The Dinner Table In the world of banking, it shouldn’t surprise you to learn that most big firms manage somehow to insure that their top two people are not so fervently politically aligned that when (notice I did not say “if”) the opposing party takes office, the firm is not left without sympathetic inroads into the halls of power, perhaps when they need it the most. I have never figured out exactly how that process…
What About Bob? I have now met Bob three times. He is a local electrician who is 62-years old and he has come to the house once to install an outlet in the Master Bath to accommodate a new bidet we wanted to install, once to install nine LED outdoor security lights and today to install a ceiling outlet box for a Big Ass Fan I have bought to put in the study. Bob would…
My Garage Seat I am becoming a man of new interests. When I started working in late June, 1976 it was a mere two months before I got engaged to be married. Our wedding was just after Thanksgiving. By February we had bought a house. It was a nice little starter house with three bedrooms and a bath upstairs and a kitchen, living room, dining room, den and half bath downstairs. As a starter house,…
Sprinting Forward Every family needs dynamic tension I suppose. I am proud to be a part of a family that likes to speak its own mind and is never short on opinions. And those opinions are not restricted to politics or the goings on around the community and world. They also extend into what we are all doing all on our own. No one is a bigger target than me and here is why I…
Secrets of the Digital Universe I feel I owe you all some resolution on several unanswered mysteries that have been plaguing me for the past few months. I have found over the past fifty years that the old medical school adage to “think horses, not zebras” is more true than not and and serves us well when trying to solve mysteries. The complicated conspiracy theory of the dead neighbor having set up a ruse to…
Escape From New York I have always loved the 1981 John Carpenter film (he wrote it and directed it) starring Kurt Russell and portraying the dystopic city which has become a Federal maximum-security prison (the only one in the country) allowed to self-govern and headed by Isaac Hayes with Ernest Borgnine running around giving people cab rides in his old Checker. Russell plays one of the great movie characters of all time, Snake Plissken with…
Shuffle Off to Buffalo In 2000 I had a problem to solve. For four years I had owned a vacation home in Ithaca. I was coming up on my 25th Reunion and I wanted to use the house for exactly what I had bought it for. I wanted to use the house to gather all my friends and have a nice place to party and make the reunion special for everyone. The problem I had…
RESPECT, Find Out What It Means To Me I just got an email from my Alma Mater, Cornell University, where I was supposed to be headed this week for my forty-fifth undergraduate reunion. Needless to say, they cancelled our physical reunion with great angst, given the amount of fundraising reliance rests on the shoulders of the reunion process. After being a major donor for many years, even I considered whether I should skip this year…
Captain Bob It was in 1989 when I was running the Global Derivatives business of Bankers Trust. I was in London, one of our three big offices in the Derivatives business, in addition to New York and Tokyo. Suddenly I had an E.F. Hutton moment when the entire trading room goes quiet for a moment as someone from the derivatives desk yells over to me across the floor the Robert Maxwell is on the phone…
Oliver Twist Today I was cleaning up my iPad trying to get rid of all those annoying little red bubbles indicating messages or notifications. You know the ones I’m talking about, we all have them on our phones and tablets and we most often try to keep them eliminated by looking at what we are being asked to look at. Whenever I get Kim’s phone in my hand (she uses her phone as a primary…