The End of Empire In the Fourth Century A.D. what had one day been the glory of the Republic of Rome and had become the Holy Roman Empire and would further become the Eastern Roman or Byzantine Empire (run from Constantinople) before it finally passed into history under the sword of the Ottoman Empire, was overrun by Goths and Huns. The general historical consensus is that the Roman Empire we all know from our Western…
Of Rocks & Trees and Citrus & Quail The world is in a funny place right now. I spoke to a friend of mine who lives in Vancouver. He reads my blog so I expect he will recognize himself. I recently called him. I spent four years on his board of directors. The company was a small public company traded on the LondonStock Exchange. We spent most of our time trying to figure out how…
Seeking Certainty The word from the White House today, in the face of the dramatic increase in infections in 30+ states (to over 50,000 on both Thursday and Friday), is that we will simply need to learn to live with the virus and carry on. This is the latest in Trump’s deadly blunders on behalf of the American people. The worst part of that is that it is not for want of good scientific and…
Leprosy is for Sissies To me the most notable movie scene involving Leprosy is from the great Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman epic, Papillon, which is about the Penal Colony of French Guiana and the trials and tribulations of Papillon the petty thief and Louis Dega the forger of French National Defense Bonds floated in 1929. During one of Papillon’s daring escape attempts before being sent to the infamous Devil’s Island for his final incarceration,…
COVID Part Deux We’ve all seen the charts and are probably all equally scared by what we see. The comparison of the curves showing pandemic infections for the United States and the European Union tell the story of the failure of the United States to combat this pandemic effectively. It shows very similar initial rise of the infections in both regions with the U.S. just a few weeks behind Europe. That is where the similarities…
Lowering the Barr It is hard from day to day to understand what situations perpetrated by the Trump Administration are the new depths to which the rule of law can stoop at his command. The sequence of events between Friday night and today have been stunning and they played out on cable TV in all their glory for us to put hand to lips in amazement. Let’s agree that of all the cabinet posts, the…
The End of the World In case you hadn’t noticed, I like bold headlines. All writers become aware that their readers decide in the first paragraph of their stories whether this among many stories available to all readers at all times will interest them and be worth reading in its entirety. Sometimes, when a thought for a story strikes me, I sit and ponder a title or headline before I organize and commit to writing…
Pilgrims’ Progress Some of the greatest works of literature have been penned by people during their incarceration. While its origins are somewhat questionable as to who told the story versus wrote the story, The Travels of Marco Polo were put to paper while Marco Polo sat in a Genovese prison (Venice and Genoa were rival city-states and commercial competitors in the thirteenth century). Jump forward some four hundred years and move from merchant ardor to…
The Drunken Pirate My friend Steve writes a blog like I do. In fact, while he has been a writer since long before we knew each other (we met almost exactly twenty years ago), I think my blog prompted him to start his own blog (https://stevelarsen.net/yeah-but-do-you-have-a-finger-from-a-dead-pirate/). Yesterday he wrote a story about the finger of a dead pirate. I won’t ruin the story by summarizing it but will say that it got me thinking…
The Dinner Table In the world of banking, it shouldn’t surprise you to learn that most big firms manage somehow to insure that their top two people are not so fervently politically aligned that when (notice I did not say “if”) the opposing party takes office, the firm is not left without sympathetic inroads into the halls of power, perhaps when they need it the most. I have never figured out exactly how that process…