Your Mother’s on the Roof Lennie Watts is staying with us for a week in San Diego. He and Kim are heading up to Los Angeles tonight for two days supposedly for work, but I know its mostly so Lennie can go to Disneyland for two days. There will be a meeting with a fellow Singnasium board member in L.A., but Lennie’s not kidding me. He’s a Disneyholic who can’t get enough of the teacups.…
Anonymity I am undecided about the concept of anonymity. Does it help to stay in the shadows? Is it humility in the best sense of the word? Or is it the ultimate hubris of thinking you are above the need for recognition? Is anonymity cowardly or brave in the most selfless way? Does privacy really matter as much as all the notices sent to us imply, or is it impossible in this day and age…
Experts to the Rescue I am six week into my latest expert testimony on a pension case and generated by my new Expert Witness Team of Italian/Spanish guys who have played in this field for others and are now launching their own gig. On the first case, which started in late November, I’ve put in over 41 hours so far. I like the way the team does this in that their billing rate is half…
The Scholar and the Dilettante Yesterday I wrote a piece about Trump’s killing of General Suleimani at the Baghdad Airport. My approach was based on a burning in my gut that said that all Trump succeeded in doing, besides distracting our feeble-most electorate from his impeachment clamor, was to get us into another war in the Middle East. Now that might well have been his plan with the idiotic and self-centered thinking that a war…
War on the Way This weekend, like always, I have the choice of watching the news or a movie. What should I stumble upon flipping the satellite dial, but The Great Escape. Back in ninth grade when I spent a year in boarding school at Hebron Academy, The poster of choice among the young male adolescents was Steve McQueen in his chinos and sweatshirt and on his motorcycle with the Nazi barbed wire fence and…
The Life Aquatic The Life Aquatic Ever since Moonrise Kingdom, I have had my concerns about Wes Anderson, less as a film director and more as a person. In that film I was simply offended by him having a young pre-adolescent girl running around flashing her white underwear. Strangely enough, if he had put her in colored or flowered underwear I would have had less of a problem. To me it was like having a…
The Cheesecake Connection The Cheesecake Connection It’s 2020 and I am working through my self-assigned chores as diligently as I can. I have started on the garage door openers. What can be more suburban than garage door openers? They scream that we live in car country and that we are all about technological convenience. I choose not to call it laziness, and God knows I am lazy, but garage door openers have entered the realm…
Here Comes the Sun Little darling, I feel that ice is slowly melting Little darling, it seems like years since it’s been clear Here comes the sun Here comes the sun, and I say It’s all right – The Beatles, Abbey Road, 1969 (50 years ago) Out here in California I wake up every day to the sunrise over Mt. Palomar to the East. It’s a perfect setting for my morning joint-soothing dip into the…
Car Culture Do you remember American Graffiti with Ron Howard, Richard Dreyfus and Harrison Ford? It was 29-year-old George Lucas’ breakout directorial and screenwriting debut. It was set in 1962 Modesto, California. That feels perfectly normal and to be expected for this American coming-of-age classic, except that it was only filmed a decade after the time it was set, which makes me scratch my head about how Lucas and all of us could get so…
The Truth About Duluth Ever since I gave up on wearing tidy whiteys, which must now be over thirty years ago, I have been in search of the perfect underwear. That may sound like a mundane quest or one that should never have been in play, but the technology of clothing and materials has come a long way. We were all raised to think that only cotton could keep you comfortable, and that keeping it…