Woof!

I'm getting to an age that surpasses my IQ and see my pharmacist more often than our children (by a multiple of ten or more).

I filled a prescription from the place I have my medications handled. I take enough of them that I should be required by law to discourage monopolies and have more than one pharmacy handle the paperwork. At least that's what I'd like to think. I went for decades paying health insurance premiums but never needing to do anything medical, but that hasn't been my complaint for more than a score of so of years.

How pompous was that? Seriously. What am I, the third runner-up in the "How Did You Like the Play, Mr. Lincoln?" contest? What were our mothers doing, I wonder, while our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation? 

And yeah, I am the kind of dork who uses score in an actual sentence, just as I say enhance where you might choose to say improve (and be wrong). I got Indian burns as a kid for being a bookworm, and now I don't care what you think of me.

Anyway, I was picking up a medicine I take only once a month. I sometimes question the sincerity of a physician who comes up with a medication a patient needs only once a month. What's the thinking there? "I want him to get better, but NOT too much better...once a month should be about right. Once a week, and he'd probably be cured. Once a day, and he'll be leaping tall buildings in a single bound. I don't want that! I've seen him in tights."

So I picked up the prescription, and the pharmacy technician explained my insurance would only authorize a ninety-day supply of three pills. Somehow, my heart will carry on, I guess. She then asked if I had any questions. Unfortunately, for her, I did. "What," I asked, "happened to Sandy?" 

She looked at me blankly. I explained to her that Sandy was a dog I had as a pet when we lived in Belford, New Jersey. I didn't add "when I was five years old." I didn't think it was germane to getting an answer to my question. She backed away slowly from the counter, which bothered me slightly, as we were already on opposite sides of it, and she was the one much closer to the drugs. 

Fearing, perhaps, she hadn't heard me, I repeated my question only louder, adding "Sandy was a Cocker Spaniel who tried to bite me." That is my whole memory of that animal. I hated that dog. So much for trying to get in good with her. 

Not even sharing that extra little bit helped. She stared at me evenly while demanding to know why I was asking her about my dog. Because I explained, you gave me permission when you asked if I had any questions.

"I meant about the medicine!" she offered with some force. I countered that it couldn't be my fault if I didn't understand what she meant since I could only hear what she said. The purchase was for less than five dollars-adding a whole new meaning to the phrase cheap thrill and I pocketed the change from a ten. I like to pay in cash sometimes when I'm feeling nostalgic; cash reminds me of when we were a powerful and feared nation and not a bunch of whiners afraid of a few questions about a dog that's been dead for decades.

The pharmacy technician seemed happy, almost too happy, as I walked away from the counter. I wonder when she'll realize that it's only a ninety-day reprieve. And that it's not Ol' Roy who's coming back for the rest of his party favors?
-bill kenny  

Reasons Why I Am Going to Hell

I am not the nicest person you could ever meet, but you already know that. When I came across an article in my local daily newspaper the other day, appropriate or not, I laughed long and loud.

Man who died in I-95 crash in Stonington was suspect in two bank robberies. 

Talk about putting the car in Karma. Beep-Beep!  
-bill kenny

A Big Cat Will Scratch You

When I was a wee slip of a lad, my Mom's Mom gifted me a cocker spaniel, Sandy. As I recall Mom's telling of the story, the first thing Sandy did after being freed from the travel cage at our house in Belford, New Jersey, was bite me on the arm. She told me I then punched the dog in the face.

Served me right, I suspect; I should have worn my leberwurst aftershave. Dogs love that kind of thoughtfulness. As you've probably guessed, I'm not a fan, though I'm the outlier in my family, as I'm pretty sure my five siblings all have dogs and cats, at least one or more of either or both. 

Our two children have four-legged (and two-finned in one instance) friends. As my Evil Twin Skippy knows all too well, I and the Animal Kingdom have agreed to see other people. I steer clear of folks who call their pets 'my children.'

Which brings me to Lauren Ann Lombardi of Seattle, Washington, who has a hurt in her heart that, I suspect, only a large dollar settlement could possibly fix. While in the United States Air Force, we (both non-flight line as well as ops folks) referred to overhead jet fighters as 'the sound of freedom.' Turns out other descriptives also apply. 

According to the Stripes' news account, it would appear her attorney may have minored in creative writing or been a contributor to Readers' Digest, "Towards More Pictureseque Speech," with phrases like "auditory carpet bombing' and "state-sanctioned acoustic torture." There's some anatomy as well as biology thrown in with "primitive limbic system." 

My heart bled peanut butter and jelly, especially over her passionate invocation of (her interpretation) of freedom of speech as outlined in the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights, though I suspect both George Mason and James Madison might arch an eyebrow at freedom to type expletives on someone else's Instagram account. Sadly, both are deceased and unavailable for comment, though I'm unclear if the Blue Angels bear any culpability for their demise.

And how can you not root for her as she channels her inner Mother Theresa? Or admire the steadfastness of her attorney, who is pressing on despite some who might find all of this litigation humorous, frivolous, or, in my case, pointless, "I don't care about the opinions of ignorant people." Now, that's some freedom of speech.

Ouch! It seems my feelings are hurt. Who can I sue?
-bill kenny 

Banquo's Ghost

I'm a couple of days late and more than a few sawbucks short on a memory I offered in this space fifteen years ago that showed up on my timeline earlier this week. When I re-read it, hoping it had been overtaken by events, I realized it's the same movie, with perhaps different characters, all these years on. Submitted for your approval:

Sunday, July 25, 2010

Picture Postcards from Near Prosperity

Coming out of the local market the other afternoon, I encountered a fellow standing alongside a Toyota Corolla, not the newest model, but one that was well-maintained. In front of the car, in a display mode of sorts, was a table with a handwritten sign that said "$40." It was a coffee table, a very white wooden table that came nearly to my knees and was about three feet or so long.

I measure the heights of many things in terms of my knees. I've had three operations to replace one and a half kneecaps, making me nearly bionic but still moronic. He wasn't interested in assaulting me with the table, but in selling it.

Dave (I didn't ask if that was his real name. Situation reversed, I wouldn't have given me mine either) was doing what he had to do to keep his family from sleeping in that Corolla. He has a job, okay HAD a job, working for a car dealership in the auto body shop. 

He was especially good, he told me, in frame straightening and cold steel reconfiguration (all I know about cars, for the most part, is where the gas goes. Almost everything he said was in English I don't speak).

He started coming to the parking lot about eight months ago, he said, looking to chat up people after they'd bought groceries to see if they needed their sidewalks shoveled free of snow, or pathways cleared to their garages.

We had a reasonable amount of snow during the winter, though I didn't get the impression he'd made enough money to get the front tires on the Corolla replaced, as they were looking a little like the top of my head, if you follow my drift and he probably doesn't have the 'discretionary' cash to pay to get them rotated to the rear (I didn't think to look if he had perhaps done that. Maybe he did already). 

Dave's already sold off most of his living room. And when he shows up out here every couple of weeks or so, someone calls the local police to report him. He certainly doesn't have a license to sell furniture in the parking lot of a mall, and it's just easier to move along, working the circuit and eventually coming back. 

He's got two kids, almost ready for middle school, and no illusions they'll be going anywhere near a college or any other post-secondary educational institution unless they win the lottery.

It's the kind of scene my mom's father, Grampy, used to tell me about when I was a small kid. During the Great Depression, grown men selling apples in front of skyscrapers in Manhattan and families, like his, learning to not want so they weren't disappointed when they didn't get. 

Every generation of Americans since we got started has done better than our parents before us, so that our children will have it better than we did. In a way, it's the promise of that dream that joins us as a nation, no matter our color, gender, religion, or politics.

I walked back to my car. I didn't need a coffee table and I couldn't persuade Dave to take ten bucks 'just in case' he ran into somebody who only had thirty, and drove off pondering how if we can't figure out what's wrong with us in the next couple of years, we may not be around to do any more figuring.
-bill kenny

Achieving Critical Mass at a Crucial Moment

The headlines the other day on Deportation Flights from Florida's "Alligator Alcatraz" didn't dishearten me so much as yet another example of the egregious cruelty we humans (and in my experience, primarily Americans) seem to display towards one another at nearly every opportunity, but, rather, how so much life in these United States has changed in my lifetime, and (Grumpy Old Man Alert!) maybe not for the better.

I live in a state, Connecticut, where the men's and women's basketball coaches at the University of Connecticut (UCONN) make millions of dollars more than the president of the university, who, in turn, makes more than the department heads, and probably the entire teaching staff, of various degree-granting disciplines. 

My evil twin Skippy thinks of it as 'triumph of the free-market.' I tend to lean more towards 'tell me what you spend your money on and I'll tell you your priorities.' (looking at you, Republican-controlled House of Representatives and Senate, as well as the White House. Tell me about the 'One Big, Beautiful Bill, George.')

Professional athletes' potential salaries compared to cancer researchers'. 

How ICE pays five-figure recruitment bonuses while we dismantle the Department of Education and defund Head Start because we decided we can't afford them. 

How we measure successful academic achievement in our school system by how much per pupil spending we have and students' performance on standardized tests, rather than surveying the improvement and advancement to our society and nation is furthered by our schools' graduates.

I found this website the other day that started out as 'interesting' and escalated to depressing and more than a little foreboding in seconds. Talk about the approaching Apocalypse. We, as a nation, need to pay closer attention because sometimes the things we do speak so loudly that I can't hear what we're saying.
-bill kenny  

Still Wearing Sunscreen

Sometimes, not often, I stumble across something I've written at some point in the past and am impressed by a turn of phrase or an insight. HEY! I said sometimes. Okay, not very often. 

Other times, I'll re-read an older posting and wonder what I was getting at. And on other other times, like this one, below, I am afraid to touch it with a barge pole. It originally was titled: 

Kurt's Blurt

I think we're on our way to being a nation of impatient mind-readers. Don't furrow your brow or make that face (I know 'what face? I wasn't making a face!' Were, too.). 

You may phrase it more elegantly (I would certainly hope so), but with apologies to Beckett, we're NOT Waiting for Godot; rather, hoping the other one shuts up real soon so we can talk.

It's taken me forever to warm to texting anyone at any time on my cell phone. I get hung up on spelling all the words with all the right letters in the proper order, with capitalization and proper punctuation for all. 

In the wonderful world of two hundred and eighty characters, such fastidiousness can make you roadkill with hair on the human highway, and more often than I'd like, I've been reminded that he who hesitates is lunch.

I've received follow-up texts to the original while I've been struggling to type a response to the first note. It feels a little bit like piling on, to be honest. It's hard to count to ten and get a grip on your annoyance while holding a piece of plastic with more computing power than the computers NASA used to put a man on the moon, while some touch typist is kicking your thumbs.

We're the same in person-to-person communications, too. Those Sunday morning public affairs programs the major TV networks used to have, so the FCC would cut them a break at license renewal time, have evolved into snarkfests where folks who remind me of terriers in need of Ritalin just yap at one another when they're not shredding some 'guest' like an old chew toy.

We're all rushing to get someplace other than here, and once we do, we're off again. My German wife calls it kein ruhe im arsch, and she would know as she's married to one (mit ohren). 

When you next converse with a real, live person, try to listen to the interaction between you, not just to the words but to the silences as well, and you may be surprised at how little of the latter breaks up the stream of the former.

I used to tease acquaintances and associates, disquieted at how rapidly I spoke, that people from my home state of New Jersey couldn't afford a pause to catch our breath or collect our thoughts, because with so many in such a small state, if you stopped speaking, you wouldn't be heard from again for years. In light of Jersey Shore et al, that may not be such a bad thing anymore.

So now we talk, type, and (for the most part) think in shorthand delivered in staccato, acronym, and emoticon, all masking, while masquerading as meaning. Instead of technology and our tools helping language and literature to flower as arts and culture flourish, we've continued to dumb down and throw majesty and meaning over the side.

I came across a quote from Indianapolis' #1 Son, Kurt Vonnegut, that makes me smile and think every time I read it. If it does half as much for you, it's worth the inclusion. "...do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites, standing for absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college."
-bill kenny (Rutgers University,  Class of '74)

I Am Still Right Here

Maybe it's the unusually unsettled weather many parts of the country are having, in this, yet-another-summer of our malcontent--maybe we're just a little more brusque with one another and have a little less patience than at other times because, when you get down to it, these are NOT other times.

Social historians have chronicled the outrage that practically every segment, 'demographic' is the buzzword used in poli-sci circles, we are feeling. We are Cranky with a capital C, if I may offer my own description.

I know people who 'only' get their news of the world from a single platform of Main Stream Media, be it the New York Times, Fox News and/or every flavor in the rainbow from one to the other (and if you think those two are the polar opposites, then good luck telling me where to put these kats and kittens because all I can say is 'crazy, man, crazy').

I like chocolate ice cream (I'm probably not supposed to eat it, but I like it), but I eat other flavors, too. It's about more than freedom of choice of an ice cream flavor-it's about NOT missing out and not getting a chance to sample every perspective. That's why I read/watch/listen to people with whom I disagree-to stretch my brain while trying to follow their argument. But it seems to me that lately we've been eating ice cream without spoons.

Every one of us is in danger of reducing ourselves to rude bumper stickers, "WOKE" or "MAGA." No inbetweens. The only thing more pointless than putting other people in boxes with simplistic labels is allowing someone to do it to you. If all you think of when I say Whitman, is a box of chocolates, Forrest, you need to get another life, because I mean Walt.

"I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end. But I do not talk of the beginning or the end." Song of Myself is a brilliant work of ironic observation and examination of the American Spirit because the title is about everyone other than the author. It is about each of us, you and me, the Americans unborn at the time Whitman wrote it. And perhaps he penned it because he knew someday we'd need it.

We have too many words to tell us how we came to this place in the story of ourselves and too few to tell us how to go forward and go ahead. The pages are blank, and so, too, are many of the minds who would lead us, leaving us to our own devices. "Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)"

"I wear my crown of thorns on my liar's chair, full of broken thoughts. I cannot repair. beneath the stain of time, the feeling disappears. You are someone else; I am still right here." 

And if we've learned nothing else from our own history, it's that no matter how we fight, and we were once reduced to national fratricide whose scars have not yet healed, we are still standing, and this moment of self-loathing and self-doubt, this too, shall pass.

-bill kenny

Better with Age

Today is my middle sister, Kara's, birthday. I hope it's marvelous because I love you to the moon and back. Here's some of what passes for thoughts that I offered on her Natal Anniversary several years ago. I called it at the time:

They Say It's Your Birthday

The world is a much better place because Kara is in it, and our family is fortunate to have her as a relative, even if, as Einstein stated, everything is relative. (Could that mean everything is Einstein? I'm asking because it would explain the bramble that is often my hair when I awake.)

Kara and I shared a short overlapping childhood as I was transitioning away, as she was becoming her own person. And in a sense, I suspect, she sees herself more often as Jill and Adam's older sister than as the younger sibling of our brother, Kelly, and sister, Evan, with whom I spent far more years, only because their luck wasn't as good as Kara's.

Kara and her husband, Russ, have their own all-grown family now, complete with a grandchild. I've discovered the easiest way to track the passing of time is to look at my children, as they are better indicators of how far we have all come than any mirror can hope to ever tell me. I imagine I am not the only one who has made that discovery.

Russ and the Birthday Girl Woman

Kara should actually be our ambassador to the United Nations, as she has a genius for persuading people to do things they would otherwise never consider, and while doing so, convincing them that it was all their own idea in the first place, while she is pleased and proud to help them.

I believe she (and my (and her)) younger sister Jill can actually pull off the Tom Sawyer paint the fence trick, but it's Kara who organizes the trip to the hardware store to get the brushes and the drop clothes. And she'll even help you muscle them into the van.

I wasn't around when our Mom was a kid-or a teen-or a young woman. I caught up with her as a young mother (and was, technically, the first reason why she was a young mother), but I have always thought Kara most resembles what our Mom must have been like when we were too small to really remember.

You cannot help but smile when you are with Kara-I am smiling now as I type this, thinking of her because she is relentlessly cheerful no matter the situation. My brother-in-law has impeccable judgment, excellent taste, and superior good fortune. Happy Birthday, Kara!

-bill kenny

OJ Is Still Causing Trouble

And when I say OJ, I don't mean the guy who rode into infamy with Al Cowlings in the slowest Bronco since Peyton Manning, but I'll give you extra credit for the thought.

I'm referring to Orange Juice, a constant companion for many of us at breakfast time, and for fast food restaurants, another front in the Breakfast Wars they wage with one another, with us as collateral damage.

In this case, it's one fast food restaurant, a McDonald's in New City, New York, nestled in the bosom of Rockland County. And as you read the news story, don't you agree it sounds a little like a First World Problem?

Yeah, I, too, wish my life were so care-free that an 'upcharge' (I love new words, don't you?) for my orange juice (making that a UC for my OJ), is what grinds my gears.

Poor Jeffrey (Martin, not Epstein). For breakfast, if only he'd chosen Alan's instead of Mickey D's, the juice comes with the meal at no extra charge. 
-bill kenny

I'd Assumed I Was Boring.

I'm the kind of person who eats unflavored gelatin because he thinks he doesn't deserve a flavor. 

I almost made the side of a milk carton under the "Have You Seen this Dweeb" rubric, but the dairy concluded my photo frightened the school children and caused the milk inside to sour.

I've had people start to yawn as I walked up to them and hadn't yet said a word.  

I can't do much about the first two except pray that a personality donor can be identified, but for the last of those, I'm feeling a lot better about myself since it may not be me when it comes to why people sleep.

Mitochondria, hmmm. ZZZZZ.
-bill kenny

You Can Still Catch Up!

You may have missed the start, but you still have plenty of time to partake. 

Unless you're like me and leave your Shark Week decorations up all year 'round (I learned my lesson. I almost fell off the ladder a couple of years back trying to take them down), this may have slipped by you.

It's SHARK WEEK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!   

And no, I have no idea why we don't have a Dirty Jobs Week, or a PBS Masterpiece Week (too soon?).

But here you go, and best wishes to those who observe, safely on shore.
-bill kenny

On This Date

"I sail to the moon

I spoke too soon

And how much did it cost

I was dropped from

The moonbeam
And sailed on shooting stars." 

"Maybe you'll

Be president

But know right from wrong

Or in the flood

You'll build an Ark."

"And sail us to the moon

Sail us to the moon

Sail us to the moon

Sail us to the moon."

Fifty-six years ago today.

-bill kenny

Everyone (Except Us, of course)

Crossing the street the other day, I passed two people deep in conversation with one another (to the exclusion of the rest of us) who were walking in the opposite direction and heard one of them say to the other, 'and all of them are either midgets or morons.'

I confess to NOT looking around to see if the circus was in town (is Congress back in session? That's all I could think of) as I instinctively knew the speaker was offering some pejorative characterizations of people with whom he disagreed, and was exercising his vocabulary skills to characterize them.

Still, reducing the world to two sorts is a sweeping statement. Everyone (else) is whatever we dislike. Not you and me, mind you-those other folks, whoever they are. 

What John Kennedy Toole called "A Confederacy of Dunces". And yeah, you can probably download it to a Kindle and enjoy it this summer as a beach book, but please don't because it's a serious book and you should have to have socks on while you enjoy it (other clothes as well, of course, but spare me the sandals).

And maybe it captures a bit too perfectly who we are as a species among all the others on this planet. Heck, for all we know, maybe every life form looks at every other life form as a midget or a moron and behaves accordingly (cats come to mind immediately). 

All of our lives are alliances of one kind or another, some more fleeting than others. In the primary grades, we had a partner for the bus #2 to go home. In high school, we had lab partners, in college, perhaps, study buddies, at work, a mentor or someone we regard as one, and in our private lives, someone we come home to.

And in each of those situations, we create egoisme a deux, which is how we make our way, forming and breaking bonds every day until the day the clown car comes to a screeching halt in front of someone we thought we really knew and then how surprised we are as we step out of the back seat to see the look in their eyes and realize we are, sadly, a little too tall to be the former.

-bill kenny

Praise We Great Mice

I'm a day late and a dollar short with this (apology implied). 

The original Disneyland opened 70 years ago yesterday, July 17, 1955. To mark the occasion — which the theme park is celebrating for a full year — Disney CEO Bob Iger rang the New York Stock Exchange opening bell from Anaheim on Thursday morning.  

Disney also opened a new attraction yesterday featuring an audio-animatronic version of Walt Disney in his office. Okay, that's only a little creepy but an improvement over the alternative. 

Ice, Ice, Disney

Who wouldn't want to be a member of the Church of Disney?
Mouse ears sold separately.

-bill kenny

The Slings and Arrows of Outrageous Fortune

If you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything. 

Honoring John Lewis

This afternoon, Chelsea Parade, from five to seven P.M. 

-bill kenny

Honoring Last Night's All-Star Game

When my parents were MUCH younger and only had two children, they would summer in a bungalow somewhere in The Highlands. Grandma and Grampy, Mom's folks, rented a bungalow just up the row from where we were. 

Summers were magical. Dad would take us fishing off one of the piers after stopping to buy a cardboard box of bait, basically flash-frozen killies. My (perhaps false) memory is that my sister was focused on fishing, fearless, and had no trouble using the killies as bait. Her wimpy older brother, not so much.  

Our bungalow community had its own beach (they all did in Fifties) and we would dig for hours, encouraged by Grampy, to reach China. He would even help us dig and we worked fervishly to see a real Chinaman and were never discouraged that it didn't happen. 

A highlight every summer was going to the softball fields just below the Twin Lights for an always amazing exhibition by genuine New York Yankees baseball players (!) My memory says they were Bill ("Moose") Skrowon, who played first base, and long-time catcher and full-time character, Yogi Berra. However, the pair did not merely play baseball with whatever adult team was out there; they played Donkey Baseball.  

In today's world, where business is sports and sports is art, no one running a professional team in any sport would allow any of their stars to ride on the back of burro. But this was the Fifties and we had a Cold War going on and Eisenhower in the White House. What can I say? We were easily amused. 

If you summered farther North than the Jersey Shore, you rooted for the hated Boston Red Sox, and if farther South, your heart beat for the Philadelphia Phillies. We were smack dab in the middle of Yankee Country (the New York Metropolitans did not yet exist, and both Brooklyn's Dodgers and the New York Giants had exited the Empire State for California), and getting to see any of our idols was a thrill nearly beyond words. Yankees players were gods. And this was their ambrosia.

It's taken me my whole life, until now, to appreciate the marvel of Yoo-Hoo. And to be honest, even after that, I still don't get it.
-bill kenny

AMA

Not as I thought for years, Against Medical Advice, but rather, Ask Me Anything. 

Mahatma Gandhi

Could that be our one, true superpower? Asking for a friend.
-bill kenny

 

Brian or Jeffrey?

One gave us The Beatles. 

Mutt and Jeff

The other gave us Schroedinger's Files.
-bill kenny 

Time Flies

Do you know where Butler, Pennsylvania, is?  This time a year ago, we were all finding out. And truth to tell, what I DON'T know about what went on a year ago in Butler could fill a book. 

Speculation persists on whether the assassination attempt was staged. I can't decide if people engaged in such pursuits are heartless, paranoid or cynical. I have noticed there's no hole or scar on Trump's right ear. It appears that the ear has grown back, which is some sort of medical miracle (and I imagine Evander Holyfield would have appreciated that). 

A year on and we're no wiser than we were on the day.
-bill kenny

Target Acquired

"I saw a werewolf with a Chinese menu in his hand
Walking through the streets of SoHo in the rain.
He was looking for the place called Lee Ho Fook's
Gonna get a big dish of beef chow mein." 

"Well, I saw Lon Chaney walking with the queen
Doing the werewolves of London.
I saw Lon Chaney, Jr. walking with the queen, uh
Doing the werewolves of London.
I saw a werewolf drinking a piña colada at Trader Vic's
And his hair was perfect.
Na!"

-bill kenny

The Future Is a/k/a Perhaps

I am an unabashed child of the novelty. I have memories of sitting on a coffee table in my parents' living room in the apartment in Elechester that we lived in when I was still an only child, watching the Dinah Shore Show on a teeny-tiny black and white television. "See the USA in your Chevrolet." Dad had a two-tone Plymouth two-door coupe, but I still sang the song. 

Seventy years later, and I'm surprised by the wizened visage I encounter in the mirror every morning. Strange days indeed. So little of what I grew up with has survived, except the memories. 

Now, we're a culture, nearly worldwide, who, because we have all these television and cable channels and means of communication, feel compelled to fill them with something. There was a time, when our kids were very young, when the idea of a 24/7 news operation was novel. 

Many of us wondered what would go on a channel like that at all hours of the day and night. At some point, as convergence began to close the distances between one form and another, news devolved into noise, not that we really noticed. 

Now, there's not a lot of nutrition in any of what we watch-just empty calories. When the President of the United States speaks and it takes longer than one commercial break (three and a half minutes), we start to twitch. We surf until we find something somewhere, even if we've seen it already, rather than attempt to stretch our attention span and focus. We have so much freedom of choice for information, we yearn for freedom from choice. 

Later this month, we'll mark the 56th anniversary of the First Man to Walk on the Moon. However, by the time we reach that milestone, it will be competing for our attention with the upcoming (in August) anniversary of Woodstock. 

Which one was history? Which one wasn't? How do you decide what is history? And what can a poor boy do, except to sing for a rock'n'roll band 'cos in this sleepy London Town there's just no place for a street fighting man.  

Sorry-I was channeling Mick Jagger, but I digress. I wondered eons ago if the news coverage of OJ and AC's speeding Ford Bronco was the end of an error. Now I know it was the lead car in the circus caravan, and I'm forced to acknowledge "This ain't no technological breakdown, Oh no, this is the road to hell." Makes me wonder what happened to that long-ago coffee table.
-bill kenny