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

Shovel Down Six Feet

I was born the same year Dwight Eisenhower was elected President. I mention that not to impress you with how old I am ('and look, he can still dress himself!' Well, sort of) but, rather, to help you understand what the dog-eared snapshot of America in my wallet looks like.

We lived in Suburbia. Dad and all the other neighborhood fathers got up early to get to the train station for important jobs in The City. Mom made Dad breakfast and drove him to the station, then came back and got all of us up, fed, and dressed for school. She waited for the school bus with us and was there at the stop when we came home in the afternoon.

In Eisenhower's America, you had air raid siren testing with under-your-desk and look-away-from-the-flash-at-the-window drills, and no one found any of this odd or unusual because we had always done it and assumed we always would.

All the boys after school played war, and all of us were brave soldiers with guns keeping the suburban sprawl backyards safe from all the enemies we saw on nighttime TV shows.

Cold War kid that I was, I lived as a member, small and young, of one of the tribes of America, the middle-class white American tribe. My circle of friends and playmates was so white we glowed in the dark. If I had any after-school playmates of another color, any color, I don't recall them.

I do remember Mrs. Henderson, my third-grade teacher, a tall, black woman who was a dynamo in the classroom, though I had no idea at the time why she worked so hard to prove herself. I figured it out many years later, long after being her student, proving (I guess) that not all learning happens in the classroom.

Growing up, I watched the civil rights movement on television newscasts and in the headlines of our daily newspapers (one in the morning and one that came out in the afternoon), on street corners in downtown and across our playgrounds.

As teenagers, we watched grainy film footage of The War (always capital letters) in Vietnam directly into our living rooms every night at dinner, where it sat on our trays along with dessert. The universe was getting more dangerous, the pace was getting faster, and we were growing to assume our place in a world we were creating as we went along.

We were the children of the Greatest Generation and often had the same sense of history a cat does. It's been decades since I thought about the "Huntley-Brinkley Report" or Wide-Wale bell-bottoms, just two artifacts of a long ago age of arrogant innocence (or ignorant arrogance if you want to be kind), when we took for granted everything we had, never wondering where it came from or how long it might last.

And now, our children impatiently wait for us to relinquish the leadership roles we inherited from their grandparents. It's our turn to wonder what it is we're leaving for them and what they will make of it and where they will go with whatever we have given them.
-bill kenny

The Moon's a Harsh Mistress

My current obsession is learning everything there could ever be to know about Artemis II and its mission to the dark side of the Moon. 

The kid who wanted to grow up to be a baseball player, and the President, and an astronaut cannot get enough information about the effort and accomplishments of  Artemis II. 

The romantic optimist in me wonders, 'If we can do this, what can we not do if we only try?' It's why I have a tough time with taking no for an answer on topics ranging from immigration (from space we all look the same), universal affordable healthcare, living wages for everyone who wants to work, shoes, clothing, and shelter for everyone in need to why can't the Yankees win the World Series (I know, it's early; I fret and like to avoid the rush). Perhaps even get some answers to.....

  

I fell out of her eyes
I fell out of her heart
I fell down on my face
Yes, I did, and I -- I tripped, and I missed my star

I fell and fell alone, I fell alone
The moon's a harsh mistress
And the sky is made of stone
The moon's a harsh mistress
She's hard to call your own.

-bill kenny

Where the Rubber Meets the Road, or Something

Everywhere I turn, the costs of goods and services are escalating, with some (looking at you, gasoline) accelerating (didja see what I did there?). 

I have a defective desk calendar since a certain someone assured all of us that prices would go down on "Day One" of his administration, and here it is, the twenty-eighth day of the fourth month of 2026, and damn, if it still hasn't happened.

I feel for the gas station operators, the grocery store employees, and all those in wholesale and retail. They're being held hostage and can do little about it except to pass along the additional costs to me and mine here in the Land of the Round Doorknobs

Yes, I suppose eggs have come down from their dizzying price heights, but milk, bread, and butter are up, so that breakfast of French Toast is a little more pricey than it used to be. Tell you where else inflation has hit, because of the very-nearly-but-not- quite-a-war-with-Iran, condoms.

Did you think I was making that up? Now you know better. Hit the drugstore and see for yourself. Tell the pharmacist you've been hired as a clown for a child's birthday party and you're looking to save some money on balloon animals. "Thank you for your attention to this matter."
-bill kenny