The Pain of the Number Last summer, when I knew I would be moving out to San Diego, I reached out to several schools in the area that had graduate business programs to see if there was any interest in my credentials as a ten-year-member of the faculty at Cornell’s business school and a forty-five year Wall Street business manager. The folks at the University of San Diego showed interest and I went at the…
What Are We Fighting For In August, 1969 I was fifteen and living in Rome, Italy getting ready to enter my junior year at Notre Dame International Prep. As we all know, junior year is the critical transcript year for a kid wanting to go to college. For a kid living overseas and wanting to finally go back to the states to do what he had always expected to do, it was not lost on…
Cactus Flowers Many years ago (almost thirty) I was a banker with an office on Park Avenue. In fact, I had a corner office facing in the preferred Southeastern direction so that I had a lovely view down towards the Beaux-Arts Helmsley Building (what used to called the New York Central Building) that frames the visual end of midtown as Park Avenue traffic goes through regal archways in the building’s base to circumnavigate the old…
The Mystery of San Pasqual This morning I got sucked into a debate that I would rationally generally avoid. I have joined Next Door, which is an app for local communities allowing people in the same neighborhood who might not know each other to share important information and, presumably, operate more like a real community. I mostly ignore or only lightly notice the neighborhood postings on Next Door since they are mostly about lost dogs…
Getting Educated Allow me to begin by declaring that I am as imperfectly formed as any other human being on the face of the earth. I like to think of myself as enlightened and evolved, but let’s face it, we are all riddled with flaws including the flaw of self-professing our “not worthy” outlooks exactly like this very sentence. How’s that for calling it in on my own position? But one of the things we…
Homeward Bound My hone out here in San Diego got its name from my favorite movie. I used to have mixed feelings about naming my homes because it seemed pretentious and very egotistical. But then I came to make my peace with the issue on the theory that these homes were all about family to me and the ability to gather with them and lend them to them and even host my close friends. So…
This Little Piggy Stayed Home Today, like most days, I called up Jeff to see what was going on in his life. I am in the habit of calling Jeff every day for several reasons. First of all, he’s one of the few men of my age that I know around here, second, he is generally my go-to guy for stuff around the house because he knows the house and he is generally a font…
The Great Energy Mystery As I have explained, my day job is building a company involved in scientific R&D to develop an efficient green hydrogen synthesis system using the latest in proton-conducting ceramics. I like joking that what “Plastics” was to The Graduate and what Silicon is to the Bay Area and electronics, ceramics will be to the new Millennium. Its quite flippant of me as a non-scientist to say this, but if something that…
I Am Not an Animal! Yesterday I told the story of Jerry Stiller and his casting in the co-leading role in my story made into an HBO anthology of subway stories. The tale of the production and debut is worth another story. To begin, the story itself was about my days of riding the early morning train into Manhattan to work every day. I was very regular on my inbound schedule and quite irregular on…
Festivus In 1997 the outrageously successful sitcom, Seinfeld, aired it’s 166th episode, the tenth episode of its ninth and final season. I think it is fair to suggest that that timing indicates that Seinfeld was at its peak audience viewership by that time. As with all Seinfeld episodes, there were multiple subplots which came together in the end of the episode with some humorous and mostly intertwined resolution. The episode was called “The Strike” because…