Your Goal Should Be to Buy Wins

As a small child, I wanted to be a cowboy. And a baseball player. And an astronaut and the President of the United States. Turns out only one of those makes money and since neither of us have ever hired an astronaut to moon walk in a bouncy house, I think we both know which profession is synonymous with obscene amounts of filthy lucre.

Still need a hint? Okay, but just initials, please. Jacoby Ellsbury. I have loved the Yankees since before I was capable of actual thought (I hear the snickers of Red Sox Nation but pay them no mind) and as long as my name isn't typed on the line below the signature on the pay checks, my opinion on this signing is just that, my opinion....but is that American dollars?

Seriously-we live in flamboyant times. We have 'warriors' on the professional football gridiron (just ask the ex-jocks in the broadcast booths who had no clue when they played and less now that they don't) taking Mom and Pop Warner to the bank every week.

I don't follow hockey or pro basketball closely enough to understand those sports' salary structures, but growing up in my father's house, we didn't call the NBA 'millionaires in their underwear' for nothing.

Still. Jacoby. Buddy. Bubalah. Seriously? You'll need a Brinks truck to go on a family outing to the bank. I worried about our children growing up and becoming possessed by their possessions (no real worries; we were, and are, poor but still, you can't be too careful) but this is a deal that makes Scrooge McDuck's money pond look like a kiddie pool. All for a game.

No wonder we still have no cure for cancer or AIDS, no money in it. Learn to hit a two seam fastball and we'll give you the key to the vault. And make no mistake-I don't blame the player, but, rather, the game and those who make it not possible, but inevitable, fans like us.

In the future, beings from another solar system will land on our desiccated and decimated planet and drive past warehouses with desks and books they may eventually guess were schools and that are similar to what they believe were our prisons except there were handles on the insides of the doors.

They will pass our houses of worship and our sports stadia and become very confused, very sad and very frightened so much so they will scurry back to their ships and leave before whatever destroyed us infects them as well.
-bill kenny

We Have So Many Different Worlds

According to the calendar, we are only slightly more than waist deep in that most wonderful time of the year where far more than just the halls end up decked with holly (and tinsel and eight different kinds of lights (all LEDs and flashing) and ornaments) and most of us wouldn’t know a fa-la-la-la-la if it bit us on the figgy pudding.

Because of the hectic head noise that is part of our Yuletide preparations for celebration, we end up staring at the trees often without seeing the forest. I hesitated while typing ‘trees’ lest it serve as a trigger that you have yet to get your tree so you add another chore to your to-do list.

Between all the hurried holiday greetings and in the midst of the manufactured merriment, you may wish for a moment you could use to catch your emotional breath rather than another big box store bargain, collect your thoughts and count your blessings instead of gathering your purchases and pocketing your change. Something, anything. Perhaps an activity for just yourself, or for you and your family and friends.

If you need a pause from the holiday if only for a few minutes, I have a suggestion courtesy of the City of Norwich’s website calendar for an event but really more of a moment, this Saturday at noon in Taftville’s Sacred Heart Cemetery.

Perhaps you’ve heard of Wreaths Across America whose three-fold mission is to Remember, Honor and Teach. Every year this national outreach coordinates wreath laying ceremonies on veterans’ graves on a Saturday in December (this one coming up) at Arlington in Virginia as well as veterans’ cemeteries and other locations in each of our 50 states, at sea, and in over two dozen cemeteries in other countries where US military members have been buried.

The wreaths, themselves, are scheduled to arrive today shortly before eleven o’clock this morning at Chelsea Parade and various local area veterans’ groups and volunteers will be unloading their share from the Connecticut delivery convoy, pausing here as one of its stops across the state.

The remembrance itself is Saturday but if you have a moment in the course of today to lend a hand and offer some moral support during the wreath delivery I suspect no matter the outside temperature and weather conditions, you’ll warm the hearts of the organizers, and put a smile on your own face.

I’ve attended the Sacred Heart ceremony and while I admire the power of words, I’ll concede I don’t know enough or the right ones to adequately describe an event that is a heart-felt and homegrown acknowledgement of the lives of our departed veterans (of all services and from every conflict and era of our history). You should experience it for yourself.

It is both a gathering and a reflection of our community in remembering the fallen, honoring those still in service and teaching one another that freedom is free only with sacrifice. I’ll look for you on Saturday at noon.
-bill kenny

Nearly on Top of the World

I have a habit of thanking imbeciles who drive through parking lots and down residential streets with bone-rattling bass rumbling strongly enough to set off seismic shocks for sharing their music. I'm very lucky they can't hear me otherwise I'm sure I'd have a a few dents and dings than I currently do but I am fascinated by cars (and trucks and motorcycles for that matter) and music.

I've come to appreciate, though don't tell her, my wife's perspective on the pairing, which seems to be that it's foolish and stupid. She doesn't drive so she brings to her side of the front seat a very different point of view than I have and, yes, I am the guy who turns down the stereo (rarely the radio anymore) when he's trying to find a particular street address which is an excellent example of her foolish and stupid paradigm and I wasn't even really trying though she assures I often am very trying.

I am not a fan of Rastafarian country and western music, but I like almost all other kinds of music, except crunk which I cannot define but know it I when I hear it as well as any and all of whatever it is Kanye West, Justin Bieber and others who unload on the public. It matters not to me that in the universe we all share, I am no more than a "who?" to any of them because they remain 'stop leaning on my Torino!' to me.

I devoutly believe employment of Auto-tune should be punishable by ten years in prison and a ten thousand dollar fine and if you spent more money on the production of the video in support of a song than you did on the song itself I think we should take away your birthday. I'll pause for a moment while you compose yourself and recover from that shock.

But music hath charms though it appears, based on this story that if you're wearing an orange jump suit, you may be the opposite of immune to those aforementioned charms. Mune? Is that the opposite or would it be Unmune? Or dark side of the moon?

Each of the songs mentioned in the article makes me smile because I've heard nearly all of them, and so, too, have you (okay, Barney not so much), and hundreds of others on every hike across a mall's macadam.

Just the soundtrack for when you're on top of the world and you can't get any higher. Not so fast, droopy-drawers (Yay, Uncle Paul!), nobody said you could go and quite frankly, everything makes that look big, and I'm not talking about ego.
-bill kenny

Gustav and Rudolph's Brother, Jack

I have wondered about the origins of phrases like "cow puncher." It's NOT the only thing I have wondered about but I mention that one after having fallen over this story in a recent 'you call this stuff news?' news summary generated entirely by computer and during the compilation of which no humans or animals were harmed (unless they were watching while it was compiled).

Quite a stroke of good fortune On Her Majesty's Semen Service, no? (and word play on a James Bond title and a double entendre all in the same phrase? Pay the man!) though I confess the article doesn't address the types of concerns inquiring minds everywhere want to know.

I'll give one to you: pigs' trotters are NOT Rocky Mountain oysters to perhaps the disappointment and chagrin of flatlanders everywhere I suspect but more likely to the uninformed delight of the rest of us who have no idea what these people are talking about or eating.

And since you just went to wikipedia twice in a minute maybe you could go back one more time and look at the top of their page again, the banner, and make an online contribution to keep them solvent as opposed to soluble? I won't type another word until you return.

Welcome back and I lied. Being an interweb liar (caps or not?) isn't as bad as having a career in porcine spermatozoa production and procurement, i.e., a masturbation and ejaculation specialist.

Admittedly, I have no idea how that process would work, with pigs. (Get your mind out of the gutter). An isolated remote in Greenland decades ago while in the US Air Force gave me a background in fowl (don't ask). There weren't a plethora of barns above the Arctic Circle so I don't know if porn magazines are deployed or we seed the slop with Beate Uhse video clips to give the pigs a hard time. I just crack myself up.

And remember, this is science and international economics in support of the New World Order and the Dawning of the Age of Aquarius (and BLT, heavy on the B). And when I say "B," I mean as in Blanc, Mel Blanc.
-bill kenny

A Sum of Forty Years and Forty-Nine Days. No More and No Less.

I wrote the notes that follow last year to remember John Lennon whose music I celebrate more perhaps than his life at times because while the latter tragically ended on this day thirty-three years ago the former will live always. 

I know in my heart of hearts I cannot improve on what I offered at that time and the anger I felt at his murder all those decades ago, I still feel all these years later, so reprising my words is a combination of both valor and discretion.

Today, for all those who came of age with The Beatles on the Ed Sullivan show, marks the anniversary of the murder of John Lennon by Mark Chapman. I'm offering that link in the interests of further proving there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. That our two children were both born after Lennon's murder gives me pause about the world I helped give them. 

John Lennon was a part of the soundtrack of my growing up years from teen through adult. If I were being truthful, and today is probably as good a day as any to try some truth, there was a portion of his post-Beatles material that never spoke to me in quite the same way as his earlier solo work or any of the Fab Four material. 

After his five year self-imposed silence, his comeback album (which is what everyone called it at the time) in the fall of 1980, Double Fantasy, was, as I referred to it on the air at the station for which I worked, 'a decent EP' (Extended Play), with some material that didn't work for me at all. 

That said, I always felt "Beautiful Boy" was exquisite (even more so when our own beautiful boy was born less than twenty month later). Obliviot that I was, I just assumed Lennon and his music would always be a part of my life (and that of any children my wife and I were to have).

How perverse that he sang of 'patience' in that song and less than a month after the album's release, he would be dead. His son, Sean, the inspiration for the song was to grow up without his father (as did all of us, though to a different degree) and has worked everyday to live within and without the shadow of the legend and myth his father became. 

The two most challenging moments over which we have the least control are today and tomorrow ("Nobody told me there'd be days like these"), but in looking at the darkness that both often have in such abundance, Lennon's music should help make us more appreciate the light especially in this, The Season of Light and Hope, so that it's much more pronounced for all the days that remain whose number is unknown to each of us.
-bill kenny

Endings and Beginnings

It was earlier this week that the past returned to the present with a news story about the (re)discovery of the World War II era Japanese Navy submarine I-400 close to a half mile below the surface off the coast of Oahu, the Hawaiian Islands.

Man (and woman) alone of all the beasts of the earth created a calendar, dividing days into seconds, hours and minutes and grouping all of the days into weeks, months and years. Just as you’ve never seen a polar bear with a wristwatch (a bottle of Coke, perhaps, and a smile), you’ll rarely encounter a fellow-traveler not hurrying and scurrying to escape the inescapable.

The timing of the discovery put me in the mind again of discussions and arguments about the presence (or absence) of God (capitalized just in case (s)he does exist-why gratuitously anger the Deity?) and the hours I’ve enjoyed exploring the Clockmaker Theory.

However, I never let the sweep second hand distract me too much from the calendar, especially on a date from a time before my birth when a world as our parents knew it was dying even as the one we were to inherit was being born. And both acts, like so much else connected to our time upon this stage, involve the death and destruction of war.

Today is Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day here in the United States-so insular am I in my rapidly approaching dotage, I have no idea what if any other nation on earth makes of this day but I hope they see it, as do I, as Day One of a Next World Order.

Quite some time ago I had as close to an original thought about it all as I ever have and it nearly died of loneliness so I wrote it down and here it is, again, because I liked it the first time, too.

Everything that had been, not just in the United States, which escaped nearly all of the physical devastation and destruction visited upon every other combatant of the world war, but also around the globe, was swept away and we are still to some degree struggling to sort out what we are and what we are to one another in light of events whose beginnings were long ago.

It was a Sunday morning on the East Coast seventy-two years ago today when the world as we had known it changed, and became the world we know now. On this date, the Imperial Japanese Navy attacked the United States Naval Base at Pearl Harbor.

Most of the rest of the world was already engaged and engorged in what historians now call World War II as German tanks roared across Europe and through Northern Africa and the Japanese Co-Prosperity Hemisphere spread across Asia.

Shortly after eight in the morning, seventy-two years ago, the USS Arizona, taking a direct hit, sank in nine minutes killing its entire crew of 1,177 Sailors. When the attack on Pearl Harbor ended, eight Navy battleships had been damaged and four had been sunk.

Also sunk or damaged were three cruisers, three destroyers, an anti-aircraft training ship, and a mine layer. Almost 200 (188 to be exact) U.S. aircraft were destroyed and 2,459 Americans were killed and another 1,282 had been wounded. Some Sailors were trapped in ships which had sunk.

Two days after the attacks, rescuers found thirty-two sailors alive inside the USS Oklahoma, but it was far too late for those aboard her sister-ship, USS West Virginia. Shipyard workers rebuilding the raised battleship afterwards discovered marks on bulkheads below its decks to indicate some Sailors had survived for up to seventeen days after the attack.

All of those stories are part of the larger story of these usually United States of America, which after its own War of Independence, strove and succeeded more often than not in Splendid Isolation in the world community. Our involvement in World War I, while intense and decisive had been brief in comparison to so many other nations. That was to not be the case in World War II.

Seventy-two years ago today, how Americans viewed the world changed. And as a result of the efforts of our grandparents and parents, after World War II, how the world looked at the United States changed as well.

We emerged in its aftermath as a super power and leader of what we called for decades the "Free World." What we are today is all part of a world that came to be as a result of what happened at Pearl Harbor rather than what could have happened as a result of the successful deployment of I-400.

And we learned as if we could forget the price of freedom is eternal vigilance or as Frank Loesser wrote in 1942, "Down went the gunner-a bullet was his fate. Down went the gunner, then the gunner's mate. Up jumped the sky pilot, gave the boys a look and manned the gun as he laid aside The Book, Shouting Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition!"
-bill kenny

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"I have learned that courage is not the absence of fear but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear."

"If there are dreams about a beautiful South Africa, there also roads that lead to their goal. Two of these roads could be named Goodness and Forgiveness."

Requiescat in pace et in corde semper.
-bill kenny