Sliding On In Doormen are unusual relationships for tenants. I have a very strong relationship with Corrado (Mr. Porca Miseria) based on the need to be sympathetic to the tragedy of his wife’s ongoing cancer treatments. In our apartment in the Seaport we had a doorman that had a daughter with a woman out of wedlock, who he was raising since she was in jail. That certainly gave us something to talk about. One of…
WeWorked By now, most people in the literate world have heard of WeWork. It is the shared workspace company that caters to and further encourages the entrepreneurial culture that is blossoming across the globe. WeWork has become globally ubiquitous in the less than ten years of its existence. What Uber/Lyft are to car culture and what Airbnb is to hospitality, WeWork is to Dilbert and office cubicle culture. Adam Neumann, the Israeli kibbutz-raised kid and…
Summer Haircuts Our dog, Cecil, is pure Bichon Frise, so like the dandelion pappus that adorn the late-summer lawns of the U.S., he becomes a fuzzball as the summer rolls on. When he gets his summer haircut he is as happy as a dog can be. It could be my imagination, but he seems to hop around with his high and tight white clip. Kim thinks he struts like a little tough. He looks cooler…
A Bull in the China Shop China is fucked-up. Is this all their doing or is it because others are fucking with China? Donald Trump seems to enjoy doing that. Regardless, the question quickly becomes, does that fuck us up? Last night my lovely wife Kim surprised me by asking me if I was worried about China bringing down the world economy. I would normally assume this was a hidden question about whether Nordstroms…
Writing to Write The Nobel laureate, Pulitzer Prize winner and long-time Dean of Humanities at Princeton, Toni Morrison died at the ripe old age of 88. She will be eulogized and obituaried by many more eloquent and articulate than me, but it still strikes an important chord in me as a writer and a human being. Toni Morrison was the daughter of two southern-born African-Americans who “escaped” the oppression of the Deep South (Alabama…
Picking Your Friends We all find and make friends in different ways and at different stages in life. When we are babies, our mothers make choices for us. These days it is most common for young mothers to join activities with their child that quickly lead to the forming of playgroups. We all want our children to be socialized and not bound solely to the nuclear family and the cat. So, these groups are,…
Hispanic Invasion Let me start with a disclaimer; I am Hispanic. Whenever I am asked to declare my ethnicity, I always say I am Caucasian. That is not about denying my heritage or ethnicity, but rather to avoid being considered a minority for whatever fact-gathering the form is involved in. With a Hispanic surname, it would be very easy for me to declare myself as a minority, which I do not consider myself to…
Reverse Polish Logic I’ve discussed my love affair with the Hewlett-Packard 12C financial calculator. It is from that device that many of us learned about Reverse Polish Notation (RPN). It’s the logic protocol used by the 12C for operating the calculator. With it, the operator (the numbers) come before the operands (the function like addition or multiplication) when inputting the equation one is looking to solve. RPN was invented in the 1920’s by Jan Lucasiewicz,…
Responsible Hosting I have owned vacation homes since 1986. That is 33 years. Over that time, I have owned vacation homes in the Berkshires (2), The Hamptons, Park City (5), San Diego and Ithaca. By my count, that is a total of ten vacation homes. At one time, I have owned as many as three at once (what a headache). The big issue is always how to maintain the home in my absence. By…
Day Tripping In 1998 when I was at the apex of my banking career, I met Terry. I was on the Management Committee of Bankers Trust Company, where I ran both the Global Private Banking and was Vice Chairman of BT Alex. Brown, responsible for their Private Client Services business. It was a big job with loads of perks, easily the most I ever received. The biggest perk was a car and driver, which was…