Where to Live There are three considerations that have more impact on our lives than any others. We cannot choose when we live as that is the role of the dice we call procreation, whether you believe in the human soul or reincarnation or whatever. I suppose some people can determine actively or passively through their lifestyle choices, how long they live, but that is a very different issue. The other three considerations are the…
Heading Into Darkness I’ve never been one that was terribly afraid of the dark. As a young child I preferred to have the door cracked open, like most kids, but I also always wanted a glass of water before bedtime. That makes me think it had more to do with wanting some attention and assurance of connectivity than any particular fear of the loss of light. These days we sleep with blackout shades (which Kim…
My Personal Rainbow It is a transitional weather morning here on my hilltop. It rained and was stormy yesterday and last night and it looks like today it wants to alternate between that weather and clear and sunny by tomorrow. I am sitting at my desk on hold with some service provider or another. I have started to be in the habit of acknowledging that I now live on the West Coast and the rest…
The Headwall I taught my ethics course last night on the subject of the subprime mortgage crash of 2007. I used the movie The Big Short as the case study and had two team of students debating the thickly implications of the activities in the market in early 2007 that I lived through so very much in real time back then as the head of BSAM. I gave the students additional reading to review including…
Pax Americana We are all either wary or weary of events unfolding in Ukraine. It has been going on since 2014 or since late November (not coincidentally just after the Biden election win), depending on when you mark time with regard to the West’s awareness and acknowledgement that Putin has been on the warpath. In the last 48 hours, things have gone from a question of whether Putin will back down to just how far…
The Burden of Refinement We live in a modern, civilized and refined world. The last few nights we have watched some movies set in the late 1950’s and we are reminded that it wasn’t so long ago (a mere sixty years ago) that things were a lot less civilized and refined. We have watched Far From Heaven and Loving, both stories set in that era when I was a young child and when the country…
Betty Betty Betty My entire family has now gone to the dogs. Carolyn, who always wanted a dog from the youngest age and was denied by circumstances, had to invent her own dog in her plush Stieff floppy-eared mutt called Ted. As soon as she was in her own stable home environment with her now-husband John, they went and got themselves a little black and white Havanese that they named Abraham Lincoln or Abe for…
Thank You for Your Service When I was starting school in 1960 I was in a little tropical valley due east of San Jose. It was literally a one-room schoolhouse where the kids of the expats living and working at the Center for Tropical Agricultural Research and Education in Turrialba, Costa Rica went to school. To be fair, it was only for grades one through eight. After that, kids had to go to high school…
Return of the Monkey There seem to be many monkeys in my life. No, I do not live in the tropics of Costa Rica, where monkeys are constantly in the trees around you, making their presence all too obvious (as we saw a few years ago during a holiday visit to the fond place of my 5-6-year old life). In that never-never land of vagueness between an early childhood memory and a pseudo-memory that has…
Another Thursday Night Everybody gets into routines. Ralph Waldo Emerson said that “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.” Waldo, as he apparently liked to be called, was a big thinker in his time (the mid-Nineteenth Century) and a champion of several causes that don’t necessarily hang together much these days. He was an abolitionist, a transcendentalist and an individualist. I’m not sure I ever…