Many years ago during the height of my days at Bankers Trust (late 1980s, I think), our then Chairman, Charlie Sanford (rest his soul) got on a kick of predicting the future and wrote an paper that he presented at a gathering at the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank. The paper was titled Quantum Finance, and it was a prediction that our consumer financial system would evolve into a complex kluge of payment processing where…
I’m sure most people think that Harvard University’s sports uniform color of crimson has something to do with its long history or its regal beginnings. Not so. Harvard’s color is crimson because in 1858, when Harvard’s rowing team needed to distinguish themselves at a regatta, they chose to use red bandanas as their identifying marker. This choice eventually evolved into the official adoption of crimson as Harvard’s color. The specific shade of crimson became official…
Many years ago at a time which I presume was an era of higher than normal immigration into the United States by people from India, there were many cab drivers in New York City who hailed from the subcontinent. I’ve always felt that the pulse of immigration trends are often felt most clearly in the cab driving population. I’m wondering how Uber and Lyft have changed that, but I’ll bet not too much. It’s tricky…
We pick up friends in life in all sorts of ways. Typically, we gather most of our friends from those who live around us. Sometimes its about home and hearth and sometimes its about the workplace. This morning I’m thinking about several specific friends that hold particular and very different meaning to me, but both come from L.A.. One came from my work environment about twenty years ago. The others are friends we lived next…
Few words manage to embody more stages in life than the word “trippin’”. I grew up in the 1960s and came of age in the 1970s. The early 60s for me were about returning to the United States from Latin America, where I functioned under the watchful eye of a German governess with strong ties to Latin America (not sure what that history might have entailed in the post-WWII era) and with the name of…
I must have done something right in life. I look around me and the word magical comes to mind. I am blessed with a magical partner in Kim. I know plenty of friends who are satisfied in their marriages, but I know precious few who can say, as I do regularly, that they find themselves more in love with their partner day by day. Kim is not perfect, but whatever imperfections she has are almost…
I don’t do a ton of social media and never have. I’ve specially gotten off of Facebook, but apparently the rest of the world is not there as I see Meta setting g new quarterly earnings records. I keep an eye on Instagram but never post (not sure how that adds to Meta’s pocketbook). Snapchat is how my kids and I stay in touch. From what I can tell, that strongman, Anatoly and whoever publishes…
The world is filled with people with gripes against one another. I don’t like being a cynic, so I try not to suggest that they are all bad people, but if there were ever a means to expose the dark underside of human nature, it would be through the reading of deposition transcripts from various and sundry civil litigation and arbitration conflicts. Just when I think I’ve heard and read it all, I’m confronted by…
This reference to “looking at clouds from both sides now” is from Joni Mitchell’s famous song “Both Sides Now”, which was first recorded in 1968. The song uses clouds as a metaphor for the different perspectives we gain as we experience life.. This song has become one of her most recognizable works, with its poetic reflections on how our perspectives change as we gain life experience. I’m sitting in the dining room on our hilltop…
The Big Sleep is a classic noir detective novel written by Raymond Chandler, first published in 1939. I read the novel in 1974 when taking a literature course to hang out with a girl I was dating. It was the first novel to feature Chandler’s iconic private detective character Philip Marlowe. The story follows Marlowe as he’s hired by the elderly General Sternwood to deal with a blackmailer named Arthur Geiger who’s targeting the general’s…