Amazon on My Mind It is said that when Jeff Bezos was taking his now-famous cross-country trip to move to Seattle, he wrote the business plan for his new business idea. That idea was to build the world’s biggest bookstore using this new concept that was gaining traction in 1994, the Worldwide Web. The internet and its packetization of information across large and remote data networks had been building in the defense and academic worlds…
A Good Day Fridays are most often good days. I believe that gets a bit blurred by both my partial-retirement status and the Coronavirus situation that has one day flowing into another with much less differentiation between weekdays and weekends. To be honest, this year it is hard for me to even realize this is summer versus any other time of the year since the weather out here in San Diego is nice all year…
Strawberry Trees Forever I am currently sitting in the shade of my garage on this lovely, sunny 73 degree San Diego day. Both doors and the side door are open, so the breeze from the Pacific Ocean might make this the loveliest spot on earth right now. There’s a big window in the garage facing West and I must admit, I always assumed someone had an extra window when building the house, so they said,…
What Comes Around The year 2008 is often referred to by many in the markets as the ultimate ”annus horribilis”. That is a bit hard for me to reconcile because where my personal “annus horribilis” was rightfully 2007 based on the the disastrous episode with the Bear Stearns Asset Management hedge funds that hit the wall of the CDO (collateralized debt obligations) and sub-prime mortgage crisis, that was also the joyous year (earlier in the…
Normal Wins Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota was a strong candidate for the Democratic Party nomination for President for many months and through several multi-participant debates. She did not stand out much as a candidate but always comported herself well and with aplomb. Her strongest attribute was her moderate posture on many of the more controversial issues of the election. In a word, where others were flamboyant or charismatic, still others were fiery and strong-minded,…
Passing Through Portland At the end of next week, Kim and I and our friends Frank and Lydia, will be passing through Portland, Oregon as we escape the confines of the Coronavirus for a road-trip holiday up through the Northern Coast of California, where the Redwoods proliferate and into Oregon. After Goos Bay, we are going to the mouth of the Columbia River, where Lewis and Clark ended their transcontinental journey. That expedition started in…
The River of Dreams Some of the best song lyrics out there were written by Billy Joel, who, God knows, doesn’t seem like a spiritual man (to paraphrase his own lyrics), and yet they are hauntingly universal the way things like rivers and fruits are universal. When I was in Guatemala and we were trying to connect with the indigenous, mostly Indian, people, the common point of connection was favorite fruits. The Africans, the Bedouin,…
Looking for the Comet About the time the United States started taking the Coronavirus seriously, specifically March 27, 2020, NASA discovered a new comet that would come through the Earth’s solar system in its path through the cosmos. The comet was called NEOWISE in honor of the acronym for the Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer. This spacecraft has been a project that wasn’t launched to find comets like NEOWISE, but did that nonetheless and…
Travel to Gravel It has just come to my realization that this was the day we were supposed to return from our big summer family trip to Krakow, Poland. I had rented a palace with fifteen rooms with separate baths for ten days, just twenty minutes from the Krakow. Joining us, much like at a Manor House in Western Ireland last summer, a Chateaux (castle) on the Cherbourg Peninsula in Normandy, in a series of…
As Goes Trump, So Goes the Nation I recently found a website that objectively lists all published presidential polls done by day and graded in terms of the quality of the statistical analysis represented by the poll. The better the poll, the higher the grade, but most importantly, all the polls published are listed whether they are done by CNN, the Wall Street Journal or Quinnipiac University. I have several observations from reviewing the list.…