Shooting the Moon When I was a kid (I’m not sure I have a handle on exactly when), I was given a game called Shooting the Moon. It was one of these wooden table games of coordination that families like to have around during the holidays to keep family members amused in good, healthy activities that help them stay away from mind-numbing TV watching. There must be people out there who make these games up…
Holiday Winds I have a raft of holiday movies that are important to me year after year. I started this “collection” during my last year in college and attribute it all to my pal Mike Parkinson for some reason. I don’t actually remember ever watching Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye in White Christmas with Mike, but that’s the movie that started it all for me. I remember going to a long-since defunct restaurant called Turbacks…
Playing Chicken As the seasons change and cooler weather is starting to get interspersed with the normally warm days, my back hillside work is grinding to a halt. It is leaving a definite gap in my daily activities which I am not so ready to abandon just yet. Well, that led to my buying an eight-foot tall chicken. Sounds logical, right? It did to me anyway and I ordered up this huge metal sculpture for…
The Next Generation They say now that humans first appeared on earth some 300,000 years ago. They seem to have “scientifically” estimated that Adam and Eve came on the scene about 150,000 years ago (I have no idea how that calculation is even possible). The last ice age started about 12,000 years ago right after a comet of significant proportions hit the earth about 1,000 years prior. They say this was an extinction-level event that…
Alternative Facts Today I got an email from my Department Chair (in Finance) at University of San Diego. He asked me if I would be willing to add a half of a course to my Spring 2022 schedule. It seems there is a need in the Masters of Finance program for someone to teach one half of a short course on Alternatives. There is an existing professor of real estate finance who will teach half…
Hazy and Lazy I make no apologies for it. I have had a lazy streak in me my whole life. I tend to think it is caused by my not inconsiderable bulk and Newton’s First Law of Motion that a body in motion tends to stay in motion and a body at rest tends to stay at rest. And the bigger the body, the more energy it takes to keep it in motion and once…
The End of the Blockchain My personal history with blockchain began in 2014 when I was the Chairman of a new venture capital company called Green Visor Capital. It was started by a fellow Cornell MBA named Simon Yoo and I agreed to help him launch by signing on as a General Partner and, indeed, by serving as its first Chairman. That situation existed for about a year and then I passed the title over…
Kneeding Comfort When my kids were younger they fell into two categories. Carolyn and Thomas were forever rambunctiously scraping their knees and existing in a somewhat constant state of scabbed kneecaps from their falling. Roger, on the other knee, was s different sort of child. He was the child that at the age of one crawled to edge of the blanket on the lawn, touched the wet grass and recoiled back to the safety of…
Uninsurable Kim is running around the house singing Uninsurable to the tune of Unforgettable by Nat King Cole. I got a notice yesterday from my long-time insurer, Chubb, who advised me that they will not be renewing my homeowners insurance coverage in 2022 due to the California wildfire issue. It seems that they have struck some sort of reinsurance deal that precludes them for renewing us hard-case daredevil Californians who choose to live in harm’s…
Autobiography We went to go see Kenneth Branagh’s new film, Belfast. It chronicles the youth of a Protestant boy growing up during the strife of the religiously war-torn Irish city. The message is quite stark and clear, growing up amidst religious strife is no fun. The young boy is presumably Branagh at about age nine. His father and mother are Belfast natives who live on a street near where they were raised in working-class Belfast.…