Deer Busters I am sure that we all get more unwanted emails than we used to. They and spam texts and calls are the annoying marketing realities of our times the way TV ads were in our youth. In the old days some people relished TiVoing all their favorite TV shows just so they could remove the ads and watch them straight through. That always seemed like more work than just putting up with them.…
Living to 100 My mother was born in 1916 and died in early 2017. She made it to 100 and six months. This week, I noted that Henry Kissinger died at the age of 100 and six months. I recently watched a recent interview with Kissinger and with all due respect to my mother, who remained intellectually sharp until only a few years before her death, I must say that Kissinger at 100 seemed as…
Goodbye Beauregard Cartier Two months ago when Betty left us, I was certain on only one thing and that was that we would sooner or later get another dog to replace her. When Cecil left us it took Kim about two months to deicide she wanted to go in search of a new dog, and that’s when Betty came along. This time we were not inclined to act so fast because we are going on…
Fire And Ice Kim had her annual gala for Singnasium, the New York based cabaret singing school of which she is the founding and now outgoing President of the Board. I have told her dozens of times that as the head of the Board and not an employee, she should not be the President but rather the Chairperson of the Board, but that has all fallen on deaf ears. These are cabaret people after all…
Cold To The Bone After leaving the tropics in 1961, weeks moved to Madison Wisconsin, where in the early weeks of winter that year, the temperature got down to a frigid 40 degrees below zero. That was a rude awakening for a kid that was used to going on summer holiday in December and struggled to bother to wear shoes. Wisconsin is in that frozen upper Midwest region where cold is a way of life.…
Extravaganza Yesterday, after our family gathering at Morton’s in midtown Manhattan (the Cornell Club private rooms were not available on a Sunday), we took most of the assembled masses to Radio City Music Hall for the Christmas Spectacular Show extravaganza. We don’t go to the show there every year, but have gone many times over the years. This show, or a form of it, has been playing in Radio City Music Hall since 1933. They…
Urban Gentility I am in the least friendly place of my life when it comes to Cornell University. The wounds of my ouster from my 25-year home on the edge of campus in Ithaca have pretty much faded, even though I get the occasional blast from the past. Recently I heard that my long-time neighbor and friend with the unique name of Clover Drinkwater has gotten crosswise with the current inhabitants due to an AirBnB…
Time Travel I have never been a fan of movies that deal with the issue of time travel. The old standard of H.G. Well’s The Time Machine was OK and I must admit I enjoyed the Back to the Future series, but by the time The Terminator came around, I found it was all getting too hard to suspend disbelief. The one that really pushed me over the edge was The Curious Case of Benjamin…
Doomsday I ran a global private banking business for six years and one of the big specialties was the whole trust and estates practice. In those days we were one of the three big trust banks in the U.S. and we had partnered with the prestigious “white shoe” law firm of White & Case for all of our trust and estates work like the drafting of wills and all the more complex elements of putting…
The Price for Being American As someone who grew up in my youth in Latin America, I always knew there was a price to being an American. We were the “Ugly Americans” in the region, which I took to mean that besides being crass and perhaps too uncaring, we were also more prosperous and not ashamed to display that. When I moved to Italy during my high school days, there was a lingering taint of…