And They Called Him Pedro Blanco For the first time since its founding in the days of John F. Kennedy, the Peace Corps has recalled some 7,000 volunteers from around the world due to the Coronavirus pandemic. Think about that. Sixty years of global hostilities and scary events and it was this event which has caused a noble and stalwart body to send out an emergency message to all its field staff to leave where…
Why I Love Kim Kim and I are sitting here in our living room watching TV. That’s not an unusual evening for us, we pretty much do the same thing every night, and especially so in these days of Lockdown. Just now Rob Lowe was on the screen as a spokesperson for the ASPCA reviewing why, in this time of great need all over the world, we cannot forget about our animal friends and all…
Out and About Recently I wrote a book for my motorcycling friends. It is a 444-page chronicle of the twenty-five years my little group of motorcycling friends have ridden together through thick and thin at home (mostly Utah and Vermont) and abroad. I had been planning on lugging thirty copies of the book to our next gathering in southern Utah. We have a spot we are particularly partial to in Teasdale, which is near Torrey,…
Corona Horns Many animals have horns and when we are confronted by the horns of a dilemma, it feels like horns are there on animals’ heads to protect them from predators. This is sometimes the case, but many times not so much. Zoologists suggest that horns exist in nature for protection in some species, but they most often exist to establish male dominance and to jockey within the species for territory and mating rights. Survival…
Travel in the Time of Cholera The 2006 movie, The Painted Veil is a glorious and poignant movie that for some reason I thought was called Love in the Time of Cholera. When I looked it up I realized my mistake. Love in the Time of Cholera is book written by Gabriel García Márquez that was made into a movie at about the same time (2007) and is set in Colombia in the same time,…
Fast and Furious I keep two motorcycles out here in San Diego. My primary bike, as it has been since 1987, is a BMW. Beemers always start and rarely have problems. One time about seventeen years ago, on one of our May trips through Utah, the drive shaft rear end differential on my KLT bike shit the bed and caused me to let the group ride on to Durango while I waited in Moab for…
What’s Worse Than a Global Pension Crisis? In 2013 I was a Clinical Professor of Finance at Cornell’s Johnson Graduate School of Management and one of the courses I had created and taught for six years at that time was a course on pensions. The course led me to observe a growing and troubling phenomenon about the state of our world and how central the pension issue was becoming to our collective economic health. I…
Pausing to Pause This morning I am reading reports that only half of Americans are taking the COVID-19 forced sequestration seriously. This more or less agrees with my anecdotal observations out here in San Diego. I’m betting that three quarters again of those non-conforming people are doing so out of the extreme need to maintain their lives that are more or less hand-to-mouth and unable to afford a pause to their daily routine of modern-day…
Doctoring-in-Place I went to my new doctor for an introductory visit today despite all this Coronavirus hullabaloo. As a recently moved senior citizen, I thought it was important to get set up with a new GP because you never know when you might need a doctor, right? I am not a guy who goes to the doctor with every little ache or pain, but I am also not adverse to going to see the doctor…
Of Moths and Flames We are slowly but surely getting hooked on the Netflix series Dirty Money. I’m sure that we are way behind and everyone has already watched these great Dateline-like shows. Tonight we watched both the show about the Goldman Sachs Malaysian scandal that brought down Lloyd Blankfein and remains an embarrassment to David Soloman and the one about the Kushner Company’s history of being a controversial landlord in the Northeast. I found…