A Watched Pot Never Boils

Mission creep is what group dynamics folks describe what the rest of us might well call L.O.S.T, or Line Of Sight Tasking (I'm still not sure what we call group dynamics without making our moms cry). At some point in a project, one of the very bright people who came up with the original idea realizes there's yet another function s/he forgot within the transaction and announces 'someone needs to do/be .....' 

Of course, the first person who makes eye contact inherits this new responsibility with absolutely no authority or means to accomplish it. Don't look up! Oops, thanks for playing.

It's part of our lives as individuals, as well, fretting in the various roles we each play in the drama. I had a plateful (and more) when it was just me, myself, and I. Falling in love and getting married evolved into me, or us, to egoisme a deux and then we added children to the mix. Solo, spouse, parent, while also being a child, sibling, and wearing a half dozen other hats. You can't tell the players without a scorecard, especially when we each are covering numerous positions.

Is there a limit to all this multi-tasking, if that's what this actually is (I like to think that term is better applied to linked tasks vice totally different ones-like a product being both a floor polish and a dessert topping) and when do we reach a limit, how do we know? I remember the 'how to cook a frog in boiling water' semi-urban legend (don't judge; I run with a colorful crowd) that makes me suspect there's no 'top-end.'

In an unrelated conclusion, I've often wondered why so many people insist that frogs' legs taste like chicken not that it ever helps if you wake up with a bullfrog on your mind.
-bill kenny

Get Off the Cross

Driving home 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 other 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.

Someone shared a story from a local newspaper with me a long time ago about a faked kidnapping involving a mother, her one-year-old child, and this elaborate charade the woman went through to be able to run off with her new boyfriend, leaving her husband. When asked why she didn't just divorce him, the woman said she wouldn't (couldn't) because of religious reasons.

I can also remember the death threats sometime back against the lives of the two creators of South Park for defaming Islam (I know, 'it takes two guys to come up with that stuff?'). Everybody's a critic, I guess. 

Notice I'm not even mentioning the religious overtones fueling the bonfire of Roe vs Wade Revisited (mainly because I think women's reproductive rights are something women should determine) though I'd be happy if those of the religious persuasion would keep their rosaries off other people's ovaries.

I 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. But 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, however you perceive Her/Him to be, exactly what we've been doing down here. 
That should be a hoot.

-bill kenny

You Can Stand Alone

Sometimes our brains play tricks on us with false associations like Santa Claus with Christmas and bunnies with Easter. Or when we talk about firing up barbecues to mark the unofficial start of summer on Memorial Day this Monday. Knowing but not apologizing for sounding like a grumpy old man, we should focus on what’s important about Memorial Day. And it doesn’t involve charcoal.

I've offered these thoughts before, and they still don’t mention baseball, hot dogs, apple pie, or a General Motors automobile. All of those are just some of what Memorial Day makes possible but should never be confused with the holiday itself.

At ten this Monday morning at The Memorial Park in Taftville, around the corner from the Knights of Columbus, there’s a remembrance service dedicated this year to Army Private First-Class David G. Phaneuf one of the twenty-three Taftville residents who gave their lives fighting in one of America's wars. Phaneuf died on February 25th, 1945, serving with the U.S. Marines on Iwo Jima.

The Peter Gallan American Legion Post 104 and the Frederick J. Sullivan Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 2212 do a wonderful job of organizing this annual event. And while Taftville's Memorial Park isn't the biggest venue in the city, there's always room for those who attend and certainly room for one more. I always find time to attend, and I hope you will, too.

If tradition is any indicator, there will be remarks by local civic leaders as well as those who've served in uniform around the world in both war and peace and lived to come home to talk about it, as well as words of comfort from a member of our local clergy.

Whle there you may look around at the metal folding chairs, all neatly aligned facing the podium, and wonder how many of those who present last year lived to make it to this year. I know I do, and it catches me up short because memories of sacrifice only survive until the last person who remembers those sacrifices has passed.

But today, the mantra is 'what have you done for us lately?' And new enemies within and without, more formidable than any we have encountered before, require vigilance and sacrifice. We've become less tolerant and quicker to anger at what anyone who disagrees with us has to say. Memorial Day should remind us to believe in something bigger than ourselves.  

With apologies to Thomas Paine’s warnings about sunshine patriots and summer soldiers, these, too 'are the times to try men's (and women’s) souls.' Too many sacrificed their everything so that each of us could have something we can call our own. To be unappreciative and selfish instead of grateful and graceful for what we have is to dishonor their memories and their lives.  

As a reminder of this upcoming holiday (and beyond), let me share the seventy-four words with which Abraham Lincoln concluded his Second Inaugural Address. 

"With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations."
-bill kenny

That's Some Bad Hat, Harry

What did you want to be when you grew up? Taller? Thinner? Smarter? More Hair? Present. 

Sorry. forgot I was asking the questions. And how much of a full circle do you think you've lived already or could live (my life has been more of a pinball pattern truth to tell)?

Consider the life of Jonathan Searle who is carrying on a family tradition. 

Not this one. 

This one.

And just when you thought it was safe to read the New York Post.
-bill kenny

Play that Dead Band's Song Again

If you stopped by today looking for the profound, welcome to disappointment, population: you. Perhaps I can interest you in something more casual? I live in hope, I suppose.

Some days this stuff writes itself. Like today.

Enjoy every sandwich.
-bill kenny 

Channeling Mark Twain

One of my favorite put-downs is something/someone being described as 'exciting as listening to golf on the radio,' mainly because in my opinion, there's nothing exciting about golf, on the radio, off the radio, actually anywhere or anytime. 

I'm not alone in my underappreciation of golf, but decades ago, part of my job was to shoot and edit video reports on golf tournaments and that was actually both exciting and fun if not also arduous and exhausting. 

In all the times I covered the sport, I never, ever witnessed a hole-in-one so when I fell across a story about the niche industry that provides insurance coverage for them, I was excited.

How excited, you ask. C'mon, you already know the answer.
-bill kenny

On a Dark Dessert Highway

To quote extensively (and effusively) from Wikipedia,
"A mondegreen /ˈmɒndɪɡriːn/ is a mishearing or misinterpretation of a phrase in a way that gives it a new meaning.^[1] Mondegreens are most often created by a person listening to a poem or a song; the listener, being unable to hear a lyric clearly, substitutes words that sound similar and make some kind of sense.^[2][3] 

"American writer Sylvia Wright coined the term in 1954, writing that as a girl, when her mother read to her from Thomas Percy's 1765 book Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, she had misheard the lyric "layd him on the green" as "Lady Mondegreen" in the fourth line of the Scottish ballad "The Bonny Earl of Murray".

"The creation of mondegreens may be driven in part by cognitive dissonance, as the listener finds it psychologically uncomfortable to listen to a song and not make out the words. Steven Connor suggests that mondegreens are the result of the brain's constant attempts to make sense of the world by making assumptions to fill in the gaps when it cannot clearly determine what it is hearing. 

"Connor sees mondegreens as the "wrenchings of nonsense into sense".^[a] This dissonance will be most acute when the lyrics are in a language in which the listener is fluent.

"James Gleick claims that the mondegreen is a distinctly modern phenomenon. Without the improved communication and language standardization brought about by radio, he believes there would have been no way to recognize and discuss this shared experience.^[11] Just as mondegreens transform songs based on experience, a folk song learned by repetition often is transformed over time when sung by people in a region where some of the song's references have become obscure. 

"A classic example is "The Golden Vanity",^[12] which contains the line "As she sailed upon the lowland sea". British immigrants carried the song to Appalachia, where singers, not knowing what the term lowland sea refers to, transformed it over generations from "lowland" to "lonesome"."

But I enjoy the more musical ones myself, even if the original artists got them wrong. 
-bill kenny