Yes, Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys died at age 82 after a life of brilliant song writing and multiple bouts with drug abuse and mental illness. Brian Wilson was absolutely brilliant – one of the true geniuses of popular music. He was the creative mastermind behind The Beach Boys’ sound, writing and arranging those incredible harmonies and melodies that defined the California sound of the ’60s. His work on Pet Sounds (Rolling Stone considers…
This feels like an unusual week for me. It’s probably most unusual because it’s a transition week for us, just getting back to our normal hilltop life. First of all, it’s early June, which means that we have an overabundance of June Gloom in the morning. That’s the marine layer that comes in from the ocean and creates a fog layer up here that burns off somewhere between 10am and early afternoon, depending on how…
I’ve heard the term dropsy for many years, but like so many things you hear, unless you have a reason for figuring out what it means, you tend to ignore it. So I ignored dropsy, figuring it was something akin to the vapors or vertigo and it certainly didn’t affect me. Well, now I have learned that dropsy is an old medical term for what we now call edema – the abnormal accumulation of fluid…
The expression “beating a dead horse” has its origins in the mid-19th century. The expression “beating a dead horse” (or “flogging a dead horse” in British English) dates back to a time when the phrase is said to have been popularized by English politician John Bright. In March 1859, during a House of Commons debate about parliamentary reform, Lord Elcho remarked that Bright had not been satisfied with his “winter campaign” and that Bright had…
If you Google or AI the word “Gubins”, it will tell you that it must be a proper noun or slang since there is no known definition in any recognizable language. I like the sound of that. I have been using the name Gubins for my dear and yet-to-be-able-to-reason charges. That means my kids, my grandkids and now, Buddy. For some reason, I have always found calling some little irrational beast a Gubins suited the…
Right now I’m sitting in the foyer of Sage Hall on the Cornell campus. Sage Hall holds a lot of meaning for me for several reasons. To begin with I was part of the Advisory Council of the business school that decided that the business school should be relocated from Mallot Hall, where I went to the school, to Sage Hall, which is at the center of the Cornell campus. Sage Hall at Cornell University…
When I was in school 50+ years ago, we all adhered to the notion that Ithaca was the second least sunny city in America behind Seattle. We all acknowledged that Ithaca was lovely in the summer, but most of us were busy elsewhere during that glorious season. So, to most of us, being in Ithaca meant we hunkered down to our studies and expected nothing of the weather to contribute to our enjoyment of life.…
Today is our day in Brooklyn. We stopped here to see our two granddaughters and my daughter Carolyn and husband John. They live a short walk from our hotel in Red Hook, so after breakfast in the hotel dining room, we headed over with a small suitcase of laundry in tow to do. It was like the prodigal son returning home from college with his dirty laundry, only this time it was the prodigal father…
Do you remember that great scene from the 1972 classic Deliverance starting Jon Voight and Burt Reynolds? The ill-fated canoe trip starts with a stop in a hillbilly town where co-star Ronny Cox gets into a banjo duel with an inbred moon-faced country boy who can pick a mean banjo. I don’t know if the two are connected, but Charlie Daniels great banjo song The Devil Went Down to Georgia would seem to have almost…