In Dante’s Inferno, hell is a funnel with nine circles. Each circle holds worse sinners than the one above it. It starts with Limbo. Virtuous non-Christians and unbaptized souls, such as Homer, Virgil, and Socrates live here. There’s no torment here, only an eternal longing for God. Then there’s Lust. The lustful are whipped around forever by a violent storm. Many of us live here and we men, especially, shrug and explain this one away…
A few years ago I wrote about my travails in getting fire insurance in the collapsing homeowners insurance market of California. The problem was mostly wildfire related (perhaps some seismic and tsunami in certain areas, but no so much here). Since then we had the devastating Palisades and Altadena fires in L.A. that further crashed down on the heads of insurers and caused the state’s assigned fire risk pool plan, called The FAIR Plan to…
My youngest son, Tom has just finished writing a book. I’m not surprised that he’s a writer because he tends towards the creative end of the spectrum with his primary medium being video and photography. I was also aware that he dabbled in writing. When he told me he was finishing up a book and that he wanted me to read it, I found that mildly amusing and thought it would be a typical first…
Cornell has been a huge part of my life for my entire life. From my earliest days I was aware that my mother had bootstrapped her life as the daughter of Slovak immigrants living in rural Upstate New York by deciding to get herself admitted to Cornell at the age of 16 in the depths of the 1932 Depression. She drove that stepping stone into a life of global adventure that led her eventually to…
Piety is devotion and reverence, most often toward God or religious practice, shown through worship, prayer, and faithful observance. The word comes from the Latin pietas. For the Romans it meant more than religion: it was dutiful loyalty to the gods, to one’s family (especially parents), and to one’s country. Virgil’s “pious Aeneas” is the classic example. That older sense survives in phrases like “filial piety,” meaning devotion to one’s parents. The word can also…
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…