In God We Trust

In case you forgot to take a calendar with you when you started to shelter in place, today is not only the last day of March it's Equal Pay Day.  

Jerry Lieber offered some of the most on-point advocacy on the topic of equality in history. 

"I can stretch a greenback dollar bill

From here to kingdom come.

I can play the numbers, pay my bills

And still end up with some.

I got a twenty-dollar gold piece says

There ain't nothin' I can't do.

I can make a dress out of a feed bag

And I can make a man out of you."

But it took a Waitress in a Donut Shop for many of us menfolk to first learn what women have long since known.

-bill kenny 

Now Do Shinola

We've all seen stories like this one. It's from CNN but I think the only difference between it and any reporting from Fox News might be that on the latter, the shit would be seated behind the newsdesk. 

And while you and I might look at stories like that one, shake our heads and go 'who the hell needs all this toilet paper?' great minds elsewhere find solutions to problems that don't even exist. Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you an answer to your unspoken prayer, the on-line toilet paper calculator.

I may never speak ill of cat memes again (until I do). 

Sort of like 'postcards of the hanging' 

Someday my grandchildren may ask me 'what were you and grandma doing during the COVID-19 pandemic, Opa?' And I'll tell them to shut up and eat their paper napkins.
-bill kenny

Cannot Wear a Big Foam Finger

Last weekend, I watched ESPN re-air the 2018 European TramDriving Championships from Brussels, Belgium. Eighteen European cities competed and so engrossed was I by a skills competitions that included who could stop closest to the orange cones and something called Tram Bowling which required a tram to run into a LARGE rubber ball that would then be propelled farther down the tracks into a set of extremely TALL bowling pins, that I'm not sure who won. Seriously. 

My eyes glazed over, sort of, while it was going on. I do remember the last place team was from Berlin, Germany, who had a terribly low score in comparison to everyone and everywhere else but who would be hosting the next championship, though since it's 2020, I'm guessing they already did host it and I'm not sure how to find out who won. It's the uncertainty that makes life so hard to live sometimes...

The day before I had watched from Las Vegas, Nevada, the 12th Annual Sign-Spinning Championships (I don't know what actual year this was held; I'm not convinced it actually matters, to be honest). I cannot imagine what the merchandise concessions for either of these competitions would look like but I have a vivid imagination that I may not be able to control. Both of these events were on, of course, because of the dearth of live actual sports because of precautions taken to mitigate the spread of the COVID-19 virus. 

And also for the never uttered reason that ESPN's mainstay of non-sports competitions, the Scripps National Spelling Bee has been suspended. I think it would have been nice to have had the kids spelling the words on the signs that were being spun, but that was not to be.

But as Rick tells Ilsa, 'we'll always have Paris,' and aggies, clearies, and mibs as well it seems. In this Plague Year, why not a competitive marbles league? Suspect it will pop up soon enough on ESPN but in the meantime, you can enjoy it here. I dare you. These are truly the days of miracle and wonder, though in my case the emphasis is heavily on the latter. 
-bill kenny

With No Marker, Things Slow Down

All this self-quarantine quality time provides me with more than ample opportunity to think to the point I give myself headaches which, alas, is about all I have to show for my efforts. I have concluded it's a fine line between history and mystery with the latter often comprising a healthy part of the former especially as we travel farther and farther away from the moment when whatever it was first happened. 

We're very fond of history where I live here in Norwich, Connecticut even we're not always as aware as we could be that we're in danger of allowing who we once were to prevent us from becoming who we need to be. I've lived here for a skosh longer than twenty-eight years, which, for many people I meet, seems to be no more than an eye blink.

I've heard a lot, though certainly by no means all, of the 'back in the day' stories about Franklin Square, the sea captains who built houses on Laurel Hill, the Sears and Roebuck (whatever happened to Roebuck, anyway?) store that was downtown and Thursday nights so hectic in the center of The Rose of New England that small children clung tightly to a parent's hand lest they find themselves in the street and lost in the throng.

These stories always have a sepia tinge to them, at least to me, and a soft-focus in terms of detail. They make me grin because they always bring a smile to the face of the person telling me the tale. And then of course, we end up in present day and no one seems to know what happened, how or why. People woke up and downtown was a ghost town-the stores were all gone and so, too, were the people who shopped in them. Might I suggest the devolution involves progress and planning-one of which is relentless and inevitable and the other often conspicuous by its absence?

My Norwich history starts (and stays) a little more black and white, with extreme contrast and hard shadows, coming over the Laurel Hill Bridge into a downtown with plywood for windows and not a soul on the sidewalks in the middle of October of 1991. That was the year of the petition drives at the local supermarkets to 'Keep the Boat Afloat' as Electric Boat was facing massive layoffs in the aftermath of the Seawolf submarine construction cutbacks. The same region that had no plan for the post World War II migration of the textile mills to the Deep South had no clue what to do with the Peace Dividend as these steady jobs are going, boys, and they ain't comin' back.

Almost three decades later, what are we still discussing? The same old same-old. We all realize Eisenhower isn't still the President and your father's advice about never paying more than $15,000 for a house without a basement doesn't even get you a good used car but we're hobbled by our past, even when we weren't here to live it or remember it. Instead of our history and heritage being a step on the ladder to tomorrow, it's a hurdle on the steeplechase we've made of our lives.

Experience is what we get when we didn't get what we wanted-we should have, by now, all the experience anyone could ever need but we refuse to plan our work and then work our plan.

Like (too) many of our neighbors, Norwich doesn't suffer from Future Shock. We are smothered by Present Shock and the fear of taking action and having to own the consequences of that action. Maybe tomorrow will be better we sigh. Unless and until it's not, and then still we sit and wait because if we do nothing, we can't do anything wrong. Nothing ever happens, if you don't make it happen. Silence is NOT agreement and we've been too quiet for too long.

-bill kenny

Forrest's Mom Was Right

To be clear, I do not expect the President of the United States, any President of the United States, to be the smartest person in the world or even the smartest person in the room. And there's no need for that because the Leader of the Free World has legions of brilliant people, all proficient specialists in the many and sundry requirements the complexities of our twenty-first-century world demands. 

All of us are smarter together than each of us alone. It's practically math. All I expect the President of the United States to do in any time of national challenge is to heed the advice of those smart people with whom he has surrounded himself. 

We've not always been blessed with bright people in our nation's highest office, at least in my lifetime, but the current occupant plumbs new depths of ignorance and arrogance. He's not only stupid as in uneducated; he's indolent and uneducable. If you put his brain in a mosquito's ass it would roll around and make a noise like a BB in a boxcar. 

The guy who stood on the balcony of the White House and stared into the eclipse of the sun refuses to allow his medical team to conduct daily press briefings without him and his demeanor and behavior are leading many observers to suspect he will overrule their recommendations, whatever they are, for non-medical reasons. 

His arrogance overwhelms their intelligence and if we're not careful, his pathological need for praise for what he (and he alone) sees as his outstanding leadership during this pandemic will get us all killed. Main Street will die, but Wall Street will be okay. 
-bill kenny

Sort of Lost in the Supermarket

I'm almost sixty-eight years old (sound like a kid making sure to get 'and a half' in when explaining that they are six 'and a half' years old) with a compromised immune system so I'm paying attention to all the COVID-19 admonitions and advice and doing my level best to follow all the insights even when I don't fully grasp them. I'm not always mindful that it's a Brave New World out here, Winston, even if we're not out in it at the moment the way we used to be.

One of our local supermarkets, feeling the competitive pressure no doubt of an Arkansas retail chain in a business where profit margins often disappear, has a form of robo-shopping I find fascinating though the other supermarkets in town who should be feeling the same pressure have yet to go down that road.

Of course, they all have a bar-coded loyalty rewards card for the checkout and that's what this market uses with a scanner at a sort of hitching post as you enter the store to release a handheld device that's then tied to your card. I think it took me longer to explain than the process actually takes.

I can then wander the aisles, grabbing stuff I want, scanning it and putting it in bags and when I've reached the checkout, I then scan one final bar code that tells my handheld sidekick I'm done, and it transfers my order to the register with the total amount in the display. I pay and go.

This process is a bit like Tom Sawyer getting people to paint his fence for him. It's not that the groceries cost less if we do all the heavy lifting, they don't. But this system isn't designed to make our lives easier. Once upon a time in grocery stores of a bygone era, there were actual employees who took the items a colleague was ringing up, placed them in bags (eggs and loaves of bread on the bottom, canned goods, and automotive supplies then dropped on top of them) and placed those bags in your shopping cart and, if asked, would help you get that cart to your mode of transportation.

Here in the now, we've still got cashiers, baggers, courtesy desk employees, the whole kit and caboodle, who stand around as we wander the store with what looks like Star Trek weapons at the ready. All we need are the communicators over our left breast pockets. And pointy ears, I suppose (check aisle four behind the breath fresheners).

The only part we're missing, but it's probably coming, are announcements that the Metamucil truck has arrived at loading dock two and twenty-of-those-of-us-formerly-known-as-customers-but-now-called-morons, are needed to unload it, and to stock the shelves in aisle eleven. Don't laugh-that day is dawning. We'll end up playing rock, paper, scissors to decide who's unloading the home pregnancy tests (they go at the header in aisle twelve beside the KY jelly display).

The other day underscoring the perfect beast isn't quite yet where the Grocer in Charge would like it, I grabbed and scanned (in one motion; I've gotten quite proficient at this) a jar of lightly salted (with sea salt, no less) dry-roasted peanuts but, instead of a little peeps and a small green light, I got an electronic squonk and a near zen message in the device display: "The item you have scanned does not exist within your order." Oh, really? 

Hell is, indeed, other people, Jean-Paul...

-bill kenny

Census Reeling

It came in the afternoon mail about ten days ago and I stacked it on the sort-of coffee table we have in what my wife continues to call "The Mancave" but I usually think of as The Treehouse, the room in our home I now spend a lot of time in that was our daughter's before she spread her wings and flew away last year. 

I only gave the envelope a cursory glance when it first arrived and in all honesty, I thought it was from the auto club, looking for renewal on our membership (I already have a lifetime membership but I can never remember if it's mine or the car's). 

Once I realized it wasn't the auto club, I guessed it was possibly a solicitation from Usury International Bank trying to tempt me with a "low, low introductory APR and no annual fee," to sign up for a credit card whose actual interest rate is such that at the minimum monthly payment level, I'd need to believe in reincarnation to ever lower the balance.

But It wasn't either of those things, funnily enough. And shame on me, I should have known better, but true to form, didn't.  After all the months of screaming and yelling on the THNs (Talking Heads Networks) and headlines in every publication from the New York Times to Highlights, and the threats of legal action over the wording of questions it was (only) the 2020 Census. 

Imagine my relief after opening it to realize there were no math questions of any kind (I hate those word problems involving two trains traveling in different directions and at different speeds) and NO tricky essay questions, like 'if you were a cloud what kind of cloud would you be?' 

The above was my attempt at being funny. And yes, I'm painfully aware that if I hadn't told you there is an excellent chance you would have never guessed. I actually specialize in Zen Stand-up Humor which emphasizes the importance of one hand clapping (which is about as good as I ever get). 

But speaking of importance, in terms of the impact both on our own lives and on those of our communities throughout the United States, the census is just about the most important thing any of us will ever fill out, not just during this self-quarantine period (though that did give me the quiet time I needed to think about how important this really is). By now, you've probably already gotten your invitation, too. 

You can respond via mail, online or by phone (this page has a listing of all the languages and all the phone numbers). It took me less than ten minutes online to fill out the form and I type with one finger (you can guess which one) so you'll probably set a land speed record.

There's a raft of really excellent reasons why each of us should complete our census form, and on their website, the Census Bureau does a great job of listing the most important ones, You can check them out for yourself here, but if you're a fan of schools, hospitals, highways, national parks, or congressional representation (among other things), I don't have to tell you our answers help create our future. 

At this moment, when circumstances may be leading us to feel and be more isolated than we've been in a long time, something as simple as filling out a census questionnaire can help us remember that we are as united as we have ever been, despite our present, but temporary, circumstances and that everyone counts.
-bill kenny

When Blackness Was a Virtue

This just showed up in one of my timelines and about the only nice thing I've discovered about getting old(er) is that those timelines are longer even if I remember less about the items on them. That and I can get into grocery stores to not be able to buy toilet paper and disinfectant wipes earlier than you whipper-snappers. I called this: 

Kurt Would Probably Use Rice Milk

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 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.

On weekday mornings I have a bowl of Cheerios for breakfast after I've gotten to work. I still spend more time there than I do at home because I live for the approval in strangers' eyes, I guess (keep your pity or contempt to yourself; I have my own). Perhaps true for you as well, I have a routine from the time I open my eyes to about a half-hour after I'm actually at work. 

All the stuff in between happens, of course, because I'm the one making it happen, but it's an auto-pilot operation. I'm such a slave to how things flow that if anything changes or shifts, like one of those wind-up toys that walks itself into a corner, I just keep bumping into whatever the roadblock has become, unable to clear it or go around it.

Cheerios at work is 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) where 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 repeat it to myself every morning and crack myself up. I never tire of saying it or laughing at it. 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-and oh, how we'd all laugh then. 

I have Cheerios in the next to last of the red plastic bowls we had from long ago when we lived in Germany and used for cereal there. Some time ago, Sigrid finally (endlich!) found very nice and (actually) quite pretty replacement bowls and the red plastic ones went to the land of their ancestors on trash day. As the oldest thing still in our house, I get VERY nervous when anything is pitched out 'because it's really old.' You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows on that equation.

I eat Cheerios and none of the generic brands (which all taste like cardboard and don't even feel like 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?

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 using sugar cubes to construct a fake iceberg, reenact the sinking of the Titanic. Of course, with that much sugar in my system, I'd be crayoning all the walls in the five-story building I work in for three days, from the outside in, until sedated with a croquet mallet.

I used to eat Wheaties, back when Bob Richards was on the front of the box  (I don't how old I was before discovering he didn't invent them but was the first endorser of a cereal. I never count the Quaker guy on the oats). I guess if you had a box with Michael Phelps, using milk would make sense, but for that collector's edition on eBay, I guess you'd 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. I suspect they catch them early in the morning before they've had their Cheerios.....
-bill kenny

Tenth Anniversary of the Affordable Care Act

I see the humor, even if it's dark, in almost anything even when it's inappropriate so it's kind of a gimme for me that in the midst of the most frightening health care crisis of my nearly sixty-eight years on this planet that today would overshadow the tenth anniversary of the creation of the Affordable Care Act, an anniversary that in a non-Plague moment in our history would spark as many hoots of derision as it would hosannas of praise. 

The tiny-handed, tiki masala-hued, incompetent grifter currently occupying the White House vowed to dismantle 'Obamacare' and 'replace it with cheaper and better health care' as his first act were he to be elected in 2016. He was elected, and he did try, with his own MAGAt Minions in control of both houses of the legislative branch and yet he, and they, failed miserably. 

Undaunted by his own ineptitude and incompetence Trump's attempting a piece by piece dismemberment via court challenges of individual provisions of the ACA up to and including a case currently before the Supreme Court that won't be argued until much later in this calendar year and perhaps not decided until well after the November elections which is certainly convenient for the Tangerine-Tinged Narcissist. And, yes, all of this is happening in the midst of a worldwide pandemic to which, so far, this country's leadership (him) has responded badly (I'm being kind).      

Ignoring that all but a handful of nations around the world already have universal affordable care and only here in the United States does the phrase 'pre-existing condition' have any meaning at all (and is used exclusively to punish sick people), here are reminders, courtesy of Andy Slavitt) of what life before the ACA was like and what's at stake as the Trumpkins continue their assault on the Affordable Care Act.

INSURANCE COVERED ONLY WHAT INSURANCE COMPANIES DECIDED: Before the ACA, pregnancy, mental health, many prescription drugs were routinely not covered. The ACA brought 10 essential benefits, requiring a standard that all 10 are covered.

LIFETIME LIMITS- 60% of employer plans had a lifetime limit. Every year, 20,000 new people would hit that limit, ending their insurance.

PREVENTIVE CARE: Because of the ACA, 150 million Americans now have access to free preventative benefits without a co-payment or deductible.

DENIALS: Before the ACA,  health insurance could be routinely declined based on your health conditions. 27% of adult Americans have a health condition that would result in them getting denied coverage. 

RECISSIONS:  Before the ACA, insurers were permitted to cancel your entire policy after you bought it and were diagnosed with an expensive illness. This happened to about  10,000 people a year most often for cancer..

UPCHARGING: Before the ACA, you could be denied insurance for having any of these conditions or, you could be upcharge: $4270 more for asthma, $17,060 for pregnancy, $160,510 for metastatic cancer. 

DRUG COSTS FOR SENIORS: Since the ACA, 12 million seniors have paid $2000 less for their Rx drugs.

COMMUNITY HOSPITALS: Before the ACA low income and middle-class people and families couldn’t afford many of their bills. If the ACA is repealed, they will see a $1.1 trillion increase in bad debt as people go bankrupt again in record numbers.

AGE TAX: Before the ACA, people over 50 could be charged 10x more than they are today. Under GOP proposals, they could be charged $12,000 more than they are today for the same insurance.

CARE FOR VETERANS, PEOPLE WITH MENTAL ILLNESS OR IN RECOVERY: 2.8 million people with substance abuse issues, 1.25 million in mental health treatment, and 42% of vets would lose coverage if the ACA were repealed..

VIRUSES AND PANDEMICS: Before the ACA, vaccines were available to only those who can afford them. The ACA made them freely available to the public.

INSURANCE COMPANY PROFITS: Before the ACA, insurance companies could routinely spend only 40-50% of your premiums on medical care. Now they must spend at least 80% thanks to the ACA resulting in billions of dollars sent back to consumers.

YOUNG ADULTS CUT OFF AT 18: Before the ACA, once you turned 18, you were cut off from your parents' plan. Now 2.3 million kids are covered as you can stay on until age 26.

PEOPLE WItH UNDER $100K IN INCOME. Most could never afford quality insurance. Now, most can for $75/month or less, some with $0 premium. 10 million have gotten insured for the first time since then.

WORKING CLASS MOBILITY: Before the ACA people were stuck in big company jobs which were dwindling. After the ACA, vocational degrees, adult Ed, small businesses and new businesses skyrocketing, part of creating 17 million new jobs.

UNINSURED RATE: The uninsured rate dropped dramatically from the ACA. If ACA is repealed the rate will jump to where it used to be. 

WOMEN: Before the ACA, a small portion of the population called women were routinely charged 50% to multiples more than men. And only one state required maternity coverage. 

So much for the "good, old days."
-bill kenny

Still Farther Along

It's weird when I run into something I wrote so long ago that I'd basically forgotten all about it and read at least the first paragraph or so as if it were by someone else (sadly, it never is). This is from a decade back when I was still employed (I almost typed 'working' but I rarely did that while I was employed) and was heavily invested in myself as I was forced to concede while reading. At the time I called it: 

The Stick Stays

I'm glad the selections have been announced for this season's edition of "Dancing with the Stars (in the loosest sense of the word imaginable) DWTSiTLSoTW" since I slipped on a wet floor at work Friday and have spent the weekend with ice packs on my left knee which suddenly straightened as my foot slid out from under me. I wouldn't have made the cut this time around for the show. 

I don't think I ever, even as a child, had that much flexion in any limb, so I'm sort of sad my orthopedist didn't get to see the split. Wish I could say the same. That it's sore and swollen (still) suggests to me that he may get a chance in the next couple of days, way ahead of the schedule he and I (but mostly him) had worked out. And bottom line, I don't get to tango with Kate Gosselin or Shannon Doherty (talk about spoiled for choice), because I can't dance a lick (or lick a dance) and neither of them is actually a star, so it works out just fine.

I'm smiling today partially from the controlled substance pain-killers I'm taking to manage the knee noise, and fear (if you've ever had limb replacement surgery, the adjective you NEVER want to hear is 'spoiled'). The pills make my sense of whimsy towards the foibles of others a little deeper so the clown princess in the oversized and soon-to-be-extinct SUV who looked me straight in the eye as she backed out across two lanes of traffic on Washington by the bank, and kept coming anyway, gets no more than a shake of the head from me because it's all I can muster. I'm feeling sorry for myself and I do it well.

In the fast-food place, standing behind a dad and his young daughter, based on the time of day and their clothes possibly on their way home from Mass (Holy Communion and a McGriddle, who could ask for anything more) I realize from the way he's speaking to the counter person about employment that he doesn't have a job. There's a discussion of shift availabilities (all of them) and pay differentials (doesn't sound like many) and he's nodding as she's talking while scribbling names and numbers down on a McNapkin.

It's funny, I think, as we age, it takes us longer to bounce back from the knocks and bruises of everyday life. I remember a coarse witticism that involves endurance at a specific activity for the course of a night and how you know you're getting old, and how I laughed when I first heard it. Same with the rest of our lives, too. In our twenties, we went from position to position with nary a thought--as the decades advanced, each job started to look more like a career until the tsunami we're enduring at the moment swept away savings, self-respect and maybe home.

The child at his feet was no more than five and had a tiara on and a pink fairy-dress that parents think every daughter at that age loves, and maybe some do. He's making sure he understands the sequence in which to call the numbers, because 'if you call region before district, they'll tell you there aren't any vacancies' when the child squeals in delight and holds up her prize.

She's found a dime on the floor-perhaps someone dropped their change from a purchase, or, more likely, it didn't quite make it through the slot in the counter collection box for the supportive housing of parents of children with cancer the franchise has constructed across the USA and around the world.

I'm not alone in this latter supposition as the father bends to pick his daughter up and explains to her where the dime really came from and, by inference, where it really belongs. Without hesitation, safe in his arms, the child leans across her father and drops the dime through the slot at the top of the box. He smiles as his order is given to him and both dad and daughter head for the parking lot and home with breakfast and, perhaps, a new hope. 

For just a moment, a bright Spring morning brightens even more. The past is gone, it's all been said. So here's to what the future brings, I know tomorrow you'll find better things.

-bill kenny

At Least I Am Amused

Because of my personality, and absence thereof, I've been social distancing (actually everyone around me has been) for many years. I am used to the solitude and, quite frankly, the boredom as I lead a very bland life. This is from a long time ago and makes as much sense in these times as it did in those: 

Limited Time Offer, Seemingly

I'm typing as fast as I can and only hope that spell check saves me from the ignominy of reading like a Hottentot at a Hootenanny. It's my own fault really-I like to live on the edge, walk on the wild side, sail too close to the wind, hang on by just a thread and as many other cliches and bromides as I can get on a 24-hour loan from Billy Bob's Emporium of Previously Used Sentence Components located in Del Rio, Texas.

I went to make myself a little pick-me-up and decided to skip the Java jive and the tea leaves and made a cup of chicken bouillon from those cubes that are so dense I've always suspected they are actually made from the matter that comprises a black hole in space. 

I especially like how there's always one piece of the foil wrap you cannot get off until you're reduced to trying to scrape it off with a fingernail and then, uh-oh, there are bouillon fragments under the nail. Do NOT put that fingertip in your mouth. Ever. If you have to ask why it's too late.

So here I am, struggling with eight fingers (the foil was really hard to get off), putting the cube container back in the pantry and checking out the label (thank goodness for that Literacy Volunteer!). There's some disquieting news all the way around, starting on the front that tells me there's chicken 'with other natural flavors'. Sure wish we'd be more forthcoming detail on that. 

And what about the LARGE yellow letters that brag NO MSG ADDED ('contains naturally occurring glutamates' Huh?) or the nutritional information that ONE cube provides 45% of your daily intake of sodium. Let the Morton Salt girl put that in her umbrella and smoke it.

And then atop the screw cap, I saw the fateful advisory, 'Best by August 2007'. OMG. I'm lousy at math (and English as we both know) but I knew there was trouble. The light grew dim and my life started flashing before my eyes. It's been so unremarkable, mine was replaced by the Jimmy Dugan Story and since that's so short, the second reel was the Song of Bernadette (Peters, which was disconcerting especially the excised dance of a thousand veils scene from Barney's Great Adventure).

And then, just before the darkness enveloped me, I tried to figure out how anyone, even the manufacturer (yeah, Hormel, I'm talkin' 'bout you) would distinguish among good, better or best in chicken bouillon cubes. Turns out it was getting dark because I was dozing, not because the mortal coil was assuming the shuffle off position. Talk about relief! Of course, I'm still a little peckish-perhaps a slice of fruit cake will hit the spot.
-bill kenny

Something to Remember On November (3rd)

Here's the timeline for Pantload45's 'perfect response' to COVID-19. 

January 22: “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China. It’s going to be just fine.”

February 2: “We pretty much shut it down coming in from China.”

February 24: “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA… Stock Market starting to look very good to me!”

February 25: “CDC and my Administration are doing a GREAT job of handling Coronavirus.”

February 25: “I think that's a problem that’s going to go away… They have studied it. They know very much. In fact, we’re very close to a vaccine.”

February 26: “The 15 (cases in the US) within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero.”

February 26: “We're going very substantially down, not up.”

February 27: “One day it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.”

February 28: “We're ordering a lot of supplies. We're ordering a lot of, uh, elements that frankly we wouldn't be ordering unless it was something like this. But we're ordering a lot of different elements of medical.”

March 2: “You take a solid flu vaccine, you don't think that could have an impact, or much of an impact, on corona?”

March 2: “A lot of things are happening, a lot of very exciting things are happening and they’re happening very rapidly.”

March 4: “If we have thousands or hundreds of thousands of people that get better just by, you know, sitting around and even going to work — some of them go to work, but they get better.”

March 5: “I NEVER said people that are feeling sick should go to work.”

March 5: “The United States… has, as of now, only 129 cases… and 11 deaths. We are working very hard to keep these numbers as low as possible!”

March 6: “I think we’re doing a really good job in this country at keeping it down… a tremendous job at keeping it down.”

March 6: Anybody right now, and yesterday, anybody that needs a test gets a test. They’re there. And the tests are beautiful…. the tests are all perfect like the letter was perfect. The transcription was perfect. Right? This was not as perfect as that but pretty good.”

March 6: “I like this stuff. I really get it. People are surprised that I understand it… Every one of these doctors said, ‘How do you know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural ability. Maybe I should have done that instead of running for president.”

March 6: “I don't need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn't our fault.”

March 7: “We’ll hold tremendous rallies...I’m not concerned at all.”

March 8: “We have a perfectly coordinated and fine-tuned plan at the White House for our attack on coronavirus.”

March 9: “This blindsided the world.”

March 13: "Today I am declaring a national emergency. Two very big words."

March 13. "No, I don't take responsibility at all."

-bill kenny

I'll Never NOT Post This On This Date

The difference, I've read, between a rut and a grave is the depth of the habit. As I've aged the humor of that observation has grown rather thin (more so than I) and, despite that, I look forward to it growing thinner with every passing day. 

I first offered the following over a decade ago and if I'm still above ground a decade from now, I'll offer them then as well. What you do is entirely up to you; just as you may be whomever you wish to be. Back then I called it: 

Scared that He'll Be Caught

This ends a tough week for anyone who's ever picked up, owned, or been named for, anyone in Alban Butler' Lives of the Saints. The main event, of course was Saint Patrick's Day. I'm not sure every place on earth paints the median strips on Main Street green as part of the parade or adds food coloring to the beer (or gets into fist-fights in New York's forgotten borough over matters of ethnicity and sexual preference) but let's face it, Saint Patrick is the 800-pound gorilla in the room for the month of March.

Which is too bad, because today is the Feast of Saint Joseph, husband of Mary (Mother of God) and (to my way of thinking) Jesus' step-dad. I've always imagined an at-the-dinner-table exchange between the Son of Man (when still small) and Joseph that has Joe ending an argument with the lad with something like "then go right ahead and ask your 'real dad' for a new bike and let's see what happens." 

And then The Curia or the Legion of Decency (or both) shows up at my house and slaps the rosary bead handcuffs on me while The Pope reads me my rights ('you have none, just free will.'). 

As a grade-school child, I missed the subtlety that went into the talk-around as the Sisters of Charity explained 'the Annunciation' and when I got older and it smacked me right between the eyes, I admired, even more, the cool, collected response Joseph seemed to have had to all of that. 

Talk about Rainy Day Women #12 and 35. It's a pity we don't roll the Apocrypha into the Bible (sort of a VH-1 Behind the Book) and let Max Von Sydow have another crack at the Greatest Story Ever Told (as soon as legal gets the rights clearances squared away).

Today, the Feast of Saint Joseph is when the swallows come back to Capistrano. I wonder if the village fathers paint the center stripe of their main street a shade of bird droppings white and grey or if they even have a parade (I think I'd steer clear of the beer, but that's just me). 

As urbane and world-wise as I like to think of myself, I love the story as much now as I did hearing it as a child. I find it reassuring and, while my belief in a Divine Being fluctuates wildly (and how screwed am I if Her/His belief in me reflects my faith in Her/Him?), I hope (in a faint-hearted, wimpy sort of way) that Paley is right about the Great Watchmaker.

I say that, mindful (with apologies to Jackson Browne) that 'I don't know what happens when people die.' And in keeping with that point, I have known two very dear people who shared the Feast of Saint Joseph as their birthday. 

They are both from long ago, at the time when I knew everything (and everything better) while I worked for American Forces (Europe) Network and Bob was my first (and very best) boss in Radio Command Information (together with Brian, Marge, Norm, and Sara) while Gisela was the record librarian of the most amazing (and amazingly organized) collection of vinyl in the world.

Bob was married to 'local color' as I was to be as well (GI's who married citizens from the country in which they were stationed; usually guys marrying women but NOT always). He and his wife, Erika, had no children but loved as if she were one, a stray dog they took in and kept all its life, Sandy. 

Erika and Sandy passed away pretty close to one another, leaving a hole in Bob's heart that never healed, filled with a pain of which he never spoke. Bob himself passed a number of years ago and I see him at this very moment in my mind's eye in a beaten beige long coat with a beret he wore in every kind of weather.

Gisela was my translator when the letter of permission from the Standesamt of Offenbach am Main (where Sigrid and I hoped to marry) arrived and I raced frantically from office to office trying to find someone to be my eyes (I was illiterate auf deutsch and vowed to never be that guy again). 

Gisela put her glasses on near the edge of her nose and would read a line and then look over the tops to give me the English translation. I still recall the shine in her eyes and her warm smile as she reached the conclusion granting us permission and she clasped both of my shoulders and hugged me in congratulations.

I remember both of them today, maybe more so than Saint Joseph, perhaps because I don't know how many others remember them and I'm sad when I think about what happens to you when the last person on earth to know you and of you has died. 

So today I tell a little of the story of their lives, as I knew them, to remind me to celebrate their lives and hope the day comes when we can laugh together about all of that and so much more.

Happy Birthday, Bob und Alles Gute zum Geburtstag, Gisela.
-bill kenny

In Search of a Softer Tone

Once a week, originally on Mondays but in recent years, Wednesdays, for a little more than a decade, I've written (or tried to) about topics and concerns centered mostly about Norwich, Connecticut, where I live with my wife. 

Those commentaries ranging from topics as varied as the construction of traffic roundabouts, through the priorities of city and board of education annual budgets, to veterans' commemorative events and (far) more, end up on the pages of The Bulletin as well as the newspaper's website. 

What people who read them in either place may not know (and possibly may care even less about) is that I've been writing and posting on the internet ('blogging') on a daily basis for over a dozen years. At no point in any of that time have I ever allowed my lack of knowledge or information on a subject to in any way ever hinder or prevent me from having an opinion. That is, not surprisingly also true for today as well.

I mention all of that because today's words on a Wednesday, are about each of us who lives in Norwich while also acknowledging how in recent days the world beyond ourselves requires, if not actually demands, we realize we are so many people in the same device and how sometimes we tend to lose sight of that forest of commonality because of our focus on our own tree.  

If I may be allowed to update a well-known phrase from Thomas Paine, "these (too) are times to try  men's (and women's) souls." Crises like the Coronavirus don't change who we are so much as they reveal us to ourselves, and if I may be blunt, COVID-19 is doing an astonishing job of laying bare so much about who we are as a nation and a society whose social contract should bring us together but, instead, has not been as stressed since the days that immediately following the darkness and despair of 9/11. 

So many of our routines that have become rituals are being altered and tested; how we respond and react says more about us than we may wish to hear. And that's human nature: we like to learn but we may not enjoy being taught and are perhaps quicker to show one another a rough edge. But, to borrow a word from my wife's native language, German, we can and should be a little sanfter, softer, with each other right now as together we make our way to and through this.

So much is new: It's strange to realize toilet paper and disinfectant wipes have become, at least for the time being, more valuable than gold bullion or BitCoin, but here we are. And we've learned to use phrases in our daily vocabularies that didn't even exist a month ago like "social distancing" and "flattening the curve." 

I'd hope one of the things we've also learned (again) is that blame-gaming and scapegoating can and will do nothing at this moment to make us safe(r) and that as comfortable as we've become in our bubbles with our technology and lifestyles, it's the exercise of a thousand small, and nearly-forgotten, habits and virtues that will keep us from becoming as hard as the days we are currently living through. 

If nothing else we should continue to believe despite the very real dangers of times like these that the world is full of brave and caring people and, if for whatever reason, you can't seem to find one right now then you must become one yourself.
-bill kenny