Catching a Break It has been a very warm week here on the hilltop. Notice that I am saying warm and not hot. Because it has been dry, the warmth of the day has felt good and not bad or oppressive. Nonetheless, when I stopped by to see our friends Faraj and Yasuko yesterday, two people who seem always on the go and usually outside in the garden, they were hunkered in the house with…
The Art of Disparagement When you disparage someone, you are making false and injurious statements about something. Usually it refers to comments made about a business or product rather than a person directly. Directing such false and injurious comments against a person is called defamation and most often takes the form of libel (written or visual) or slander (spoken or audible). All of this specificity is intended to get to the bottom of the comments…
Death on the Hilltop No, no one has died…yet. Last night I got a strange email from someone I didn’t know. It began, “I haven’t met you yet, but I have been living in the neighborhood since 2013.” It was from a woman who claimed to be in our neighborhood and who was forwarding an email that had been sent a few weeks ago by her husband. It went on to say, “My husband realized…
The Fog Returns I am sitting here on my hilltop and see that I am surrounded by fog. Fog is a funny substance. On the one hand, it should be a welcome addition for purposes of the garden, giving everything a coating of its fine mist is a persistent and soaking way. I don’t know how much moisture plants get out of fog, but it seems like it would be good for them in its…
Life Is A Cabaret Kim has been singing and dancing her whole life. It is a very big part of who she is. When she has music to learn and arrangements to consider, she is at her happiest. SHe discovered cabaret as her medium of choice shortly after we got together in 2005, so it is safe to say she has been doing cabaret for about twenty years. While we lived in NYC she was…
Multi-Billion Dollar Democracy I see that the Harris/Walz team is touting that they have raised $540 million from donors (mostly small donors) in the last month or so (basically, since Harris announced). That seems like a lot of money to me, so I looked it up and was surprised with what I found. On a website called USA Facts, a not-for-profit, nonpartisan civic initiative that seeks to make government data easy for all to access,…
Beautiful Several years ago, Kim took me to see Beautiful, the Broadway show about the music, life and times of Carole King (a.k.a. Carol Joan Klein). The other night, Kim bought tickets to see a production of the same show at something called the Moonlight Amphitheater in nearby Vista. To begin with, I must say that the Moonlight is a lovely venue that we are very lucky to have so nearby. It’s a great spot…
The Way We Were The 1973 film by that name starring Robert Redford and Barbara Streisand was impactful to me for many reasons. To begin with, the author of the script and the book on which the movie is based, Arthur Laurents, was a Cornell University graduate who was a contemporary of my mother. He was born about 10 months after my mother, so he was probably not Class of 1937, but he wrote his…
American Dynasties There are certain families that have done everything they can to place themselves at the center of American life. It almost seems that they can’t help themselves. In the early days of the Republic, the gold-standard name was Washington and yet our first president and father of our country did everything to distance himself from being viewed as a king. He voluntarily left office after two terms and never did anything to try…
Hope Is Making a Comeback They say that the best political campaigns are those that appeal to change for the future. While people are generally fearful of change, they also want it because it gives them something to look forward to and few of us are ever totally content with the status quo. Normal modeling would suggest that there should be 20% of the population that likes what it has and is more worried about…