The thing about living out here in San Diego is that the weather is, simply perfect. I just asked Claude where the best place to live in the United States is in terms of comfort. Claude went through the preference Q&A needed to answer that sort of question, asking me about what sort of temperature I preferred (mild 60’s-70’s rather than warm 70’s-80’s) and what I wanted to avoid the most (humidity rather than cold/snow)…
As I mentioned before, my favorite painting is one that hangs in our living room directly over the etagere that I bought in Toronto 36 years ago. That etagere is home to all the most interesting and emblematic curios and artifacts that I and we have collected over the last seventy years. To be fair, some of them were really collected by my mother during her travels across Latin America as well, but they have…
As a continuation of my physical trauma of last week, I will start by declaring that after a week of my new thumb reality, I have seen some minor improvement in the strength of my left thumb, but it ain’t back to anywhere near 100%. I am using a very simple test every day to track the situation and since I do not have any strength calipers, I am using my ability to touch each…
We wound up our California Zephyr train ride yesterday by chugging through Roseville, where the largest rail yards in the western U.S. are located, and then through Sacramento (the yellow/Golden bridge seems to have been the highlight…at least from the train), and eventually down to San Pablo Bay and the northeastern part of San Francisco Bay that fronts Richmond, Berkeley and Oakland. The East Bay is very much the working side of this great bay…
I am siting in the observation car of the Amtrak California Zephyr train, hurtling along at 78mph across the barren Northern Nevada desert between Winnemucca and Reno. It’s 6:50am and I have spent the last 8 hours onboard since Salt Lake City. So far, its been an adventure. We flew up to SLC yesterday and spent the day with our dear friends Deb and Melissa, mostly just hanging out and chatting the afternoon away until…
It’s a popular myth, or at least an oversimplification, that opposable thumbs are uniquely human and separate us from other animals. That’s simply not true. Virtually all primates have opposable thumbs…chimps, gorillas, orangutans, baboons and bonobos. Many also have opposable big toes, which humans have largely lost through evolution. Bonobos are particularly interesting in this context because they’re one of our two closest living relatives (along with chimpanzees), sharing roughly 98.7% of our DNA. Their…
A few days ago (April Fools Day), we all saw the Artemis II rocket blast off from Launch Complex 39B at Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 6:35 p.m. EDT. It was the first crewed mission toward the Moon since Apollo 17 in 1972, carrying NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Christina Koch, and Victor Glover, along with Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen, on a 10-day journey around the Moon. I don’t know about you, but it sure…
For a while now I have been noticing the new emergency room series called The Pitt (a play on Pittsburgh, the high intensity and grit, and the fact that ER’s are on the lower level of hospitals) on my Hulu feed. Then my trainer, who is a grad student in kinesiology working towards his Physical Therapy certification, told me I had to watch it, so I did. I loved it. It was incredibly realistic, perhaps…
For many years now, when I’ve gone on motorcycle rides that included my friend Frank O’Connell, I would hear about this little toy company that he was involved with. Frank is a marketing guru of significant renown and he also has a connection to the toy business from years ago when he worked for Mattel on the Intelevision product. I know this for two reasons, the first of which is that it’s what business friends…
A few weeks ago and for no particular reason, I downloaded onto my Audible app, a copy of Ron Chernow’s biography of Mark Twain. Mark Twain was the pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835–1910), one of America’s greatest writers and humorists. Born in Missouri, he grew up in Hannibal on the Mississippi River, a setting that would define his most famous work, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry…