Highway Star

I drive a Subaru Forester. It is not a turbo. It doesn't have a hemi in the boot for added torque or anything like that. It's a pretty straightforward, boxy-like vehicle that smells vaguely like cheese, but in a good way.

I drive it rather unadventurously back and forth to work five or more days a week. The great thing about not having a life is there's little to interfere with being a drone and I have been a Drone's Drone for decades (and have the trophies on the fireplace mantle now that you ask, but you didn't).

I putter the twelve plus something miles from my house to my work in the oh dark thirty of the early morning, between the casino shifts at Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun before the first shift at EB takes to the road.

I use the state highway to go to work. It's two lanes, a lot repaved last fall so it's in pretty decent shape unlike so much of the infrastructure with which we surround ourselves, and traffic, at the hour I drive it is okay and not too much of a problem.

Coming home in the afternoon, because now, psychologically we're on 'my' time, I bang the left at the Mohegan Pequot Bridge which has been the subject of constant expansion discussions for the last decade and a half (all the time the Mohegan Sun casino on the far shore of the Thames River has been open) but nothing has been done.

The Q Bridge near New Haven on 95 is well over half way finished but that was done with mostly Fed dollars and boxcars full of 'em and this one would be about the same cost but there's no money and there's no work-around while they take the bridge apart so this isn't happening any time soon.

The drive home is a LOT more intense. Yesterday the guy one car behind me in the right lane, the lane that disappears as you head over the bridge  after you make the left at the light. I believe, based on his behavior, thought he had a Testarossa. He actually had a Tiburon.

And that, my friend, is why you only saw the back end of a Forester all the way over the bridge, no matter how much skittering you did back there, but also why I offered you a rigid digit salute as you passed me horn honking but then missed your shift and fell off the pace, badly. Laugh? Not even the half of it. I thought I'd die banging my head on the dash.
-bill kenny

Sometimes a Thing Is What a Thing Is

Early yesterday evening on one of the social media outlets, I happened across this image and found it to be arresting both visually and emotionally.

I'm not sure why I got stuck on it, but I did and I abandoned it only with reluctance. Seeing it made me feel like I was five years old again when the world was filled with limitless possibilities, though as a five-year old I knew neither of those words.

It reminded me of how much more magical a place this life is when you are young than when you are old. The same eyes that saw adventure hinted at in the shadows now curse the weak light and worry about the dangers that lie within.

And then I realized, sadly, it was a man and not a boy with the wheel barrow. A man who was seeing as much and as little of the mystery of the moment as I was staring at the screen watching his struggles on my monitor. And then I thought about Jimmy Webb and smiled.
-bill kenny

Sort of Like Saint Patrick's Day

Across the USA today many of our friends and neighbors will celebrate Cinco de Mayo even though many can speak no more Spanish than is used at Taco Bell.

For a lot of us, today is a good reason for a party and we certainly don't need a second invitation to do that. With the exception of parts of the American Upper Mid-West, the weather should be conducive for frivolity and debauchery. As if either had anything to do with the origins of the day, today.

Hi.Lar.I.Ous. Yes, lots of jokes; some hateful, some hurtful, but only if you're the subject or the object. If you're the teller of the tale or part of the audience, it's a laugh riot. Somewhere beneath all of that attempted humor and synthetic bonhomie there might come a moment of reflection on the importance of this day for those of Mexican heritage. And a realization that we're more alike than any of us might have dreamed.
-bill kenny

Lawn Ornaments Riding Horses

Today is the 139th running of the "Fastest Two Minutes in the Whole Dam World or Something Like It" Yes. It's Kentucky Derby Day, the Race for the Roses and a hundred cliches that those who follow the Sport of Kings (and I wasn't sure what they meant for quite some time about that growing up) take as seriously as those who follow the World Series, the Super Bowl or the Stanley Cup take their sports.

The difference being you don't get to ride a team mate around a track in anything resembling a counter-clockwise direction (I think; and do they change directions  in Australia for the obvious reason) which is too bad because I imagine a placekicker riding around on a linebacker would be quite striking visually.

All I know about the event today is what Dr. Hunter S. Thompson wrote in 1970 when I was barely eighteen years old. It tore my mind in two; your turn.
And, you're welcome.
-bill kenny

P. T. So Good

Somewhere, the éminence grise of Bethel, Connecticut, Phineas Taylor Barnum is smiling. Heck, he's doing way more than that-he's probably laughing his butt off and the object of his derision is, in all likelihood, the luckless, lunchless, Henry Gribbohm.

What's not to love about this story? The whole 'lost his life savings' angle? He's thirty years old, for crying out loud. I am much more impressed if, at 85, he loses his life savings. As it stands the line should read 'his life savings, so far.'  Perhaps I should be impressed with his pluckiness (rhymes with luckiness, of which he has none).

Do the math with me. His object and desire was to win a $100 gaming system (or something, I'm hazy on what a Kinect actually is but I don't think that's the story, yet) and after he blew $300 NOT winning it, he went home, got the rest of his life savings (out of his sock drawer or coffee can) and came back to the same game of chance where the first $300 sank without a trace and lost the rest of the money.

I love his reference to the little ones. "You’re expecting the kids to win a few things, let the kids have a good time,” except the photo that comes with the article has a child in a stroller so I'm guessing the gaming system wasn't for Henry (or Henriette) Jr., unless they now drool-proof the controllers (wish they'd done that for mine).

Not enough emphasis, I believe, is being paid to the banana. Historically, bananas are a wonderful source of protein and the staple of countless, timeless, physical humor routines. And the whole notion of it being a rasta banana just cracks me up eight ways to Sunday.

In another time and place, after an encounter with what might be seen as the Duke and Dauphin (for considerably more than ten cents, each), Henry would have gone home wiser and lighter in the wallet for the experience. Maybe he'd have contacted the police but you know you're in 21st Century America, and only knee-deep in Maury Povich Country, when you call a TV news outlet and don't mind that your tale of woe makes you look like an idiot.

Andy Warhol just asked P.T. to pass him a cruller and he's getting comfortable, though not too, because Henry's fifteen minutes of fame will be over in the blink of a young girl's eye. Life is a carnival, Henry, believe it or not. Life is a carnival, two bits a shot. And in light of your companion, mon, perhaps a little more.
-bill kenny

The Final Piece of the Puzzle

I don't really care about the world beyond my window today. I should, and at some level I do, but in reality I don't. Today is our daughter's birthday. Happy birthday, Michelle.

You will always be my little girl even though there are more times than I care to admit when I recognize you are an adult. There will come a time when you will take solace in that thought. It will probably not be before lunch today, but thanks for playing.

Michelle spent months after we arrived in Connecticut from Germany looking at everything and everyone with her big eyes as if trying to memorize everything. I think it worked out pretty well because 21 plus years after all of that, it's still pretty much in the same places and with the same faces.

Okay some of us have gotten old(er) and our mileage may vary but I really hope you have a marvelous birthday and that the rest of the year is equally swell. And yes, I know you expect I'll finish up with a ridiculously well-known composition by Sir Paul McCartney back when he had a day job, but I've always enjoyed a song of the same name from a small and somewhat obscure movie that's best known some forty years later for giving us the music of Bernie Taupin and Elton John. Happy Birthday Mickey Mouse.
-dad.

John Donne's Dilemma

The telephone is a device taken for granted in every home, office and, until recently, glass booths on nearly every street corner across the country. From the first switchboard in New Haven, Connecticut in 1878, the telephone has come to be more a ubiquitous utility than the revolutionary communications device it was when first introduced.

I cannot remember the last time I saw, much less used, a pay phone. Cell phones are nearly universal and may have been most responsible for hastening their disappearance. Somewhere I fear, Clark Kent weeps, but history marches on.

Not too far from New Haven and that first switchboard is our state capital, Hartford, and what is basically a third attempt to author the next chapter in the history of the telephone here in Connecticut, House Bill 6402, officially called  "An Act Modernizing the State's Telecommunication Laws."

As I said, this is the third time for this legislation and while that may be the charm, it might be worth a closer look.

As kids growing up when we said 'the telephone company' there was no confusion-everyone knew whom you meant and who they were, but in recent years, there's a proliferation of providers. In addition to land lines and dial tone from 'the phone company, we have cell phones, Voice Over Internet Protocols (VOIP) and telephone service offered by cable companies. It's all the Department of Public Utilities Control can do to keep track of quality of customer service, prices for services rendered, who's on first and well, you know how that one goes.

You and I might assume any legislation 'modernizing the state's telecommunication laws' would be unanimously endorsed and embraced, and in looking at the press coverage on the behind the scenes skirmishing over the bill, the arguments aren't over the language but the impact.

Fifteen years ago, time flies when you're having fun, SBC which had purchased SNET which had been one of the Baby Bells before the Big, Bad Phone Company monopoly was ended in 1982, bought AT&T and realizing the bigger name recognition adopted the AT&T name as its own.

The new AT&T asked for and received approval for the merger and may have sealed the deal in The Nutmeg State with a promise of increasing Connecticut employment by about 1,400 jobs, always a siren song to legislators and regulators trying to bring home the bacon. Except, as the decade unwound and the economy fell apart, jobs disappeared and there are now fewer, many fewer jobs (about 1,800) with AT&T now than there were in 2001.

I'd like to believe modernizing the state's telecommunication laws will guarantee those jobs, but not only will HB 6402 not do that, it doesn't force AT&T to honor its current commitments to what you or I might see as universal happy endings for customers like better (or continuing) service, newer technologies and products or even reasonable prices.

AT&T, not surprisingly is in favor of the bill's passage. They are its direct beneficiaries and I don't deny them the right to what they claim should be a 'level playing field.' But how do you suppose our state representatives and senators feel about us as the casualties of a bill with very few consumer protections and even fewer corporate penalties. Maybe we should call them up and ask them. We don't need a brother to lend us a dime, but we may need to borrow some dialtone.
-bill kenny