The Return of the Dirty Feet When I moved out here to California in 2020, I assumed I would be wearing shorts year-round. It sure started out that way, but by November I was feeling like long pants were still an important part of my wardrobe. That whole time when I wore shorts, I wore Crocs on my feet every day. Over that period of time I increasingly spent my time working in the gardens.…
Unlinking LinkedIn is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. For me, that means that it really didn’t exist as much of an aid to my career, either as a source for employees or as a source for employment. These days, the business world uses LinkedIn as one of its foundational services and I imagine a goodly proportion of career-minded people use it in either direction on a daily basis. I’ve been on LinkedIn since the…
Captain America Today I stopped by the local BMW Motorcycle store in Escondido. I am planning out my upcoming rides and feel I need a few pieces of on-bike luggage. This is less about the trip we have planned to Moab in May and more about the trip In June and July back east. The plan is to take the motorcycle trailer back to Ithaca to bring back some personal effects from Homeward Bound, so…
Jettisoning Junk This summer when I travel to the old homestead in Ithaca, which I even call Homeward Bound, I will take on the task of depersonalizing the house of all the memorabilia that I will want to keep once the University takes over the house for good at the end of the year. Several people have called this the end of an era and they are not wrong in characterizing it as such, but…
The Jungle of My Mind My readers have often heard me harp about my distaste for the tropics. I lived six of my first seven years in the tropics of Venezuela and Costa Rica and it has left an indelible mark. There are few places I would rather not find myself stranded in than a dense dark jungle. I think its a combination of the humidity-driven discomfort and the truly creepy crawly things that thrive…
One Stolen Accordion There is a social media site that I now connect with that throws me bits and pieces about local goings on. It’s called Nextdoor and it has spread in it’s twelve-year existence to encompassing 116,000 local areas, serving over ten million members. That is still a relatively small fraction of the population, but if we assume it is more popular in non-urban settings, that is quite a lot of users. The U.S.…
The Boys in the Boat All things pass. But sometimes they return, even if for brief moments. That may be the best definition of eternity any of us can ever achieve. This morning I was at JFK staying at the TWA Hotel, which I wrote about. I was reminded of John F. Kennedy and Howard Hughes. That was their glimmer of eternity as they sparked memories in one Baby Boomer’s brain and found their way…
Wild Animals I am surrounded by wild animals. First among them are Charlotte and Evelyn. Those are my two granddaughters, who are spending the week with us here on the hilltop. They are reasonably well-mannered wild animals, but wild animals nonetheless. What makes them wild is that they are visceral, unpredictable and do not follow any particular convention with which I am familiar. They don’t bite or present any particular danger to me, but neither…
The Earth as Property I have written about the awareness that has come to me recently about the increasing importance of ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) issues in managing corporations and, for that matter, all manner of investments. That awareness came prior to my formulating the syllabus for this semester’s course in Law, Policy & Ethics, so I added two full class sessions to focus on the policy and ethical issues of ESG in today’s…
Things Fall Apart Back when Cornell was choosing a book for all incoming freshmen (and the entire rest of the Cornell community) to read each year, they selected Chinua Achebe’s 1958 African classic about pre-Colonial Nigeria called Things Fall Apart. The novel tells a story of Okonkwo, a local village wrestling champion as he deals with the advent of white colonialism and Christianity into Africa and how that affects his family, village social fabric and…