The House of the Rising Sun My sleep patterns leave a lot to be desired. I am blessed at the age of 67 to be without significant maladies. I take medication for high blood pressure, but they seem to work well in keeping me at a BP level that is normal and apparently without major health complications. I do not suffer from reflux or any of the other annoying gastrointestinal problems that often plague aging…
Back Up the Truck For the forty-five years of my Wall Street career the expression to “back up the truck” refers to something a guy by the name of Tom Pope said to me. Tom had grown up in the International Department of our bank in the first half of the 1970’s. That was when the domestic banking market was in its decline due to large loan losses on loans to REITs that had gone…
Stupid is as Stupid Does In 2020 we were scheduled to go to Spain and Portugal (Barcelona to Porto) for a motorcycle trip in August. Needless to say, by the middle of Spring everyone was unequivocally concerned enough about COVID to unanimously recognize the wisdom of cancelling the trip. We even went so far as to assuage our troubled motorcycling souls by tentatively planning a “post-Pandemic” trip in February to Patagonia. By the time the…
My Worst Nightmare This morning I decided to go to the Market, our local deli, to get a breakfast burrito to share with Candice and an Asahi Bowl for Kim. When I walked in I immediately saw the glass case with the fresh donuts. There was only one person in front of me in line and I stood my respectful six feet away from him while the counter girl finished her tasks and turned to…
Getting to Know You The house just South of us is now sold, neighbor Mary has moved on to her new home in Denver (we even had dinner with her in Denver a few weeks ago) and the new neighbors are in the process of moving in. Today I saw that they seemed to be around, so Kim and I wandered over through our garden trellis and introduced ourselves. Both the man and the woman…
Quick Like a Bunny When we moved to this hilltop we noticed that when we drove up High Mountain Drive, there was one house on a curve, actually one yard on a curve, where we could always count on seeing one or more rabbits running off, chased by our headlights. We came to calling the anonymous house the Bunny House. Given that it was one of the only homes up on this hill that has…
Dragonfly Louis Comfort Tiffany was not the founder of the iconic jewelry store Tiffany & Co., but was the son of its founder, Charles Lewis Tiffany. What strange family dynamic would have a father with a middle name spelled in a different manner than the given first name of his son? Louis was the first design director of Tiffany & Co., but by that time he was an accomplished artist in several mediums including painting…
Staying Calm I am watching Crimson Tide tonight, that great submarine movie about a nuclear launch crisis in the Pacific. It pits Gene Hackman, the Captain against Denzel Washington, the XO, in a face-to-face confrontation caused by a contrived partial communications situation. The set-up is whether a pre-emptive nuclear launch to gain a tactical warfare advantage is worth launching nuclear weapons in an unclear situation where there may have been an Emergency Action Message (EAM)…
On-Again, Off-Again COVID-19 is the gift that keeps on giving. We are all so very tired of the Pandemic lifestyle that we are all tending to get lax with our safety measures. After more than a year of being diligent with masking and social distancing, we may not be justified in letting down our guard, but we can probably all agree that we understand why it is happening. So far this summer, we have gone…
Riding with Polo One of my favorite branding stories involves the Ralph Lauren Polo brand. In early 2009, I was Chairman and CEO of a company called Africa Israeli, USA. It was the U.S. subsidiary of the Israeli parent of the same name, a company I liken to the General Electric of Israel because it was big and diversified. However, instead of washing machines and jet turbines, Africa Israeli had gone down a path of…