Same Shirt, Different Day

When I re-read this now all I can say is I must have been feeling special, really special. At the time I wrote it I called it: 

The Curtain Fell Down

As we were driving back from grocery shopping, my wife, Sigrid, looking out the passenger window at the grey landscape blending seamlessly into a grey horizon where, somewhere overhead, it met an equally grey sky, offered a word in her native tongue, German, to describe it all, trostlos-hopeless. 

This is the toughest time of year for a lot of us, to include folks like me who stare out the window hoping to catch a glimpse of what's next. A number of years ago someone took me on a short helicopter flyover of some of the woodlands and farmlands in this area of Connecticut in the late fall, early winter, and the view from the top seemed to be of another world at times.

I can recall everywhere we went (and you can see a lot of them from the roadways, but there are many, many more as it turns out), seeing rock walls through the forests and brook beds, intersecting at angles and wondering how odd that must have seemed to the indigenous peoples here when European settlers first arrived. 

In comparison, the European landmass was the smallest of the continents, and maybe that's where the assertiveness (if not out and out aggressiveness of its natives) developed as they went out into the big world and marked their territory not only to use but, at times, to use up. 

I drive through lands demarcated by ancient stone walls every day as I travel through the Real World, and none of the creatures I pass in my travels or travails regard them as immutable boundaries or barriers. They are there and nothing more. I would imagine for a Mohegan or a Pequot, thinking of the tribes in this region of Connecticut, watching an early settler struggle to subjugate the earth to farm crops, engaged in back-breaking labor to maneuver the giant stones they unearthed while tilling, to serve as property markers was too amusing to not smile. 

And it's taken us centuries to learn lessons of harmonious, not rapacious, living within a natural order. Reuse and recycle from plunder and leave and to work very hard to not spend too much time calculating what has been lost from lessons left unlearned for too long. Broken Arrow.
-bill kenny

Four Chaplains Are a Timely and Timeless Reminder

We live in an America in 2019 too often divided into red baseball caps and blue waves.

Where finger-pointing has replaced the helping hand and few think of anyone other than themselves. There was a time we weren’t like this.

On February 3, 1943, at the height of World War II, the SS Dorchester, a converted cargo vessel pressed into duty and refitted as a troop transport ship was torpedoed in the early morning hours as the convoy of which it was a part was sailing from Newfoundland, Canada to a port in Southern Greenland.

The ship with 904 troops and civilian crew aboard sank bow first in about twenty minutes. The severe list as the ship sank prevented the launch of some of her lifeboats and the subsequent overcrowding of the remaining lifeboats caused some of those that were launched to capsize, spilling their reluctant and unfortunate passengers into cold North Atlantic waters whose temperatures were barely above freezing.

Because of the circumstances of the ship’s sudden sinking, no distress signals could be sent delaying the start of any rescue attempts. When help did arrive the following day, many who had survived the sinking were floating in their life jackets, dead from hyperthermia. Only 230 men were rescued. The sinking of Dorchester was the largest loss of life of any American convoy during World War II.

Among those who died onboard the ship were four US army chaplains, who helped frightened soldiers board lifeboats, and gave up their own life jackets when the supply ran out. The four, (Methodist minister, Reverend) George Fox, (Reform Rabbi) Alexander Goode, (Roman Catholic priest, Reverend) John Washington, and (Reformed Church in America minister, Reverend) Clark Poling, then joined arms, offered prayers for the living and the dead and sang hymns as the Dorchester sank.

Their deaths serve as an example of courage for us, the living, especially now.

The Peter Gallan American Legion Post 104, on Merchants Avenue in Taftville will conduct a Four Chaplains ceremony this Sunday afternoon at 2 to both honor their selfless sacrifice and celebrate their lives.

Rabbi Julius Rabinowitz, Rabbi of Beth Jacob Synagogue in Norwich, Reverend Scott Schuett, Pastor of Redeemer Lutheran Church in Lebanon, Father Brian Converse, Pastor of Our Lady of Lourdes Roman Catholic Church in Gales Ferry, and Reverend Sara Ofner-Seals, Pastor of the First Congregational Church of New London, each representing the faith of one of the original chaplains, will deliver a benediction, representing the final moments aboard Dorchester. 

Reverend Schuett is the keynote speaker

The attendance at last year's observance I thought was impressive so come early if you hope to have a seat because it's a small and intimate space. The ceremony is thoughtful and thought-provoking and you'll come away with lessons learned about lives truly lived with grace under pressure in a spirit of caring and generosity for others that I fear sometimes is lost in the tumult of today.

Please join us if you can this Sunday afternoon, if not in Taftville then wherever you are to remember their heroic sacrifice. History is the sum of our collective remembrances and these memorials remain our best hope for preserving our past into the future.

-bill kenny

Pour Me a Double of Atmosphere and Hold the Ice

This new year, 2019, that arrived with the usual hopes and high expectations is already almost a month old or will be later this week. How exactly did that happen, and when? Perhaps the good news is if you've been holding off buying a calendar, you should start to see some great prices on them as the deep discounts kick in. That's an economic stimulus we can all get behind.

All government from federal to municipal works only as hard as we, the people who live in our millions of towns and cities across the country, help it work (somebody at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue seemed to have forgotten that for about a month but he's gotten a refresher in civics in recent days). 

Locally, everything from picking up trash as you go for a walk around the block, to testifying at a public hearing on a zoning change or offering yourself as a candidate for an office, each a small step by itself, adds up to a larger way forward. 

I fear we've spent far too many years in this Brave Experiment Called the United States getting much too comfortable referring to others as 'them' so that 'we' will have someone to blame when things go wrong. The danger of finger pointing is three of the fingers point back at yourself. Perhaps if instead of balling out fingers into fist we offer them as a hand up to someone else in need, together we can make where we live better for all of us. 

More facts, less emotion-not quite as catchy as Don't Crush that Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers (and you thought I made that up?) but maybe we really do need something with more utility and less futility. "I'll find repose in new ways/Though I haven't slept in two days. 'Cause cold nostalgia chills me to the bone."
-bill kenny

One of America's Great National Pastimes

In six days it will be impossible to watch Super Bowl LIII and NOT see advertising for erectile dysfunction medication, fast-food, beer, beer and more beer, and political positioning, posturing, and pandering of varied and sundry kinds. 

But here's a commercial CBS, the TV network airing the Super Bowl will not let you see. 

God Lord willin' and the creek don't rise.
-bill kenny

No Single Drop of Rain

Today is the seventy-fourth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. which serves as the cornerstone for today's observance of International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

As a child when my mother's mother told stories of "The War" her generation had fought, she rarely mentioned the death camps-perhaps because we were of Irish ancestry and Roman Catholic religion, perhaps for reasons she never had the time or the opportunity to explain. Europe was far away and there's too often a tendency to suggest it's good to let the past remain the past. Not this time.

I'm her age now and the cautionary tale that the Ha-Shoah should have been does not seem to be a lesson we on the planet have fully learned. There is mindless murder every day in every corner of the globe because of the color of skin, the choice of a God, the shape of an eyelid, always some variation of the fear of The Other.

We are NOT much better here in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave, where our last Presidential campaign and its aftermath generated so many alternative facts (= lies) that many of us could shower for the rest of our lives and still never feel clean as we impersonalized and dehumanized those with whom we are/were in disagreement philosophically and politically, rendering them abstractions and making them easier to hate and then hating them deeply and completely. 

As we keep Slouching towards Bethlehem we've continued our journey along the road to perdition and that, I fear, means we will persist in writing off one another and the damages we do to ourselves as part of the overhead of being on the planet. As if a person's lifetime is worth no more than an arched eyebrow or a shrugged shoulder.

I still haven't purchased or read this book despite vowing to do so but I shall because it's very important, at least to me, that someone bears witness to who we were and how easily the danger and horror of all of that did happen and can happen again. Growing faint in the face of evil is to do nothing and doing nothing cannot be allowed especially when each of us, worldwide, knows that silence is consent and the first chapter in the horror story.

About a minute and a half into this trailer, Keri Lynn (spelling?) explains why she became involved in the Paper Clips Project. I suspect she's long since graduated from high school by now and her place has been taken by other bright and shiny young people who, if we're lucky, will not need to build rafts to save us from the flood of our own hatred but, instead, bridges that allow connections despite our differences.
-bill kenny

Younger than Yesterday

I forgot all about this from nine years ago. I was having a good time. I called it:

Like Listening to Golf on the Radio

Yesterday afternoon was a family outing, of sorts, for us. My daughter, whose accomplishing what I think is her last semester as a senior at Eastern Connecticut State University, has moved home from the dorm life of recent years for the final slog. 

Her full-time return to our hearth and home hasn't changed the Bonnie and Clyde lifestyle of her parents, even if her father now moves and reacts more like Clyde's dog than Clyde himself. She does give my wife a Thelma for her Louise and so it goes.

Anyway, the three of us spent the afternoon at a home show. You've seen the ads for these things on your local cable system, where all the folks who have goods and services for home improvement and remodeling cluster in one location designed to pitch their products not at homeowners or home dwellers like you and me, but the hundreds and thousands of small businesses from whom the former purchase expansions and improvements.

Not surprisingly, in an economy where General Motors has had to let a few auto manufacturing divisions go, times have been tough and money tight.

This isn't the first year we've gone to this home show. It's local and we have tickets from my son, Patrick, who works for a company that, like the other vendors, rents space to set up a booth to pitch its product to potential customers. 

That the business is cell phones took me back the first time we went until I realized how ubiquitous cell phones, yes, even in the construction business, have actually become.

This year, to underscore the point that anything can be sold to anyone if the forum is right, was a booth not that far from Pat's that offered teeth whitening. Obviously, such a service is not instead of the gutter helmet booths of which I counted three by different companies, but rather, in addition to for people who might be interested in buying gutter protection but also want to have a big, bright smile because they don't have to dig leaves, or small, dead animals, out of their gutters.

I knew the economy was tight just from the amount of space in the aisles on the floor of the arena where the home show was staged. The last time we went, I think, two years ago, it was jammed and everything and everyone flowed like molasses on an August afternoon. It felt at times that everyone east of the Connecticut River was at the show. 

But this time, the crowds seemed to be much smaller, though I'd read an article earlier this week suggesting the bottom had been reached nationally in the home sales and home improvement markets. Maybe just not here, or just not yet.

Patrick described the ebb and flow of customers as 'like listening to golf on the radio', an expression that struck me as both descriptive and unquantifiable, simultaneously. As both of our children have grown into adults of their own, I've discovered I understand less and less of the world in which they live. Which, since it was my job as their Dad to prepare them for it, reflects very badly on me and wonderfully well on them for adapting and overcoming anyway. 

More often than not these days, they shield me as a stranger in a strange land from a lifestyle of calculated coldness whose language is stark and frightening and for which I lack a decoder.

As we walked from one booth to another, I could see, or thought I could, the desperate gleam in the eyes of many of the vendors as the hours since the home show opened raced by and the leads for the next big sale never finalized because this time, the cliches are more than that. 

Times are tough and the world is a rougher place to make your living than it was a year ago. Not only is virtue its own reward, but it's also perilously close to becoming its own punishment. And it may get a whole lot worse before it gets a whole better and I'm worried that if that's the case, how will we ever know?

"And it's a battered old suitcase to a hotel someplace,
And a wound that will never heal.
No prima donna, the perfume is on an
Old shirt that is stained with blood and whiskey.
And goodnight to the street sweepers, the night watchmen flame keepers
And goodnight to Mathilda, too." 
-bill kenny

Gonna Need a Bigger Ballot

We have what feels like forever until the next time we vote for President, assuming we turn out to vote (which seems to be a problem endemic and nearly unique to American democracy) but the number of folks already seeking at least the Democratic Party nomination may shortly outnumber the total number of eligible voters. 

I just hope we all realize that with the election being held in 2020 it's on all of us to clearly see what we are voting on and for whom. As of earlier this week here's who's in and here's who's expected to get in. 

In 2016 I was less than enthralled with the candidate the Democrats put forward and while I supported the choice, by casting a ballot, my heart wasn't in it. In light of what happened, I won't do that the next time or ever again. 

Of course, as I said, we have a ways to go yet and I realize it's never eaten as hot as it's served but our democracy works only as well and hard as we do--and Out here in the middle, it's getting lonesome and not just a little scary as we keep shouting at, instead of speaking to, one another. 

It's getting so hard to hear ourselves think, I fear we may have finally stopped.
-bill kenny 

Lightbulb Sun

This made me smile when I found it so I'm guessing I did when I first wrote it nine years ago. Wonder what happened to my smile. At the time I called it:

Greetings from I. G. Farben

It's not called that anymore-it wasn't even called that when I worked in it decades ago. Then it was called the Creighton W. Abrams Building and was known as the US Army's V Corps Headquarters in Frankfurt am Main, FRG. The FRG, Federal Republic of Germany, was diplo-speak for West Germany; East Germany, the bad guys, were called the DDR, Deutsche Demokratische Republik. 

It was a massive building and rumor had it that frightening chemical weapons had been developed in the annex behind the main building during the war. Another rumor had it that Frankfurt am Main was nearly totally destroyed during World War II except for the area where I. G. Farben had their massive corporate headquarters which is why Ike set up shop there. 

He and Mamie were gone by the time I got there, as was Checkers and his owner, too, though I once wore a cloth coat to a cat rodeo. I do know there was a great place around the corner to get kiwi and strawberry ice cream, so delicious it practically ate itself while you watched.

I was working in a video production facility that everyone liked, as an abstraction, but in terms of manning and funding, no one was too crazy about us. It's not that we weren't nice people or didn't deliver great products-we just cost lots of money. 

Armored vehicles were going for tens of millions of dollars, this was during the Cold War, remember, (a Gift Store?) and we were squared off against Ivan and his toady lackeys (our toadies were, of course, our friends and allies) and whoever blinked first laughed last. Or something. I forget. It was a long time ago. Anyway, we had LOTS of tanks. Video cameras cost tens of thousands of dollars and we had trouble getting money from the guys with all the tanks to buy us even one. 

I thought about that yesterday when a fluorescent bulb in the fixture overhead "burned out". I remembered Ron H., one of our engineers, and his running buddy, George Whose Last Name I Have Forgotten. George was from Samoa and was the most easy-going person I've ever seen, even when provoked by Ron.

Ron was crazy, brilliant but crazy. He and his wife had two very young boys, Brenden and LB. And if you guessed that LB was short for Little Brother, then, perhaps you met and know Ron because that's what the youngest one's name was and that's what the initials stood for. 

Ron, as the chief engineer, saw his job as repairing the video field production equipment we took on our travels while accomplishing our jobs and broke. He skipped over almost all of that and cut directly to 'broke'. And he was right. We did inordinate amounts of damage to production equipment as it got run over by any number of tracked vehicles moving at high speeds across unforgiving terrain. When dropped from helicopters, it did not bounce, it splattered. 

Rain cases were not, as hoped, waterproof shock-mounted protection and so it went, one disappointment after another. And Ron and George repaired everything, even if we didn't come back with all the parts we started out with. There was a day we compensated by returning with part of a German motion picture camera, a very expensive motion picture camera, that was, alas, utterly worthless to us and anyone else. Ron and George did more with less than any two people since Adam & Eve. 

But I thought of Ron because of the "burned out" light. Ron used to explain to the most junior of the field cameraman the differences in methods of illumination, a topic not really touched on in the Television Production Handbook by Herbert Zettl, the video equivalent of every Sacred Text of every major, and most of the minor, religions. Something not covered in Zettl? The little ones would lean forward and listen closely, and Uncle Ron didn't disappoint.

Incandescent light, he'd explain as if this were nothing more than a review because (yawn) all of us knew this already (or so his tone of voice would suggest), illuminates by driving darkness out of a defined space. He noted that late at night when you turned the nightstand light on, it always seemed even brighter than during the day because the late night was much darker. Heads would slowly nod and the sound of young fish flopping on the dock, hooks still in mouths, would begin to be heard.

Fluorescent light, he pointed out, worked in the exact opposite way--it absorbed darkness and left only light. There would an occasional askance look-Ron would continue unperturbed because he was already to his clincher. How many of you, he'd ask, have ever removed a "burned out" (air quotes every time) fluorescent?

All hands went up. And did you notice, he'd ask, how there was what looked like black very close to where the metal gap met the glass fixture at the two ends? Again, all heads nodded furiously. That, he explained, is because the florescent is full and can hold no more darkness and the leftovers are seeping out. 

He'd allow that to linger for the briefest of moments before adding he could understand how some might be tempted to doubt him but, submitted for their approval, he'd add, have you ever thrown a "burned out" fluorescent light into a metal dumpster? Of course, all of us had done this countless times. 

The next time you do it, he said, open the little door on the side of the dumpster and take a look in there--it's as black as a coal mine. Why? Because (of course!) throwing the glass fluorescent into the metal dumpster broke it, releasing all the stored up darkness the bulb had been sucking out of rooms for years, scattering it around the dumpster. 

I do not recall Ron ever finding the time, or the opportunity, to correct the information he'd shared with the best and brightest videographers the US Army could send to Western Europe as we avoided, but documented nevertheless for all posterity, the deadly embrace of the Russian Bear.
-bill kenny

Sometimes It's Truth And Consequences

This is hard to write today (and not just because somebody, no names please, dripped marmalade onto the keyboard so now three of the letters stick) but it may be harder still for some to read. 

I served eight years in the Air Force, sometimes referred to, I hope tongue in cheek, as 'a leisure time activity of the Department of Defense' by members of the other armed services. When we'd put our hands in our jacket pockets in cold weather, they would call that 'Air Force gloves' and when we'd shrug with indifference at comments like that, they'd suggest it was an 'Air Force Salute.'

But as dissimilar as the branches of the service often are, among their shared commonalities is the tradition within hierarchies that leadership will build and sustain organizations that best reflect its values. 

And for me, therein lies the rub. 

Neither my wife nor I attended Norwich Free Academy, but we raised two children who did (Classes of 2000 and 2005, respectively) so we invested nine consecutive years attending parent-teacher conferences, traveling to soccer matches, cheering at band competitions, and enjoying so much of what NFA does so well. 

Which brings me, reluctantly, to the other side of the coin, the ongoing investigation into allegations of inappropriate behavior by a former athletic trainer with two female students and the actions and inactions of those in leadership positions in responding to those allegations.

The report last week from the NFA Board of Trustees' own investigation into all of this, and the conclusion clearing the Head of School of wrongdoing, which made front-page headlines both confounds and vexes me. 

The news account speaks of an 'independent investigation' commissioned by the Trustees which seems to me would be a contradiction of terms well beyond the scale of 'jumbo shrimp.' The actual independent investigation is still ongoing by the Norwich Police Department and the Connecticut Department of Children and Families. 

It's neither my desire nor intent to poison that well but what the NFA Trustees did was little more than a self-licking ice cream cone which devoted time and space to the sequence of events, witnesses' recollections and statements and what was done, and not done, and by whom, but failed, in my view, to address the most essential question of the most important person in NFA.  

Should the Head of School have known? Absolutely. 
Why he didn't or chose not to, are the answers I think are most important. 

The Head of School is responsible for the successes of every student and staff member at NFA every day. As such, it follows as night the day he is also responsible when they fail. And let's be clear, this 'situation' is a failure of still indeterminate scale and scope. 

Trust should be an unbreakable bond but is also very fragile. By their actions, the NFA Board of Trustees has made themselves as much a part of the problem as is their Head of School. I'm not sure the current NFA governance is not too broken to be repaired and must instead be replaced.      

As parents and members of the local communities who entrust their children to Norwich Free Academy, we need to be transparent and forthright, traits that seem alien to how the NFA Trustees conduct business, in holding the Head of School and themselves as a system that perpetuates plausible deniability responsible. 
We owe that to our children and to ourselves.
-bill kenny                   

Paging the World Wildlife Federation

Much of my family was terrorized by nuns when we were school-age. 
I doubt we were alone.

As seen on Facebook

Aside to Francis I, we're watching you very closely. Amen.
-bill kenny

Victor Not Victim

Today is a federal holiday celebrating the 90th birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. 

And a good day to not only make a difference but to be the difference.
-bill kenny 

Past as Prologue

Except that everything has changed, this post from nearly a decade ago is as true now as it was then when it wasn't true at all (practicing for SHS' job). Back in the day, I called it: 

January Thaw or Spring Preview

I don't understand why it happens, but I'm glad it does. We are experiencing (and if you're in an area that gets cold and snowy in winter, I hope you are as well) a January thaw, though the exact reason has never really been something I've been good at grasping.

You can check this out--I really liked "where z is a threshold anomaly," probably because that's what the bartender in Mosco's Tavern, near Douglass College up in the heights section of New Brunswick, used to call me before throwing me out on my jacks. At least that's what I understood her to be saying, but I was pretty far gone and the auditory sense fades quickly under an alcohol onslaught (she threw real hard for a girl, too). 

The most telling line in the study (and I enjoyed the entire paper because I can more or less follow it), if you're a statistician you may feel very differently and be correct, is "people will find patterns in the world around them, whether or not those patterns result from coherent underlying causes." 

That's a truism that covers a multitude of events. And in the end, the report concludes that there may or may not be a real January Thaw. Rush Limbaugh had one of these cause and effect epiphanies last week for why bad things happen to Haiti (and who benefits) and it only bolstered some wag's cause and effect arguments on why Rush is one of the bad things that keep happening to the Republican Party. To each his own, I suppose; it's as you like it.

We could both stand outside this morning without over jackets, Rush and I, maybe waiting to see if Norwich Is Moving Forward, which was such a popular turn of phrase not all that long ago around here, and see which one of us turns blue first. Truth to tell, I don't think he'd stand a chance, being deep in the heart of Connecticut and everything. Heck, there are some who argue Joe Lieberman is hardly blue at all and look at how long he's been here. 

All I know is it's above freezing again today, and in the middle of January, that's about as close as we get around here to a heatwave. The cold will return because it always does, but whatever you call what we're having right now, means winter's days are numbered..... 

-bill kenny 

In Hoc Signo Vinces

"Pretty soon there won't be no street for dummies to jog on or doggies to dog on. Religious fanatics can make it be all gone."

"You can't run a country by a book of religion. Not by a heap or a lump or a smidgeon."
-bill kenny

When Somebody Should Becomes Someone Who Does

In case you hadn't noticed, parts of our federal government aren't actually functioning at the moment for circumstances well within our control, or at least the control of the current occupant of 1600 Pensylvania Avenue in Washington, D. C.

No blue screen of death, no hitting the control alt-del keys at the same time or unplugging and then replugging the government back in will do the trick it seems. We have, says the guy who called in the air strike on himself, a national emergency and I have to agree except we differ on the location. 

The President thinks it's the "Southern Border" with Mexico where all the drugs and the terrorists come in (he says) but the drugs are actually coming over the border of Connecticut courtesy of Purdue Pharma in Stamford while the terrorists are being apprehended at airports and other legal points of entry into the country and more have been nabbed at the border with Canada than with Mexico so I may never look at Bob and Doug quite the same way again.

I'm of the opinion the President is veracity-challenged but what I should be saying is that he, and those of his party who are supporting him, are liars. He is engaged not only in fact-free fearmongering but in an all-out assault on the truth that is now so widespread the Senate Majority Leader, a member of his own party, is more or less in hiding from other members of Congress.  

In the aftermath of the November 2016 voting when we were all reminded yet again that "elections have consequences," the same party that controlled the White House also controlled both the Senate and the House of Representatives. They ran on an agenda to basically eradicate any vestige of the 44th President of the United States from our history and they set about with considerable gusto to accomplish that. 

Their signature achievement was their self-proclaimed greatest middle-class tax cut in US history that wasn't anything of the sort which actually helped accelerate the growth of the national deficit, a growth that can only be slowed by stealing from those among us who have the least material goods and political power say the people who created the so-called tax.cut. At the epicenter of that gang of greedheads and grifters is where you always seem to find the Senate Majority Leader.

Strange how for the two years the same party which controlled all the houses of the government was unable/unwilling to expend billions upon billions of dollars to literally sink into the sands (across the southwest and elsewhere) invest in border security but waited until after control of the House of Representatives had passed back the other party after the November 2018 elections (see elections and consequences) to decide that situation had reached the status of a national emergency. 

Probably like you, I'm no longer clear as a country where we're heading since the sides of the handbasket are really high, but I am getting concerned about the precipitous elevation in the temperature as the journey continues.
-bill kenny      

Is this a Cool World or What?

I'm a dinosaur who grew up in an age when the sole home wizardry device, the television remote, actually had a cable attached to the TV. The TV received, on a good day, three commercial stations and one educational channel if the foil on the rabbit ears was adjusted just so. 

Hell, for much of my childhood, I was the TV remote, changing the channels as one or the other parent wished, a duty that each younger sibling inherited as part of the maturation process in our family.

Half a century on and not only has video killed the radio star, but guys can check their motility by glancing at their smartphones (not sure about cleaning the display screens, but I'll confess to not having asked). 

And making headlines at this year's Consumer Electronics Show was the exciting news that we are mere heartbeats away from never having any need or reason to lace up our own sneakers sorry, sports shoes again. 

What hath God wrought? It would seem an answer to Karla's question, finally.
-bill kenny

Honoring the Dreamer and His Dream

Some holidays can be both timeless and timely, Independence Day and Memorial Day, while others, Presidents Day and Veterans Day, often reflect the tenor and tone of how/who we are today rather than why we chose to celebrate them. 

And then there's Martin Luther King, Jr., Day, this coming Monday, which is both a celebration of the man's life but also a call to work even harder for the goals he wanted for all of us.

The Norwich Branch of the NAACP and Norwich Free Academy hosts a celebratory luncheon whose theme is "Restoring the Soul of the Nation," this Friday in the Sidney Frank Center Ensemble Room, which again this year will honor outstanding achievers from across our state and community. Tickets may still be available and you should visit the website, to get yours.
    
Dr. King, born the same year as Anne Frank, would have turned 90, yesterday, his actual birthday, had James Earl Ray not assassinated him almost fifty-one years ago in Memphis. 

The murders of American icons, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Dr. King, and Bobby Kennedy, all occurred in The Sixties. I was alive for all three and I hope you'll believe me when I tell you we are a better nation today, if not always better people because they lived.

I think of the three, King's impact and influence are still most felt in more ways and aspects of our lives as US citizens than perhaps he, himself, might have ever imagined. 

I was a high school sophomore, a pimply too-loud white preppie kid, wandering around our nation's capital, Washington D. C., on a school trip my father organized that ended up right through the middle of Resurrection City, at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, just weeks after Dr. King's assassination.

I was stunned at the scale and scope of the settlement, the audacity and eloquence of the vision that propelled and compelled it into existence and the pervasiveness of the poverty and despair that made it inevitable and necessary. Reinventing American society so that the reasons why it had to be done would become history and aren't a part of our present or future, is a small, but important, piece of Dr. King's legacy.

Monday, on the actual King Day holiday, across the country there will be ceremonies and commemorations. Ours in Norwich at City Hall starts at quarter past one in the afternoon in the David Ruggles Freedom Courtyard with some speeching, a little preaching (I think we can put it to good use), as well as singing followed by a march to Evans Memorial African Methodist Episcopal Church for some warm words on what has been to my memory historically a typical New England winter's day and then we'll all go home, back to the lives we lead and the people we are.

I would hope this year across this country we use however we choose to celebrate the dream of Dr. King, in a manner that makes it our own. And then, each in our own way and time we use that dream as he did as a fulcrum, to change the world. Again.
-bill kenny     

If You're Waiting for a Sign

Your wait is over.

Viewing it from the roadway perspective, technically, it is a sign from above.
-bill kenny 

When Life Imitates Art

I came across a mean, but funny (to me) posting yesterday on Twitter that read, in part, "I just installed the Wal-Mart app on my smartphone and the first thing that happened was three of my teeth fell out." 

No one anywhere makes those kinds of jibes about Target. 

Here's why.  

Ruth is stranger than Bridget

-bill kenny

As the Hot Stove League Heats Up

We're having (I almost typed 'enjoying' but I'm not) a snap of cold weather, with temperatures barely getting into the twenties with more than just a slight breeze in my part of New England but I'm not complaining because I don't have to shovel any of it and for that I am very grateful. 

I've mentioned before I love baseball, specifically New York Yankees baseball, and I've been itching for the start of the 2019 spring training season since the about two minutes after the Yankees were eliminated in the American League Divisional Playoffs by the Boston Red Sox who ended up deservedly winning the World Series. 

This is from a long time ago and helps me take my mind off of Manny Machado whom I keep reading may end up in pinstripes and whom I would welcome to the Yankees as much as I did Alex Rodriguez, Roger Clemons or Wade Boggs. 

When I first offered this, it was:  Turns out House is Right.....

I'm curious about this: is there anyone who follows baseball, and I'll actually pull over and watch little ones play tee-ball if there's a game near where I'm driving, who didn't assume Mark McGwire was cranked while plying his trade and chasing home run records? And if you said you were surprised, would you be insulted if I didn't believe you? 

Are you as impressed as I am about McGwire's motivations for finally 'fessing up or do you suspect they are as pure as the blood and his other bodily fluids that Major League Baseball failed, or forgot, to test? 

Reading all the 'news bulletins' and watching the sports networks go to maximum media feeding frenzy on this like it was date night at Piranha High School, I kept waiting for someone, anyone, to look into the camera and wink.

Could have been Bud Selig, Mr Stealth Charisma as Commissioner of Baseball (he's often mistaken for Keneshaw Landis, (especially by those who have NO idea who either one of them is, or cares; sort of like Fox Sports) who volunteered an I-kid-you-not straight-faced explanation of "Being truthful is always the correct course of action..." 

Meanwhile, it should have been McGwire's former manager in both Oakland and in St. Louis (and who has hired him to be a hitting coach for the Cardinals) Tony LaRussa who is "encouraged" and who thinks "as we go along, his explanations will be well-received." I adored his insistence that he didn't know anything about Human Growth Hormones or steroids in either team's clubhouse, so I have to conclude he's either clueless or, like his about-to-be hitting coach, a liar.

I've mentioned before that I love baseball, so it cuts me to the quick when I suggest, not in anger but more in sorrow, EVERYONE who's played Major League Baseball in the last fifteen years, and for the next five, be automatically disqualified for consideration for election to the Hall of Fame. 

I think all of us have to assume you cheated. Turns out every, or just about, word that sleazebag Canseco wrote was true--most major leaguers can't even spell petard, much less be hoist with it.

It's supposed to mean something, Barry, Mark, Sammy, Alex, Rafael, Rajah, and all the other luckless, lunchless losers--and if you're one of the straight arrows who didn't cheat, too bad. You knew who did because it's obvious even to a dolt like me that everyone knew and knowledge with NO action is the same thing as cheating because you tolerated it.

"Everybody lies. We're stuck in the middle. I think I liked it better when the world was round."

-bill kenny  

Jesus, Take the Nikes

I was cleaning my glasses yesterday morning when the large type of the headline in my local newspaper caught my eye and served as an incentive to quickly finish the cleaning and get back into the land of the literate: Vatican launches track team.

If you think Air Jordans are pricy, wait until you start shopping for Air Francis. 
-bill kenny

Channeling Sheriff Bart

It's my, and possibly yours as well, most favorite scene from Blazing Saddles.  

Never thought it would be topped. 
Until December 11, 2018, in the Oval Office by Pantload45. 

I'm not sure who wore it better.

-bill kenny

A Blast from the Past

We humans are at the absolute top of the food chain and that may be why we seem to have so many problems with food on a regular and recurring basis. Today's screed is based on an almost decade-old news story that at the time I called: 

I'm Lovin' It-Her, Not So Much

There are days when the public relations kids cannot make this stuff up; that's why they have radio, print and television outlets. Who among us, toiling in the pursuit of persuasion, wouldn' want rabid fans of your good or service who will ACCEPT NO LESS than your product, OR ELSE. 

This is one such 'news from the newsroom floor' item and if I'm in the fast-food business I'm riding this palomino pony until that little guy's legs wear down to the nubs and my stirrups touch the ground: "Woman gets violent over lack of McNuggets".

I live for stories like this and am very grateful one of our local (for me) newspapers had it in its online edition earlier this week, though the copy suggests the incident actually happened a week ago. Not sure if I was more surprised that she pleaded not guilty (I realize the presumption and assumption of innocence is the cornerstone of our legal system) or that she was, as I understand it, arraigned on a Saturday.

Toledo, Ohio, may be suffering a shortage of Chicken McNuggets and that's unfortunate (unless you're a chicken) and, I'll admit, may not speak well for their casual dining industry, but....that their court system is in session on a Saturday morning, is refreshingly reassuring. The system not only works, but it also works weekends, and, I suspect, is as diligent in running to ground felonious foodies, be they pizza pilferers, doughnut delinquents or even kebabnappers.

This entire incident underscores my belief in law and order, though in this case, I think the attempted order actually preceded (and in no small part) precipitated the encounter with the law. I wouldn't be surprised if Dick Wolf sees some money in all of this. 

And as I'm working through the various accounts, I've developed a respect for the physical prowess of Melodi Dushane, who has the look of a woman very accustomed to getting her Chicken McNuggets with as many different dipping sauces as she wants. You think I jest? Have a seat, buckaroo, and pick a fist and use it, while still seated, to punch something (anything) as hard as you can in an attempt to break it. How'd that work out? Better eat your Wheaties, eh?

I'm wondering if Wendy's, whose chain began in Ohio, have contacted her for an endorsement. I think they're just rolling out a new spicy chicken nugget, and you know how they say 'timing is everything'. If they also offer, as a beverage choice, Hawaiian Punch, we could see some awesome cross-promotional commercials during this Super Bowl. But sit back from the screen.
-bill kenny