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…
It is said that the definition of insanity is “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” That is widely misattributed to Einstein, but he never actually said or wrote this. This misattribution has become so pervasive that it’s one of the most common “fake Einstein quotes” circulating online. Einstein scholars and institutions that manage his archives have repeatedly confirmed that there’s no record of him ever making this statement. The…
Many people use the term purgatory without having been raised Catholic and therefore probably not really understanding the concept. Purgatory is a concept in Catholic theology referring to a state of purification after death for souls who died in God’s grace but still need to be cleansed of the temporal punishment due to sin before entering heaven. The doctrine holds that souls in purgatory are destined for heaven but must first be purified of any…
People seem to think that Rudyard Kipling, the British Nobel laureate who wrote about his experiences with colonialism, coined the phrase that “Only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun”, but in fact it was Noel Coward in his musical, The Third Little Show (1931) where he says, “Mad dogs and Englishmen Go out in the midday sun. The Japanese don’t care to, The Chinese wouldn’t dare to, Hindoos and Argentines sleep…
Comedy is on my mind today because we are planning to go see The Naked Gun, the Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson remake by Seth MacFarlane of the 1988 Leslie Nielsen classic by the same name. I watch a lot of Liam Neeson (who doesn’t?) and just saw several of his new thrillers recently, so when I saw the New York Times profile on him in this new comedic role where he puts his gravitas…
Cornell University, which has one of the most highly regarded food science programs in the United States, is our group’s school of choice, As I mentioned yesterday, six of us attended Cornell, my mother also attended and I was a member of the faculty for ten years as a Clinical Professor. Cornell’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences houses their Department of Food Science, which is indeed considered among the top food science programs globally.…