Over the years, I’ve had a few encounters with pickpockets. My first one was in Rome at the Porta Portese Flea Market. Porta Portese is a 17th-century city gate on the edge of Trastevere in Rome. It’s best known for the huge Sunday flea market that runs from the gate along Via Portuense and the nearby streets. If you go early, by 7 or 8 a.m., you get the best finds and the thinnest crowds.…
The other day, we were sitting in the Delta Sky Club Lounge at JFK, the least exclusive club in the world where you almost have to try not to gain admission since everyone else seems to get in, when I realized that a first class domestic ticket doesn’t get you into the joint or any other Delta lounge at JFK. How did that happen? I’m not a fan of airline lounges anyway. They are always…
The Bermuda Triangle is a loosely defined patch of the western North Atlantic, roughly bounded by Miami, Bermuda, and San Juan, Puerto Rico, that became famous for supposedly unexplained disappearances of ships and planes. The legend came from a series of events starting with Flight 19, five Navy Avenger bombers lost on a training flight in December 1945, plus the rescue plane sent after them. Before that, the USS Cyclops, a Navy collier, vanished there…
The modern shopping mall dates to 1956, when Southdale Center opened in Edina, Minnesota. Architect Victor Gruen designed it as the first fully enclosed, climate-controlled mall, with two department stores anchoring each end and a central garden court. That became the template for American malls, but it had several earlier precursors dating back to ancient times. There’s a fine line as to what constitutes as mall versus a market. My travels to the Middle East…
I was a banker. To most people these days that means you were a stuff and somewhat money-grubbing sort of traditional office geek. In ancient days the profession of moneylender was a far less savory profession. They were the shylocks. “Shylock” is slang for a loan shark: someone who lends money at extortionate interest and often enforces repayment with threats or violence. As a verb, “to shylock” means to lend at usurious rates. The term…
When I was growing up in Wisconsin between the ages of 7 and 12, I was pretty much on my own. My mother was in graduate school at the university of Wisconsin. She went in at the age of 45 with three kids in tow and no husband or alimony. Mom was a pretty independent woman, having gone off in 1946 to Venezuela with the Rockefeller Foundation, when women did not do those kind of…
I’m getting nervous. We are less than a week away from the Midterm elections and the world is coming unhinged. The overthrow of the Serbian authoritarian regime is the canary in Europe’s political coal mine with the youth movement overwhelming the political process to retake control of a rogue government that served itself rather than the people of Serbia. Leave it the Balkans to Bslksnize the political spectrum of Europe. And now there’s Brazil. It…
When I was teaching at Cornell as a Clinical Professor of Finance in 2013, I wasn’t expected to “publish or perish”. That was for tenure-track professors, not us denizens of the practicum. But while teaching a course in pensions, I stumbled on a compelling thread that really concerned me and caused me to do some ham-handed research (I’m not cut out to be a serious researcher…that takes too much diligence and rigor). I found numbers…
We’re spending the weekend in New York City, and while I’m the one of the two of us that tends to want to limit my travel to New York City these days, I’m really glad we came. Besides the obvious pleasure we’re getting in seeing our friends who we’re coming to celebrate a 70th birthday for, the weather in New York has decided to cooperate with some magnificent, crisp, late October weekend weather with the…
The year I graduated from college (1975), Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons came out with their song December, 1963 (Oh, What a Night) and it reached #1 on the Billboard Hot 100. Since I was nine years old in 1963 I’m not sure there was anything special going on in my life on that date, but the original song, written by Bob Gaudio (Big Girls Don’t Cry, Rag Doll, Walk Like a Man, Bye…