It’s All Debatable I have a friend, Gary, who reads this blog with regularity and who more or less shares the same political outlook I have. He was just out visiting the last few weeks and we got into mud wrestling more than once about which direction thing would likely go in the 2020 election. I am an avowed optimist and let’s just say that Gary is not so much. I usually attribute less than…
Boy Scout Bankruptcy Back in 1962 I was living in Madison, Wisconsin. At that time it was all about ice fishing, ice boat sailing and other middle-American pastimes. For vacations we would go north up to the Wisconsin Dells (sort of version of Lake George or Franconia Notch with lots of kid amusement areas) or even further north to Lake Superior for a cold, refreshing dip in the icy waters of the greatest of the…
Harvey the Rabbit I have heard for years about the famous Pulitzer Prize play by Mary Chase that was made into a movie starring Jimmy Stewart. The play was written in 1945 and the movie was made in 1950. What brings it to mind is a combination of issues starting with the image of Harvey Weinstein dragging his sorry ass into the NYC courthouse every day using a walker with two high-viz yellow tennis balls…
The Kids Are All Right There is a movie by that name starring Annette Bening, Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo. It’s about a same-sex couple (Bening and Moore) who have two children who were the product of each of them plus a common sperm donor (Ruffalo). It’s a fairly contrived story that might possibly exist in a few real life situations, but is unlikely to represent the issues faced by a broad swath of…
A Dangerous TV Table How easy should you make your life? I am never quite sure how I feel about that issue. There is a fine theoretical argument that says that struggle is the grit that makes for a better life. But then that’s all very theoretical. Who would make their life harder when they can make it easier? Not very many people I know. And how exactly does one discount that future “better” state…
The Rincon Mystery Whenever I ride my motorcycle to the mountains or the desert, I go through the town of Valley Center, which sits between where I live and the country I find so beautiful to drive through. The ride through Valley Center isn’t a bad ride either, with enough nice twisty roads and little enough traffic to make it a perfectly pleasant ride even though its not the wide open spaces up on Palomar…
Beaten by the Market I am spending more and more time these days working as an expert witness in investment management cases. One thing keeps coming up over and over again and that is the value or lack thereof of active management versus passive management. In simplistic terms, for readers who are not financially-focused people, the simple issue is whether people can consistently beat the market or whether the market will always dominate and make…
Feeling the Bern The results of the Iowa Caucuses and the New Hampshire Primary are in and the Democratic candidates are off to Nevada and South Carolina for the next round of delegate gathering in their long march to the DNC Convention. Just to recap, this month there are the Nevada Caucuses and the South Carolina Primary followed by the March 3rd so-called Super Tuesday with primaries in Virginia, Vermont, Utah, Texas, Tennessee, Oklahoma, North…
A Bear in the China Shop Right now there is an area of central China that is quarantined with its residents “blocked” from exiting and all entrances and goods for it are closely monitored to and from the province of Hubei and specifically the large cities of Wuhan and Huanggang. Over twenty million people are inside the quarantined zone. To put that into perspective, that is more than the population of the entire country of…
An Invasion of an Unusual Hut I have just discovered a treasure trove of handwritten stories done by my mother when she was transitioning from high school to College. These are stories on lined paper, written in ink in very neat cursive writing and in this first story’s case, written on Thursday, October 26, 1933 by Millie (Ludmilla) A. Uher. Given that she wrote this when she was just seventeen, presumably a Freshman at…