As the thermometer we have from Radio Shack, part of a weather station we've had for years (and no, I have no idea what happened to the rest of it or if there ever (or even?) was a rest of it) topped off at 94.5 degrees Fahrenheit yesterday in the afternoon on the wall of our kitchen in our house in Norwich, Connecticut, all I knew was I wasn't going to get to my 10,000 steps for the day.
Mom raised crazy children but not stupid ones. Okay, that part actually began with my sister Evan, leaving me as the singular and limited combo edition but not even I am that much of a glutton for punishment and/or willing to don a ball cap and wander around outside.
I can't help but wonder where the hell all this heat was back in February when no one on the East Coast was searching for Nemo at all, but, rather, was shoveling that booger bastard off our steps, roofs and driveways. Global warming, if I may be permitted a criticism, needs to work on its timing. Yesterday I was more of a believer than Mickey Dolenz ever was.
Armed with the remote, I stretched out on our small couch, the one that allows me to lay out as Lennon purportedly did on a love seat in his living room in The Dakota, and prepared to hunt for something to watch. When I tell our kids about TV before remotes, I don't think they believe me.
I suspect neither has any memory of the tiny black and white TV in their shared room in our ground floor apartment on Ahornstrasse in Offenbach where they used to watch the Sandmannchen before I read them a story to put them to bed.
Yesterday my hunting was rewarded as I caught, from nearly the opening credits one of my favorite movies, filled with artifacts of a different America, and life than the ones we lead now, You've Got Mail. I, too, remember the interminable dial-up modem murmur and the visuals of the electronic handshake hoping for the payoff. (It always felt about that long until you heard it 'the voice' and I hope the guy they hired retired with enough money to have someone to read aloud all of his email.)
I think in a previous life I was an eleven year old girl because I've always wanted Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan to be boyfriend and girlfriend. Not the mushy stuff, just the good parts. And for awhile they made a not inconsiderable number of movies, and quite the livelihood I imagine, from being just that in cinema.
Of course I adore the movie for them, and for the many small things I believe I remember of an America in transition, but mostly I watched it from beginning to end for the gentle whimsy and music Harry Nilsson who didn't write a note as part of the soundtrack but somehow did anyway, warm and wondrous and filled with everything you know.
-bill kenny
Sunday, July 7, 2013
Saturday, July 6, 2013
And Change Back
The expression goes that a picture is worth a thousand words.
I have no idea in this era of "hi-res" imagery if the exchange differs with the pixel count.
I'll let you sort that out, or not, as you wish.
All across the USA since probably Wednesday night, people have been enjoying fireworks to commemorate our Declaration of Independence. What you're looking at here are from our celebration in Norwich, Connecticut at our Harbor last night.
You're welcome.
Without harshing your star-spangled buzz, I will point out currently in our nation's capital, named for our first President, we have a legislative and executive branch of government pretty much at war with one another.
The Executive Branch has been on a decade long witch hunt through surreptitious means to find traitors and enemies. They've been very successful, in my opinion, in making both.
The Legislative branch can't do anything because one chamber is controlled by one party and the other chamber is controlled by the other party, and actually by a sect/faction of that party that's not satisfied with anything less than ideological purity and conformity, even at the expense of governance.
Now that we've all enjoyed the fireworks, let's do something together for the rest of the year and put our nation back together in the manner our Founders intended, for the greatest good and the good of all. And stop being so damn short-sighted and adamant in our ignorance and arrogance.
-bill kenny
I have no idea in this era of "hi-res" imagery if the exchange differs with the pixel count.
I'll let you sort that out, or not, as you wish.
All across the USA since probably Wednesday night, people have been enjoying fireworks to commemorate our Declaration of Independence. What you're looking at here are from our celebration in Norwich, Connecticut at our Harbor last night.
You're welcome.
Without harshing your star-spangled buzz, I will point out currently in our nation's capital, named for our first President, we have a legislative and executive branch of government pretty much at war with one another.
The Executive Branch has been on a decade long witch hunt through surreptitious means to find traitors and enemies. They've been very successful, in my opinion, in making both.
The Legislative branch can't do anything because one chamber is controlled by one party and the other chamber is controlled by the other party, and actually by a sect/faction of that party that's not satisfied with anything less than ideological purity and conformity, even at the expense of governance.
Now that we've all enjoyed the fireworks, let's do something together for the rest of the year and put our nation back together in the manner our Founders intended, for the greatest good and the good of all. And stop being so damn short-sighted and adamant in our ignorance and arrogance.
-bill kenny
Friday, July 5, 2013
Close to Little Eden
Maybe you did it, too, take off from work today I mean. I wouldn't normally do it, but kicked in the teeth by my employer for a prolonged period of time (decades actually), and now most recently punched in the crotch metaphorically (though it doesn't feel all that metaphoric), I take what I can when I can and besides I asked permission.
We had a glorious day of weather yesterday here in The Rose of New England, and probably had a longer day than I did as slept in until close to half past ten. Atoned by spending part of the afternoon enjoying the heat in the street with my feet ending up as I so often do at the Norwich Harbor, formed by the confluence of the Thames, Shetucket and Yantic Rivers.
It was pleasantly busy both on the water and the shore as lots of different people were taking advantage of their day off and the weather for some quality time with family and friends. Same spot after nightfall tonight will be one of the most populated places in the entire state of Connecticut as over 50,000 folks find their way to Norwich for our Harbor fireworks.
They'll ooh and they'll aah in the rockets' red glare as the bombs are all bursting in air and then they walk back to their cars, drive away and leave us all here and alone to ourselves until next year. And we can't seem to figure out how to break the chain. The pier lights our carnival life forever.
-bill kenny
We had a glorious day of weather yesterday here in The Rose of New England, and probably had a longer day than I did as slept in until close to half past ten. Atoned by spending part of the afternoon enjoying the heat in the street with my feet ending up as I so often do at the Norwich Harbor, formed by the confluence of the Thames, Shetucket and Yantic Rivers.
It was pleasantly busy both on the water and the shore as lots of different people were taking advantage of their day off and the weather for some quality time with family and friends. Same spot after nightfall tonight will be one of the most populated places in the entire state of Connecticut as over 50,000 folks find their way to Norwich for our Harbor fireworks.
They'll ooh and they'll aah in the rockets' red glare as the bombs are all bursting in air and then they walk back to their cars, drive away and leave us all here and alone to ourselves until next year. And we can't seem to figure out how to break the chain. The pier lights our carnival life forever.
-bill kenny
Thursday, July 4, 2013
... And Sing an American Tune
I offered this last year-some people liked it, a lot. Thank you. It didn't make my stomach hurt too much when I wrote it so I'm thinking it's not as bad as what too often ends up here.
I took this picture at Little Plain Park, a pocket park I pass whenever I am attending a municipal meeting in the City Hall of our town (Norwich, Connecticut). This picture is from Monday night-the monument is from 1902.
The battle the memorial commemorates was Port Hudson and frighteningly furious as its carnage was, it was overshadowed by events in Pennsylvania, at Gettysburg, where the world, Lincoln's fears to the contrary, both noted and long remembered what was done there though sometimes I'm not sure that we do.
For many of us who are/were nominally in the middle of our work week, today's a day of sleeping in a little later, of enjoying that second cup of coffee at breakfast while lingering over the morning’s newspaper instead of grabbing and gulping and for whittling down your ‘honey dew’ list or maybe closing an eye to it altogether on what should be a day more of contemplation than celebration, today, the 4th of July.
Before it gets really crazy busy today, perhaps each of us should look in the mirror and then take a look around at the country we received from our parents and their parents and which we are giving to our children and theirs. There’s been as much gained as there has been lost through the tears and years and some of what has changed has been better and some of it has only been different. The dilemma is in the deciding which.
By many accounts the heat was oppressive and tempers were hot in Philadelphia two hundred and thirty seven years ago as that aggregation of malcontents and troublemakers (in the eyes of His Majesty, George III, King of England) gathered to refine, define and catalog their grievances and complaints as they took exception with the most powerful empire the world had ever seen.
Enumerating what it called our ‘unalienable rights’ to include ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ the founders of our republic, who did not agree on very much except that the present state of affairs could not be allowed to continue, concluded the only way forward as a people on a largely unexplored, new continent whose size and wealth was not yet known, was to break with the past and declare independence from King and Crown.
Out of all of that has come all of this.
And along the way, the original magic and meaning has sometimes been lost in backyard pool parties, car sales and chicken fried steaks on the barbecue. Our politics is spirited even if our interest isn't and our understanding of the issues is muddled and muted. And, again, it’s not that we all agree with who we are and what we are doing. It’s been suggested we as a nation haven’t been this divided morally, politically and socially since the Civil War. And that observation and analysis should mean far more than it does.
Some say never have so many had so much of life’s material rewards but, others say never have so many struggled to hold on to what they have. On the outcome of last fall's elections, we were told, lay the future of our nation-just as has always been the case.
We are a year on and not much (if anything) the better for that bruising battle except to realize (or should have realized) that every election is important and that if you choose not to decide, that, too, is a decision.
What may be missing is our national sense of self and our confidence and belief in our own abilities to forever adapt and triumph. We demonstrated those traits at the Founding and I would hope, today, each in our own way, we might again find them, both for those whose inheritance we are and for those whose promise is yet to be.Happy the 4th of July.
May the 5th and all the days that remain be even more so.
-bill kenny
I took this picture at Little Plain Park, a pocket park I pass whenever I am attending a municipal meeting in the City Hall of our town (Norwich, Connecticut). This picture is from Monday night-the monument is from 1902.
The battle the memorial commemorates was Port Hudson and frighteningly furious as its carnage was, it was overshadowed by events in Pennsylvania, at Gettysburg, where the world, Lincoln's fears to the contrary, both noted and long remembered what was done there though sometimes I'm not sure that we do.
For many of us who are/were nominally in the middle of our work week, today's a day of sleeping in a little later, of enjoying that second cup of coffee at breakfast while lingering over the morning’s newspaper instead of grabbing and gulping and for whittling down your ‘honey dew’ list or maybe closing an eye to it altogether on what should be a day more of contemplation than celebration, today, the 4th of July.
Before it gets really crazy busy today, perhaps each of us should look in the mirror and then take a look around at the country we received from our parents and their parents and which we are giving to our children and theirs. There’s been as much gained as there has been lost through the tears and years and some of what has changed has been better and some of it has only been different. The dilemma is in the deciding which.
By many accounts the heat was oppressive and tempers were hot in Philadelphia two hundred and thirty seven years ago as that aggregation of malcontents and troublemakers (in the eyes of His Majesty, George III, King of England) gathered to refine, define and catalog their grievances and complaints as they took exception with the most powerful empire the world had ever seen.
Enumerating what it called our ‘unalienable rights’ to include ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ the founders of our republic, who did not agree on very much except that the present state of affairs could not be allowed to continue, concluded the only way forward as a people on a largely unexplored, new continent whose size and wealth was not yet known, was to break with the past and declare independence from King and Crown.
Out of all of that has come all of this.
And along the way, the original magic and meaning has sometimes been lost in backyard pool parties, car sales and chicken fried steaks on the barbecue. Our politics is spirited even if our interest isn't and our understanding of the issues is muddled and muted. And, again, it’s not that we all agree with who we are and what we are doing. It’s been suggested we as a nation haven’t been this divided morally, politically and socially since the Civil War. And that observation and analysis should mean far more than it does.
Some say never have so many had so much of life’s material rewards but, others say never have so many struggled to hold on to what they have. On the outcome of last fall's elections, we were told, lay the future of our nation-just as has always been the case.
We are a year on and not much (if anything) the better for that bruising battle except to realize (or should have realized) that every election is important and that if you choose not to decide, that, too, is a decision.
What may be missing is our national sense of self and our confidence and belief in our own abilities to forever adapt and triumph. We demonstrated those traits at the Founding and I would hope, today, each in our own way, we might again find them, both for those whose inheritance we are and for those whose promise is yet to be.Happy the 4th of July.
May the 5th and all the days that remain be even more so.
-bill kenny
Wednesday, July 3, 2013
Almost Independence Day
A cynic, it's said, is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. I've always wondered why this is always said to me, but I learned ago to not ask the question if I cannot stand the answer.
The Uniform Monday Holiday Law, passed in 1968, when we had a lot of people in uniform even without a law, shifted a not inconsequential number of our federal holidays to Monday observances, further institutionalizing a beloved invention, the three day weekend.
At the end of May, we "observed" Memorial Day as par of a three day holiday and some of us are ironing out the details right now to add this Friday to our weekend so tomorrow's Independence Day can kick off a four day weekend.
I can't help but believe The Founders, sweltering in the Philadelphia heat in the summer of 1776, would be impressed by our inventiveness in stringing the days together, though how favorable that impression would be is another matter.
That's the great thing about the freedom we have and too often, nearly unconsciously take for granted, that kind of heedless hedonism is concerned part and parcel of the package of freedoms that men and women have paid with their lives though out our relatively short history so we might blithely never think of their sacrifices.
Nearly thirteen thousand Connecticut residents took up arms against the British Crown during the Revolutionary War. That's not an insignificant number when you remember even then this state wasn't very large in terms of population.
Perhaps at some point in the coming days, between dips in the pool, beach runs or manning the grill, we could pop into one of the cemeteries that are more a part of the scenery than of our neighborhoods all across the city.
Maybe we'll find a quiet place of original New England Patriot, to devote and dedicate a moment of thought to those whose selflessness has in recent years been replaced by selfishness far too often.
While we enjoy the Harbor fireworks, we can realize as marvelous as they are, nevertheless, they're a pallid and poor approximation of the too-often deadly barrages an unbroken line of heroes and heroines withstood without flinching so that we, who cannot be bothered to attend municipal budget hearings, who have better things to do than visit our child's school and meet the teachers, who have not one single positive suggestion or idea to foster and further community and economic enrichment and who turn out in record setting (low) figures to vote, still complain copiously at how poorly the city they have entrusted to us is now being handled.
It was a rapid descent as we fell from the grace of E Pluribus Unum to the crassness of Where's Mine? Freedom Isn't Free has become a cliché and that's sad, because that belief is at the core of what Independence Day is and should be.
We were the revolutionaries, the visionaries who set a course for a new nation with values and standards that defined both who and what we are, Americans. But those are big thoughts, perhaps for our big weekend as it unfolds. Today, after all, is only Almost Independence Day.
-bill kenny
The Uniform Monday Holiday Law, passed in 1968, when we had a lot of people in uniform even without a law, shifted a not inconsequential number of our federal holidays to Monday observances, further institutionalizing a beloved invention, the three day weekend.
At the end of May, we "observed" Memorial Day as par of a three day holiday and some of us are ironing out the details right now to add this Friday to our weekend so tomorrow's Independence Day can kick off a four day weekend.
I can't help but believe The Founders, sweltering in the Philadelphia heat in the summer of 1776, would be impressed by our inventiveness in stringing the days together, though how favorable that impression would be is another matter.
That's the great thing about the freedom we have and too often, nearly unconsciously take for granted, that kind of heedless hedonism is concerned part and parcel of the package of freedoms that men and women have paid with their lives though out our relatively short history so we might blithely never think of their sacrifices.
Nearly thirteen thousand Connecticut residents took up arms against the British Crown during the Revolutionary War. That's not an insignificant number when you remember even then this state wasn't very large in terms of population.
Perhaps at some point in the coming days, between dips in the pool, beach runs or manning the grill, we could pop into one of the cemeteries that are more a part of the scenery than of our neighborhoods all across the city.
Maybe we'll find a quiet place of original New England Patriot, to devote and dedicate a moment of thought to those whose selflessness has in recent years been replaced by selfishness far too often.
While we enjoy the Harbor fireworks, we can realize as marvelous as they are, nevertheless, they're a pallid and poor approximation of the too-often deadly barrages an unbroken line of heroes and heroines withstood without flinching so that we, who cannot be bothered to attend municipal budget hearings, who have better things to do than visit our child's school and meet the teachers, who have not one single positive suggestion or idea to foster and further community and economic enrichment and who turn out in record setting (low) figures to vote, still complain copiously at how poorly the city they have entrusted to us is now being handled.
It was a rapid descent as we fell from the grace of E Pluribus Unum to the crassness of Where's Mine? Freedom Isn't Free has become a cliché and that's sad, because that belief is at the core of what Independence Day is and should be.
We were the revolutionaries, the visionaries who set a course for a new nation with values and standards that defined both who and what we are, Americans. But those are big thoughts, perhaps for our big weekend as it unfolds. Today, after all, is only Almost Independence Day.
-bill kenny
Tuesday, July 2, 2013
One Too Many Stories
I love tall tales even though I'm more short and squat than is good for me. Truth be told my name translates from the original Latin as 'that stubby little fellow' and I try to never lose sight of that in a never ending battle for truth, justice and a Superman only cable channel.
So while I've always wanted to believe that from childhood on, I've lived next door to Princess Anastasia or that Jimmy Hoffa, in costume, has trick-or-treated annually in my neighborhood or that, by gum!, it really does take two hands to handle a Whopper, experience has led me to believe a very small percentage of all the things I've seen with my own two eyes.
So when I saw this story the other day and read of this woman's dilemma, I went down right quickly and got lickity-splitly out to my Ol' '55 because I, too, have lost more than my fair share of tennis bracelets as I was strolling by unmonitored metal donation bins.
Those things are pernicious and vicious. Perhaps I am the only person in the history of the world who ever dumpster-dived (dove?) when I was a slip of a boy back on the Banks of the Olde Raritan.
But somehow, I don't think so. It is mean of me to mock the woman in the story and I know that, but she doesn't help her case by phoning for help from inside the collection box (as I read the story) and then, after all the travail and extricational activities, NOT finding the bracelet she 'dropped' that led her into temptation in the first place.
I'm wondering if this could be what happened to The Donner Party?
Did you smell that? Smelled like Mongolian Barbecue to me, coming from over there. Let's just look and we'll come right back here and tell the others. Yep, that's what we'll do, as soon as I pick up a box of napkins Have we started over?
-bill kenny
So while I've always wanted to believe that from childhood on, I've lived next door to Princess Anastasia or that Jimmy Hoffa, in costume, has trick-or-treated annually in my neighborhood or that, by gum!, it really does take two hands to handle a Whopper, experience has led me to believe a very small percentage of all the things I've seen with my own two eyes.
So when I saw this story the other day and read of this woman's dilemma, I went down right quickly and got lickity-splitly out to my Ol' '55 because I, too, have lost more than my fair share of tennis bracelets as I was strolling by unmonitored metal donation bins.
Those things are pernicious and vicious. Perhaps I am the only person in the history of the world who ever dumpster-dived (dove?) when I was a slip of a boy back on the Banks of the Olde Raritan.
But somehow, I don't think so. It is mean of me to mock the woman in the story and I know that, but she doesn't help her case by phoning for help from inside the collection box (as I read the story) and then, after all the travail and extricational activities, NOT finding the bracelet she 'dropped' that led her into temptation in the first place.
I'm wondering if this could be what happened to The Donner Party?
Did you smell that?
-bill kenny
Monday, July 1, 2013
Weather or Not
Yet another Monday. How does this keep happening? We had one of these last week and the week before. Not sure what the point is to a week so rigidly organized unless it's a mistake and as I learned over the weekend no one makes the same mistake twice because the second time it's a choice and NOT a mistake.
I know, how zen. Snatch the pebble from my hand, grasshopper. But hurry; it's a long way to an unhappy ending in a closet in Thailand and a short while to get there.
Our weather Saturday was marvelous and Sigrid and I spent a good portion of it on the boardwalk of Niantic (I don't capitalize boardwalk unless I'm talking about Asbury Park and I'm not), actually to be accurate, near the boardwalk which got hammered really hard by Sandy and still has a ways to go before ALL of it's back. But back it will be sooner rather than later and I wish the good people of East Lyme and Niantic much success in that.
As you can see the beaches and the waters abutting them were filled but with room for plenty more and the living was easy. I had never been to Niantic before, at least that I knew of but the people we met were very good sports even though their luck had run out. It reminded me more of Ocean Grove than Asbury Park but it felt 100% Shore and that was the best part.
Sunday we stayed closer to home as I slept in, a rarity, and while so doing, did NOT awaken my wife while trying to stay quiet. (I am not good at staying quiet and never have been). A quiet walk in the morning took me past the Blackstone Apartments, a few steps from our house, and a sort-of wild life sanctuary that the flung bird seed from the feeder you can hardly see in the picture has created by sprouting and none of the gardening guys have the heart to cut it with a mower.
Makes me feel a little bit like Marlin Perkins though Omaha is another place I've never been (insert your favorite Three Dog Night song here.). Which brings us back to here, wondering how much has changed and never realizing we are what limits that change. Right now.
-bill kenny
I know, how zen. Snatch the pebble from my hand, grasshopper. But hurry; it's a long way to an unhappy ending in a closet in Thailand and a short while to get there.
Our weather Saturday was marvelous and Sigrid and I spent a good portion of it on the boardwalk of Niantic (I don't capitalize boardwalk unless I'm talking about Asbury Park and I'm not), actually to be accurate, near the boardwalk which got hammered really hard by Sandy and still has a ways to go before ALL of it's back. But back it will be sooner rather than later and I wish the good people of East Lyme and Niantic much success in that.
As you can see the beaches and the waters abutting them were filled but with room for plenty more and the living was easy. I had never been to Niantic before, at least that I knew of but the people we met were very good sports even though their luck had run out. It reminded me more of Ocean Grove than Asbury Park but it felt 100% Shore and that was the best part.
Sunday we stayed closer to home as I slept in, a rarity, and while so doing, did NOT awaken my wife while trying to stay quiet. (I am not good at staying quiet and never have been). A quiet walk in the morning took me past the Blackstone Apartments, a few steps from our house, and a sort-of wild life sanctuary that the flung bird seed from the feeder you can hardly see in the picture has created by sprouting and none of the gardening guys have the heart to cut it with a mower.
Makes me feel a little bit like Marlin Perkins though Omaha is another place I've never been (insert your favorite Three Dog Night song here.). Which brings us back to here, wondering how much has changed and never realizing we are what limits that change. Right now.
-bill kenny
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