The Last Straw Not so long ago I wrote about my travails with AT&T and Verizon and the extremely annoying process of trying to cancel services I do not use and have not used for a while. I termed it a death throw for these telecom behemoths when they must resort to unscrupulous tactics to try to drain the last few drops out of the cow they have been milking dry. I thought that was…
Rounders If you haven’t seen the movie, Rounders, and you enjoy an occasional game of poker with friends, you really must find a way to see the movie. It was made in 1998, so it has more or less modern production value and yet its got the patina of age that makes it a classic. There are other great poker movies like Molly’s Game, The Cincinnati Kid, and Maverick, but almost everyone agrees that Rounders…
Maybe Elon is Right Elon is a strange name. Google tells me it is the 950th most common boy’s name at this point with some 234 baby boys (and 5 baby girls) getting christened with that name last year. It is both a Biblical Hebrew name meaning Oak Tree and an African name meaning Spirit (technically, the individual that God loves). It’s not just God, we all gotta love Elon. If you absolutely have to…
The Cost of Joy It was Alfred Lord Tennyson who said in his short poem In Memoriam to A.H.H. (His Cambridge pal Arthur Henry Hallam) in 1849: I envy not in any moods The captive void of noble rage, The linnet born within the cage,That never knew the summer woods. I envy not the beast that takes His licence in the field of time, Unfettered by the sense of crime,To whom a conscience never wakes.…
Rock On Tomorrow I finally get to test out my new rock climbing wall, which I have dubbed, MoonstruckPurna in honor of all those vast Himalayan peaks that I will never get close enough to see, much less to climb. I have the means to include Nepal in my travel itinerary, but, quite frankly, the altitude scares me off and I prefer to get my mountain climbing kicks vicariously and from a distance. I love…
Back to the Garden It’s August and I see that it will be up into the mid-80s by noon. While I would prefer it five degrees cooler, the weather here on the hilltop is actually pretty pleasant and working outside in the garden is tolerable so long as you are judicious in your activity in the midday sun. Mad dogs and Englishmen may not care about the midday sun, but I would rather not risk…
The Clutter of Life It’s 5:30am again and here I am trying to make sense of my insomnia. I actually feel like I got a decent span of sleep with almost six hours uninterrupted last night, but once awakened after that amount of sleep, I am a lost soul lying in bed listening to my CPAP machine in ways that I cannot hear when I am more tired and more ready for sleep. I think…
The Power Elite What a strange world we live in. I feel it is even stranger for me than it is for most. I am a white male born of privilege, but raised with a liberal ideology. My paternal grandfather was a fascist, one of Mussolini’s men from the region of northern Italy near Bassano del Grappa in the Tyrol. He was either a bully like young Benito or more likely just a sycophant trying…
Hunting for Hunter This title will probably do more to raise the readership of my blog among my red friends than anything other than one denouncing Hillary for something obscure and yet serious, like the mishandling of top secret government document. But while the story has nothing to do with Hunter Biden and why right wing deflectors need a bane of their existence to distract them from all the very real, growing and harsh criticism…
Papyrus Denial There are very few places in the world I either have not been to or do not care about returning to. That is not to say I cannot get enthusiastic about a trip to a specific spot by specific means with specific other travelers. I do not dislike foreign travel, I’ve just done so damn much of it that I am less and less enthusiastic about prioritizing it. I know it sounds boring…