The Isle of Staaten It’s been about a year since Kim and I moved back to Manhattan after a three-year stint living on Staten Island. I think about it often since it was an unusual place to move (there was a very particular reason for it) and an unusual place to live. I have an office that stares out to New York Harbor and watches the Staten Island Ferry go back and forth to…
The Raid on Entebbe Entebbe juts out into Lake Victoria and is the main airport for Uganda. The only reason any of us know the name is because of the 1976 Arab-German hijacking of an Air France airliner enroute from Tel Aviv to Paris. It was less about the fact that the terrorists landed at Entebbe and sought sanctuary from Idi Amin, than it was about the 100 Israeli commandos that executed a near-flawless and…
Spring Break This is Easter Week and I guess that for much of the world, this is a good week for a vacation. I find it a funny time to take a vacation. I also understand that for people with kids in school, you take your vacations when your kids’ school holidays are planned. Both of my ex-wives were quite rigid on the subject of taking kids out of school to take family vacations. For…
Three Shawermas to Go The Middle East is my kinda place. I used to go twice a year for two weeks at a go. Sometimes I would get a day off (Fridays, the holy day for Muslims) and sometimes I skittle up to someplace like Istanbul where they seem to care more about keeping to a Western workweek schedule than taking off their Sabbath. I never went in summer and I was always careful…
Playing the Waiting Game This weekend I learned of the passing of an old colleague from Bankers Trust. He had been in hospice and I had tried to go see him several weeks ago, but was told by the family that he had faded too far by then. I jumped on the visit the day I returned from a trip, having heard he was in hospice when I left for the trip. I literally chose…
Tesla Magic My brother-in-law is all about leading-edge technology. He bent my ear for years about an electric car. So, a few years ago I decided to buy a Tesla X after sitting in one and finding it quite comfortable for me. The X is the Tesla version of an SUV even though it looks like an SUV-light. I got the regular 75D model since the quickness and top speed were more than enough for…
Science and Other Flights of Fancy In 1964, at the age of ten, Chris almost burned his family’s house to the ground. The fault lay in the science. Luckily, the damage was limited to the downstairs bedroom closet and it’s surrounding area. That was lucky because this was an expanded log cabin from about 1850 (the oldest home in the neighborhood). It was old enough and dry enough, being all wood, to have gone up…
Smoke On! Several years ago I went to an unusual sporting event, an aerial race around New York Harbor. These were air races of souped-up single-prop planes that were reminiscent of WWII fighter planes (I am reminded of that scene from Empire of the Sun when a young war-torn Christian Bale points at a passing American fighter-bomber and says, “P-51, Cadillac of the sky!”). Red Bull was promoting the event and it involved taking a…
Life on the Tarmac Tarmac is a great word. It connotes so much more than macadam or asphalt. Tarmac says you are going places. It has an exotic nature to it that implies that something is about to happen and that its likely to be something meaningful. If you are stuck on the runway or idling on the asphalt, that sounds bad and wasteful. But is you are poised on the tarmac, you are about…
My Amigo Mike In 1971 I transitioned from high school to college by way of a summer in Cleveland. That was the summer the Cuyahoga River caught fire and the summer I learned how to fend for myself. I arrived in Cleveland from Rome, Italy, where I had lived for three years, skipping over the all-important Woodstock to Kent State years of American life. I promptly rented a room in a fraternity house on the…