Escape From New York I have always loved the 1981 John Carpenter film (he wrote it and directed it) starring Kurt Russell and portraying the dystopic city which has become a Federal maximum-security prison (the only one in the country) allowed to self-govern and headed by Isaac Hayes with Ernest Borgnine running around giving people cab rides in his old Checker. Russell plays one of the great movie characters of all time, Snake Plissken with…
Shuffle Off to Buffalo In 2000 I had a problem to solve. For four years I had owned a vacation home in Ithaca. I was coming up on my 25th Reunion and I wanted to use the house for exactly what I had bought it for. I wanted to use the house to gather all my friends and have a nice place to party and make the reunion special for everyone. The problem I had…
RESPECT, Find Out What It Means To Me I just got an email from my Alma Mater, Cornell University, where I was supposed to be headed this week for my forty-fifth undergraduate reunion. Needless to say, they cancelled our physical reunion with great angst, given the amount of fundraising reliance rests on the shoulders of the reunion process. After being a major donor for many years, even I considered whether I should skip this year…
Tearing Up In the Spring of 1972, during my second semester of Freshman year at Cornell, a group of us who had joined the same fraternity (Phi Sigma Epsilon) and some of the brothers, who we were getting to know, went into Collegetown for a Sunday night pizza dinner at Johnies’ Big Red Grill on Dryden Road. I was an engineering student as were a number of us and the topic of the evening was…
Finding the Warmth Today it was overcast to start what will likely be a fine day. An overcast day always makes me want to jump in the hot tub in the morning. I have my spa app set up to have my spa warmed and ready from 7am to 9am. I would guess I go in three or four days a week during those hours. Other days I go in later and just manually turn…
The Time of Monsters This expression sings so very true today as our cities are under siege and the army, in the form of the mobilization of the National Guard, is being brought to bear first in the heartland of Minneapolis. “This is the time of monsters” is attributed to a a little-know Italian founder of the Communist Party there and it dates to that turbulent era of the post World War I to 1930’s…
Getting Educated Allow me to begin by declaring that I am as imperfectly formed as any other human being on the face of the earth. I like to think of myself as enlightened and evolved, but let’s face it, we are all riddled with flaws including the flaw of self-professing our “not worthy” outlooks exactly like this very sentence. How’s that for calling it in on my own position? But one of the things we…
In Search of Content We have heard for twenty years, ever since the internet took serious root with the advent of widespread broadband, that content would be king. Like with many business imperatives, timing is everything and the world was not ready yet for content to be king twenty years ago. I would argue that to paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, the platform is the message and over the past twenty years there has been a great…
A Fortnight of Sunlight Twenty years ago, Peter Mayle and his wife spent a year “retiring” from their overcast British lifestyle (he had been a British Mad Man) by buying and renovating a house in Provence. He was already a writer, but his best-selling book A Year in Provence established him at a late stage in life (his 60’s) as a prominent and popular writer. I both loved the book and loved the whole romantic…
This Little Piggy Stayed Home Today, like most days, I called up Jeff to see what was going on in his life. I am in the habit of calling Jeff every day for several reasons. First of all, he’s one of the few men of my age that I know around here, second, he is generally my go-to guy for stuff around the house because he knows the house and he is generally a font…