Better to Turn Off One Light

The more things change, the more they don't. What follows are musings from this time six years ago. I'm not happy to report there is NO update possible because NONE has happened. It's early when I go to work, not as early as when my brother Adam heads out, and by the time I do he's gotten most of the chickens fed and the cows milked, which works out well for me since my employment efforts are confined mostly to the mess the back ends make. 

At the foot of Washington Street, which is also a state highway whose number, even after all these years of living here, I cannot remember, right next to the church with a sign that once advised, "Life is Short, Pray Hard" at the intersection with the Sweeney Bridge, is a traffic signal that captures relationships in and with The Rose City. 

The light sits at the junction of a "T". Those coming down the hill who go right AND those coming up the hill who go left, all head in the same direction over the bridge onto what becomes Route 82 (I think). Maybe that's what happened to Norwich-everyone went for a drive and drove over the one-way bridge and never came back because they can't. The traffic signal is a beacon and often a vexation and, I suspect not for me alone, a cause for some head-shaking. 

No matter the hour, this traffic signal is on duty--no blinking light, red for us and yellow for the other folks. No pause and go-no roll on through and have a nice day. Nope, nada. It works 24/7 every day of the year. Once, during a truly awful snow storm it was a blinking light (red in both directions-that was very helpful, especially for those struggling to get up the hill) but only that one snowstorm. I wasn't sure what to make of the state snow plows NOT heeding the red blinking light as they blew right on through it, so I decided I imagined it (I'll bet you didn't know there's a difference between city snow and state snow.Yepper).

Again, as always, yesterday morning the traffic signal was red when I reached it. It's not on a sensor and if it's on a timer, it's more of a calendar than a clock, based on my experience. My red signal lasted five and a half minutes at four something in the morning (Yes, my life is that empty I timed it. In fairness, it's NOT always that long, so add inconsistency to the list of quirks.).

The part I find funny is at the time of day I'm there, it's not unusual to NOT see another vehicle for the entire timeI'm at the light. Yesterday was a bit weird when the walk/don't walk signal came on, and there were NO pedestrians. For a moment I thought I saw a barbecue, but that would have been quite a feat...so I'll imagine I thought I saw a 'puddy tat.'

Eventually (of course) the signal changed, otherwise I'd be trying to type this on a cell phone (and be cited for violating CT's hands-free law) and I had f-i-f-t-e-e-n seconds of green light (that amount of time is a constant; go figure). I've driven the street at all times of the day and every day of the week and it's not always like that so I have to wonder why, at oh-bright-early it can't be blinking. I'm counting on, eventually, the bulb(s) in the signal, mine (red) and the oncoming (green), just burning out and motorists can then drive happily ever after or until they reach the next intersection at the Laurel Hill Bridge. 
-bill kenny

Still An Imponderable.....

Last time I had an original idea it died of loneliness so this is a revisit to a somewhat familiar place to discover I know no more now than I did then. More and more we live in a word-less world. By that, I don't mean a silent one but rather, a world in which you can scrape by with pictures and symbols. I love looking at the tags in shirts--it's like a graduation from Semaphore University. There's no bleach, hang-dry only, wash in cold water, dolphin-free, dry-clean, only etcetera. 

I thought it reassuring that no matter where in the world you travel those symbols are the same until I realized it has a lot to do with the manufacturing process and that almost all the clothes we buy, no matter where in the world we live, are made in the same third-world sweat shops. That's more likely the reason why the care symbology at the collar is the same. Oh. 

I'm not going to hold a Geography Bee with Carmen Lauer and Matt San Diego on where our clothes are made, because I have no trouble finding my way around as nearly everyone, be it at home or at work, tells me where to go. And that's an unfair advantage even for television stars to overcome. 

What I am intrigued by is how our technology, not knowing where in the world we will use it, has created its own language to which we have universally adapted. Do you remember when you used to yell for 'Help!'. Our machines' clocks do the same thing, sort of, except they flash 12:00--we all know that means there's trouble at the mill and are now conditioned, when we see it, to look around for a cause. 

My smartphone does this weird little vamp when it's loading an application (I had to ask someone who knows about phones to describe that process so I could write it down here. I have so little idea of how the device works, when it doesn't work, someone else has to tell me as I cannot figure it out by myself). Maybe yours does the 'gimme a minute jitterbug', too.

It looks like a vertical bow-tie and then it starts to whirl and twirl in a clockwise direction. Someone told me it's NOT a bow-tie at all, it's supposed to be an hour glass. That actually makes more sense to me, since that would have something to do with time, which is what the device is wasting, and not neckwear, of which I have a closetful though I have no idea of its purpose (or didn't) even though most workdays I wear one. 

Every time I see the posters for the raffles, there's always the disclaimer at the bottom, 'duplicate prizes awarded in the event of ties' and I keep thinking, today's the day. Good fortune, here I am! Luck be a Lady tonight. And yet all I ever win is a dry-clean only dolphin two sizes too small, no bleach only.
-bill kenny

Across the River to the Jersey Side

Growing up in Jersey (what exit? Nine) my point of reference was alway New York and with apologies to the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens and Staten island, when I say New York, I mean Manhattan. It was and remains the City of Lights for generations of Jersey kids, north of Trenton.

But when you're closer to Philly than NYC, as you are when you grew up in Delran Township, being a Lady Scarlet Knight is a big deal unless/until you win Olympic Gold in your sport, twice, and then on the biggest stage in women's soccer, the Federation of International Football Associations' World Cup held in Canada in the summer of 2016, you take your squad on your back and win the championship practically by yourself, a trip to NYC is part of the Big Wave Drill as your nation celebrates you and your teammates as you roll through the Canyon of Heroes.

Before you applaud Carli Lloyd's luck, maybe you should see the pluck she showed in preparing every day for years to be ready for the moment and the exclamation point she placed on it less than a fortnight ago. I guess that old saying is true, "the harder I work, the luckier I get."

So Friday, Carli Lloyd got to head eighty-three miles North by Northeast to New York City to join the USWNT for a well-deserved victory lap. Meanwhile, the sky-is-falling-or-will-soon-be experts across the country and around the world are looking at the 2019 World Cup and sizing up projected rosters of opponents and fretting about that fourth star on the US Women's national jerseys.

Four of this year's 23 member squad came from the Jersey Side. And with all due respect to the fine programs in Sweden, Germany and Japan, I have it on good authority that "nothing else matters in this whole wide world, when you're in love with a Jersey Girl."
-bill kenny

Paved and also Extremely Warm

You probably never knew Mr. Roark. Had my luck been better, I, too, could say the same. He was the athletic director at Carteret Preparatory Academy for Boys in West Orange, New Jersey in 1970. He may have been the AD for the previous two centuries, based on the world-weariness with which he seemed to survive every day surrounded by hundreds of us little shirted and tied glow in the dark white preppie kids who thought the world was our oyster. I never knew his first name. He was so old he may have been born before first names were invented. 

I remember him really only for one, beyond devastating, put-down of our physically gifted (though intellectually somewhat diminished) football halfback offered as a performance critique on a very long bus ride back from Admiral Farragut Military Academy after we had had our collective buttocks not-so surgically removed by their football team, highlighted by an (ahem) ill-advised quick kick by this halfback that hit our quarterback full in the face, knocking him out cold on the field, and causing the ball to roll into our own end zone where the Farragut entire team, including the bench, cheerleaders and very possibly the scoreboard operator all pounced it on their way to a triple-digit victory. 

The only sound on the ride back on the Garden State Parkway was of the transmission gears shifting and we all sat forward on our seat cushions as Mr. Roark, a glutton for punishment if there ever was one (or maybe just someone trapped in a marriage he no longer liked who couldn’t afford a divorce), who traveled with every sports team to every away game, leaned into the aisle across from the halfback to offer the following (I remember it forty-five years later as if he had just said it): ‘if they put your brain in a mosquito’s a-s, it would roll around and make a noise like a BB in a boxcar.’

That’s the sound I heard a moment ago as I read this NBC news story and started shaking my head. The American Civil Liberties Union, everybody’s favorite punching bag when we yell at one another and pretend it’s a discussion, on exercising constitutionally guaranteed freedoms, is right in the thick of this one as they always are and as they were so long ago for even more egregious imbeciles who desired to exercise their right to be obnoxious in Skokie, Illinois. I suspect after a day in court representing their client, they scrub off with a metal brush under a chemical shower in the hopes of getting all of it off themselves.

I’m thinking the Klansmen’s ardor for highway clean-up will cool noticeably once they learn the color of the pavement they are seeking to patrol. Perhaps an arrangement can be made to allow them to clean the underside of the roadway. That way, their efforts shouldn’t disturb the flow of traffic and motorists can leave those left blinkers on all the way to the Florida Panhandle.

-bill kenny     

Sure Seemed Like a Good Idea

Have you ever seen those bags of candy in the grocer’s with the itty-bitty sized Snickers and Three Musketeers bars in them that some marketing genius wants me to consider “fun size?” That stuff always gets a big negatory headshake from me. 

To my way of thinking “fun size” should be REALLY BIG candy bars the size of a Honda Accord or a Chevy Spark (if you insist on “Buy American” not that you just did with that choice) not teeny-tiny candy bars. What a weird idea of fun.

I mention that because the Nabisco people have a serious contender in the category of Dubious Idea of the Year and it’s only July-Oreo Thins. I would have been perfectly willing to give somebody at the main office a Nobel Prize if the proposal had been to rename the Double Stuff Oreos, Oreos, and call these new things, Nearly Oreos. 

Here’s my concern: Oreo Thins are not intended to be twisted open so that we can eat the vanilla cream filling (or whatever synthetic approximation it really is and, no, don’t tell me I don’t want to know) nor are we supposed to dunk them in milk. What? NOT dunk them. What kind of an Oreo cookie is this?

Back in my day, an Oreo was two snacks in one: the vanilla cream filling and the two chocolate wafers as a sort of dessert on the dessert, for afterwards. They even had a how-to song! I will confess that my brother Adam’s birthday is something I don’t always remember; the Oreo Song I cannot ever forget. 

When did Oreo shaming become a thing and don’t tell me that this is NOT that because it is. Seriously. Why else would anyone (anywhere) try to tell me an Oreo with a lot of the filling removed should now be considered ‘sophisticated.’ Oh? Who eats Oreos to be sophisticated? Poppycock! They are fun to eat which is why they are the way they are and I am not alone in that belief.

And as it so happens cookie makers take note, things aren’t all that happy in Happy Valley either nor will they ever be- not when you provoke the wrath of the Nittany Lions, however briefly. So you just keep  cowering behind that “really super-duper swell new idea” drawing board you have there until you come up with something the folks in Dubuque can embrace. And Oreo Thins ain’t it.

-bill kenny

Life Imitates Art

I’m not a sci-fi guy. Yes, I’ve read Asimov and Heinlein but I mean the ‘way-out’ there stuff; the folks who believe there is a Matrix and who look over the shoulders trying to watch Skynet watching them watching it (a/k/a the Infinite Paranoia Reflection). 

As you may have noticed from stopping around these parts, I have enough trouble with real life. I don’t need to go to a parallel astral plane or to a future beyond the conceivable to get myself into trouble. I’m still not comfortable with how a thermos (a vacuum flask) keeps hot things hot, and cold things cold (how does it know the difference?) and that’s a device from well over a century ago. 

So much for future shock you say, and I’m with you whether I like it or not. I’m still wrestling with the past perfect and have not been doing well in those encounters so you can perhaps imagine the size of my grimace when the Mega-Bots Throw Down became a news story. 

Somewhere Neal Peart is smiling as his dystopian vision unfolds, somewhat ahead of schedule I’m saddened to report. But, every cloud has a silver lining, in theory at least, and as Coyne, Drozd and Evans might have pointed out ours may well be named Yoshimi. If and when she gets here, she can have some coffee-hot or iced may depend on her timing…

-bill kenny    

All We Are Saying Is Give Peas a Chance

Today assuming the weather proves to be all that the forecasts promise, marks the start of the (It's) Great (to be) Outdoors Season at Howard T. Brown Park at the Norwich Harbor (I like to think the "T" stands for terrific, or should).

You know how one of your resolutions for 2015 was to eat healthier? How's that working out? Thought so. Here's the bad news first: the year is now more than half over and the healthy still ain't happening.

But, the good news is the Downtown Norwich Farmers' Market starts this morning at ten, running until two, with fruits and all manner of vegetables fresh from the farm to your table, so bring a basket and your appetite. You can stop by every Wednesday starting today through the 28th of October and get your 'good for you' on.

There will also be baked goods, cheeses, and other goodies to take home and make your own. And if you work up an appetite while shopping (I work up an appetite just typing about food shopping, but your mileage may vary) there will be two lunch vendors, Lake View Farms with a variety of salads, as well as Brick and Basil with wood-fired pizza.

Market organizers will have some picnic tables and tables so you can enjoy the harbor views along with your lunch. And today at noon there's a free class from Get Bent, Mommy and Me Yoga. You can keep tabs on what's going on at the market by checking out their facebook page or just going to the park today and staying there until Halloween.

If you're worried about parking, don't be. The Main Street Municipal Garage is a block from the Harbor and parking is free (and there's always spaces). You'll have enough time to get your purchases back to the car and back to your house before you'll be returning because tonight kicks off the Rock The Docks concerts with Eight to the Bar starting things off at six.

You can find a couple of hours to enjoy a brew or a view and some grilled food and a chance to visit with neighbors you probably haven't seen since we were all dressed up like Eskimos clearing snow not that long ago. The music's always great and free and this year there's a companion, so to speak, Friday Night Acoustics, starting (when else?) this Friday with Carrie Ashton at six.

Wednesdays definitely mark the mid-point in the week, now more than ever, especially at the Howard T. Brown Park. You can come join the fun or stay home and complain about how there's never anything to do here. Of course, you'll have to talk loud because the rest of us will be at the park. Having fun.
-bill kenny