Is the Bloom Off the Rose? I am sitting on our patio this sunny late July morning and there is a slight breeze from the east. I am doing what I always do in the morning if I am not rushing off to do something or go somewhere, I am trying hard to be in the moment and feel what I feel around me. I like the patio in the morning and in the late…
A Son is a Son When we were recently at the Lodge at Red River Ranch in Southern Utah, we had one evening when our plans to go stargazing got temporarily postponed due to a bull bison on the loose on the ranch grounds. The Lodge proprietor and general buffalo wrangler, Dave, was out with the cowpokes trying to do two things simultaneously. They needed to corral the young bull bison that had escaped its…
The Unholy Land Kim and I have traveled to Israel fairly extensively. It is certainly a fascinating ancient place with lots and lots of human cultural history and religious significance to at least three major religions representing the ideology of a majority of the world (57% by best estimates). Being one of the crossroad spots of human evolution, it is claimed as sacred by many and has been fought over for millennia by multiple constituencies.…
Tough Guys I’m a tough guy most of the time, but a tender guy at other times. I’m big and burly and I ride big motorcycles and have been the breadwinner for several families worth of dependants. That and the fact that I survived forty-five years in the top ranks of Wall Street, one of the tough guy arenas, makes me fit the tough guy profile. Buy I cry at sad movies and have a…
The Day the Earth Stood Still I’m not that much on science fiction in my movie-going preferences, but there are some films that you can’t help but remember. One of the most famous commands in the history of film, one that is right up there with “Leave the gun, take the cannoli”, is that 1951 SciFi memento, “Klaatu Barada Nikto” that Patricia Neal is supposed to say to Gort, the robot with the power to…
The Natural World I just finished reading a very long article in National Geographic that caught my eye, then caught my fancy and finally ensnared my right-side brain’s imaginative component. I am a big title person when it comes to storytelling and this article had a very descriptive, but really unimaginative title. It rambled on about going inside the “factory of the world” (that would be China), and finding that there are still corners that…
Rejection and Regret You know I am an eternal optimist and while some might think that is either naive or tactically artificial (like Donald Trump claiming to always be a winner and never a loser), I actually believe that my system creates excess serotonin and that seems to be something that happens overnight. I am serious about that, why else would I be such a difficult and cranky person at night (never engage me in…
The Distant Ocean When service people come to this house of ours on the hilltop, as one HVAC specialist did just yesterday, they invariably stand and look out at our views, especially towards the ocean, and comment on what a great view we have. We do have a great view and both Kim and I do not take it for granted. On almost every day, one of us will comment to the other about the…
Crystal Clarity I want some new laws of thermodynamics. Thermo means relating to heat and dynamics relating to the forces of change within a system or process. If we don’t break down that term like that, we get mired in the world of arcane physics and get dragged into the realm of energy conservation and things like entropy, which are all about randomness and uncertainty. The first two laws of thermodynamics were promulgated in the…
Mission Creep Ever since human beings have gathered together with enough organization to marshal an army, they have succumbed to the temptation of allowing their military objectives to gradually shift and circumstantially over-commit to any manner of unanticipated objectives. But it wasn’t until the 1990’s in Somalia and the Blackhawk Down problems in Mogadishu that some NYT or WAPO journalist came up with a catchy term to explain what was turning into U.S. State Department…