The 600 Year Blink I read two enlightening articles this morning, one from The New Yorker and one from The Atlantic. It has occurred to me lately that in the age of digitized content, several magazines have seemed to be in ascendancy rather than decline like so many other magazines. In the pattern unfolding of the Coronavirus era, I sense that magazines will not be excluded from the tendency to accelerate the prevailing trends. The…
Deposing Views Today I was involved with an all-day deposition in a case where I am acting as an expert witness. I spent about 10-12 hours reading all the materials I had written on the case (1 46-page Report, 2 20-24-page Rebuttal Replies), the two rebuttals (each 25-30-pages) and various summary motions, articles, etc. I had worked on the case from late November through mid-January, when I wrote the first report. I spent 56 hours…
Ultimate Democratization The year was 2000 and we had just come through the Y2K scare relatively unscathed. It was not for lack of scrambling and effort as you may recall, so who knows whether we averted a crisis by getting out ahead of it by sounding the alarms, or if the concern was over-hyped and was never really a big risk. Either way, it was nice to see that Y2K did little to slow the…
Needless Mark-up I hear that Neiman Marcus is likely to declare bankruptcy soon as the latest signal that the retail business sector is the next in what promises to be an ongoing array of zombie business segments in the new normal. This morning I heard a retail analyst talking about it. He was actually quite balanced about it all. Clearly Neiman Marcus is an iconic brand that has been around for 113 years. It originated…
High Plains Drifter I look nothing like Clint Eastwood. I think nothing like Clint Eastwood. I’ve heard about his politics, so I want nothing to do with Clint Eastwood. But damn, does that guy know how to make movies that appeal to us all. I am my own version of a high plains drifter. I’ve spent my life parachuting into new places and figuring out how to prevail. Now comes the ultimate test of that…
Donut Holes I can tell that this quarantine has gone on too long or at least long enough. It’s been seven weeks by my count and any way you slice it, that’s a long time to be at home. The problem is, I can’t reasonably expect any sympathy for that since the entire world considers staying at home the least troubling of the three choices. The first choice is to be sick with COVID-19 and…
All Tesla All Day Almost three years ago I got it in my head that I might want to own a Tesla X to use out here when I moved for good. The experience from start to finish was interesting. Kim and I went to one of the urban malls that are scattered in San Diego. This one was near La Jolla, which meant it was close to the mother lode of excess disposable income.…
Getting Chile In 1985 I was sitting in our Chairman’s office with five other senior officers of Bankers Trust Company. I was 31 years old and had been with the bank for nine years. I made the first-line officer rank of Assistant Treasurer in 1978, Assistant Vice President in 1980 and Vice President in 1982. This was somewhat of a lockstep, but a lightning-fast lock-step if that isn’t too much of a non-sequitur. The career-track…
The Fairy Tree On our property out by the barbecue patio and hot tub there is a wonderful tree. It is a baobab or more commonly known as a Madagascar Bottle Tree. It is sometimes called an upside-down tree because of its unique shape. They are common to South Africa, Madagascar and Australia and they look pretty much like an Orangina bottle through the trunk, which in the case of our specimen planting is perhaps…
The Ruralization of the World For my entire lifespan of sixty-six years, the world was moving in only one way on its inexorable trend towards urbanization. What began as a trend driven by the industrial revolution starting in the mid-1800’s, was driven into the entire world by both industrialization and the automation of farming. It was such a common theme that the song How You Gonna Keep Them Down on the Farm (Once They’ve Seen…