Doodlebugged Since ancient times, man has needed water and yet has for some reason chosen to live where there was none in apparent evidence. I suppose there are lots of good reasons why that might come to pass, but it seems that given the fairly scant number of humans walking the Earth in olden days (supposedly only 5 million souls in 10,000 B.C., when agriculture was invented and more water was needed for that purpose),…
Fat is as Fat Thinks Let’s get one thing out of the way right up front. I’m fat. I’ve always been fat (at least as long ago as I can remember and to some degree). I’ve never been at an ideal weight, if such a thing exists. I look at people who are not fat and have never been fat and wonder how that changes their world view. I could guess, but I’m betting that…
Birch Ain’t Beer As the judicial system of the United States narrows in on Donald Trump from several simultaneous sides, not surprisingly and sticking to form, he is further revving up his anti-establishment rhetoric to save himself and in so doing he is predictably getting the full support of his base. That base had shrunk over the course of the last three years, but sure enough, there are signs that the impending legal battles are…
Into the Heavens Several years ago when I was teaching at Cornell, I did what people do on big college campuses, I faked my way into a parking spot, this time at the Statler Inn valet parking, pretending to be attending some function in the ballroom with other guests. What I was really doing was avoiding a long uphill walk or bus ride to one of the distant parking lots at the expense of a…
A Stuffed Generation I was speaking with my youngest son Tom today and he was discussing the day he spent yesterday helping his mother empty and mostly discard a NYC storage room that had been cluttered with miscellaneous junk accumulated over the years. He described the struggle of getting concurrence from his mother that this stuff was no longer needed in her life. While I have always eschewed storage rooms for the exact reason he…
Tik-Tik-Tock, China’s on the Block My son Tom made his chops at Shake Shack a few years ago by bringing his Gen Z perspective to their marketing department by suggesting that they would benefit by using TikTok for getting their product message out to the young target market that they wanted to attract. He had been using the TikTok app to generate personal mini videos that gave him a creative outlet for his video making…
Chinese Menu We have just seen the conclusion of a pow-wow between Xi Jianping of China and Vladimir Putin of Russia. In theory this should be no big deal since the dynamic duo have met together over 25 times (I heard a pundit say it was 40 times, but I can only verify 25 or so of those), and that’s a lot. That speaks to a number of things, not the least of which is…
Cry Me a River Twenty years ago, Justin Timberlake broke up with Britney Spears and sang a song that has become a hallmark of “she done me wrong” weepy love songs. Cry Me a River has become the ultimate breakup song even though it was first sung in 1955 by Julie London. If you ask someone to define what the title means, they are likely to tell you that its about a public display of…
Forget Paris In 1995, Billy Crystal wrote, directed, produced and starred in a movie for which he enlisted Debra Winger as his love interest. That movie was called Forget Paris and it gets a modest 6.5 rating on IMDb, but is actually a very funny and somewhat poignant movie about life and love and how hard it is to expect that things don’t move on in life, whether we want them to or not. Who…
Bracing for Survival In my youth and up to age 40 or so, I was 6’5” tall. I am now less than 6’4” and still receding. I know everyone shrinks a bit as they age, but I feel I have less shrunk than been compressed by gravity. When you carry around the amount of bulk I have for almost 70 years, its quite amazing that my muscles and bones have been able to hold up…