Do you know the Saturday Night Live (SNL) skits with Kristen Wiig as a part of the “Lawrence Welk Show” sketch series? However connected I might have been to the “Lawrence Welk Show” in my grade school days in Wisconsin, I feel more connected to Lawrence now since our hilltop is directly above the Lawrence Welk Resort (now owned by Marriott as a timeshare) that sits adjacent to Rt. 15 between Temecula and Escondido on…
I have a friend, Kevin, who likes to swim with sharks…for real. Kevin is a manly man. He hunts, he fishes, he dives, he motorcycles (on road, but especially the hardscrabble off-road type). He keeps horses and rides in fox hunts (is that even legal?) and owns several farms where he likes to drive his heavy equipment around and move earth and shit from one place to another. On one farm he owns in northwestern…
On this past Sunday night, the night of Father’s Day, we had tickets to see the next LaJolla Playhouse play in the season’s rotation. As season ticket-holders, we see them all, and quite frankly, they do a good job of attracting good new productions that almost all feel like they have a shot of getting to the big time, even though few probably do. Our friends Dulcinea and Bill, who live in LaJolla, are also…
I have started the process of figuring out what’s what with my left hand and its loss of grip strength. The good news is that so far it hasn’t done much to impact my day-to-day life. I can ride my motorcycle all day (though I do wear anti-vibration gloves, which do help a bit). I can do all the gardening I have ever done (though lifting cactus pots by carefully gripping the plastic pot between…
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…
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…
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.…
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…
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…
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…