Ain’t Too Proud to Beg Pride, arrogance, hubris, self-importance, pomposity is all one and the same. Pride is the top of the Seven Deadly Sins List followed by greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath and sloth. As we all know that pride “goeth before the fall”, the question becomes what do we do to avoid the pitfalls of pride? Tonight, Kim and I went with Matthew and Philip to see Ain’t Too Proud to…
Working My Way Back to Me I keep seeing this TV ad for Land Rover that highlights the Dragon Challenge in Hunan Province, China. Land Rover must be in advertising saturation mode since the ad is on all the time. It seems to be an amazing 99-switchback mountain road combined with a 999-step staircase going 45 degrees up the side of a mountain. In the commercial, the Range Rover Sport climbs straight up the…
Life is Beautiful Do you remember the 1997 Italian film by Roberto Benigni by the same name? You should, it was a Best Picture nominee and won Best Foreign Film and Best Actor for Benigni, who played the happy-go-lucky Guido, who guides his little son through the horrors of Nazi concentration camp life by making a game of it all. It is a poignant, funny, but ultimately sad movie that has a powerful and…
Expert Witness Back in 2012 I was recruited as an expert witness by a law firm trying a case about securities lending on behalf of a foreign pension fund. The suit was against a big bank that acted as the fiduciary for the pension fund. It was a fascinating case that involved a classically innocent and naive widows and orphan’s operation getting led by the hand down the primrose path of global alternative investments. …
Weinstein, Epstein, Trumpstein The Grammy Record of the Year for 1985 was Money for Nothing by Dire Straits, which goes: That ain’t workin’ that’s the way you do it Money for nothin’ and your chicks for free Now that ain’t workin’ that’s the way you do it Obviously, some guys don’t have everything workin’ right and the chicks just don’t seem to come for free. Speaking as a man who lusted after far…
Drowning in the Mainstream In the classic 1951 movie A Place in the Sun, Montgomery Clift rows out in a boat on Lake Tahoe (the reality versus the Adirondacks it was supposed to represent) and he has with him his knocked-up girlfriend played by Shelly Winters. He is vexed as a poor boy by the desire to make it big and snag the rich girl (Liz Taylor), to have his place in the sun,…
The End of Democracy I love the news summaries that major news publishers now put online. They are the ultimate headline approach to reading in that if the story grabs you (that’s the point of headlines and why I spend so much time coming up with snappy titles for my stories), you then just click through to the one or more URL links in the headline and off you go with the next level…
Never Give Up NBC Sunday Today had a Sheryl Crow interview and discussed her career and life choices. She went from being a normal midwestern girl raised in a middle class lifestyle and choosing a normal school-teaching career, to being a Michael Jackson protege that launched her first platinum album in 1993. Somewhere along the golden path of Hollywood music success, Crow moved to Nashville and adopted some children so she could get back to…
Dying Too Soon Today my youngest son and I went to go see a movie that had a lousy Rotten Tomatoes score of 43. I was skeptical of the score since the fan rating was 79 and it starred Julianne Moore, Billy Crudup and Michelle Williams. The movie was After the Wedding. It’s the story of a successful entrepreneurial woman (Moore) and her sculptor husband (Crudup) who wants to make a large charitable gift to…
The Enemy of the People Just when you thought Sharpiegate was dying down, we have two or three new scandals being uncovered that our beloved President Donald Trump seems to be perpetrating. These are not conspiracies being reported by left wing radical news blogs (like this one), these are stories posted by Politico and the Washington Post. There is so much to discuss, I almost don’t know where to start. We are all…