Urban Gentility I am in the least friendly place of my life when it comes to Cornell University. The wounds of my ouster from my 25-year home on the edge of campus in Ithaca have pretty much faded, even though I get the occasional blast from the past. Recently I heard that my long-time neighbor and friend with the unique name of Clover Drinkwater has gotten crosswise with the current inhabitants due to an AirBnB…
Time Travel I have never been a fan of movies that deal with the issue of time travel. The old standard of H.G. Well’s The Time Machine was OK and I must admit I enjoyed the Back to the Future series, but by the time The Terminator came around, I found it was all getting too hard to suspend disbelief. The one that really pushed me over the edge was The Curious Case of Benjamin…
Doomsday I ran a global private banking business for six years and one of the big specialties was the whole trust and estates practice. In those days we were one of the three big trust banks in the U.S. and we had partnered with the prestigious “white shoe” law firm of White & Case for all of our trust and estates work like the drafting of wills and all the more complex elements of putting…
The Price for Being American As someone who grew up in my youth in Latin America, I always knew there was a price to being an American. We were the “Ugly Americans” in the region, which I took to mean that besides being crass and perhaps too uncaring, we were also more prosperous and not ashamed to display that. When I moved to Italy during my high school days, there was a lingering taint of…
Claiming Casualty I recently wrote about the ethical dilemma I face with regard to my new television, which got somehow gouged on its main 85” screen in two small spots. I suppose I could go forward and just not worry about the damage since it doesn’t completely disrupt my viewing pleasure, but it is an expensive new TV and I would rather it be put right, so I am going down the path to try…
Losing a Friend Friends drift into and out of our lives all the time. I, in particular, am very aware of this phenomenon since I spent most of my early life moving from one locale to another as a trailing child to a globetrotting mother. My early years were spent in the tropics of Venezuela and Costa Rica with an interregnum in such different places as Santa Monica and Ithaca. That more or less took…
Heading to Hollywood As Kim and I stumble our way into the holidays, we listen to more than our share of Christmas music on the various Sirius holiday channels and watch more than our share of holiday movies. I have little use for the Hallmark holiday movies that Kim so very much loves, but give me a regular holiday movie and I’m very happy. We maintain our list of top classics like White Christmas, It’s…
The Comfort of Analysis In the expert witness business there are four basic functions that one must be able to handle. The first involves reading large quantities of evidence, testimony and reports. I have never been a particularly fast reader. I didn’t get glasses until I was in fourth grade. For some reason, my mother didn’t notice my vision deficiency until it was quite debilitating in school. I just could not see what was on…
Everyday Ethics For the first time in several years, I am not teaching ethics this semester. In fact, I’m not teaching at all and may have hung up my teaching spurs for life at this point. What I remind myself is that teaching ethics was much harder than I ever thought it would be. That is much like the degree of difficulty we all face each and every day with ethical dilemmas that present themselves…
Automotivation When I turned sixteen I lived in Rome, Italy and all I cared about mechanically were motorcycles. I was on my third off of four high school motorcycles (a Gilera 125) and cars were an afterthought. What motivated me at that age was two-wheeled vehicles with names like Gilera, Triumph, Laverda, Moto Guzzi and Ducati. When I was applying to colleges, one of the biggest reasons I liked Stanford was that as a freshman…