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…
Fat is as Fat Thinks Let’s get one thing out of the way right up front. I’m fat. I’ve always been fat (at least as long ago as I can remember and to some degree). I’ve never been at an ideal weight, if such a thing exists. I look at people who are not fat and have never been fat and wonder how that changes their world view. I could guess, but I’m betting that…
Into the Heavens Several years ago when I was teaching at Cornell, I did what people do on big college campuses, I faked my way into a parking spot, this time at the Statler Inn valet parking, pretending to be attending some function in the ballroom with other guests. What I was really doing was avoiding a long uphill walk or bus ride to one of the distant parking lots at the expense of a…
Insuring Eternity Back in the late 1970’s when I was beginning my career in banking, I was traveling across New England almost every week, visiting a combination of banks and insurance companies to sell them our banking services. I was a member of FI or financial institutions side of the bank. For some strange reason, the FI side of banking was always the red-headed step-child of the banking business compared to the corporate side. The…
COVID Schmovid I have just travelled through seven different global airports on eight different flights, spending some fifty hours in airplane cabins with their recirculated air, over the past few weeks. We stayed in seven different hotels and ate in something like thirty different restaurants ranging from an elegant Middle Eastern Lebanese restaurant on the Nile to Tre Scalini on the Piazza Navonna in Rome, all the way to a Martian Dome eating hall at…
Into the Ozone I am a big fan of technology, and especially the communications vehicles like email and text. In fact, since I consider communications the heart of human interaction and evolution, I am especially enamored with how, in my lifetime, our ability to communicate with one another has evolved to the point of her perfection. I only moderate that view with the term “near” since I’m sure that there are some that think we…