The Brown Lotus I have an acquaintance from my Cornell business school contacts who is a very bright Indian-American who operates in the venture capital space. He is a serious writer of editorials and I am on his email list. I have noted that while he is nowhere near being a MAGA Republican, he has a decided disdain for liberal ideology. He grew up in the impoverished areas of Southern India in a family run…
Know When to Walk Away I’ve been coming to and through Las Vegas for many years. My sister Barbara and her family moved here in 1978 and have never looked back. My mother moved there to support my sister in 1980 and spent the rest of her life there. That meant that I had lots of reasons since those days to pass through Las Vegas. For almost 30 years, Las Vegas was a logical jumping…
The Great Divide I have been fascinated by the idea that there is a line one can draw down the continent that demarcates what is known as the hydrological divide of the Americas. That means simply that to the east of that line all the water flows east and to the west of it, all the water flows west. This line extends all the way from the Bering Strait down to the Straits of Magellan.…
Open Water A few years ago there was a movie called Open Water that was about two scuba divers who got left behind on a drift dive in the Caribbean. I once did a drift dive off of Cozumel back in the years when I was actively scuba diving and I can tell you that the idea of being accidentally left behind in the open ocean is a scary thought that probably occurs to most…
The Mystery of Well-Being In November of 2020, as we were all hunkered down with our first winter of COVID and we were glad to be out of NYC and on our hilltop, I walked outside onto our deck after a particularly hard rain the day before and I suddenly found myself hip deep in my deck. I had most suddenly fallen through my deck just steps outside my Kitchen door. It was amazing that…
Zoo To You Too San Diego is nothing if not a Zoo town. We actually have what I would call two zoos here. They are both part of the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance and the one is the world famous Zoo near Balboa Park in the middle of the city. The other is the San Diego Zoo Safari Park and it is very near where we live in Escondido. The main Zoo is 100…
And Tango Makes Three This morning I heard a very heart-warming story on the radio. It’s the story of a book banning. Apparently, a few years ago at the Central Park Zoo, there were these two chinstrap penguins that got particularly friendly and started living together, making a nest together. Their names were Roy and Silo. There was nothing terribly unusual about that except that they were both males. The zookeepers saw no harm in…
The Last 100 Days Presidential tenures are often defined by their first one hundred days. This tradition began with Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1933 and is the direct result of a comment he made in a speech to the nation right after his first 100 days. It therefore seems somehow fitting that the last 100 days of the Biden presidency (defined as the last 100 days before the election) would perhaps most define Joe Biden’s…
The Battle Begins This morning, after picking up bagels as per my usual Sunday morning chores, Kim and I took the kids and grandkids to the San Diego Zoo Safari Park. Our annual Zoo membership entitles us to four half-price tickets. Technically we were supposed to accompany the kids, but we drove two cars (technically a car and a truck) and took Buddy along for the ride and just dropped them off and skedaddled. It…
Good Old Joe If things don’t happen in the next day or two, we may have to stop saying that. I have turned myself into a pretzel as many of you probably have, trying to show the respect and support I think Joe Biden deserves for the job he has done as president, while considering our best prospects for avoiding the dreaded unmentionable. In 2016, when in theory he should have been the logical next…