Power Sleeping The world talks about sleeping as much as any bodily function. It is clearly one of the basic necessities of life and yet few other functions enjoy such a broad range of discretion, habit and variability. The swaddling of babies is a subject that has been much studied by child development specialists. It turns out that people from northern climes swaddle their babies very tightly and those from southern climes swaddle them very…
Father’s Day Blues I have three children who are all grown and out of the house at this point. This is the last Father’s Day when they know for sure I am in the neighborhood, as we have been planning to move to Sam Diego in about eight months. I’m sure we will be back regularly and I will probably even try to be back for Father’s Day. For one reason or another I have…
Catch Me If You Can In 1970 I was Treasurer of the senior class at Norte Dame International Preparatory School in Rome, Italy. This had been my school for three years and despite being a reasonably big fish in a very small pond (our class was a whopping 54-strong), I was what was called a “Day-dog” rather than a boarder. In those days of the late 60’s most of the multinational American, Canadian and British…
Running Out of Money Bloomberg News today posted an article titled, Retirees Might Run Out of Money 10 Years Before They Die. It’s a title intended to shock people into action or at least awareness. I have a strong interest in this topic. In 2013 I published the book Global Pension Crisis: Unfunded Liabilities and How We Can Fill the Gap, published by Wiley & Sons. The book was based on ten years of…
Heat Wave I am starting to read that we should expect a very hot summer. They are already posting record-breaking temperatures in some unusual places like northern Norway (Mr. Trump’s favorite go-to country of white, pale people), reaching up into the arctic circle in unprecedented manner. When I hear about temperatures that are in the 120oF+ I think about how uncomfortable I get at 80oF if the humidity gets over 40% I think…
Standing Strong in China We are all familiar with the iconic picture of the unknown “Tank Man” standing in Tiananmen Square, blocking a column of tanks in a student-led protest for more civil liberties in China. The result was thousands of deaths and arrests of Chinese citizens in the ensuing days of protests. It was a threshold for the world, but less so for China, itself. I saw a BBC piece where a reporter…
Getting Out of Voting The biggest problem faced by liberal democracy is disaffection. It is a pernicious problem because the vicious cycle it breeds is obvious. If you feel your vote doesn’t count or that it won’t change anything, then perhaps you get apathetic and choose not to bother voting. The forces of darkness prevail, and they not only push policies that further disadvantage those disaffected non-voters, but they put in place voting restriction…
There’s No Accounting for Taste Do you remember that scene from the original Ghostbusters movie when The EPA nerd lets loose the ghosts that the team has trapped and kept in a special Ecto-Containment Unit in the wall of the converted firehouse (actually located in Tribeca just off West Broadway)? The team is forced to describe to the mayor what will happen if the ghosts get out. Venkman says, “This city is headed for…
Sicko I am blessed with a good healthy constitution, which I attribute mostly to my upbringing of eating a lot of emerging markets dirt. I spent six hears of my youth in the less than hermetically sealed areas of Latin America. The tropical valley in Costa Rica for two years seems somewhat self-explanatory. Things were always on the edge there. The edge of the jungle. The edge of civilization. The edge of tropical dampness. …
The World Can Use a Guy Like You Yesterday, I was getting my hair cut at my favorite $17 Albanian/Uzbeki barbershop on Broadway. I was in a spaced-out frame-of-mind, given my long day of transatlantic travel, followed immediately by a movie birthday party for my granddaughter and her dad. They were showing that 1985 classic, Back to the Future. I got to see the flux capacitor go from needing plutonium to generate 1.21 Gigawatts of…