Sicko I am blessed with a good healthy constitution, which I attribute mostly to my upbringing of eating a lot of emerging markets dirt. I spent six hears of my youth in the less than hermetically sealed areas of Latin America. The tropical valley in Costa Rica for two years seems somewhat self-explanatory. Things were always on the edge there. The edge of the jungle. The edge of civilization. The edge of tropical dampness. …
The Guy Behind Me I don’t really use Twitter or Instagram because I never feel that my whereabouts and my thoughts as expressed in short, clipped tweets or a selfie should be that interesting to anyone but my dearest closest relationships. Let’s put it this way, my wife might feel forced to keep up with all that, but I doubt even my kids would want that much information about me on a streaming basis. Therefore,…
The Zoo Today I attended the third annual “Power to Ammonia” conference here in Rotterdam. You have to love the tag line. As a child of the sixties, I can hear John Lennon singing “Power to the People”, followed by Jefferson Airplane and their Volunteers. “Got a revolution!” This was no difference, except it’s a different kind of revolution. We all wore bright green lanyards around our necks because what this conference is all about…
Sleeping is for Kids I’m on yet another intercontinental flight tonight. And guess what I’m doing? That’s right, I’m not sleeping. I am on a Delta Boeing 767-300 that departed JFK at 4:28 pm and is landing at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam at 5:20 am local time. That’s a 6:39 minute flight covering 3,214 miles. I’m in seat 2A in business class. There are no first class seats. Only Emirates and Singapore and the like…
The Kuomintang Candidate Richard was a young adventurer who wanted to see the world now that he had missed the greatest event of the century, World War II. He had been too young to enlist and then it ended with the flow of other young men returning with stories that he could never formulate based on his own lack of experiences. Richard wanted to be a writer. He was trying to form his own…
Body of Evidence Charlie had always been a big man. In fact, he had been a big youth and a big child. He never completely understood where it all came from since his mother was 5’4” and came from sturdy Eastern European stock that was certainly broad, but not particularly tall. His father was a tall man for his era at 6’0” and narrow of hip and overall physique. Somehow that genetic combination yielded…
Trash Talk I think its fair to suggest that the era of telephone land lines, an important part of our communications network for 100-125 years, is dead. The growth of land-lines pretty much happened in the normal exponential curve that can be seen for any new technological innovation. It began with the Bell patent in 1876, grew to a few million installed lines in 1905, got nationalized as a strategic asset by the government…
Shhhhhh-owa One of the funniest comedy bits ever produced was the 2,000-Year-Old Man by Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner. I can repeat a number o the lines from that riff that always make me laugh. None makes me laugh louder that the one where Reiner (the interviewer) ask Brooks (the 2,000-year-old man) if they had language 2,000 years ago. He says they certainly did, so Reiner follows-up by asking how language came about. Brooks…
Money Matters That old expression, “I hate it when that happens” comes to mind whenever I find myself thinking of money. It’s funny, I made a career out of running and building large money management businesses (Bankers Trust Private Banking, Deutsche Asset Management, Bear Stearns Asset Management) and yet I have little or no respect for money. Wow, that seems like a big disconnect, but I would argue that the experience of running money…
The Gulf Between Us Chuck wanted desperately to make this deal happen in Qatar. There were many good reasons for that, but none was better than the fact that seeing this groundbreaking technology advanced and even accelerated by the funding only a wealth pool like the Qataris could resource was the best of them. Everyone thought Chuck was all about making money and a casual observer would be justified in that thought, but someone…