The Institution of Lunch It’s midday on Sunday and its an overcast day out here in northern San Diego County. I just got a text (actually a What’sAp text) from my friend and colleague in Palermo. He sent me pictures of his first family outing in the car for nine weeks of the nationally imposed lockdown. The picture was of the Carabinieri stopping the car to ask questions and search it. He said most shops…
The Muthah I watched the movie The Finest Hours about the greatest small-boat rescue ever executed in the history of the U.S. Coast Guard. Like most good stories, this film has a primary conflict of man against the sea (one of the oldest and most primordial tales), but it has several other secondary conflicts that add texture and interest that keep the viewer engaged while the next primary conflict scene gets set-up. Think about that…
The 600 Year Blink I read two enlightening articles this morning, one from The New Yorker and one from The Atlantic. It has occurred to me lately that in the age of digitized content, several magazines have seemed to be in ascendancy rather than decline like so many other magazines. In the pattern unfolding of the Coronavirus era, I sense that magazines will not be excluded from the tendency to accelerate the prevailing trends. The…
Deposing Views Today I was involved with an all-day deposition in a case where I am acting as an expert witness. I spent about 10-12 hours reading all the materials I had written on the case (1 46-page Report, 2 20-24-page Rebuttal Replies), the two rebuttals (each 25-30-pages) and various summary motions, articles, etc. I had worked on the case from late November through mid-January, when I wrote the first report. I spent 56 hours…
A Hitch in the Ointment Mixed metaphors are a wonderful thing. People who use them are usually not the sharpest cookie in the jar. Take Donald Trump….please (apologies to Henny Youngman). He’s never metaphor that he didn’t like and he uses them so much that it’s hard to tell which he feels are intentionally doubled up and which he doesn’t even realize are metaphorical. And it’s not like he has a problem distinguishing between metaphors…
The Big Ass Effect Before you get too excited, let me explain that yesterday I hosted a Zoomathon for my American Flyers Motorcycle Club, who formally celebrates its Silver (25th!) Anniversary this month. There were eighteen participating callers with a total of thirty-four attendees plus two (Nik and Charlene) who I inadvertently left out in the Zoom waiting room, failing to admit them after I had admitted three tranches of other entrants waiting. Oops. I…
Ultimate Democratization The year was 2000 and we had just come through the Y2K scare relatively unscathed. It was not for lack of scrambling and effort as you may recall, so who knows whether we averted a crisis by getting out ahead of it by sounding the alarms, or if the concern was over-hyped and was never really a big risk. Either way, it was nice to see that Y2K did little to slow the…
Conquering Paradise It’s Monday morning and another great day in Paradise. Yesterday I started watching the 1992 movie 1492: Conquest of Paradise with Gerard Depardieu. I was prompted in that direction by a National Geographic article on a great new Mayan (more likely Toltec) artifact find in Chichen Itza in the middle of the Yucatán jungle. That reminded me of the Mel Gibson directed film Apocalypto about a manhunt by tribal people though the jungle.…
Another Pleasant Valley Sunday I don’t mind outing myself as a Monkees fan. In the 60’s everybody my age was a Monkees fan. And then for thirty years or so I had to secretly hanker for a little Daydream Believer not to mention Another Pleasant Valley Sunday . Now that both Davy Jones and Peter Tork are dearly departed, only Mike Nesmith and Mickey Dolenz are left and between the two they have over 150…
Family-in-Law I have what I consider to be a strange relationship with most of my family. I am not so egotistical as to think my relationships of this kind are any more or less strange than most peoples’ but I am blessed/cursed by a willingness to write about it in an open and hopefully honest way. Trust me, I am well aware that at this moment in this story, every one of my family members…