Downtown Guy Billy Joel forever owns the term Downtown Guy from his song Uptown Girl, which many Billy Joel aficionados consider one of his less great and more bubble gum songs. I was more of a fan of it than others, but no one has ever accused me of having refined taste in music. At least they haven’t once they find out I’m a big Meatloaf fan. So it is with some apology…
Phi Sig Ep In the fall of 1971, those of us on the second floor, north wing of University Halls #4 had an unusually strong degree of camaraderie. We were not close at all to those people on the south wing and only connected to those on the west wing via the Resident Advisor Greg and his perfect blonde girlfriend, Louise. The RA on our wing was Wiley and while we didn’t know his…
Wake Up, Maggie, I Think I Got Something to Say to You It was late September, 1978 and Steve really thought he should be back at school. He could collect his books and get on back to school. Or steal his daddy’s cue and make a living out of playing pool. Or find himself a rock ‘n’ roll band that needed a helping hand. If that reminds you of Rod Stewart, it’s not coincidental. …
The Etagere Back in 1990 I was sent to Gulag Toronto. That’s what I called my two-year tour of duty as CEO of BT Bank of Canada. I was in exile by my firm for having presided over a sin of omission (as opposed to a sin of commission) wherein a secondary decision that fell under my command was faced with a large credit loss. It was a collateralized cotton loan to a renowned…
Power Sleeping The world talks about sleeping as much as any bodily function. It is clearly one of the basic necessities of life and yet few other functions enjoy such a broad range of discretion, habit and variability. The swaddling of babies is a subject that has been much studied by child development specialists. It turns out that people from northern climes swaddle their babies very tightly and those from southern climes swaddle them very…
Catch Me If You Can In 1970 I was Treasurer of the senior class at Norte Dame International Preparatory School in Rome, Italy. This had been my school for three years and despite being a reasonably big fish in a very small pond (our class was a whopping 54-strong), I was what was called a “Day-dog” rather than a boarder. In those days of the late 60’s most of the multinational American, Canadian and British…
The Zoo Today I attended the third annual “Power to Ammonia” conference here in Rotterdam. You have to love the tag line. As a child of the sixties, I can hear John Lennon singing “Power to the People”, followed by Jefferson Airplane and their Volunteers. “Got a revolution!” This was no difference, except it’s a different kind of revolution. We all wore bright green lanyards around our necks because what this conference is all about…
Sleeping is for Kids I’m on yet another intercontinental flight tonight. And guess what I’m doing? That’s right, I’m not sleeping. I am on a Delta Boeing 767-300 that departed JFK at 4:28 pm and is landing at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam at 5:20 am local time. That’s a 6:39 minute flight covering 3,214 miles. I’m in seat 2A in business class. There are no first class seats. Only Emirates and Singapore and the like…
An Angry Man Back in 1987, over thirty years ago, I had a young man working for me who was very well-liked by everyone. He was a Midwesterner who was smart and shrewd, but generally mild-mannered. He had been a football player at a Division II school, and while tall and lean, he was also considered by everyone to be a strong athlete. In the two years he had worked for me, I had not…
A Pang of Creativity I just saw something that knocked my socks off and that only happens occasionally. After 6+ years of working on the New York Wheel and trying to marshal all the creative energy I could muster from the people who build things like that, I got involved with a similar project in Dallas that wanted to do the same thing. I spent a fair bit of time episodically on the project…