No Sleep Until the World Series

Major League Baseball's All-Star Game was earlier this week, and it was at least more interesting than the annual (in recent years) National Football League's Pro Bowl (All-Star Flag football) game.  

I'm a Yankees fan (actually a New York baseball fan to include the NY Mets who are having a difficult season to put it mildly) and because my dad was a New York (baseball) Giants fan before they moved to the West Coast with the Brooklyn Dodgers in May of 1957, also a San Francisco Giants fan. 

Mom was a Brooklyn Dodgers fan so in the middle fifties I grew up in a household with two broken-hearted baseball fans as parents. Los Angeles Dodgers are ludicrously in the lead of the National League West Division (I would say 'they should be because they have the biggest payroll in the MLB,' but both the Yankees and Mets aren't too many dollars behind them and don't have the position in the standings they do). 

All professional sports are a conundrum in a way. We, the fans, see the teams as ours, and root passionately for anyone wearing the colors, until they don't (Red Sox fans loved Wade Boggs until he signed with the Yankees and then not so much), 

But the people who own the teams, almost exclusively billionaire white guys, see them as their property to relocate as they see fit and can turn an additional dollar (just in case you thought Horace Stoneham and Walter O'Malley yearned to enjoy the sea breezes of the Pacific Ocean).

I'm a grumpy traditionalist who loathes the designated hitter, the designated runner, the put-a-guy-at second-to-start-the-tenth-inning-if-the-game-goes to extra innings (unless my team wins as a result). The game that was good enough for my father and his father before him (I'm guessing) is more than good enough for me. 

With the exception of umpiring; that can certainly be improved. There's a bit too much personal bias to my taste, so maybe, but only maybe, robot umpires are a step in the right direction for baseball. Play ball!
-bill kenny. 

Time Has Come Today

The days have been getting shorter since the Summer Solstice last month and will continue to do so. both in terms of dawnings and duskings (duskings? Sure, why not) until we reach late December. But since the only constant is change, we may be about to change from falling back this autumn as we've done for decades.    

US Congress takes next step to make daylight saving time permanent. I used the clock resetting stuff every fall to remind myself to swap out the batteries in the smoke alarms, but now that I have the new ones with the ten-year batteries, I'm ambivalent about permanent Daylight Saving Time.

I'll be willing to bet a year or two of stumbling around in the dark, going to school or work in the morning and/or coming home from work and school in cave darkness might cool our ardor for this innovation. Of course, it could do wonders for flashlight sales.
-bill kenny

The World's Only Reliable News

I work hard to gather information from a variety of news sources (not you, NewsMax, and OAN; I said news, and you most certainly aren't). With the world at my fingertips on a keyboard, I'm blessed to live in a moment when information rushes like water through a firehose.

The challenge is sorting the real from the surreal (and at breakfast, the cereal as well). What each of us does with the information to convert it to knowledge has everything to do with us and very little to do with the media operators we encounter.

Thanks to President All the Best Words, we have to navigate through two more, 'Fake News," which can mean anything from a flat-out lie to a story/report with which we disagree. 

Last weekend here in my corner of the Hundred Acre Wood, one of our local newspapers had a front page above the fold story involving a member of the clergy who's been part of the community since before my family and I arrived here in the autumn of 1991 (=a really long time). 

It was not a kind retrospective on the man's career, and reader comments both on the newspaper's website and on their Facebook page were angrily hostile to the article, the writer, and the newspaper, though to my eye, reading them carefully, none of them offered any fact-based counterargument to anything that was in the story.  

All of us who consume news/information are always in danger of building our own siloes (see my comment about the aforementioned NewsMax and OAN). The more sources we sample, hopefully, the broader our perspective becomes. Not that we need to become so open-minded that our brains fall out of our heads, but at one time in this country, we strove to listen to others' points of view. 

Now we just slap them with a label, ANTIFA or MAGA, and move on. Judging saves us a lot of thinking, that's for sure. Red Pill, Blue Pill, if only Nemo and Morpheus had subscribed to the Weekly World News, their lives, and ours, could have been so much better. 
-bill kenny

Work and Other Four Letter Words

This is from seventeen years ago in this very space. I am impressed, even if I say so myself. At the time, I called it:  

Cursing (in) the Darkness, Sitting at the Light

It's early when I go to work, not as early as when my brother Adam heads out, and by the time I do he's gotten most of the chickens fed and the cows milked, which works out well for me since my employment efforts are confined mostly to the mess the back ends make.

At the foot of Washington Street, which is also a state highway whose number I cannot remember, right next to the church with a sign that once advised, "Life is Short, Pray Hard," at the intersection with the Sweeney Bridge, is a traffic signal that captures relationships in and with The Rose City.

The light sits at the junction of a "T". Those coming down the hill who go right AND those coming up the hill who go left, all head in the same direction over the bridge onto what becomes Route 82. 

Maybe that's what happened to Norwich-everyone went for a drive and drove over the one-way bridge and never came back because they can't. The traffic signal is a beacon and often a vexation and, I suspect, not for me alone, a cause for some head-shaking.

No matter the hour, this traffic signal is on duty--no blinking light, red for us and yellow for the other folks. No pause and go, no roll on through and have a nice day. Nope, nada. It works 24/7 every day of the year.

 Once, during a truly awful snowstorm, it was a blinking light (red in both directions-that was very helpful, especially for those struggling to get up the hill), but only that one snowstorm. 

I wasn't sure what to make of the state snow plows NOT heeding the red blinking light as they blew right on through it, so I decided I imagined it (I'll bet you didn't know there's a difference between city snow and state snow). 

Again, as always, yesterday morning, the traffic signal was red when I reached it. It's not on a sensor, and if it's on a timer, it's more of a calendar than a clock, based on my experience. My red signal lasted five and a half minutes at five fourteen in the morning (Yes, my life is so empty that I timed it. In fairness, it's NOT always that long, so add consistency to the list of quirks.).

The part I find funny is that at the time of day I'm there, it's not unusual to NOT see another vehicle for the entire time I'm at the light. Yesterday was a bit weird as the walk/don't walk signal came on, and there were NO pedestrians. 

Eventually (of course), the signal changed; otherwise I'd be trying to type this on a cell phone (and be cited for violating CT's hands-free law). I had f-i-f-t-e-e-n seconds of green light (that amount of time is a constant; go figure). I've driven the street at all times of the day so I have to wonder why, at oh-bright-early, it can't be blinking. 

I'm counting on, eventually, the bulb(s) in the signal, mine (red) and the oncoming (green), just burning out, and motorists can then drive happily ever after or until they reach the next intersection at the Laurel Hill Bridge.
-bill kenny

Play 'Free Bird!'

Just kidding. Don't you dare.

That song and a handful of others on a list that expands and contracts based on who is doing the listing are among those not to be played on a bar's jukebox, under any circumstances. (And it is a rather impressive list, is it not?)

Not sure how this song came to be, but I know it should never be on a banned list.
-bill kenny

Aller Guten Dinge Sind Drei

A recent political passing on the national stage reminded me of an old German expression that translates as 'all good things come in threes,' and leads me to wonder who's next?

Do you suppose Kalshi has a list and odds? Wanna bet?  

Gamble if you want to win.
-bill kenny

I Watch the Patchwork Farms

This is the hardest part of the season for me. The promise of the endless summer I savored in June has been replaced by a sinking feeling that I've missed out yet again, even though I'm not really sure what, exactly, I've missed. The days are still very often hot, but the light fades faster than it did three weeks ago, and there's something in the air, different and yet familiar.

In years past, this was the time of year when my wife and I would be organizing one or the other (or both) children for the arriving, too-fast-and-too-soon school year (actually, my wife did all the organizing, and the school supplies were assembled despite my assistance). This not-summer much longer but not-yet autumn resonates beyond those of us with school-age children.

That the world beyond my doorstep is in shambles and chaos is not helping me manage the malaise that's become my constant companion for reasons I cannot fully understand. We have lived in our house, on our street, in our neighborhood, and in our city for nearly thirty-five years. I don't think the fatigue I'm feeling in terms of 'same shirt, different day' is a result of any of that, but what's harder to sort out is what to do about it.

You may have had it happen to you as well-you look up and you're not where you used to be or where you want to be, and have no idea how you got to where you are or what to do next. I used to tease my wife back when it was just she and me, as I loaded us into the VW Käfer and just drove. After all, when you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there. Eventually, we were always home and dry, more or less.

I've been around this juke joint for a not inconsiderable number of years, somewhat to my surprise and to the abject chagrin and dismay of more than a few people whom I won't dignify by naming, though they know who they are. I'm thinking that maybe I'm just momentarily becalmed and that in the next moment, or maybe the one after that, the wind will fill my sails and we'll be off again, racing to the horizon and beyond.

I'm starting to enjoy the sunrises more than I ever have and to take the sunsets as personal affronts when the days end. I can figure out how and when the night creeps in on a cat's feet, but I cannot stop or slow it. Hoping today's events can fulfill this morning's promise, just as I did yesterday, and hope to as well on the morrow.

-bill kenny