The Old Lone Ranger

One Brief, Shining Moment

By Rich Marin | June 21, 2026 by Rich Marin

In the 2004 Clive Owen movie, King Arthur, the Arthurian legend is reimagined with the knights as Sarmatian warriors, horsemen from the Eastern European/Central Asian steppes. The film’s premise is that the Sarmatians were conquered by Rome and their sons were conscripted to serve Rome by defending Hadrian’s Wall in England. This represents an alternative historical theory to the romantic medieval French version based on the quest for le Saint-Graal…the Holy Grail. While the Holy…

All-Nighter

By Rich Marin | June 20, 2026 by Rich Marin

On Wall Street in the era when more and more work was being done on the trading floor on the computers, all sorts of new problems arose that required us to make adjustments. I was working on the trading desk in 1982/83 when Apples and PC started coming into the mainstream. Prior to that there were computers, but they were either mainframes in some remote location of mini-computers located on a different floor wired into…

Memoir

Rock Gardener

By Rich Marin | June 19, 2026 by Rich Marin

Ever since I moved to this hilltop, there have been two vacant lots across the street. They are generally less desirable lots than ones like ours that have ocean and Mountain View’s in every directions. They are nice suburban lots and they do get some partial views of surrounding hills, but they are simply less special, which is why they are, as yet, not built on, even though this development got launched 30 years ago.…

Business Advice Memoir

Why Movies?

By Rich Marin | June 18, 2026June 17, 2026 by Rich Marin

I have taken note of pervasive trend in entertainment. I am tempted to say that it pertains to attention span, but I suspect there is a lot more to it than that. It boils down to this; an increasing number of people prefer short snippets of content rather than getting involved in a full-length feature film, whereas others of us (you all know where I come out on this debate) greatly prefer a good old…

Business Advice Memoir Retirement

Globalizing All Over Again

By Rich Marin | June 17, 2026 by Rich Marin

I am sitting here at almost 11pm on a Tuesday night at the age of 72 wondering who I am supposed to talk to about the fact that I’ve put in five unexpected hours of expert witness work tonight rather than writing a cute story for you all to read tomorrow morning. I got a surprise email yesterday from my Australian client asking for a Zoom call tomorrow night to review my in-process report. That…

Business Advice Memoir

The End of the Tunnel

By Rich Marin | June 16, 2026 by Rich Marin

This sounds funny, but I have spent almost all of my 72 years in a tunnel. That metaphor could mean many things. A tunnel metaphor typically conveys one or more meanings. The most common is one of confinement / restriction. A tunnel is a narrow path with no lateral movement. There is no choice but to go forward and one’s vision is limited to what’s directly ahead. It can also mean a journey through darkness…

Love

Down Time

By Rich Marin | June 15, 2026 by Rich Marin

Kim finished her show yesterday and I attended both showings. It was an excellent show which I feel represents another significant upgrade to the production value of her vocal group’s showmanship. By my rough estimate, Kim spent 600 hours over six months on the project. She has been immersed in these 24 songs for the better part of six months. Unlike the last show, which I also thought was a meaningful upgrade in performance quality,…

Memoir Politics

Defenestration

By Rich Marin | June 14, 2026 by Rich Marin

As I read about the court-ordered removal of the Donald J.Trump name from the Kennedy Center in Washington, the word defenestration naturally comes to mind. The word means throwing someone or something out of a window. It comes, as so many great words do, from the Latin fenestra (window). Historically and politically, the word is most famously associated with the Defenestrations of Prague, two historic incidents in Bohemia (1419 and 1618) where officials were thrown…

Business Advice Memoir Politics

NIMBY – JOMO

By Rich Marin | June 13, 2026 by Rich Marin

It’s hard not to think about SpaceX and AI every minute of every day these days. I remember in the late 1990s., we were all abuzz about the Internet. We thought it would change everything. The comparison of the Internet and AI is valid in that the buzz is similar in feel, but AI may be more fundamental. The hype was genuinely euphoric and widespread with every business needing a “.com” strategy overnight, just as…

Business Advice Memoir Politics

The Pillage of Rome

By Rich Marin | June 12, 2026 by Rich Marin

How many times has it been analogized that America is the Roman Empire of the 21st Century? The rise and the fall. Few subjects in history are richer or have been more studied as a cautionary tale. The Kingdom of Rome began as a small Latin village on the Tiber, legendarily founded by Romulus. Seven kings ruled before the last, Tarquinius Superbus (Tarquin the Proud), was overthrown in a patrician revolt. The Republic that resulted…

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