The House Janice sat at the kitchen table sipping her coffee and watching the morning news on the secret drop-down flat-screen TV she had installed in the kitchen cabinet when she renovated the kitchen last year. It was her dream kitchen repeat with six-burner cooktop, twin dishwashers for party clean-up and a full beverage center with wine cooler and beer/soda cooler drawers. It was accented in her favorite color, fire-engine red, and had a mosaic…
Ala-fucking-bama I’m very upset with the entire state of Alabama. It is interfering with my marriage. My wife is so upset with the newly passed and signed abortion law that she is railing about men interfering with women’s rights to be in control of their own bodies. I have pointed out that it was a female legislator in Alabama that sponsored the bill and a female governor that signed the bill into unconstitutional law. I…
Remote Control If you are like me, you grew up with a romantic notion of what remote control meant. It involved gas-powered airplanes, speedboats, race cars, and even the Zenith TV in your living room. It implied this amazing and exciting ability to sit back and relax while you do minimal work to make your fun take place in hyper-speed. In that dream, you know exactly how the machine (whatever it is) operates. You understand…
Pity Don Junior Supposedly, Donald Trump Jr. has now come to terms with the Senate Intelligence Committee. I feel bad for poor Don. My wife and I had the opportunity five years ago to be seated at an AON client event at the same table as Don Jr. My wife is the least likely person in the world to forgive and forget someone who prides themselves in photos taken of them out engaging in big…
Rick’s Cafe The worst part of any road trips are the detours. On this motorcycle trip we already suffered the disappointment of having Rt. 33 down through the Los Padres National Forrest and into Ojai closed for construction. Today we had to circumvent the fantastic Angeles Crest ride. Both times we detoured through Santa Clarita and up through Palmdale. Going down we went on Bouquet Canyon Road and today we went up on Lake Hughes…
The Emerald Iguana I manage to find some interesting places to stay when we travel. On a recent trip to Santa Fe I found this place called The Inn of the Five Graces. When we arrived it was a challenge to feel impressed since it was on a small side street and the rooms were spread across the street such that the bellman had to to walk us over to our room looking both ways.…
The Texaco Station Mark looked over at Jeanne as they came to the bottom of Rt. 190 out of Death Valley. They had been driving for two hours since leaving their motel at Stovepipe Wells, which was the cheapest place they could find. They were told not to miss having breakfast at the Alabama Hills Cafe in Lone Pine. “You still want breakfast?” Mark asked? Jeanne nodded with a smile. Mark would have passed because…
Free Falling One of the bucket list items from The Bucket List was skydiving. That’s not terribly original, but I assure you, it will never appear on any bucket list I produce. I like to say that I avoid activities that involve a lot of gravity. I know that Newton proved 300 years ago that gravity has the same impact on a falling object regardless of mass. I don’t believe it. When a toddler falls…
The Dude Mention The Dude and everyone immediately thinks of The Big Lebowski and the character played by Jeff Bridges. We know lots of things about The Dude, but mostly we know that The Dude abides. He accepts his lot in life and goes with the flow. That slacker mentality accounts for the popularity of the 1998 classic Coen Brothers film. By that date, much of the “Yutes” of America were in that frame of…
The Bottom of the Earth At -282 feet below sea level, Death Valley is the lowest elevation in North America, That compares to the lowest in the world at the Dead Sea in Israel, which is -413 feet. If you want to count water-filled depressions, then Lake Baikal in Russia is about -1,200 feet at its deepest point. But then why ignore the Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean at -36,000 feet? If Zabriskie Point…