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…
A Reason to Believe that Every Picture Tells a Story I’m sitting in my dining room for a change of pace and because Handy Brad is painting a wall in the study where Kim’s bookshelves will go when Amazon delivers them. This WFH program requires versatility and my mid-back tweak requires me to sit upright while I write. The workman’s compensation board assigned to my WFH program tells me that care for my lower and…
Bubbling Away in Coronaville It’s Monday morning of the first day of the rest of our lives. I like to say things that are indisputable and I think that ticks the box. It already feels different. I have called all three of my kids in the past twelve hours and checked to see that they and the grandgerms are OK. The initial report is that one had a skirmish with his wife over a family…
The Tea Tree Time I’m sure that herbalists and Aborigines will find this hilarious, but I have only recently discovered Tea Tree products. Somehow over the last year, probably when Kim was away somewhere, I was forced to do the unthinkable, go out into the commercial sector (in this case a Duane Reade Pharmacy) and buy my own shampoo. Can you imagine? I inadvertently bought some sort of Tea Tree shampoo and as soon as…
Post -Apocalyptic Investing By Richard Marin, Managing Director of SEDA Experts, LLC During my forty-year Wall Street career I went through some pretty serious crises. At a relatively young age (34), I once sat in the anteroom of the ornate office of the Minister of Finance of Venezuela on a warm and humid Caracas afternoon. I was with our Vice Chairman, Carl Mueller, who was a wizened veteran of the Street. Carl had been the…
Social Distancing Damn, the lingo dictionary is expanding almost as exponentially fast as the Coronavirus is expanding. In one segment on MSNBC alone I heard them use the terms Social Distancing, Hand Hygiene and Respiratory Etiquette. Hand washing is well understood, though I recently saw a Facebook video explaining how to wash your hands properly and diligently and find that I’ve been doing it wrong all these years. That might explain a lot. As for…
Not Invented Here I am constantly thinking about how to insure that I keep a diversified base of topics for my stories and not write too many posts about either Donald Trump and his insufferable politics and, for the moment, the Coronavirus. I think we are getting near overload on both those two topics. What I have learned is that everybody loves a good story and spinning a good story is what I like to…
Sent Home I’ve always been intrigued by Burning Man. I have never gone nor do I ever expect to go, but I am nonetheless fascinated by the annual gathering. I’m not sure I ever really bothered to understand what Burning Man is all about, other than walking around the desert naked and getting a sunburn. So I looked it up and it seems there are ten guiding principles: • Radical inclusion – all are welcome…
On Golden Pond Flying to New York for my first visit since moving to my own Golden Pond on our hilltop. I started at the airport and then for the first three hours of this flight (while pretending to sleep for a few hours) to listen to an audiobook which I just downloaded. It’s called Dark Towers and its about the rise and imminent fall of Deutsche Bank, including its strange and tangled relationship with…
Calling Bullshit Today it has been announced that SXSW, the South By Southwest music/film/media festival in Austin, that has been held annually without interruption for thirty three years has been cancelled this year due to the Coronavirus.. Today, the Italian government has indicated that it is locking down Lombardy and a few other surrounding provincial areas to contain the virus at the potential cost of massively hobbling the Italian economy, where Milan and Lombardy are…