Social Media is a very perplexing arena for me and I find myself thinking about it a lot and pondering its place in the universe. My exposure to it began in 1998 when I invested in a start-up called Six Degrees. The “six degrees of separation” idea comes from a few places. The original concept traces to Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy, who in a 1929 short story called Chains proposed that any two people on…
My stories are organized into six categories that I designate after I’ve written the story and am posting it to my site. I recognize that while I’ve written across all six categories and find that some stories fit neatly into those buckets, I suspect that if I were to redo the blog, i would change and probably expand the categories to better conform with what I actually write about the most. Without trying to construct…
The United States Marine Corps has one of the most storied histories in American military service, spanning over 250 years. The Marines were established in 1775, when the Continental Congress authorized two battalions of Marines to serve as a landing force for the Continental Navy during the Revolutionary War. The first Marines were recruited at Tun Tavern in Philadelphia, a date and place still celebrated in Corps tradition. After the Revolution, the Corps was briefly…
Snake Plissken is the iconic fictional antihero from John Carpenter’s Escape from New York (1981), played by Kurt Russell. He’s a former Special Forces soldier turned criminal, distinguished by his eye patch, gruff demeanor, and complete contempt for authority. The story drops him into a dystopian 1997 Manhattan that’s been walled off as a maximum-security prison, tasked with rescuing the President. Escape from New York is set in a near-future America (that would be the…
In 1983 I was asked to launch a futures and options subsidiary for my bank, Bankers Trust. Don’t stop reading because you think I am using this as a launchpad for another boring discussion of derivative products and how I was the Robert Oppenheimer of banking who helped create the atomic bomb of the financial world. This little futures and options subsidiary was intentionally a separate legal entity that would have its own subsidiaries to…
In 1963 I was nine years old and my mother, at the age of 47, was getting her Doctorate at the University of Wisconsin in the capital city of Madison (Go Badgers!). We were living on her fellowship of $3,000 (that’s per year, not per month). She had rented a little house in a typical suburban development that must have had about 200 little crackerboxes of the sort you learned to draw when you were…
I was literally born into the Cuban Revolution. My mother was working in Venezuela for the Rockefeller Foundation, my parents met and married in Caracas, and any and all travel back and forth to the United States took place through the Pan Am hub in Havana. The Cuban Revolution began in 1953, with Fidel Castro’s attack on the Moncada Barracks on July 26, 1953. By my birth math, I was three months in utero at…
This morning I’m heading out for a motorcycle ride to go out into the eastern ranch country near Julian. We will drive out through Valley Center, probably the reddest part of the county, then through the various Indian reservations, which I find always hard to divine in terms of their degree of social consciousness (do they care more about helping their poor and downtrodden or about their casino revenues that buy them all shiny new…
I’ve been using the word squidgy a lot lately. I didn’t think it was a real word, but apparently the Cambridge English dictionary disagrees and says it is, indeed, a real word. It means “soft and wet and changing shape easily when pressed” and it seems to be most often used in relation to bread that has been not quite fully baked and has a squidgy center. What’s interesting about that is that it is…
I have always believed that living somewhere with broad, expansive views makes a huge difference. Don’t get me wrong, intimate and beautiful courtyards and gardens can be lovely and very inspiring without the benefit of panoramic distances, but nothing beats the long view, whether of some water scene overlooking an ocean or lake or some distant mountains majesty. When shopping for a home to which to ultimately retire in 2011, Kim and I (joined by…