Eating Out and Ordering In I spent forty-five years (minus two years for bad behavior when I got sent to Gulag Toronto) living in New York City. Just to get everyone on the same page, the two-year stint in Toronto was literally a three-year sentence (starting in 1990) by my employer, Bankers Trust Company, to run our Canadian Bank. I had been running a vast empire of the Global Derivatives business and the Global Commodities…
From Here to Eternity There is something very familiar about this unfamiliar place. I am in the Jury Lounge of the North County Regional Court Center in Vista, California. I have been called to service by the Superior Court for the County of San Diego. I already pushed this off once a few months ago due to my business schedule and unlike the last time I was called a few years ago during COVID, my…
The Hole in My Pocket As a storyteller, I often quip to people that when and if I ever write my proper autobiography (as though these blog stories don’t effectively do that already), I already have a title all picked out for it. I am a big title guy and often use a title to lead me into or out of a story. I guess there is a part of this storyteller that is also…
The Guardians of the Galaxy We tend to throw around astronomical terms without necessarily knowing of them in detail. I’m not sure I have ever spent the time to understand the full scope of the firmament. The classic human conundrum that more or less defines the limits of our simple minds is to ask how far space extends and, for that matter, what is beyond that. The void is the default mechanism now as it…
Done Trippin’ For some reason that I can’t completely explain other than to say that I can’t avoid taking responsibility for my own cumulative decisions, we are suddenly immersed in more trip planning than normal. We literally have things on the docket now for each of the next six months. This month is relatively easy because we are just going back to New York to spend time with the kids, the pretense being granddaughter Evelyn’s…
Movie of the Week Movies have been a big part of my life for over fifty years. They were my screen time in high school. They were big event gatherings in college. They were weekend entertainment getaways in my early adulthood. They were a videotaped passion to share with my kids on vacation at the beach house or the ski house. And now, in later adulthood, they are major relaxation fillers for an increasingly sedentary…
The Gatemaster Gozer the Gozerian is the evil Sumerian God who is also known as The Destructor and is equally worshipped by the Hittites and Mesopotamians. He or she (Gozer was gender-nonspecific way before it became popular) is served by an array of minions and demigods including Vinz Clortho, the Keymaster. Vinz is some form of half-dog and half-bear in his incarnation during Gozer’s first attempt to destroy the world in 1984. Gozer, who is…
Happiness is an Old iPad Keyboard This morning I picked up on an article sent to me by Apple News. I like these daily emails because they give me headline overviews of curated articles, only some of which I have otherwise seen in my regular news feeds from the New York Times, Washington Post, WSJ, the New Yorker, National Geographic or Financial Times. I would estimate that at least two thirds of the headlines are…
The Tailor of Escondido I stumbled on the twenty-year-old movie with Pierce Brosnan, Geoffrey Rush and Jamie Lee Curtis, The Tailor of Panama. The movie is a strange blend of international spy thriller and comedy, with Rush playing a well-connected Saville Row tailor doing business in Panama City, and Brosnan playing a disgraced MI-6 secret agent who goes around fabricating a Canal Zone fantasy to revitalize his flagging career. I have had three encounters with…
A Nation in Handcuffs I was told yesterday that we would all be waking up to a new America today. This was, as you can imagine, due to yesterday’s indictment announcement about Donald Trump, the ex and 45th president. The word handcuff is getting used an inordinate amount today, mostly in the conjecture of whether Trump is likely to be forced to suffer a perp walk in handcuffs in addition to the obligatory fingerprinting and…