Yesterday I was on a ride out to the eastern part of the county to an area called Sunrise Highway. It is in the Laguna Mountains near the Mexican border and defines the line between the western and eastern parts of San Diego with the Carizzo Valley to the east that runs down towards the Salton Sea. The high plains basin of Lake Cuyamaca and the ridge line to the east of that are some…
The Ocotillo (Fouquieria Splendens) is one of the most distinctive and fascinating desert plants of the American Southwest. Kim and I (especially Kim) have been very fond of the plant for a dozen years, since we started exploring our desert surroundings. Our friend Natasha is crazy about the Joshua Tree (Yucca Brevifolia) a native Agave that grows in the Mojave Desert just east of here and is both the state plant of Nevada and is…
The “man in the moon” concept has ancient origins that span multiple cultures, arising from humans’ natural tendency to see faces and familiar shapes in random patterns (called pareidolia). The most widely recognized Western tradition comes from European folklore, where the dark patches on the moon’s surface were interpreted as facial features – typically two eyes, a nose, and a mouth. Different cultures developed their own explanations for how this “man” ended up there. One…
For the longest time, I have found that my poor posture has made it so that walking or standing around for any length of time makes my back hurt and fatigues me to the point of wanting to sit down and thereby greatly reduce my step accumulation that we all so carefully monitor these days. Do I have a bad back…not really. I have no vertebrae or disc issues per se that I know of.…
I’m listening to a podcast, something I almost never do, because my good friend Melissa (the one who is a therapist in Utah and partner to my good friend Deb), sent it to me and told me I needed to listen to Scott Galloway and his Prof G Markets podcast with Ed Elson. I didn’t know Ed Elson. He is a writer, analyst, and co-host of the Prof G Markets. Ed worked as a research…
Yesterday we had a few family and friends over for a small (15 people) Labor Day Barbecue. This year more than ever before, I am acting as the grill master for these events and we have been offering up a blend of burgers and hotdogs. I have tried CostCo burgers and sausages, Omaha Steaks burgers and sausages and, this time, Von’s Pub-Burgers (with cheese, bacon and, sometimes, jalapenos) as well as their standard mild Italian…
I’ve never thought of myself as either a greedy bugger or a particularly jealous soul. Moses came down from Mount Sinai where he received the Ten Commandments according to the biblical account in Exodus. This occurred during the Israelites’ journey through the wilderness after their exodus from Egypt and after they were freed from servitude from the yoke of Pharaoh Ramesses the Great. The story describes Moses ascending the mountain where God gave him the…
My first memory of television was in 1958 in my grandfather’s house (we called him Dodo, which is the Slovak version of Gramps). We were living there while my mother regrouped from divorcing my father and leaving California, where we had been for a year in Santa Monica. On Saturday morning, with my mother and sisters off shopping in the metropolis of Ithaca and Dodo out puttering in the barn or nearby fields, I was…
I have mentioned several times that I have been a founding member of the news service Puck since it began in 2021. Puck is an American digital media company who’s coverage aims to cover the ‘four centers of power’ in the United States: Silicon Valley, Hollywood, Washington, D.C. and Wall Street. The company was founded by Jon Kelly (former Vanity Fair editor who created The Hive), Joe Purzycki (co-founder of Luminary), and Max Tcheyan, and…
Given my natural inclination to write about the things on my mind at the moment, I should be writing about how I only have one more day until Kim gets home tomorrow, but I’ve already sung my lonely hearts club song this week. I actually had one friend tell me that he always suspected that I had father issues…so I think I’ve had enough therapy for the moment. It’s the Saturday of Labor Day weekend…