve.” No, I did it. And I’ll un-clutter it just a piece at a time. Like, you know, we may think that the country has moved so far one way that we don’t recognize it anymore, but it is just one thing at a time.

JAN: Yeah. Here’s the thing. This goes back to something I posted on Facebook in an error. It was an error on my part, but…

JIM: A factual error or a mistake in judgment?

JAN: No, no, a mistake in judgment…

JIM: Okay.

JAN: …because I forgot…

JIM: Because, I know you don’t make factual errors.

JAN: Well, I try not to.

JIM: Okay.

JAN: I try to give people the benefit of the doubt, but… 

JIM: That was the mistake.

JAN: Exactly. There’s a way right now that we can talk about we don’t lose relationships over politics. And there’s a time I would have said that’s true. We work through those differences. I no longer believe that because I think what we’re seeing right now goes a lot deeper than policy differences. These are moral fiber differences…

DEE: Yeah.

JAN: …and I’m going to give credit to Jason Tedford who posted this because it said exactly what I’ve been trying to kind of sort through in my mind. “If I remove myself from your life over politics, it is not because we disagree. It is because your values and beliefs are a threat to the existence of people I love.” Here’s where it connected for me. When I think of - in general - the goal, the direction I want to go in this year, I’m using the baptismal covenant, and we used it on our Christmas card intentionally. It is on my Facebook page intentionally, because I think it speaks to where we’re at. Well, “I will strive for justice and peace and respect the dignity of every human being.” In my opinion, this [incoming] administration does not respect the dignity of every human being. They do the opposite. They denigrate and “other” people. And that’s going to require a response on our part to stand up for people who need our assistance. So to me, this quote spoke to that baptismal covenant. And there may be people with whom I have to sever or step back from, I’ll put it that way, because their policies are actually going to hurt people badly. [music begins] And that’s not just a difference of how we spend our money. That’s a much deeper difference.

[Music]

JIM: I’m going to give you a guy’s name. Rob, you’ll be very interested in this. I want to know if you know this guy’s name. In the way that I know Magnus Carlsen’s name, you might know this guy’s name. Nigel Richards. Do you know who Nigel Richards is?

ROB: It sounds familiar.

JIM: He’s from New Zealand. He holds five English language world titles for Scrabble®.

ROB: Oh!

JIM: The more remarkable thing is, he just won the Spanish language Scrabble® title.

ROB: Oh really?

JAN: That is remarkable.

JIM: And he did it by looking at the whole list of official words for Scrabble® in Spanish and memorizing the list.

DEE: Wow.

ROB: Oh my gosh.

JIM: And I thought that was pretty cool. That was pretty cool. And there were like 25 games you played, er, no, 24 games, and he lost one game. One, 23 of them.

ROB: Wow.

JIM: Okay? And I thought, “Wow, what a great thing for this guy to do.” In 2015, he became the French language Scrabble® world champion…

JAN: Okay, now he’s just annoying.

ROB: Gosh.

JIM: …despite not speaking French, and he repeated that feat in 2018. And he does it by memorizing the things, and then coming in, and he understands the strategy.

ROB: Yeah.

JIM: He knows how - it’s not just do you know the words, but it’s the way the board is laid out…

ROB: Right, right.

JIM: …because you just sent a picture of what was it? You named it.

ROB: Jan named it.

JIM: Kathy McMahon Stewart and 

JAN: Valery Dobney.

ROB: Val Dobney Memorial Scrabble® champion.

JIM: Scrabble® compe-… And who won that game?

JAN: It was Andrew.

ROB: Andrew did.

JIM: Andrew won that one. But you and your mom are famous…

ROB: Yeah.

JIM: …in our circles for…

JAN: The four of us.

JIM: Scrabble® competitions. 

ROB: Oh, we played a lot, yes. Every year when she came down, I mean, “Rob, you want a game.” She’s always eager to play.

JAN: Rob still has the score sheet from all the games they played.

DEE: Aw.

JAN: And they ended with your mom winning.

ROB: Yeah, the last game we played, Mom won, beat me.

JAN: And they didn’t play again.

ROB: And that was just a couple weeks, few weeks before she died.

JIM: Do you remember the first time you beat your mom?

ROB: Yeah. Well, I mean…

JIM: How old would you have been?

ROB: I really didn’t start playing until I was into my 40s. When she first started coming down, that’s when I started to play Scrabble®.

JIM: Oh, okay, so it wasn’t a childhood thing.

DEE: Was she always was Scrabble® player?

ROB: No.

JIM: Oh, okay.

ROB: But she loved Scrabble®.

JAN: What did Dee say again?

DEE: I asked if she was always a Scrabble® player, if it was something she picked up later.

ROB: It’s something that she loved to do. Yeah.

JIM :So there it is, Nigel Richards, the world Scrabble® champion.

ROB: In three languages.

JIM: He’s acknowledged by people that care about these things as perhaps the greatest Scrabble® player ever. And his memory was able to - enabled him to win both the French and the Spanish language versions, though he does not speak either language.

DEE: I bet you he’d lose Russian.

ROB: In competitions, do they get to use a dictionary?

JIM :You mean use a dictionary while you’re playing?

ROB: I mean, we have a Scrabble®, it’s a Scrabble® dictionary.

JIM: But don’t you just use that for challenges?

JAN: No.

ROB: They look up - we look up words. I mean, we check to see. “I got this word. I want to see if it’s actually a word.” And, I don’t know, probably in a competition, that’s not legal.

JIM: No, no, no.

ROB: But that’s the way we do it.

JIM: No, it’s like the Tour de France with training wheels. You know, it’s there’s something.\

ROB: But Russell is constantly looking up. “Is that a word? Is that a word? Is that a word?” Now we’re not looking for words. We’re checking…

DEE: To make sure.

ROB: …if something we have on our board is a word.

JIM: And if your eyes happen to wander around the page a bit…

ROB: No.

JIM: “Where is that word again? Maybe it’s back here. Maybe it’s over here.”

ROB: No, no, no, no.

JIM: “Maybe it starts with this G I can’t get rid of.”

JAN: Oh, gosh.

JIM: Well, that’s it. That was just an odd thing in the news I saw. I thought, “I’m going to ask Rob about this script.”

ROB: Nigel Richards. Now I know.

JIM: Nigel Richards from New Zealand. Wellington. Well, it’s reported from Wellington. The competition was held in Granada, Spain…

ROB: Spain.

JIM: …in November.

JAN: That’s amazing.

[Music]

JIM (voice-over): So a couple of news items, a few resolutions, and some unresolved matters. Next week, we continue making our way with more sightseeing of recent events, and some ideas of how to stay grounded when the ground under our feet begins to shift. Then in upcoming episodes, we’ll cruise down the Rhine, the Main, and the Danube rivers as Jan and Rob and friends recount their recent cruise as marauding Vikings.

Here’s to the new year.

Until next time.

[Music]