The Hallowed Halls I am once again sitting here in the hallway of a building on the campus of the University of San Diego, where I am an adjunct professor in the graduate business program. When I was at Cornell’s graduate business school for ten years, I was not alone as an adjunct professor, but it was not like here. I do not know, nor do I plan to investigate the exact balance between full-time…
Bootstrapping Bootstrapping is a complicated word. Much more complicated than I had imagined until I started looking into it. I would ask you to play along with me and make a note to yourself about what you think of when someone uses the term bootstrapping. I don’t want to bias your thought process by adding a context. The term derives from the small leather loop or tab at the back of a man’s boot that…
Immigrants Everywhere This morning, two of my friends, Kevin and Roger, are on a motorcycle ride in Mexico that they wanted me to join them on. My teaching obligation made that impossible, but that hasn’t stopped them from sending me their usual array of inane texts with sophomoric humor and political undercurrent. This morning they are preparing to head back home so I got a string of emails making fun of how much money they…
It’s the Economy, Stupid There is much discussion in the air about how to keep the economy strong. This is always a big topic at any time, but I think it is fair to say that it is almost the only issue that really affects everyone. Issues like abortion may be an example of a non-economic issue (though I bet someone could draw a loose connection), but whether we are talking about infrastructure, immigration, defense…
Perishable I am sitting here on election night, 2021 and it just so happens that Kim and I watched a documentary on Gettysburg. We were just looking for something to fill in after a movie (Cast Away) that ended about an hour before we generally like to head off to bed. We did not choose it for any politically-motivated reason. And yet, the last part of the documentary focused entirely on Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.…
Traveling to Enlightenment We went to see the new Ridley Scott movie The Last Duel last night at the local Angelika Film Center. Once again, it was very lightly attended with a mere 8-10 people in the well-appointed theater. The film is set in 1386 or so and chronicles what was the end stages of the Middle Ages in Europe. The movie makes reference to the economic hardship to noblemen and their estates by virtue…
Ode to the Agave On my 2.5 acre property on this sunny hillside, I estimate that I have three hundred agave plants of all sizes and several shapes. I have a series of books on succulents and cacti by Jeff Moore, one of renowned horticultural experts in the field. One of those books is a massive picture book titled Aloes and Agaves in Cultivation. The first 197 pages are dedicated to Aloes with the next…
To Mask or Unmask We are all created with multiple personalities, or at least multiple personas. We would all like to think we are the same person with everyone, but that is simply rarely the case. We are all made up of layers. I know that when my mother was alive, when I was with her, especially at her condo in Las Vegas, I was a respectful and dutiful son. I cared about what she…
Calico Cats Quandry I currently subscribe to global news feeds including NYT, WAPO, WSJ and FT, but also read New Yorker, Esquire, Vanity Fair and NatGeo. Oh, very relevantly, I also read the monthly AARP Bulletin. When Apple News feeds me something I can’t read without subscribing, I generally pass and just absorb the headline. I also use Prime, Netflix, AppleTV, HBO Max and Hulu for subscription videos. I will ignore the social media subscriptions…
Water for Lizards The Sara Gruen novel, Water for Elephants sold 10 million copies and became a hit movie staring Reese Witherspoon, Robert Pattinson and Christoph Waltz. It caught my fancy because it follows the circus life of a young man who must drop out of veterinary school at Cornell and takes to tending elephants for a job. Elephants are strange beasts that inspire all sorts of imagination and whimsy. They are the largest land…