Traveling to Enlightenment We went to see the new Ridley Scott movie The Last Duel last night at the local Angelika Film Center. Once again, it was very lightly attended with a mere 8-10 people in the well-appointed theater. The film is set in 1386 or so and chronicles what was the end stages of the Middle Ages in Europe. The movie makes reference to the economic hardship to noblemen and their estates by virtue…
Ode to the Agave On my 2.5 acre property on this sunny hillside, I estimate that I have three hundred agave plants of all sizes and several shapes. I have a series of books on succulents and cacti by Jeff Moore, one of renowned horticultural experts in the field. One of those books is a massive picture book titled Aloes and Agaves in Cultivation. The first 197 pages are dedicated to Aloes with the next…
To Mask or Unmask We are all created with multiple personalities, or at least multiple personas. We would all like to think we are the same person with everyone, but that is simply rarely the case. We are all made up of layers. I know that when my mother was alive, when I was with her, especially at her condo in Las Vegas, I was a respectful and dutiful son. I cared about what she…
Calico Cats Quandry I currently subscribe to global news feeds including NYT, WAPO, WSJ and FT, but also read New Yorker, Esquire, Vanity Fair and NatGeo. Oh, very relevantly, I also read the monthly AARP Bulletin. When Apple News feeds me something I can’t read without subscribing, I generally pass and just absorb the headline. I also use Prime, Netflix, AppleTV, HBO Max and Hulu for subscription videos. I will ignore the social media subscriptions…
Water for Lizards The Sara Gruen novel, Water for Elephants sold 10 million copies and became a hit movie staring Reese Witherspoon, Robert Pattinson and Christoph Waltz. It caught my fancy because it follows the circus life of a young man who must drop out of veterinary school at Cornell and takes to tending elephants for a job. Elephants are strange beasts that inspire all sorts of imagination and whimsy. They are the largest land…
All About Tesla No matter which way I turn these days, I am running into Tesla. TO start with, as I have reported, I own a Tesla X that is now five years old and has a whopping 11,000 miles on the odometer. I have full autonomous functionality on the car and have used it only a half dozen times to show friends how it works. Quite frankly, I’m not a fan of autonomous driving,…
The Antisocial Network Facebook can’t seem to help itself from getting in the news at every turn. It has achieved what I’m sure many people would have declared as unlikely and that is to get just about everyone against them. Watching the 2010 Jesse Eisenberg rendition of Mark Zuckerberg as he spawnsThe Facebook from his Harvard dorm room out of spite for the woman who spurned his affections, you do get a prescient view of…
Chasing Projects My back hillside is finished. My Garden is done and perhaps overdone. My patio area is complete. My games area is ready and waiting. Even my Fairy Garden is set until the next change of season. What then to do with my abundance of time, enthusiasm and need for accomplishment? I guess I now have to rely on three sources of new projects. The obvious first one is to consider what I can…
Riding With Steve In 1963 Steve McQueen made the movie The Great Escape with James Garner, Richard Attenborough, Charles Bronson, James Coburn and David McCallum. It was directed by John Sturges, who made The Magnificent Seven and Old Man and the Sea (the one with Spencer Tracy). It is one of my favorite movies and I’ve seen it over and over again. It was nominated for a number of awards and even won a few…
New Age Finance I am teaching a course this semester in Advanced Corporate Finance. The traditional topics of such a course are the weighted average cost of capital (WACC), capital structure, debt and equity, risk management, projections and valuations. While those fundamentals still have value as a baseline, the truth is that with only that skill set it is unlikely that any person in the class would be able to make the necessary decisions to…