The Worm Comes Home to Roost Worms are not terribly likable beings. The ones in the ground seem pretty harmless and some people, mostly organic gardeners, will tell you about all the good things that worms do for biodiversity and eco-balance. The ones that find their way into our bodies in various ways are a lot less pleasant, whether causing a crescent mark on the head of some ten-year-old Opey or being the subject of…
One Fine Day In 1963 the Chiffons came out with their version of the Carol King song, One Fine Day. In 1996, what have become two of the most iconic stars of the big screen, George Clooney and Michelle Pfeiffer, made a movie with the same name and which used the Chiffon’s recording as it’s theme song. In the movie, two single parents with one young child apiece and struggling careers, spend a day chasing…
Insuring Eternity Back in the late 1970’s when I was beginning my career in banking, I was traveling across New England almost every week, visiting a combination of banks and insurance companies to sell them our banking services. I was a member of FI or financial institutions side of the bank. For some strange reason, the FI side of banking was always the red-headed step-child of the banking business compared to the corporate side. The…
Marshaling an Effort In 1991 I bought my first ski condo in Park City. Technically it was in Deer Valley, actually, an out of the way corner of Deer Valley, not near any of the ski runs. The houses and condos adjacent to the ski runs cost about $1 million more since the ability to ski-in and ski-out is so desirable. I seem to recall that I paid something like $230,000 for this three-bedroom, three-bath…
Itchy Brother Do you remember your cartoons from childhood? There were so many, but some were so good that they were memorable. Then again, it might have been that we watched them over and over again since the networks had figured out that kids actually liked the repetition and familiarity if bred, as opposed to the adults who scorned re-runs as below-grade entertainment. And in those days, TV advertising was geared to the mothers of…
COVID Schmovid I have just travelled through seven different global airports on eight different flights, spending some fifty hours in airplane cabins with their recirculated air, over the past few weeks. We stayed in seven different hotels and ate in something like thirty different restaurants ranging from an elegant Middle Eastern Lebanese restaurant on the Nile to Tre Scalini on the Piazza Navonna in Rome, all the way to a Martian Dome eating hall at…
Here I Go Again Kim worked for David Coverdale in the 80’s when she started working in L.A. trying to jump-start her musical theater career. She was the personal assistant for the band Whitesnake, who came out with the song in 1982 on the Saints & Sinners album. I’ve always liked the song and did even before I met Kim. There is something so familiar and lonely all at once about the lyrics that suggest…
Have I Been Replaced? Even if you live in an insular world, you have heard the volume over artificial intelligence (AI) go up quite a bit over the past few months. The movie A.I., with Jude Law, came out twenty-two years ago, so you know the topic been out there for some time. But I think the two subjects which have brought this to the fore right now are a combination of Tesla’s autonomous driving…
All Quiet on the Western Front, but Not So Sunny The Oscar season is upon us again and as I glanced down the list of nominees for the various big awards, I saw films that I have seen and admired, films I have seen and thought were not worthy and even a film that I have tried to watch twice and cannot get into despite being told its sooooo good. But one movie completely slipped…
ES-Jesus We are leaving Rome today and taking the day to transit to Cairo to start our Egyptian leg of the trip. If anticipation is a big part of any trip, we now have anticipation coming out of our ears. I’ve always wondered how mountain climbers feel when they are hanging out at Camp 4, preparing for the summit. They are acclimating and preparing themselves for the most important and probably most dangerous part of…