Desk Toys There is an advertisement on TV these days for insurance with a guy in his office, which is turned into a ball pit. Who can tell anymore if these ads are for Geico, Progressive, Farmers or whatever? Unless there is a gecko or that androgynous Flo person in the ad, they are all funny and good entertainment to watch, but all they really do is remind us that insurance is a competitive…
The Lost Weekend The 1945 Billy Wilder movie The Lost Weekend stars Ray Milland and Jane Wyman. It is about a four-day bender taken by a chronic alcoholic and it explores the depths of a wounded human soul. I too just had a lost weekend or sorts. I am not a drinker, so alcoholism is not my vice. Back in 1968 at the age of fourteen, I traveled to Italy with my family…
One Small Step for Man The other day at lunch several similarly aged Baby Boomers and I sat at lunch playing “where were you when.” The first trick is to figure out the events of our lives that rose to the occasion. JFK getting shot in 1963 is the baseline and everyone could remember. We all missed on Martin Luther King and The RFK assassinations in 1968. The next one was the moon landing in…
Hiding in the Dark This morning I did my usual few hours of work on my computer in our study, which is an interior room without windows. I work in the bowels of the building where little can disturb my concentration and I stare at the screen or the wall (albeit I am listening to MSNC on the TV in the corner, but that is hardly a distraction any more, more like an oxygen hose…
Pivoting In my business we have decided to try to pivot. Let me try to explain what I mean by that. Life is about flexibility and change. When a business faces a roadblock, especially an insurmountable one, the only sensible thing to do is to alter direction to get around the roadblock. By most standards, that is considered intelligent management. In a hedge fund that is called style-drift and is deadly to investors as it…
The Long and the Short of It We have all heard about the UN report that gives us a dozen years to take corrective action before the climate change battle is irretrievable lost. That report, while falling on seemingly deaf Trumpster ears, has made the EU sit up and get even more serious than they have been about addressing the root causes of things like greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Running a business called Low…
Is This Business As Usual? After Donald Trump’s rally in North Carolina last night the obvious and somewhat anticipated conclusion by the press (a body I still trust on such topics) is that the attacks on the Squad (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn) and Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass)) were tactical and purposeful to give the President a target for his campaign rhetoric and an “enemy” to galvanize his base. Listening to…
Unlikely Bedfellows I arrived at Cornell University in 1971 with an army jacket and a duffle bag. I had not led a conventional suburban life, and I was not entering college in a traditional middle class American manner. I had hitchhiked from Cleveland, where I had spent the summer learning about sociological research studies at Case Western Reserve University and learning that rivers in the United States were so polluted that they could, indeed,…
Throwing it All Away Bohemian Rhapsody is back in vogue with the release of the movie by the same name. Who doesn’t like Freddie Mercury and Queen with their effusive, enthusiastic and expressive songs? The lyrics are simple, memorable and speak to many of us. There are even certain lyrical phrases that actually invoke the melody of the phrase when they are said. Let’s try it just for fun: Mama, just killed a man…
Getting Smaller I was watching an obscure little film from 1993 called Indian Summer. It had a great cast with Alan Arkin, Diane Lane, Matt Craven, Bill Paxton (RIP) and Kevin Pollak. It is another Big Chill movie with a summer camp twist. I am sure many can relate to the ensemble of characters and roles, not to mention the reminiscences of summer camp summers past. At one point in the story, there is a…