Le Weekend When I was in high school I learned that in France they had adopted the English word weekend into their language and culture, which had not previously existed (and therefore had not single word to represent). This became Le Weekend. It seems the concept has more going on with it than I had realized. The designation of years, months and days connect to cyclicality of the heavens. Solar orbits, lunar cycles and terrestrial…
On Friendship Tonight we are having dinner with several of Kim’s closest friends, or, to be precise, one of her closest friends and her beau. Usually we would be having dinner with those two and their other mutually good friend with whom they share a long theatrical history (I think it was on the National Road Tour of State Fair). Unfortunately, that person is not invited and is somewhat at odds with the one with…
Emeritus Status In the days of the Roman legion, when soldiers earned their wages some suggest it was at least partially paid in salt, hence the word salarium and eventually the English word salary came into being. There is little or no evidence to support this myth even though it is part of modern etymological lore and is somewhat supported by sayings like “worth your salt”. However, despite this debate, it is true that many…
Renegade Nation Our mantra as a nation has always been E Pluribus Unum or “Out of Many, One.” Our new mantra might be more accurately changed to Quid Dicere, Quid Faciunt , which translates to “Say anything, do anything.” The recent news from Washington is that as Congress moves to enforce its constitutionally-given obligation to balance back against the Executive Branch of government, the President has decided that he’s not having any of it. He…
The Raid on Entebbe Entebbe juts out into Lake Victoria and is the main airport for Uganda. The only reason any of us know the name is because of the 1976 Arab-German hijacking of an Air France airliner enroute from Tel Aviv to Paris. It was less about the fact that the terrorists landed at Entebbe and sought sanctuary from Idi Amin, than it was about the 100 Israeli commandos that executed a near-flawless and…
Camel Money In the world of finance, everybody understands the term Camel Money. It means money that has, what we call on Wall Street, a high talk-to-ticket ratio. It is the money that has supposedly been flowing from the middle east since the Oil Embargo of 1973 and OPEC’s wanton thrashing of the U.S. consumer. That was when Petrodollars first came into visible existence and we began to understand that people who had scads of…
About the Battle Battles rage every day in every aspect of life. I am reminded today of a past battle which I feel is instructive and which I will characterize vaguely and with pseudonyms and made-up settings. It is a battle fought over a decade ago, so I suspect the statute of limitations (defined by law and by life) has long expired. Most involved in the battle probably wish it would just be forgotten, but…
Spring Break This is Easter Week and I guess that for much of the world, this is a good week for a vacation. I find it a funny time to take a vacation. I also understand that for people with kids in school, you take your vacations when your kids’ school holidays are planned. Both of my ex-wives were quite rigid on the subject of taking kids out of school to take family vacations. For…
The Old and the Restless Our semi-annual gathering of the BT Legends group was held last night. There was a total of fifteen of us in attendance. We were a group of ex-bankers, so we were not terribly diverse even though there were three women in the group. The rest were old white guys. Doing some approximate polling, I would say the age range was 61 to 81, but the mean was likely around 71…
Three Shawermas to Go The Middle East is my kinda place. I used to go twice a year for two weeks at a go. Sometimes I would get a day off (Fridays, the holy day for Muslims) and sometimes I skittle up to someplace like Istanbul where they seem to care more about keeping to a Western workweek schedule than taking off their Sabbath. I never went in summer and I was always careful…