Leaving Las Vegas In 1995, Nicholas Cage portrayed an alcoholic suicidal screenwriter who chooses to drink himself to death in the city where secrets go to die. I like Nicholas Cage as an actor, but I really like Elisabeth Shue as an actress and found her portrayal of Cage’s prostitute girlfriend to be riveting. I’ve been a fan of Shue since her role as the Valley Girl girlfriend in Karate Kid. And then, between Adventures…
The Sphere We have come to Las Vegas to see the new extravaganza called The Sphere, brought to us by James Dolan, the owner of Madison Square Garden, Radio City Music Hall and much more. I figure that anything worth putting $2.3 billion into to change the attractions landscape is worth a look. So, I gathered some enthusiasm for an excursion from San Diego by convincing Mike and Melisa to join me and Kim for…
The Full Spectrum I have written before about my old problem’s with Verizon and AT&T and trying to cancel services that these companies simply don’t want to cancel. They seem to have a business model predicated less on keeping customers happy than on making sure that it is as hard as humanly possible to cancel their service and thus stop paying them their monthly tariff. Usually, after holding incessantly on the phone for a representative,…
Corpo Diplomatico I am again watching a Ben Kingsley movie made in 2018 called Operation Finale about the seizure and extraction from Argentina of Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the final solution deployed by the Germans against the Jews of the Holocaust. Part of the snatch and grab process of getting Eichmann from the point of seizure near his suburban home to the commandos safe house. They transport Eichmann, drugged to near unconsciousness, thin the…
Buying Myself Flowers I spend more time buying myself flowers these days than I probably have my whole life. Most often they are not cut flowers, but rather plantable flowers that are part of my gardening diversions. Last month I planted a whole array of flowers ranging from miniature carnations to marigolds to Shasta daisies in an effort to find things that the bunnies would not eat and that would therefore keep the Betty Garden…
Me and the Military As I have explained before, my age places me in between major American wars and just beyond the reach of the draft. I grew up with WWII on the brain and that has never left me, as both Prime and Netflix long ago figured out by way of their movie selections for me. I spent my high school and college years thinking about and worrying about military conscription and the war…
The Winds of War The year I graduated from high school, 1971, Herman Wouk published his second novel about WWII. His first novel, which won the Pulitzer Prize, was The Caine Mutiny which was made into that great movie staring Humphrey Bogart with Captain Queeg rolling ball bearings in his trembling hand during a court martial trial of his First Mate. Wouk was clearly a great storyteller, but he was also a great fictional historian…
Gray Grey Day Here in America, we live our lives for the most part in the gray, much less so than the grey. Do you know the difference? I didn’t until I Googled it and found out that it is one of the most commonly queried words in the English language because both spellings look right to us. The only difference between the two, which are both very commonly used, is that gray appears more…
Trump on Stage Today’s news cycle has been dominated by the civil trial in New York City of Donald Trump and the Trump Organization. Today was the day when the prosecution called Trump to the stand, having already heard from his co-defendants Don Jr. and Eric last week and before the court hears from his daughter Ivanka. It was quite a shit show from the sound of it. I say the sound of it because…
Party Hard When we first moved out here four years ago, I was surprised that Kim didn’t want to engage with some form of singing or musical theater group. It took her a while, but eventually she found a choral group called Encore that she decided to audition to join. As with all things about singing, Kim is very unassuming and she declared after her audition that she was not at all sure that she…