Brave New World When people think about 20th Century dystopic novels, they tend to think about the 1949 book, 1984 by George Orwell (his real name, Eric Arthur Blair). It was Orwell’s last of nine published books since he died the next year of tuberculosis before the full impact of his theme story about democratic socialism in a fictional country called Oceania, who’s capital city is London. But the seminal dystopic novel, written eighteen years…
Happiness is an Old iPad Keyboard This morning I picked up on an article sent to me by Apple News. I like these daily emails because they give me headline overviews of curated articles, only some of which I have otherwise seen in my regular news feeds from the New York Times, Washington Post, WSJ, the New Yorker, National Geographic or Financial Times. I would estimate that at least two thirds of the headlines are…
Experimental Gardening I have pretty much worn my shorts every day this week, which means that summer is finally upon us. Technically its still spring, both by the calendar and the temperature, but after a long cool (I can’t bring myself to say cold) and wet few months, I am ready to shift back into warm weather gear. During the past week and a bit, I have been in the garden every day for some…
Animal House I hadn’t watched the movie National Lampoon’s Animal House for many years. To people of my generation and background, this 1978 movie staring John Belushi, is a classic. While the movie was supposedly written about Dartmouth, the similarity to my experiences at Cornell in 1971-1975 are quite startling. Having seen this movie so many times over the past 45 years, I know most of the gags by heart (and made sure to preview…
Humping Mulch If you read my stories every day you can’t help but notice that one day I may talk about cerebral issues that seem important to me, whether they are psychological, economic, social or political. The next day I may well write about my aching back and how I injured myself trying to do something on my hillside that was beyond my natural abilities, as they exist in my advancing age. It was Rene…
The Demographic Dividend I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about demographics. That stems from my writing of Global Pension Crisis in 2013, because you cannot talk about pensions and retirement dynamics without getting into demographics. I wrote that book on the back of a course I taught about pensions at Cornell’s business school from 2008 until 2017. In fact, I found the demographics that I kept seeing and tallying every year when I…
Self-Education Due to a clogged roof drain on our flat roof over by the office side of the house, during the heavy rains of March we developed a leak. We went through the normal process of sleuthing out the origin on the leak by having Handy Brad open up the outside wall between the sliding glass door and the window next to my desk. That was an area of about six feet wide, floor to…
Aging Out I am finding myself using that term, aging out, more and more often these days. The term requires no definition as it is pretty self-explanatory, it simply means that you are getting too old to do something that you have done for a long time and that you presumably like to do, but can no longer do either easily or in a way that you prefer. It can also mean that you are…
Buying Quality I’ve just written about how overpriced the world has become and how difficult it has become to capture value in today’s world of runaway generational wealth expectations. What I mean by that is that people seem to feel like they are being stupid if all they do is get by and earn a fair wage. Everyone wants to own their own business and sell it at some wonderfully high multiple and spend their…
A Sunday Selection In retirement, one day of the week wanders into the next with barely a care. My pal Mike and I have made a point of keeping track of each other’s minimalist schedules, almost as though our prior working lives, so governed by scheduling, require some outlet. Mike plays formal senior softball games on Tuesday and Thursday mornings and usually a pick-up game on Monday morning. He does home shores like vacuuming and…