Pardon Me Miss, But I've Never Done This....

A month from now, assuming I survive (with a capital A), I'll turn seventy-four years old. As if by magic, in recent months, I've gone from a vibrant and engaged biped (at least in my mind) to a crotchety curmudgeon who could give Miniver Cheevy charm lessons. 

I came of age with manual typewriters and rotary-dial teelphones through whaever we're up to now. I had great hopes as ARPANET became the internet, believing that with a powerful means of sharing information, we might, as a species, become more educated and better-informed. I know, "How'd That Work Out?"

I have all the technological tools of the Twenty-First Century, including a couple about whose purpose I am less than clear, though it would appear, based on very recent evidence, that some of us have redefined their function. 

This showed up over the weekend as a message in WhatsApp or Telegram, perhaps both or just as likely neither. 

My evil twin, Skippy, wonders what happened to going door to door selling magazine subscriptions 'to bring in extra funds.' Probably still works, but the pages stick together.
-bill kenny 

Faithful While Faithless

Raised in the faith of my fathers, I know that today, Palm Sunday, begins the most important week in the Christian calendar, even if you've lost your faith as I have done along the way to here and now. 

If I could think hard enough, what follows might be considered a contemplation. I can't, so it isn't. It may not make sense to you; that wasn’t my intent. I needed to hold the world still for one moment to make sense for me. Your mileage may vary in ways neither of us can contemplate.

Karl Glogauer was the wrong man at the right time.

The protagonist in Michael Moorcock's novel, who travels from the future to the time of Christ, Glogauer, instead, meets a profoundly retarded child of Mary who is, in Moorcock's account, most definitely NOT the Son of God. 

Glogauer then assumes the persona of Jesus of Nazareth, based on his recollection and knowledge of the accounts in the Gospels of the New Testament, culminating in his crucifixion to fulfill those accounts, which shaped history to the moment in the future in which he journeyed into the past to complete the story.

Perhaps the most simultaneously unsettling and reassuring aspect of Behold the Man is not the death of someone else in place of the Son of God but its emphasis and reaffirmation of the importance of the belief that He lived at all. 

For you, for whom today is an Ecce Homo experience, my sincere congratulations are tinged with more than just a little jealousy and envy.

Not everyone has the comfort of your beliefs and the reassurance of your faith. Some may not wish to have it, while others who once did are forced to realize again the distance traveled from then to now, involved a bridge of faith that, once abandoned, has been destroyed and can possibly never be rebuilt.

As even Mark reported, help for one's unbelief is not easily obtained, and perhaps the realization that such assistance can only be given, never earned, is part of why pride becomes the greater sin, especially for those with so little reason to be proud. 

It's the shadow of doubt that creates the chink of vulnerability in an armor of faith that condemns a wanderer to know the path but refuses to walk it again.

Sometimes it's the belief, and sometimes, the believer.
-bill kenny   

Say "No" to Rapists and Racists

If you're not outraged at the mess the Pedo President and his cabal have created not only in this country, but throughout the world, you haven't been paying attention. 

Now the US Treasury is going to put his signature on our paper currency, but even if it's on every bill printed for the next three years, it will still have appeared more often in the Epstein Files. 

Wake up and act up. 

The greedheads who are looting our nation and corrupting everything they touch, as well as the red ballcapped gomers who go along hoping to get along, aren't going to go away unless and until we make them.

As a nation, we were the hope of the world. We can be that again. Together.
-bill kenny 

Lafayette, We Are Here (kind of)

The state of the union, in my opinion, is such that sometimes English fails to capture the frustration, confusion, and anger of any given moment. 

Steve Martin once noted the French have a different word for everything, and in this case, it's a whole sentence, courtesy of retired French Army General Nicolas Richoux. It's spot-on.

‘qu’il aille se faire foutre.’

Merci beaucoup. 'Et je vous remercie de votre attention à ce sujet.'
-bill kenny

By the Dawn's Early Light

I am not a big fan of experimentation (I used to be a huge fan of things created through fermentation but that was another lifetime, one of toil and blood, and I make it a rule to not go there anymore) and plod along for the most part with one foot in front of the other in travel and travail from Point A to something like Point B. It fills up the day and makes the time go fast.

For many years, when I worked (actually for multiple decades when I worked), I would have a bowl of Cheerios for breakfast at my work desk. Cheerios at work were my decompression food, I suspect. When I sleep, I cannot recall if I dream, though my wife has told me there are nights (and early mornings) when I shout out and/or talk or get up, and for which I have no explanation because I have no recollection. My dream world is just black. I use the whole going to work and getting used to being there for the next twelve hours part of the day as the Re-entry to Earth part of the program. And the fuel for this is Cheerios.

I knew someone who called them bagel seeds-suspect the Big G folks wouldn't have been too happy about that, but it makes me smile, and I repeated it to myself every morning and cracked myself up. If I had but a million or so folks with my delightful sense of humor (someone had to say it, and it didn't look like you were about to), I could have my own cable news show or podcast-and oh, how we'd all laugh then. 

I ate my at-work Cheerios in the next-to-last of the red plastic bowls we had when we lived in Germany and used for cereal there. Years ago, Sigrid found very nice and (actually) quite pretty replacement bowls, and the red plastic ones went to the land of their ancestors. As the oldest thing remaining in our house, I get VERY nervous when anything is pitched out 'because it's really old, since' You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows,' on that equation.

I always ate my Cheerios without sugar or milk. Actually, and I don't eat a lot of cereals, I NEVER eat dry cereal with anything other than a spoon and my mouth. Why do you think they call it DRY cereal? Besides, what am I supposed to do with the milk? Drop little tiny people in the bowl, so they can be rescued? Perhaps I should get a recording of "Nearer My God to Thee" and use sugar cubes to construct a fake iceberg, then reenact the sinking of the Titanic. 

I used to eat Wheaties, back when Bob Richards was on the cover.  I guess if you had a box with Michael Phelps, using milk would make sense, but for that collector's edition on eBay (I'm assuming with contents), you'd probably have to use the ultra-high temperature stuff that looks like white water. I've never understood how they get the cows to stand still while they heat 'em up, but I suspect they catch them early in the morning.....
-bill kenny

Beat the Drum

The older I am, the better I was, in just about every way imaginable. 

In a few years, I'll be regaling passers-by with tales of my youth from when I was a Cy Young Award-winning pitcher, an astronaut, all while also serving as the President of the United States. But today, you're in luck because my calendar doesn't stretch that far. 

I have waited for this day since about half an hour after the last out of last year's World Series was recorded, and it arrived NOT a moment too soon. Today is the day that whoever you root for starts out in first place in the standings, just like my team, even if we root against one another. 

How can this be? Because today is Major League Baseball's 2026 Opening Day, this is the day Abner Doubleday (historians be damned) has made. Let us be glad and rejoice in it. Play Ball!
-bill kenny

HBD, Larry

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, an American poet, painter, social activist, and co-founder of City Lights Booksellers & Publishers in San Francisco, was born on this date in 1919 in Bronxville, New York. 

Decades before 'fake news' and 'alternative facts' were espoused by amoral, talentless, narcissistic, lying demagogues and their self-serving enablers, he wept for what was to come. 

And now that it's here, it's even worse than imagined.

PITY THE NATION

Pity the nation whose people are sheep
And whose shepherds mislead them

Pity the nation whose leaders are liars
Whose sages are silenced
And whose bigots haunt the airwaves

Pity the nation that raises not its voice
Except to praise conquerors
And acclaim the bully as hero
And aims to rule the world
By force and by torture

Pity the nation that knows
No other language but its own
And no other culture but its own

Pity the nation whose breath is money
And sleeps the sleep of the too well fed

Pity the nation, oh, pity the people
who allow their rights to erode
and their freedoms to be washed away

My country, tears of thee
Sweet land of liberty!

– Lawrence Ferlinghetti (after Khalil Gibran) 

-bill kenny