When things go sideways, its important to step back and keep things in perspective. I suspect this is really about maintaining emotional and psychological balance so that not every setback sends us to the cliff edge contemplating jumping off. This is an exercise we all must master in our lives if we are to soldier on in the face of adversity, and as the old saying goes, into every life a little bit of rain…
Mud-puddle has always been a word or word contraction that I have always liked for some reason. It was the great novelist Sinclair Lewis, America’s first Nobel Laureate for literature as well as Pulitzer Prize writer, who won those accolades “for his vigorous and graphic art of description” when he described in his first and most famous novel, Main Street, the confines of small town American life, with its “mud–puddles and ragged weeds by the…
For years now, I have thought to myself that I simply don’t understand why people listen to podcasts. Meanwhile podcasting has grown to become one of the most profitable mediums (to the podcaster) with the most audience appeal and an absolute influence on the political scene. It is now being said that Joe Rogan single-handedly won this election for Trump by swaying 11-15 million listeners (mostly young males) to the Trump camp, thanks to his…
Last night I got a one hour massage from my massage therapist who has come to my home for perhaps eight years. I paid him for my regular two hour massage. My long history with this guy, a very soft-spoken man who grew up in the valley to the east where the more hardened folks of this area reside. It’s ranch country and they are ranch-strong, which I suppose is a lot like being farm-strong.…
When did they stop making bootstraps part of our daily ritual? I have recently become a devotee of Claude, the AI bot from Anthropic. It tells me, “From what I understand, the literal bootstrap (the tab or loop on boots used to pull them on) has never entirely gone “out of fashion” – they remain functional features on many types of boots today, particularly Western/cowboy boots. If you’re referring to the saying “pull yourself up…
I have, for some inexplicable reason, been buying garden things lately. I go on sprees like this every once in while and this seems to be one of those nervous whiles. I say nervous because today is the day before Election Day and there is a lot going on for me, but at the same time, I’m not going anywhere. Let me explain. I am starting the final set of hearings on a case I…
The tradition of Halloween seems to stem mostly from Celtic sources that celebrated the remembrance of the dead and martyred, specifically those that are cast into the Christian realm of purgatory where those souls who have died in a state of grace are further cleansed before their ascension into heaven. I guess I had always thought of purgatory as a bad and restless place that you went to if you were not worthy, but it…
For some strange reason, one of my obsessions is with the higher hierarchy of the Catholic Church. My mother and father were Catholics. My mother’s family were devout Slovak Catholics who intentionally lived across the street from their parish church on land that my grandfather donated to the church of that purpose. But my mother was a modern (for her time) first generation American who was far more pragmatic about life than any church doctrine…
I will admit to ignoring much of the national press on Sunday. I, like many Americans, feel overwhelmed by the fray of pre-election maneuvering and speculation. Every analytical piece trying to explain the state of the race based on polling and/or intuition brings on a stronger and stronger sense that it’s time to sit back and let the dice fall where they may. That’s a very hard thing to admit for someone as committed as…
This week, both the L.A. Times and the Washington Post, owned respectively by billionaires Patrick Soon-Shiong (a biotech magnate ranked 204 on the Forbes 400 list of billionaires) and Jeff Bezos (Mr. Amazon is #2 on that Forbes 400 list, second only to Elon Musk and probably well above Musk had he not bifurcated his estate and given MacKenzie Scott, his first wife $38 billion in the settlement) shocked the liberal democratic side of the…