Polymals on the Loose I have a funky few days here in Manhattan this week. Usually I’m in New York either to see the kids or for Kim’s singing performances. We did the whole Lincoln Center gig thing last visit and the early kid Christmas activities were this weekend. I’ve been doing early Christmas with the kids for 33 or so years, so I’m pretty used to that program. My older kid’s mother is a…
Skin Tags We were watching a movie last night, The Family Stone, staring Diane Keaton and various other celebrities. Two of the actresses who were in the younger generation of the family were Sarah Jessica Parker and Rachel McAdams. During the camera close-ups, it became obvious that each had a similar mole on her right-side chin, which distinguished her face with what our society generally calls a beauty mark. It was funny seeing a well-known…
In the Dead of the Night There are many things you can call 4am. If you are staying up late to party or for one reason or another, it is the wee hours of the night. When you wake up in the middle of the night as I often seem to do these days, it is right on the cusp at this time of year of being early enough to go back to sleep but…
End of the Semester A semester seems to be an eternity when it begins. You look at the syllabus you have created for a course and you see something like sixteen weeks laid out ahead of you. That’s a something like fifty hours of class time lectures, hours of reading papers and grading exams, hunting for parking spots and lots of freeway time back and forth to campus. Then, before you know it, its the…
The Club What has ever become of the Club? No, I do not mean that kryptonite steel bar that we used to use to secure our steering wheels so that when we parked on the streets of New York, perpetrators could not easily steal our cars. I checked and those contraptions are apparently still available for about $40, so I assume that they still work. Old school, but, I guess, pretty effective. No, I am…
Risking Everything I am stealing that headline from the New York Times this morning as that theme seems to be screaming this morning for attention. The article in the Times is about the rising protests in Iran and China and the fact that the oppression in those two autocratic countries has gotten incredibly severe and economic salve is so absent, that people cannot help themselves but protest. This is in the light of the economic…
Fresh Garbage When I was in high school, my sister Barb was a groupie of a European band called The Free Love. Their hit song was called Fresh Garbage and it’s tagline was “Look beneath your little morning, see the things you didn’t quite consume, the world’s a can for your fresh garbage….nah, nah,nah,nah,nah,nah, Na-nah, nah…” It was quite a hit. My pal Mike gets a regular 8+ hours of sleep each night. He goes…
We Can Dream We all take way too many things for granted. I don’t like to think of myself as “privileged”, but I am. I was fortunate to be born when I was, part of the post-war Baby Boom and yet not so far after that I’m part of the downward mobility trend that is permeating our children’s lives. I didn’t quite make it into the top half of the Boomers, who are the ones…
The World Needs More Italians I am perhaps the least Italian-looking person you may ever meet. People might mistake me for German, Eastern European, Russian, Scandinavian and yes, I even get mistaken for being Jewish more often than you might think (must be the Eastern European shtetl look I have about me). But for the three years I lived in Rome, the many times I have visited Italy and spoken reasonably fluent Italian and any…
The Cookie Starts to Crumble In wrapping up my ethics course, I have just gone over my final lecture where I will review all the fundamental concepts we have discussed and debated during the semester. I really think I have, over two semesters of teaching this course, pulled together an excellent set of almost universal topics that would be worthwhile for almost anyone to spend some time considering or studying. Obviously, it is geared to…