Lord of the Dance In 48 hours I will be arriving in Shannon, Ireland, gathering up a gaggle of family and friends (19 to be exact) and we will drive in two rented 9-passenger vans and one 4-passenger car the three hours to Westcove, where we have a peaceful and large (operative word is large…as in sleeps 26) manor house and grounds on the Ring of Kerry, right on a lovely cove that looks…
Hacking and Wheezing There has been some lousy bug floating around (I’m sure it’s not limited to New York City, but it’s definitely here) that is not the seasonal flu strain (I got that shot), but it has debilitated several people including me. When I say debilitated, I should be careful. I have not lost one day of work (some of my colleagues who have it have lost a few odd days), and I have…
Downtown Guy Billy Joel forever owns the term Downtown Guy from his song Uptown Girl, which many Billy Joel aficionados consider one of his less great and more bubble gum songs. I was more of a fan of it than others, but no one has ever accused me of having refined taste in music. At least they haven’t once they find out I’m a big Meatloaf fan. So it is with some apology…
Perpetual Notion The Bodies Exhibit was working out just right for Krista. She was taking home almost $400 every shift she worked, between the salary and the cash tips. Everything was handled in cash, which was just fine with her. If she could get just three shifts per week she could cover all her ordinary living expenses and then some. It left her lots of time and flexibility to go on auditions and go-sees,…
Power Sleeping The world talks about sleeping as much as any bodily function. It is clearly one of the basic necessities of life and yet few other functions enjoy such a broad range of discretion, habit and variability. The swaddling of babies is a subject that has been much studied by child development specialists. It turns out that people from northern climes swaddle their babies very tightly and those from southern climes swaddle them very…
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…