Word As I have mentioned in previous posts, I am working on and have now mostly finished a book on the twenty-five years of motorcycling I have done with my group, called American Flyers Motorcycle Club (AFMC). It is quite the magnum opus with 374 pages, 104,000 words 183 photographs or images and one long chart of our 60 rides over those years. I am writing this for my fellow members and me as a…
Kublai Khan and Citizen Kane I’ve had quite a weekend. One day was totally dedicated to my kids and grandkids. They wanted to check out the American Dream, which is the newest metro-area attraction brought to you by the people who brought the Mall of America to Minnesota. That’s a family called the Ghermezian’s, and they bought the old Xanadu project that got mothballed in the 90’s. Xanadu was intended to parlay a location near…
Compiling Life In May we have the Silver Anniversary Ride of my motorcycle club. I founded the group with four others and we have had about sixty rides over those twenty-five years. Not everyone has made every ride, and members have come and gone, but there is a core group that still rides and a few others that no longer ride, but like to gather with us nonetheless. By my count we have had 80…
Let’s Get Physical With the move to San Diego there are many tasks and transitions needed to make everything flow smoothly. Kim and I have the good fortune to be in good health. I am in surprisingly good health given my size and my ongoing lifestyle choices. My family and I joke about how 23&Me designates me as being predisposed to be a performance athlete. I care little about that, but I certainly do prefer…
Il Brigante My son Thomas and I had dinner tonight at a favorite restaurant that was nearby the condo I owned and lived in for ten years. That was from when Thomas was nine until nineteen years old. It was the home he spent time with me from when he was in fourth grade at Little Red until he was a freshman at Big Red. Compare that to my older children. My oldest never lived…
The Dolomites In 1969 I was living in Rome, Italy and there were only a few things I was about. Everyone went to school so while I was a good student there was nothing very differentiating about that. I had a diplomatic card, but enough other kids had parents either at the embassies or the UN agencies, that that wasn’t so different. And about all that was good for was avoiding traffic tickets (despite parental…
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…