So Much for My Idea of a Joke

Out of sheer boredom  the other day (and maybe just a little spite; okay, maybe more than just a little spite), I created (made up really, 'created' suggests more thought than is put into a sneeze and this didn't even reach the level of a sneeze) a rather pedestrian motion picture hypothetical. 

I just called it Movie Idea (that's how few brain cells were involved in the thought process) and here's how it flowed out: the Marvel comics characters franchise takes on The X-Men. The winners then square off with The Transformers. 

Whoever triumphs in that match meets Vin Diesel and the Fast & Furious crew. After that has been decided, winner meets the Star Wars crew, prequels, sequels, cowbells and all. Then, up next, the Star Trek crew. 

In the next to last round that winner would be pitted against Buzz, Woody. and the Toy Story characters and after all that, every James Bonds that ever was (to include David Niven from Casino Royale) battle the survivor. As a reward, all I want is .0001% of all the merchandising sales.

It never occurred to me that Bill & Ted were waiting in the wings. I suppose Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter have suffered for their art. And now it's our turn. Again.
-bill kenny   

When Feet Meet the Street

Walking through the city in which you live is a much better way of getting to know about it (as well as yourself) than speeding through it in a car. It's one of the reasons I spend so much time walking through various neighborhoods all across Norwich. I figure what I've saved in not buying driving gloves, I've invested in walking shoes.

And even better than walking through Norwich, no matter how leisurely the pace or enjoyable the company, is helping clean it up or in this case at least making a good start. And that is what many of us were doing this Saturday morning passed. 

Organized by Jill Fritzsche at Foundry 66, with supplies and refreshments funded by a grant from The Last Green Valley, a not inconsiderable number of neighbors donned gloves, grabbed buckets and plastic trash bags, and armed with maps of downtown divided into projects areas teamed up, literally, to give a good impression of an old-fashioned spring cleaning to downtown and not a moment too soon. Summer will be here before we know it, with lots of community events and putting your best foot forward doesn't happen without help.

We spend a lot of time sharing concerns and voicing worries on local radio programs, at city council meetings and in our newspapers about all the things we don't have and the money needed, but sorely lacking, to transform where we live into _____ (insert the name of your ideal if not idealized town here). 

And yeah, it's hard to argue with the math that drives so many unhappy decisions when you look at the struggles the men and women we've elected must deal with when examining the needs and requirements, and the urgencies and exigencies of public education, public works, and public safety. We live at a time when we have more wishes than wallet to fund them but that doesn't mean we are helpless or hapless and none of us should feel that way.

The collection from one Saturday morning's work 

Because we can't do everything doesn't mean we can't do anything. And those who feel there's nothing they can do should remember that each of us can do something. I think that's what brought so many of us together on Saturday morning. 

The weather was spectacular but I think those who turned up were coming anyway and it wasn't just because Chelsea needed some TLC. I'd like to think what put us on the streets picking up trash and recyclables and kicking up dust with brooms and sweeping was the chance it afforded each of us to give something back maybe the only way we can.

Being a resident of a city is more than paying taxes, it's donating time and talents. Money for the first one is always tight but we are fortunate to have and to share so much of the latter two. Community projects not only help our community, they help build our sense of community. Thank you for being who you are, where you are.

-bill kenny     

It Began with George

In honor of my favorite season, baseball, a glimpse through my past darkly.

I've rooted for the NY Yankees most of my life. My dad was an NY Giants fan and continued to root for them even after Horace Stoneham moved the ball club to Candlestick Park and my mom grew up a Brooklyn Dodgers fan and remained one for many years after Walter O'Malley had led the way west and to riches beyond imagination for professional baseball and ultimately all professional sports. In the last decade or so, Mom has become more of a Florida Marlins and Tampa Bay Rays fan, I think, because of geographic considerations.

I see my Dad and Mom, being from two tribes in two different worlds as they were in the early Fifties, really like Romeo and Juliet (at the very least, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern) against all odds, meeting and marrying, I can hear the swelling violins over the mighty Wurlitzer playing Take Me Out to the Ballgame (what? The only constant is change. Just go with it, okay?).

For a while as a tyke I rooted for the NY Mets up to and through the return of Wilie Mays, my all time hero, to play for The Amazin's in the twilight of his career, nearly getting brained trying to play center field. We went to more than our share of games in Shea Stadium (motto: 'You can almost touch the airplanes taking off and landing!') and even as kids we could tell something was stinking up the field and it wasn't what the ground crew was using. 

These weren't the years of Tom Seaver.Tug McGraw, You Gotta Believe and I Guess the Lord Must Be in New York City, these Mets teams were frighteningly bad, you need only ask Jimmy Breslin.

My younger brother, Kelly, and I went to a Mets game one afternoon with my friend George B, from Browning, and his younger brother when Roger Maris played for the St. Louis Cardinals and every time Maris came to the plate we, along with everyone in Shea, booed him lustily for all of his success with his former ball club, the Yankees. I did feel a pang of guilt when, years later, he died of cancer wondering if we boo-birds had contributed in any way to his demise.

But for most of nearly six decades, my team has been the Yankees (and their beer sponsor, when Mel Allen was their broadcast voice, was Ballantine). Hadn't realized until a couple of years ago, visiting our son living in Boston at the time, after we wound up on Yawkey Way, behind Fenway on a Sunday game day against the Yankees and spotted the teeshirts with "Take Your 26 Rings" on the front with "And Shove 'em Up Your Asterisk (sort of)" on the back the intensity of the passion that those who disliked the Yankees possessed. 

I've had friends with bumper stickers, "I root for two teams, the Red Sox and anyone playing the Yankees." Notice the past tense of the verb (kidding and sorry about keying the paint on your trunk. When you squint, it does look a little like the Yankees logo, weird huh?).

Imagine my surprise the other day to come across an item on ESPN that at first made me smile, but now, has hurt my feelings, "Indians, NOT Yankees, Most Hated Team in Baseball" What? The Cleveland Indians? Must be a bad joke, like the two hundred and forty-seven sequels to Major League, which was one of the greatest sports movies of all times. Besides, no one ever made a movie called Damn Indians. 

We're talking Bob Uecker over that huckleberry Phil Rizzuto, 'just a bit outside' versus 'Holy Cow!' C'mon! But there it is in black and white, or whatever color electrons are on your monitor, 0.9 to 1.8, but I do take solace with the amazing consistency of The Olde Town Team, who finished second. Again. I can hear the rending of garments all the way to Harvard Square. Burn On.

-bill kenny

You're Right, Euripides

It's been an eventful couple of weeks for our daughter, Michelle. She began a new job, celebrated another natal anniversary and over the weekend reminded me again that we've come a long way from her nestling her head in the palm of my right hand and her tiny feet not quite touching the crook of my arm at the elbow on the day she came home from the hospital. 

She's been puttering around in a 2002 Hyundai Elantra for a little more than nine years, ever since some asshole stole the Mitsubishi Mirage she inherited after we bought the Subaru Forester from in front of the house on a Saturday night/Sunday morning when she was home from college. Yeah, good times. 

Like the Mirage, the Elantra was a manual transmission and she's very pleased and proud of herself that she can handle stick like ringing a bell. As well she should be as she's in a very select company. Friday evening she asked me what I was up to on Saturday afternoon and, as I've been trained by her mother for four-plus decades, I knew to correctly answer, "whatever you'd like to do." As it turns what she wanted to do was to shop for a new car. 

Very much her mother's daughter, she already decided on the car, a Chevy Cruze, and the color, some form of beautiful blue with (of course) a manual transmission and at some point had found someplace locally that had what she thought might just be the car. 

Before we ever got to the dealer, she had researched auto insurance coverage and the premiums had already decided as a consequence to say farewell to her current carrier and had started the paperwork for a car loan, understanding the amount she was financing and the lending rate. 

We never covered in Dad School what it was I was supposed to be while my daughter was buying a car so I had to improvise and do nothing. That was just about all I could muster anyway. The longer I sat with her at the dealership the more I wondered why I was actually there at all until I realized I needed to sit back and enjoy the view. 

The daughter her mother raised has, like her brother, our son, become a remarkably well-equipped adult, spreading her wings and not just flying but soaring. 
-bill kenny     

12:00! 12:00!

For much of at least a decade, I've teased the grown-ups in charge of where I work about the easiest way to spot the generational divide between their staff who are teachers and those teachers' students is to do a quick survey of wrists for the presence and absence of watches.

In my experience, huge numbers of folks (this is a WAG) under the age of thirty-five don't wear a wristwatch (sorry, apple) because they use the display on their cellphones to tell them what time it is.

When I was a wee slip of a lad with most doorknobs still taller than my head, living in Belford, New Jersey, my Mom's sister, Ann, used to crack her up comparing how her daughters and I told time back in the days when we rode dinosaurs to kindergarten.

It was funny to the two sisters because their children all learned to tell time by calling out the position of the hands on the clocks in the living room using the channels of the television shows they watched. Heck, it made sense to us. 

My cousin Donna might say 'the little hand is on the Terrytoon Circus channel and the big hand is on the Captain Kangaroo station." Her mom would need to know the former was channel nine and the latter was channel three. In other words, it was a quarter after nine, easy-peasy.

Fast forward a generation to where those kids had their own kids and having pride of place in most of our living rooms was a video tape recorder an/or (later) DVR with a large you-can-see-it-across-the room clock display. You knew there had been a power outage if, when you came home, the device was flashing 12:00, a sort of electronic version of Help! 

So ubiquitously universal is/was the flashing 12:00 that, when they saw it, our children almost instinctively knew something was wrong (Timmy was still in the wheel because Lassie couldn't read numbers, I guess). Time, no matter how you tell it, marches on.

And now, according to various press reports (Real news, not the Mango Mussolin's fake news), it has come to this. I was thinking about a Chicago tune I am inordinately fond of but then also realized "I might get burned up by the sun, but I had my fun." Sunscreen uber alles.  
-bill kenny            

Yet More New Normal

We have ourselves quite a situation, My Fellow American, and while I tell myself my hands are clean I have to admit my heart is troubled and my conscience is not returning my calls. 

A not inconsiderable number of us were so angry (actually inchoate with rage)  at women, persons of color, people whose gender and/or gender preference were different from their own, those whose religious beliefs were "wrong" and/or "unAmerican," foreigners who stole their jobs, and "them" in general that in November 2016 they backened the circle, pulled the lever and made their X in the block labeled FUKKIT and FUKKYOU and elected the most singularly unqualified human being in the history of our species to be the President of the United States of America. 

Donald J. Trump. A creature whose sole talent seems to be self-aggrandizement resulting in self-enrichment on a scale and scope never before seen in American political life. A man who incites and inspires the basest of instincts to include hate, intolerance, and greed, acting as a shitball magnet to attract scumbags to his cause, eager to do his bidding, whatever that may be. 

As of Tuesday, this is a count of how often he has lied, not misspoke, not misremembered, not conflated, but flat out lied and we have allowed, enabled and in some cases (looking at you Slimeball Hannity) encouraged him to do it and just shrugged. I'm not even going to mention or think any more about Roberet Mueller's investigation into Putin's Russia meddling because for me, we did this to ourselves. 

The great thing about being a cynic is I can only be surprised and never disappointed. Proving my point yet again: I suspect a hiccup earlier this week on cable TV news will change little to nothing for those who look at the Mango Mussolini and smile to themselves while adjusting thie MAGA ballcaps that they had to buy because while Pantload 45 is a sumabich, he's their sumabich.           

Earlier this week on Slimeball Hannity's Faux Gnus' Really Big Show, another of Trump's 'best people,' the fellow serial philander and former mayor of New York City, Rudy Guiliani, explained somewhat pedantically how both Trump, his current client (as Rudy is on Trump's legal team), and Michael Cohen, Trump's purported fixer attorney and cell phone mogul, lied at every turn about the dollars that bribed an 'adult film actress' about a 'relationship' she and Trump had years earlier. 

The feces very nearly ended up hitting the ventilator about three weeks before the 2016 election but thank God, In Cash We Trust saved the day. For those keeping track at home this is just the latest misadventure from Cadet Bone Spurs and The Greedy Bastard Aggrieved White Men who are the Trump Administration.  

His challenge to us every morning, usually tweeted, comes down to 'who are you gonna believe, me or your own eyes and ears?" That's an easy answer for too many people who continue to claim (somehow) to love our country and yet also hate very nearly every one who is in it. 

Trump is the answer to their every prayer, be they evangelical, atheist or agnostic. And after awhile, you just stop noticing the strange which may be just as well since we have chosen to be powerless to stop it. Every day the occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue proves yet again that when you lie down with dogs you get up with fleas.         
-bill kenny

Eight and Forty Years On

If you think being disagreeable when disagreeing is an alt-right and/or antifa newfangled invention/perversion of traditional social comity civil discourse and civic duty, think again.

Kent State. Jackson State.

Almost half a century onwards and we persist in our animus and ignorance.
-bill kenny