Not About the Strait of Hormuz

Getting gas the other evening, I watched a guy with a double-axle pickup truck rail against 'those greedy b'tards' for what he's paying for (I'm assuming) is diesel or high-test. I've never owned a fuel pig, so I don't know what you feed them.

I do know the bed of that truck was so clean you could eat off it, because I looked, which tells me his health insurance doesn't pay for penile enhancement surgery, which is why he bought The Beast in the first place. Pays to advertise.

When I last shopped for a car, I spent more time wondering about the leather seating than I did on the hydrocarbon emissions. Because I'm a bad person? I don't know; are you? Not really, we're just a little mutton-headed and set in our ways. Leather trim, I understand, but breathing air I can't see....not so much.

Look at our coasts, north and south, or east and west. All this offshore drilling, and the press for even more, who is that for? Us or U.S., you choose. If we were being honest with one another (but we lie as often as we blink and in the blink of an eye commit atrocities against one another), we'd eliminate nozzles at gas pumps and replace them with heavy-gauge syringes so we could just mainline the oil, diesel, kerosene, and gasoline, because our appetite for 'the ooze' is practically insatiable.

It's not as public decoration that those platforms and rigs ring around the coastlines or those derricks raping the landscape hammer into the earth in search of fossil fuel. It's cold, hard commerce, my brother and sister, coin of the realm. If it didn't pay, it wouldn't happen. 

It's okay because we tell ourselves we could kick the petrol habit at any time; assuming, of course, we all wake up tomorrow morning and are Amish. How do you bake bread anyway? Yes, I'm mocking them-it's not like they're surfing the Internet and will read this. And if they did, what's going to happen? Are they going to build a barn in my backyard? Don't get your shawl in a bunch, I'm kidding.

But I'm not about this: We all "would prefer" wind, solar, and other alternative energy, unless it costs more than what we're paying now or involves changing (in any way) how we would prefer to live. If it does, well, sorry about the seagulls, those tarballs, and fracking for natural gas and benzene in your drinking water. It is really too bad about those coastal animals in the marshlands who were destroyed, but (what's that expression I love, oh yeah) you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.

So don't worry about the price of gasoline because we're oblivious to its true cost-until the next time we have to send 18 and 19-year-old kids halfway around the world to sit on the lid of some third or fourth-world country whose sole value to the Bastion of Democracy is they have oil. If you look really hard in the mirror you already know what we are-it's all down to agreeing on a price. And picking out who has to pay it.
-bill kenny

Dick the Butcher May Have Had a Point

Our son and his wife have a greater appreciation for Homeowner Associations and the importance of retaining an attorney than I hope I will ever need to have. Is it just me, or is so much of our daily lives somehow entangled with the legal system?

"I'll see you in court," has become the new "Have a Nice Day," and no one (except me) seems to notice or care. 

My youngest brother is a member of the New Jersey judiciary, having spent the earlier part of his life toiling in various aspects of the law as an attorney. I fear more than one of these "7 Truly Bizarre Things People Have Sued Over" sounds horribly familiar.    

Maybe just me, but I think Naruto should have hired one of those lawyers we see on television to file an appeal.
-bill kenny

¡Que tengas un feliz Cinco de Mayo!

Across the USA today, many of our friends and neighbors will celebrate Cinco de Mayo even though many can speak no more Spanish than is used at Chipotle or Taco Bell.

For a lot of us, today is a good reason for a party, and we certainly don't need a second invitation to do that. Except for parts of the American Upper Midwest, the weather should be conducive for frivolity and debauchery (assuming the weather needs to be even remotely pleasant for those of us who will 'observe the holiday').

Battle of Puebla, May 5, 1862

It's too bad we north of the border of Mexico don't have a better grasp of our own and our neighbor's history to more fully appreciate the significance of a holiday on calendars other than our own.

-bill kenny

Ruth Is Stranger than Bridget

In the course of the last decade or more, as hyperventilation and hyperbole joined forces to pass judgment on everything from elementary education through politics at every level of government to life in these occasionally United States, I would, in rare moments, needle drop on Alex Jones' fever dream, Infowars. 

For a long time, all I thought he had was a website, and then, through a former colleague (whom I barely knew when we were stationed in Germany (separate locations)), I found he had a YouTube channel. And as horrified as I was to make that discovery, there are many YouTube channels even more bizarre than Jones'. 

Talk about a waste of technology. His stuff was lunatic fringe for the longest time, and somehow (I never understood how) joined at the crazy with QAnon, which (by itself) put the  "F" in "WTF." That otherwise sane people, almost all only white men, swallowed his bunkum, confounds me, but never really involved me until he weighed in on the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, insisting it was all fake. 

I cannot imagine the pain of losing a child, much less having a loudmouth lout insist that none of what you were experiencing was real, that you and your deceased child were crisis actors. Decency should have dictated that Jones stop, but decency is a lost value, and it took a long, arduous legal battle to shut him down, and bankruptcy to shut him up.

Proving God's sense of irony is alive and well, The Onion successfully bid to acquire Infowars' assets (though, thankfully, not its head a$$hole), though there's still some legal fandangoing yet to happen, which is why all that is available right now is this brilliant send-up of the usual tripe Infowars was notorious for. Enjoy.
-bill kenny

Thoroughly Thoreau

Health issues have hobbled me for a little over a year, forcing me to be nearly homebound, to the polite dismay of my wife, who married me for better or worse nearly forty-nine years ago, but not necessarily three meals a day, every day.

Until about a month ago, I could walk without resting for a little less than one hundred yards and navigated from one perch to another whenever I had a reason or need to walk any distance. I purchased a Rollater and regained my appetite for walking.  

Late last week, with a cerulean blue sky and abundant sunshine, as my local TV meteorologists are fond of saying, I visited one of my favorite places in The Rose of New England, Mohegan Park. It's been a while since I've been there (close to two years or so), but it didn't disappoint. Let me show you.

All we are saying is Give Bees a Chance

1963 Spaulding Pond Dam Flood Memorial

My favorite place

Have a great Sunday!
-bill kenny

Happy Birthday, Kiddo!

Today is our daughter's birthday.

At two days old

As not seen from a drone

   

Who doesn't love a Happy Ending?

Hope it's amazing!
-Love, Dad. 

Lawn Ornaments Riding Carousel Ponies

Tomorrow is the 152nd running of the "Fastest Two Minutes in the Whole Dam World or Something Like It." Yes. It's Kentucky Derby Day, the Race for the Roses, and a hundred cliches that those who follow the Sport of Kings (and I wasn't sure what they meant for quite some time about that growing up) take as seriously as those who follow the World Series, the Super Bowl, or the Stanley Cup take their sports.

The difference being you don't get to ride a teammate around a track in a counter-clockwise direction (I think; and do they change directions in Australia for the obvious reason), which is too bad because I imagine a placekicker riding around on a linebacker would be quite striking visually.

All I know about the event tomorrow is what Dr. Hunter S. Thompson wrote in 1970 when I was barely eighteen years old. It tore my mind in two; your turn. And, you're welcome.
-bill kenny