Downhill Racer Last night I made Kim watch A History of Violence, the 2005 film directed by David Cronenberg and staring Vigo Mortensen, Maria Bello, Ed Harris and William Hurt. While Cronenberg leans more to the macabre and gory than I generally prefer, I have always like Vigo and there is always something appealing about the guy who wants to be at peace but gets dragged back into his violent past by circumstance (John Wick,…
Into Thin Air My hilltop is dominated by boulders. I haven’t really done an accounting of the exact number of boulders, but as I look at various drone photos I have of the property, I estimate that I have about 100 large boulders fairly evenly split between front and back hillside. It’s quite hard to come up with an exact number since one has to make an impromptu judgement as to what size rock constitutes…
A Dental Damn OK, admit it, you just had to start reading this story with a title like that, didn’t you? Don’t worry, this story has nothing to do with the latex product sold by that similar name, though I bet a lot of you are as curious about the device as I am. I have no particular reason to be so curious, but its just one of those things that you hear about along…
Arbor Arboretum Arbutus Carborundum Trees are once again on my mind at the moment. In the same way that I felt compelled last year to hire a consulting horticulturalist to teach me what I didn’t know about gardening (his message can be distilled to two words – MORE MULCH), I have just hired and spent two hours with a consulting arborist. I found him much more professional and credible than the horticulturalist, though they did…
Governance Provenance Where does the concept of governance come from? I have read the anthropological books like Guns Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond that delineate the history of governance from the tribal to today’s democracy in all of the areas of the world. What Diamond suggests is that none of the development of civilization are really due to any inherent superiority of one race or culture of mankind, but is rather much more attributable…
Captain Redux Not so long ago I wrote a piece called Captain America that was about my plans for an upcoming transcontinental ride this summer from Des Moines back to my hillside. Everything about that ride in terms of the reasons for doing it have changed as things do, so I am finding myself in change mode. The sequence went like this: first the testimony I was to give in Des Moines has been pushed…
Forgiveness One of my favorite movies that I happened on scanning Netflix tonight is the 2011 movie Warrior with Tom Hardy, Joel Edgerton and Nick Nolte. The reason I am scanning Netflix is because Kim is off rehearsing with her Encore choral group for an early June concert, her first with Encore. Last night we watched three of the four second installments of the AppleTV series called WeCrashed about Adam and Rebekah Neumann, the founders…
“Free” Markets The very first lesson one used to learn in business school back when I went 50 years ago was that there was no such thing as a free lunch. We all sort of know what that is supposed to mean and there have been many euphemisms that have expanded on that notion, most notably in the tech world of social media where it is said that if you cannot find the product, that…
A Fistfull of Vomit One of my personal quirks is that I have only very rarely thrown-up over my 68 years. I know this isn’t a particularly pleasant topic, but it is one of life’s little events that we almost all have to face every once in a while. For my part, I can recall facing that physical requirement once in the 60s, once in the 70s and again once in the 90s. The first…
The Danger Zone Yesterday was Memorial Day, the day when we are supposed to honor those Americans who have given their vitality and perhaps their very lives in defense of our country, in defense of democracy. It is a day I take quite seriously and I made that small gesture of flying the American flag out in front of the house, like I try to do every year. You see, I was too young for…