Timing is everything in life and sometimes things happen when they do for a reason. That opening sentence makes me wonder how many other euphemisms I could cram into one sentence if I really tried. I wrote a few days ago about getting a Watchtower pamphlet from a Jehovah’s Witness canvasser on the topic of war and violent conflict. Since then, the primary canvasser and a different journeyman assistant came to my door and wanted…
I started in business school during the spring of my senior year in college by taking a few of the first-year courses. To be fair, I had taken economics courses for four years already by then, but economics, while connected to business, is simply not the same. So, for all intents and purposes, I have been thinking about the finance business since 1975, a full fifty years at this point. Wall Street tends to bifurcate…
In 1983, 42 years ago, I was sent by my bank to work on the downtown trading floor, in a building named BT Plaza, which sat next World Trade Center 2. I used to call it the shortest 40-story building in the world…because of its next-door neighbor. Not to be too dramatic or foreshadowing, but it is also the building that in 2001 got a 17-story gash down its northern side from the collapse of…
This morning, after a few chores, I was sitting on the bench beside my driveway, talking on the phone with one of my expert witness partners. The call was all about the existing six cases I have on my current docket and the three new pending ones that could start any day now. The topic of those cases suddenly went from back burner to front burner in my consciousness as I’ve worked to unplug my…
As I have mentioned in previous stories, I am scheduled to head off to New York City on Sunday for a trial in which I will be giving expert testimony on a case that started in the middle of 2022 and which I have put about 330 hours of time on since then. This is the case that I was contacted about in mid July and told to start preparing for trial due to start…
Yesterday we had a few family and friends over for a small (15 people) Labor Day Barbecue. This year more than ever before, I am acting as the grill master for these events and we have been offering up a blend of burgers and hotdogs. I have tried CostCo burgers and sausages, Omaha Steaks burgers and sausages and, this time, Von’s Pub-Burgers (with cheese, bacon and, sometimes, jalapenos) as well as their standard mild Italian…
My first memory of television was in 1958 in my grandfather’s house (we called him Dodo, which is the Slovak version of Gramps). We were living there while my mother regrouped from divorcing my father and leaving California, where we had been for a year in Santa Monica. On Saturday morning, with my mother and sisters off shopping in the metropolis of Ithaca and Dodo out puttering in the barn or nearby fields, I was…
I’ve never thought of myself as either a greedy bugger or a particularly jealous soul. Moses came down from Mount Sinai where he received the Ten Commandments according to the biblical account in Exodus. This occurred during the Israelites’ journey through the wilderness after their exodus from Egypt and after they were freed from servitude from the yoke of Pharaoh Ramesses the Great. The story describes Moses ascending the mountain where God gave him the…
I have mentioned several times that I have been a founding member of the news service Puck since it began in 2021. Puck is an American digital media company who’s coverage aims to cover the ‘four centers of power’ in the United States: Silicon Valley, Hollywood, Washington, D.C. and Wall Street. The company was founded by Jon Kelly (former Vanity Fair editor who created The Hive), Joe Purzycki (co-founder of Luminary), and Max Tcheyan, and…
My youngest son, Tom, just turned thirty yesterday. I was never terribly overwhelmed by turning thirty, forty, fifty, sixty or even seventy. I don’t tend to connect myself to my age very much even though I never deny my age, nor do I even try to hide it. I just don’t seem to care one way or the other for some odd reason. Everyone else seems to attribute much more significance to age and birthdays,…