Bagel Seeds

I hadn’t realized this past Monday was “National Be Nice to Someone Day” so I’d like to offer a belated thank you to you who obviously have nothing better to do to with your time. Might not be what the organizers had in mind but I’m not going to lose any sleep over it.

Actually, checking the calendar, which I do usually too late in the game to do me any good, I was bemused (no other word comes to mind) to discover today is National Donut Day (jimmies included), and proving (sort of, I guess) that knowledge is power, because you, too, now know it, we could go to Dunkin’ Donuts and get a free donut.

The holiday is SO BIG it has a second date, November 5^th; I most certainly hope the Christmas People are paying attention-and would it kill the pony rides for birthdays guys to follow what I think is a truly excellent example?

There are other places besides DD with free donuts, to include these guys. I haven’t seen or heard anything about Starbucks’ planned observances though I tend to see them as more coffee than cruller in this situation. 

I’d hope perhaps like that Christmas Truce of 1914, today could be a day where corporate competition and hostilities are set aside if only for the time it takes to brush the crumbs from your shirt.

And, silliness aside, it would be nice to search out the folks who (wo) man those red kettles around those aforementioned holidays, and make a donation because as they can tell you, need knows no days off.  And if you’re watching your figure, today is your day because you’ll never gain weight from a doughnut hole.

-bill kenny

Draw this Dog

I suppose I should explain how we got here, except I don’t know anything about you. I’m here because I do this every day of the year and have for a very long time. 

I understand my motivation, but all I can judge you on is your behavior. Whatever brings you here, thanks-some days that is as good as it gets. You will have to decide if this is one of those some days or not.  

I mention all that as a disclaimer for this stuff today. I was thinking about an acquaintance, who, I was told, was a member of Mensa (there’s this for Womensa; you’re welcome).  

Because of how I’m wired, I imagined the test for Mensa membership being akin to that dog’s head on the back of those old matchbooks you were challenged to draw. The Mensa part was in explaining the breed and knowing its Latin name, like ‘poopsus everywhereibus’ or ‘licksibus like a carwasharum.’ Or something similar.

When I smoked tobacco cigarettes, which I did like a chimney at three packs a day for 23 years and then stopped cold-turkey, I had a Zippo lighter, but always carried a book of matches ‘just in case.’ Yeah, I’d have been better advised to have carried another set of lungs, but too soon old-too late smart. 

Despite having the matchbook, I was never able to successfully draw a correct conclusion much less the dog. I find it interesting when you go to the Art Instruction Schools’ website, they don’t mention the dog at all.

If you’re waiting for a life lesson, we passed your stop already. There’s not a whole lot more to this than what you’ve just waded through. Some days the moving finger, having writ moves on; other days, one digit stands stock-still at attention like a sentinel at his post.

-bill kenny    

Ribbons of Euphoria

Calling all “Somebodies!” We know who we are. We’re the ones who see trash on the sidewalk and think “somebody should pick that up,” or watch people at Howard Brown Park throw bread to the ducks and seagulls right in front of the “Do Not Feed” signs and feel “somebody should tell them to stop.”

Yep, somebody should do a lot of things-not just here in Norwich, of course-but everywhere, though right here at home is a pretty good start.

In case you hadn’t noticed, along with a lot of other stuff, we’re having a ‘somebody’ shortage. It mostly happens because we think we don’t have the money or the talent or the time to be that somebody who makes a difference when, in just a minute or with no more money than that we’d otherwise spend on a cup of coffee, we can join our talents with others like (and unlike) us and BECOME the difference. If each of us gave a little we’d soon have a whole lot of a whole lot.

No single drop of rain feels itself responsible for the flood that follows and that, roughly, is how “crowdfunding” works. A trickle of dollars for a project or a cause you believe in is transformed into a river of change, literally and figuratively.

I love crowdfunding and have supported local projects to include a vegetable garden at Kelly Middle School and the successful effort to stage “Benedict Arnold” at what is now the Chestnut Street Playhouse.

We have another opportunity to be somebody who helps Downtown Norwich, specifically 90 Main Street as the Bold as Love Guild whose Go Fund Me page asks, “Why Not, Norwich?”

The page explains far better than I ever could how their goal is to be a creative space in the heart of the city that will both entice and showcase artistic expression as well as spur innovative initiatives of the very type that were, and still are (they believe, and so should we), a hallmark of cities and towns across New England.  

90 Main Street is that empty multi-story red building next door to the municipal garage, just up the street from Encore Justified, practically across from NCDC.  As their introduction to the community they hope to join, you can get a sneak preview by visiting them this Friday as part of  Downtown Norwich First Friday activities.

It’s a chance to “help make something beautiful happen” and those don’t come along every day. I hope you’ll put your money where their dream is, I did. It’s an investment from which all of us will benefit.

After all, some dance in the rain while others get wet. Who are you?
-bill kenny  

Thoughts Meander like a Restless Wind

Weather is always a lot more frightening on television for me than it actually is in real life. Watching the American Southwest and Midwest get pummeled by every manner of awfulness in terms of meteorology (okay, no rain of blood or frogs, but just about everything else) made me appreciate the great weather (okay it was hot and very humid) we have had in these parts.

It looks like in the course of the next few days we're going to get enough rain to make up for our "rain deficit" which is probably like attention deficit, but I wasn't paying attention when the TV weatherman explained it, but NOTHING to rival what Houston, Texas and about a dozen states had to handle. For which I am most grateful.

Passed on the highways and by-ways over the weekend a lot of folks with convertibles in the top-down mode which is okay I suppose (it's a little braggy if you ask me, but no one did) except they were almost all wearing hats which, to me, is like having a raincoat on when you're in the shower.  If you're committed to going topless then go all the way, otherwise go home.

Sunday, on my back from work on Route 12 going through Ledyard and Preston I passed the pile of rubble of the Norwich State Hospital's Kettler Building which is about all that's left of a century's efforts at institutionalized mental hygiene and hospitalization. There are a lot of gruesome tales told about the Norwich State Hospital which sat on close to 500 acres on the banks of the Thames River, and most of them don't have happy endings.

There are some buildings still standing on the "Preston" side of the property possibly because they are architecturally valuable or historic and all the buildings within the Norwich City limits, recently privately purchased, are still there as well.

But a great deal of the "campus" is gone. When you back to that Abandoned America link and realize 80% of what you see there is now gone, you get a sense of the size and scope of the demolition project. But for me on Sunday looking at all the twisted metal and broken brick, I wonder what becomes of all of that.

Are we sure inanimate objects have no sense of self or feelings because if they do what does the sheet rock  hauled away and dumped I don't know where think happened to the doorways and windows it once lined.

And, the biggest question of all, what became of all those who were cared for in those buildings. Sometimes, it seems to me those who made the decision to tear it all down wasted not a moment on that consideration.
-bill kenny

Just a Fleeting Sense of that Rare Suspense

Today, the first of June, according to meteorologists, marks the beginning of the Atlantic Hurricane Season. I don’t know what your plans are, but I’m hoping to hit the Hallmark Store on the way home to get a card, weather permitting of course. 

Considering the havoc in recent weeks that’s been visited upon huge expanses of the Mid and South West, and the ever increasing severity of the drought across the Western States(not forgetting the pounding much of us, but more especially those in the Northeast, took this past winter), there’s something vaguely “Olden Days” about a weather pattern or condition being pinned to a point on a calendar.

Breathe easy. I’m not trying to make a stealth point about the impact and/or consequences of human behavior and global warming, though I do believe there’s a correlation, otherwise God/Mother Nature/the Universe simply hates us. You can make up your own mind, but buying futures in umbrella manufacturing companies may not be a bad idea. Y’know, help you put away a little nest egg for a rainy day (did you see what I did there? Pretty suave, eh).

It’s either amazing or amusing that we are the only species on this planet to create a measurement system for a concept we casually call time which slices and dices and amalgamates and aggregates every moment, waking and sleeping, into seconds, minutes and days, all components of something we call a week which cumulatively become a year, a decade, a century. 

Sometimes we get lost in the noise of counting and calculating and forget the point is living the life everything else measures.

-bill kenny 

Walking in Your Footsteps

There’s a routine on an ancient Monty Python record of an imaginary game show, “Stake Your Claim,” that always makes me smile whenever I hear it or even just think about it. 

The point where I lose it is when “Norman Voles of Gravesend” who claims he has written all “of Shakespeare’s plays and my wife and I wrote all of his sonnets” is interviewed by the show’s host who asks, “Mr Voles, these plays are known to have been performed in the early 17th century. How old are you, Mr Voles?”  

Chagrined, Norman admits that he’s only 43. The host pounces swiftly, “Well, how is it possible for you to have written plays performed over 300 years before you were born?” Trapped, Norman capitulates to the inevitable, “There's no possible way of answering that argument, I'm afraid. I was only hoping you would not make that particular point, but I can see you're more than a match for me!” Click here and you can laugh for yourself.

I think we’ve all known a Norman Voles or two, and perhaps even voted (more than once or twice) for the gentleman. I love stories that are the soul of plausibility until exposed to daylight where they turn to dust as everyone averts their eyes to not embarrass or be embarrassed by what’s happening.

We’ve all had a Mayan Apocalypse, or traveled a portion of life’s highway with our own Harold Camping who learned that even a stopped clock is right twice a day. Both of which brings us to Edgar Nernberg and his amazing if slightly ideologically incompatible discovery. It would seem the past isn’t all that’s cracked up to be. 

The discovery should make him the talk of every Tim Horton’s in Alberta and Saskatoon. Especially after it’s learned that beside the fish was an unopened 60 million year old jar of tartar sauce. Aside from some extra napkins, you really could not ask for more.

-bill kenny 

Perhaps Gold-Plated Gold

Which of these is really real? 

A holy water font in the latest edition of the Beate Uhse catalog? 

A pride of vegan lions at the Bronx Zoo? 

Or a Lamborghini sports utility vehicle? 

Yeah, me too.

I didn’t know that conspicuous consumption was being considered as an Olympic sport.  That’s the only reason I can come up with to explain why this vehicle would ever be built. And all this time I thought something else was God’s way of telling you that you have too much money.

-bill kenny