Florida Calling My kids all love theme parks and especially so Disney World and Disneyland. I have many stories from their youth to depict this passion for a fun day of rides, lines and mediocre food, but none quite reaches up to the heights of my daughter’s honeymoon. As the dutiful father of the bride, I gave them two weeks in Tahiti, thinking that would be an ideal spot post-nuptial. I should have remembered that…
Joshua Treed This weekend Kim and I are spending our time in Joshua Tree on the southern edge of the Mojave Desert. The occasion is the 40th birthday gathering for Kim’s nephew (technically my nephew as well), Joshua. I don’t know that he chose the venue for the gathering because of the name he shares with the area, but I’m also sure that the coincidence did not miss his attention. We are organized and led…
Paying Your Share I have been lately using what I will call a Donald Trump tax trick. I lost a bundle a few years ago on a perfectly valid attempt to launch a business with my son. Many of my friends attended Winter Wonderland on Staten Island so they know I spent a lot of money making that extravaganza work in one sense (the attraction was well-attended) and not work in another (for various reasons…
RBG Rollover Yesterday when I went out in the car to run an errand, MSNBC came on through my Sirius Satellite radio and I found myself in the middle of a live Q&A between the Supreme Court justices and the Attorney General of Mississippi (Scott Stewart) and the U.S. Solicitor General, Elizabeth B. Prelogar. While Stewart’s responses to justices’ questions were competent and articulate (as much as I disagreed with most of them on principle),…
Tongue-Tied Sometimes I have to struggle to find a good title for a story or, indeed, find a good story. My friend Gary, who reads and comments on almost every story I write has recently told me that it is only logical that I will run out of things to say and stories to write and I have challenged that. I said that so long as I have breath and can get around and do…
Ghislaine and Chris I have written before about how I met Ghislaine Maxwell thirty-one years ago in both New York City and London. I do not know for certain when she met Jeffrey Epstein, but the New York Times reported that they met in the “early nineties”, so the chances are that I had the opportunity to meet her before she knew Epstein, much less before she went headlong into his sordid kiddy-porn world and…
The Dog Whistle Gone Astray There are several phrases that have been making the rounds for the past few years in the political pundit community. I hear them repeatedly on MSNBC and they always jangle my sensibilities for some reason, most likely due to their recent overuse. The one I really don’t like is “gaslighting”. It means to cause someone to question their sense of reality. It comes from a play Gas Light produced in…
Freight Forwarding We are in the week after Thanksgiving and it feels, as always, like we are wrapping things up for the year. We are having a few final things done at the house (replacing the flooring in the MBR and Guest Rooms), we are planning our last two trips (one to Joshua Tree for Joshua’s 40th birthday, and the other to NYC to see the kids), Kim is wrapping presents at her wrapping center…
Up Schitt’s Creek I have just started to catch up on the Dan and Eugene Levy cable TV comedy that aired from 2015 – 2020. What prompted it was that I needed a gap-filler TV show to watch while I wait for Kim either before dinner, after dinner or while she is getting her PJs on. I guess I am just more sedentary than Kim because when I sit down for the evening and start…
Shooting the Moon When I was a kid (I’m not sure I have a handle on exactly when), I was given a game called Shooting the Moon. It was one of these wooden table games of coordination that families like to have around during the holidays to keep family members amused in good, healthy activities that help them stay away from mind-numbing TV watching. There must be people out there who make these games up…