Aus der Traum

From the wonderful world of American professional sports, proof again that every day is different if not better. The biggest difference perhaps between today and yesterday is that the career of Tim Tebow who has had a Rake's Progress in the National Football League as a New England Patriot has come to an end.

He woke up yesterday morning still with the team. By mid-afternoon, he was thanking everyone for the opportunity such as it was. When you're trying to make a roaster with a Tom Brady on it, from what I understand of US pro football (which isn't much), it's like being asked to play piano on a Jerry Lee Lewis record. And if you don't know much about rock and roll, that invitation is a suicide mission.

Tebow will start the post-Labor Day work week the way a lot of us have in recent years in this economy, looking for a job. It doesn't make any difference if you're a Republican or a Democrat, there's plenty of blame to go around for the problems we're having so why bother? Blame isn't going to put people back on payrolls.  

I read an article a lot of folks who had careers in the NFL are hitting the bricks this weekend-enough talent was released suggested someone on a sports radio station I accidentally tuned to, to form three more teams. Not necessarily the news a guy like Tim Tebow, or any of the other players without jobs, really wants to hear.
-bill kenny 

A Penny for Your Thoughts

Being raised a Catholic, I'm very comfortable with believing in things I cannot see. That's how I am with technology-much of what modern man (and woman) hath wrought remains well beyond both my intellectual reach as well as my understanding grasp. 

I just assume stuff operates on FM with the "M" standing for Magic and the "F" being a given. We haven't bought more paper checks in years. Mostly because we have no money and the judge said calling them 'wish notes' doesn't make them less illegal when there's nothing in the account. So much for that rose by any other name jazz. 

Actually I pay my bills on-line which, as you know, is a little like a magic show. I go to my bank (in my case, credit-union) website and do a secret handshake and a little dance and then am ushered into a back room where dollars are doled out to those folks I tell the bank to pay.

Our son got me into this a couple of years ago and now the post office is hemorrhaging money. You do the math. I have an alibi. 

For a long time, I assumed all the transactions were electronic. The money was zapped from my checking account to the account of whomever I was paying but I've since learned some folks aren't set up that way and in those cases my payer (notice the banking lingo there? I picked that up on YouTube-actually I picked this up which is why I use a credit union, like a Bailey Building and Loan Association but with less Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed)) actually writes and mails them a physical check. 

I'm in the process of repaying Sallie Mae for a parent's loan for college-it's moving right along and by the time I'm seventy-five I should have it repaid especially with the wizard book-keeping they do on their side of the ledger. 

My credit union started this past Monday by transferring to them the previously-agreed upon sum of money. It showed up as a debit in my on-line account and I entered it into the check register, or what I call my Prayer Book (it's really my check book but you get the idea). 

Sallie Mae advised me this past Saturday by email they had received the money. I appreciated the note. What I didn't appreciate was the delay and the lack of understanding where the money had been since Monday. 

I didn't have it and as since the transfer was electronic, unless the servers were powered by Twenty Mule Teem Borax, I didn't get the five day delay. I also didn't really appreciate getting a notice on a Saturday but when I called the customer service numbers, no one was there on weekends. I'm thinking the Keebler Elves have some 'splaining to do.

Spoke with "Sid" earlier this week-am not sure if he answers to "El" or not and decided to NOT push it. By the time I was done on the phone, "El" would not have been what I would have called him anyway. I ran head on into circular logic which often resembled a circular saw. 

As best as I got it from "Sid," the reason why it took five days for my payment to post is because it took five days. Pause. Subject to my questions that concluded his briefing. 

I was unable to overwhelm him with my charm (yeah, I smiled too as I read that; stop laughing now dammit!) or bring him over to the dark side. He was impervious to logic, reason, chocolate or pony rides all of which I offered in varying amounts for the duration of the call. 

That it took Sallie Mae sixteen days to post a payment the previous cycle and only five this time, one of us thought should be considered practically instantaneous. I was NOT the one who thought this way, but did understand the appeal and admired the attempt.

I kept asking for a reason; he kept giving me a history. It sounded like discussions with our dad when I was a kid, 'why? 'because.' Game-Set-Match. 

I chuckled as he reached, by himself, a conclusion we had successfully concluded our discussion on this item as he asked if there was anything else he could help me with. Considering he hadn't helped me at all, I found the use of else touchingly brave and kept smiling as he went through a thirty second farewell in which he wished every single person in my family a pleasant day without knowing how many of us there were or are, and not actually caring, I'm sure. 

As for the Moneygoround, I'm looking forward to the next fourteen years. 
 -bill kenny

What?

I'm thinking as we start a three day weekend except for me who took today off so I could have a four day one instead that today might be a good time to examine the Secrets of the Illuminati for some ideas about ------ LOOK BIKES!!! 

Yeah. It happens to me and it happens to you, too. We start across a synapse with the best of intentions: I will construct a sentence about a specific topic and SHINY OBJECT ALERT! Or some such Florella. 

Suddenly we're trapped in a non sequitur or an intellectual cul de sac and have lost the train of thought from the locomotive right through to the conductor with the pocket watch. That reminds me about ---- SEE WHAT HAPPENS!! 

Here. Read this, but just a a bit at a time, maybe a paragraph or two, otherwise you'll forget that you're reading it in the first place. I started on it last year and then, suddenly....WHAT? DRY CLEANING BAGS FILLED WITH MARS GAS!

That was close, maybe a little too close. 
Glad I wasn't doing any home repair work. 
-bill kenny

Andy Kaufman in the Wrestling Match

I’ve decided one of the things I hate about maturing (to include avoiding the phrase ‘getting old’) is how if you live long enough your past disappears. 

I can remember the Cuban Missile crisis, Vietnam, the moon landing, the First Gulf War (what are we up to now, X? They're like Super Bowls, aren't they?) among the other paragraphs and pictures in that imitation of a history book your local junior high school has gathering dust in a janitor’s locker room.

I didn’t read about those events-I was on the planet for them. Okay, I was a wee slip of a lad for the Cuban Missile Crisis but I recall the air-raid drills at school where we ducked our heads under our desks and looked “away from the (atomic) flash at the windows.” 

It never occurred to me that none of that wouldn’t help me at all. I was a kid and I didn’t know any better. What was John Foster Dulles’ excuse?

And slowly all those moments fall away as each day more of us who had first-hand recollections of these and other events faithfully and/or otherwise depart. I, for one, keep tripping over all these mortal coils that have been shuffled off. It requires big steps and watching where you walk.

In a way, it’s sort of like walking on the moon and that’s too bad because Neil Armstrong, the first man to really walk on the moon, died Tuesday leaving a lot of us who sat up and watched that happen on TV feeling even older these mornings as we sip our Tang, scan our Kindles and wonder what the hell happened to all the years in between.

Another piece of the ‘we can do anything’ mosaic has gone behind the couch of history where it’s too hard to retrieve. I and a generational cohort were Cold War Kids who went toe to toe with the Rooskies (kinda) and Gorby blinked first. 

When the Berlin Wall came down (I have a piece of it in my basement) I felt like I’d won the World Series. Now I feel like I'm watching the World Series (of Poker) on ESPN along with spelling bees like those are actual sports. And if you’re younger than thirty you don’t know the difference.

Have another slice of Ritz Mock Apple Pie-it’s a perfect way to celebrate Sir Isaac Newton whose discoveries, to include gravity, fueled and fired humanity’s imagination for centuries and helped get us to the moon. Just Don’t Interrupt the Sorrow.

-bill kenny

Neither Dead Nor Denied

Today, a half century ago, The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. stood on a hastily-constructed platform in front of the Lincoln Memorial at The National Mall in Washington D. C.. For a moment on that day, America stopped to listen. Today we can be forgiven if some wonder how much any of us have heard. 

Dr. King was the final speaker at, to that time, the largest day-long civil rights rally in American history, a rally that demanded, not asked for, "jobs and freedom." It attracted a quarter of a million people who heard a powerful declaration of purpose that King, himself, had entitled, "Normalcy-Never Again." 

The normalcy of the United States as our nation's capital simmered in the late summer heat fifty years ago was very much a separate and even more different nation than the one in which we awoke this morning. And yet it is very much the same. 

While for some of us, the events of 1963 could just as well be that of 1863, because they seem so long ago or, for some, before we were born, it is for many just the turning of a page, a look back both in sorrow and in anger at broken and battered lives as well as at missed and misspent opportunities. 

The United States of 2013 struggles to re-establish its own middle class after the longest recession since The Great Depression. What we have learned is that poverty, of the soul or of a bank balance, has little interest in or use for race, creed or color. Money doesn't talk; it swears. 

And with a decline of economic fortunes, many of us have become harder people, less willing to give, to share and even less interested in caring about the rights of those like, and often unlike, us who are our neighbors and fellow-citizens. In some ways, the snapshot has yelllowed but hasn't changed all that much in fifty years. 

Dr. King's America on that August day in 1963 had, as it did every day, despite fine-sounding and high-minded efforts in ten decades since the Civil War's end, black people who were still systematically disenfranchised with more than two-thirds denied the right to vote; where 'separate but equal' was still more prevalent throughout our country than the right of access to integrated schools, public washrooms, drinking fountains or buses and trains. 

We were then, as difficult as it seems to those looking at recent Supreme Court rulings on voter rights or who struggle with the hurt and heartache of Stand Your Ground having taken a young man's right to life and liberty, two nations who rarely spoke with one another about our shared goals or common ideals. 

Instead, too often fueled by fear and ignorance, we were two tribes who scrupulously avoided dialogue and discussion on an ever growing divide of desires and aspirations. 

For those of us whose children just started/returned to our schools earlier this week as another academic year begins, Dr. King's speech and the society and nation in which he spoke are a distant half-remembered historical dream of a long ago that disappears in the harsh daylight of Hard Times in the Land of Plenty with which so many of us must contend every day. 

It was only after Dr. King chose to speak from his heart and less from his notes at the podium that afternoon that the power, the longing and the joyfulness for which "I Have a Dream" became famous became apparent. 

His oratory soared, carrying everyone to new heights, those present in The National Mall and the millions more who watched on televisions across the country because while TV didn't know exactly what was happening, they did know it was important. 

Fifty years later, Dr. King's dream is our dream. We are, at our best, a nation whose struggle in pursuit of our dreams lights the souls of those around the world and for whom we are a last, best hope. 

King never said our journey would be easy and it isn't; nor is it over. Far from it. We have come a long way and yet we have a long way yet to come. We cannot get there by ourselves but only by taking the hand of the person to our left while offering ours to the person on our right-and stepping forward, together. And always. 
-bill kenny

In This World of Troubles

This past weekend was quite an earful for news and notes on contemporary music, not all of it good (the news, not so much the notes). 

As a card-carrying BOF, I had to look up 'twerking' (how would I know) in the online dictionary of urban slang and then wash my hands for a couple of minutes from having touched the keyboard. Talk about a goofy word. But you know what? I think I am showing my age. 

A quick on-line flip through the LA Times' photo gallery from Sunday's MTV Awards show at the Barclay Center in Brooklyn produced 'huh?' at least half the time for me. 

I wouldn't know a song from Lady Gaga if I fell over her (and she did one that had Clarence Clemons in her video and I bet her fans went 'huh?') while people like Kanye West and his Auto-tune, do less than nothing for me. If they gave Grammys for self-aggrandizement he would get one, it seems, but I have no idea how his music sounds or why he does what he does, whatever it is. 

Some of the photos lead me to conclude I was better off to have gone to bed rather than stay up and watch. Another (c)rude question from beyond the Great Chronological Divide: what exactly are 'Mob Wives' and why would anyone connected to that be on a music awards show if that is, indeed, what the MTV show was about? 

I mean, all the music, which is what the 'M' in MTV originally stood for is now on their other channels. Most of the time on MTV they're just twerking off or twerking each other off. (You know, I have changed my mind. That is a delightfully useful word. Think Beatles' "We Can Twerk It Out" you're welcome.) 

And the folks who are famous or being famous-and they know why they are-aren't all that different from my rock and roll roots years with creatures like Twiggy whose entire function was always unclear and whose fame was as fleeting as fog on the Tyne. 

Of course she also has an album for sale! Why was I so surprised to see that? It's a miracle she doesn't have a sex tape and a workout video or perhaps something available for "only $29.95" that serves as both. Postage and handling are extra, of course. 

Amongst and Betwixt all the Miley Cyruses (don't you suppose her folks are proud?) and Robin Thickes (actually beneath my contempt and I have low standards) was news that would reverberate with my generation. 

Governor Jerry Brown's old flame, and one of the most original female voices of the California Cosmic era of rock, Linda Ronstadt, has Parkinson's. Maybe it's just me but that 'happily ever after' is starting to get shorter and shorter, innit? Gute Besserung, Linda. 
-bill kenny

The Real Boys of Summer

All hail the Little League World Champions, Tokyo! The purity of the game these young people (boys and girls) play more than makes up for the asshat multi-millionaires who ply their trade at the "professional" level of the sport. 

Yes, Ryan Dempster, you cowardly custard I'm talking about you and you, David Ortiz, are an enabler because you could have called the brat on his behavior last weekend in Boston against Rodriguez but you didn't. I am also very proud of myself for not referring to Dempster as Dumpster. Until just now. Oh dear.

The kids from Westport, Connecticut were thisclose to being in the championship game of the Little League World Series, LLWS, but as Sly might argue what wasn't to be, just wasn't. Adversity builds character-ask President Karzai of Afghanistan. 

What's not to like about the LLWS? Great competition and singular athleticism-superlative sportsmanship on the field, in the dugouts as well as in the stands. I think of it as a sort of Woodstock with mitts and bats, minus the brown acid or any other stimulant or performance enhancer. 

I was struck watching by how wholesomeness abounds and I am confounded by how we let the purity of the game at one end of the spectrum get so corrupted by the time we get to the other and all the difference I can see is the dollars. 

Major League Baseball isn't so much a sport as it is a business-the product is whatever goes on down there between the white lines. And pass me a beer and whatever snack product is endorsed during the half-inning break.

If we could remember that first catch, the first feel of the bat in our hands when we made contact with the ball--none of that is at the same level as that first kiss and I'm not suggesting it is, but if we could recall that, we'd have zero tolerance for the Ryan Brauns, Melky Carbreras and the Ryan Dumpsters of the sport. 

Why didn't I mention Alex Rodriguez as an object of scorn? Not because I don't dislike him, far from it, but because he's innocent unless/until proven guilty. So much for the rush to judgment, Ryan. 

And should the day come, tough guy, when either the American League does away with the designated hitter or you find yourself in a National League game batter's box, perhaps at that moment you'll have a better appreciation of the game. The kind the kids display in Williamsport this time of the year and across the USA all season long display. 
-bill kenny