Getting Ready for the Big One After battling the war of the worlds of ants this summer, the weather seems to have broken to a more pleasant temperature zone with the lows overnight in the low 50’s and the highs reaching up to the low 80’s. That is now my kind of weather for a number of reasons. It used to be an issue of pure bodily comfort, but now I recognize it as an…
Wearing Our Underwear on the Outside Woody Allen’s fifth movie was made in 1971, the year I graduated from high school, left Rome to work at Case Western Reserve University for the summer and eventually wound up bumming a ride to Ithaca to start Cornell fifty years ago. Can you name Woody’s first four movies? His first three (What’s Up Pussycat?, What’s Up Tiger Lily? and Casino Royale) didn’t really star Woody, but as the…
Busy Day I have three major work activities that occupy my days…except when they don’t. I have some days when nothing at all is going on. But then there are days like today that make up for all that free time. Today I started my day with a two hour conference call with my European (Sicily and Lisbon) expert witness partners. We went over my final response to a rebuttal of my rebuttal on a…
Long Way Up Ten years ago Kim gave me a Christmas gift of the DVDs of Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman riding their BMW GSAs around the world. First there was Long Way Round (2004), taking the Silk Road from Europe through the Far East, and then there was Long Way Down (2007), from the Highlands of Scotland to the tip of South Africa. I am a motorcycle aficionado to the max and I like…
Breathing is Overrated I have recently come to recognize that you have to breathe to stay alive. That may strike you as an obvious statement, but I think it deserves some reflection. Doesn’t it strike you as a little strange that Mother Nature endowed us with this powerful cerebellum that’s capable of relatively advance reasoning. It’s capable of all sorts of great things. It can invent important breakthrough stuff. It can conjure great and elaborate…
The One Before All Zeros I am sitting in a parking lot in San Diego. Now let’s start with an important observation, parking lots in San Diego are one helluva lot nicer than parking lots in most parts of the country. This is not the first time that I have noticed this, but now I am a resident of San Diego, so I look at it through renewed eyes. I have been a permanent resident…
Flea, Fly, Flu I recall that when Thomas, my youngest was a child in his early school years he needed to recite a \poem for school. The poem could be of his choosing and, like any kid, he wanted to find as short a poem as he could. The world’s shortest poem is supposedly called Fleas and it goes: Adam Had ‘em I didn’t like the implications and the contraction, so I encouraged him to…
Bearing Witness Tonight my niece’s husband and two children came over for dinner. We haven’t seen them all year thanks to concerns about their kids’ and our COVID vulnerability (their kids have CF and we have old age). It all came off without any hitches and their daughter Mila was able to test out our new Moonstruck Madness games area. She pretty much played all the available games; mini-golf, bocce, disc golf, horseshoes and cornhole.…
On Art and Effort My friend Steve just posted a piece he titled In Praise of Talent, and it was about his experiences and reactions to the arts of writing and photography, particularly as they relate to the journalistic endeavors he has pursued through his life. He expressed annoyance at attribution to the tools of the trade (particularly in photography, since I doubt anyone would ever accuse a writer of having used his pencil, pen,…
My Aching Back About ten days ago I was going into my hot tub in the middle of the afternoon. That was when the weather was particularly hot and I was using the spa to cool off. Heat is such a relative thing. In the middle of winter, ninety degrees in a hot tub feels almost cold and you need to crank it up to 100 to be soothed. But in the summer, ninety degrees…