I Guess It's Special

We have a "As Seen On" (ASO) TV cable channel. Oh, praise whatever Monotheistic Deity or force of nature you so choose, that I should live to see the day. As if regular TV isn't bad enough (and it isn't by a long shot, at least not yet), now I can sit back brothers and sisters and kick out the jams motherfu-- fellow campers.

This station has everything-actually it has more than everything because a lot of this stuff, just as you think (pray) that the infomercial is over, someone rushes back into the sound booth to tell you about the INCREDIBLE deal you can have, but you must act now (perhaps this is actually a secret casting call for Shakespeare in the Park).

If you're up late enough and have a nimble enough thumb and pointer finger you can---hey! My eyes are up here buckaroo banzai. Thankyewverymuch. Anyway, you can get double of something that less than ten minutes earlier you not only had never heard of in your life but couldn't imagine ever wanting or needing. And now you've got two of it! "Just pay separate shipping and handling.' And who among us wouldn't want to do that?

So much talk these days about things in our everyday lives being outsourced! But on ASO TV almost all of it is made "with pride" in the USA. It's no kind of pride I know as almost all of it leaves me with 'meh' as the closest reaction I may ever have about any of this stuff. And remember, if you call before midnight tonight, they'll get your money even faster.
-bill kenny

From Beatle John to Brother Ray

We spent a not inconsiderable part of this weekend getting wet. Not nearly as wet as we needed to get to wipe out what I suspect is close to a double digit deficit (say that three times fast) in rainfall, but still sort of soaked.

Connecticut has a lot more small farmers than we're generally given credit for and I'm not counting Michelle, our daughter, with her postage stamp garden in the backyard in that number. We've been eating her tomatoes and radishes for a couple of weeks now and I'm looking into a John Deere time-share for next growing season (not really).

All of our lakes and ponds are at critically low levels-probably like where you live as the variations of drought have spread across most of the country where we're not having an out and out dust bowl situation, so the timeliness of the deluge can not be overstated.

I did encounter a couple of folks on Saturday who were annoyed, vaguely but only because so much of life on earth annoys them, about the rain because they work during the week and look forward to dry and sunny weekends off, but one man's ceiling is another man's floor. Not much else to say except sdaeh rieht edih dna nur yeht semoc niar eht fI.

And thousands of miles from here, as saber rattling in what we once thought of as The Promised Land takes a back seat to the politics of the Global US Presidency, I'm more concerned than ever at a very different kind of rain and how galoshes, macintoshes and umbrellas will be of little use or any defense in stopping it. 
-bill kenny

Faster than the Speed of Thought

I just noticed this yesterday for the first time (noting it more than once, technically doesn't count for squat, so I won't mention that part again) and I'm probably the last person on the planet to notice, including the three people in a cave in Bora Bora who don't have electricity or computers, but Facebook has started to match the ads they stick on the right side of the screen with whatever you're liking or typing about in the middle part.

When it happened yesterday, I'm such a moron I thought something was going on but wasn't sure exactly what had happened on the periphery of my vision. I'm a terrible non-touch typist so I have to stare at the keyboard and my fingers and the screen to see what I'm typing so all the stuff NOT directly in the middle of the monitor gets a free pass at least until I look up.

When it happened again, I had an 'ah-ha!' moment, frustrated that there was no one to show off this incredible discovery to. And later when Thelma and Louise came home and I told them, they looked at me with some pity, a little curiosity and a whole lot of impatience. I got a heaping helping of the 'are you done yet?' look and decided I was even though I wasn't.

So I didn't tell them I wanted to see how fast Facebook was and I came away impressed. I liked a couple of random postings on food, to include one that was a picture of some one's dinner (and I don't have many friends so I appreciated the share though I wasn't hungry) and of the three items, and two of them were sort of green, I could only identify one, green asparagus. Why don't we eat white asparagus in this county? It is so delicious your tongue will smile. Seriously. 

Anyway. Within two minutes of 'liking' the food, I had at least three farmer's markets and farm fresh produce ads. So I posted an entry on a classic (sixties) car and sure enough, a couple of eye blinks later there was a Dodge Dart ad, for the new one, and below it (I think) a BMW. I also had an ad for Alias Julius, a singer/songwriter whom I very much enjoy. 

For a moment the Imp of the Perverse got the better of me and I thought about stringing together a lurid limerick or a salacious sentence so degenerate the Facebook Police would speed over from Farmville or wherever the barracks is located to arrest me. Then I typed "one boy hits her like a tambourine" and this is almost what happened.   
-bill kenny

You Got to Fill Out a Form First

Do you hate waiting in line more in hot weather in July than in the cool of the Spring or the Fall. Me, too-not sure why but I sure do. And once I get steamed, emotionally and physically, it carries over into everything I do for hours afterwards. Talk about all revved up and nowhere to go. Need to learn to savor the flavor while  I still have a sense of taste.

Yesterday evening we sort of had rain, the first rain in awhile. We've had low water levels in our rivers, lakes and streams since a very mild winter, but we're not farmers around here so it's not as critical as Idaho and Nebraska. Here we have crunchy forests because it's so dry, not dust storms where lives and livelihoods are blown away forever.

When I want to feel sorry for myself about how unhappy waiting for anything makes me in the heat, I think about how much closer to the end of my life I am than to the beginning. Especially with a phalanx of physicians and a multitude of meds that I'm on. What if, despite my obstinacy, there is a Hereafter and I'm a walk-on in that movie?

In light of how I have felt about Him for lo these many decades, how can I expect The Lord of All Creation to react to my arrival, probably on a very hectic and crowded day when I'm at my most snippy (rhymes with Skippy) (inside joke). "And face to face, in the vastness of space your words disappear."
-bill kenny

Not the Reindeer Games

Today it all starts and we'll huddle around any television, any tablet, any smartphone any device that carries motion video and can transmit The Summer Games of the XXX Olympiad. As of today we're all fans and we're all in.

To warm your heart, if you're living in one of the 3.2 miles of the United States that's not being slow-roasted as I type this, try this column out of the WaPo (Washington Post; I was using the thuglife spelling I think). I love features on the smaller than life stuff vice how thrilled one of the guys on the men's basketball teams is to be in London or something of that ilk.

Someone somewhere will have the Thoughts of Phelps bound in a little red book like Mao's right up until he demonstrates his extraordinary lung capacity with a bong hit that lasts three days and then we'll all fall over one another condemning him. Why? Because that's how we roll.

It's supposed to be fun-not commerce by another name. Am I the only one who finds the irony so thick you can cut it with a fork that McDonalds is one the official sponsors of the Summer Olympics (I enjoyed that and screw you IOC). Some of the people on the gymnastics teams couldn't lift a Big Mac off their training partner if it accidentally fell on them.

And you have to love BP, the same folks who gave us the 'good golly, are we sorry about that Gulf of Mexico, youbetcha, buddy!' routine not that long ago are gonna help defray the costs of far more than just the swimming events. If the fish and gulls could see that now, right? Fueling the future while fooling ourselves.

We've already had the US team's clothing made in the wrong place-and the hosts, the United Kingdom, found out yesterday it's better to be a North Taurean than a South Taurean. Even when the moon is in the Seventh House. Who knew?

Poor North Korea, the new best country on earth to hold your honeymoon, is so impoverished, if the past is a predictor, close to thirty percent of their team will dash the hundred or so yards and defect taking with them probably half the political education officers assigned as their shadows and half the handlers of those guys, all intended to keep them from being gone with the wind in the first place.

Enjoy it while it lasts because when it's over, the 2012 Presidential nominating conventions will start and then the death of civility and common sense, also known as the election campaign, will ensue. But for now let the games begin. After all, you can go mad in celebration if you win a medal.    
-bill kenny

(We Are)

By now you know that Sally Ride, the first American woman astronaut died Monday of pancreatic cancer. For lots of reasons, many of them reasonably personal, I've done a bit of digging and have concluded based on a review of available literature that while she was the textbook example of a purpose-driven life, hers was an especially painful death and no one deserves that.

I found this only a day or so ago and it made my eyes perspire, as my sister, Jill, used to say when she was small, because it is intensely personal. All the gender politics of the era and now, in death, even more gender politics, are nowhere to be found. This is Kathryn Sullivan, one person, remembering another person, Sally Ride.

I'm starting to wonder if maybe that's not what God really is-the perpetuation of someone's memory after they have ceased to be. And so long as someone, somewhere thinks of that person, they live on. I would hope each of us will have someone who would do that for us when our time is come. 

And if you, for whatever reason, should doubt you are worth celebrating, let me assure you most certainly are. Actually let me introduce you to Phil Hellenes and encourage you to find the time to savor this. You are so worth it. We all are. 
-bill kenny 

Take Back the City

I attended Saturday’s presentation on the thirty-five million dollar police station in what I’m told was the ‘old Sears Building’ in a then bustling, downtown Norwich that could have been a Norman Rockwell Saturday Evening Post magazine cover but had ceased to exist at some point in the Sixties.

To hear those times described by folks who lived here then and wore much younger persons’ clothes, those were the days of Big Cotton. If only the past could be the Present what need of a future would we have? As it turns out, the concern might be better phrased as what kind of a future will we have?  

Who among us ‘new residents’ hasn’t heard how downtown was so crowded on Thursday nights that the children, well-behaved (of course), attentive and ever-mindful on the hands of their moms and dads, had to walk in the streets around Franklin Square because the sidewalks were so jammed with shoppers there was just no place else to go.

Not that much later, we did figure out someplace (else) to go, thanks to the interstate highway system and away we went, leaving Chelsea with a morass of one-way streets that make sure you can’t get there from here, a lot of empty buildings in various states of disrepair and disrepute and misty-water colored memories of the way we were.

I’ve only been to half the meetings on the police station but there are two issues, in my opinion, at work here, joined at the PowerPoint slide but not actually sharing a common reality.

What I’ve come away with so far at two very poorly attended meetings is that people are  supportive and vocal in that support, of the Norwich Police Department, and agree with the Chief of Police when he very gently suggests the current station is less than adequate.

The descriptive used Saturday was ‘transform’ which led me to thoughts of Megan Fox, lots of thoughts (some salacious to be honest), but we didn’t mean those Transformers.

What was offered instead was the same rationale that created the Wauregan Hotel, the Mercantile Exchange, the Haymarket Building and half a dozen other public money projects-what I call the Single Building Conspiracy- at a total cost of close to one hundred million dollars but didn’t get enough people into downtown to fill a phone booth assuming those still existed.  

We are assured this time we can't miss (or at least we hope so). Just a little more patience is all we need and we’ll see downtown bloom again. This is a lot like Saul on the road to Damascus and suspending belief while helpful isn't necessarily hopeful. And that's the rub. Hope is always important but hope is not a plan and Norwich needs a plan more than downtown needs another transformative building.
-bill kenny