Natasha When I was a kid watching cartoons as often as I could, one of my favorites was the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. As you may recall, there was an entire ensemble of characters that comprised the Show. Some of the characters had their own schtick, while others were part of the Rocket J. Squirrel and Bullwinkle drama. That drama, narrated like a tongue-in-cheek documentary with an Edward R. Murrow type of voice, seemed often…
Cut and Paste The expression of cut and paste has taken on a derogatory connotation. It implies a degree of laziness or casual composition. You cut and paste when you don’t want or need original thought. I think that is actually a very unfair characterization of what can be a true creative process. I write a lot. I write every day…usually several times a day. Sometimes I write stories for this blog. Sometimes I write…
The Revenge of the Roller Coaster I used to proudly display a framed poster of a roller coaster in my office. It was a lesson I probably learned rom one of my old mentors, Joe Manganello, who was the Chief Credit Officer of Bankers Trust Company for many years. I used to spend many hours in his office during the years of the LDC debt crisis when I was responsible for $4 billion of bad…
Winstons I Have Known I don’t know nor have I known too many Winstons in my life. The name first came into recorded existence in 1880 and since then there have been over 27,000 males recorded with that name. In the most recent year on record, 2018, there were 787 male newborns named Winston in the United States. To put that into perspective, my name, Richard, during that same span of 1880-2018 had 2,574,832 male…
Sitting in the Garden I visited Green Thumb Nursery in San Marcos today. Green Thumb has suddenly become my go-to local nursery owing to the diversity of products that they offer. My usual favorite nursery is Waterwise Botanicals. They are a very serious nursery that only stocks drought-tolerant plants and a whole array of roses, which are decidedly not doubt-tolerant. In many ways they offer the best quality of a wide variety of plant matter…
The Land of the Dollar Bill For some reason that 1974 song by a band called Paperlace, The Night Chicago Died is running in my head like the sound of running feet and the shouting in the street. I had a peaceful enough Saturday that had no particular connection to Al Capone’s gangland Chicago, but when does that matter when a line of lyrics gets wedged into your brain? The reason I suspect I am…
The Real Reality TV Hero We all spent the better part of five years dealing with Donald J. Trump, who was, by any rational standards an abject failure as a real estate developer and general businessman. Those of us from New York City (I was there 1976 through 2019), and especially those of us who spent some of those years in the real estate development game, as I did between 2008 and 2017, were always…
Riding in the Hood The childrens’ short story or fable of Little Red Riding Hood is said to have derived from oral histories during the Middle Ages, when demons and evil beasts still roamed the woods of the Black Forrest. I presume these were less about entertaining children than they were about cautioning them about the dangers in the woods. Anthropomorphizing the beasts of the forrest for the purpose of warning children not to wander…
Shielding Oneself Yesterday, I wandered over to the far north side of the back hillside, a place at have largely ignored for the past two months as I’ve focused all of my attention on the Hobbit House on the south side of the back hillside. I had seen that one of my metal agave sculptures had been upended by the strong winds we had had earlier in the week. I had also seen Joventino spending…
Moonstruck Shire I have been asked by a loyal reader to break my policy of not publishing photos, so as a one-time exception, I am going to publish pictures of the completed Hobbit House you have been reading about. My daughter Carolyn suggested a build something like this for my granddaughters, my sister Kathy gave me a sign naming it Moonstruck Shire, my son Thomas helped me seal and waterproof the roof, my son Roger…