I Am Not an Animal! Yesterday I told the story of Jerry Stiller and his casting in the co-leading role in my story made into an HBO anthology of subway stories. The tale of the production and debut is worth another story. To begin, the story itself was about my days of riding the early morning train into Manhattan to work every day. I was very regular on my inbound schedule and quite irregular on…
Festivus In 1997 the outrageously successful sitcom, Seinfeld, aired it’s 166th episode, the tenth episode of its ninth and final season. I think it is fair to suggest that that timing indicates that Seinfeld was at its peak audience viewership by that time. As with all Seinfeld episodes, there were multiple subplots which came together in the end of the episode with some humorous and mostly intertwined resolution. The episode was called “The Strike” because…
Droning On Today was a perfect day in many ways with the exception that we are still quarantined and kept from our loved ones. That circumstance may, indeed, have made the small pleasures of the day seem so much more. To begin with, the temperature rose from a cool and brisk 56 degrees to a midday high of 70 degrees. That meant that a morning hot tub was ideal in its warmth. It was there…
The Institution of Lunch It’s midday on Sunday and its an overcast day out here in northern San Diego County. I just got a text (actually a What’sAp text) from my friend and colleague in Palermo. He sent me pictures of his first family outing in the car for nine weeks of the nationally imposed lockdown. The picture was of the Carabinieri stopping the car to ask questions and search it. He said most shops…
The Muthah I watched the movie The Finest Hours about the greatest small-boat rescue ever executed in the history of the U.S. Coast Guard. Like most good stories, this film has a primary conflict of man against the sea (one of the oldest and most primordial tales), but it has several other secondary conflicts that add texture and interest that keep the viewer engaged while the next primary conflict scene gets set-up. Think about that…
The 600 Year Blink I read two enlightening articles this morning, one from The New Yorker and one from The Atlantic. It has occurred to me lately that in the age of digitized content, several magazines have seemed to be in ascendancy rather than decline like so many other magazines. In the pattern unfolding of the Coronavirus era, I sense that magazines will not be excluded from the tendency to accelerate the prevailing trends. The…
Deposing Views Today I was involved with an all-day deposition in a case where I am acting as an expert witness. I spent about 10-12 hours reading all the materials I had written on the case (1 46-page Report, 2 20-24-page Rebuttal Replies), the two rebuttals (each 25-30-pages) and various summary motions, articles, etc. I had worked on the case from late November through mid-January, when I wrote the first report. I spent 56 hours…
A Hitch in the Ointment Mixed metaphors are a wonderful thing. People who use them are usually not the sharpest cookie in the jar. Take Donald Trump….please (apologies to Henny Youngman). He’s never metaphor that he didn’t like and he uses them so much that it’s hard to tell which he feels are intentionally doubled up and which he doesn’t even realize are metaphorical. And it’s not like he has a problem distinguishing between metaphors…
The Big Ass Effect Before you get too excited, let me explain that yesterday I hosted a Zoomathon for my American Flyers Motorcycle Club, who formally celebrates its Silver (25th!) Anniversary this month. There were eighteen participating callers with a total of thirty-four attendees plus two (Nik and Charlene) who I inadvertently left out in the Zoom waiting room, failing to admit them after I had admitted three tranches of other entrants waiting. Oops. I…
Ultimate Democratization The year was 2000 and we had just come through the Y2K scare relatively unscathed. It was not for lack of scrambling and effort as you may recall, so who knows whether we averted a crisis by getting out ahead of it by sounding the alarms, or if the concern was over-hyped and was never really a big risk. Either way, it was nice to see that Y2K did little to slow the…