Knowing The Score For years I was looking for a Robert DeNiro movie that had caught my fancy the one time I saw it years ago. It was a movie where he played a seasoned safe-cracker of global renown who pulls off heists in the U.S. and elsewhere and then works his way back to his real life home in Montreal. There he lives in an Art Deco designed apartment and owns a classy, but…
Moving On I’m ready. I always liked that old adage, “I was born ready.” We have had a long twenty years as a nation. We are in our third major national crisis by my reckoning. I guess that since I have no military background and don’t have kids or relatives who have served in the various wars in the Middle East (Kuwait, Iraq, Afghanistan), I tend to think of the national crises as being the…
The Path To Enlightenment We spent the day doing errands and driving around with MSNBC on full blast. When we were home we were glued by eye or at lest ear to the TV and cable news. The path to political enlightenment just happens to wander through the land of the pundits and pollsters and even if we didn’t care for MSNBC, which we do, we would have to be tuned into Steve Kornacki and…
Wandering Through The Desert I usually take the ride out through the ranch country of San Diego County, through the Anza Borrego Desert, on my motorcycle. The 74-mile ride is a good day in the saddle. But today I made the trip in the car with Kim and Betty since we were being followed by our Sonoma friends who had never been to this particular desert oasis. In the Spring, the super-bloom of the desert can…
He Was Right Over the last week Donald Trump has held an array of rallies where he has said many outrageous and untrue things. We as a country are unfortunately becoming immune to his rantings and have come to expect little or no truth in his words. I don’t actually think most Trump voters think his words are truthful, but rather they just enjoy his brashness and unconventional handling of every situation regardless of the…
Despondent It’s election night and there are about one third of the races that have been called by NBC News. It’s a dead heat with Biden having a slight electoral vote lead at this point (98 to 86) but it is far from an ebullient night so far. I don’t believe in getting despondent about an election because my natural optimism doesn’t lend itself to going into the dark early on. I hate all the…
Anticipation Do you remember that Heinz Ketchup commercial with the ketchup moving down the neck of the bottle in slow motion towards the waiting hamburger? They used the 1971 Carly Simon song Anticipation from her hit album of the same name. I imagine no one but Carly thinks about that song any more without thinking about Heinz Ketchup. Interesting factoid, we have all wondered our whole lives whether its ketchup or catsup and what’s up…
A Mitzvah For Mary Growing up in Latin America and then Wisconsin did not give me much opportunity to meet Jewish people. Strangely enough, my first Jewish friend was Michael Feldman, who I met when we moved to Poland Spring, Maine. South-Central Maine is more like Appalachia than the typical postcard of Bar Harbor. Michael was there because his grandfather Saul owned the Poland Spring Resort, one of the oldest resorts in America, dating back…
Brad Moon Rising I have now given Handy Brad eight months of more or less continuous employment. Assuming an average 35 hour per week, that means I practically have had a full-time staff member most of the year to help me with my projects around the house. Those have included re-stuccoing the back side of the house and deck, re-flashing the deck, power-washing the entire house’s stucco, replacing the utility room outer doors, building concrete…
We’re Not In Kansas Anymore I worry about Kansas. My friend David bought the rights to a recent book about the life of Carry Nation, the hatchet-wielding leader of the temperance movement who was also a Suffragette. He asked me to write a treatment of the book for a possible movie. I did that and ended up learning more about Ms. Nation than I had intended. The project hasn’t gone anywhere just yet, but we’ll…