Now You See It… This weekend was family weekend for us here in New York. On Friday we warmed up by going for our annual holiday party at The Metropolitan Club. This is an annual event put on by our friends Alan and Nancy Zakon, who make their home in Key Largo, Florida, but keep their Metropolitan Club membership for their visits to New York City. I worked briefly in the mid-1990’s with Alan,…
The Motorcycle Show I have a long history over the past twenty-five years with the New York Motorcycle Show. It is always held at the Jacob Javits Center on the West Side and it is in the winter, either in December like this year or in January, as in the past. There is nothing unique about the venue, convention halls are all mostly the same. The amazing thing isn’t that the venue looks like it…
Cash Management What is cash? Cash is liquidity, money you can put your hands on at the moment you need it. In theory you want to keep only the money you absolutely need on hand in cash so that the rest of your money can be more productively employed in some form of compounding investment. I have said before and will say again that compounding is one of the greatest powers of the world because…
Our Political Banana Peel Back in college, one of my buddies loved the comedian Don Rickles. For those of you who remember him, his schtick was focused on denigrating people of all ethnicities and creeds. Everyone was a hockey puck to him (I never realized a hockey puck was such a lowly item). He had a comment that has always made me laugh. He would find somebody in the audience that he found funny-looking and…
The Politics of Coping We had dinner last night with the husband and son of one of Kim’s old Los Angeles friends. Neither of us knew them very well, but there was history and they were in New York on business, so we met them for dinner. What we did know about this man was that he was in commercial real estate and that he was from Orange County. Normally, that would not make for…
Another Farewell Back in 2002 I went to Las Vegas to see Cher in her farewell tour. It was a fabulous show with Cyndy Lauper as an energized opening act. Cher had a schtick at the beginning of the show where she said she had been a “fricken’ Diva” for forty years and that she had killed it in that role. This was classic Cher show of extreme self-confidence, the sort of thing only a…
Stand-up Comedy If you’ve seen the movie The Aristocrats, you know how demented comedians can be. The Aristocrats “joke” is purposefully lewd and disgusting. In fact, the joke perpetuates and magnifies the crudeness and pushes comedians to try to out-do each other with more and more sick imagination. It does not help burnish the image of the profession. I’m sure one of the biggest challenges for new comedians is to know where to draw…
The Pain of Free Will As part of my obligatory SAG/AFTRA movie viewing to help Kim with her nomination work, I have now viewed thirty-six of the fifty-four screeners we have been sent. That represents exactly two-thirds of the stack and I have another eighteen or so to get through. I have been doing a bit of binging this past weekend to play catch-up. I watched The Mustang, Parasite, Marriage Story, Cliffs of Freedom, Etruscan…
See the U.S.A. In seventeen days we will get in our leased Mercedes Benz 450 GLS, loaded up with luggage, the dog (and his dog seat…complete with seatbelt) and my Audible book files. We’ve done this before a few times, the biggest reason being that its the only way to get the dog cross-country. I like driving, so this is not something I dread. The last time we did this, we did it in three…
To Be or Not to Be In the pendulum swing of politics, Mr. Trump and his Republican lackeys in Congress have caused the pendulum swing as far right as I can imagine. When I was recently on a motorcycle trip with a solidly red friend, he asked me with genuine curiosity why I thought some people in the country are throwing their support behind Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren when their positions are clearly…