The Garden of Eden All of the religions that honor Abraham as their founder embody a version of the fabled garden that sits at the center of the ancient world where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers flow together in Mesopotamia. That area now has a very bad rap since it constitutes the entire country of Iraq and up into Syria and Southern Turkey. If the rampant warfare wasn’t enough, the forces of nature have conspired…
Keeping Up I speak often about teaching and what it means to me. But now that I’ve done it at the graduate level for thirteen years, ten at Cornell and three so far at USD, I am approaching an inflection point and decisions will need to be made. Last week I bumped into the Chairman of the Finance Department, who is my boss for the Advanced Corporate Finance course that I have taught for two…
Stepping It Up Today was a nice sunny day, but a bit on the cool side. I am starting to teach my course tonight, so I plan to leave my afternoon pretty open to get my game face on and do a few course administrative chores. I have been waiting for clear weather for a few days so that I could get some things done in advance of Joventino’s arrival tomorrow. I have bought 600…
Still Standing or Standing Still I am constantly in awe of the natural world. There are plenty of times in life when we go about our business of the moment and don’t give our immediate or broader surroundings a moment’s thought. I suppose that is the normal state of affairs for life forms that must struggle to keep the spark of existence alive. The Protozoa does not spend much time contemplating its existence or worrying…
The Population Irony In 2013 I published my first book about the global pension crisis. Pensions involve demographics and the demographics of China at the time were screaming that the thirty plus year old one-child policy of China was becoming an economic and pension issue for China. The fundamental issue is that economic growth cannot be had without population growth. It is an economic credo that is hard to avoid. And China had implemented what…
Into the Desert The desert is on my mind today for some reason. I’m sure it has something to do with all the rain that keeps on falling, but I want to go beyond that. I am always more inclined to head east from here than to head west. West means heading towards the throngs of people near the coast. The ocean can be pleasant, but the crowds rarely are. By contrast, if you head…
Scared in the Dark Today in the rain, I got hooked into a movie I had seen and resisted for some time. It’s called Genius and is the storyof Max Perkins, the famous editor at Scribner’s who discovered and published F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, among others. Jude Law plays Wolfe and he is a desperately troubled figure that has an overactive mind and an out-of-control literary ego that may have helped…
Rain, Rain Go Away I started writing about the rain on January 1 and here it is the middle of January’s and I’m still doing it. This has been an unusually wet month here on the hilltop. Last night sounded like the wrath of God with the wind howling and rain pelting the house and windows. It all started yesterday once I landed and it hasn’t let up yet. According to the online weather report,…
Seeing the World There are only a few pieces of promotional mail that I bother with. One of those that I can’t seem to ignore is that National Geographic Expeditions magazine. The magazine is a pretty fancy piece of literature that must be expensive to produce and is therefore probably not just sent out randomly. I must be of the preferred customer list as both a long-time subscriber to their magazine and an occasional buyer…
Garden Tours I first drove up to this house on Christmas Day, 2011, so eleven yeas ago. I was on my motorcycle and brother-in-law Jeff was on his bike and we we tooling around looking at what Zillow said was on offer in the general vicinity. Kim, Thomas (his official name at the time) and I had driven down from San Francisco over the course of a week and looked for what I guess we…