I doubt many of us knew where Rafah was a year ago. That is one of the strange silver linings of war. Earlier this year we took a boat ride in Laos on the Mekong River. I knew the name all too well from those newsreels of the Vietnam war from the mid-60s. Someday someone will say, “I’m going sightseeing in the Donbas Region” like they were going to the Lakes District of England. I’m…
I am sitting in the hot tub on an overcast Autumn day. It’s the first time -in many weeks that I have used the hot tub, and I feel like I have earned it by virtue of working most of the day on two active cases, one of which is at the stage of finalizing the report for submission to the court of arbitration, and the other is heading into a full day deposition tomorrow…
We’ve all seen it happening for eight years now and I think we’ve all been either ignoring it or thinking it’s just a schtick. If you had told anyone in the country that an old crass, bigoted billionaire who cried a victimization river would get a following of 47% of the voting population, we would have laughed at you and told you that your imagination was very weird. Everything we have all been taught over…
I love the internet for many reasons. Obviously I like the entertainment value via streaming. I, like a larger and larger segment of the population, am out of the cable TV and satellite TV business and just care about broadband internet access via WiFi. When we travel anywhere I have no idea why they even bother with channel delivery choices on room TV’s. They are just too hard to figure out from one hotel to…
I had a conservation this morning with one of my red friends who I text with daily as a member of a motorcycle group. There are four of us and two of us are decidedly blue and two are just as red. But the truth is that as convenient as the clarity of red and blue might seem, reality is never that neat and tidy. The truth is that the four of us are all…
I wrote yesterday about Bill Ackman and his support of Trump. One of Bill Ackman’s 33 reason why he dislikes the Biden/Harris agenda was: #8 – “promote DEI ideologies that award jobs, awards, and university admissions on the basis of race, sexual identity and gender criteria, and teach our students and citizens that the world can only be understood as an unfair battle between oppressors and the oppressed, where the oppressors are only successful due…
The phrase “I don’t do windows” is well entrenched in Americana whether you consider it just a saying or an outright meme. The etymology of the phrase is cloudy, with most people wanting to attribute it to the sitcom maids of the 60’s and 70’s like Hazel or Florence (from the Jeffersons), but some recognizing that it goes back into the movies of the 30’s and 40’s as well. It’s in the same category as…
Humility is considered the foundation of all virtues in the Christian religion. It is equally valued in Judaism and Islam. I have wrestled with humility on many occasions in my life, but have generally found that it has far greater value than most any virtue that I can invoke. It is often hard-won through failure and the more success you have the more prone to setting it aside you can become. Being wrong is a…
I went to see Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis today. I felt I had to go see it even though it is being met with very mixed reviews and getting characterized much like Kevin Costner’s Horizon fiasco as a vanity play by an aging great one of film. Great filmmakers don’t seem to be able to fade away, they have to go out with a bang…and it’s usually one on the noggin. But then again, Megalopolis…
We’re in the town of Visalia for the night as we end our Oregon and Northern California roadtrip. I haven’t been in Visalia since 1981 other than to pass through on one motorcycle trip I took a dozen years ago. We are staying overnight here in Visalia because it was too damn far to drive from Nevada City to home, especially since we have to drop off Gary & Oswaldo in West Hollywood on our…