Picture This

Like almost everyone on the planet (seemingly), I have a smartphone as a cellphone. I have no idea how to make or answer calls should the need arise (and when it does, I look around frantically for someone to help me with the technology, usually to no avail).

It's chock-full of applications to facilitate accomplishing the most amazing of feats, most of which, despite all the years of having a smartphone, remain a complete mystery to me. I can sort of use the calendar, given enough time, and, I'm proud to note, can actually use the search function, though I've had no success when I Google 'how does my smartphone work?' 

Truth to tell, I have the phone for the camera. I have delusions of photography. I'm not really a photographer, though I take a metric butt-ton of pictures just about every place and every time I go and post them all over the place. Volume over quality, I guess.   

Ansel Adams, am I not, and while practice makes perfect, it's actually perfect practice that makes perfect, and that's not happening, at least not in my case. However, I fell across a cheat sheet of sorts, with a title seemingly written for me: "How to take better photos on any smartphone."

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and I don't doubt that; I'm just unclear on the pixel-to-picture exchange rate.
-bill kenny 

"First-Time Callers..."

Today is National Grandparents Day. It was informally observed for decades until the presidency of Jimmy Carter, who established it as the first Sunday after Labor Day, on Sunday, 7 September 1979. 

To be honest, it could have been celebrated since the founding of the Republic, and until VERY recently I would have had no idea. And by 'VERY recently' I mean since the middle of July. My wife and I became first-time grandparents with the birth of a son to our daughter, Michelle, and her husband, Kyle. 

In this Age of Technology, Oma and Opa have been oohing and ahhing over shared videos on Facebook and devouring all the still imagery we can find. Still, tomorrow, albeit very late in the day, as it's a drive and a half to Virginia, we'll get a chance to see our grandchild in the flesh for the first time. 

We'll only be in Virginia for a couple of days, not long enough to see him grow up and go to college by any means, but hopefully, to share moments of his life we'll remember even though he won't. I think the expression is true: "A grandchild fills a space in your heart you never knew was empty."
-bill kenny 

Maria Muldaur Approved

I live close (relatively) to two of the largest native american casnons in the country, and yet unless I'm using gambling space to get from one point to another in the casino, I've never paid any attention to all the means of gambling, sorry, GAMING, that the places offer. I love how we've substituted an M for the B and neutered the word. You can still lose your life savings in one visit to any of the tables or machines, but it sounds so much more refined to say gaming.  

I have to concentrate when I'm watching stuff on ESPN because across the bottom of the screen, more often than not, are odds on a variety of sports and sporting events. No idea what Over/Under means, but I compensate for my lack of knowledge by having an absence of interest. 

All over my TV for weeks was a blitz of commercials for something called Kalshi, which at first I thought was for a cereal I always thought was called Kashi. It wasn't. Imagine my surprise. The commercial with the golfer and the aliens was, I thought, pretty funny. 

In terms of how Kalshi works, not a clue. I must confess I did not know the golfer was a celebrity; the perils of not getting out much anymore. The other golfer/alien commercial is, for my taste, much darker and funnier, though I still don't understand any of what this is all about. 

I do know casino operators are less than thrilled with Kalshi and with its growing-by-leaps-and-bounds popularity. I realize some people will drink anything and others will bet on the opportunity to watch them do it. But while it's not quite a high-roller's dream, I came across a story on a camel marketplace where you can buy, sell, trade, and God knows what else with camels. 

It's not Ali Baba and the forty thieves, but it does make midnight at the oasis an attractive destination. Unless, of course, you're a camel.
-bill kenny 

Understanding the Price of Freedom...

My mind is sometimes a projectionist’s fever dream as cross-generational imagery, historical, hysterical, some mine and some from before my time, coalesce and collide unbidden and unwanted. I can't watch, but I can't look away either.

All of those images pale when recalling street-level video of a brilliantly blue heaven over a lower Manhattan skyline on September 11, 2001, and the startling and sudden appearance of a commercial airliner entering one of the Twin Towers, disappearing inside, forever, while the mind struggles to process what the eyes had seen

Who doesn't have a story about where they were on 9/11?  Today, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of those attacks, the shock and pain are still fresh. It’s as if history stopped at the moment of the first plane impacting. And when time began again, the Age of Innocent Ignorance was over, and that of the Dark Hard World had begun.

The attacks of 9/11 created for every American, regardless of race, creed, politics, sexual persuasion, or color, including those not yet born, a shared memory in which pre 9/11 America becomes almost mythical. 

As often as we speak about the way we were before 9/11, there's a strange quiet when we talk of what has happened in its wake. We talk in abstractions about the Global War on Terror and of the thousands, and tens of thousands, of men and women in uniform deployed around the world in defense of freedoms we too often take for granted here on the home front.

We'll offer thoughts for the victims of 9/11, but to better understand the price of freedom, perhaps we should visit the memorial at Norwich’s Chelsea Parade to remember the selfless service and sacrifice of Norwich residents Jacob Martir-Guiterrez and Keith Heidtman, who died during Operation Iraqi Freedom. 

Their memorial is just a few steps from Norwich Free Academy, where both were students. In such a way, the circle remains unbroken in remembering two young men who ran towards, not from, danger when their nation most needed them because they realized courage is not the absence of fear, but, rather, something more important than fear.

There's a German proverb, "fear makes the wolf bigger than he is." There are already too many wolves in our world without creating more. As Franklin Roosevelt offered to a very different America in a very perilous time, "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself - nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance."

We can honor Jacob Martir-Guiterrez and Keith Heidtman, not just today, on the anniversary of 9/11, but every day, by living fearlessly and helping one another become better people.
-bill kenny

Forever in Their Twenties

Tomorrow is the twenty-fifth anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon (and Shanksville, Pennsylvania). Torrents of words have been, and will be, written about a day burned into the memory of the world. 

These words are not part of that but, rather, a remembrance of a different anniversary also tomorrow, September 11, but in 1982, in Mannheim (West) Germany. Two colleagues, Private First Class Bruce Scott, US Army, and Senior Airman Michael Sutton, US Air Force, were among the forty-six persons who perished when a U. S. Army CH-47C "Chinook" helicopter crashed. 

They were very young, as were we all back then, with their careers and lives before them. I work hard to remember them at this time every year, and the hole that will never heal that their absence left forever in the hearts of their family and friends.

-bill kenny

The Sweep of the Second Hand

There's still bright sunshine and a warmth that lingers into the late afternoon (just not as late as it did a month ago), but the calendar has no illusions: another summer has come and gone.

I'm hoping we have a Second Summer as we've had in recent years, and then a lovely fall that mysteriously and miraculously blends effortlessly into a beautiful New England spring. What's that you say? Winter? 

Sorry, I can't hear you, and there's no point in speaking up or repeating yourself; I still can't won't hear you. I understand the restorative powers and the role each of the seasons plays- I don't choose to enjoy winter. Ever since I didn't get that new sled for Nikolaus Tag years ago, I'm over it now.

Truth to tell, considering the speed with which this summer passed (and yeah, they seem to accelerate as I age) and the number of us who had fervent hopes but few plans for what we were to do with it, perhaps what I should learn is to enjoy the days while they are here. 

Anticipation is great (and perfect on burgers), but savoring the flavor of the moment, while in the moment, may be something us old people who think we're not should cultivate and not try so hard to avoid.
-bill kenny

Carry Your Cup in Your Hand

It's hard to believe the golden summer for which we so yearned while slogging through snow and ice this past winter has, for all intents and purposes, come and gone. 

Those plans for vacations we hoped to enjoy have had their 'best used by' dates disappear before our eyes, and here we are at that place on the calendar where we start the next chapter and turn the page.

If you have children in school, the end of summer is old news. If your children are grown and gone, you're still aware of school as the buses wend their way throughout town while elsewhere groups of youngsters of all ages trip and troop across sidewalks and crosswalks, all in the name of learning.

In the coming days, many of us will hit the stores armed with lists of school supplies and struggle to juggle after-school activities, our jobs, and fractious households that don't run themselves. Soon, too many will be back to managing families the way a horse runs: one footfall at a time, rarely, if ever, looking far enough ahead to see if our path is taking us to where we want to go or, instead, leading us over the proverbial cliff.

Now, and when city budget discussions heat up in April, are really the only two times all year we devote any thought to education, which is unfair to children, teachers, parents, actually, to all of us. 

This is not an advocacy for more money for schools-there isn't any more money but, and it's a cliché, if you think education is expensive, try calculating the cost of ignorance.

You and I went to different high schools together. Our schools were so different from the ones our children/grandchildren attend, they could just as easily be from another planet. Actually, without putting too fine a point on it, it was a very different world, and when you look at us now, the society and culture we inherited from our parents and then look at what we are giving to their grandchildren, the 'stuff in the middle' is our doing.

A glance at a newspaper, a TV screen or a computer monitor is all you need to confirm our world is a dangerous and different place now. Gone or going is the industrial age, being replaced often rudely and without ceremony, by the knowledge age. 

This is typed on a workstation keyboard. Our children live in a world of hand-held digital devices that make desktops and laptops look like Gutenberg's press. Access to information, the how-to, and the what-you-do-with-it-next are the world our children and theirs will live in, and lamentations about how that's not what school was like when we were young help no one.

Stasis in life and in learning is foolish and fatal. Everyone with an interest in education, and that should mean all of us, must recognize that the purpose of education should be to learn the rules of life better than anyone else so that you can change the rules. Always a good thing to remember, especially as the seasons change yet again.
-bill kenny