Our Gypsy Blood I am somewhere in season five of following the travails of Thomas Shelby and his family of Peaky Blinders. I recognize that I am a full decade behind in finding fascination in this series, but I am enjoying it nonetheless. The story covers the fifteen years after WWI in Birmingham, England and follows the rise of a larcenous and unscrupulous family as they work their way through the roaring twenties dealing with…
The Framers’ View I just saw Eric Holder, the ex-Attorney General under Barack Obama, responding to a question about all of the Donald Trump indictments and pending legal actions. That is the sort of question that is being asked of many many people these days, whether they are ex-government officials or just cable news pundits. One of the things that we have all been thinking about for the past six or seven years is the…
The Unholy Land Kim and I have traveled to Israel fairly extensively. It is certainly a fascinating ancient place with lots and lots of human cultural history and religious significance to at least three major religions representing the ideology of a majority of the world (57% by best estimates). Being one of the crossroad spots of human evolution, it is claimed as sacred by many and has been fought over for millennia by multiple constituencies.…
The Day the Earth Stood Still I’m not that much on science fiction in my movie-going preferences, but there are some films that you can’t help but remember. One of the most famous commands in the history of film, one that is right up there with “Leave the gun, take the cannoli”, is that 1951 SciFi memento, “Klaatu Barada Nikto” that Patricia Neal is supposed to say to Gort, the robot with the power to…
The Natural World I just finished reading a very long article in National Geographic that caught my eye, then caught my fancy and finally ensnared my right-side brain’s imaginative component. I am a big title person when it comes to storytelling and this article had a very descriptive, but really unimaginative title. It rambled on about going inside the “factory of the world” (that would be China), and finding that there are still corners that…
Rejection and Regret You know I am an eternal optimist and while some might think that is either naive or tactically artificial (like Donald Trump claiming to always be a winner and never a loser), I actually believe that my system creates excess serotonin and that seems to be something that happens overnight. I am serious about that, why else would I be such a difficult and cranky person at night (never engage me in…
The Distant Ocean When service people come to this house of ours on the hilltop, as one HVAC specialist did just yesterday, they invariably stand and look out at our views, especially towards the ocean, and comment on what a great view we have. We do have a great view and both Kim and I do not take it for granted. On almost every day, one of us will comment to the other about the…
Crystal Clarity I want some new laws of thermodynamics. Thermo means relating to heat and dynamics relating to the forces of change within a system or process. If we don’t break down that term like that, we get mired in the world of arcane physics and get dragged into the realm of energy conservation and things like entropy, which are all about randomness and uncertainty. The first two laws of thermodynamics were promulgated in the…
Mission Creep Ever since human beings have gathered together with enough organization to marshal an army, they have succumbed to the temptation of allowing their military objectives to gradually shift and circumstantially over-commit to any manner of unanticipated objectives. But it wasn’t until the 1990’s in Somalia and the Blackhawk Down problems in Mogadishu that some NYT or WAPO journalist came up with a catchy term to explain what was turning into U.S. State Department…
Dizzy Disney Today Kim takes daughter Carolyn, her husband John, granddaughters Charlotte and Evelyn, as well as sister-in-law Lisa to Disneyland. Carolyn and her family will stay for three days while Kim and Lisa return after one day of Disney overdose. Carolyn and her family are addicted to Disney as much as anyone can be. She and John got engaged at Disney World and they have each spent milestone birthdays there (she at 30 and…