rags

Seventh Sojourn of the Seven Dwarfs

rags — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 13:12:39 GMT

Personal for Snow White:
Let's continue that discussion on why you think seven is a lucky number. Call me.

Monday night's Norwich City Council meeting marks the half-way point in the first year (of the two year session of the Council) for this City Council and Mayor and City Manager, though the City Manager is a hired, not elected, official whose precise responsibilities are as less than fully defined as his predecessor's were when he was bought out by the previous City Council for not being a 'team player' as one Norwich resident who makes his living (and judging from his suits, a good one) representing developers, so scathingly phrased it last March. That City Manager was Not One of Us, and neither is the current City Manager. Neither am I.

I live in Norwich, not because I was born here or because my parents carried me off to here at a tender age, but rather, because I choose to. When I am unhappy at how we progressing, or NOT progressing, as a city, in terms of taking care of the basic needs of all of our citizens, I know the processes and practices to attempt to initiate discussions, create coalitions and develop solutions. And right now, I'm a little short on 'benefit of the doubt' when it comes to the well-meaning men who sit as my representatives on the City Council.

Last November, six seats were open for renewal or replacement (alderpersons are two year terms while the Mayor is a four year term) and we chose five NEW brooms to, seemingly, continue to sweep old dust. Last Fall, during a very informative (imho) election campaign, everyone now on the Council, promised to examine and evaluate the City Charter, last revised in March of 2001 (I was on that Charter Revision Commission) but still in need of further definition (what are the Mayor's responsibilities and what are NOT those responsibilities-two areas that caused a LOT of difficulties in recent years, though one party in the disagreement preferred a proxy war to an open and frank exchange that might have resolved some of the problems. We like to talk at cross-purposes here in the Rose City, maybe like where you live?) with an eye towards additional review and possible repair in other areas .

Six months into their terms, this City Council has discussed once the idea of reviewing the charter and then closed their eyes. Can you detect my annoyance? Another hot topic during the election campaign was ethics reform (the current charter has a small section on ethical standards and behavior, slight enough that all of us can overlook it without turning red) that all agreed was very important, though six months further up the road, not very important enough to have actually done anything after accepting the final Ethics Review Committee report in March.

I told you I'm old enough to know how to use the system to fix the system when needed. Remember, Democracy is a contact sport, so wear a cup, my brother (and sister). Here's what on tap for Monday's meeting. You be the judge about 'talking the talk and walking the walk.' And lest anyone get confused, I have (extremely) high expectations for this Council and that just sharpens my disappointment and heightens my anger.

Growing the Grand List was of the utmost importance all the candidates told us last fall. I fear what they meant was talking about growing the Grand List was important because that's all they've done since--the Mayor's Economic Development Round table last Monday notwithstanding. And as Dylan once noted, 'nothing is revealed.' And in case you were betting I'd forgotten, Council members who worked to dismantle the Administrative, Planning and Economic Development sub-committee of the City Council, you lose. And the two of you who engineered that maneuver know who you are-and now know I know who you are as well.

In recent weeks, some residents have become concerned about 'new problems in our Police Department' (a public hearing between the Police Chief and City Council is slated for two weeks from Monday, on 21 July) but, for reasons that are home-grown, too many don't want to concede that the discipline and eccentric behavior (I'll call it that since a person is presumed innocent) aren't new and aren't actually the problem-but rather, a symptom of the problem.

We here in the Rose City have a long and proud heritage of ignoring problems and hoping they'll go away. We have a Norwichtown Mall (or Mausoleum as I call it. The Chinese take-out place closed a week ago, Friday, after 23 years there. How bad does it have to get that Chinese take-out places go out of business?) with close to no tenants, a downtown with ornate architecture but practically uncontaminated by the presence of residents, commerce or visitors, a school system that annually requests more money than it knows it can receive and then talks about 'cuts' in its operating budgets (but NOT nearly as loudly as it should have spoken about its State-mandated reading remediation strategy that it was required to develop because it has failed its students and because our children fall farther and farther behind the standards outlined in No Child Left Behind. Throwing money at the problem didn't fix it. What a surprise.) to show for our efforts, and lack of same. Quite frankly my fellow Rose City Resident, iIf you are not outraged at how we don't get things done around here, you just haven't been paying enough attention.

Perhaps we could all get away with empty rhetoric in good economic times, but for the moment those times are gone. The rising tide of prosperity didn't lift all of our boats here in Norwich and when the levee breaks, it doesn't promise to be a pretty picture for anyone in these parts. For the seven elected folks in the front of Council chambers at City Hall--meaning well and doing well are TWO different situations. I voted for change last November and staging a tabla rasa a year from this November doesn't frighten me at all. Gentlemen, I'm starting to wonder about which one of you might be the tallest-and in the context I'm thinking of, being tall ain't anything to be hometown proud about. Norwich can never suffer from Future Shock--we're unable and unwilling to overcome our own past and, besides, it's Present Shock that's crippling us.

Greetings from Exit Nine

rags — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 11:30:59 GMT

You already know it's the Fourth of July--the calendar told you that. And we Americans (how arrogant are we that we share this American continent with people from Canada and Mexico-not even mentioning the other American continent, but we are Americans and everyone else is, well, everyone else) can, I hope, find the time today to reflect on who we are and how we got here (the good parts. We beat one another up waaay too often the rest of the year on who has warts and where they are. Let's have a truce, okay?).

I consider myself a Jersey Guy--I wasn't born there, but we moved there when I was very small and I moved away (not realizing it was forever) back in1975. Now, when I visit relatives--actually that's code for when I visit my brother, Adam (he went from being my 'baby' brother to 'youngest' brother until I, finally, realized he's forty-one years of age and birth order is now difference without distinction) and his wife and two (adult) children (whose ages fall in the gap between my son, Patrick, and daughter, Michelle), I'm aware 'this is not my Here' (because I've felt it everywhere I've been my whole life.).

Adam's much more a Renaissance Man than I. He can engage you in a discussion on regional and geopolitical questions or why (oh why!) Kyle Farnsworth is still with the Yankees (he was the one who confirmed the nasty rumor that the Pinstripers still had Carl Pavano on the payroll) whereas I know what I like (in your wardrobe) and that's about it. Sometime ago he came up with striking figure of speech, snowglobe, to describe his piece of earth and by definition, all of our claims here (Frodo Lives! Just not around here). He found his Jersey Girl and I had to travel some to find mine, but I had a headstart and used it my advantage.

I think it's amazing and amusing, with the space of years and distance combined with the differences in growing up, how each of us came to be who we are, where we are and how similar the snowglobes we've made actually are. And, because if you've read me more than once, you know while you can take the boy out of Jersey, you can't take the Jersey out of the boy, you had to guess I'd quote Joyce Kilmer. Or not. No matter what the dot net says, I always hear:
'Sandy, that waitress I was seeing has lost her desire for me.
I spoke with her last night, she said she won't set herself on fire for me anymore.'
And, altogether now, whether you're from Jersey or not:
'Sandy, the fireworks are hailin' over Little Eden tonight,
Forcin' a light into all those stoned-out faces left stranded on this Fourth of July.'

Almost Independence Day

rags — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 08:33:35 GMT

We're thisclose to Independence Day but I'm actually thinking, albeit only for a moment about (Saint) Valentine's Day, because cupidity should have something to do with the latter, right? But it doesn't--however, it has a lot to do with who we are and where we are in the world today.

If fifty is the new thirty (I had such high hopes for what that made 56-all in vain as it turns out), I guess that makes four dollars a gallon the new buck seventy-five. I wish I were joking but I'm not--we're still driving as if the Bill of Rights guaranteed us cheap gas and we keep buying vehicles so large they have their own zip codes.

As a nation founded on the idea of fun, or what do you make of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" (thanks, Ben, and not just for the stove; and all this time I wondered Are Friends Electric? And will they now cost more because of rate hikes on the first?) when did we become Me-Firsters on everything? Yeah, we can take turns checking out at the grocery, merging into traffic, getting a hot dog at the ballgame, and you can start the line behind me.

We have become a nation of 'what's mine is mine, but what's yours is negotiable' even while we promise in the next few days to think about those whose service makes our way of life possible. At the risk of sounding less New Age and more like the relentless pragmatic curmudgeon that I am, I'd point out to armchair warriors that many, if not all, of those in the US Armed Forces will fight for their country (= you + me) but they will die for one another. They put a flower in the picture frame/Some mother's memory remains.

'Liberty, Fraternity, Equality' were the watchwords of the French Revolution and despite the purest of intentions, that little episode went off the rails in rapid order. We, on these shores, were still such a young and fragile democracy. We were struggling with problems of our own and never became involved in a revolution that boasted it was modelled on ours. Somehow we knew mirrors were not windows and reflections were only true to themselves and not the originals. Good for us--better for everyone else.

I don't want to harsh your buzz as you buy ice for tomorrow's picnic or pick up the steaks for the grill for the afternoon barbecue or maybe oil up the glove for the softball game that's always part of the weekend's activities but maybe in the next three days, you can find the time to click here and read a little about the 140 thousand kids, of all ages, we've sent halfway around the world and only think about when some part of that number end up as "B" roll on the nightly news. The pursuit of happiness is an essential freedom, but as with all freedoms, it comes with a cost.

Just a Song before I Go

rags — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 08:33:31 GMT

Its machinery is part of the scenery--the Apple (Dumpling Gang) have their technology in every aspect of our lives. They are the Red Sox to Steve Balmer's Microsoft Yankees, perhaps (I'm not good at either technology or baseball, though I am VERY fond of both, so I figured I'd throw that comparison out there and see if it stuck to the wall. Not only didn't it stick, but it left a mark) but I think all of us are better for the innovations and applications that have been the product of their uneasy coexistence for the last decades.

Sometime last week (or so-calendars are another thing I'm not really good with), Apple's iTunes marked its five billionth music download. It started in April of 2003, as the major record labels (or what's left of them) had finished pummeling Napster into oblivion. Napster, the child of Shawn Fanning's clever brain, started out as a file sharing service that many (=millions and millions) people used to share music with people they didn't know without the interaction of (or finanical benefit to) record retailers and wholesalers or music labels and was, because of this, an incredibly evil thing.

For artists (Metallica in particular), Napster was cursed for almost single-handedly "killing music" (Don Henley, I guess, never got that memo but wrote one of his own which I find as compelling today as when he authored it.) a term that recording companies had recycled from an earlier generation when they blamed home taping (thank goodness for ADD and no one remembering the Eighties). These days Napster is back, in a very different incarnation that never mentions its previous existence (in much the manner of the firemen in Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451) and I assume the record industry is out of intensive care, right?

Except, I'm troubled, a little no matter how many downloads iTune sells.
I have a car, I have a couch in my living room and I have a snowblower--to name just three items I own, or feel I own. You may have similar, though not the same, stuff (or that kid at the car/couch and snowblower emporium has got some 'splaining to do) or something like them and you think you own them, too. It's different with music now--and it's changed, not for the better, from when we were growing up and the change is the result of agreements quietly reached between the suits at the labels and the tie-dyes at places like iTunes that resulted in Digital Rights Management.

What if I told you we didn't own our cars--despite the payments every month and the DMV mailing us the title and the big smiles all around and 'honey, isn't this great, etc!' but rather we own a license to operate the vehicle NOT a driver's license (though we need that, too) a license, so to speak, to be allowed to (practically) own the car, or a couch or the snowblower. That is, we can use the item we bought and paid for, but it's not ours, and there are conditions to how we can use them that we agreed to abide by when we 'bought' the item.

Confused? Nothing to see or hear here, move along. If you thought that when the Supreme Court settled the Betamax argument, it was settled, I have some unsettling news: Think again. And wait until recording companies can figure out a way to charge passers-by for listening to the music coming out of a radio when a car drives down the street with the windows open.
Yeah, happy five billionth, Steve Jobs! I'd send you a musical telegram but the DMR won't allow it to be sung, or even thought about.

Hottentots and Forget Me Nots

rags — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 08:37:19 GMT

I think the days where you can crib a line from a Bruce Springsteen tune are beyond us, now. Almost four decades of releases, vinyl and come what may, and I think we've kind of got the catalog. Admittedly, my theft is more oblique than overt, but stolen is stolen unless it's Christmas in Germany.

Before the Brave New World Order, my wife's mom used to send a care package from Offenbach near the end of November, the fourth Thursday in Germany being celebrated with a little less gusto than how we do it, that always included kinder schokolade (actually the big eggs with the amazing toys always requiring some assembly within), esel salami and Christmas stolen.

Now with the world a 24/7 mall, we just go on line and nine out of ten times the products we're buying with the familiar names are now made in China. It's how we like it-cheap. When it wears out or breaks, we buy another and forget in the old days that didn't happen so often or so fast. We work very hard to forget how to remember how things were and pretend they were always just as they are now. We've always been at war with Oceania or was it Eurasia? Sometimes I get confused but the next Two Minutes Hate will make it all clear.

When you watch animals of the same species meet one another for the first time, they are usually tentative, sniffing and pawing and sniffing some more. We're not very much like that-whether it's someone new moving in (been on the movee side of that equation) to our neighborhood or just a wave of new people showing up where we hadn't thought they might be or even imagined they could be.

We're coming up on Independence Day which should be the standard against which we hold ourselves, as citizens of this country and as citizens of the world, everyday and not an excuse to buy 20% off at the Mall, buy a keg and have a barbecue with a grill that's crying like a fire in the sun (I said medium well-done, Conan-nice job). A hundred and forty years ago we were still struggling with the aftermath of a fratricidal war that ended slavery in the USA, and have tried, fitfully, at times to move on with ourselves and our lives.

In many ways who we are now is what we were then-as that war propelled us fully into the Industrial Age, whose Revolution had begun twenty years earlier, and helped move us towards a more open and larger engagement with the rest of the world until we had achieved Pax Americana, that started some eighty years after Appomattox.

Many have sacrificed much so that we can be who we are--and many are away from home today, far from home, in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, Colombia, the Horn of Africa and South Korea because those who wish us ill don't take holidays and as a famous Chicagoan (no, not Ernie Banks) so eloquently explained decades ago, you get more with kind words and a gun than you do with kind words alone.

Men and women in uniform, no matter their personal politics and feelings, would agree that growing faint when confronted by the evil in the world will not deter or distract it. It must be confronted or it will consume everyone and everything, including those who think fretting about our democracy is more noble than struggling to protect it. As you shop for the big three-day weekend please spare a moment for all those, past, present and future, who make it possible. And I'll meet you further on up the road.

Chisholm in my Bosom

rags — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 12:24:19 GMT

Confession is good for the soul and since I've already had my fiber for the day, here goes:

The other day, when we had that rain come up out of nowhere at about 1100 with the torrential rains, and the gale-force winds and the incredible amounts of lightning and thunder? That was my fault. Sorry-I promise to try hard not to have it happen again, but that may not be possible.

I had the car washed--hey, it's a black color with gold or green reflective parts in it (I'm never really sure-and the only part of it I am sure about is when/if I have an accident that requires body work and a new paint job, it will NEVER match what's on the car right now.) that looks very cool when it's clean and shiny, and the wheels are black and the rims are clean. I have tinted windows, not Pimp My Ride tinted windows (how do the people who do that on that show see out those car windows at night?) and except that it's a Subaru Forester XS, you might think it's a cool ride. (And if you clinked on the link, and read Toups' review, him and AutoChannel can take a long walk off a short pier.)

And I have a garden (actually, another confession; my soul will be glowing!) my daughter has a garden. She and I have been at this every summer but one since we moved to Norwich, CT from Offenbach, Germany in 1991. Some years we've gotten a bit exotic-we had Lima beans one year and tried corn (not so successful) and we didn't get discouraged the first year a pest I had never before encountered, slugs, ate every single one of our started from seed in the house in late winter and transplanted into the backyard afte the last frost tomato plants in one night. But I neither forgive, nor forget.

I have since done a lot of very focused research on slugs, though mostly confined to how to kill them by drowning them in empty cans buried around the garden with an inch or so of skunky beer inside. For the slugs, it's like catnip and they cannot resist it. The trap really works but don't waste money on good beer-they don't have any idea what good beer is and I always use Golden Anniversary because I can buy a case for what a six-pack of domestic name-brand beer costs. Maybe I should ask them for an endorsement deal? Or not.

Anyway, in addition to getting the car washed, I watered the garden. Which is code for I turned the sprinkler on and forgot about it for about forty-five minutes until my wife, sitting in the kitchen with those bat ears of hers (she can hear a mosquito break wind-from across the street), looked up from her newspaper and asked 'what's that noise I'm hearing?' I guessed wrong for quite some time (thirty years of marriage has its effect), and then she demanded to know 'are you watering your garden?' and sonuvagun, if I wasn't.

About fifteen minutes after turning off the water, the heavens opened. So if I saved you a car wash or a moment of bonding in the backyard while trying to light the hibachi for that cookout you just learned you're hosting for your sister and her husband, the guy who says 'yo!' to start every sentence, you're welcome. I'm sure you'll return the favor, if you haven't already. As Arthur Brown would be the first to admit, it's a Crazy World.

Obvious, Glimpse, Blinding of

rags — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 12:34:35 GMT

I visited someone in their office building today--it's a nice building and nearly new (= less than twenty years old) with that pressure blasted formed concrete exterior that taggers see as a challenge and a taunt and folks my age see as a 'nice' building. You can park in his company's lot just around the corner and walk and hardly ever step in any dog poop on the sidewalk, which is especially nice if you're barefoot (I wasn't but it was still nice) and rarely encounter any homeless, or as I've heard them called recently, 'urban indigents.' I wonder if the homeless were all perfectly attired and impeccably coiffed would we then call them urbane indigent? Careful where you step.

From the sidewalk it's a climb of nine thick, high steps--when you have bad knees and killer math skills like I do, you pick up on this stuff right away. Normal height of a step into a building from a public venue is seven inches, trust me on this one, and usually, at least in homes, for interior stairways it's more like six inches and has been for the last forty years or so (it was closer to five inches when our parents were our age, but all those vitamins and the fluoride in the water have made us taller and as a result a lot quiet changes in our environment have been made to accommodate the new and improved homo sapiens, of which we are the more recent models . Shows what you conspiracy theorists know! All those CIA plots did help some of us.)

As for width, or depth from the base of the next step to the ledge on the one you're on, about seven inches is average. These steps were closer to twelve inches tall and at last fourteen inches deep--the kind of steps that tempt you to try, but not gracefully or successfully, to take them two at a time. Instead you walk like a toddler, always almost teetering and tottering but never quite falling over. Not an Everest ascent but not pleasant either.

At the top, two signs flank the two glass doors that open out onto a relatively short landing (which, I assume, if you have packages in your arms as you're exiting could help you tumble down the nine stairs) and the signs note "No Handicap Access" in white letters with a little pictogram of a person in a wheelchair. I'm sure there's a mandate, municipal, state or federal that requires these signs. I don't think anyone in a wheelchair is sprawled on the sidewalk, perhaps being righted by one of those urbane indigents of whom I wrote a moment ago, dusting her/him self off and readying another assault up the stairs.

The only thing that could have made it more perfect would have been, when you make the right coming out of the parking lot, instead of turning left to get back into the flow of traffic, if someone had put the 'Dead End' sign at the end of the cul-de-sac instead of at the beginning. Makes me wonder if the movie didn't say 'The End' would we all be found dead in darkened cinemas, surrounded by boxes of half-eaten, over-priced Milk Duds and flat soda?

Stopping by the Canned Goods section on a snowy evening

rags — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 11:27:21 GMT

Why, when we go to the supermarket, do we walk down the middle of each aisle? Do we really need highway markings and passing zones and such? We're supposed to all be sharing the store though I'm not opposed to the idea of scheduled times to hit the freezer section or the deli. That might actually work out better for all of us so maybe my local grocer can think about that instead of all the surveys they send me via email that want to know how I feel about their new 'we care a lot about you' slogans.

Bless them, all the slogans are swell though they sound like variations of Barry Manilow's Weekend in New England (ironic, I know, considering where the chain is based)--but when you get down to it, we're not going shoe shopping (I can't actually buy shoes in the store though I can buy insoles, socks and foot powder, come to think of it) or walking down the aisle. It's a grocery store not a junior high relationship. How about this: "We Got Food."

You'll need a TV campaign: a spokesperson, lady or man (I don't care), ditto for age and double ditto for race--wearing one of those open-necked shirts with your store's logo on it and the spokesperson says something like, "Are you hungry? Are you unable or unwilling to hook your own fish, grow your own fruits and vegetables or kill your own meat? Good News! We have people who do-and did! We've got a store full of food and if you have money, or plastic, you can buy some and take it home to your house and eat it! Stop in and Happy Shopping!'

TV commercials always have a LOT of exclamation points! Especially the ones for groceries. I guess twenty cents off on a bottle of Clamato Juice is a big deal, just not at my house. Not a big enough deal, mind you, that I have to wander down the middle of the aisle oblivious to the other scavengers in the hunt and do that impossible-to-predict complete stop while staring at the Chinese food in a can section of the Ethnic Food aisle before walking off without putting anything in the cart. Lather, rinse, repeat across the whole store.

I watched a woman today stand in the frozen foods aisle, and after staring through the glass doors for at least two minutes, opened one and kept it wide open for five minutes while reading the back of the DiGiorno ultimate pizza box. Thank goodness it wasn't Tolstoy; we'd have all died of frostbite. So my unattractive choices for explaining her behavior are: she was oblivious to the rest of us who had to step around here and her cart, which was sort of cantilevered across from her or she just didn't care. Hmmm....
Did I mention "We Got Food" is still available? Well, sort of......

No Gnus is good news?

rags — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 08:41:13 GMT

I encountered an acquaintance at a bookstore (okay, the indefinite article is a bit kissing to be clever as in most areas there's the bookstore, Borders) with a copy of Fleeced by Dick Morris and Eileen McGann (who are husband and wife). He's a nice person who, in my opinion, has an ongoing difficulty distinguishing between news and commentary--he absorbs both the broadcasts of Bill O'Reilly and the Associated Press State Summaries with the same absence of salt, despite the (obvious to me) differences in the two products. My concern is when you've decided all sources are equally valid, in terms of establishing they have observable facts to support their perspectives or if they just feel very strongly about an issue, you have also decided that NO sources have validity (Deming's Red Bead Experiment).

I know enough about Mr. Morris to know he is a clever man--people who worked with former President Bill Clinton for as long and successfully as he did, did not do so only because they have a nice face (though I suppose it helps from the stories I've read. And good knees, too, apparently) but have quick minds and killer instincts. The White House is not for the faint of heart. I've never thought of him as a researcher or as a reporter and a quick flip through his most recent tome suggests it's more of the polemic that characterizes our politics than a sober assessment of how to improve them.

In a way, the book and the discussions that one, or the other, political party's leadership has (on an ongoing basis) about somehow limiting or curtailing discussion (especially from people with whom 'we' disagree) is a huge and negative difference between the USA I grew up in the 1950's & 60's and how we are as a nation now. Back then (there's a phrase that scares me), I believed people were good and would do the right thing instead of how we are in the here and now when more and more of us have to be shamed into it.

All the TV talking heads on all the '24 hour news channels' now are basically shouting at one another (not talking with) and they are watched by a nation who, more and more often, vote less and less frequently, not only than their parents did but how they themselves voted earlier in their lives. We've concluded bumper stickers are all the arguments we ever need to make life-altering, or affirming, decisions on who leads our cities, States and Nation.

We've moved from discussion to diatribe and hurl invective at one another, across the entire political spectrum, as a form of Jungian therapy. We fear terrorists from without but have surrendered to terrorists from within, who demonize dissent, who eliminate a frank exchange of ideas and who can no longer disagree without becoming disagreeable. Comity and consensus at any price. Will that be cash or credit and do you have our card?

Happy Trails!

rags — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 08:35:36 GMT

I have enough adventure in my life now. Being a half-step slow in Contact Ballroom Dancing (at least that's life here in the Land of the Round Doorknobs feels to me on an everyday basis), I don't seek out or embrace the exotic or the out-of-the-ordinary. Home and dry at the end of another perfect day seems like achievement for me.

But it doesn't mean I don't know people who can, and do, live large. A score of years ago (I love that number, score-and thank you Abe for making its use memorable!) I was, in a fit of civic involvement (now treatable with injections of B12 and wood alcohol, I'm told), one of those Rose City residents on the Norwich Schools Building and Technology Committee appointed by the City Council in a process boycotted by the Board of Education to oversee the deployment of a technological infrastructure across the thirteen school houses in the Norwich Public School system (for eleven million dollars in bonding) and see to fruition the expansion at two of the elementary schools, Bishop and Huntington (another 11 million in bonds).

Those of us on the committee (with one exception, moms and dads of kids in the publuc schools) were, without realizing it, pawns in a shadow game and our treatment, all these years later still so angers me that there are folks from 'back then' that, when I see them now, I cross the street to avoid trying and failing to keep a civil tongue in my mouth (my guy says I have anger issues; he's very perceptive). However, perhaps because we were political punching bags, or we just all got along very well, many of us have stayed in touch and exchange notes and smiles, still, on a regular basis.

And one, Evert, is deceptive in that he appears to be a quiet, unassuming, capable bi-ped, successful businessman, husband and father, and he is all of those things. But there's a flinty gleam in his eye, a flash in his smile that gives you pause if only for a moment. Evert, as it happens, has a love of long-distances and later this week he'll be traveling to and through Alaska (wait for it) on his motorcycle, with four friends (and maybe some 'fly babes' He knows what they are, but I don't.)
Gotta tell ya, having spent thirteen months in Greenland, I have zero desire to visit Seward's Folly but admire his sense of 'what's beyond the next mountain' and really love the fact that I can experience some of it without ever leaving the Nutmeg State by checking out his blog. Dale and Roy said it first and best!

Political Science--Equal Parts of Neither

rags — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 08:37:00 GMT

Next Monday is closer than last Monday, which is a good sign. Last Monday, in Norwich, CT, the town where I live but not where I'm from, we discovered the other thing, like weather, that everyone talks about but about which no one seems to actually do anything. We found another situation in which we didn't miss a chance to miss our chance. We became a variation of that motivational poster you've seen of the basketball sitting lonely and abandoned at the foul line and beneath it, in somber letters, the observation that 'you'll miss every shot you never take.'

Except, here, we'd have a lot of roses, a baseball stadium with hardly anyone in it and a lot of vacant storefronts. Springsteen could remake that video right here-heck, there's probably tax credits from the CT Film Commission involved and it's not like we'd even have to watch the clip.

Some eight (plus a few days) months after two developers, Northland Investment Corporation and Bourbon Street Norwich LLC had submitted proposals for the slightly larger than 60 acre parcel of land called the Norwich Hospital, the Norwich City Council got around to giving them an answer. (The big chunk, 419 acres, is in neighboring Preston and I wouldn't be surprised to see them start to call it the Preston Hospital.)

Last Monday the Mayor and City Council decided to turn down both proposals and add the project, itself, to an economic summit the Mayor is hosting this coming Monday at 5 PM in City Hall. He's counting on many of the folks who stopped attending the meeting of the Administrative, Planning and Economic Development Committee (whose dissolution he called for about twenty-six months after he'd reconsitituted it), but who never tired of complaining about how little it did and how much of their time it took up, to participate and do something many of them may be uncomfortable about doing: plotting a route for economic development and taking responsibility for making it happen.

We like sidelines in the Rose City, and sitting on them, a lot. We like saying publicly it doesn't matter where a good idea is from (as long as the persons in charge can take the credit)-guess which part of that sentence we say out loud and which part, not so loud. Same as where you are, right. See? We are all the same, in too many ways for too many days.

I'm not known for patience-either having it or thinking of it as a virtue when inaction is so often confused for patience. But you already know that, right? It's not like we don't have a process here in Norwich to create Smart Growth and economic development. Just look at our website and the listing of boards, advisories, commissions , so many people in the same device.

There are hundreds of citizens through many of these committees with a role in the revitalization of the Rose City, and others, such as the Norwich Community Development Corporation, NCDC (350K doesn't buy much of a web presence it seems. Has the City Council seen this site?), who aren't listed on the city website but who should be included.

With this many well-meaning people, why does it seem to be so difficult to get projects in Norwich started and then accomplished? It took eight months to say 'no, but thanks' the right amount of time for a decision? Come to think of it, what's the process for finding out what 'Norwich' (= you + me who live here) 'wants' on the hospital property and how should we tell developers to go about it? Do we want a floor polish or a dessert topping-we can't have both at the same time (and I'm holding out for a pony ride for my birthday).

Working with the Mayor and his charter-mandated role in economic development, all the players in Norwich should be able to define the process and then refine the product. And yet, it doesn't happen. Do developers pass Norwich by because we may not be as 'user friendly' and transparent in their eyes as we see ourselves? And shouldn't we ask that of them, or of ourselves? Sorry-I forgot, I'm NFH (Not From Here).

You know what? I fear we don't think we have problem (only everyone else does) and that's why we have no desire or reason to alter our approach, which leaves us to always do what we've always done. Sadly, that will always get us what we've always gotten. Take a look at downtown Norwich, our tax bills, the growth (and lack of it) on the grand list and you can decide how well 'this is how we've always done it' is working out.

ALL of us, elected and appointed officials, the professionals who work for Norwich, and we, the voters, have to start working next Monday afternoon from 5 until whenever at the workshop/economic summit/pancake breakfast/hootenanny [I defer to whatever the Mayor wishes to call it] to define what the Next Norwich looks like, with as much specificity as we can, and then refine the tools and talents we'll need to make that happen.

Continuing to hope 'this all works out' is not working-hope is NOT a plan. And a plan without a purpose, milestones, course of action or method to measure results is yet another Monday evening City Council meeting. Here in Norwich we're all waiting for someone else. We're at a point where incidents and accidents are distracting us from building a better place for ourselves and our families. The gap between promise and performance is a chasm. We can do better-we have to.

Carlin's Curtain Call

rags — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 10:30:49 GMT

I believe history, political, cultural, economic or sports, is driven by Ideas, but embodied by Deeds. That is to say, the American Revolutionary War would have been fought at some point in time because of the various pressures and beliefs, on both sides of the Atlantic. That it was fought when it was fought was as much the doing of George III as it was of a half-dozen wealthy white guys in Massachusetts and Virginia who decided they'd had enough.

Same thing, to me, holds true for Rock and Roll. I was born in 1952 and had no older brothers or sisters--for me, Danny and the Juniors At the Hop was the camel's nose under the tent but sociologists tell me, regardless of race, it was Elvis who legitimized rock and roll. When the Brill Building seemed to have co opted the fervor and the fever and gave us Frankie Avalon and Fabian, the outlanders in the UK, not realizing R&B wasn't on mainstream USA radio, gave us their version of it and forty-five years later we're still tallying the effect on our lives of all the bands and music that came over the bridge The Beatles built.

John Lennon remarked years after the group disintegrated but years before he was murdered that he fully expected, no matter what else he did in his life, when his obituary were written, the first thing it would mention was that he was in The Beatles. Of course, and sadly, he was right.

I mention that because sometimes we take mental snapshots of people and times in our lives and that's what we hold onto. As Ray Davies noted, people often change but memories of people can remain. When George Carlin died Sunday in Los Angeles, the obit from Reuters, in its first sentence, called him a 'counter-culture hero famed for his routines about drugs and dirty words.' And had he died in 1978, that would have been true enough-but he passed away thirty years later and Reuters couldn't be bothered to update the obit. I think Carlin would have found that funny.

I bought his debut album, for which he received the Grammy (and on his second elpee you can hear his reaction as that performance was taped for that album, interrupting the routine that would later get him to the Supreme Court) and went to see him with Sally Mary Atkins with whom I was madly in love for a semester while I was at Rutgers and she went to Boston College. Actually we didn't see him in the student center in New Brunswick because the performance was sold out ten times over but the campus radio station, WRSU-FM, and its program director, my classmate Bob Berman, received permission to 'broadcast' it through the university's buildings (the radio station had no transmitters nor license so there was never a danger children might hear George say words on the radio that their parent said during arguments in their living rooms. Thank goodness!).

George Carlin had been the hippy-dippy weatherman on Ed Sullivan and Johnny Carson and had characters like Congolia Breckenridge. He was, I learned years later, an Air Force broadcaster at Lajes Field in the Azores. While I was in the USAF, as a disc jockey, I often ran across folks who claimed to have heard him while at Lajes. By my rough count, had half of all those who said they were there actually been there, the island would have been renamed Atlantis and been found on the ocean's floor.

Carlin was part of the changing times in comedy in a way The Beatles, Dylan and the Stones were in pop music. He owed as much to Nichols and May as he did to Mort Sahl, Bob Newhart and the man who would prove to be a secular saint, Lenny Bruce. And by being a sum of all those parts and others, he transcended them and became part of a larger comedic conscience and consciousness that shapes in its way the comedy my children enjoy as much has his predecessors shaped mine. (I expect neither Dane Cook nor I am entirely comfortable with that notion, and that's fine by me.)

My son, Patrick, and I almost saw him, not like me and Sally decades earlier, but for real when he was at one of the casinos the winter before last. The day of the performance, it started snowing at noon and didn't stop for many hours--just driving home, normally a fifteen minute exercise took hours and both of us decided that we'd skip him and the casino postponed the performance and, not that we knew it at that time, we'd missed our last chance in this life to see him perform.

I, along with millions, watched him on his HBO specials though I became frightened by the erosive, caustic wit he seemed to display in ever more abundant supplies as the years went on. The later shows I found more angry than funny-as if he were growing less patient with our laughing at his stories and NOT hearing his larger points. Perhaps he had realized there were more horribly obscene things to be thought than The Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television and none of us had yet realized that. He became Elijah but we didn't even see the desert, much less the wanderings and now it's too late. He may have been the first to make me realize I had become the very people my parents had warned me about.

You must remember me, old man. I know that you can if you try.
Just open up your eyes old man and look who's come to say good-bye.

The Campfire of the Vanities

rags — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 08:34:32 GMT

I'm not sure if anyone has ever studied this, but suspect if there's a government grant available a researcher will be visiting you soon.....are humans the only species aware of our looks, and then attempt to change them in the hopes of improving them?

We do the changing part a lot--I make my wife and children smile by growing a moustache and a beard (of sorts) on a regular basis. I think it looks really cool while growing in, though I am in the minority on this. Then, sadly, when the beard should be very cool, it is, instead, incredibly icky-grey making me look like a bedraggled street person searching for my cardboard sign, 'Will lick your leg for a quarter.' The upside is I get the senior discount at Dunkin' Donuts. Well, sometimes.

Hitting the gym or the weight room or the stationary bicycle. The Pilates workout in those skimpy please-look-someplace-other-than-my-chest leotards with the goofy pull up socks that always seem to bunch up at the ankles, you remember that stuff in Flashdance?, those socks. The sweatbands, headbands, wrist bands and, for all I know, boy bands. All of that rigmarole. And all we're doing is a version of shape-shifting. We're not improving the contents, just the dimensions and appearance of the container. But we still work at it.

Cosmetics is a multi-billion dollar industry here and I have no idea how much around the world and you don't see lemurs hitting the Revlon counter at Macy's (at least not around here) and I've never read any accounts of a spotted leopard forgoing a share of the gazelle kill because red meat goes right to its hips. I buy aftershave, because I like the smell and deodorant because I don't like to smell. Some wag suggested with all the potential and possibilities for violence in our world these days that we're never certain in the air, in our car or on the street-but under our arms, there we are safe. Call me bulletproof, Pepe. Safe as houses.

But I have problems with the stranger who shows up in my morning mirror (he sort of looks like the person on the driver's license, but that guy only vaguely resembles my mind's eye reflection) and the other day, coming up an escalator in one of the mall stores, I caught a glimpse of the back of my own head on the surveillance camera--yikes! That little, tiny, bald spot--I mean the one that's so small the only one who can see it is me and it's on the back of my head and so I can't see it, that bald spot--it's HUGE! It's visible from space. All that was on the monitor was that bald spot! Sweet Mary, Mother of all that's Holy! From overhead, I look like Friar Tuck!

On you, this is funny but I'm not talking about you. I'm obsessing about me and the least you can do is pretend to be interested and STOP SNICKERING! I went directly to the drugstore and got Rogaine. (I'd never seen TV commercials for the fifty-five gallon drum size and didn't even know it existed until they rolled it out to the car. I have no idea if it works but I'm avoiding department store escalators until it's had a chance to at least try to work. The stuff I use says apply 1.0 ml (it comes with a dropper like I'd know the difference between 1.0 and .01 milliliters otherwise) twice a day and massage it into the scalp in a clock-wise motion with my fingers (as opposed to what? I wondered, but only for a moment). If the directions had said 'hop on one foot while whistling' I would have trouble typing this right now, if you follow my drift.

I'm not sure what's in it--except there are numerous prohibitions and injunctions about women using it, or coming into contact with it and women are incredibly tough--they give birth to live children, remember, so it must be a serious health threat, right? The label also instructs me to wash my hands 'thoroughly with soap and water after each application.' My fear is that if I don't, I'll grow hair on my palms (I had this fear years ago but still had a head full of hair) and I'll have nothing on my pate to show for any of this. Hey! Isn't that Carly Simon over there, getting on the up escalator?
You wave 'hello', I'm too afraid to take my hands out of my pockets.

Nobody Home....

rags — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 11:30:16 GMT

I've been assured by those with initials after their names that we are living in enlightened times (the more letters after a name, the smarter the person must be, right? It's Wheel of Fortune as life itself instead of as a distracting gameshow within it. 'I'd like to buy a Ph.D for two hundred, Pat' as Vanna's jazz hands show more emotion than she ever could.). I can only assume our parents and their parents, conversely, lived in endarkened times because their experts had way fewer letters, but such is our Brave New World, Alpha, and don't let any of those Gammas tell you otherwise. Careful with that axe, Eugene.

It's not so much that in America anyone can grow up to be President of the United States or a major league baseball player (as long as you have 200 million dollars to either finance your campaign or to buy the HGH and steroids that you can later deny ever using)--that's always been the American Way. We are enlightened now, my friend, because nothing is actually anyone's fault.

Make no mistake--bad things still happen. Truly awful calamities befall us every day, we've become desensitized to them because we're bombarded by them, but that doesn't mean they don't happen. We have crimes against and injuries to persons, from robbery and assault to and through murder most foul, my sweet Prince, and then we have disasters from flood waters and forest fires to sub-prime meltdowns, housing foreclosures and five dollar a gallon gas.

But none of this, I'm told, is anyone's fault. Stuff happens (and feel free to use a word that has an 's' and a 't', like stuff but it's also friendly and says 'hi', if you wish) and because it's no one's fault--no one has to take responsibility for any of the actions or for any acts of restitution or repair. No harm-no foul; it's not just for basketball anymore.

Some of our leading minds, you know them, too, the ones with the TV talk shows and the ones that are on all the news program as experts, will help us find someone else to blame for who we are and how we got here. Nothing is our fault and we're just hapless hostages from Hades. Say it with me, "I'm a victim, too" Did you just check out that last link? How Age of Tofu and Dawning of Aquarius is that, eh? A website where you settle scores in public without actually ever confronting the other person, or even identifying them. 'Sympathy and trust abounding' indeed-we've got a herd of Winnebagos.

There are six phases to every aspect of life here on the Big Blue Marble, be it personal or societal:
Enthusiasm, Disillusionment, Fear/Panic, Search for the Guilty, Punishment of the Innocent and Reward/Honors for the Non-Participants. All of us are somewhere in there at all times and in all ways. As a parent, I could be at One while as a spouse I'm at Four--perhaps as a citizen of a particular city and state I'm at Five and as an employee I'm aiming for Six.
"Complain about the present and blame it on the past/
I'd like to find your inner child and kick its little ass."
Really! Is that anyway for Air Age Americans "to dialogue" with one another?

He not busy being born is busy dying

rags — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 14:16:28 GMT

Happy Juneteenth to you, where ever you are. I could offer you an explanation of Juneteenth, with nary a card to be found in your neighborhood Hallmark store, but there's a lot of unresolved sorrow, fear, anguish and anger associated with the origins and causes for the system of oppression whose end, in the United States as we knew it then, Juneteenth helps mark. It was on June 19, 1865, when slaves in Galveston, Texas, learned that the War Between the States had ended and that they were now free.

In the here (and hear) and now, basically lasting all day today (a day later than is historically accurate but it's Saturday and what doesn't celebrate better on Saturdays, right?) at the Marina at Norwich Harbor across from Louis Brown Park, will be quite-the-do. And large fun has been a part of these annual celebrations in Norwich for the 20 years that the Norwich NAACP has sponsored them.

In a sense, holiday celebrations help bring different people, and peoples, together, to reflect on who they are, who they were and who they are on the way to becoming. Ideally, each of us sees in one another a reflection of ourselves as well as a better understanding of our unique talents and gifts-the stuff that makes you, you and me, me. That's why the Juneteenth party at the Norwich Marina is so large--not only all the people who are going to be there are at it, but all those who've come before them and those generations as yet to be born who will fulfill their promises and who will dream their own dreams and then live those as well.

So celebrate with us here in Norwich or where ever in the world you find yourself today.Sometimes, unless and until you look back it's hard to see how far you've traveled. It can be easy to realize the journey has a distance yet to accomplished, and to feel daunted by the challenge of that task, but it is sweeter and sweetened by the knowledge of where we were and where we are now. "And if my thought dreams could be seen, They'd probably put my head in a guillotine. But it's alright, Ma, it's life and life only."