April Panorama It’s hard to keep a perspective on the weather when you live in a place like San Diego. We are in our fifth year of living full-time on this hilltop and I am generally pretty happy about the weather overall, but more confused than not, especially at this time of year, about what is normal, what is abnormal and what is shifting. I will define the normal/abnormal axis as the cyclical swings of…
Jack of All Trades One of the oldest English expressions is “Jack of all trades” which dates back to Old English in 1390 when, during Medieval Times, it was considered a strength for a man to be knowledgeable and capable in several different skills. One might even suggest that since that was really the end of the Dark Ages and the beginning of the Renaissance, that the Jack of all trades may well have morphed…
I’ve Fallen and I Can’t Get Up There use to be a very funny commercial with some elderly woman on the kitchen floor pressing a small transmitting device that she wore around her neck which would announce to some emergency service or other that she had fallen in her home and that she was unable to get up. Naturally, there was nothing really funny about the situation since that happens all too often to the…
Moses and Wealth Yesterday, in honor of Holy Week, Netflix put on a three-part series about Moses. It was a dramatization of the well-known biblical story that starts with Moses’ birth to a poor Israelite family in Egypt, his dramatic adoption via the reed basket floated up the Nile and found by a royal princess despondent over the loss of her natural child. It spent little time reviewing Moses’ upbringing in the house of the…
Pixelating I understand the hierarchy of communications. It starts with the written word and moves to the spoken work (as in recorded). At the same time, the written word gives way to pictures, which then give way to video, which eventually gives way to live, real time video and audio interaction. It’s all very logical and its clear that involving more senses in the communicating process is almost always an improvement. The expression that a…
The World According to Rich I just had an exchange with my red, but supposedly anti-Trump friend Kevin. This is that text group that I have been engaged with for several years that used to be two Florida residents (read that was them being red in political orientation) and one too blue Californian (blue ex-New Yorker…same thing). We added another friend from Arizona, Steve, who is appropriately purple, less by political leaning and more by…
When Did We Get So Stupid? Today’s top New York Times story is about China and its efforts to bolster the Trump presidential campaign, joining Russia in its clear preference for the United States to choose the stupider path for the future of a MAGA resurgence. The Times suggests that there are two reasons for China’s support, first that China, like Russia, wants the U.S. to butt-out of global politics. Russia wants to inflict its…
Wandering the World Wondering A few years ago, Kim and I were recording an audiobook in a NYC sound studio and I watched and giggled as Kim was having trouble distinguishing between the words wandering and wondering. They really are quite different words, but as different as they are, they are also somewhat similar. Do you wander the world or do you wonder about the world…or both simultaneously? I think we do both and I…
Living Dangerously I recall reading about John McAfee, the founder of the anti-virus software company, McAfee. His later life reads like a cheap thriller novel or Dateline episode. After selling his company and declaring its software products scams that consumers should uninstall, he moved to Belize, only to get caught up in a murder scandal that had him running in exile from the small Caribbean country, often referred to as the Mosquito Coast. From there…
The Silence of the Lamb March comes in like a lion and out like a lamb, right? Is that all about the balancing act of life or is it about the weather patterns of the Northern Hemisphere, or perhaps its all biblical in suggesting that lions and lambs can coexist? I really don’t know and Google isn’t being that helpful about it all. What I do know is that as we approach the end of…