Happy Passover: Passover 2020 begins on the evening of Wednesday, April 8, and ends on the evening of Thursday, April 16. - Google Feedback Inside most cynics is a failed idealist just waiting to rise from the ashes, reborn. - O'Kendley Happy St. Paddy's Day: "There is good in the world, simple, uh, complex, dysfunctional. I'm related to outlaws that lived in America during the 1930s, they were horse thieves, uh, not screws -- er, ah, Garda -- or priests and nuns like my family in Ireland. I like to believe that if the O'Brien boys had come across a Klan lynchin they would have risked all, includin their lives to have stopped it: Good isn’t perfect… Slainte.”
To friends and family: “I'll drink to our coffins: may they be built from the wood of a hundred-year-old oak tree that I’ll plant tomorrow.” - author unknown Please give to St. Baldrick’s Foundation: 1333 South Mayflower Avenue, Suite 400/ Monrovia, California 91016/ 888-899-2253/ sbinfo@stbaldricks.org March is Women's History Month:
Ms. McTavish By Kevin O’Kendley Darlene McTavish jumped in a cab: her twenty-two-year-old Harley was in the shop, she’d dropped it on an icy corner a week earlier; fortunately she hadn’t been injured but the bike had been pounded. When the taxi glided to a stop in front of FitzGerald’s Grocery Emporium the cabbie said, "Six smackeroos." To Darlene's surprise the meter was double-jointed or two-faced showing separate prices for males and females. The fare for women was $6.00 and the ticket for guys, $4.62. Darlene grumbled, "What the? Where in the Constitution does it"-- “Ahem. Pardon me?” Inscrutable with hoodie eyes the cabbie then explained briskly, "That's just the way it's always been. Ask anyone, missy." Missy? Darlene took a deep breath, a brilliant calming technique learned from her YWCA Lamaze lessons. Though mystified as to why it was cheaper for a man to ride in a cab than a woman Darlene still shelled out a fair tip: two bucks. Inside Fitzy’s it was the same thing, the same inflammatory mystery lurked behind every price tag: milk was $4.00 for women and $3.08 for men, coffee $7.00 for women and $5.39 for men, and then the kicker, the final flipping insult, Tampons were $5.00 for women and $3.85 for men! Tampons?! Ahhhhh -- Despite being outraged -- her little clamshell ears were fire-engine red -- Darlene gently -- breathing in and out -- asked the mustachioed cashier with the pug-lumpy face, "What's going on? Y’know this is unfair -- un-American. It's flat out wrong." The cashier shrugged, and said with no small kindness, "Sorry, ma'm, but on the average women make seventy-seven cents for every buck a man makes in this country -- you do the math." -end- a short from 2013. Happy President's Day. There are those in this country that believe our political interaction has no sane guiding hand behind all that we do.
The Citizen's United vs Federal Election Commission Supreme Court Decision is still King of the Hill.
Nine people hiding in plain sight.
February is African American History Month: (Posted earlier) “Negro History Week”, “the precursor to Black History Month”, was “created in 1926 in the United States, when historian Carter G. Woodson and the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History” designated the second week of February as such. - Wikipedia "Each year since 1976, the President of the United States has officially designated February Black History Month.” - Independent. President Trump changed the designation in 2017 to African-American History Month. - 7 Eyewitness News Chicago "Our future is in the rear-view mirror and gaining on us."
posted earlier: Today is the 74th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by the Red Army. 1.1 million people, primarily Jewish, were gassed and incinerated by the Nazis in the prison camp. Approximately six million Jews were systematically murdered in Nazi concentration camps in efficient factory-precision during World War ll, between 1939 and 1945. Before the Holocaust, the pre-war Jewish population (and as early as 1933) in Europe was approximately 9.5 million. By 2012, Europe's Jewish population was approximately 1.4 to 1.6 million. The world's Jewish population in 2016 was approximately 14.2 million people. About half of the world's surviving Jews live in the U.S. - Sources: BBC/ NerLeElef-Judaism Online/ Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum web site/ Wikipedia/ Jewish Virtual Museum. The second largest number of prisoner deaths/murders committed by the Nazis were inflicted by starvation, disease, executions: …“at least 3.3 million Soviet POWs died in Nazi custody,” as part of the overall 5.7 million POW deaths in WW-2 in the Pacific, the European, African, and other theaters. “This figure represents a total of 57% of all Soviet POWs" that were imprisoned in Nazi camps. - Wikipedia Please give to the Jewish World Service: 45 West 36th Street, 11th Floor/ New York, New York 10018/ 212-792-2900 Happy Martin Luther King Day (posted earlier): ..."when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!" - Excerpt from, I Have A Dream: Martin Luther King/ Intellectual Properties Management. “24 years ago I, uh, was the only white guy in a eight-man cell in L.A. County Jail. There were ten or twelve guys in the cell -- three or four of us sleeping on the floor. A couple of months ago I was watching a CNN -- Lisa Ling -- special on L.A. County Jail. About 1 out of 4 guys were white. It was good to see real proof of the evolution of integration in our society.” (caption edited: 1/20/20)
Please give to the NAACP: 4805 Mt. Hope Drive/ Baltimore, Maryland 21215/ 410-580-5777 The Republicans won't be able to do much to get Trump re-elected but the Democrats are on the job. (edited 1/20, caption c. 2020) "Happy New Year."
A cartoon from 1992: President Bush and President Clinton. |
A carbuncle is a roiled mass of skin or a beautiful gem. The incredible gem is pictured in the logo below and at the bottom of the short story section...
Kevin O'Kendley is the owner of Carbuncle Moon, and the author of all original material -- cartoons, blogs, shorts, essays, articles -- on the website (there has been a very limited editorial input in some of my work). All quoted sources are noted. I am responsible for all posts. The only blogs not time-dated are those advertising nonprofits. All nonprofits are vetted, investigated, though after the summer of 2018 my vetting has lapsed: (6/1/21).
Kevin O'Kendley: P.O. Box 172, Winterport, Maine, 04496, and 200 P Street, A-32, Sacramento, California, 95814, ksokendley@outlook.com. Technical help is provided by an evolving computer genius, my son, Conor O'Kendley: A good kid with a great heart who can be reached at P.O. Box 172, Winterport, Maine, 04496. (Conor is in the Navy now, a swabby) Photography provided by a visual artist, my daughter, Caitlin O'Kendley: a young woman with a beautiful soul. (Caitlin is in college now, a media-journalism student) If your nonprofit is advertised on this site and you wish to have it removed please contact me at the above listed snail-mail or email address or use the contact form on the website. If you download a blog, cartoon, a short story -- or for any other reason -- and wish to donate $ to this site, its author and technical support personnel, please send donations to above listed addresses payable to Kevin O'Kendley. My family and I could use the dinero. All cartoons, blogs, and short stories are for sale. Categories |