Oliver Twist Today I was cleaning up my iPad trying to get rid of all those annoying little red bubbles indicating messages or notifications. You know the ones I’m talking about, we all have them on our phones and tablets and we most often try to keep them eliminated by looking at what we are being asked to look at. Whenever I get Kim’s phone in my hand (she uses her phone as a primary…
Tearing Up In the Spring of 1972, during my second semester of Freshman year at Cornell, a group of us who had joined the same fraternity (Phi Sigma Epsilon) and some of the brothers, who we were getting to know, went into Collegetown for a Sunday night pizza dinner at Johnies’ Big Red Grill on Dryden Road. I was an engineering student as were a number of us and the topic of the evening was…
The Time of Monsters This expression sings so very true today as our cities are under siege and the army, in the form of the mobilization of the National Guard, is being brought to bear first in the heartland of Minneapolis. “This is the time of monsters” is attributed to a a little-know Italian founder of the Communist Party there and it dates to that turbulent era of the post World War I to 1930’s…
What Goes Around In November 1985, I was sitting in my corner office on the third floor of 280 Park Avenue. I used to call that the “cafe” office because it was close enough to the street to feel a part of the hub-bub out on Park Avenue and yet it was above it all. To be clear, I was thirty-one years old at the time, which is almost hard for me to imagine in…
Anti-Social Media Yesterday, after a turbulent weekend of social media “interaction” on Next Door, I opted to disconnect. I have not formally taken myself off of the system since I may want to still know if there is a rattlesnake on the loose or a lost kitty wandering about. But I have signed-off of the text exchange that got far too bitter and entrenched for my delicate sensibilities. I know what you’re all thinking, but…
What Are We Fighting For In August, 1969 I was fifteen and living in Rome, Italy getting ready to enter my junior year at Notre Dame International Prep. As we all know, junior year is the critical transcript year for a kid wanting to go to college. For a kid living overseas and wanting to finally go back to the states to do what he had always expected to do, it was not lost on…
The Mystery of San Pasqual This morning I got sucked into a debate that I would rationally generally avoid. I have joined Next Door, which is an app for local communities allowing people in the same neighborhood who might not know each other to share important information and, presumably, operate more like a real community. I mostly ignore or only lightly notice the neighborhood postings on Next Door since they are mostly about lost dogs…
The Rapture and Rupture of Pompeo Mike Pompeo has been an enigma to me for a long time. I doubt I’m the only person who think his name immediately invokes the tragedy of Pompeii and the pillars of salt that resulted from the population after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. I first heard about him when he was announced for appointed by Trump to be the head of the CIA in late 2016. He was…
America Lost When I was in college I thought I had a unique perspective on America. Of my seventeen years on earth I had lived six years in the tropics of Latin America, a year in Santa Monica flirting with the children of TV stars in nursery school, four years in the Midwest city of Madison, Wisconsin learning about the difference between oleomargarine and real butter in the Dairy State, three years in the wilds…
As the World Turns Richard Haass, the President of the Council on Foreign Relations, the highly respected organization and policy think tank, has held that position for the past dozen years. He has now written a book called The World: A Brief Introduction. This book is described as a primer on the global era we live in from COVID-19 to terrorism and gives us a basic understanding of the dynamics that have in the past…