Life is Beautiful Do you remember the 1997 Italian film by Roberto Benigni by the same name? You should, it was a Best Picture nominee and won Best Foreign Film and Best Actor for Benigni, who played the happy-go-lucky Guido, who guides his little son through the horrors of Nazi concentration camp life by making a game of it all. It is a poignant, funny, but ultimately sad movie that has a powerful and…
Expert Witness Back in 2012 I was recruited as an expert witness by a law firm trying a case about securities lending on behalf of a foreign pension fund. The suit was against a big bank that acted as the fiduciary for the pension fund. It was a fascinating case that involved a classically innocent and naive widows and orphan’s operation getting led by the hand down the primrose path of global alternative investments. …
A Bridge Over Troubled Waters In the Spring of 1972, I had successfully negotiated my freshman year at Cornell. That year had been eventful in that I had transferred from the Engineering School to the College of Arts and Sciences. I had pulled that off on my own since my mother’s approach to child rearing was that you were on your own at seventeen once in college. No one challenged me on the move…
Indian Giving One of my favorite possessions is a stone and copper outdoor statue of a reclining Socrates. This is a life-sized Socrates, who’s draped toga is a rough field stone that is shaped just so, to look like a reclined flowing robe. Nature crafted it thus and caught the eye of the artist. The artist attached a head, arms and feet made of copper and adding the element of realism to the subtle…
Just Another Monday Morning Labor Day 2019 has little labor in store for me. I am up early, as usual, only a bit earlier since I was exceedingly tired last night and hit the hay by 9:30pm since I had Nyquiled myself into a stupor. It takes a lot of tired to cause me to be unable to write and I had a sufficient dose to do the trick. I still can’t tell if I’m…
Looking Shrewd One of the things I have learned in doing business in the Middle East is that shrewdness is a highly prized attribute. I have worked for and with Israelis. I have worked with and for Saudis. I have worked for (decidedly not with) a big-time Uzbek. I heard it said by one of these groups and maybe all of them that the greatest praise you can give a man is to tell him…
Summer’s End No matter who you are, in the United States we all know summer starts on Memorial Day and ends on Labor Day. And the July 4th holiday is more or less mid-summer. That’s how we roll in the good old US of A. It doesn’t matter that colleges end in early May, and public schools end in late June. Most colleges start in late August, but at least most public schools start…
Loving New York In 1964 I made my first trip to New York City. I may have been here before that but at age ten I can remember the visit with my mother and sisters on a visit from our home in Middleton, Wisconsin. We drove there in our white Chrysler New Yorker, strangely enough. We went to see the World’s Fair, which proved to be especially significant to my view of the future…
The Eisenhower Cohort General Dwight David Eisenhower (a.k.a. Ike) was Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Forces throughout its existence. That is when we all know he guided the efforts of Operation Overlord 75 years ago and pushed for the reclamation of continental Europe from the clutches of the fascist Nazi war machine. The books and stories that recount those daring days are plentiful and we have almost all seen some version of the…
Teaching to Learn I am way too impressionable. Not like Trump, who adopts whatever posture he has been advised to consider by the latest person to talk to him. But when I hear or read something that strikes me as valid, I take it to heart and most importantly, I try and act on it. Yesterday, my wife and I were talking about how to keep track of things we need to do. She likes…