Ramblings of a badly aged Baby Boomer who went from Rebel Without a Cause to Bozo Without a Clue in, seemingly, the same afternoon.
Monday, June 30, 2025
All Quiet on the Western Front
Sunday, June 29, 2025
No Sugar Tonight
Saturday, June 28, 2025
Bears Repeating
It's not so much 'guess where I'm headed today' as it is 'why aren't you going, too?' Heat of summer or cloudy skies and rain, it's the 60th Rose Arts Festival and it wouldn't be the same without you.
As the saying goes....Rose Arts Festival 2025
-bill kenny
Friday, June 27, 2025
Thursday, June 26, 2025
Two Hands to Help Ourselves
As a cranky, elderly Yank who woke up one morning and realized he was trapped in the body of an old person, I've discovered that my tolerance for well-intentioned stupidity has been exhausted.
My problem with controlling my urge to smack dopes with a cricket bat is that I live in a target-rich environment and Amazon is all out 'self-control.' It's not just locally; we are a nation of insatiable appetites who still think the world revolves around us, even though few anywhere else on the globe agree with that.
At some point, as the Evangenitals would have you believe, the Lawd gave us two hands to take as much as we could and two pockets to put it all in. And to do it quickly because around here, he who hesitates is lunch.
We want things we don't need to impress people we don't like, and think little to nothing about it. Welcome to Amerika 2025. As long as we put a flag on it, it ain't greed, right?
-bill kenny
Wednesday, June 25, 2025
Private Party
Very much narrow casting today, to (in general) New England, because that's where American History is made, and more specifically to where I live, the Rose of New England, Norwich, Connecticut.
We, like many towns throughout the region, aren't suffering from Future Shock but, rather, Present Shock. When the textile mills went south, geographically, in the Fifties because of much cheaper labor (and then, in turn, in the New World Order, went overseas for even cheaper labor), we had no Plan B.
Quite frankly, the manufacturing era is over. America doesn't make things anymore, aside from TikTok videos and MTV. We devalued and disassembled much of our education system to the point that we no longer have the skills or knowledge to apply for work, even if all the factories elsewhere came back here tomorrow.
Here in Norwich, it means we have a Grand List mostly of residential properties because, despite all the brave talk, we are less than successful in attracting commercial and business enterprises. Oh, don't get me wrong, we're making progress, but not at a rate and pace that slows the annual mill rate increase on my house, which raises my mortgage payments to pay for taxes that fund the continuing crumbling infrastructure of every kind and constraints on public services.
What we do have is lots of old buildings, and by old, I mean the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century. In a perfect world, or even one just up I-395 a few exits, we'd have a plan for economic tourism that would complement intelligent development. The keyword is plan. Instead, we have hope.
-bill kenny
Tuesday, June 24, 2025
Over, Under
These are, with apologies to Thomas Paine, times to try a man's (and woman's) soul.
MAGA or WOKE,
DUI or DEI,
These are the questions of the hour. But, and again with apologies to TP, the til-now-unresolved question of questions has always been: toilet paper roll, over or under.
And the answer is.
Backwards, forwards, spin around.
-bill kenny
Monday, June 23, 2025
Eyes Wide Shut
This is the opposite of DADT ('Don't Ask, Don't Tell').
I had a dream the other night that I had failed to put out our recycling bin and was dragging it down the street while chasing the truck. In light of how little running I can do in real life, I was sort of impressed with the pace I maintained in my dream.
Actually, what should have impressed me was that I remembered any aspect of that dream because I tend not to do that at all. I'm not alone, though I find this to be of small solace. With apologies to Willie and Prince Hamlet, dreaming is not necessarily everything it's cracked up to be.
It's a fine line between a coiled spring and a mortal coil, only one of which is available at your local hardware store. But as vexing as it is to NOT be able to remember dreams, a larger question could/should be why do we dream at all, and the answer(s) are not simple or direct.
In the course of all of this, I stumbled across a previously unknown to me quote from Edgar Cayce that I very much enjoy: "Dreams are today's answers to tomorrow's questions." If only.....
-bill kenny
Sunday, June 22, 2025
Inhale Deeply
As a kid growing up in Central New Jersey, one of the great hot summer smells was the after-the-rain-stopped-aroma of evaporating rainfall dissipating into steam from the blacktop combined with the scent of the wet grass. That was how I knew it was summer.
Petrichor is the technical term for the smell of rain. I was an adult before I ever learned it and have marveled over how perfectly it describes something I never even knew had a name. What I didn't know until the other day, is what causes petrichor and how it comes to be made.
Science tells me it's geosmin and 2-MIB, and that's well and good I suppose, though I will always think of it as the smell of summer and the promise of wonder that it portends. And when I remember the summers of my boyhood I always hear this.
-bill kenny
Saturday, June 21, 2025
Waving Not Drowning
As a consequence of leading a sheltered life, I end up having encounters that while perfectly normal for Hugh or You, are sometimes disconcerting for me. The other day I had the chance for the first time in my life (at least in this one) to 'knuckle bump' with someone.
I had no idea what he was intending when he put his right fist straight out but I flinched and braced for impact. When nothing happened, I more or less opened my eyes and he was staring at me the same way I stared at my plate years ago when I learned 'calamari' was Italian for squid. Apparently, it takes the place of a handshake in the post-covid world. Who knew? (Not me.)
I never ate lunch, or any other meal, at the cool kids' table, so I appreciated the crash course on hip I received -except I know instinctively that what an old guy thinks is cool, probably ain't. All those trick pygmy pony handshakes from years gone by--the ones that look like they were choreographed by Alvin Ailey or George Balanchine; when I try to do them it's more like Jerry Lewis.I am a living fossil and the former part of that assertion is subject to discussion I've been told. Since most of that happens after I've toddled off to bed, I've no firsthand knowledge of the respective positions, except to note that Wednesday is rubbish day in my neighborhood, and so far, I haven't awakened on Wednesday mornings and found myself curbside (so far, so good).
I've accepted my role as an aging bebop doofus hipster who became far more decorative than useful decades ago and then, as my looks faded and old age set in, took to staying indoors until the sun went down because I was frightening the neighborhood children.
-bill kenny
Friday, June 20, 2025
Summer Solstice Safety Tip
Pretty spiffy title today, eh? Thought of it all by myself (for the most part).
But it's not always just clever wordplay and scintillating wit around here (it can be argued it's never either of those and I would be hard put to argue the opposite). Sometimes there's actual advice you can use (with the same frequency with which a blind pig finds an acorn, but still).
But today's an opportunity for public service, something I'm not noted for, with good reason. With the start of summer today, it's safe to say we'll all be looking for more family time in the great outdoors.
Here's a picnic tip I stole from Yogi Bear.
But on a surprisingly serious note, for me, some excellent advice for anyone who has a water bug in their family.You can thank me later.
-bill kenny
Thursday, June 19, 2025
A Question in Your Nerves Is Lit
But it's not all celebrations. There's unresolved sorrow, fear, resentment, anguish, and anger associated with the origins and causes of the system of oppression whose end, in the United States as we knew it came back then one-hundred and sixty years ago on June 19 when slaves in Galveston, Texas, learned the War Between the States had ended months earlier on 9 April and they were now free.
-bill kenny
Wednesday, June 18, 2025
So these Are the Good, Old Days?
I attended Norwich City Council meetings since the winter of 1993 when those on that Council and the members of the Board of Education differed so strongly on the funding levels for the school system in the proposed budget that the Council's hearings were relocated, as the hearing was just beginning, from City Hall to the gymnasium at Kelly Middle School.
As I recall, dozens of speakers implored and berated the aldermen (and woman) to reconsider allocations for the Norwich Schools while hundreds of others sat and listened. Nothing changed.
The issues we come to the Council with haven't really changed all that much--they are the folks to whom we turn for repairing our roads, extending a sidewalk, asking about additional police patrols, understanding why schools close--the daily operation of our city.
I'm not sure, even though in theory we vote for City Councils to partner with the Mayor in working on Big Picture issues like long-term economic development and community improvement, that we're comfortable with having anyone actually do that.
If it were only that simple--sitting at the confluence of the Shetucket, Thames, and Yantic Rivers we, of all Connecticut cities, should be most aware no one one steps into the same river twice because both we and the river have changed.
We, as a city, a state, and a nation have spent money for decades (at least as long as I've been alive, not that I'm suggesting cause and effect) as if we'll find enough paper money in our trouser pocket or enough change between the couch cushions in the living room to offset the stagnation in the Grand List.
-bill kenny
Tuesday, June 17, 2025
A (Long) Look Back
Found this while looking for something else. It's from a long time ago; I think I once knew the guy who wrote it. At the time the title was:
In through the Out Door
-bill kenny
Monday, June 16, 2025
Illegitimi non Carborundum
I live in a city of a bit less than forty thousand folks (pending a visit from the ICE Shutzstaffel) in the heart of New England (some have repeatedly suggested a different part of the anatomy) also known as Connecticut, "The Land of Steady Habits."
We often, perhaps too often, confuse talking about something with actually taking action and doing it. Part of the reason why, I suspect, is we have figured out that if we don't do anything (about downtown revitalization, the Occum Industrial Park, the stagnation in the growth of our municipal grand list, to say nothing of the heartbreak of psoriasis), we can't do anything wrong.
Some people in our state see us as losers, which is harsh but it takes one to know one, I guess, but I see us as 'discouraged experts,' when what we need are 'enthusiastic beginners.' If we had a spirit animal it would be Eeyore when what we could use is Tigger. I never get lost when walking because even total strangers are quick to tell me where to go. Hospitality is an acquired skill, it seems.
Point, in fact, we spend most of our time waiting for the other shoe to drop, for the subordinate clause that follows '..but...' as we allow our enjoyment of the many good things we could have to be marred by our concerns about the bad things that most assuredly are just around the corner.
A pessimist, I'm told, is somebody who feels bad when they feel good, out of fear that they'll feel worse when they feel better. There's always been more of that than needed and probably more than necessary. Especially here, and especially now.
This a tough time to be a positivist since so much of who we are and how we live seems to be devolving into nativist and tribal groupthink with little room for rational and reasoned discussion. We're in such fear of failing that we've given up trying which is the ultimate failure.
-bill kenny
Sunday, June 15, 2025
Farther Fathers
The memories are flashes more than full sequences.
I can recall a white mug with a round soap in the bottom of it, a brush with the softest bristles I could ever imagine standing on its red handle like a bayonet not yet fixed next to it on the shelf to the left of the mirror and a double-edge single-blade razor that used Gillette Blue Blades (Look Sharp! Feel Sharp! Be Sharp!)-none of that multi-blade $hit or heated shaving gel.
Saturday, June 14, 2025
If You Can Believe in Something Bigger than Yourself
Between now and Election Day, we will hear every single person seeking office in the United States of America invoke the flag in support of whatever it is they are advocating.
That is their right, just as it is mine to arch my right eyebrow and aim a caustic comment or two (I get them by the gross, they're much cheaper that way) in their general direction, certainly no longer in the hope of dissuading them or any adherent from pursuing a particular course of action I'd rather they not, but because it's hygienic and perhaps therapeutic for my own mental state.The American flag is a symbol of our nation and means to each of us what we wish to see in it every time we look at it. Today is Flag Day and we will hear a lot about 'the flag' and 'our country' before we make decisions this November about who we are and who we shall continue to be.
It doesn't fit in a post on Truth Social or other social media so you rarely, if ever, hear the whole quote in much the same way as we use the flag to cover a multitude of venalities. Today, Flag Day, it's good to remember our flag shouldn't be a prop for personal or political posturing but rather a symbol of our nation's resolve and unity.
-bill kenny
Friday, June 13, 2025
Jeff and Rod Touch (Ron) Wood
Interestingly, there are so many more concerns about, today, Friday the 13th in a nation of fifty states, founded from thirteen original colonies than just about anywhere else on earth
From the notion of seven years of bad luck if you break a mirror while crossing the path of a black cat and not throwing salt over your right shoulder, to dozens of local and regional variants, we all know people who, today, are as quiet and immobile as they can, 'just in case...'Here's a puzzler, filed under 'Things from England', that suggests if you worry enough about anything, you can, and will, get sick. Like the old saw about how paranoids are convinced people are out to get them and when, because they alter their behavior, people are indeed out to get them, does this mean they are cured?
I visit the snopes.com website to debunk junk I see online or TV. That's where I can check out topics ranging from 'tariffs are paid by the country exporting goods to the United States," 'Amelia Earhart was Barack Obama's Secret Santa' and just about any combination of either of those we could think of. But Friday the 13th is a slippery slope even for snopes.
After I've suggested you not step on a crack, or do anything else with it, or have any interaction with a ladder of any kind for any reason, I'd offer, in a half-full glass kind of world, perhaps we're all better off if we consider today as the second coming of Thursday the 12th, only supersized.
-bill kenny
Thursday, June 12, 2025
Nine Years On...
It's obscenely ironic in an age of instantaneous communication how much of what is important doesn't survive beyond a single news cycle. There is so much information and so many vehicles to share it, that we are inundated and ultimately overwhelmed, as news and events just wash over us.
Nine years ago, today, the Pulse Night Club in Orlando, Florida was The News for all the worst and wrong reasons. What follows are words I offered a year after it happened knowing that somewhere events just like it would keep happening. At the time, I called it:
Collateral Damage in the Age of Style
There's been so much killing and carnage since it happened I'd almost forgotten. It was one year ago that an impotent, life-long loser murdered forty-nine people in the Pulse Club in Orlando, Florida.
As a card-carrying First Worlder, without ever knowing it or knowing of it, I helped create the world order that has hundreds of millions living in squalor and penury so profound and institutionalized they will never escape it. The world, as they know it, has conspired to leave them with nothing.
The institutions I have created and support have, in turn, constructed protections and insulation for me so that I have as much, or as little (preferably) interaction with or even knowledge of their existence. I'm not indifferent to their struggle and plight; I am oblivious to it. And they have no personal contact of any kind of me and mine. We are on parallel but separate planets.
Except, of course, we share this one. And because we are our own closed system, one with the other, we guarantee that this dance of death and doom will go on until no one is left standing.
I'm never sure if God created man in His image and likeness (some things you must take or leave on faith alone), but I'm very sure we created God in ours, leaving me to wonder who will forgive us.
-bill kenny
Wednesday, June 11, 2025
Keep the Dog in the Basket
I love rock and roll music and have a very expansive definition of what I consider it to be (hint: does not include any Rastafarian country and western or any variation of crunk polka). I do not play a musical instrument, and I cannot sing, though that doesn't mean I won't try. Forewarned is forearmed.
For me, music sounds like what feelings should be and I applaud any and all who make it, and I most definitely include in that number, Peter Bence.
Treat yourself to this eargasm, and enjoy!
-bill kenny
Tuesday, June 10, 2025
Waiting on a Dial Tone
I just realized as I was typing the title for today's epistle that I am truly a fossil.
I'm not sure how many, if any, of the people I've known and or worked with in all the years we've been back in The Land of the Round Doorknobs, have a landline telephone (we do) so my reference to waiting on a dial tone might be as inappropriate as characterizing someone's complaints as 'sounding like a broken record.'
It's okay, I suspect I'd look good in high-button shoes and a waistcoat with a handle-bar mustache (channeling my inner Ben Davidson). Despite having a cellphone for (guessing here) about twenty years, I still have difficulty making or receiving calls, especially the former as I wait for a dial tone that is never coming. Some day in the not-too-distant future, no one on earth will know what a dial tone is.
I made my livelihood with words in one form or another for about fifty years. Spoken or written, I threw them against walls and sometimes they stuck, and sometimes no luck. But the words I seem to return to in search of solace and closure (?) are the words I never shared.
We all get busy or lose sight of someone who once meant the world to us. Sometimes the dynamics change and what was once a friendship devolves into an acquaintanceship or even less. Sometimes there's collateral damage on the human highway and after we've slowed down to look at it, we resume normal speed and never think about it again.
In recent days, mutual friends shared the sad news that someone I'd known and worked with over four decades ago, and who had reintroduced us through a social media platform a few short years ago, had passed away. Our online relationship had been both thoughtful and thought-provoking (all thanks to him as I certainly couldn't contribute a meaningful thought on a bet).
Just the day before receiving the news of his passing, I sat down to drop him a line and what passed for thoughts in my case and got distracted by the hurly-burly of the day and never finished my note and now, of course, I never shall.
And then, perhaps because there is a Master Clockmaker in our universe, I came across an article that reduced me to tears and also offered me a comfort that I hadn't expected or intended. If you've never encountered a Wind Phone, now you can say that you have.
And you needn't journey to Japan to use it. Just a reminder from me to you that 'Hello' is the first step in a journey we start anew every day.
-bill kenny
Monday, June 9, 2025
Forty Years Runnin' Down the Road
Forty years ago this month, Bruce Springsteen released his seventh album, Born in the USA. He's been in the news quite recently because, as far as I can tell, significant numbers of people who didn't understand the album or the title track back then still don't understand him now.
I think he and Samuel Clemons would have gotten along famously or at least better than Elmo and Donny Dorito.
Happy Fortieth.
-bill kenny
Sunday, June 8, 2025
Burning Brightly
As a grade school child, today, Pentecost, was one of the most difficult Sundays we had all year as Roman Catholics. As a loyal son of the Holy Mother Church, I struggled to wrap my head around the Holy Trinity and God as the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost (later changed to Spirit, which I always thought was a great marketing idea, as all I ever thought of was Casper, and I'm pretty sure that wasn't supposed to be the point).
Saturday, June 7, 2025
Do As I Say
We had an Incident in Baltimore Harbor the other day, but with so many oil spills and the like, it's becoming really hard to get as upset about them as we need to to change our habits.
It seems to me waaay too many of us prefer talking about doing something to actually doing something. And in this case, we've decided that since all ducks are birds, all birds must be ducks. And, before you get cranky I AM NOT downplaying the destruction caused by the incompetence, arrogance, avarice, sloth, and who knows how many other of the deadly sins that have created the latest incident.
But......it's not just the oil industry (multi-national, poly bendable, super attenuated, hyphenated, and poly-unsaturated). When I last went car shopping, do you know how many vehicles, similar to what I bought, got better fuel economy? It's a trick question, not because I didn't tell you what I bought, but because I don't know (either). I didn't ask-because I didn't care. I 'knew' the vehicle got decent mileage and that was fine. I cared more about the cloth seats than I did about the hydrocarbon emissions and hand on your heart so, too, do you.We read oil spill stories on Facebook or other social media and click on the angry emoji or maybe the sad one and move on. If we were to be as honest with one another as we say we are (and we lie something awful, don't we?), we'd do away with nozzles at the gas pumps, and replace them with HUGE gauge syringes and IV bags to mainline the oil, diesel, kerosene and gasoline, because our appetite for 'the stuff' remains unsated. For every hybrid car sold, there are sales of TEN V-8 models (for all I know; I'm in rant mode. Do I look like I have time to research facts?).
Yeah, we all want wind, solar, and other alternative energy, (okay, not Donny Dorito) unless it costs more than our current fossil fuel fix, or involves changing in any way how we live. That's why Facebook is so great! I just click on the appropriate button and my soul is cleansed. Sorry about the gulls, and it's too bad that all those coastal animals in the marshland ecosystems are being destroyed. Dude, that's so sad I can't bear to watch very much of it on the TV news anymore.
If only we could get to the source of the greed, go deep beneath the waves, and cap the rapacious gluttony that has us chugging down those fifty-five-gallon oil drums like waterfront whores knocking back cheap tequila shots during Fleet Week.
I'd offer to be the first (to sign, not to change) but I'm booked solid right now with my day job. You see, I lay traps for troubadours who get killed before they reach Bombay. Business is booming.
-bill kenny
Not that Song Again!!!
I wrote this a really long time ago, before our son got married (He and Jena's anniversary was last Friday). I've not done very much...

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Labor Day 2024. Robber Barons, Mega Banks and Wall Street: too much. Working Poor, Middle Class and Main Street: never enough. There once ...
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Many years ago, we taught history in our schools because we studied history to learn from it as opposed to now, when we denigrate it and bel...