Getting Ready for the Big One After battling the war of the worlds of ants this summer, the weather seems to have broken to a more pleasant temperature zone with the lows overnight in the low 50’s and the highs reaching up to the low 80’s. That is now my kind of weather for a number of reasons. It used to be an issue of pure bodily comfort, but now I recognize it as an…
A Merging of Interests Kim recently offered our neighbor Mary to tend to her plants while she was away seeing family in the Midwest. Kim took this task very seriously and diligently went over to Mary’s house every day (usually using it as an opportunity to give Blind Betty a nice walk). One of Mary’s plants that lived on her deck was suggested to be brought over here to be looked after more easily. It…
Wearing Our Underwear on the Outside Woody Allen’s fifth movie was made in 1971, the year I graduated from high school, left Rome to work at Case Western Reserve University for the summer and eventually wound up bumming a ride to Ithaca to start Cornell fifty years ago. Can you name Woody’s first four movies? His first three (What’s Up Pussycat?, What’s Up Tiger Lily? and Casino Royale) didn’t really star Woody, but as the…
Busy Day I have three major work activities that occupy my days…except when they don’t. I have some days when nothing at all is going on. But then there are days like today that make up for all that free time. Today I started my day with a two hour conference call with my European (Sicily and Lisbon) expert witness partners. We went over my final response to a rebuttal of my rebuttal on a…
Long Way Up Ten years ago Kim gave me a Christmas gift of the DVDs of Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman riding their BMW GSAs around the world. First there was Long Way Round (2004), taking the Silk Road from Europe through the Far East, and then there was Long Way Down (2007), from the Highlands of Scotland to the tip of South Africa. I am a motorcycle aficionado to the max and I like…
The Burden of Conscience Imagine being in your mid-80’s and being at a point in your life when you have accomplished a great deal, more than most and more than you had ever expected. Then imagine you want to take your long-earned rest and simply spend time with your loved ones, but you can’t. You can’t because you carry on your shoulders the weight of the world…literally. All of the world’s great evils get translated…
Breathing is Overrated I have recently come to recognize that you have to breathe to stay alive. That may strike you as an obvious statement, but I think it deserves some reflection. Doesn’t it strike you as a little strange that Mother Nature endowed us with this powerful cerebellum that’s capable of relatively advance reasoning. It’s capable of all sorts of great things. It can invent important breakthrough stuff. It can conjure great and elaborate…
The One Before All Zeros I am sitting in a parking lot in San Diego. Now let’s start with an important observation, parking lots in San Diego are one helluva lot nicer than parking lots in most parts of the country. This is not the first time that I have noticed this, but now I am a resident of San Diego, so I look at it through renewed eyes. I have been a permanent resident…
Flea, Fly, Flu I recall that when Thomas, my youngest was a child in his early school years he needed to recite a \poem for school. The poem could be of his choosing and, like any kid, he wanted to find as short a poem as he could. The world’s shortest poem is supposedly called Fleas and it goes: Adam Had ‘em I didn’t like the implications and the contraction, so I encouraged him to…
Life on Venus I read with only passing interest that scientists have discovered phosphine gas in the clouds surrounding the planet of Venus. This is considered by many to be a thrilling piece of evidence that there may be life somewhere other than on Earth since phosphine is most often made by microbes and microbes have been long suspected to inhabit the clouds around Venus. The view is that the temperatures on Venus are too…