I have mentioned Argentine Ants before, because I have found it fascinating to learn about this phenomenon of nature. Argentine ants are the most common nuisance ant in Southern California. They’re small (about 1/8″), uniformly brown, and travel in long, steady trails. They’re hard to eliminate because they don’t form separate colonies. Instead they build huge “supercolonies” with many queens, so killing the ants you can see does almost nothing. They tend to move indoors…
I’m back on my hilltop and am momentarily alone here on this quiet sunny Saturday morning in late September. Kim is up caring for Sharon, her older sister and will return later today after having lunch with an old pal in Santa Barbara. Buddy is finishing up a few days stint with his doggy pals at Doggy Day/Night care and is unaware that I will be picking him up in a bit and bringing him…
There are many advantages to traveling besides the obvious ones. Among them is that I get to listen to morning TV news while I’m getting ready. For some reason, we don’t do that at home because after getting ready in the morning, we are in the habit of sitting in the living room across from one another, Kim on her games and me on my iPad writing my stories. So, this morning in addition to…
On this first day of fall, I find myself wandering around in lower Manhattan. There is a decided, chill in the air, which feels nice after the long hot summer. I got in late last night. My first meeting is right down here in lower Manhattan, but it’s not until 1 PM so after working out and having a late complementary breakfast at my hotel, I find myself wandering around old familiar places. Of all…
In 1976 I was rushing to finish business school because I had secured a good job at a large, Money Center, white-shoe bank headquartered on Park Avenue. That was Bankers Trust Company, the sixth-largest bank in the country and one with a very storied past that included being founded by none other than J.P. Morgan, among other financial dignitaries of the day. Technically, Bankers Trust was a commercial bank, which under the confines of the…
Yesterday I traveled cross-country on what may have been the worst travel day for the air traffic control system in recent memory. Yesterday (Monday, Sept 21) a major air traffic control outage hit the Northeast. What happened was an air traffic control communications failure in Philadelphia forcing the FAA to restrict arrivals at several major airports, affecting JFK, LaGuardia, Newark, Philadelphia International, and Teterboro. Ground stops began at Newark, Teterboro and Philadelphia around 10:00 local…
Having just finished our Rhine River cruise with a wonderful outcome and lots to commend it, we are already looking forward to our next Viking cruise, which is the eleven-day Greek Odyssey cruise through the Aegean in late February and early March (decidedly off-season, but appealing to us for the obvious reasons of less crowds in the Mediterranean). The way that cruise has shaped up is that we are a group of eight. We are…
In 1972, while rushing what was to become my college fraternity (a.k.a. a place to live for the next two years in a college town short on student housing), I got picked up by a fraternity brother who drove a Chevy Impala that looked, even by standards of the day, like a boat on wheels. This guy, named Steven Kantrowitz, was, like most people at Cornell, a smart guy, but also brash and unorthodox to…
My brain is going back to 9th grade earth science with this one…Astronomical autumn begins with the autumnal equinox on September 22 in the U.S. I will be in Manhattan for that. Meteorological autumn, which meteorologists use for record-keeping, started September 1 and runs through November 30. I was in Amsterdam for that. Meteorological seasons are built for convenience, while astronomical seasons follow Earth’s orbit. Meteorological seasons simply group whole calendar months into three-month blocks:…
There are several specific things on my mind this morning regarding authoritarianism. Let’s start with a proper definition. Authoritarianism is a system of government in which power is concentrated in a single leader or small elite that isn’t meaningfully accountable to the public. It typically limits political freedoms, suppresses opposition, and restricts independent institutions like the press and courts, while often still allowing some private economic and social life. It differs from totalitarianism, which goes…