Many years ago during the height of my days at Bankers Trust (late 1980s, I think), our then Chairman, Charlie Sanford (rest his soul) got on a kick of predicting the future and wrote an paper that he presented at a gathering at the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank. The paper was titled Quantum Finance, and it was a prediction that our consumer financial system would evolve into a complex kluge of payment processing where…
Many years ago at a time which I presume was an era of higher than normal immigration into the United States by people from India, there were many cab drivers in New York City who hailed from the subcontinent. I’ve always felt that the pulse of immigration trends are often felt most clearly in the cab driving population. I’m wondering how Uber and Lyft have changed that, but I’ll bet not too much. It’s tricky…
Few words manage to embody more stages in life than the word “trippin’”. I grew up in the 1960s and came of age in the 1970s. The early 60s for me were about returning to the United States from Latin America, where I functioned under the watchful eye of a German governess with strong ties to Latin America (not sure what that history might have entailed in the post-WWII era) and with the name of…
I must have done something right in life. I look around me and the word magical comes to mind. I am blessed with a magical partner in Kim. I know plenty of friends who are satisfied in their marriages, but I know precious few who can say, as I do regularly, that they find themselves more in love with their partner day by day. Kim is not perfect, but whatever imperfections she has are almost…
I don’t do a ton of social media and never have. I’ve specially gotten off of Facebook, but apparently the rest of the world is not there as I see Meta setting g new quarterly earnings records. I keep an eye on Instagram but never post (not sure how that adds to Meta’s pocketbook). Snapchat is how my kids and I stay in touch. From what I can tell, that strongman, Anatoly and whoever publishes…
The world is filled with people with gripes against one another. I don’t like being a cynic, so I try not to suggest that they are all bad people, but if there were ever a means to expose the dark underside of human nature, it would be through the reading of deposition transcripts from various and sundry civil litigation and arbitration conflicts. Just when I think I’ve heard and read it all, I’m confronted by…
This reference to “looking at clouds from both sides now” is from Joni Mitchell’s famous song “Both Sides Now”, which was first recorded in 1968. The song uses clouds as a metaphor for the different perspectives we gain as we experience life.. This song has become one of her most recognizable works, with its poetic reflections on how our perspectives change as we gain life experience. I’m sitting in the dining room on our hilltop…
The Big Sleep is a classic noir detective novel written by Raymond Chandler, first published in 1939. I read the novel in 1974 when taking a literature course to hang out with a girl I was dating. It was the first novel to feature Chandler’s iconic private detective character Philip Marlowe. The story follows Marlowe as he’s hired by the elderly General Sternwood to deal with a blackmailer named Arthur Geiger who’s targeting the general’s…
Every morning, our routine is that Kim and I sit across from each other in the living room between 6:30 – 8:30am. The time is never exactly the same, but the venue is consistent and the activity is pretty much the same. Everybody has their morning time and this is ours. It is a very pleasant time for both of us. Kim spends her time reading the news on her iPhone and doing her full…
The bagel has a rich and complex history that spans centuries and multiple countries. While its exact origins are debated, bagels are believed to have emerged in Jewish communities in Poland, though they have connections to earlier ring-shaped breads from other cultures. Some food historians trace the bagel’s ancestry back to the Arabic world. The earliest known mention of a boiled-then-baked ring-shaped bread can be found in a 13th-century Syrian cookbook, where they were referred…