Dr. Mike In August, 1971, fifty-two years ago, I hitchhiked my way from Cleveland, Ohio to Ithaca, New York, a distance of 330 miles. I was traveling from my summer job at Case Western Reserve University to my freshman year matriculation at Cornell University. In those days, freshmen at Cornell mostly lived together in the ghetto of West Campus in what were called the University Halls, a set of six cinderblock three-wing dorms, four stories…
Doodlebugged Since ancient times, man has needed water and yet has for some reason chosen to live where there was none in apparent evidence. I suppose there are lots of good reasons why that might come to pass, but it seems that given the fairly scant number of humans walking the Earth in olden days (supposedly only 5 million souls in 10,000 B.C., when agriculture was invented and more water was needed for that purpose),…
Fat is as Fat Thinks Let’s get one thing out of the way right up front. I’m fat. I’ve always been fat (at least as long ago as I can remember and to some degree). I’ve never been at an ideal weight, if such a thing exists. I look at people who are not fat and have never been fat and wonder how that changes their world view. I could guess, but I’m betting that…
Into the Heavens Several years ago when I was teaching at Cornell, I did what people do on big college campuses, I faked my way into a parking spot, this time at the Statler Inn valet parking, pretending to be attending some function in the ballroom with other guests. What I was really doing was avoiding a long uphill walk or bus ride to one of the distant parking lots at the expense of a…
A Stuffed Generation I was speaking with my youngest son Tom today and he was discussing the day he spent yesterday helping his mother empty and mostly discard a NYC storage room that had been cluttered with miscellaneous junk accumulated over the years. He described the struggle of getting concurrence from his mother that this stuff was no longer needed in her life. While I have always eschewed storage rooms for the exact reason he…
Cry Me a River Twenty years ago, Justin Timberlake broke up with Britney Spears and sang a song that has become a hallmark of “she done me wrong” weepy love songs. Cry Me a River has become the ultimate breakup song even though it was first sung in 1955 by Julie London. If you ask someone to define what the title means, they are likely to tell you that its about a public display of…
Bracing for Survival In my youth and up to age 40 or so, I was 6’5” tall. I am now less than 6’4” and still receding. I know everyone shrinks a bit as they age, but I feel I have less shrunk than been compressed by gravity. When you carry around the amount of bulk I have for almost 70 years, its quite amazing that my muscles and bones have been able to hold up…
One Fine Day In 1963 the Chiffons came out with their version of the Carol King song, One Fine Day. In 1996, what have become two of the most iconic stars of the big screen, George Clooney and Michelle Pfeiffer, made a movie with the same name and which used the Chiffon’s recording as it’s theme song. In the movie, two single parents with one young child apiece and struggling careers, spend a day chasing…
Marshaling an Effort In 1991 I bought my first ski condo in Park City. Technically it was in Deer Valley, actually, an out of the way corner of Deer Valley, not near any of the ski runs. The houses and condos adjacent to the ski runs cost about $1 million more since the ability to ski-in and ski-out is so desirable. I seem to recall that I paid something like $230,000 for this three-bedroom, three-bath…
COVID Schmovid I have just travelled through seven different global airports on eight different flights, spending some fifty hours in airplane cabins with their recirculated air, over the past few weeks. We stayed in seven different hotels and ate in something like thirty different restaurants ranging from an elegant Middle Eastern Lebanese restaurant on the Nile to Tre Scalini on the Piazza Navonna in Rome, all the way to a Martian Dome eating hall at…