In case you have any doubts that, as the Crown of Creation, we aren't the most arrogant species to walk the planet, let us concede our genius at making and using tools, combined with the niftiest thumbs in nature makes us the current undisputed heavy-weight champions of the world.
And then, after we've done that and ignoring the reality that we've yet to find a means of harnessing any of our genius to overcome hunger, racial and ethnic hatred and so many other failings and failures of human nature, what have we come up with, instead, to distract ourselves. Submitted for your approval: Stupid Human Tricks like Foam Fighters Pacific (or Britain or Europe).
I'm not being snarky about it because I have an android instead of an I-phone, because the 'app' is free for either (sorry Blackberry, again) and the game, I'm told by those who know about these things, is 'dirt cheap' at under ten bucks. Rather, I can envision a moment at the end of the world despite being a FARC, when God, or Someone like Her/Him, regards all of us assembled with a mixture of disgust and contempt while turning to glance in a mirror and mumbling 'image and likeness, I think not!'
Not sure being able to win a dog fight while sitting on my couch or strafing an approaching army while reclining in a hammock is really the highest use of technology and of our brains with all the (real) worlds yet to conquer, but it seems on more days than not you can sweep a city block anywhere and pack all the ignorant SOB's you've gathered up in a sack, hit the sack with a bat and you'd hit the right one.
Unless, of course, we have an app for that as well.
-bill kenny
Monday, May 7, 2012
Sunday, May 6, 2012
Run for Home
Today is the day my youngest brother (almost typed baby brother out of force of habit-a habit that hasn't been accurate or a habit in half a lifetime, mine, or three quarters of one, his) is in the New Jersey Marathon. He took up distance running it seems to me less than eighteen months ago and by now has probably covered enough distance in practices and competitions to be nearly to the Golden Gate Bridge.
I know and have known a few people who are distance runners-thank goodness it's not contagious as my insurance doesn't cover vaccinations against it. Pat K from Germany, 'die Grosse Patrick,' as our son, Pat, used to call him, decided to take part in a triathlon after having covered one for a TV sports broadcast.
Sally F did the USMC marathon and more recently Tough Mudder and Joe B and James B (no relation) together with Jim McG run and bicycle at least five days a week (multiple miles at a time). I admire the determination and the stick-to-it tiveness such discipline takes and make myself scarce (a major effort considering my age and infirmities) whenever the word and volunteer surfaces in the conversation.
In high school every summer I used to run the perimeter of Harvey's Lake, Pennsylvania where our parents had a summer home. It wasn't that many miles but it was enough to convince me whoever invented a bicycle deserved whatever Noble Prizes we hadn't already given to whomever invented the automobile.
I think I know my brother well enough to know there will not today, nor have there been at any time in the course of his training, be a moment where he wonders why the heqq he is doing this. From the time he was able to form facial expressions, his have almost always been of the squared jaw, set in neither a smile nor a frown but more of an 'let's do this' indication. And I suspect today as he, along with thousands of other runners launches and lunges along, he will early on find his pace and with an ease that belies how hard and how much work is involved in so doing, maintain it, uninterrupted, through to the finish. Just the way he lives.
-bill kenny
I know and have known a few people who are distance runners-thank goodness it's not contagious as my insurance doesn't cover vaccinations against it. Pat K from Germany, 'die Grosse Patrick,' as our son, Pat, used to call him, decided to take part in a triathlon after having covered one for a TV sports broadcast.
Sally F did the USMC marathon and more recently Tough Mudder and Joe B and James B (no relation) together with Jim McG run and bicycle at least five days a week (multiple miles at a time). I admire the determination and the stick-to-it tiveness such discipline takes and make myself scarce (a major effort considering my age and infirmities) whenever the word and volunteer surfaces in the conversation.
In high school every summer I used to run the perimeter of Harvey's Lake, Pennsylvania where our parents had a summer home. It wasn't that many miles but it was enough to convince me whoever invented a bicycle deserved whatever Noble Prizes we hadn't already given to whomever invented the automobile.
I think I know my brother well enough to know there will not today, nor have there been at any time in the course of his training, be a moment where he wonders why the heqq he is doing this. From the time he was able to form facial expressions, his have almost always been of the squared jaw, set in neither a smile nor a frown but more of an 'let's do this' indication. And I suspect today as he, along with thousands of other runners launches and lunges along, he will early on find his pace and with an ease that belies how hard and how much work is involved in so doing, maintain it, uninterrupted, through to the finish. Just the way he lives.
-bill kenny
Saturday, May 5, 2012
Tin Soldiers
I should be using the abashed or chagrined fonts today, but they don't exist. A day that I believed I would remember forever came and went yesterday and I didn't note the date until I found a mention on line at someone's 'hopelessly liberal' website. Since my heart beats on the left side of my body, I tend to stop in on a regular basis but I didn't get there until late in the day yesterday.
Yesterday was the 42nd anniversary of the murders at Kent State. Alison Krause. Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Scheur and William Schroeder died in a rain of bullets at the height of the (un)civil unrest over the United States' engagement in the War in Indochina. The link is from an essay two years ago that is probably a more intense read now than it was at the time, in light of the hardening of our political and ideological arteries as the contest for the White House this fall grows nearer.
The four who died were not the only students to die that spring. Less than two weeks later in Jackson, Mississippi, two more students, Philip Gibbs, a Junior at then-Jackson State College and James Green, still in high school as a senior were murdered as well for disagreeing about the conduct of a war half way around the world from them.
I was a year older than Green, a white child of some privilege in a prep school in The Oranges of New Jersey. Our class was less than a month away from finals-I was heading to Rutgers University that fall on a full academic scholarship and life was good except at dinnertime when the TV news arrived, usually with the main course on the table, and death and destruction were always on the menu.
I had, as had millions of other young men across America, registered for the draft, as required by law. I'd hedged my bets on the advice of older friends and had registered at the Selective Service office at 42 Banta Place in Hackensack. Four plus decades on I can still remember the address, and the reason for registering there.
The office in Hackensack served many of the tony towns, West Orange and Montclair among them but also the inner city of Newark where thousands of kids with no chance of anything close to the life that made me and my classmates unhappy would win at only one thing-the monthly pull of personnel as determined by the draft board. The Vietnam War had already become an action where blacks were sent by whites to kill Asians. The last people to figure that out were the white children who had life on a plate.
Color isn't and wasn't coincidental. The names of the (white) kids at Kent State I'll know until the day I die-but the identity of the two casualties at Jackson State, both black, I have to look up. And still I pretend I can't imagine why that is. Maybe four decades on, I should think of the first two weeks of May 1970 as about something more than a war fought faraway and think of the casualties continuing to pile up in our cities' streets every day and night. Strange how the more things change the more they remain the same.
-bill kenny
Yesterday was the 42nd anniversary of the murders at Kent State. Alison Krause. Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Scheur and William Schroeder died in a rain of bullets at the height of the (un)civil unrest over the United States' engagement in the War in Indochina. The link is from an essay two years ago that is probably a more intense read now than it was at the time, in light of the hardening of our political and ideological arteries as the contest for the White House this fall grows nearer.
The four who died were not the only students to die that spring. Less than two weeks later in Jackson, Mississippi, two more students, Philip Gibbs, a Junior at then-Jackson State College and James Green, still in high school as a senior were murdered as well for disagreeing about the conduct of a war half way around the world from them.
I was a year older than Green, a white child of some privilege in a prep school in The Oranges of New Jersey. Our class was less than a month away from finals-I was heading to Rutgers University that fall on a full academic scholarship and life was good except at dinnertime when the TV news arrived, usually with the main course on the table, and death and destruction were always on the menu.
I had, as had millions of other young men across America, registered for the draft, as required by law. I'd hedged my bets on the advice of older friends and had registered at the Selective Service office at 42 Banta Place in Hackensack. Four plus decades on I can still remember the address, and the reason for registering there.
The office in Hackensack served many of the tony towns, West Orange and Montclair among them but also the inner city of Newark where thousands of kids with no chance of anything close to the life that made me and my classmates unhappy would win at only one thing-the monthly pull of personnel as determined by the draft board. The Vietnam War had already become an action where blacks were sent by whites to kill Asians. The last people to figure that out were the white children who had life on a plate.
Color isn't and wasn't coincidental. The names of the (white) kids at Kent State I'll know until the day I die-but the identity of the two casualties at Jackson State, both black, I have to look up. And still I pretend I can't imagine why that is. Maybe four decades on, I should think of the first two weeks of May 1970 as about something more than a war fought faraway and think of the casualties continuing to pile up in our cities' streets every day and night. Strange how the more things change the more they remain the same.
-bill kenny
Friday, May 4, 2012
An Addiction and Affliction
We're a little less than a month away from Memorial Day, which in popular culture is seen as the 'unofficial start of summer.' Considering it started out as a day to honor those in all branches of the armed forces who gave their lives in defense of this country, I suppose one should be grateful for any remembrance no matter how unrelated to its inception we still have. I'm thinking of a Christmas TV spot for Mary and Joseph and their needing new snow tires on the way to Bethlehem. Blasphemy! I doubt it, ka-ching! is more like it.
Anyway, I digress. I know, 'that's news?' Getting gas the other evening, I watched a guy with a double axle pick-up truck rail against 'those greedy b'tards' for what he's paying for (I'm assuming) is diesel or high test. I've never owned a fuel pig, so I don't know what you feed them. I do know the bed of that truck was so clean you could eat off it, because I looked, which tells me his health insurance doesn't pay for penile enhancement surgery which is why he bought The Beast in the first place. Pays to advertise.
I've been here before, back in June of 2010 when I ranted and at the risk of appearing lazy, I don't think it can be said often enough so I'll say it again. When I last shopped for a car, I spent more time wondering about the leather seating than I did on the hydrocarbon emissions. Because I'm a bad person? I don't know-are you? Not really, we're just a little mutton-headed and set in our ways. Leather trim I understand, but breathing air I can't see....not so much.
Look at our coasts, north and south OR east and west. All this offshore drilling who is that for? Us or U.S., you choose. If we were being honest with one another (but we lie as often as we blink and in the blink of an eye commit atrocities against one another), we'd eliminate nozzles at gas pumps, and replace them with heavy gauge syringes so we could just mainline the oil, diesel, kerosene and gasoline, because our appetite for 'the ooze' is practically insatiable.
It's not as public decoration that those platforms and rigs ring around the coastlines or those derricks raping the landscape hammer into the earth in search of fossil fuel. It's cold, hard commerce, my brother and sister, coin of the realm. If it didn't pay, it wouldn't happen. The Oil Companies sell as much of it as they can pull from the earth, and three and a half decades or so after millions of us stood in lines on odd and even numbered days to buy gas, we are more even more dependent on the same folks who cut us off back in the day.
It's okay because here in 2012 we could kick the petrol habit at any time; assuming, of course, we all wake up tomorrow morning and are Amish. How do you bake bread anyway? Yes, I'm mocking them-it's not like they're surfing the Internet and will read this. And if they did, what's going to happen? Are they threatening to build a barn in my backyard? Don't get your shawl in a bunch, I'm kidding.
But I'm not about this: We all "would prefer" wind, solar and other alternative energy, unless it costs more than what we're paying now or involves changing (in any way) how we would prefer to live. If it does, well, sorry about the seagulls and those tarballs and fracking for natural gas and benzene in your drinking water. It is really too bad about those coastal animals in the marshlands who were destroyed, but (what's that expression I love, oh yeah) you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs (it's a fine line between free range and Free Bird).
So don't worry about the price of gasoline because we're oblivious to its true cost-until the next time we have to send 18 and 19 year old kids halfway around the world to sit on the lid of some third or fourth world garbage can of a country whose sole value to the Bastion of Democracy is they have oil. If you look really hard in the mirror you already know what we are-it's all down to agreeing on a price. And picking out who has to pay it.
-bill kenny
Anyway, I digress. I know, 'that's news?' Getting gas the other evening, I watched a guy with a double axle pick-up truck rail against 'those greedy b'tards' for what he's paying for (I'm assuming) is diesel or high test. I've never owned a fuel pig, so I don't know what you feed them. I do know the bed of that truck was so clean you could eat off it, because I looked, which tells me his health insurance doesn't pay for penile enhancement surgery which is why he bought The Beast in the first place. Pays to advertise.
I've been here before, back in June of 2010 when I ranted and at the risk of appearing lazy, I don't think it can be said often enough so I'll say it again. When I last shopped for a car, I spent more time wondering about the leather seating than I did on the hydrocarbon emissions. Because I'm a bad person? I don't know-are you? Not really, we're just a little mutton-headed and set in our ways. Leather trim I understand, but breathing air I can't see....not so much.
Look at our coasts, north and south OR east and west. All this offshore drilling who is that for? Us or U.S., you choose. If we were being honest with one another (but we lie as often as we blink and in the blink of an eye commit atrocities against one another), we'd eliminate nozzles at gas pumps, and replace them with heavy gauge syringes so we could just mainline the oil, diesel, kerosene and gasoline, because our appetite for 'the ooze' is practically insatiable.
It's not as public decoration that those platforms and rigs ring around the coastlines or those derricks raping the landscape hammer into the earth in search of fossil fuel. It's cold, hard commerce, my brother and sister, coin of the realm. If it didn't pay, it wouldn't happen. The Oil Companies sell as much of it as they can pull from the earth, and three and a half decades or so after millions of us stood in lines on odd and even numbered days to buy gas, we are more even more dependent on the same folks who cut us off back in the day.
It's okay because here in 2012 we could kick the petrol habit at any time; assuming, of course, we all wake up tomorrow morning and are Amish. How do you bake bread anyway? Yes, I'm mocking them-it's not like they're surfing the Internet and will read this. And if they did, what's going to happen? Are they threatening to build a barn in my backyard? Don't get your shawl in a bunch, I'm kidding.
But I'm not about this: We all "would prefer" wind, solar and other alternative energy, unless it costs more than what we're paying now or involves changing (in any way) how we would prefer to live. If it does, well, sorry about the seagulls and those tarballs and fracking for natural gas and benzene in your drinking water. It is really too bad about those coastal animals in the marshlands who were destroyed, but (what's that expression I love, oh yeah) you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs (it's a fine line between free range and Free Bird).
So don't worry about the price of gasoline because we're oblivious to its true cost-until the next time we have to send 18 and 19 year old kids halfway around the world to sit on the lid of some third or fourth world garbage can of a country whose sole value to the Bastion of Democracy is they have oil. If you look really hard in the mirror you already know what we are-it's all down to agreeing on a price. And picking out who has to pay it.
-bill kenny
Thursday, May 3, 2012
Nattily Attired in Post-Natal Anniversary Apparal
I had a self-inflicted adventure yesterday morning that began with leaving the house, twice. I was in the car, engine running and backing it out of the garage, when I became concerned at how fuzzy everything on the rear wall of the garage appeared in my headlights (as it was VERY early). The good news was that I wasn't having a stroke-I had forgotten to put my glasses back on after shaving.
While I understand the indignant curiosity and respect an argument that says 'you're nearly as blind as a fruit bat without them! How could you forget them?!' I would offer it's very early in the morning, so much so that for many people it's more like a part of the previous night so visibility is only a conceptual notion with little practical application.
Besides, I had other things to worry about. I was to wear a generous helping of my birthday clothes. Not my birthday suit; that was on under the clothes, but a shirt, tie and trousers I have received as gifts for my birthday last week.
Make no mistake-I'm not living in or from Appalachia-I own more than one pair of shoes (though you'd not know it by the way I wear shoes) and have a full wardrobe of outfits my wife has either purchased or approved (ideally, both) as my judgment after asking her to marry me, seemingly, fled never to be seen or heard from again.
I felt like I was heading to First Holy Communion-except the tie wasn't one of those on a strap that went around your neck and hooked with a snap, but a real Pierre Cardin. I had a crisp white oxford shirt on (I am convinced 'oxford' is shirt code for 'not a button-down') and pleat-less black trousers because I hate those goofy folds up near the belt loops and between the pockets where all that fabric just billows and flows.
I had been warned by my usually loving wife to NOT make a mess in my new clothes or I would, presumably, be buried in one of the other sets she and our children had gotten me as gifts. I found the irony of being threatened with a fatal pummeling for dirtying clothes hysterical until I looked into her sweet face and saw in her eyes the soul of a dry cleaner.
I tease her about the restrictions and the constrictions but I know she has my best interests at heart. That, and I've long since accepted it's her way or the highway if I ever expect to try on those Christmas socks from Yule '99.
-bill kenny
While I understand the indignant curiosity and respect an argument that says 'you're nearly as blind as a fruit bat without them! How could you forget them?!' I would offer it's very early in the morning, so much so that for many people it's more like a part of the previous night so visibility is only a conceptual notion with little practical application.
Besides, I had other things to worry about. I was to wear a generous helping of my birthday clothes. Not my birthday suit; that was on under the clothes, but a shirt, tie and trousers I have received as gifts for my birthday last week.
Make no mistake-I'm not living in or from Appalachia-I own more than one pair of shoes (though you'd not know it by the way I wear shoes) and have a full wardrobe of outfits my wife has either purchased or approved (ideally, both) as my judgment after asking her to marry me, seemingly, fled never to be seen or heard from again.
I felt like I was heading to First Holy Communion-except the tie wasn't one of those on a strap that went around your neck and hooked with a snap, but a real Pierre Cardin. I had a crisp white oxford shirt on (I am convinced 'oxford' is shirt code for 'not a button-down') and pleat-less black trousers because I hate those goofy folds up near the belt loops and between the pockets where all that fabric just billows and flows.
I had been warned by my usually loving wife to NOT make a mess in my new clothes or I would, presumably, be buried in one of the other sets she and our children had gotten me as gifts. I found the irony of being threatened with a fatal pummeling for dirtying clothes hysterical until I looked into her sweet face and saw in her eyes the soul of a dry cleaner.
I tease her about the restrictions and the constrictions but I know she has my best interests at heart. That, and I've long since accepted it's her way or the highway if I ever expect to try on those Christmas socks from Yule '99.
-bill kenny
Wednesday, May 2, 2012
The Dangers of Pronouns
If you're like me, you have a pretty high threshold for pain. Sounds like a good thing until I concede in my case, I'm talking about other people's pain. I can be surprisingly stoic when we're talking in glittering generalities about how 'somebody needs to take on for the team' right up until I get in the batter's box and beanballs start whizzing around my head. Then my ardor and interest in jungle rules whiffleball cools noticeably.
We have the same aversion to pain when the calendar rolls around, as it has again, to municipal budget time since it is our wallets absorbing the pain. Our motto tends to become 'what's mine is mine, but what's yours is negotiable.' This Monday in all likelihood on the Norwich City Council agenda will be a motion to adopt in some form, to include revised beyond recognition, the City Manager's proposed budget from April 2. It will be interesting to watch the negotiations at the front of the room, realizing they impact everyone in the room.
You remember the City Manager's proposal: another opportunity in the hearings and discussion leading up to Monday night to use pronouns like "us" and "we" where, instead, and as always, 'them' and 'they' wound up as culprits for everything in that document no one liked, to include the type font. ("A little too Bodoni Bold for my taste," I heard no one at all say.)
Our language reflects our perspective. Even though the farther out in space you go the more alike we look, down here on terra firma, we can elevate differences and distinctions to an artform when it suits our purposes. "Those people" in City Hall have no idea what "we" are going through. Maybe you didn't say that, ever, but I know I have. It's not important who says or thinks it, but rather, how it colors how we act after we do.
Every year we have the same furtive tug of war for finite public dollars among those of us who want more for education, public safety, employee recruiting and retention, infrastructure, pony rides (had hoped to slip that one by you), capital improvements and investments.When "we" wonder what "they" were thinking of, something close to the reason we formed government is getting badly lost in the noise and language.
Someone tells me s/he is 'for education.' Of course you are, what's the alternative, ignorance? The insistence on turning out dozens or hundreds of school children to serve as human shields at Council deliberations has gotten old, but still we do it and those who believe it is effective swear by it and those who are unmoved shake their heads.
Don't forget all of "us" support enhanced public safety but do you seriously believe there is anyone who doesn't? When we define which ones are inside, we are also creating an outside. What we mean by what we say is where we tend to disagree. Maslow's hierarchy of needs helps us articulate and prioritize our desires and wants as well as our abilities and capabilities of satisfying them. Here's the Blinding Glimpse of the Obvious (BGO): 'they' are 'us.' It is only together, me and you can become 'we' and 'we' need all of 'us' all the time.
-bill kenny
We have the same aversion to pain when the calendar rolls around, as it has again, to municipal budget time since it is our wallets absorbing the pain. Our motto tends to become 'what's mine is mine, but what's yours is negotiable.' This Monday in all likelihood on the Norwich City Council agenda will be a motion to adopt in some form, to include revised beyond recognition, the City Manager's proposed budget from April 2. It will be interesting to watch the negotiations at the front of the room, realizing they impact everyone in the room.
You remember the City Manager's proposal: another opportunity in the hearings and discussion leading up to Monday night to use pronouns like "us" and "we" where, instead, and as always, 'them' and 'they' wound up as culprits for everything in that document no one liked, to include the type font. ("A little too Bodoni Bold for my taste," I heard no one at all say.)
Our language reflects our perspective. Even though the farther out in space you go the more alike we look, down here on terra firma, we can elevate differences and distinctions to an artform when it suits our purposes. "Those people" in City Hall have no idea what "we" are going through. Maybe you didn't say that, ever, but I know I have. It's not important who says or thinks it, but rather, how it colors how we act after we do.
Every year we have the same furtive tug of war for finite public dollars among those of us who want more for education, public safety, employee recruiting and retention, infrastructure, pony rides (had hoped to slip that one by you), capital improvements and investments.When "we" wonder what "they" were thinking of, something close to the reason we formed government is getting badly lost in the noise and language.
Someone tells me s/he is 'for education.' Of course you are, what's the alternative, ignorance? The insistence on turning out dozens or hundreds of school children to serve as human shields at Council deliberations has gotten old, but still we do it and those who believe it is effective swear by it and those who are unmoved shake their heads.
Don't forget all of "us" support enhanced public safety but do you seriously believe there is anyone who doesn't? When we define which ones are inside, we are also creating an outside. What we mean by what we say is where we tend to disagree. Maslow's hierarchy of needs helps us articulate and prioritize our desires and wants as well as our abilities and capabilities of satisfying them. Here's the Blinding Glimpse of the Obvious (BGO): 'they' are 'us.' It is only together, me and you can become 'we' and 'we' need all of 'us' all the time.
-bill kenny
Tuesday, May 1, 2012
I Will Say the Only Words I Know
Our daughter, Michelle, gets annoyed when I write about her, even when I write nice things like she's the world's greatest squirrel wrangler, or wranglette (I'm never sure) so I expect she'll be less than happily surprised I'm mentioning her today (I checked with her Mom on this because Adam isn't the only one whose natal anniversary goes aglimmering sometimes).
Michelle, who explains to people she has 'my father's wit and my mother's charm' has a birthday all of her own tomorrow. I cannot believe my itty-bit is an adult -from such small beginnings but she is and in hindsight, I'm thinking maybe she was born an adult intellectually and just grew into the size of one.
I can tell you we were NOT big fans of project day when one of us was enrolled in Buckingham School's Integrated Day Program. The teacher would videotape each child's presentation and the Q & A afterwards and Michelle's mother and I would take turns sitting in stunned silence as she departed from her carefully rehearsed script and descended into participatory educational chaos. On more than one occasion, I'm pretty sure I saw Conrad's Mister Kurtz, but it was awfully dark.
Michelle has a quiet intensity about her that can take you by surprise. She is in many respects, most especially intellectually and emotionally, a quiet riot and amazingly confident in her own judgements, actions and decisions. She may be wrong, but she is never in doubt.
She has a myriad of attributes and strengths from both the Schubert lineage as well as the Kenny clan but she is far more than the sum of her genetic inheritance or philosophic leanings and her character and intellect are very much her own. She celebrates her birthday tomorrow and you'd be well advised to join in, if you can or be prepared to explain why you didn't. And Mike, I went the entire column without mentioning the squirrels! Oh. Shi---HAPPY BIRTHDAY!
-dad
Michelle, who explains to people she has 'my father's wit and my mother's charm' has a birthday all of her own tomorrow. I cannot believe my itty-bit is an adult -from such small beginnings but she is and in hindsight, I'm thinking maybe she was born an adult intellectually and just grew into the size of one.
I can tell you we were NOT big fans of project day when one of us was enrolled in Buckingham School's Integrated Day Program. The teacher would videotape each child's presentation and the Q & A afterwards and Michelle's mother and I would take turns sitting in stunned silence as she departed from her carefully rehearsed script and descended into participatory educational chaos. On more than one occasion, I'm pretty sure I saw Conrad's Mister Kurtz, but it was awfully dark.
Michelle has a quiet intensity about her that can take you by surprise. She is in many respects, most especially intellectually and emotionally, a quiet riot and amazingly confident in her own judgements, actions and decisions. She may be wrong, but she is never in doubt.
She has a myriad of attributes and strengths from both the Schubert lineage as well as the Kenny clan but she is far more than the sum of her genetic inheritance or philosophic leanings and her character and intellect are very much her own. She celebrates her birthday tomorrow and you'd be well advised to join in, if you can or be prepared to explain why you didn't. And Mike, I went the entire column without mentioning the squirrels! Oh. Shi---HAPPY BIRTHDAY!
-dad
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