The Tailor of Escondido I stumbled on the twenty-year-old movie with Pierce Brosnan, Geoffrey Rush and Jamie Lee Curtis, The Tailor of Panama. The movie is a strange blend of international spy thriller and comedy, with Rush playing a well-connected Saville Row tailor doing business in Panama City, and Brosnan playing a disgraced MI-6 secret agent who goes around fabricating a Canal Zone fantasy to revitalize his flagging career. I have had three encounters with…
Teaching to Learn I’ve been formally teaching since 2007, which makes for thirteen years of experience. I’ve taught at two world class Universities as a Clinical Professor of finance and management at the graduate level. That means I have organized and delivered about 36 separate courses on multiple topics. My medium of choice is the PowerPoint presentation, but my modus operandi is to use storytelling to improve student engagement and to take the learning experience…
A Nation in Handcuffs I was told yesterday that we would all be waking up to a new America today. This was, as you can imagine, due to yesterday’s indictment announcement about Donald Trump, the ex and 45th president. The word handcuff is getting used an inordinate amount today, mostly in the conjecture of whether Trump is likely to be forced to suffer a perp walk in handcuffs in addition to the obligatory fingerprinting and…
Dr. Mike In August, 1971, fifty-two years ago, I hitchhiked my way from Cleveland, Ohio to Ithaca, New York, a distance of 330 miles. I was traveling from my summer job at Case Western Reserve University to my freshman year matriculation at Cornell University. In those days, freshmen at Cornell mostly lived together in the ghetto of West Campus in what were called the University Halls, a set of six cinderblock three-wing dorms, four stories…
Oh Boy! No Joy I have now watched over an hour of news on MSNBC about the indictment of former president Donald Trump by a Manhattan criminal grand jury. It’s been quite a show as I have sequentially watched MSNBC hand this piece of raw journalistic meat around three anchors and a countless number of pundits including presidential scholars, legal analysts, political and campaign analysts in New York, Washington D.C. and Florida. I have watched…
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…