And Not a Word about Taylor Ham

I grew up in New Jersey and am in several 'You Know You're from New Jersey' Facebook groups where arguing about 'Taylor Ham' or 'Taylor Pork Roll," can incite near-physical violence among commenters. 

I try to steer clear since I grew up near New Brunswick (now Franklin Township) in what's regarded as Central Jersey, which, according to folks from North and from South Jersey, may not actually exist. For my part, I never heard of or had Taylor in any of its configurations as a kid growing up, so I stay crouched and silent. Mom raised crazy children, but not stupid ones (okay, after me. Happy now?).

Yeah, it can be argued, 'I can pick it out on a map,' and you'd be right. Especially on this 'Eat your way across the USA' map site that I found (never leave home without it and a supply of napkins). And when you bore down to "Northeastern United States," Jeepers, Wally! Look what's conspicuous by its absence.
-bill kenny 

Weather or Not

Hartford’s Samuel L. Clemons, better known to the world as Mark Twain, once noted, “Climate is what we expect, the weather is what we get.” 

I suspect he’d find what’s passing for our current winter weather to be somewhere between amusing and frustrating (perhaps simultaneously) though on that recent morning when the mercury at my house started the day seven below zero I warmed myself by remembering this quote, “Cold!. If the thermometer had been an inch longer, we’d have frozen to death.”

I was smiling that day as I left the house. Years ago, my wife installed a monitor from our weather station on the frame of our backdoor just down the hall from the closet where we keep our outer clothes, coats, jackets, scarves, and mittens. 

Her theory was you could check the outside temperature as you're readying to depart and keep the 'whoa!' sharp intake of a sudden surprise to a minimum when you step out the door from the kitchen to the back landing.

I am so gentrified. We called the back landing a stoop when I was a kid in Jersey, which is what it still is. It's not like I live in the part of Connecticut where I and my stockbroker neighbors have servants who wash our cars with domestic light beer or build a twin-hulled catamaran to challenge for America's Cup. 

I’ll concede we do have a big backyard, but not big enough for a polo pony, so pardon me while I remember NOT to dye my roots or frost my tips but to call things by their real names (I think Royce would have been a good name for the horse, btw).

What’s that song, ‘can you tell a green field from a cold, steel rail?’ This may surprise you, but I can, though I don’t recall anyone asking. What were once vices are now habits. 

Recently worlds collided at various points and times when I’d check the outside thermometer during the week and, like at your house, had the numbers range from the aforementioned seven below zero (that merited a double take) to just north of forty-five. Habit still has me check, though I confess the numbers have no effect on my decision to go outside. 

In terms of Galvanic Skin Response, GSR, the skin on my face could (at least in theory) better and more easily tell a difference in the percentage of moisture in the mid-double digits far easier than a difference in temperature of two degrees (maybe at Kelvin, but only maybe). But I chance a glance every time I pass the display, just in case…

Do I risk some form of a cerebral surprise if I don't check the gauge before stepping outside and, because I do, am I minimizing the possibility of atmospheric ambush? Hand on my heart, no clue, and truth to tell, I don't know why I look, except out of, you guessed it, habit.

In the summer, if/when the display was to be a triple-digit reading (which has happened), I admit I do pause for a moment but I’ve yet to be tempted to disrobe and leave my clothing (neatly) piled on the kitchen floor before heading out for a walk. And that sigh of relief you may have just heard was probably my neighbors, grateful for one less bad habit of mine. 
-bill kenny

Pity or Envy

Maybe you're suffering through Snowmageddon or, braced for a bruising, you received instead a mere brush. I watched local news here last night and some of the reporters seemed almost gleeful about what was, or wasn't, heading into Southeastern Connecticut.

Places like Dodge City and Baltimore were barely mentioned so if you live in those areas you might want to talk to your Chamber of Commerce about elevating public awareness. Assuming you ever get dug out.

As a young fella from Minnesota (where they know whereof they speak meteorologically) once sang, you don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows, but if you have a weather app on your smartphone, you may have been wearing that sucker out since at some point yesterday.

We had a lot of snow here last winter. It arrived late in the season and it stayed until what seemed like Independence Day but I'm sure my trip to the hyperbolic chamber has something to do with that recollection.

Not sure when it's safe to look much less go outside so I hesitate to gloat or commiserate because I'm not sure what will happen around here next. And though there's no business like snow business, as it is in so much else in life, when the feces hits the ventilator, it's every man for himself. I've been burning my bell, book, and candle. And the restoration plays have all been goin' round.
-bill kenny

Krebs oder Cholera

I have attempted in recent years as America's two major political parties have taken turns going off the rails-I think it's the party of Lincoln's turn (again; hope you saved those Goldwater/Miller campaign posters) to draw out Republican friends who are now 'conservative' (and yet don't practice recycling) on their assessment of the chances of The Rail Splitter being admitted into the party tracing its lineage back to him.

I am being ironic, to a degree, but since Faux News' Sean Hannity hasn't yet reported on metals, precious and otherwise, the concept escapes them. Their loss, as I'm here for my own amusement most days. I must point out they are surprisingly (to me) comfortable in their desire to be right rather than be President and I'm fervently hoping, come Election Day, that remains the case.

The Democrats are such a train wreck, one is tempted to look away but I have no idea what happens when you're not watching them, as their bad behavior when we are watching is astounding. I don't mean just their morality--what kind of boob sees the outcome of the John Edwards trial as a victory? And do we mention Anthony Weiner and his well, you know what or Charles Rangel and his elastic ethics? They are, however, and however flawed, closer to being 'The Big Tent' their-across-the-aisle colleagues were when I was a kid.

Today's Republican party has purged itself of its Nelson Rockefellers, Charles Percys, Bill Scrantons, John Chafees, Edward Brookes, Clifford Cases, Millicent Fenwicks and Peter Freylinghausens (those three, I'm proud to say, are Jerseyans with Case a fellow Scarlet Knight ) and is about to push Olympia Snowe onto an ice floe and cheer while shouting 'good riddance.' If Mitt Romney is too liberal for your base, as a wiser and hairier creature concluded many years ago, it's probably time for new head gear.

Earlier this week my brother Adam, known in some parts of the Kenny Klan as 'Finally! A Son with Brains!' offered his own Election 2012 Prayer of Assisi. As a statement of intent, it's a fine place to start and an even better place to end up. We won't, because we love the dirt and the hurt and shame on us.

We have two plus wars bleeding us dry, literally and figuratively-an economic recovery that may well have been designed by the Terrier sitting in the Wheelbarrow out of the Monopoly game with a concomitant concentration of wealth and power last seen just before the French Revolution, and just as obscene. I suspect the futures market for knitting needles is at all-time highs and nobody at Smith-Barney has any idea why.

So let's see how close we get to calling Romney the "M" word and Obama the "N" word. I still think if the President inserts an apostrophe between the first and second letter of his last name, he's looking at a five point bump in the polls. As for Mitt, short of dragging out a brother named Bat and a cousin Glove, you have to dance with the one that brung ya.

The Lincoln-Douglas debates set a standard, since then we've had Laurel and Hardy, as well as Stiller and Meara. We are selecting the most powerful person on earth, NOT electing the next Prom King, and if  we don't start to realize this we'll pass from the stages and pages of history faster than we may already be doing.

We get the government we deserve-sounds more ominous than optimistic. There's just so many times we can dodge that bullet and this November we may find out we've exhausted our good fortune. Stop voting for bumper stickers and voice bytes (yeah, I mean Linda McMahon and all the flying monkeys like her)-insist on debates of meaning and merit. Each of us, our time, our talent and our treasure, is worth the world-make the man who wishes to be our next President treat us with the respect and intelligence we have earned.
-bill kenny

Krebs oder Cholera

In the words of the immortal Mae West, the Hollywood icon and not the personal flotation device, "when choosing between two evils, I like to try the one I've never tried before." Gesagt, getan. What's said is done. About a month ago on a Friday in the late afternoon, our home phone and our Internet simultaneously spit the bit. It wasn't the first time it hadn't worked and may well prove to NOT be the last time but it was my last straw.

About two years ago we swapped out and consolidated TV, phone and Internet service providers and went with a giant monolithic communications conglomerate. Lots of choices, lots of channels, bandwidth so deep and large you'd wade in at least up to your shoulders and beyond and don't forget that award winning phone quality. Sounds like a TV ad, right? Sort of is, and for a while at least it sort of was.

And then the high speed Internet started to get slow-that's not really true of course. It seemed to get slow is a more accurate description. The cable TV signal which was sort of iffy on some channels on most days when it wasn't iffy on most channels on some days slid a bit as well and telephone service. Well, gotta tell ya it's getting to the point where I'm no fun anymore about a home land line. It's like an appendix. I have one but don't know why.

The outage lasted through mid-day on Sunday when Bob came out and fixed what, as it happens, two other cable TV guys had goobered up while at the house the previous Friday when oh so coincidentally things got stupid even as they were getting back in their van. After two hours of wheedling on a cell phone that evening we had a promise of Bob by Sunday if we were lucky and then after a half hour on the land line on Monday afternoon a grudging adjustment on my bill for forty two hours of no service for two of the three services for which I fork out over two hundred and ten smackers a month netted me twelve bucks. Thanks.

The online offer from the phone guys, themselves the blackest of the black-hearted monopolies earlier in my lifetime, came wie gerufen and the installation happened on Monday. So far, so good but also so what. I've watched us go from rabbit ears that Dad maneuvered to keep the snow to a minimum through Community Access Television, CATV, out at Harvey's Lake to the really big bucks for cable operators who now own TV networks.

There's no way I can watch all of this television, but I am willing to die trying when I'm not racing on the new, but old, Internet connection and not calling anyone named Roger on my phone. The cable guys had close to two hundred channels; the phone pholks have over four hundred, I think. Turns out it's not a federal law that ESPN has to be on channel 29. Either that or the telephone TV is an outlaw, I don't know which, but I'm back, in my dotage, to being a hunter gatherer. As it happens, Springsteen was only half right but that's because he wasn't a math major.
-bill kenny