This morning we docked for several hours in Kinderdijk, south of Amsterdam and just east of Rotterdam. Kinderdijk is one of the real low-lying spots of Holland and is supposedly where the young man of fables, Hans Brinker, stuck his finger in the dyke to keep it from failing. What’s interesting is that these ancient clay levies they call dykes are not the sort of structures like concrete dams that could or do spring leaks…
In 1967 a movie called To Sir, With Love starring Sidney Poitier came out. Poitier played Mark Thackeray, an unemployed engineer who takes a teaching job at a tough secondary school in the East End of London while he’s otherwise out job hunting. He’s assigned a class of rowdy, disrespectful working-class teenagers nearing the end of their schooling, who’ve run off previous teachers. Rather than sticking to the standard curriculum, Thackeray, who was classically well-educated,…
Every once in a while I find it necessary to write a story about Kim. Sometimes she does something extraordinary that is worthy of a post. Other times its about my deep appreciation about some act of kindness I see her undertake. And then there are times which I will characterize as “down times” when I am just siting there with her by my side and I find myself thanking the Universe and Gary Kremen,…
The older I get and the more into retirement I delve, the more I find myself wondering about the value of memories. We are generally raised to believe that keeping memories is a good thing. It’s a pretty deep cultural assumption. Photos, journals, archives, “never forget,” nostalgia as a positive emotion. The whole apparatus of human development treats memory as inherently valuable, and forgetting as loss or failure (dementia, “senior moments,” a fading photograph). But…
It’s Monday morning and we’ve just completed a weekend that was mostly in the high 90s. I see that yesterday topped out at 98, but I think I saw 105 on the truck thermometer at one point in my travels. The good news is that it didn’t put a damper on our fiesta on Saturday evening. We had a marvelous time, as did most of the attendees from what we have heard. Everyone got into…
I’m sitting at San Francisco Airport waiting for the last flight back to San Diego. I flew up here this afternoon, was on the ground for five hours and spent two of those in the city visiting with a friend. This was an unexpected trip but one that very much needed to be made because some big decisions were made and friends need to support friends when they make such big decisions. “Peace out” as…
Most people are kind, right? Depends on how you measure it, but the evidence suggests that’s a true statement…but with caveats. Behavioral economics experiments (like dictator games and public goods games) consistently show most people share resources, cooperate, and punish unfairness even at personal cost, more than pure self-interest would predict. Lost-wallet studies (a famous one across 40 countries) found most people actually try to return wallets with cash in them, and surprisingly, more cash…
Last night I went to go see the summer blockbuster film The Odyssey for the second time. It seems that Spiderman may be overtaking Odysseus for the top spot, but the Escondido IMAX was still pretty crowded after a few weeks since the release of The Odyssey, so I think it’s holding up at the box office. As you may recall, I saw the movie the first time from the second row of the Hollywood…
Today is August 1 and we begin our march to the end of another summer. It’s our last day with our granddaughters before I take them to the airport for their return flight home to Brooklyn. We are all on short time now. For over a year since I defeated my edema by, among other things, wearing compression socks almost every minute of every day, I have been wearing long pants rather than shorts. Boys…
There is no such thing as a perfect day, but there are days that are more pleasant than others. Yesterday was a pretty good day on this particular hilltop. It began with me having a kick-off meeting on a new case that I’ve just been assigned. By now I can tell if a case is going to be well-structured and organized or whether its going to be chaotic and all over the place. This kick-off…