From the Depths I came back to my hilltop last week with a cold. It wasn’t COVID, it was a cold. I tested for COVID on Tuesday morning and again (COVID can be a tricky bastard) yesterday…Monday…since we had guests coming and I felt I owed it to them to be sure of my infectiousness. I had also heard from friend Gary in West Hollywood that what he had thought was a cold upon returning…
Corruption There are certain themes that dredge up lots of memories and sentiments. The sad state of affairs in life in general is that the word corruption is one such theme. Corruption is most often used to describe fraudulent or dishonest conduct and is most often associated with that act being undertaken by someone in a powerful or otherwise trusted position. I have always considered myself a trusting person. I like to think that I…
The Failure of Power I had a real epiphany this morning and this story is the output from that. I awoke at 6am after a decent night’s sleep and as I went into our shared closet I flipped on the light as I always do, only to find that all but one of the track lights failed and did not go on. I did the usual of flicking the switch back and forth (as though…
The Ebb and the Flow The tides, as we all know, are a direct result to the gravitational pull of the moon, but there is actually a lot more to that. The tides cycle from high to low twice per day even though the moon only passes over any given spot on the earth once per day, so what’s up with that? My earth science training reminds me that the tides are actually influenced by…
A Prelude to War Frank Capra won an Academy Award in 1942 for his production of his Office of War Information documentary. It was used first to pump up the soldiers in the armed forces that were heading into the war effort after the attack at Pearl Harbor. And then it was shown widely to the American people so as to get everyone on the same page about exactly why we as Americans were doing…
Selling Out the Cheap Seats Tonight we are watching Seabiscuit, which is one of the great inspirational movies. It always leaves me with a lump in my throat, especially when the Depression-era narrative is explaining the backdrop of the socioeconomic lay of the land across America in the 1930’s. Seabiscuit raced from 1935 to 1940, when the weariness of the Great Depression had worn down the common folk of America. Seabiscuit was a horse of…
Prickly Neck Do you know that feeling when the angel of death passes over you and something happens to make you feel kinda weird as the specter of the infinity of time brushes by? I just finished a motorcycle ride of 1,600 miles across northern Spain and I had only one close call when some oncoming idiot came around a curve in the mountains too hot to handle and drifted a few feet into my…
Infrastructure Fantasy Yesterday, as we rode through the countryside north of Barcelona up into the Pyrenees Mountain area, it was hard to miss how lovely it all was. Yes, the weather was perfect, which for a motorcycle tour is paramount, but there was also the issue of the roads. The first half of the journey sort of went from urban to industrial (I didn’t really see so much of what we think of as suburban,…
World War III When I travel outside the United States, I find myself watching a lot of CNN International. This isn’t necessarily an intentional increased globalization of my perspective, but rather a function of what hotel cable news tends to be available. At home my go-to provider has, as I’m sure most of my readers have guessed, become MSNBC. With the loss over the past year of Brian Williams, that controversial but very tongue-in-cheek anchor…
Howdy Rowdy In the last year, as I have mentioned several times, ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) as a corporate issue has become very mainstream and much debated. Some of this debate is based on philosophical differences between groups that believe it is critical for companies to help society get to the “right” place on important issues in those realms versus others that are simply not used to this sort of extension of the corporate mission…