Insuring Insurance A month ago I wrote a story about self-insuring, aimed mostly at the business of buying insurance on travel and discretionary purchases or “toys”. I have a very different topic to consider today and it’s based, as always, on something I’ve recently read about the state of the insurance industry during the Coronavirus crisis. The Wall Street Journal reports that there is increasing pressure on insurers to broaden their policy protection to not…
It’s A Complicated World As I’ve been sending out my magnum opus to my friends, my 444-page coffee-table book about twenty-five years of motorcycle riding, called The Ride is All, it has given me cause to reconnect with a few friends who had fallen by the wayside. I am rewatching (for the umpteenth time) one of my favorite recent vintage movies, Green Book with Vigo Mortensen. As Tony Lip (Vigo) is driving Don Shirley (Mahershala…
The New Gold Rush $2,000,000,000,000. That’s a lot of stimulus and thank God for Chuck Schumer or $500,000,000,000 of it would be the private piggy bank of one of the worst businessmen of all time and would undoubtedly go to all the wrong places. As it is, The Democratic senators managed to put in a provision forbidding that any of this loan money for corporations can go to companies owned by Federal employees. Any idea…
The Comeback There is a great deal of discussion these days about the wreckage of the economy in progress with the Lockdowns expanding by the day. The only thing that shows any variance is how long it takes for given state governments to realize that they have no choice but to declare stay-at-home mandates. It’s almost silly how fervently those more concerned about the economy think they can will their way out of a problem…
And They Called Him Pedro Blanco For the first time since its founding in the days of John F. Kennedy, the Peace Corps has recalled some 7,000 volunteers from around the world due to the Coronavirus pandemic. Think about that. Sixty years of global hostilities and scary events and it was this event which has caused a noble and stalwart body to send out an emergency message to all its field staff to leave where…
Why I Love Kim Kim and I are sitting here in our living room watching TV. That’s not an unusual evening for us, we pretty much do the same thing every night, and especially so in these days of Lockdown. Just now Rob Lowe was on the screen as a spokesperson for the ASPCA reviewing why, in this time of great need all over the world, we cannot forget about our animal friends and all…
Out and About Recently I wrote a book for my motorcycling friends. It is a 444-page chronicle of the twenty-five years my little group of motorcycling friends have ridden together through thick and thin at home (mostly Utah and Vermont) and abroad. I had been planning on lugging thirty copies of the book to our next gathering in southern Utah. We have a spot we are particularly partial to in Teasdale, which is near Torrey,…
Corona Horns Many animals have horns and when we are confronted by the horns of a dilemma, it feels like horns are there on animals’ heads to protect them from predators. This is sometimes the case, but many times not so much. Zoologists suggest that horns exist in nature for protection in some species, but they most often exist to establish male dominance and to jockey within the species for territory and mating rights. Survival…
Travel in the Time of Cholera The 2006 movie, The Painted Veil is a glorious and poignant movie that for some reason I thought was called Love in the Time of Cholera. When I looked it up I realized my mistake. Love in the Time of Cholera is book written by Gabriel García Márquez that was made into a movie at about the same time (2007) and is set in Colombia in the same time,…
Fast and Furious I keep two motorcycles out here in San Diego. My primary bike, as it has been since 1987, is a BMW. Beemers always start and rarely have problems. One time about seventeen years ago, on one of our May trips through Utah, the drive shaft rear end differential on my KLT bike shit the bed and caused me to let the group ride on to Durango while I waited in Moab for…