Slightly Bigger than the Amboy Dukes

Imagine my surprise at Ted Nugent's return to the public spotlight. Go ahead, I'll wait. I was taken aback by the reference in this story to him as a 'shock rocker' since I'm not sure I know what those are (anymore) but am pretty sure The Tedster doesn't quite fit the position description. As old as dirt I am, Ted's older. We go back a far piece as they say in many of the places he bowhunts. Long ago, in an arena faraway in  Ludwigshafen, I went for an afternoon interview and stayed for a shock treatment with Mother's Finest as his opening act followed by some of the tallest and largest ampliers I'd ever seen in my rock and roll life as he took the stage.

The same guy who had, on a previous tour, handed out buttons that read 'If it's too loud, you're too old' was even louder, and older, on this particular tour, not that I chose to raise that topic after sitting through an afternoon sound check by both him and his opening act AND their full set AND his full set AND two encores. I had already figured out his collected works would probably never make it to the MOMA-he had long since done all of that math himself. It's not what he came for.

Yeah, he's gonzo and the Motor City Madman but the guy can play and he lives his life the way many of the rest of us can only dream of so doing (as long as none of us are Leonard Cohen). And now he's in trouble-who'd have thunk it. Most of Ted (93+ %, I'd wager) is entertainment, mostly his own. Long before he had a radio gig he was broadcasting to amuse himself about himself. And I can't help but think at some level he's enjoying that he may have become the equivalent of the Dixie Chicks for the current occupants of the White House. I cringe to even think about what he might be imagining he could do with the Dixie Chicks but I wouldn't be surprised he'd tell you-and it wouldn't be what you had first thought.

You had to know the day would come when he'd be forced to stop and smell the bovine excrement he's been recycling all these years because he knew it (long before the rest of us). He doesn't take any of this personally and would be crestfallen to learn someone else did. He runs with scissors. It's what he does. If we're smart, we'll run behind him otherwise he'll run us over. And don't let him near the paste!

The Nuge is all about fun and being loud and driving fast and shouting down people, preferably doing ALL of that while chowing down on a live animal. He never hunts for sport, claiming he dresses his own harvested game, starting with the socks, I'm sure. He's used to the sound of one hand clapping, mainly because he has another use for a digit on the other hand. I do know when you sup with Ted, you need a long spoon and a car that gets great gas mileage when it's on a Journey to the Center of the Mind. Right up front, stage right.
-bill kenny      

More Second Guessing than Second Acts

The big news item over the weekend was the less than successful Fenway Park Centennial in Boston. Just kidding. That was a disaster but only for a small number of folks who are genetically programmed to expect terrible things to happen to their baseball team (whom they love despite whatever happens) mainly because they often do. To help keep everything in perspective remember you can be a success with a .300 batting average which actually means you fail seven of ten times to get on base.

But I'm not talking about Bobby Valentine-I'm referencing the passing of Charles ("Chuck") Colson, a former Richard Nixon loyalist who purportedly boasted he'd run over his own mother to get RMN re-elected. From the many accounts of his personal life and Presidential years I've read, Richard Nixon was not the happiest man on earth and it's been my experience unhappy people tend to attract like-minded ones. Look at my circle of friends. Okay bad example; I don't have any. Though I guess that does prove the point, eh? Stupid logic.

Unless you were already an adult when Chuck Colson and the crew (H. R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, John Dean, Don Segretti, G. Gordon Liddy, E. Howard Hunt) were all associated with the Committee for the Re-election of the President (CREEP) during the thunder and lightning phase of the Vietnam War, words cannot ever convey or capture how close this country was to Civil War.

That tendency we have now to call those right of center 'crypto-fascists' and those left of center 'communists' had its beginnings back in those days when everyone who fought in the jungles of 'Nam were 'baby-killers' and my unshaven and unwashed side tended to chant 'Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh! The NLF are Gonna Win!' Maybe that's where the Secret Service first had the idea about that staff assistance visit to Colombia (turns out Visa isn't everywhere you want to be). The power of suggestion.   

The end of the world, or of our democracy, was happening 'round the next street corner and on a daily and recurring basis and forty years after The Plumbers and the attempts to humiliate and intimidate Daniel Ellsberg and hundreds of other little crimes against the Constitution and one another (yeah, the SDS didn't stand for Super Duper Students, so sue me), we have the dying out of a generation of wolves and the thinning out of the herd of sheep who made the wolves possible brings us back to where we started.

Shakespeare's Anthony in Julius Caeser offered "(T)he evil men do lives after them, the good oft is interred with their bones." I can't sit in judgement on the sum of the life of Chuck Colson and if you know someone who says s/he can, congratulations, you know a self-righteous moron (other than me). I pledged to be one of those who 'don't buy books from crooks' and I've failed at many things, but not that.

I come to bury Colson, not praise him and in so doing mark the passage of years without acknowledging the accretion of knowledge; humbled to realize that not learning to forgive my own past means failing to learn and then live from its lessons.
-bill kenny    

WPP Fandango

It's possible the lousy weather we have been threatened with for the last couple of days will arrive today and actually be here when I get up (I'm not up now; I was but now I'm not. It's a computer thing and no one understands). Most Saturdays I get to sleep in until 0630 or so unless I'm in the blood tests cycle which I am as of this week. I did two sets last week, one for a doctor I'd seen the week before and the other for someone I started out seeing on Wednesday and actually saw Friday afternoon (talk about a commute!).

I had blood drawn yesterday and will have some more drawn next weekend as well (I do Saturdays because they are all 'fasting' tests-what ever became of slowing tests?) and it's too hard to make happen during the work week. Anyway, the blood tests yesterday morning meant I blew off a hearing on most of the public safety portions of the municipal budget whose hearing was oh bright early yesterday. Trying to combine my 'get 10,000 steps in' regimen AND the tests AND the budget hearings didn't work.

I caught up with a sporadic contemporary at an event at mid-morning, the grand reopening of the first store in a dead-on-its-feet-not-too-long-ago mall whose ownership changed hands last fall and whose new operators have vowed to bring back. It's a nice ladies clothing store-think of it as Victoria's Secret without Secrets (especially if we're talking this Victoria)) and we fell into laughing about all the folks who showed up in City Council chambers the night the developers introduced themselves to us, and the keen interest in what was going to happen and questions about the near and long term future fielded that night.

Fast forward seven months and it's the members of the City Council, all the members (you couldn't say about about the last Council) and some of the other staff from City Hall and me and my guy. In the ladies store. Being cool and everything, of course, and I look up, after admiring the colorful displays and all the new window treatments and lighting effects and smile as an unkind thought crosses my mind. Just then I realize Herr Rosencrantz to my Guildenstern is smiling to himself as well.

We're watching the sales staff of the store who had to be worried they would have jobs when all of this got said and done, smiling as they share pastries and a box of coffee chatting and laughing with the members of the Council, oblivious to the fact that every one of the 'concerned citizens' who made it a point to make a point that night, mostly obscured by clouds, in Council chambers have just too much else they are worried about now to come and see the first fruits of this new partnership and collaboration at the Norwichtown Commons.        

They'd have found the time if the effort had foundered or had failed entirely. Perhaps they're still waiting on the latter or even counting on it. Schadenfreude ist auch ein freude. Sorry you had to make due with your WPP on a pretty decent Saturday morning. The biggest problem with abandoning a sinking ship that doesn't sink is that hellaciously long swim back to shore. Good luck with that cold comfort and change.
-bill kenny

Maybe She'll Sing Two

This weekend Boston, and everyone who loves baseball, is celebrating the 100th anniversary of Fenway Park-for some, America's Best Loved and oldest operating baseball stadium (not so much the former in my house). Who else but the New York Yankees would you bring to town to help you celebrate a centennial? (My first guess was the Mormon Tabernacle Choir but their farm team hasn't produced a decent second baseman in a decade).

Game time this afternoon is 4:05 and tickets are, theoretically, available. I would hope Jerry Remy and Don Orsillo would have the game on NESN but it's probably Joe Buck and Tim McCarver on Fox. I assume it's the Fox Game of the Week because it's a no-brainer and when you add that to Fox Sports, the low-hanging fruit is so low, it's on the shelf in the grocer's.

There's probably no chance the TV guys are going to carry the singing of the National Anthem because they've sold all that time already and 162 games in a season times 240 teams in the league (or are those just the ones who make the playoffs; with all the wildcard stuff I forget) we're talking decades of singing.

Which is too bad, today, because for those going they get to hear a Sudbury Home Girl, Linda Chorney (I spelled it right the first time, for a change) who now hangs her hat in Sea Bright, New Jersey (second only to Ocean Grove as my favorite shore retreat; Point Pleasant Beach and its North Pole Bar is my all-time crazy time place to go) do the honors on that well-known Francis Scott Key composition

Her Emotional Jukebox is the best record you've never heard (or heard of) and is an absolute gem mostly because, as even a casual read of her blog will reveal, she is very passionate and articulate about those things she chooses to write and sing about. She was almost well-known for winning a Grammy for Best Americana Album, but she didn't win one and so became well-known for how she almost won one which seemed to upset a lot of people who regard music as product. My technical term for such people is azzhole.

Singing at Fenway is a bucket list item for her as, slight character flaw, she roots for the Sox. I'm grateful her husband is a Yankees fan. Here's a great tune from her that you should enjoy even if you're a Royals' fan, though I'm not sure they are actually real. I, for one, have always enjoyed the observation by blackbirdilona in commenting on the song.

But since we can't see her sing the Star-Spangled Banner, I'll offer you a gem buried deep in her blog-a spontaneous collaboration she did with Shaun Hopper a few weeks ago and that always makes me smile-even, and especially, if her Red Sox manage to beat my Yankees.
-bill kenny

From Yad Vashem to Cover the Night

Sometimes the calendar conspires to bring the past, distant and the not-quite-so, into the present so vehemently and violently we cannot look away even if we so choose (and we do often so choose, too often). Around the world this week have been memorials marking Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance) but today for different and also the same reasons, should be the highwater mark as we do instead of say.

Where words fail, pictures have to capture emotions and the Holocaust provokes emotions unlike any other historic occurrence. Having been in Bergen-Belsen and Dachau, but never to the industrial strength murder factories, I may have a better idea than some of the scale and scope of the catastrophe that befell European Jewry eighty (!) years ago, but no one can "understand" what happened because what happened was insanity intersecting with depravity that surpassed understanding. 

The Holocaust is six million murdered Jews but so many more, and others, were collateral damage that the mind almost stutters trying to grasp the enormity of the horror. Poles, Gypsies, Communists, Russian POWs, homosexuals, physically and mentally handicapped, Jehovah's Witnesses, Roman Catholic clergy, political prisoners of all stripes and other 'undesirables' all were tossed into the meat grinder's maw where they were worked to death and dispatched with a bullet to the back of the head, starved or gassed.

Killing those unlike ourselves is something we do as a  species on a regular and recurring basis here on the Big Blue Marble. We're the only ones who do-animal, vegetable or mineral-the undisputed heavyweight champions of the world. It's not confined or restricted by geography or ideology. No continent or people are immune to it. The Holocaust might be noteworthy because hatred harnessed the Industrial Age to deliver carnage on a conveyor belt for the first time in our collective history.But it hasn't been the last time.

Biafra, Somalia and the Balkans are just some of the more notable recent genocides and they may well pale in comparison to what we don't yet know about all the dirty little wars fought throughout The Arab Spring and across equatorial Africa. I mention this, because, with any luck at all, today will be an historic day as a CMB, Champion Murderous Bastard, Joseph Kony, will be stopped.

His path has been bloody if largely ignored by those of us we who live in The West and who are most comfortable seeing him as a Third World Problem. The real problem, of course, is there is only One World and we are all in it, and so is Joseph Kony. The Eastern US liberal aged white guy that I believe myself to be says 'apprehend the miscreant and put him on trial' but the Jersey guttersnipe in me says, 'never mind the cost-find him today and put him down as you would a mad dog.'

Our global village makes possible so many miracles on a daily basis that finding and ending (yet another) mass murderer's career should be routine. Every day's the end of days for some, or at last for this one. It's time to cover the night. Every moment we live on this planet, we add to the story of Us. And the story for today is remarkably simple and unadorned: Today is the day to Make Joseph Kony History.
-bill kenny

Careful with that Fingerpointing

I actively dislike that we can consider ourselves, with reason, to be the Crown of Creation, and yet do and are as stupid as the day is long-. Having spent a year  in Greenland above the Arctic Circle I'm here to tell you their summer days are 24 hours of non-stop daylight.

I mention that because I am just as inclined to reach for the cheap thrills, and the low-hanging fruit-the line of least resistance news items when I believe/hope no one is watching (to include me I guess). It happened yesterday wandering through a headline compilation (see you later, aggregator!) that included a peg to the recently passed IRS filing deadline, that was tied to a much larger issue.

Congress is grunting and groaning like they will seriously attempt to 'lift the tax burden' from our shoulders, my fellow 99%. Pigs will fly and Elvis, himself, will return with PB and banana fried sandwiches before any of us have a 'fair tax code' but we love hearing that siren song. Thankyewverymuch. It's a Presidential election year, all the seats in the House of Representatives are up for grabs as are a third of the Senate seats. Of course Congress is looking at tax code reform. They've been accused of being many things; stupid is never among them.

I gave serious thought to clicking the link and reading the story, since I still have a job and earn an income ("too much" say the people I work for) so, to a large extent, I have a dog in this hunt, but then, just below appealing to every single base instinct, there was this: "Lindsay Lohan: The Judge Said No Clubs and Coachella Ain't No Club!" Almost gave my clicking finger an embolism nailing that one.

I don't even care about this person and could probably not tell you three movies, or anything else, she's ever been in. She's Professionally Famous, As Seen On TV. She doesn't do anything and she doesn't have to. She attracts eyeballs every time her name shows up in a story. If I were the Grain Price Control Authority (sounds cool doesn't it? I imagine the silk tour jackets are killers.) I would start carpet bombing major and minor media outlets with press releases entitled: "Lindsay Lohan Has Nothing to Do with this Story."

See? It almost worked. You clicked on it and then went 'waitaminit! Where's the pictures? What kind of a Lindsay Lohan story is this?' And then your remembered to read the whole headline and realized the error of your ways. We do it all the time, everyday.

Taliban battling Afghan National Army (btw, Zabihullah, if the attacks were such a "success", whose guys were face-down dead in the dirt eight times over? Care to wager after a month of such 'successes' we'd see  the end of all of this?) or should we catch up on Khloe Kardashian? The slaughter of innocents that is Assad's Syria or dig how ripped Paris Hilton looks in whatever it is she's wearing. Pick an event, any event-you can find the polar opposite pablum in less than a minute and that's what most of us will choose. And then we sit around and wonder 'how come Fox News is so popular?' Tell me about the rabbits, George.
-bill kenny

Helping Put the Green in Greeneville

Sunday is Earth Day. Technically, everyday is Earth Day with special emphasis on April 22nd, the date in 1970 when the first Earth Day was observed. I marched in the parade that day in NYC and am not proud to admit we left quite a mess for others to clean up.

I have a chance to atone for that youthful indiscretion this Sunday morning and so do you when we volunteer for the Shetucket River Cleanup that kicks off at 9 in the parking area created by the Norwich Public Utilities where the 8th Street Bridge and Roosevelt Avenue meet.

You can sign up by calling Peter Procko at 860-908-5532 and then show up Sunday with work gloves, sturdy work shoes and, if you have one, a rake. There’s a lot to do and we’re going to need all the help we can get and then some.

I confess joining late the Shetucket River and Greeneville Dam fan club. It was about a month ago I wandered past the information kiosk about the fish found below, and above, the "new" dam in the Shetucket and read about the fish ladder. It was a fine walk on a mild March Saturday. Understand "new" dam is a relative term, having been built in 1915 to replace the "old" one, from 1828, sections of which are still visible upriver.

I shared part of the walk with a resident and occasional fisherman who told me stories of the life and times of earlier-than-his-generations of Greeneville residents and the influence of the now long-gone industries the Shetucket River fostered and furthered on his youth and on all those youngsters with whom he grew up.

Greeneville was named for William P. Greene who purchased land on both sides of the Shetucket River in 1826 for development, proving even then Norwich was a good investment. In 1828 Greene transferred his purchases to the Norwich Water Power Company, (he was the largest shareholder), and the original dam was constructed in 1828. I have no idea if an historic predecessor to the Norwich Community Development Corporation was involved in the construction as the city's preferred developer and don't know anyone old enough to know in order to ask.

Even with our mild winter and the dry Spring forcing water levels to record lows and exposing more riverbank than has been seen in a century or more, you'll hear the Shetucket roar before you see the dam. There's a constant hum, probably like that of one hundred and eighty years ago that drove water wheels producing the power needed by mills to turn out the cloth made into uniforms of Union soldiers in the Civil War and drove the foundries that forged cannon balls and grapeshot fired in the battles that preserved our nation.

I realize asking you to give up a few hours or more (it's been a mess for a long time, I'm not going to lie to you) is asking a lot, especially on a Sunday but important people do important things and this is important, not just for Greeneville but for all of us who live here. Please join us Sunday and help save the planet, or at least a small part of it and to assure Greeneville’s story remains a part of our history.

-bill kenny