The Zoo Today I attended the third annual “Power to Ammonia” conference here in Rotterdam. You have to love the tag line. As a child of the sixties, I can hear John Lennon singing “Power to the People”, followed by Jefferson Airplane and their Volunteers. “Got a revolution!” This was no difference, except it’s a different kind of revolution. We all wore bright green lanyards around our necks because what this conference is all about…
Bearding the Lion Let us start with how exactly one “beards”. Does it mean growing out your whiskers? I’m guessing not since, try as you might, I doubt anyone can force any beast to grow whiskers. Does it mean to grab the beard of the beast to annoy the shit out of It? I also doubt that. Grabbing a beast’s facial hair seems both difficult to accomplish given that it’s best weapon is probably its…
Sleeping is for Kids I’m on yet another intercontinental flight tonight. And guess what I’m doing? That’s right, I’m not sleeping. I am on a Delta Boeing 767-300 that departed JFK at 4:28 pm and is landing at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam at 5:20 am local time. That’s a 6:39 minute flight covering 3,214 miles. I’m in seat 2A in business class. There are no first class seats. Only Emirates and Singapore and the like…
An Angry Man Back in 1987, over thirty years ago, I had a young man working for me who was very well-liked by everyone. He was a Midwesterner who was smart and shrewd, but generally mild-mannered. He had been a football player at a Division II school, and while tall and lean, he was also considered by everyone to be a strong athlete. In the two years he had worked for me, I had not…
Sideshow What is the main event of one’s life? I think we would all have a hard time not agreeing that it is love. And that means that the love we give not the love we get. As the saying goes, think about loving, not being loved. If we would all agree to that, why is there so much hatred all around us? The obvious reason is that how we express our love is…
The Kuomintang Candidate Richard was a young adventurer who wanted to see the world now that he had missed the greatest event of the century, World War II. He had been too young to enlist and then it ended with the flow of other young men returning with stories that he could never formulate based on his own lack of experiences. Richard wanted to be a writer. He was trying to form his own…
Blue Wave Blunders I have never registered for a political party in my life. I suspect what started as apathy has turned into resentment for the system at this point. I probably should try to help select the Democratic candidates (there is zero chance I would ever register Republican or even Libertarian). The truth is that I find most of the Democratic candidates (except perhaps Bill DeBlasio this time around) as somewhat acceptable and…
A Pang of Creativity I just saw something that knocked my socks off and that only happens occasionally. After 6+ years of working on the New York Wheel and trying to marshal all the creative energy I could muster from the people who build things like that, I got involved with a similar project in Dallas that wanted to do the same thing. I spent a fair bit of time episodically on the project…
A Heavy Heart How does a man of conscience grapple with his own failures in an era of increasing pragmatism? It’s not a rhetorical question. It is a question I face this morning and have faced on several other mornings. The story begins with a business failure twelve years ago. The length of time is important because it highlights that some things never go away, and we must all ask ourselves if that is helpful…
The Ego Spiral Sigmund Freud laid it out for us 120 years ago. He got his start at the task of educating the public in the popular aspects of psychoanalysis with his The Interpretation of Dreams, followed by The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious and eventually Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and The Ego and the Id. The jokes that come to mind ranging from the…