Planning to Plan Do you remember Owl Jolson? He is that little adorable Merrie Melodies cartoon character from the 1936 animated short called I Love to Singa. It’s about a young owl whose father (that sounds funny…Who, Who) believes that the only pure music is classical whereas little Owl Jolson wants to sing Jazz. In other words, its a cartoon version of The Jazz Singer, with all the angst and…
Playing With Your Life One of the areas that I spent a great deal of time in during my professional life was the arcane arena of life insurance. Somewhere over the years, the business of life insurance took some very strange turns in this country. To begin with, the lobbying army that represents the industry is formidable, and they have done a wonderful job of making an arcane arena all the more arcane by purposefully…
Circulation I’m not sure how long its been now, but for some time I have been plagued with numb toes. It really has no adverse affects and I have had it checked out vis-a-vis diabetes and it’s not that. My glucose levels and my A1C are all in line and my doctor agrees that its not diabetic nerve damage. I’ve been to a neuropathist and besides telling me what I know that there is some…
The Windows of Life Back in November, 1985 when my 42-year-old son was three years old, Microsoft launched what is now its ubiquitous and comprehensive personal computer platform/application called Windows. Since then, Microsoft has had a stranglehold on the business application business that no one, even Apple, has been able to unseat this behemoth from its lofty perch overseeing almost all of our daily business lives. We are all pretty much joined at the hip…
Returning to the Scene Life is short and memories are long. It’s been three years now since I had my big altercation with Cornell University over the house at 313 Warren Road. I long since moved my belongings out and handed over the property to the University. One of the things I took with me was the brass sign I had placed on a large rock at the entry. It had the address and the…
Feeling Healthy During our recent trip, I got mildly felled by a stomach bug and knocked it out with a dose of Azithromycin that Kim had with her for that exact purpose. It was a three-day course of a very powerful antibiotic and it did the trick such that I literally only sat out one dinner and was otherwise fine both sitting for all the meals, but also going out to whatever tours we had…
The China Syndrome Do you remember the 1979 Jane Fonda and Jack Lemmon movie, The China Syndrome? It was about a cover-up at a nuclear power facility that was malfunctioning and creating a nuclear hazard. I’m not sure how much we Americans have thought about either nuclear disaster or even China as a risk to our lifestyle since then, but we are about to be faced with a whole new version of China risk than…
Vacancy If you grew up in the 60s like I did and you got the opportunity to take road trips, also like I did, then one of the icons of your travels was seeing the signs at the various motels that you passed that blinked NO (or not) before the word VACANCY. If business was good at the motel, the NO was lighted and you presumably knew not to bother to stop and ask if…
Writing on Retirement Among the several categories into which I place my blog stories, I include retirement. I’ve had a fascination with retirement for 30 years, ostensibly, because I ran one of the largest retirement businesses in the world. That stint caused me to spend many hours, contemplating the idea of retirement as exemplified in the vast of Defined Benefit and Defined Contribution pension plans that were part of my business domain. You simply cannot…
Discovery and Rediscovery I’m now back on May hilltop and after a very comfortable 8 hours of sleep in my own bed and a wake-up call from Buddy standing on my shoulder to lick my face, I am pleased to be in rediscovery mode this morning. The most important news this morning is that I managed to lose 8 pounds during my three weeks away. I suspect this was through a combination of eating Asian…