Hope Floats Today my daughter texted me that her two daughters were signed up for several courses for the winter session of extracurricular activities. She did this not only to keep me abreast of their goings on, but also because Kim and I give her holiday money intended specifically for the purpose of keeping her daughters enrolled in such activities to broaden their horizons. This past semester it was lacrosse for Charlotte and soccer for…
How Many Christmases? None of us know what the future brings other than that it is likely to surprise us. I am sixty-eight years old, so if I want to believe the actuarial table, I have a life expectancy of 16 years. That means that including this one before us right now, I have sixteen Christmases left. If I matched my father, I would only have two Christmases left, but if I track my mother,…
Fraternization I’ve been teaching since 2007, so that makes the span of time fifteen years. However, I took a few years off after ten years at Cornell, so I’ve really only been actively engaged in teaching for fourteen semesters, ten of them at Cornell and four of them at USD so far. I am scheduled to teach my ethics course again next semester so I will hit fifteen semesters for sure and will most likely…
Dentists I Have Known I don’t think about my teeth very often. As Kris Kringle says in Miracle on 34th Street, “I’m as old as my tongue and a little older than my teeth”. That makes my teeth pretty damn old. Even though we see some Egyptian mummies like Tutankhamen with their teeth still in their jaw bones and we often hear that long-buried corpses are identified by their dental records, by age 50, Americans…
A Hallmark Card One of Kim’s favorite things about the holidays is to watch countless numbers of Hallmark holiday movies. Approximately 56 million people have access to the Hallmark Channel via their cable or satellite TV access. Since 2004, this cable channel has zeroed in on what is obviously a very powerful demographic. They really do two things throughout the year, produce and play holiday movies and mystery movies. I’m not sure why that combination…
Duck, Duck, Goose It’s not completely random, but working with different lawyers on expert witness cases can be pretty hit or miss. As a hired gun, I am not in charge of anything in these cases expect the specific opinion that I am asked to render to support my team in the case. Like any lawyer considering accepting a case, I am asked to accept a case based on a minimal amount of research and…
Roiled I find the word roiled to be very useful and descriptive in many circumstances. I find myself often using it to describe markets, which can become very agitated. I particularly used it in my testimony with the U.S. Attorney’s office for the Eastern District of New York (Tillary Street in Brooklyn) as the financial crash of 2008 was unfolding. Now those were roiled markets. It is meant to describe a mixing of fluids that…
A Benign Conundrum When I returned from my stint in Gulag Toronto, the assignment I was given in 1990 as punishment for presiding over a commodities merchant banking unit (I had been specifically asked to keep charge of it as I tried to wrestle the burgeoning global derivatives business to the mat during its adolescence) when it took a large loss on a supposedly secured cotton merchant loan. It turned out that the bonded warehouse…
Black Friday I am not sure where Black Friday gets its name since the adjective “black” usually denotes a calamity of some sort. What I do know is that the commercial world wants us to start our Christmas shopping as early as possible. We in America have tacitly agreed to allow Christmas shopping to begin no earlier than Thanksgiving. That logically makes the Friday after Thanksgiving a big retailer day. The retail trade, both brick…
Reversal of Fortune The 1990 Jeremy Irons, Glenn Close story about the von Bulows of Newport, Rhode Island was a great movie that told the tale of two extremely wealthy and privileged people whose money did not bring them happiness, but quite the contrary. People love stories where wealthy people get their riches to rags just reward for leading puerile lives not caring about anyone else. The only thing better are stories of rags to…