And It’s Suddenly Summer Today is Easter Sunday and it has been a cloudless day with constant sunshine and a high of about 71 degrees. During my three years on this hilltop, that sort of profile of a day’s weather would have sounded cool rather than warm. But after the last three months, today felt like a warm summer day, and that seemed appropriate for Easter Sunday. After everyone had their brunch and left for…
Life in the High Court As part of my experience as an expert witness, I once got an assignment in the London High Court, which is the court of England and Wales where civil cases are tried. While the American legal system is based on English Common Law, it is fair to say that the two systems are still very different. According to the textbooks, English Common Law is controlled by a combination of statutes,…
Yucca on the Brain When I bought this house eleven years ago, I could see it had a beautiful garden, but that was from a quick drive-by from the bottom of the driveway. I never actually set foot on the property until the closing a few months later. At that time I had heard about succulents, but I really didn’t know an agave from an aloe from a yucca. When I moved out here to…
Killing Myself Softly When I was in college we had music and we had TV, but there were no home computers, no internet, no Worldwide Web, and certainly no social media. There are many things that these advancements have provided us and I have generally been a big proponent of technological advance. I would go so far as to say that I have positioned myself until recently on the bleeding edge of that change. I…
Trash Talk Today is Wednesday, which means it is trash day here in Hidden Meadows, or at least on our little hilltop within Hidden Meadows. I don’t make it my business to know the trash pick-up schedule of the local surroundings, though the very visible trash cans at the curb are a dead giveaway, so I suppose I could figure it out if I cared to. In actuality, Thursday is the pick-up day, but Wednesday…
The 8 Billion Person Paradox National Geographic magazine continues to amaze me and feed me information that is relevant to the most important issues we face today. The April, 2023 issue just arrived on my doorstep with a cover graphic that looks like the earth transformed into some combination of a high-viz articulated world map and a funky coronavirus with spiky outcroppings. The large title emblazoned across the globe simply declared “8 BILLION” with a…
Cold Sunshine The pig is in the poke and the poke is currently a split-screen on MSNBC with a bunch of law enforcement folks (presumably federal, state and City) hanging around the exit to the courthouse in Lower Manhattan with the other side of the screen a still shot of Donald Trump sitting tentatively and with cowed anticipation at a defendant’s table in the courtroom flanked by two high-paid attorneys on each side, waiting for…
Never Wrestle With A Pig You know the old adage. Never wrestle with a pig because you’ll get dirty…and the pig likes it. This is what we are hearing today as Trump left Mar-a-Lago and flew off to New York (LaGuardia Airport) to spend the night at his 33,000 square foot, $327 million condo on Fifth Avenue and 56th Street at Trump Tower. Oh, wait a minute, my mistake, I was defining the Trump Tower…
The Tailor of Escondido I stumbled on the twenty-year-old movie with Pierce Brosnan, Geoffrey Rush and Jamie Lee Curtis, The Tailor of Panama. The movie is a strange blend of international spy thriller and comedy, with Rush playing a well-connected Saville Row tailor doing business in Panama City, and Brosnan playing a disgraced MI-6 secret agent who goes around fabricating a Canal Zone fantasy to revitalize his flagging career. I have had three encounters with…
Teaching to Learn I’ve been formally teaching since 2007, which makes for thirteen years of experience. I’ve taught at two world class Universities as a Clinical Professor of finance and management at the graduate level. That means I have organized and delivered about 36 separate courses on multiple topics. My medium of choice is the PowerPoint presentation, but my modus operandi is to use storytelling to improve student engagement and to take the learning experience…