I attended a birthday and a wake, of sorts, on Saturday in Groton. Practically under the Gold Star Bridge in Groton, besides the Thames River, is a small but very well-kept bridge of a submarine, USS Flasher, which forms the centerpiece for the World War II Submarine Veterans Memorial. It's surrounded by polished granite tablets listing every US Navy submarine Sailor who lost his life during World War II, thousands of names etched into the cool stone to be preserved forever or for as long as human memory permits. It is quite beautiful and an oasis, of sorts, along a very busy stretch of road that runs to and through Electric Boat and Pfizer in Groton. You can see the Thames from behind the memorial and while I didn't see any of the submarines stationed up river at the base returning or departing on Saturday, it wasn't hard to imagine sixty-five years ago when that happened on practically a daily basis.
I didn't have to strain too hard to see those ghost ships and Sailors on the Thames as many of their shipmates, now in much older clothes, were reminiscing together in the sudden sunshine of an April midday. It had rained over night and into the early morning, but it was warming and dry by the time the two hundred or so submarine Sailors and their family and friends took an hour to observe the 108th birthday of the US Submarine Force, when the US Navy purchased USS Holland (making it the first USN submarine) and, sadly, a grim reminder of what every submariner of every nation knows can happen, the 45th anniversary of the loss of USS THRESHER.
There were Sailors of practically every decade for the last six or so to include a man I met briefly a number of years, LT Ernie Plantz, who had been captured by the Japanese after his submarine, USS PERCH was so badly damaged that the crew had scuttled it. He survived the Bataan Death March and 1,297 days as a prisoner of war. He was among friends from what I saw on Saturday, because he was among shipmates.
There were fine and kind words from senior leaders, officer and enlisted, still on active duty at the base, and a large contingent of very young Sailors from the Submarine School, each holding a flag of a submarine still on 'Eternal Patrol.' It was interesting to watch the old submariners look at the kids and see themselves as they were back when, and the junior Sailors, looking at those who had gone down to the sea long ago, some so long ago their parents hadn't yet been born, and realizing perhaps for the first time that they were the latest link in a chain of service to country that stretched back 108 years.
For the submarine veterans, they know far more about the life and times aboard a sub like THRESHER than will ever be spoken about in a speech on an anniversary and many of them served aboard submarines commissioned decades before the advent of nuclear power. For them, "DBF", Diesel Boats Forever, isn't just a slogan, it's an affirmation. And all the while, the eyes on the youngest Sailors grew larger as all this history, in their blue vests, some (the World War II Sailors) with their hats with large plumes, sat and sunned themselves more in the warmth of memory and remembrance than in the early April rays.
Each year, the dual commemoration is held and as the years have passed, the number of World War II veterans has declined for sad and obvious reasons. But the memorial continues and, I suspect, will always continue as long as there are submariners to stand the watch until relieved.
"They tumble blindly as they make their way across the universe."
-bill kenny
Monday, April 7, 2008
Sunday, April 6, 2008
No Sugar Tonight
There are days you eat the bear, and days the bear eats you. That's why there's always at least two paper napkins in the right pocket of whatever jacket I'm wearing. I like being prepared. I wasn't a Boy Scout but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night.
Speaking of prepared, our local grocery store is redoing its insides. Moving huge amounts of the store around-really everything between the frozen food and the produce and delicatessen sections (because, I suspect, of all the wiring and plumbing and counter tops needed for those areas). As of last night, the cat food is where the soda used to be and the bread and muffins are in first aisle near the celery and the organic stuff that looks like salsa wallpaper paste in the plastic tub, as opposed to near the bakery, which is where it was for at least a decade.
My wife thinks I'm crazy but I blame it on the cost of fuel. Almost everything in every grocery store is beamed down from the manufacturer by spaceships traveling at light speed. After the merchandise appears in the parking lots of the markets, elfin creatures all with a "K" monogrammed on their sweaters and answering to the name 'Ernie', come out of the hollow tree stumps, unpack the goods and place them on the store shelves before melting away and into the forest. Or not.
Yeah. I'm thinking mostly tractor-trailers, double clutching, eighteen forward gears, refrigeration units set on high and burning through diesel like we had an unlimited supply somewhere in the Texas Panhandle. But we don't and as the cost of fuel continues to sky-rocket, so too, will everything associated with it, to include the food we buy in the store that comes on those trucks (we laid the elves off; they got a decent severance package and a year's worth of health care benefits). It's just a matter of time before we see those higher prices on the shelves so I think as a sleight of hand, my local store is making me relearn its contents. Rather than my picking up a jar of Smart Balance peanut butter and wondering why it's now $3.89 and asking 'Honey, didn't this used to be about $3.50?' I can now wonder about 'wasn't all of this stuff on the shelves opposite the cereal? The grocery equivalent of the School of the Burning House (Buddha as a deli counter worker, not a volunteer fire fighter; that's a discussion for later this week, assuming we can remain civil enough to discuss it).
If this works and I get distracted from the price increases on groceries by issues connected with locating them, will I attend tomorrow night's Norwich City Council meeting where, according to the agenda, the City Manager is presenting the 2008-2009 proposed budget and find all the benches in the Council chamber facing one another instead of the front of the room?
And will some of us be looking for eggs while others are looking for paper towels?
-bill kenny
Speaking of prepared, our local grocery store is redoing its insides. Moving huge amounts of the store around-really everything between the frozen food and the produce and delicatessen sections (because, I suspect, of all the wiring and plumbing and counter tops needed for those areas). As of last night, the cat food is where the soda used to be and the bread and muffins are in first aisle near the celery and the organic stuff that looks like salsa wallpaper paste in the plastic tub, as opposed to near the bakery, which is where it was for at least a decade.
My wife thinks I'm crazy but I blame it on the cost of fuel. Almost everything in every grocery store is beamed down from the manufacturer by spaceships traveling at light speed. After the merchandise appears in the parking lots of the markets, elfin creatures all with a "K" monogrammed on their sweaters and answering to the name 'Ernie', come out of the hollow tree stumps, unpack the goods and place them on the store shelves before melting away and into the forest. Or not.
Yeah. I'm thinking mostly tractor-trailers, double clutching, eighteen forward gears, refrigeration units set on high and burning through diesel like we had an unlimited supply somewhere in the Texas Panhandle. But we don't and as the cost of fuel continues to sky-rocket, so too, will everything associated with it, to include the food we buy in the store that comes on those trucks (we laid the elves off; they got a decent severance package and a year's worth of health care benefits). It's just a matter of time before we see those higher prices on the shelves so I think as a sleight of hand, my local store is making me relearn its contents. Rather than my picking up a jar of Smart Balance peanut butter and wondering why it's now $3.89 and asking 'Honey, didn't this used to be about $3.50?' I can now wonder about 'wasn't all of this stuff on the shelves opposite the cereal? The grocery equivalent of the School of the Burning House (Buddha as a deli counter worker, not a volunteer fire fighter; that's a discussion for later this week, assuming we can remain civil enough to discuss it).
If this works and I get distracted from the price increases on groceries by issues connected with locating them, will I attend tomorrow night's Norwich City Council meeting where, according to the agenda, the City Manager is presenting the 2008-2009 proposed budget and find all the benches in the Council chamber facing one another instead of the front of the room?
And will some of us be looking for eggs while others are looking for paper towels?
-bill kenny
Saturday, April 5, 2008
"So come with me where dreams are born and time is never planned"
At what age did you know what you wanted to be when you grew up? I've grown old without ever growing up and have shuffled along for the most part occasionally standing up when someone said sit down. Like every kid growing up, I was convinced no one understood what I was going through and that I was the first person in the world to feel whatever particular emotion I was experiencing that day. We all were like that.
We all lived in neighborhoods where everyone knew everyone else. Where every house had a mother and a father and sometimes they fought (real shouting matches, people screaming at each other, stuff thrown on on the lawn and late at night lots of noise as car and house doors slammed) and no one thought twice about it because it always happened. You walked to the school with the same kids everyday until someone said you had to ride school buses and then you walked to the bus stop together and rode the same buses to the same school and rode them home in the afternoon, changed into your play clothes (remember Mom's tone when she lectured about the sneakers? 'You're not going outside with your school shoes on, young man and that's final.' And it was.) and went outside to play with the same kids in the neighborhood you knew your whole life.
I grew up with Robert Fritsche and when his dad's company moved him to a job in Ohio, the whole family packed up and moved and the day they left, the whole neighborhood, kids and adults, lined the street as the moving van pulled away and following it the Fritsche's Ford Country Squire station wagon and we all waved very solemnly because we knew we'd never see them again in our whole life and we watched as the car went up Bloomfield Ave headed towards Easton, growing smaller by the moment until it was just a speck on the horizon and then it was gone. And on the way home, I stopped at Bobby Alonzo's house and we grabbed our mitts and headed to the ball field. Farewell Fritsche.
Those were the days. In many respects. Those were the days when companies relocated people to other offices and factories in other states, not in other countries. Moms stayed home and Dads got dressed for work. In some houses, the rich ones (we kids always thought), the dads drove themselves to the train station and got on the train to The City to work and in others, Mom got up with Dad so they could ride together in the car to the train station and Dad would put it in park and get out while Mom slid over to get behind the wheel and roll down the window and kiss him goodbye and he'd go into the train station and off on his adventure. Mom needed the car for grocery shopping and maybe to take all of us to the dentist after school and then later in the evening, she'd drive to the train station and pick up Dad and they'd come home and have warmed over leftovers while we got ready for bed.
And now I've read where sociologists and historians and behaviorists shake their heads in wonder when they read of the accounts of everyday life 'back then' and are amazed that we survived. And yet here we are, in this world we created in spite and despite our parents and ourselves. Many of us have children who attend schools that are so tough, they have their own morgues (sorry, Lenny; it was a great line then and a great line now) and when you look at the children of today, how often do you see yourself? When mine were small and came home in the afternoons and told me about their days, more and more there was less and less of it I could understand. My children and their friends worried about clothes, shoes, video games, cell phones (why does a fourth grade child need a cell phone and what would Maslow say about such a need?) and their lives resembled mine at their age in almost no way.
How many kids were in your fifth grade class? I had fifty-two and learned enough to get to sixth grade (and a bit beyond) and today we have classroom ratios that sound like something out of Little House on the Prairie and standardized test scores that suggest McGuffy Readers could make a comeback. It's not, I think, that the kids are failing in school it's that we have developed a school process, an education factory, if you will, that fails our children. "Johnny Can't Read" and instead of enrolling him in a remedial class we have a school psychologist he visits every other day to be asked 'and how does that make you feel?'. I don't know what it's like to be fourteen years old in school these days, but I know I wouldn't want to be that age again on a bet. But what happened and how did it happen? What were we doing, as the parents of these empty children, that allowed the monsters to dominate their lives and color their dreams?
Peter Pan is basically a shuttle service to Foxwoods, you can look it up. The Never Land express lost money hand over fist and was finally abandoned.
-bill kenny
We all lived in neighborhoods where everyone knew everyone else. Where every house had a mother and a father and sometimes they fought (real shouting matches, people screaming at each other, stuff thrown on on the lawn and late at night lots of noise as car and house doors slammed) and no one thought twice about it because it always happened. You walked to the school with the same kids everyday until someone said you had to ride school buses and then you walked to the bus stop together and rode the same buses to the same school and rode them home in the afternoon, changed into your play clothes (remember Mom's tone when she lectured about the sneakers? 'You're not going outside with your school shoes on, young man and that's final.' And it was.) and went outside to play with the same kids in the neighborhood you knew your whole life.
I grew up with Robert Fritsche and when his dad's company moved him to a job in Ohio, the whole family packed up and moved and the day they left, the whole neighborhood, kids and adults, lined the street as the moving van pulled away and following it the Fritsche's Ford Country Squire station wagon and we all waved very solemnly because we knew we'd never see them again in our whole life and we watched as the car went up Bloomfield Ave headed towards Easton, growing smaller by the moment until it was just a speck on the horizon and then it was gone. And on the way home, I stopped at Bobby Alonzo's house and we grabbed our mitts and headed to the ball field. Farewell Fritsche.
Those were the days. In many respects. Those were the days when companies relocated people to other offices and factories in other states, not in other countries. Moms stayed home and Dads got dressed for work. In some houses, the rich ones (we kids always thought), the dads drove themselves to the train station and got on the train to The City to work and in others, Mom got up with Dad so they could ride together in the car to the train station and Dad would put it in park and get out while Mom slid over to get behind the wheel and roll down the window and kiss him goodbye and he'd go into the train station and off on his adventure. Mom needed the car for grocery shopping and maybe to take all of us to the dentist after school and then later in the evening, she'd drive to the train station and pick up Dad and they'd come home and have warmed over leftovers while we got ready for bed.
And now I've read where sociologists and historians and behaviorists shake their heads in wonder when they read of the accounts of everyday life 'back then' and are amazed that we survived. And yet here we are, in this world we created in spite and despite our parents and ourselves. Many of us have children who attend schools that are so tough, they have their own morgues (sorry, Lenny; it was a great line then and a great line now) and when you look at the children of today, how often do you see yourself? When mine were small and came home in the afternoons and told me about their days, more and more there was less and less of it I could understand. My children and their friends worried about clothes, shoes, video games, cell phones (why does a fourth grade child need a cell phone and what would Maslow say about such a need?) and their lives resembled mine at their age in almost no way.
How many kids were in your fifth grade class? I had fifty-two and learned enough to get to sixth grade (and a bit beyond) and today we have classroom ratios that sound like something out of Little House on the Prairie and standardized test scores that suggest McGuffy Readers could make a comeback. It's not, I think, that the kids are failing in school it's that we have developed a school process, an education factory, if you will, that fails our children. "Johnny Can't Read" and instead of enrolling him in a remedial class we have a school psychologist he visits every other day to be asked 'and how does that make you feel?'. I don't know what it's like to be fourteen years old in school these days, but I know I wouldn't want to be that age again on a bet. But what happened and how did it happen? What were we doing, as the parents of these empty children, that allowed the monsters to dominate their lives and color their dreams?
Peter Pan is basically a shuttle service to Foxwoods, you can look it up. The Never Land express lost money hand over fist and was finally abandoned.
-bill kenny
Friday, April 4, 2008
I Poke Badgers with Spoons
I saw that this morning on the back of the car in front of me, as opposed to on the front of the car in back of me, and it made me smile and then it made me wonder.....Where exactly do you poke a badger? In the nose? In the eye (that sounds unpleasant and unkind)? In the belly? How does the badger react to all of this poking, with bemusement, bewilderment or annoyance and anger? How long a spoon should you use if you intend to poke a badger? A spoon of the length one uses to sup with the Devil? Is there such a thing as having too long a spoon? The priest is right-that is truly an original sin.
I wondered about this as I was reading the next installment in the newspapers of the discussion that promises to get heated without any warmth or light in Norwich about taxpayer support of volunteer fire companies. Norwich, like many cities and towns across the state and country, is fortunate to have energetic and engaged community members who help out in a variety of ways and at various times, perhaps none more selflessly than the volunteer fire fighters. I don't know about you, but when I see an uncontrollable or unexpected fire, my first impulse is to move in a direction away from the fire, unlike volunteer fire fighters who run towards it.
As economic times harden in the Land 'O Plenty, and the belt tightening continues (and we start to look up recipes for cut-off pieces of tightened belt, with rock soup as the appetizer. Feeds as many as can find a place at the table) members of our new City Council (they are new, themselves, as five of the seven were just elected in November) are examining practices and procedures for how and why processes in Norwich are accomplished. Sometimes different is better and sometimes it's not. For everyone who likes change, you'll find one or more who think 'not so much'.
The volunteer firemen are concerned about what they feel might be happening to their organizations while those councilmen on the Public Safety Committee insist their desire is to improve, not harm, the volunteer fire companies. The firemen should be concerned, but not about what processes could get improved in Norwich, but from Robert Putnam. I knew the guy was trouble the second I saw those shoes, and as it turns out, his warnings on 'social capital' and how we Americans have grown more disconnected with one another, our families and our communities, are ringing louder than any fire bell. Even if you've never bowled a line in your life, you need to read his book and then look at where you live. When we say to one another 'we can't afford to live like this', we mean in everything and in every way. That's why we (or at least me) elected this City Council in Norwich.
For my part, I've checked Amazon dot com to purchase a copy of Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America not only because it's Spring and the EPA has stocked so many of the streams and rivers, because TFiA doesn't have much to do literally with that, but, because in Spring, it's good to remember how we used to dream big and live larger and wonder why we don't do that anymore. Brautigan's book is a good place to put the souvenirs we pick up along the by-ways and side roads of our lives. And the sleeve in the back of the book is just the right size for a spoon, runcible or otherwise.
-bill kenny
I wondered about this as I was reading the next installment in the newspapers of the discussion that promises to get heated without any warmth or light in Norwich about taxpayer support of volunteer fire companies. Norwich, like many cities and towns across the state and country, is fortunate to have energetic and engaged community members who help out in a variety of ways and at various times, perhaps none more selflessly than the volunteer fire fighters. I don't know about you, but when I see an uncontrollable or unexpected fire, my first impulse is to move in a direction away from the fire, unlike volunteer fire fighters who run towards it.
As economic times harden in the Land 'O Plenty, and the belt tightening continues (and we start to look up recipes for cut-off pieces of tightened belt, with rock soup as the appetizer. Feeds as many as can find a place at the table) members of our new City Council (they are new, themselves, as five of the seven were just elected in November) are examining practices and procedures for how and why processes in Norwich are accomplished. Sometimes different is better and sometimes it's not. For everyone who likes change, you'll find one or more who think 'not so much'.
The volunteer firemen are concerned about what they feel might be happening to their organizations while those councilmen on the Public Safety Committee insist their desire is to improve, not harm, the volunteer fire companies. The firemen should be concerned, but not about what processes could get improved in Norwich, but from Robert Putnam. I knew the guy was trouble the second I saw those shoes, and as it turns out, his warnings on 'social capital' and how we Americans have grown more disconnected with one another, our families and our communities, are ringing louder than any fire bell. Even if you've never bowled a line in your life, you need to read his book and then look at where you live. When we say to one another 'we can't afford to live like this', we mean in everything and in every way. That's why we (or at least me) elected this City Council in Norwich.
For my part, I've checked Amazon dot com to purchase a copy of Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America not only because it's Spring and the EPA has stocked so many of the streams and rivers, because TFiA doesn't have much to do literally with that, but, because in Spring, it's good to remember how we used to dream big and live larger and wonder why we don't do that anymore. Brautigan's book is a good place to put the souvenirs we pick up along the by-ways and side roads of our lives. And the sleeve in the back of the book is just the right size for a spoon, runcible or otherwise.
-bill kenny
Thursday, April 3, 2008
The Tyranny of Capital Letters
We begin sentences in English with capital letters and proper names and places get capitalized as well. As our public discourse coarsens, in this Presidential election year, more and more of us think, speak and talk about what we feel are the main issues in ALL CAPS…… Of course, there's (the) WAR (I love the use of the definite pronoun as if with all the armed struggles going on in the world, there is but ONE war) and the ECONOMY and, let's see, HEALTH CARE and WORLD HUNGER and AIDS (it's been a public health crisis issue for, what, twenty-five years...)
Actually we have as many issues, all of which need fixing at our local levels as well as at the regional and national levels, as we will ever have capital letters and I don't think we have very much from shouting at one another about any of them. Even when we agree, we've elevated being disagreeable to an art form. If anyone ever makes the stare of cold contempt an Olympic event, there will be a mob at the medals podium. Maybe it's because there's a lot more of us now on earth than ever before (and yet, I know of a dozen places I can get to in ten minutes and not see another soul for hours, so how crowded is the planet?) we're all a little shorter with one another.
Sadly, how we say what we say has a great deal to do with how we hear one another, or fail to. Instead of the Crown of Creation, the Top of the Food Chain, pooling resources to create solutions for common challenges, we hurl barbs and invectives across partisan political and ideological barricades to determine 'whose fault this mess is'. And while there's no clear consensus on a winner, the loser is all of us. Not just for all the time and talent and energy and money and manpower we squandered trying to agree on an approach to working on a problem but for ALL the other CAPITAL LETTER ISSUES we never even got to.
A quick local example on how we can all further comity and communication over confrontation and cacophony, where I live in Norwich, CT. This coming Monday night, our new City Manager, Alan Bergren, presents to his bosses, the City Council, his proposed 2008-2009 budget. (Where ever you live, your municipality is probably at about the same point on the calendar). If there were ever a moment to more carefully listen to and read what is being proposed, and how it is to be paid for, in the course of the year, I don't know when it is.
Here's what will happen in Norwich: people I've never seen at City Council meetings will attend (in theory a good thing, right?) and even though there have been hints and references in the local papers about the budget, it will be after 7:30 PM (EDT) Monday before the City Manager actually shares it with the Council. That won't stop most of us in the audience from debating in ever louder tones what we think is in it and why. By the time the Council gets the budget (and they're almost as new as the City Manager; that is, of the six (plus Mayor) on the Council, only the Mayor and one alderperson are 'holdovers' in the wake of November's election), there will be a chill in the air as sides have been drawn and positions chosen. For the three days after the Council meeting the local radio call-in show will be buzzing with angry residents, none named Ezra or T. S., and then the letters to the editors of the two local papers will start, and there will be some reasonably warm public hearings on the proposed budget where numbers of every size and variety will be thrown about like projectiles.
Memory can play tricks on you in terms of what things cost three years ago or what was paid for and how as public safety expenses. That's why, and if you live in Norwich, I've done the legwork for you, and if you don't, go to your town;'s website and find your old operating budgets and download them so you can compare where we are heading to where we were. In Norwich, you'll find the last four previous budgets, here, and make it a point to read the words (explaining the allocations) as hard as you read the numbers and it'll help all of us have a more informed discussion on our next budget as we build a better city for our families and ourselves, which, I think, is one of the reasons why we form governments in the first place.
We'll continue the debate and phone-ins and the letter-writing, but hopefully with a bit more insight and understanding of both the process and the product. I'm working on getting new glasses so I can better see other's points of view but "Right now I can't read too good/Don't send me no more letters, no/Not unless you mail them/From Desolation Row."
-bill kenny
Actually we have as many issues, all of which need fixing at our local levels as well as at the regional and national levels, as we will ever have capital letters and I don't think we have very much from shouting at one another about any of them. Even when we agree, we've elevated being disagreeable to an art form. If anyone ever makes the stare of cold contempt an Olympic event, there will be a mob at the medals podium. Maybe it's because there's a lot more of us now on earth than ever before (and yet, I know of a dozen places I can get to in ten minutes and not see another soul for hours, so how crowded is the planet?) we're all a little shorter with one another.
Sadly, how we say what we say has a great deal to do with how we hear one another, or fail to. Instead of the Crown of Creation, the Top of the Food Chain, pooling resources to create solutions for common challenges, we hurl barbs and invectives across partisan political and ideological barricades to determine 'whose fault this mess is'. And while there's no clear consensus on a winner, the loser is all of us. Not just for all the time and talent and energy and money and manpower we squandered trying to agree on an approach to working on a problem but for ALL the other CAPITAL LETTER ISSUES we never even got to.
A quick local example on how we can all further comity and communication over confrontation and cacophony, where I live in Norwich, CT. This coming Monday night, our new City Manager, Alan Bergren, presents to his bosses, the City Council, his proposed 2008-2009 budget. (Where ever you live, your municipality is probably at about the same point on the calendar). If there were ever a moment to more carefully listen to and read what is being proposed, and how it is to be paid for, in the course of the year, I don't know when it is.
Here's what will happen in Norwich: people I've never seen at City Council meetings will attend (in theory a good thing, right?) and even though there have been hints and references in the local papers about the budget, it will be after 7:30 PM (EDT) Monday before the City Manager actually shares it with the Council. That won't stop most of us in the audience from debating in ever louder tones what we think is in it and why. By the time the Council gets the budget (and they're almost as new as the City Manager; that is, of the six (plus Mayor) on the Council, only the Mayor and one alderperson are 'holdovers' in the wake of November's election), there will be a chill in the air as sides have been drawn and positions chosen. For the three days after the Council meeting the local radio call-in show will be buzzing with angry residents, none named Ezra or T. S., and then the letters to the editors of the two local papers will start, and there will be some reasonably warm public hearings on the proposed budget where numbers of every size and variety will be thrown about like projectiles.
Memory can play tricks on you in terms of what things cost three years ago or what was paid for and how as public safety expenses. That's why, and if you live in Norwich, I've done the legwork for you, and if you don't, go to your town;'s website and find your old operating budgets and download them so you can compare where we are heading to where we were. In Norwich, you'll find the last four previous budgets, here, and make it a point to read the words (explaining the allocations) as hard as you read the numbers and it'll help all of us have a more informed discussion on our next budget as we build a better city for our families and ourselves, which, I think, is one of the reasons why we form governments in the first place.
We'll continue the debate and phone-ins and the letter-writing, but hopefully with a bit more insight and understanding of both the process and the product. I'm working on getting new glasses so I can better see other's points of view but "Right now I can't read too good/Don't send me no more letters, no/Not unless you mail them/From Desolation Row."
-bill kenny
Wednesday, April 2, 2008
Do the Wall Street Shuffle
UBS writes off 19 billion dollars while Deutsche Bank expects a 4 billion dollar Subprime hit. And the Dow Jones closed up yesterday 391.47. Don't you feel better just reading that? I hope so because I have NO idea what it means. It was in a wire service story I saw, and nearing my 56th birthday I realize I'm supposed to be hep to this jive. Except I'm someone who keeps a shooter in his change holder because you never know when a hot game of marbles will break out and, like American Express, you never want to leave home without.... your shooter, Jeannie or otherwise.
The thing I came away with in all of this Financial Fandango is this might be the moment to take your credit card company aside and say, 'no hard feelings, but I'm writing off my balance to you. Appreciate the kindness.' I have one card in particular, in comparison to UBS, the write-down (or is it write down? Is there a hyphen and do you get charged for punctuation like that? Where would we find out about this? Never mind) is so small as to be non-existent. Heck, you can't really even see the balance. From space. When it's dark. And you have your eyes closed. If I can get the Secretary of the Treasury on the phone, 'Hello, Mr Paulsen! Loved you with Tommy and Dickie! Not sure about this gig with Jr. and Dick. Oh, you mean the letter o in your last name...wow, it does make a difference, actually, Good point. Well, nice talking to you, Sir....."
But I digress. Big business is able to walk away from messes it creates. Uncle Sam, on behalf of all of us, has been mooching money for years, promising to pay us back on Tuesday for a hamburger today, and can now pay just about no one back. Not a problem when you can have the power to print more money. And here we are, you and me, left holding opposite ends of the same bag. I'd like to think when all of this gets sorted out, and the markets are back in harmony with the Moon's Seventh House and Jupiter ascending (or something), then Peace will guide the planets and Love will steer the stars. Or not (the summer of love wasn't nearly all it's cracked up to be. Take my word for it, I was there. Lots of drugs, lots of awkward stumbleround with people whose gaze you had trouble meeting the following morning and boxcars of empty rhetoric about things it turns out we didn't know anything about. Go figure.).
Einstein postulated matter can neither be created nor destroyed and from the way we've been going for years it may as well be true of wealth and money. A decade ago we had the 'dot com' bubble and its subsequent bursting, and before that (and since, come to think of it), the real estate boom and bust and boom (and bust) again. Everything old is new. We had Prohibition and now we have a ban on hand-held cellphones in cars. Might be better to allow wet bars where the GPS system is, for all the attention being paid. And meanwhile, in Vapor World, fortunes are made and lost with the click of a mouse and in Downtown Terra Firma we drive to market in cars whose gas costs us a buck more a gallon than it did last year at this time to buy things with money we don't have. Are you happy, now? Didn't you see what the Dow Jones closed at? What's NOT to love!?
-bill kenny
The thing I came away with in all of this Financial Fandango is this might be the moment to take your credit card company aside and say, 'no hard feelings, but I'm writing off my balance to you. Appreciate the kindness.' I have one card in particular, in comparison to UBS, the write-down (or is it write down? Is there a hyphen and do you get charged for punctuation like that? Where would we find out about this? Never mind) is so small as to be non-existent. Heck, you can't really even see the balance. From space. When it's dark. And you have your eyes closed. If I can get the Secretary of the Treasury on the phone, 'Hello, Mr Paulsen! Loved you with Tommy and Dickie! Not sure about this gig with Jr. and Dick. Oh, you mean the letter o in your last name...wow, it does make a difference, actually, Good point. Well, nice talking to you, Sir....."
But I digress. Big business is able to walk away from messes it creates. Uncle Sam, on behalf of all of us, has been mooching money for years, promising to pay us back on Tuesday for a hamburger today, and can now pay just about no one back. Not a problem when you can have the power to print more money. And here we are, you and me, left holding opposite ends of the same bag. I'd like to think when all of this gets sorted out, and the markets are back in harmony with the Moon's Seventh House and Jupiter ascending (or something), then Peace will guide the planets and Love will steer the stars. Or not (the summer of love wasn't nearly all it's cracked up to be. Take my word for it, I was there. Lots of drugs, lots of awkward stumbleround with people whose gaze you had trouble meeting the following morning and boxcars of empty rhetoric about things it turns out we didn't know anything about. Go figure.).
Einstein postulated matter can neither be created nor destroyed and from the way we've been going for years it may as well be true of wealth and money. A decade ago we had the 'dot com' bubble and its subsequent bursting, and before that (and since, come to think of it), the real estate boom and bust and boom (and bust) again. Everything old is new. We had Prohibition and now we have a ban on hand-held cellphones in cars. Might be better to allow wet bars where the GPS system is, for all the attention being paid. And meanwhile, in Vapor World, fortunes are made and lost with the click of a mouse and in Downtown Terra Firma we drive to market in cars whose gas costs us a buck more a gallon than it did last year at this time to buy things with money we don't have. Are you happy, now? Didn't you see what the Dow Jones closed at? What's NOT to love!?
-bill kenny
Tuesday, April 1, 2008
"No, you're not!" said Little Nicole
I'm not the biggest fan of shaving that's ever lived. I do it, at least on workdays, because the alternative, not shaving makes me even uglier and older looking which is quite a feat, come to think of it. Shaving is like getting a haircut or mowing the lawn or washing the car. No matter how well done (and I've never been accused of giving myself a good shave) you have to do it again. With haircuts, I've actually kept track of the number of haircuts I've gotten since leaving the Air Force on 23 September 1983; it comes to seventy-nine haircuts. Why would I track this number? Because I hate getting them even though I look like some kind of a crazy when I don't get them. I already have the wide eyes and the herky-jerky movement-the last thing I need to look like first runner up in the St Vitus lookalike contest is a bushel basket of hair growing all over the place.
Okay, not exactly all over the place-I have a bald spot on the top of my head, probably visible from space at this point in my life. I still think what's happened is, as I've aged, I've learned more and my brain has gotten bigger to store all this knowledge and my head, to keep from crushing my bigger brain has also gotten larger. The problem, as I'm sure you can see (and possibly suffer from as well) is that I only have a finite amount of hair and scalp to cover my head. As it gets larger, they get thinner. So it's not so much I'm going bald as I'm getting smarter. I hope.
Perhaps that's why I attempt the beard so often: to grow on the bottom of my head that which doesn't any longer on the top? To make matters worse, or at least more humorous, if I don't shave, the growth on my face is very grey. I mean really grey-like skid-row grey; as in 'Buddy, can you spare me a dime?' grey. So grey that two weeks ago while I wasn't shaving (and lying to myself that 'it looks pretty decent this time'; it didn't) I got a senior citizen's discount on breakfast at a fast food place I've gone to for years. As much as I enjoyed saving money, my feelings were a bit bruised. I, however, did not return to the counter and give the senior discount back to the clerk. Mom raised crazy children, not stupid ones.
I'm not sure why I dislike shaving-it's not just the monotony or the monopolization of time (I have never been able to figure out how to do anything else while shaving) or that I cut myself like I'm auditioning to be Johnny Depp's understudy in whatever that movie was. I even managed to cut myself with an electric razor and still the Guinness Book people won't return my calls, even though now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall.
I buy the latest razors, the fanciest blades and have taken (and passed) the on-line and correspondence courses on how to use all of them. I own an amazing assortment of gels, creams and foams (somewhere I may still have a mug and a brush which is how my dad taught me to shave, I think, because that's how his dad taught him to shave. Patrick, my son, and I share no such moment), after shaves and skin toners and those damn styptic pencils.
I hate those things most of all. The only good thing about them is I don't have to walk around for three hours in the morning with little dots of toilet paper that I used to stanch the bleeding on my neck and chin while everyone I talk to pretends to NOT see the toilet paper and then they walk away thinking, 'what a doofus! Can't even shave himself!' Yes I can! Just not very well. Besides, someone has to be the bad example and styptic pencil manufacturers gotta eat too.
Elementary penguin, singing Hare Krishna. Man, you should've seen them kicking Edgar Allen Poe.
-bill kenny
Okay, not exactly all over the place-I have a bald spot on the top of my head, probably visible from space at this point in my life. I still think what's happened is, as I've aged, I've learned more and my brain has gotten bigger to store all this knowledge and my head, to keep from crushing my bigger brain has also gotten larger. The problem, as I'm sure you can see (and possibly suffer from as well) is that I only have a finite amount of hair and scalp to cover my head. As it gets larger, they get thinner. So it's not so much I'm going bald as I'm getting smarter. I hope.
Perhaps that's why I attempt the beard so often: to grow on the bottom of my head that which doesn't any longer on the top? To make matters worse, or at least more humorous, if I don't shave, the growth on my face is very grey. I mean really grey-like skid-row grey; as in 'Buddy, can you spare me a dime?' grey. So grey that two weeks ago while I wasn't shaving (and lying to myself that 'it looks pretty decent this time'; it didn't) I got a senior citizen's discount on breakfast at a fast food place I've gone to for years. As much as I enjoyed saving money, my feelings were a bit bruised. I, however, did not return to the counter and give the senior discount back to the clerk. Mom raised crazy children, not stupid ones.
I'm not sure why I dislike shaving-it's not just the monotony or the monopolization of time (I have never been able to figure out how to do anything else while shaving) or that I cut myself like I'm auditioning to be Johnny Depp's understudy in whatever that movie was. I even managed to cut myself with an electric razor and still the Guinness Book people won't return my calls, even though now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall.
I buy the latest razors, the fanciest blades and have taken (and passed) the on-line and correspondence courses on how to use all of them. I own an amazing assortment of gels, creams and foams (somewhere I may still have a mug and a brush which is how my dad taught me to shave, I think, because that's how his dad taught him to shave. Patrick, my son, and I share no such moment), after shaves and skin toners and those damn styptic pencils.
I hate those things most of all. The only good thing about them is I don't have to walk around for three hours in the morning with little dots of toilet paper that I used to stanch the bleeding on my neck and chin while everyone I talk to pretends to NOT see the toilet paper and then they walk away thinking, 'what a doofus! Can't even shave himself!' Yes I can! Just not very well. Besides, someone has to be the bad example and styptic pencil manufacturers gotta eat too.
Elementary penguin, singing Hare Krishna. Man, you should've seen them kicking Edgar Allen Poe.
-bill kenny
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