Free As a Bird

The list of things I will never attempt, much less achieve, in my life, grows longer by the day. 

Today I've added something new, based on this report. 

https://starryai.com/app/my-creations/1021319031

Home (home) and dry.
-bill kenny

 

Girls That Don't Exist

I never saw the movie, Her. 

To be honest, I don't watch movies but that trailer scares the bejabbers out of me. Turns out, it was only a tune-up. 

Created with https://www.craiyon.com/

Do you think we are living in strange days now? Wait a microsecond and technology will make things even stranger. 

Talk about life imitating art.
-bill kenny 

Potato Days

None of the Major League Baseball teams I root for are in the post-season. 

The Connecticut Sun of the WNBA made it to Game #4 of the semi-finals before losing to the New York Liberty. 

The respective seasons of the National Football League's Giants and Jets (both of whom are called New York and yet both play in New Jersey) are going nowhere but are making great time while doing so.

I feared, aside from German soccer via ESPN+, my sports viewing for the next few months might be limited but as it turns out, I just didn't know where to look and was following all the wrong stuff.

The drama of Llama Rama Racing, the adrenaline rush of kiotoshi, or the thrills of Kaiju Live Monster Wrestling?  You pick. I can't make up my mind.

Decisions, decisions, decisions. I guess that's why God invented The Ocho.
-bill kenny   

Answering the Ringing Bell

I'm typing this with my fingers crossed (which might help my spelling but will do nothing for my grammar, I fear) since, by the time you read this, I should have completed the radiation treatments in my fight against prostate cancer. 

I can't type 'successfully' in that previous sentence because there's still a long wait for the results of a series of blood tests that measure levels of the Prostate Specific Antigen (PSA) whose ceaseless increases almost three years ago signaled the start of this campaign.

It was a morning follow-up appointment with my urologist at William H. Backus Hospital when he dropped the "C" word into the conversation and outlined a proposed course of treatment. After he paused at some point I asked him if he would repeat what he'd just explained since, I had to confess, I had trouble hearing him over the screaming in my own head. He assured me mine was not a unique reaction to a cancer diagnosis. And so began my education.

I've always regarded myself as lucky. I met and married the girl of my dreams almost forty-six years ago while a guest in her country (our anniversary is the 21st of this month). Together we have two children raised nearly entirely here in Norwich. I had a career that brought me joy every day I worked (and my bosses most days when I departed). 

The house my wife and I share is within walking distance of Backus Hospital and we have in the course of the three-plus decades we've lived in Norwich had many, too many I might say, occasions to avail ourselves of the time and talents of so many talented healthcare professionals across a variety of specialties. 

Part of my good fortune includes, unlike almost twenty-eight million other Americans, having health insurance, with prescription benefits and hospitalization. In case, you haven't noticed, and touch wood if you've never needed to worry about it (yet), America is a very expensive place to become sick. 

There are currently seventy-two countries in the world with universal health care, including Albania, Mexico, and the United Kingdom but the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave is not one of them. 

Health insurance provides for regular physician visits with as-required lab tests, and follow-ups to include diagnostic testing and prescription medication that contributes mightily to living longer and fuller lives. Botswana and the Maldives both also have universal health care so I'm always bewildered at how so many of us bristle with annoyance if not outrage when I wonder why we cannot  (will not?) create a healthcare system for every American. 

I'm sort of stealing a march on Movember which gets a lot of media attention and is an annual event when prominent public figures (usually men, joke intended) grow mustaches during November to help raise awareness of men's health issues, such as prostate cancer, testicular cancer, and men's suicide. It's all well and good to emphasize a month but even better if we can do it every day of every month. Agreed?

I've sort of sleepwalked through most of my life, to be honest. When I look in the mirror I still see a strapping, handsome,, talented man in the prime of his life, a real dynamo and a two-fisted humdinger of a guy ready for anything (and modest. Did I mention my modesty?). Until the day my doctor said cancer, and then everything got very real, very fast. Don't sleep through your wake-up call.
-bill kenny

  

I Am a Passenger

I'm waxing nostalgic at the moment for no particular reason. Later this month my wife and I celebrate our 46th wedding anniversary (she says it feels longer; I think that's because the Germans use the metric system to measure. At least I hope that's why). 

For the first five-plus years of our marriage, my wife and I didn't own a car. We lived in a medium-sized city in West Germany (albeit a city that, by itself, in the middle Seventies had as many people as all of New London County, Connecticut had when I showed up here in 1991) with a bus, streetcar, and train network that made 'getting a car of our own' one of those 'nice to do' but not 'need to have' situations.

Today we live in a medium-sized city in Southeastern Connecticut with a whimsical, at best, local bus service and NO ferries, jitneys, trams, or trains of any kind so privately-owned vehicles move up the list almost to 'required appendages.'

The capital of the State of Connecticut, Hartford, is about an hour's drive from Norwich. I have no idea, if you were to attempt a journey by 'mass transit', how you would do it but I daresay it'd take more than an hour and perhaps more than a day. I've read some interesting articles on the impact of the automobile on the American Way of Life (the right to keep and bear cars should have been included in the Bill of Rights, seriously). 

When you look at our older cities and neighborhoods anywhere across the nation, you can see from the center to the outskirts, like the rings of a tree, how the internal combustion engine became the infernal comedic device in so many instances, with us as the punchline.

Ours is not a state, and this side of the Connecticut River most especially, is not a region where relying on buses and trains gets you anything more than frostbite and long hours of travel. Sort of helps you get a better understanding of how people get addicted to a variety of controlled and uncontrolled substances--and you can make a short movie of mobility junkies, getting a hit off the gas pump--taking a deep drag off the high octane bong and snorting a line of Ultra 93. Talk about Mercury Blues.

In Connecticut, our idea of addressing issues like soaring energy costs and greenhouse gases is to build MORE roads, with more lanes so people can get to where they're going even faster. As for arguments that an investment in mass transit will yield economic development benefits as well as improve our urban and suburban quality of life, we can't hear you because we've chosen to not listen.
-bill kenny

Don't Touch that Dial

What's your favorite song? (Everyone has one, so don't try to put me off, okay?) Without a doubt, it's different from mine but to be honest, my favorite song right now, is different from my favorite song this time yesterday.  

I know, you're waiting to see my point, and I'm frustrating you by wearing a hat. Actually, and you've guessed it, favorite songs, foods, shirts, etc. are all pretty subjective and compilers of 'Absolute Best Lists' need or should need to tread carefully.

But they often don't, which gives the rest of us something to think about. Like 'The 50 Greatest Videos of All Time, Ranked."

It became a whole new day in the morning when visuals got added to the music, in this geezer's opinion (and I'm not sure in a good way). I still have my Sony Walkman hanging from the handles on my walker, so keep off my lawn, you whippersnappers!
-bill kenny

Equivocating over the Inevitable

 There are two unavoidables, and it's not yet April 15th so do the math...

Feel free to agree. Or move on.
-bill kenny