Choosing Life It has occurred to me that while I very often write about the hottest political topics of the moment, I have gone the better part of a week since the abortion topic hit our headlines in such a stark manner as it has, and I have not yet chosen to write on that topic. It is a hard topic to address, not because my views are conflicted, but because there is almost no…
Campus Life I never spent any time on a college campus until the summer of 1971 when I left high school in Rome and flew to Cleveland, Ohio to spend the summer working in the Department of Sociology at Case Western Reserve University. My mother was friends with the Department Chair and he gave me a summer job as a research assistant, mostly coding forms on a study that the Department had conducted about he…
The Life of Leisure One of the categories of stories I post under is retirement. I chose that because for as long as I have been actively writing I have written on the subject of retirement, starting as early as the early 1990s when I was a mere forty-something. back then it was less about anticipation of retirement or longing for it. It was because I ran one of the largest retirement businesses in the…
The Return of the Dirty Feet When I moved out here to California in 2020, I assumed I would be wearing shorts year-round. It sure started out that way, but by November I was feeling like long pants were still an important part of my wardrobe. That whole time when I wore shorts, I wore Crocs on my feet every day. Over that period of time I increasingly spent my time working in the gardens.…
Unlinking LinkedIn is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. For me, that means that it really didn’t exist as much of an aid to my career, either as a source for employees or as a source for employment. These days, the business world uses LinkedIn as one of its foundational services and I imagine a goodly proportion of career-minded people use it in either direction on a daily basis. I’ve been on LinkedIn since the…
SP2201 I am in the habit of rewatching movies I have seen before, some of which I have seen many times. Yesterday, while my granddaughters were occupying the big living room TV watching Rocky and Bullwinkle (which also never gets old), I chose to watch Dirty Dancing on my iPad. The movie is set in the summer of 1963, when I was nine years old, strangely enough, the same age as my oldest granddaughter. While…
Captain America Today I stopped by the local BMW Motorcycle store in Escondido. I am planning out my upcoming rides and feel I need a few pieces of on-bike luggage. This is less about the trip we have planned to Moab in May and more about the trip In June and July back east. The plan is to take the motorcycle trailer back to Ithaca to bring back some personal effects from Homeward Bound, so…
Twitterin’ Tesla It is Saturday morning and that time which will forever be cartoon time to me and those in my generation who grew up waiting expectantly for this very time of week. Do you remember Sylvester (a.k.a Sylvester James Pussycat, Sr.)? His catchphrase was a spittle-soaked version of “Sufferin’ Succotash!” We mostly grew up not having a clue what that meant, but being amused by its rhythmic sound. Perhaps we knew that the combination…
Teaching to Teach I have been teaching at the graduate business school level since 2007. That represents fifteen years or approximately 20% of my life (deducting a bit for the interregnum between teaching at Cornell and University of San Diego). I have taught a variety of subjects including hedge fund investing, securities finance, pension funds, project finance, advanced corporate finance and now business ethics. This semester I am teaching a course called Law, Policy and…
Jettisoning Junk This summer when I travel to the old homestead in Ithaca, which I even call Homeward Bound, I will take on the task of depersonalizing the house of all the memorabilia that I will want to keep once the University takes over the house for good at the end of the year. Several people have called this the end of an era and they are not wrong in characterizing it as such, but…