Not Just a Hat Rack Grace Ethel Cecile Rosalie Allen was an American actress, singer, dancer and comedian who was known as Gracie Allen and was married to George Burns, the actor and comedian. The Burns and Allen Show ran for years on both radio and television with Burns being the straight man to Allen’s hair-brained female routine. We all remember the way their show always ended, “Say Goodnight, Gracie.” What we may not…
Crying About Death We have some dramatic things going on that give me pause and make me think. I just watched a clip of presidential candidate Andrew Yang (a marginal candidate who has gotten some exposure lately, but who is far from a central or likely candidate who could be nominated to the Democratic ticket). He had talked with a woman whose child had watched her sibling get shot and killed in El Paso. …
Fading Glory In June of 1996 I was driving to the Tompkins County Airport on Warren Road, in Ithaca, when I spotted a For Sale sign on a house that was opposite the 17th green of the Cornell Golf Course. I noted the broker telephone number as I passed, and on a whim I called to see what the old derelict farmhouse was on the market for. This was before the era of Zillow and…
Country Life John Denver said, “Well life on the farm is kinda laid back, Ain’t much an old country boy like me can’t hack. It’s early to rise, early in the sack. Thank God I’m a country boy.” No one would ever mistake me for a country boy. But I’m no metrosexual smooth dude either. I never grew up in the suburbs. I’m worldly and global, but not very Latino or Italian (those being the…
Writing to Write The Nobel laureate, Pulitzer Prize winner and long-time Dean of Humanities at Princeton, Toni Morrison died at the ripe old age of 88. She will be eulogized and obituaried by many more eloquent and articulate than me, but it still strikes an important chord in me as a writer and a human being. Toni Morrison was the daughter of two southern-born African-Americans who “escaped” the oppression of the Deep South (Alabama…
Picking Your Friends We all find and make friends in different ways and at different stages in life. When we are babies, our mothers make choices for us. These days it is most common for young mothers to join activities with their child that quickly lead to the forming of playgroups. We all want our children to be socialized and not bound solely to the nuclear family and the cat. So, these groups are,…
Reverse Polish Logic I’ve discussed my love affair with the Hewlett-Packard 12C financial calculator. It is from that device that many of us learned about Reverse Polish Notation (RPN). It’s the logic protocol used by the 12C for operating the calculator. With it, the operator (the numbers) come before the operands (the function like addition or multiplication) when inputting the equation one is looking to solve. RPN was invented in the 1920’s by Jan Lucasiewicz,…
Grindr Goes Global Admit it, you’ve heard of Grindr, the world’s largest social networking app for gay, bi, trans, and queer people. My wife Kim and I have many gay, one trans and probably a lot of queer friends (even though I do not think I could adequately define that term with any precision). You notice I do not suggest we have bi friends, though we may, because how would we know unless we…
Life on the Bubble What is a bubble? On the one hand a bubble is a globe-shaped amorphous item with a gas inside of a liquid formation. If you had to live on a bubble, it would be a very tenuous existence for sure. A bubble can also be a situation where market prices are unsustainable and artificially high. That’s an economic term usually applied to situations that cause many people to make a…
A Persian Goodbye I always wanted a to be an architect. That came to a screeching halt the first week of freshman orientation when this student magazine was slid under all our dorm room doors on which it showed the earning power of all the major professions. Veterinarians were at the top and architects were at the bottom. I had not applied to the school of architecture, but as an engineering student, I still had…