What's Going On

I guess it shouldn't really come as a surprise to any of us that, in a nation that elected a D-list celebrity to the office of the President, what we regard as 'truth' and 'facts' now come from a bewildering variety of sources, many of them a comfort in my youth that we called 'the newspaper funny pages.'  

Newspapers are fading fast and in many communities have already disappeared. These news deserts are a sad sign of the times as advertiser-support is what drives the size and scale of newsrooms and as fewer people choose newsprint, that readership base grows smaller making it less attractive to advertisers causing revenues to decline and newsrooms to shrink which attracts even fewer eyeballs and round and round goes the gossip.

But the funnies persist, even if we now call them the comics. And here's one I've enjoyed for years that was painfully factual when it was first published over twenty years ago and hit the same nerve perhaps even harder when it resurfaced last week. 

"Picket lines and picket signs. Don't punish me with brutality."
-bill kenny

Baseball Is Like Church

By now, you've read, or should have, that the Norwich Sea Unicorns, undefeated since changing their name from the Connecticut Tigers will be joining the Futures Collegiate Baseball League, the FCBL. Think YMCA but with different gyrations and contortions (I can see the Sea Unicorn mascot dancing on the dugout roof during the mid-inning break now). 

The FCBL is a wooden bat league (which is the way the Good Lord intended baseball to be played). FCBL ballplayers are unpaid collegiate athletes who hope to gain experience and exposure to Major League Baseball scouts. The Sea Unicorns' home opener at Dodd Stadium is Memorial Day, at 7 PM. Tickets went on sale Monday and you can get information on all the home dates, fireworks, and ticket prices here 

I'm delighted there will be baseball atop the mountain this season but there are a lot of business expenses and cost-sharing details the city of Norwich and its namesake Sea Unicorns will have to work out (full disclosure: I was on the Baseball Stadium Authority for the first ten years of Dodd Stadium and while baseball fans see a sport, it's a very serious business), so I'll keep my fingers crossed that everything that needs to be agreed upon will be worked out equitably.

I don't know much about the FCBL (you can already hear the song in your head, can't you?) except that regular-season games that are tied after one extra inning are settled by a home run hitting contest. The team that hits the most homers in three minutes wins. I would have preferred they'd chosen a pie-eating contest but that might be because I have a travel fork I take with me everywhere.

The FCBL does have the designated hitter rule, DH, and as a National League guy (except for my passion for the Yankees) I'm vexed. I dislike the DH and not just because I wonder where guys like Ruth, DiMaggio, and Aaron might have ended up if they could have sat on the end of a dugout during the dog days of August and come out and batted three or four times a game and then sat down again.

Do what I do a couple of times every summer: stop someplace where kids are playing sandlot ball or Little League and ask how many want to play baseball when they grow up. And then, next, ask them what position. Guess how many of them say Designated Hitter? Yeah. Game, set, and match.

Apropos “game.” And I hate to be unctuous about this (no, I don’t): the purpose of baseball caps evolved as the game matured. They were intended to shade your eyes from the rays of the sun because The Lord intended baseball to be played outdoors and during the day (only) so S/He could watch from heaven. The purpose of the workweek during any baseball season was, and remains to this day, to get in the way of going to a ballgame.

I do not understand why other sports teams have ball caps. It's not part of their uniform, and for the NFL, how would your guys even wear them? Under the helmet or over it? And that goes for the NHL, too, come to think of it. And I would stop smiling, NBA; sports in tiny shorts; so millionaires in their underwear? Seriously? 

But humor aside (you were wondering about the previous paragraph), professional baseball is a business and because it's driven by television advertising dollars, day games have gone the way of the dodo, or just about. And for a sport that started out as 'family entertainment' major league baseball has long since lost the plot on that point. So if we go back to my sandlot full of kids playing baseball, maybe none of them want to grow up to be players because it all happens after their bedtimes. 

But in a little more than two weeks' time, basically in our backyard, some bright and eager hopefuls, with equal amounts of talent and enthusiasm, will take the field and make Dodd Stadium their own field of dreams. And we can all watch. And cheer them on.

-bill kenny

(More) Pointless Ponderings

While out driving the other day I was behind someone with a bumper sticker that you just know has a HUGE story behind it. I've sort of seen the first part before, "My Dog is Smarter than Your Honor Student" but it was the second part, "My God Can Beat Up Your God" that leads me to wonder just how deep some still waters run.

I long ago abandoned in despair the faith of my fathers so there really is no upside to the hereafter-I can appreciate the humor in having painted myself into a corner like this; I'm just never happy about having to sign the painting.

Forever and a day ago there was a news story on the alterations made to an episode of South Park because someone had posted threats against the lives of the cartoon's two creators (I know, 'it takes two guys to come up with that stuff?' Everybody's a critic) for defaming Islam. 

I'd like to think so many different cultures around the world have embraced the idea of a deity because the ideal represents a unification of values and belief systems that, no matter the flavor or brand, have more in common sometimes than those who practice them. 

I've grown old watching us shift from the idea that we were created in God's image and likeness to vice versa, which scares me more than I care to admit. Probably not my place to wonder, but if there are End Times, and they do arrive and all that which is prophesied does come to pass, who among us is going to stand before the angels and archangels, Cherubim and Seraphim, the Thrones and Dominations, and explain to God, whatever you perceive Her/Him to be, exactly what the heck we've been doing down here. That should be a hoot.

-bill kenny

Like Soup and Salad

Nicholas Newhart puts the shit in shit out of luck (pro tip: where it says 'click here' do it but brace yourself). 

That this happened outside of Kid Rock's Nashville, Tennessee, restaurant (underscoring how he must be to fine dining what he already is to great music I guess; a true Renaissance man) just shows how some things are just fated to go together. 

Ain't no drag (you know you know the rest of the line).
-bill kenny

For Joan and Anni

Today is Mother's Day--not everywhere in the world, but pretty much everywhere around these parts and in most all of the places you or I are ever likely to go or be, so that's a good deal. I've heard that florists sell more flowers, that more greeting cards are bought and mailed and that more telephone calls are made on this one day in the United States than on any other day of the year, all of which underscores how significant so many of us see this day as being. 

My mother grew up as the second-oldest child, and the second daughter in a large family. In the course of her life, her older sister, all three of her younger brothers, and her husband of nearly thirty years all died before she passed in June of 2017. She and her husband, my father, had six children in two cohorts. I have no idea how many grandchildren she had, but I have little doubt that she knew and that's what's important. 

She was a breast cancer survivor who could, in light of how often she had been dealt from the bottom of the deck, could have been a very different person than the tiny and more fragile-than-I-remember-her-from-the-last-time woman who called every year on my birthday or at Christmas, before she walked across the street to the beach (she lived in Florida because she hated snow) and who was always ready to offer advice, when asked, on any topic under the sun but who never pushed her viewpoint because she didn't want to seem bossy. 

My wife's mom lives farther away from us than Florida. She lives in Offenbach, Germany, and was born in the same year as my mother. They met once, a long time ago, when Oma America, as our daughter Michelle, called my mother, came to visit and had afternoon coffee with Oma Germany. My wife's mom's husband passed away many years ago, after we arrived here in the States, but still years ago, and my wife's family is a bit smaller than mine--two younger sisters and a younger brother. My wife speaks with her on the phone on a reasonably regular basis and, I always manage to get a shout-out to 'Mutti!' 

Both Moms were born in a world in the throes of the Great Depression, lived much of their teen years in a world at war, and then had and raised their own families in the uneasy truce that followed as the world that was then, created terrors and technology that have become the landscape of the world that is, now.

Like your Mom, my mother and my wife's mother aren't in the pages of a history book someplace, though, without being indelicate about this, we have an opportunity to have a history at all because of them. I've wondered how different, and better, this world would be if Moms were in charge. 

Let's face it, they were always wizards patching scraped knees from the playground and broken hearts from the same place. Moms could also assemble that science fair project from stuff under the sink the night before it was due, and they were always available to quiz you before those Friday spelling tests. 

Why would 'real world' issues like arms control or the flood of refugees, or the establishment of universal affordable health care be too hard for them? Moms make miracles happen every day.

"Lift up your hearts and sing me a song,
That was a hit before your mother was born.
Though she was born a long, long time ago,
Your mother should know. Your mother should know."
Happy Mother's Day.
-bill kenny

Shake Me but Don't Wake Me

This time a year ago I started having dental appointments to create a mandibular advancement device. I've always snored, or think I have and Sigrid assures me that there have been few and far between nights in our forty-three years plus of marriage when she hasn't had to jostle me to get me to change positions in the bed. 

She assumes I'm dreaming I'm a motorcycle but the truth is I had very few memories of any dreams and actually had my pulmonary specialist tuck me into an overnight sleep study where we discovered I had horrible sleep apnea and restless legs (in my previous life I was a dancer, I suppose).

He had me visit a dentist who specializes in sleep disorders and she made me my very own device to shift my relaxed jaw so that I could better breathe and within days of getting it (after weeks and months of measuring and adjusting, and COVID precautioning and fighting with the insurance company) I just pop it into my mouth and turn out the lights and dream and dream and dream. 

I'm not always snore-free but, Sigrid says, I'm better than I was. And after all, I'm only sleeping.
-bill kenny

  

One of Us Has Gotten Older

I'm not sure I really understand what an immutable fact actually is. I believe an open-faced peanut butter and jelly sandwich will always land face down when you drop it, but I'm not sure if that counts as either immutable or a fact. And now I have a sticky kitchen floor so there's that. 

This is from a different decade (that's how long and longer I've been at this) and I believed it to be true when I first offered it and more so, perhaps, now. I called it:   

I Think it Started with George

I've rooted for the NY Yankees most of my life. My dad was a NY Giants fan and continued to root for them even after Horace Stoneham moved the ball club to Candlestick Park and my mom grew up a Brooklyn Dodgers fan and remained one for many years after Walter O'Malley had led the way west and to riches beyond imagination for professional baseball and ultimately all professional sports. In the last decade or so of her life, Mom became more of a Miami Marlins and Tampa Bay Rays fan, I think, because of geographic considerations.

I see my Dad and Mom, being from two tribes in two different worlds as they were in the early Fifties, really like Romeo and Juliet (at the very least, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern) against all odds, meeting and marrying, I can hear the swelling violins over the mighty Wurlitzer playing Take Me Out to the Ballgame (what? The only constant is change. Just go with it, okay?).

As a tyke to teen I rooted for the NY Mets even through the return of Wilie Mays, my all-time hero, to play for The Amazin's in the twilight of his career, nearly getting brained trying to play center field. We went to more than our share of games in Shea Stadium (motto: 'You can almost touch the airplanes taking off and landing!') and even as kids we could tell something was stinking up the field and it wasn't what the ground crew was using. 

These weren't the years of Tom Seaver and Tug McGraw, and You Gotta Believe and I Guess the Lord Must Be In New York City, these Mets teams were frighteningly bad, just ask Jimmy Breslin.

My younger brother, Kelly, and I went to a Mets game one afternoon with my friend George B, from Browning, and his younger brother when Roger Maris played for the St. Louis Cardinals and every time Maris came to the plate we, along with everyone in Shea, booed him lustily for all of his success with his former ball club, the Yankees. I did feel a pang of guilt when, years later, he died of cancer wondering if we boo-birds had contributed in any way to his demise.

But for most of over six decades, my team has been the Yankees (and their beer sponsor, when Mel Allen was their broadcast voice, was Ballantine). A decade or so ago, visiting our son living in Boston at the time, we wound up on Yawkey Way, behind Fenway on a Sunday game day against the Yankees and spotted the teeshirts with "Take Your 26 Rings" on the front with "And Shove 'em Up Your Asterisk (sort of)" on the back. 

Until then I hadn't realized the intensity of the passion that those who disliked the Yankees possessed. I've had friends with bumper stickers, "I root for two teams, the Red Sox and anyone playing the Yankees." Notice the past tense of the verb (kidding and sorry about keying the paint on your trunk. When you squint, it does look a little like the Yankees logo, weird huh?).

Imagine my surprise to come across an item on ESPN that at first made me smile, but now, has hurt my feelings, "Indians, NOT Yankees, Most Hated Team in Baseball" What? The Cleveland Indians, a Big Wahoo Welcome, and all the rest of the less than miraculous happenings along the Cuyahoga River, those Cleveland Indians? 

Obviously, this was all long before the Houston Astros elevated cheating to an Olympic event (though I guess you could argue the Russians beat them to that). I thought it must be a bad joke, like the two hundred and forty-seven sequels to Major League, which was one of the greatest sports movies of all time. 

Seriously, the Cleveland Indians? We're talking Bob Uecker over that huckleberry, Phil Rizzuto, 'just a bit outside' versus 'Holy Cow!' C'mon! But there it is in black and white, or whatever color electrons are on your monitor, 0.9 to 1.8, but I do take some solace with the amazing consistency of The Olde Town Team, who finished second. Again. 

I can hear the rending of garments all the way to Harvard Square. Burn On.

-bill kenny