The Joy of Disconnecting I’ve been away for two weeks and while I was keeping up with my emails and even sending a few of my own, I was not watching any TV (zero, none) and that means that I was not watching any MSNBC or CNN news. Our regular routine is that I watch MSNBC from about 6pm through and until close to midnight. I may take a breather for a movie if…
Who Wants to Live Forever? The Highlander is a cult classic about Connor McLeod, a Scotsman who is chosen to engage in an immortal battle of good versus evil. He is played in the four Highlander movies by Christopher Lambert. The weapon of choice is the broadsword and the age is imprecisely Medieval. Who should school Connor in the sacred ways of the sword, but an unconvincing Spaniard (more likely a Glaswegian) played by…
Tempus Fugit I am no Latin scholar, but I did take four years of Latin in high school. My mother, who had never taken a moment of Latin during her education through graduate school, was convinced that Latin was an extremely useful course of study for a young man heading out into the world. You may recall that doctors used to write their prescriptions in Latin so as to make it less likely that scoundrels…
Staging Retirement The way I write these blog stories is to think about what’s on my mind, think about what topics might be interesting enough to write about and then asking myself if it fits into the basic categories I have defined for myself and written about for the past five months. Not that complicated, but fortunately, still requiring some chin-rubbing and pondering as I like to be more than just mindless in most…
An Extraordinary Life I see that Gloria Vanderbilt died at the ripe old age of 95. It was said on Morning Joe that she had led an extraordinary life. I’m sure that is true in that she is a bit of a household name, mostly because of her designer jeans made popular in the 1970’s and 1980’s. It isn’t lost on many that her son, white-haired Anderson Cooper, can be seen every night on…
Running Out of Money Bloomberg News today posted an article titled, Retirees Might Run Out of Money 10 Years Before They Die. It’s a title intended to shock people into action or at least awareness. I have a strong interest in this topic. In 2013 I published the book Global Pension Crisis: Unfunded Liabilities and How We Can Fill the Gap, published by Wiley & Sons. The book was based on ten years of…
Heat Wave I am starting to read that we should expect a very hot summer. They are already posting record-breaking temperatures in some unusual places like northern Norway (Mr. Trump’s favorite go-to country of white, pale people), reaching up into the arctic circle in unprecedented manner. When I hear about temperatures that are in the 120oF+ I think about how uncomfortable I get at 80oF if the humidity gets over 40% I think…
Rhode Scholarship I grew up in awe of Rhode Scholarships. There was something about its student/athlete mix of excellence that made me think that these thirty-two annual selectees were uber-special. The scholarship has sought to “instill a sense of civic-minded leadership and moral fortitude in future leaders.” I thought it was noteworthy when I heard that Bill Clinton was a Rhode Scholar. Then I met my friend Frank in 1991. Frank is a good…
The Retirement Survey I got a reminder today from Cornell University to participate in their Retirement Activity Survey. I decided to fill it out more for interest about what they were asking and trying to sort out rather than to be a good retiree. To begin with, I feel a little funny being considered a Cornell faculty retiree. Yes, I taught at Cornell for ten years and yes, as a 50% employee I qualified…
The Art of Leisure I’m learning. Today is just another May Saturday. There is nothing special about it. I’ve done my May motorcycle ride. Memorial Day is a week away. I have a business trip to a conference in Rotterdam in two weeks, and then three weeks after that (six weeks from now) we have our annual family trip (this year to Ireland). That leaves seven more weeks of summer and the month of September…