Love and Hate in Las Vegas “Whether you love me or hate me, you’ve got to vote for me.” That was President Trump’s statement at his New Hampshire pre-primary rally last night. I prefer the quote made about Elizabeth Warren by a USA Today journalist, a self-professed staunch conservative. He said, “I don’t care if Senator Warren is a mendacious Massachusetts liberal, she could tell me that she’s going to make me wear waffles as…
Catch-22 I watched the Mike Nichols movie based on Joseph Heller’s dark WWII comedy about a bombardier off the coast of Italy doing everything he can think of to get sent home. Catch-22, the novel, was first published in 1961 and made into a movie in 1970. The story of its title deserves to be told as a prequel to its absurd comedic tone. The concept of the rule “catch” of a paradoxical situation…
Crying About Death We have some dramatic things going on that give me pause and make me think. I just watched a clip of presidential candidate Andrew Yang (a marginal candidate who has gotten some exposure lately, but who is far from a central or likely candidate who could be nominated to the Democratic ticket). He had talked with a woman whose child had watched her sibling get shot and killed in El Paso. …
Owning it All I was worried about having time to write my blog this weekend. We are in Ithaca staying at our house there, with my daughter and her husband and kids. Their Ithaca life is heavily dominated by the pool, the yard and fireflies at dusk (as it should be) and my weekend is dominated by seeing old acquaintances from college. These are not my usual classmate crowd that I lived with for most…
Tucker, Tucker, Tucker… White Supremacy is quickly becoming an oxymoron. And it’s the likes of the suddenly vacationing Fox commentator (who really really was planning a vacation just then, really, just like all the guys at Fox who used to be there) who is making it more moronic and more embarrassing for those of us with oxy (occidental) heritage. Hatred and fear are ever-present in the world, so that should not surprise us. What is…
WeWorked By now, most people in the literate world have heard of WeWork. It is the shared workspace company that caters to and further encourages the entrepreneurial culture that is blossoming across the globe. WeWork has become globally ubiquitous in the less than ten years of its existence. What Uber/Lyft are to car culture and what Airbnb is to hospitality, WeWork is to Dilbert and office cubicle culture. Adam Neumann, the Israeli kibbutz-raised kid and…
A Bull in the China Shop China is fucked-up. Is this all their doing or is it because others are fucking with China? Donald Trump seems to enjoy doing that. Regardless, the question quickly becomes, does that fuck us up? Last night my lovely wife Kim surprised me by asking me if I was worried about China bringing down the world economy. I would normally assume this was a hidden question about whether Nordstroms…
Hispanic Invasion Let me start with a disclaimer; I am Hispanic. Whenever I am asked to declare my ethnicity, I always say I am Caucasian. That is not about denying my heritage or ethnicity, but rather to avoid being considered a minority for whatever fact-gathering the form is involved in. With a Hispanic surname, it would be very easy for me to declare myself as a minority, which I do not consider myself to…
Whining About the Future Have you seen the recently published maps of Europe with the heat profiles that we are suffering this summer highlighted? It was shocking when we saw those heat maps for the Eastern United States a few weeks ago, but now these European maps are astounding. We are witnessing before our very eyes the transformation of Sicily, Spain, Sardinia, Corsica, Malta, much of Greece, the Western shores of Italy, the Adriatic…
Hurting and Healing When I lived on Staten Island, I lived a mere several hundred yards from the place where Eric Garner was choke-hold wrestled to the ground and killed by police over a charge of selling untaxed cigarettes. Both of my sons lived even closer to that same spot. Tonight, I saw on the Democratic debate the discussion about reparations to African-American’s who descended from slaves. It seems 73% of African-Americans favor those…